Half Step Princess

toxic teenage lesbian romance in XXXXXXX, ontario, with swords

A  half step is an action where the fencer makes a partial advance or retreat moving just one foot forward or back. It's an essential bit of footwork, useful to make a feint, or extend and delay one's preparation before an attack.

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It's 2011 in Ontario. We're all growing up. The future is bright. The sun is going down. Girls take the bus home. Blades are drawn.

Gwendolyn Baker , grade ten, is the new student in her fencing club. Shy and petite, an only child, she's never been very talented at sports, and she finds herself lost and frozen in the shadow of a city which seems to be fading away.

Despite her anxieties, delinquent Charlotte (club ace and her upperclassman), Joanna (standoffish private school princess), and Hannah Abigail (know-it-all beauty) all set eyes on her. A haze of suburban angst and foiled romances hangs over the autumn landscape while Gwen falls into a canopy of bitter rivalries.

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~30k words of toxic teenage yuri, 3 months of autumn, 5 bouts, 4 closeted lesbians, 2 tournament arcs. 

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Inspired by 60s-70s sports anime, Ontario gothic, 80s-90s shoujo, English modernism, and 00s-10s digital nostalgia, with a dreamy original soundtrack by In Love With a Ghost  and art by Madeline Miyun

 
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Written, drawn, and composed in six weeks for Toxic Yuri VN Jam 2

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Historical Notes

More than two-thirds of the population of Canada lives in the suburbs.

From 2005 to 2009, tens of thousands of jobs were cut in the automotive industry in Ontario.

In 2004, the City of Kitchener announced a strategic Economic Development Investment Fund to "modernize the city's business community."

Since 1957, the University of Waterloo cooperative education program has grown to become one of the largest co-op programs in the world, with over 20,000 students enrolled today. An enormous number of those students are in the School of Computer Science.

My bus ride home from school in Kitchenener-Waterloo took me around two hours, one way. As of 2019, KW's ION Light Rail now runs (part of) that route. I still haven't rode it.

About a third of my high school graduating class went onto study CS. Or Engineering. Or Business, at Laurier.

Since a dip in 1996, the average price of a home in the Greater Toronto Area has increased from around $200k to nearly $1.2m (Canadian dollars, of course).

A study by Statistics Canada in 2026 found the Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge tri-city to have one of the highest unemployment rates. Small cities across Ontario have been reported as some of the worst places for job seekers in various articles and job studies over the last decade.

The Ontario Fencing Association did not release a policy clarifying rules regarding transgender athletes until 2019.

This story is not set in Kitchener.

There should be no requirement for an athlete to disclose their transgender identity or history to compete in high performance sport (up to the point where international federation rules would take effect) unless there is a justified reason to do so.