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The Importance of The Unlikable Heroine

I’ve always had this tendency to apologize for everything—even things that aren’t my fault, things that actually hurt me or were wrongs against me.

It’s become automatic, a compulsion I am constantly fighting. Even more disturbingly, I’ve discovered in conversations with my female friends that I’m not alone in feeling this impulse to be pleasant, to apologize needlessly, to resist showing anger.

After all, if you’re a woman and you demonstrate anger, you’re a bitch, a harpy, a shrew. You’re told to smile more because you will look prettier; you’re told to calm down even when whatever anger or otherwise “unseemly” emotion you’re experiencing is perfectly justified.

If you don’t, no one will like you, and certainly no one will love you.

I’m not sure when this apologetic tendency of mine emerged. Maybe it began during childhood; maybe the influence of social gender expectations had already begun to affect me on a subconscious level. But if I had to guess, I would assume it emerged later, when I became aware through advertisements, media, and various unquantifiable social pressures of what a girl should be—how to act, how to dress, what to say, what emotions are okay and what emotions are not.

Essentially, I became aware of what I should do, as a girl, to be liked, and of how desperate I should be to achieve that state.

Being liked would be the pinnacle of my personal achievement. I could accomplish things, sure—make good grades, go to a good school, have a stellar career. But would I be liked during all of this? That was the important thing.

It angers me that I still struggle with this. It angers me that even though I’m an intelligent, accomplished adult woman, I still experience automatic pangs of inadequacy and shame when I perceive myself to have somehow disappointed these unfair expectations. I can’t always seem to get my emotions under control, and yet I must—because sometimes those emotions are angry or unpleasant or, God forbid, unattractive, and therefore will inconvenience someone or make someone uncomfortable.

Maybe that’s why, in my fiction—both the stories I read and the stories I write—I’ve always gravitated toward what some might call “unlikable” heroines.

It’s difficult to define “unlikability”; the term itself is nebulous. If you asked ten different people to define unlikability, you would probably receive ten different answers. In fact, I hesitated to write this piece simply because art is not a thing that should be quantified, or shoved into “likable” and “unlikable” components.

But then there are those pangs of mine, that urge to apologize for not being the right kind of woman. Insidious expectations lurk out there for our girls—both real and fictional—to be demure and pleasant, to wilt instead of rally, to smile and apologize and hide their anger so they don’t upset the social construct—even when such anger would be expected, excused, even applauded, in their male counterparts.

So for my purposes here, I’ll define a “likable heroine” as one who is unobjectionable. She doesn’t provoke us or challenge our expectations. She is flawed, but not offensively. She doesn’t make us question whether or not we should like her, or what it says about us that we do.

Let me be clear: There is nothing wrong with these “likable” heroines. I can think of plenty such literary heroines whom I adore:

Fire in Kristin Cashore’s Fire. Karou in Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke and Bone series. Jo March in Little Women. Lizzie Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. The Penderwick sisters in Jeanne Birdsall’s delightful Penderwicks series. Arya (at least, in the early books) in A Song of Ice and Fire. Sarah from A Little Princess. Meg Murry from A Wrinkle in Time. Matilda in Roald Dahl’s classic book of the same name.

These heroines are easy to love and root for. They have our loyalty on the first page, and that never wavers. We expect to like them, for them to be pleasant, and they are. Even their occasional unpleasantness, as in the case of temperamental Jo March, is endearing.

What, then, about the “unlikable” heroines?

These are the “difficult” characters. They demand our love but they won’t make it easy. The unlikable heroine provokes us. She is murky and muddled. We don’t always understand her. She may not flaunt her flaws but she won’t deny them. She experiences moral dilemmas, and most of the time recognizes when she has done something wrong, but in the meantime she will let herself be angry, and it isn’t endearing, cute, or fleeting. It is mighty and it is terrifying. It puts her at odds with her surroundings, and it isn’t always easy for readers to swallow.

She isn’t always courageous. She may not be conventionally strong; her strength may be difficult to see. She doesn’t always stand up for herself, or for what is right. She is not always nice. She is a hellion, a harpy, a bitch, a shrew, a whiner, a crybaby, a coward. She lies even to herself.

In other words, she fails to walk the fine line we have drawn for our heroines, the narrow parameters in which a heroine must exist to achieve that elusive “likability”:

Nice, but not too nice.

Badass, but not too badass, because that’s threatening.

Strong, but ultimately pliable.

(And, I would add, these parameters seldom exist for heroes, who enjoy the limitless freedoms of full personhood, flaws and all, for which they are seldom deemed “unlikable” but rather lauded.)

Who is this “unlikable” heroine?

She is Amy March from Little Women. She is Briony from Ian McEwan’s Atonement. Katsa from Kristin Cashore’s Graceling. Jane Austen’s Emma Woodhouse. Sansa from A Song of Ice and Fire. Mary from The Secret Garden. She is Philip Pullman’s Lyra, and C. S. Lewis’s Susan, and Rowling’s first-year Hermione Granger. She is Katniss Everdeen. She is Scarlett O’Hara.

These characters fascinate me. They are arrogant and violent, reckless and selfish. They are liars and they are resentful and they are brash. They are shallow, not always kind. They may be aggressive, or not aggressive enough; the parameters in which a female character can acceptably display strength are broadening, but still dishearteningly narrow. I admire how the above characters embrace such “unbecoming” traits (traits, I must point out, that would not be noteworthy in a man; they would simply be accepted as part of who he is, no questions asked).

These characters learn from their mistakes, and they grow and change, but at the end of the day, they can look at themselves in the mirror and proclaim, “Here I am. This is me. You may not always like me—I may not always like me—but I will not be someone else because you say I should be. I will not lose myself to your expectations. I will not become someone else just to be liked.”

When I wrote my first novel, The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls, I knew some readers would have a hard time stomaching the character of Victoria. She is selfish, arrogant, judgmental, rigid, and sometimes cruel. Even at the end of the novel, by which point she has evolved tremendously, she isn’t particularly likable, if we go with the above definition.

I had similar concerns about the heroine of my second novel, The Year of Shadows. Olivia Stellatella is a moody twelve-year-old who isolates herself from her peers at school, from her father, from everything that could hurt her. Her circumstances at the beginning of the novel are inarguably terrible: Her mother abandoned their family several months prior, with no explanation. Her father conducts the city orchestra, which is on the verge of bankruptcy. He neglects his daughter in favor of saving his livelihood. He sells their house and moves them into the symphony hall’s storage rooms, where Olivia sleeps on a cot and lives out of a suitcase. She calls him The Maestro, refusing to call him Dad. She hates him. She blames him for her mother leaving.

Olivia is angry and confused. She is sarcastic, disrespectful, and she tells her father exactly what she thinks of him. She lashes out at everyone, even the people who want to help her. Sometimes her anger blinds her, and she must learn how to recognize that.

I knew Olivia’s anger would be hard for some readers to understand, or that they would understand but still not like her.

This frightened me.

As a new author, the prospect of writing these heroines—these selfish, angry, difficult heroines—was a daunting one. What if no one liked them? What if, by extension, no one liked me?

But I’ve allowed the desire to be liked thwart me too many times. The fact that I nearly let my fear discourage me from telling the stories of these two “unlikable” girls showed me just how important it was to tell their stories.

I know my friends and I aren’t the only women who feel that constant urge to apologize, to demur, to rein in anger and mutate it into something more socially acceptable.

I know there are girls out there who, like me at age twelve—like Olivia, like Victoria—are angry or arrogant or confused, and don’t know how to handle it. They see likable girls everywhere—on the television, in movies, in books—and they accordingly paste on strained smiles and feel ashamed of their unladylike grumpiness and ambition, their unseemly aggression.

I want these girls to read about Victoria and Olivia—and Scarlett, Amy, Lyra, Briony—and realize there is more to being a girl than being liked. There is more to womanhood than smiling and apologizing and hiding those darker emotions.

I want them to sift through the vast sea of likable heroines in their libraries and find more heroines who are not always happy, not always pleasant, not always good. Heroines who make terrible decisions. Heroines who are hungry and ambitious, petty and vengeful, cowardly and callous and selfish and gullible and unabashedly sensual and hateful and cunning. Heroines who don’t always act particularly heroic, and don’t feel the need to, and still accept themselves at the end of the day regardless.

Maybe the more we write about heroines like this, the less susceptible our girl readers will be to the culture of apology that surrounds them.

Maybe they will grow up to be stronger than we are, more confident than we are. Maybe they will grow up in a world brimming with increasingly complex ideas about what it means to be a heroine, a woman, a person.

Maybe they will be “unlikable” and never even think of apologizing for it.

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Lucrecia Crescent

for @of-monster-and-man

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massive ff7 dump

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THE LADY AND THE DEMON - (A Final Fantasy 7 Fairy Tale of Lucrecia & Chaos)

Merry Christmas @ravynnenevyrmore

She remembered a time when she had no wings. The days when she was earth-bound, when she was plain Lucrecia Crescent–oh, those days were decades past! The memories stretched backward to a timeless while spent behind a frozen veil, to the moment when someone’s hand appeared out of the mist to fling a small crystal globe into her sacred pool. Sacred it was for its powers of life and death, past and present, and most of all for the souls that whispered in its depths. Dark mako, sleeping souls, her only company while she dreamed away the years wrapped in gossamer light. The intrusion of the globe into the placid waters sent ripples floating out, across the pool, until they lapped at her feet, and startled her awake.

Keep reading

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-// okay but also my favorite visual Lucrecia trope is making the corners of her lips turn up like that. idc if she’s smiling, scowling, grimacing, or crying, if I’m drawing her you will always see those little upturned corners.

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-// just a little freehand Lucrecia doodle to remind myself I can still draw except that’s debatable. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

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How cool is it that Lucrecia has a canon birthday when not even all of the playable characters do? In fact, she’s the only character with a canon birthday who isn’t one of the playable characters!

Because she’s awesome, that’s why.

I’ve just realized that I’ve written posts for all the canon birthdays (ones having day and month, not just year) and so I thought I would do up a quick master list. Click on the images above to see them full size and the given dates.

Aerith Gainsborough

Cid Highwind

Tifa Lockhart

Lucrecia Crescent

Cloud Strife

Vincent Valentine

Yuffie Kisaragi

Barret Wallace

At some point I will also make an effort to do other character profiles, but in the meantime, enjoy.

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If we meet again.

放空時想到的內容  句子是網路上找的  最近只想畫這一對(*´◒`*)

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“Remember when you pulled my organs out and left them with a thick splat on sterile floors? Hahaha. I do. Would you like to see how I’d do it, Doctor?”

They hate each other. Lucrecia because she’s staring her own guilt and mistakes in the face and Jenova because lmao how dare these fucking people touch me

I should write a fanfic about them

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Cursed Sleep (A Vincent Valentine & Lucrecia Crescent fanmix)

White Blank Page - Mumford & Sons But tell me now where was my fault,/in loving you with my whole heart?/Oh, tell me now where was my fault,/in loving you with my whole heart?/Her white blank page/and a swelling rage, rage/You did not think when you sent me to the brink, to the brink/You desired my attention, but denied my affections, my affection

Skinny Love - Bon Iver Come on skinny love just last the year/Pour a little salt, we were never here/My, my, my, my, my, my, my, my/Staring at the sink of blood and crushed veneer

Hardest Of Hearts - Florence + The Machine Darling heart, I loved you from the start/But you’ll never know what a fool I’ve been/Darling heart, I loved you from the start/But that’s no excuse for the state I’m in

The Only Thing - Sufjan Stevens Do I care if I survive this? Bury the dead where they’re found/In a veil of great surprises; I wonder did you love me at all? / Everything I feel returns to you somehow/I want to save you from your sorrow

Hurricane - 30 Seconds to Mars Do you really want/Do you really want me/Do you really want me dead or alive/To torture for my sins/Do you really want/Do you really want me/Do you really want me dead or alive/To live a lie

The Scientist - Coldplay I was just guessing at numbers and figures/Pulling the puzzles apart/Questions of science, science and progress/Do not speak as loud as my heart/But tell me you love me, come back and haunt me

Cursed Sleep - Bonnie Prince Billy Cursed eyes are never closing/Cursed arm are never closing/Cursed children never rising/And cursed me never despising

My Immortal - Evanescence I’m so tired of being here/Suppressed by all my childish fears/And if you have to leave/I wish that you would just leave/‘Cause your presence still lingers here/And it won’t leave me alone

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Now there’s an AU we haven’t seen yet! =)

‘Is this where you’ve been all this time?’

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The lovely Lucrecia, with some giant Bride of Frankenstein heels <3 She dances to this. Others in the series are here and here!

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Vincent was terrified to open his eyes. But the smell of musty wood and old books told him of the ShinRa mansion, familiar and safe. It hint at the possibility of a nightmare, a flicker of longing that none of it had been real. His entire body tingled, felt tight. He hoped to find Lucrecia sprawled across him, at an awkward angle that had caused his limbs to fall asleep. For once he would have woken glad for her crashing his bed, and fuck Hojo, he’d kiss her full on the lips. And they’d leave, without looking back. He’d take her to Kalm first, find a way to contact Veld.

Veld had once told him that a way to a man’s heart was through his balls.

Vincent had always thought he had meant sex, an easy jab at Vincent’s womanizing. But Vincent realized that Veld, with his crumpled wallet photo of his daughter, and the guilt in his voice when he talked about her, had meant something entirely different. Something Vincent now understood. He could explain to Veld, appeal to his sense as a friend and father to help them… a risky move, but one he, in that moment, decided to take. First, he had to open his eyes.

But it was no nightmare, and there was no Lucrecia, just Hojo’s basement laboratory, just test tubes and papers and instruments. Vincent forced himself to sit, confused and surprised by his clothing. Someone had cleaned and dressed him. He wore black leathers, a complicated mechanism of straps and buckles. Where his arm had been was another– a crude replacement pieced together of dark golden metal. It resembled a gauntlet, but thinner, sharper.

“It’s not the suit you’re used to, but it will keep you intact.” Hojo did not look up at Vincent. “From what I observed, your transformations are quite brutal. The damage your body sustained postmortem until revival are permanent. New injuries will resolve.”

Vincent didn’t have it in him to respond. To feel anything but the weight of his new reality.

“The arm is a gift. To remind you of how much you’ve destroyed.” Hojo lift his eyes. “And I have one more for you. Actually, this one you can thank my wife for.” Hojo walked over to him, threw something across his lap. It was a tattered crimson garment. Vincent did not move to grab it.

“That was your father’s coat.”

Vincent knew what it was. His father’s wardrobe consist of mostly black, which made his heavy highwayman coat so vivid in Vincent’s memory. Grimoire was tall and broad and striking on his own, but the image of him, all black and red, ran its roots through the core of Vincent’s being.

“It’s less of a coat now, more of a rag.” Hojo walked to Vincent, picked up the cloak and tossed it around Vincent’s shoulders. “The explosion that killed him damaged it quite badly. Lu kept it, for some stupid sentimental reason. Now it’s yours. The mantle of failure.” Hojo took a step back, admired the hollow of a man who sat before him.

“It is uncanny how much you look like him. I wonder if Lucrecia fucked him too.”

-Excerpt from the final chapter of my Vincent Valentine origin story, The Nightmare Begins: http://archiveofourown.org/works/8201843/chapters/18789221

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“But why should they want it, if it means death?” “All they have to do is refuse to believe it means death. The easiest way to solve a problem is to deny it exists.” –The Gods Themselves.

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On Problematic Faves

Someone asked me recently which FF7 characters I find to be the most interesting, and which I find least interesting.

Most interesting to me were: Lucrecia, Vincent, Tseng, Reeve, Hojo. Least interesting: Cait Sith.

They asked me to justify my position, of course. How could I “like” those characters? Why didn’t I “like” Cait Sith? How could I find Reeve interesting but Cait Sith boring?

These questions do not make sense to me.

Let me identify a thing that I think happens here. When we talk about “favorite characters,” there seems to be an assumption that we have to agree with them as people. I’m not saying Cait Sith was an asshole; I’m saying I found him to be a dull character. I’m not saying I think Lucrecia, Hojo, and Tseng are moral paragons; I’m saying they intrigue me.

“Liking” the villains is not an uncommon thing; Sephiroth and Reno are amongst FF7’s most popular characters. But adopting a villain as one’s “fave” often comes with excuses. “Oh, but I headcanon that he was being mind-controlled by Jenova’s will and he’s actually not a bad person.” “Oh, but I headcanon that it gave him lots of grief to drop the Sector 7 plate on all those innocent people and anyway it wasn’t his fault because he was following orders.” “Oh, I like Sephiroth in this AU I have where he comes back from the dead and turns good so I pretend that’s canon because I like it better.” “Oh, the Turks really become good guys in the end, though!” Like, why can’t we just let the villains not necessarily be good people, and still like them as characters? Why do people find this to be so contradictory?

I don’t think I hand-wave Lucrecia’s faults (although I am very against people headcanoning new ones onto her and disliking her on the basis of their own imaginings, so it may seem like I do when I point that out). I certainly don’t hand-wave Hojo’s, I find Vincent and Tseng to be far more interesting characters when their Turk crimes are not hand-waved, and for that matter Reeve is far more interesting to me when I think of the possibility of him actually being a lot shadier and more manipulative than he probably is meant to be in canon.

I do not agree with these characters’ life choices. I don’t have to. They still fascinate me, perhaps for that very reason. And they still have admirable traits among their bad ones, too.

Absorb that. People can do things you hate, and still have admirable qualities. People can do things you hate, and still deserve to be respected as human beings. People can do things you hate, and that doesn’t even make them objectively wrong, because you are not the center of the universe’s compass for moral rightness. I very much mean this to apply to real life as much as it applies to fictional characters. Your political enemies, the people you know in real life who have done deplorable things, that person you’re arguing with on the internet and calling “human trash who doesn’t even deserve to live” because their ideologies differ from yours— they are all people who are a mixed package of good ideas and bad ideas and things they’ve gotten right and things they’ve gotten wrong, just like you are.

So instead of condemning people—and fictional characters! I truly believe these abilities are intertwined—you disagree with, why not try understanding them? Shit, yeah, that’s difficult, because they seem so wrong that their sense of rightness is absolutely alien to you, but I posit that that is what makes them interesting.

Give me all of the problematic faves. Those are the ones I’m interested in. Don’t give me the good guys who get an entire damn story about justifying their moral position; Give me the ones who are still left flailing in uncertainty because the lines that guide them aren’t as clear cut as the standard societally-prescribed guidelines of right vs. wrong. Give me the ones who forge a new path and have to figure it out on their own. Give me the ones who get it wrong, and how they deal with that.

Those are the characters who interest me, and the interesting characters will always be the ones I enjoy the most.

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“I can probably fix this.” —Lucrecia Crescent

(not really. but basically.)

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Experiment vs. Experimental

We often speak colloquially about how Lucrecia “experimented” upon Vincent when she attempted (and succeeded at) bringing him back to life. Heck, I’ve even used the word colloquially myself, and Hojo accuses her of just experimenting upon him in canon.

But there is a subtle distinction between experimenting on someone and using an experimental procedure, and since the loss of this distinction seems to be what leads people to have such an unflattering opinion of Lucrecia—particularly in her treatment of Vincent—I thought it might bear some discussing.

I’m a fan of beginning any discussion of semantics with dictionary definitions, so let’s examine this from Wikipedia:

An experiment is a procedure carried out to support, refute, or validate a hypothesis. Experiments provide insight into cause-and-effect by demonstrating what outcome occurs when a particular factor is manipulated. Experiments vary greatly in goal and scale, but always rely on repeatable procedure and logical analysis of the results.

Wikipedia doesn’t have an entry for just “experimental procedures,” but let’s look at this one for “experimental cancer treatment,” which is similar to the situation we’re looking at:

Experimental cancer treatments are medical therapies intended or claimed to treat cancer (see also tumor) by improving on, supplementing or replacing conventional methods (surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, and immunotherapy).

And sure you could say, “But Vincent didn’t have cancer!” And that would be 100% true. Vincent had death. He was literally afflicted with death, which I am going to be so bold as to say is actually a more serious affliction than cancer.

Back to experiments. First and foremost, an experiment is “carried out to support, refute, or validate a hypothesis.” This is why Hojo accuses her of conducting an experiment upon Vincent’s body (i.e., he was accusing her of simply wanting to validate her hypothesis rather than actually caring about the man and wanting him to live for unselfish reasons), this is why the suggestion unnerves her so much, and this seems to be why so many fans take offense to her merging Vincent with Chaos.

But here’s where I believe the critical error is happening: When Hojo says, “You’re using this fine specimen to finish your thesis,” he is not actually a reliable narrator, nor do I think he is meant to be taken as one. (I do think we’re meant to question it for a time, and you can read more about my interpretation of this scene here.) And I can’t believe we’re still in an age where we take the words of this abusive man at face value but need her words to be proven when she insists “no, you’re wrong, you’re wrong!” but I’ll lay it down nevertheless:

Lucrecia was not “experimenting” upon Vincent. This was not a repeatable procedure, and it’s arguable that screaming, banging on her computer, and crying on the floor constitute a logical analysis of the results. It also stands to reason that Hojo does, in fact, understand what an experiment is and knew this was not one, but he was taunting her because he is an emotional abuser.

She was using an experimental procedure. And, as in the case with cancer patients, she was resorting to this in a situation of life or death where the result was unlikely to be favorable otherwise.

Now, admittedly I have a personal tie to this analogy; my mother died of cancer a few years ago, so I’m somewhat familiar with how it goes when you resort to experimental treatments. First the typical, approved methods are tried—the “safest” methods with the least pleasant side effects that are still determined by the doctor to likely be effective (eg., radiation). Then, if those treatments don’t do the trick, the suggestion is to up you to the next most intense level of treatment that has proven to be effective (eg., chemotherapy). (Mind you, at some point radiation and chemotherapy were experimental as well; they’ve just already gone through all their experiments and been approved. And “approved” just means “benefits deemed (through sufficient trials a.k.a. experiments) likely to outweigh risks and side effects.”) And then at some point, if you’re quite unlucky, the doctor tells you nothing seems to be working and you have a very low chance of survival and would you like to try this experimental procedure because hey frankly it might not work but it could work and if you don’t you’re pretty much definitely going to die? And you probably say yeah, what the hell, sign me up.

Except Vincent was way past that. Vincent was on death’s door already, probably past the threshold. Vincent’s chance of survival at that point was 0%. Also, Vincent was not being treated at Massachusetts General Hospital, where presumably oncologists are subject to regulations about exactly what experimental procedures they can offer to which patients under which circumstances and at which point in their illness. Vincent was in the laboratory of Dr. Lucrecia Crescent, scientist, who was not presently at risk of being fired if she did not adhere strictly to treatments approved by the FDA, and who also had a very emotional investment in the survival of said patient which probably clouded her judgment.

So Lucrecia used a highly, highly experimental procedure, by which I mean “hey I just thought this up but what the hell I think it might work.”

There are two key differences here between what Lucrecia did and the latest study going on at your local hospital:

Participation in a medical study is entirely consensual by the patient (or at least the person legally permitted to make medical decisions for them, I guess?); Vincent was not given the chance to consent.

The medical studies at the hospital are far past the “wow I just had this crazy idea let’s see if it works” stage; Chaos was not.

On the first point, while I fully understand why that enrages some people, I’d like to point out that the only person who can say whether or not it was okay for Lucrecia to have used that experimental procedure on Vincent and whether or not he consents in hindsight to it having been done to him is Vincent, who thanks her at the end of DoC for saving his life.

On the second point, I’d say that yeah, the procedure clearly could have used a little more FDA testing before being tried on a patient. But Lucrecia also didn’t have that option, as Vincent was going to die and decompose if she did not act immediately, and acting immediately does not always allow time for calm and rational thought, which she goes on to apologize profusely for.

While we could of course spend many hours debating the morality of many of Lucrecia’s decisions, and while this distinction between “experiment” and “experimental procedure” does not apply to the actual experimenting she did on Sephiroth, I think it’s important to not lump all of Lucrecia’s actions together under the same broad stroke. What makes her such a fascinating character is her moral complexity and the dialogues we can have about it, and simplifying her actions and decisions is the very definition of overlooking the complexity of them.

So, in this, at least, let’s acknowledge the difference between experiment and experimental.