LKH Lashouts

I can't count the times the guys hold her hand not in a normal couples way but like you would a small child.
Yeah, Shutdown was an entire ONESHOT'S worth of that. Which is why it's so absurd that poor Jade, who has literally been ABUSED FOR CENTURIES, is getting less comfort over that than Anita does over her grandmother telling her that she wasn't pretty.

I really feel sorry for Jade.

What I'm seeing more of is misogyny and double-standards. If Jade had been a guy, her neediness and trauma would have been seen as bonus points, and Anita would have LOVED her dependency.
EXACTLY. :X

I think Jade's getting booted not so much out of homophobia (though Anita is HELLA homophobic, make no mistake, I'm not arguing that) so much as LKH doesn't find it sexy to write about two women. She may have a woman or two in her life/bed now IRL and maybe she thought that meant she liked women IN GENERAL enough to enjoy writing girl-on-girl the way she clearly enjoys writing Anita with guys (badly though she does it) but she found it did nothing for her on paper. And since all of Anita's relationships are based on sex and nothing else, out Jade goes!
Huh. Good point. It is pretty strange that she can't think of ANY OTHER analogy for going down on a woman than "It's like sucking off a guy, only different!". Even her f/f porn is male-centric. :X

Lending credence to that:
Maybe my biggest trouble with Jade wasn’t that she was female, but that she was so uncertain, so that I always had to persuade, do all the planning, and just court her in a way that the men normally courted me.

A thing here that strikes me about Anita: she really likes the ABSTRACT fantasy about being Just Like A Guy, but in practice... she seems to really despise any part of it aside from being an abusive, aggressive @#$%. She doesn't enjoy dominance in the long term, she doesn't enjoy power for its own sake*, and she doesn't enjoy courting anyone. Her ACTUAL desire seems to be to submit, to not be responsible for anything, and to have powerful men take care of her and her every need.

*(I'm serious. She enjoys showing off power, she enjoys abusing people, and she enjoys being flattered. But she has no positive reaction to just HAVING the power and being able to do things with it. If anything, it seems to gross her out and make her complain unless she can use it to make someone hurt, and even then the rush dies down immediately afterwards. And "hurt" isn't even the right word - pain doesn't excite her, HARMING someone and traumatizing them excites her.)

If I had to peg Anita as ANYTHING, despite what she says about being ~dominant~ and ~never really bottoming even when she bottoms~, she's a deeply, deeply self-hating submissive with extreme emotional underdevelopment and an abuse fetish. It's actually self-sabotaging that she uses "submissiveness" and "dominance" as an excuse for her abusive behavior - as "dominant" = "superior" and "submissive" = "inferior" in her framework, she can't POSSIBLY admit that submission makes her happy as anything other than an extremely situational fetish.

I really think the character would be a lot more well-balanced if she dropped her fantasy fetish view of the world, admitted that submission to certain people =/= MUST SUBMIT TO EVERYONE EVER, and decided to be strong-willed and hard-charging AND ALSO let herself unwind under the dominance of people of her choosing. But no - in order for her to admit to it AT ALL, it has to be ringed around with excuses, ornate dressing-up about Inherently Blah-Blah-Blah, and everything possible to prevent her from saying 'I like this, and it does not make me less of a person and unworthy of respect'.

Goodness knows she does enough that makes her unworthy of respect, but that seems to escape her narcissistic headspace...