Very obedient of you

Do not fret, none can resist the Masculine and definitely at least average sized penis charm of Tucker The Tiger Carlson

He settles down, chat. After all his happy hooking up. Get a funny boyfriend and goes steady, cohabits, has sweet cuddly sex and whatever, which he balks about at first. That's his arc though I guess. I've been saying that Paul seems transfem eggy, but maybe not I dunno. My justification was it seems like Paul is a lot more emotionally invested in being a lesbian because he gets effusive when he is a dyke, and he seems emotionally disconnected and slathered in disingenuous irony when masc, I dunno. I saw a Goodreads review say he struggles with the gender binary, but he seems really into inhabiting it instead. He never really shifts to anything inbetweeny, (even though he seems hyped about it the one time it comes up) usually he is a slender lad of some description. I know it's reductive to judge somebody's gender by physicality even if they are fictional, but chat, Paul never once thinks actually critically about gender, his monologue does not leave me with much. He is a weird shapeshifting water spirit.

The other thing I gathered is that Paul is a "you had to be there" "if you know, you know" kind of book. It is explicitly for gen-x 90s queers who were in those scenes, which makes sense. Thanks to reading not only the A Novels but also Stone Butch Blues and Any Other City I kind of have a sense for what this is, so it didn't chokeslam me too hard. I know about 90s punk DIY or whatever.

It was very funny to watch people GENDER the characters in those Goodreads reviews, though! Paul is ALWAYS a he/him user himself, even when literally playing a lesbian woman, but several readers decided to "they/them" him, major yikes. There's also an androgynous youth later on in the book who has no pronouns, fuck I love Robin <3 but the reviews go wild with whatever stupid pronouns for that youth, which is not fuckin epic lol. I think the cis (and maybe the binarists) are showing their asses =)

Overall though I don't really have a sense for what Paul's arc was. I didn't really sense a shift in his perception of self or anything, I'm not even fully sure what his Committed Lesbian Excursion was for. I have never spent so much time in somebody's head and known so little at the end of it.