#plus she is very much the mom friend/big sister archetype so having her as older makes sense. so maybe 19

[amouress16]

I decided to design my own Yuu/MC oc! A lot of her ‘abilities’ and such are things I have interpreted from canon and some theories I have on why the MC is the way they are.

[toongrrl-blog]

Part One of Barb Series: Why Barb Died (Character Device Talk)

*Please watch the Betty Draper Francis video first, for extra credit, check out the channel’s vid on Jack Dawson and come with knowledge of Beth March*

Happy end of the 2010s! Before I discuss what Barb could have brought to the Party in Stranger Things I need to discuss how as a character she needed to die.

1. Beth March

In one scene in Little Women, the girls and Laurie discuss their ambitions for adult life. Oldest sister Meg wants to marry and have kids, oldest middle sis Jo wants to become a known and successful writer, youngest sister Amy wants to become rich and famous as an artist and maybe a socialite, and middle child Beth wants things to stay the way they are for her, with her loving family at her side. What’s wrong with this? What the other three sisters have in common is that they are hoping for adult lives which include a lot of change, responsibility, independence (either as a career woman or running a household with little kids underfoot), new experiences, and even new people in their lives (Meg would need to meet a guy to marry and have kids with him, Jo would need to meet people in her professional life, Amy would entertain guests and appeal to patrons). Shy Beth is a talented pianist, vet, and doll collector and is very charitable but she doesn’t seem to want to take the risks it would take to grow as a person and thrive and mature or be noticed for her own merits aside from “Angel of the House” and the future looks pretty hostile; so by the end of the novel, Beth has died in her early 20s while sisters lives have changed (Meg married and had children in a cottage while gaining confidence as a homemaker, wife, and mom; Jo sells her writing and meets a professor who wants to start a school where she becomes headmistress after they marry; Amy goes on a Grand Tour of Europe and marries wealthy and happy).

The series Stranger Things, on a whole, is a coming-of-age series that borrows from the John Hughes and Steven Spielberg films of that era that captured the joys and pains of growing up, while Joyce’s and Hop’s storylines borrow from conspiracy thrillers around that era and somewhat from Hitchcock films. All these films captured ordinary people undergoing extraordinary (E.T., North By Northwest, The Goonies, The Stepford Wives) and life altering events (Jaws, The Breakfast Club, Silkwood) that force them to encounter challenges and make decisions they wouldn’t normally make in their mundane lives. Joyce ends up facing a monster with an axe and even makes demands of people who could wipe her off the Earth, the boys have to ride their bikes to evade murderous men in vans and hide a young traumatized girl, Nancy has to learn to create and use deadly weapons and use her skills of sneaking out for something besides sex, Jonathon has to cut his and another girl’s hand to lure a monster to their trap, Hop sneaks into a morgue just to slit a dead boy’s corpse and find cotton stuffing, Will has to use what knowledge and skills he has to survive another world filled with creatures out to kill him, most of the kids throughout the series have to lie and break laws to save their town. 

While the official guide does list Barb as being a varsity softball player and a mathlete and Shannon Purser concurs that Barb would have been the Velma of the group if she lived, there is one big thing that separates the Velmas from the Barbs and Beth’s of the world: Velma takes risks, she would trespass private looking property and dilapidated buildings to solve a mystery. Barb is a loyal friend and honest and studious and smart, but she’s ultimately the good girl archetype: cautious, obedient to her elders, predictable, conservatively and femininely dressed, chaste. An archetype that Nancy is trying to flee (not that the alternative of being a girl who sneaks out with her boyfriend to makeout is going to help Nancy at all) to avoid ending up like her mother. Barb has the fangs (talent and means) to be a Party member, she just lacks the nerve to jump and sink those fangs.

2. Commentary on the Patriarchy and the Tyranny of Beauty Standards

Most of the female characters in the series don’t fit the strict criteria of their Reagan era Indiana small town regarding what makes a good woman. Joyce is a single mother who doesn’t come with well-coiffed hair and she appears to be hysterical and is a working mother in a time and place where all these factors would label her a “bad mother”, Nancy is a frank young woman who takes risks and even asserts her sexuality and herself when plenty of people (like the shitheads at Hawkins Post) would prefer her to be a delicate virgin in pastels, El is physically stronger than the boys with her powers and she is very direct in her manner despite her soft-spoken demeanor, Max is a girl who is interested in arcade video games and skateboarding and brightly colored summer clothing and reads her Mom’s Cosmo cover to cover and is assertive, Erica is an assertive young girl who can talk truth (and shade) to adults and has a knowledge of My Little Pony and Cold War Politics, Robin is snarky and has a style that makes her stand out from most girls in Hawkins and is a teen genius, Kali’s rage and Joan Jett-esque appearance would make the preppy and pastel and autumnal tone wearing residents of Hawkins in Cardiac Care, Suzie has defied notions about girls in science and math and even the Mormon beliefs of her parents by french kissing and dating a non-Mormon boy like Dustin, and Karen despite her appearance of hot housewife perfection is dissatisfied with her marriage and comes close to cheating on her husband. 

In contrast Barb is pretty much the most conventional character: she dresses conservatively in ruffles and pink, she is seemingly chaste, follows the rules diligently and worries about getting punished by the Holland and Wheeler parents, and has a more common body type found in cis-gender women (correct me if I’m wrong, hopefully I don’t offend trans pear shaped women) and not often found in the older members of the female cast. But despite Barb’s body being common among women in general and specific to her region (the American Midwest is noted for starchy and creamy and fried foods and is historically farming country, where pioneers would find her strong for work in and out of the log cabin and give birth to the necessary amount of children i.e. extra hands for work), the delicate and slender builds of Joyce and Nancy, the classic proportionate and slender grace of Robin, and the leggy and toned image of Karen are closer to the female standard of beauty in the 1980s. In Barb’s lifetime (1967-1983), the image of beauty was dominated by leggy, toned, slim, busty women or lean women with minimal breasts: no room for tall, broad, pear shapes like herself. And in 1983, Molly Ringwald wasn’t yet a household name that freckled redheads with dry wit and atypical images could look on with pride. Hell I remember reading a copy of Color Me Beautiful where they recommend that women with heavy hips and small waists (similar features of Christina Hendricks and Shannon Purser) shouldn’t cinch their waistlines, the celebration of Marilyn Monroe pinups with round hips, pillowy thighs and tummies, rounded tushes were long gone by then. Basically Barb being her natural self, was not seen as “feminine enough” and combined with her glasses and style (any plus sized or early developing gal can tell you that it is hell to find junior styles that suit your body size and shape) have ruled her as “uncool”. 

There is also that Barb does a lot of things that the boys do: being slightly geeky, a loyal friend, has innocent and wholesome interests, chaste, and is quiet (like Will) but she still gets killed. One can sense that #JusticeForBarb came out of an anger with misogyny in media and society that tells women to be a certain way and punishes them whether they fit a mold or not. Women are still underpaid in the workplace, underrepresented in government, still deal with unequal and toxic relationships, are shamed for being virgins or for having sexual experience (Carol pokes fun at the idea of Barb finding the sex sounds too much and yet contributes to the slut shaming graffiti of Nancy), are told on one hand to look a certain way to attract the male gaze and shamed when they indulge in sexual desire (something Nancy can attest to with her glamorous mother who offers to lend her black heels and focuses on Nancy’s beauty before a funeral, the same mom who was angry her daughter had sex), they are either too fat/skinny/busty/flat/frizzy/straight haired/pale/slutty/prudish/dark/feminine/masculine/full-butt-ed/quiet/loud/naive/cynical/smart/dumb/angry/happy, and they deal with a media that sells a very narrow standard of beauty to the point that when they see a drop dead gorgeous actress or model with similar features they feel seen.

Oh Bondage, Up Yours!

*Read this is not a “Barb is a slut shamer!” piece yes that was shitty but she was a teen girl in a small 1980s town and she ISN’T starting a (paraphrasing Kimberly Nicole Foster quote) “no whores allowed campaign” OR trying to pass a law that demands women keep their ectopic pregnancies to full term*

3. End of Innocence

When Barb died, it marked the end of Nancy’s childhood and her needing to grow up. That was the night Nancy went straight from childhood (Barb), teenager (sex with Steve), and then shortly became an adult when she realized that Barb had disappeared. For many women (like myself at ages 9 and 10), the moment they get their period or grow breasts or reach a certain age, marks a dramatic end of their childhood. Suddenly many are told to police their behavior and language around boys, even policing the food they eat or their bodies. There is also extra responsibility and stress, demogorgans being one of them. Nancy is now having to deal with the sorts of issues that adult women dealt with on Mad Men along with scary monsters threatening her town and the fact her parents are not as happy as they look to the world, there is a gap between the experiences of her and Mike, she has a baby sister who probably was conceived to save the marriage, and Nancy can’t confide or trust either of her parents (who are absorbed with their own issues). Now Nancy is making big decisions that Barb, with the sheltering and seemingly close parents, will likely never deal with. Nancy is even taking fashion risks with clothes that are more functional, stylish, show off her figure, and can even withstand flayer blood and exorcising her boyfriend’s little brother.

4. A Huge Threat

Barb was intended to be a character that we connected with, someone to be built up somehow. There was a character like this in a movie: her name was Marion Crane. She was a secretary who has been supporting herself and her little sis since their parents died, patiently waiting for her boyfriend to make more money at his job so they can marry and stop sneaking around sleeping with one another, in desperation she steals a lot of money from her workplace, drives to California where she meets a mild-mannered but strange young man who manages a distant motel in the vicinity of a Victorian house where an older woman is croaking about promiscuity, after talking with him over a dinner of sandwiches in his taxidermy themed office, she goes to take a shower and has decided to return to Phoenix to return the money, then a strange figure comes with a large butcher knife in horribly out of date clothes and starts stabbing her to death.

This was from the Hitchcock film Psycho, the forerunner of the slasher genre that dominated the earlier half of the 1980s, and it premiered to shocked audiences in 1960. The meaning of the grisly murder of Marion, a character the audience was following from the beginning of the film, was that Norman Bates was a huge threat and intensified the need for Marion’s killer to be brought to justice.

The same thing can be said about the deaths of Benny and Barb, to show how much a threat the demogorgan and Hawkins National Lab were to the townspeople of Hawkins (and the world as a whole), basically such big threats that a little boy can be kidnapped from the safety of his home, a young teenage girl could be snatched up and killed from a suburban swimming pool, and a kindly cook and owner of a local diner would be executed for knowing about a runaway child. 

5. The future of Women in Stranger Things

Not all is lost, Barb’s death forced the Duffer Bros to take a look at how women were written and treated in their series, and even helped spurred tv viewers (who ordinarily wouldn’t pay attention to social issues) to take a deeper look and interest in how people especially women are treated. For some reason I like to think: Max, Robin, Erica, and Suzie are a way of recognizing Barb’s potential within the series and even what viewers saw. 

Now stay tuned to where I figure out how Barb could have been beneficial to the party.

[nightcoremoon]

Top 10 Badass Female Characters in Fire Emblem Fates (in my opinion)

10- Reina/Peri

Okay so the reason why there's two people in this slot is because they're literally the same archetype. They love blood and killing and violence and blah blah blah, BUT ALSO they have at least some levels of depth and complexity to their character to keep them from being boring one note death machines. Problem is Reina doesn't have any supports with anyone so you don't get to know much more about her, but she protected your mom. Peri protects your older brother. Anyone who keeps your family safe is definitely badass.

9- Kagero

Ah Kagero. You get captured all the freakin time but that's not your fault. You're still the best dread fighter hands down, and definitely my favorite ninja (Kaze is too fragile and Saizo is too slow and Soleil is unavailable to a path). Plus she's an artist and while she may not be the best painter she still loves it and enjoys her hobby. She's a loyal servant and an even more loyal friend, and would put her own life on the line to protect your brother.

8- Anna

Can't fault a girl for war profiteering. Strong independent woman don't need no man, been around the block for centuries and across kingdoms, crack shot with a bow, gold farmer, feisty redhead, runs circles around the L crew, I could go on. She's always on my team and is supported by MC for dem stats and the unity ability in pretty sure procs make a killing but idk. Regardless she's still gr9.

7- Arete

She gets killed like four times before finally going down, and that first time was fairly heroic honestly. Definitely one of the most important people in regards to lore.

6- Camilla

What list would be complete without the best sister??? No not because of her giant tiddies (awesome to look at they may be) or the giant ass window (also awesome to look at) or even the weird incest thing going on (I guess from a Japanese lens that's awesome too but eeehhh) but because she's actually a great combat unit especially if she spends a couple levels as a hero getting those skills. Axes AND magic AND an attack buff means she should always be out on the field. She may be insane and has a lust for blood rivaling Peri, but she's a good sister, a good ruler, and a good unit.

5- Soleil

Oh yes. FUCKING SUPERB YOU FUNKY LITTLE LESBIAN! She's a big glass cannon so I always make her a master ninja and god is she a good ninja. She never gives up even in the face of innumerable odds, she's got great stats all depending on who her mom is, she's SUPER FUCKING GAY FOR GIRLS, oh yeah and she's a teenager leading a band of mercenaries; how fucking cool is that?

4- Rinkah

Stomp on me like you stomp on enemies. Oni savages are like fighters with better stats and both blacksmiths and chieftains have some top notch skills and she's the only one in the game who can do that naturally. She's an adamantly staunch advocate for her people, and makes leaps and bounds of character development through her supports. She's also clearly the most visibly sculpted lady sans for maybe Effie and anyone packing that much solid muscle has got to be pretty fucking awesome.

3- Hinoka

Real talk tho Hinoka is the actual best sister slash mom. Proof? Setsuna and Azama are both still alive somehow. The providence that protects them from traps and getting choked to death has got to be the pegasus knight. She's the second best female offensive lance user in the game (excluding knight/cavalier/merchant/basara/etc who have different roles than pure adjacent physical lance-based dps), especially if she A+'s either Camilla or Setsuna and S's either Xander or Silas. She's got enough variety to her that I feel the Lucina seal would simply be wasted on her. My only complaint is that without reclassify she kinda sucks but hey, just buy a freakin heart seal.

2- Scarlet

VIVA LA REVOLUCION! Tragic you can only use her in one path. I romanced her in my very first playthrough to give stats to my Kana (and also because I knew it would be my only chance to really use her). She deserves so much better than to just be fridge stuffing to give Ryoma that manpain. Dammit Japan. At least she's got the coolest armor design.

HONORABLE MENTIONS TIME!

Azura: the fucking queen of Valla who carries the plot on her shoulders. literally the most important person in canon. deserves better.

Felicia: accidental badassery still counts, right? slap on a flame shuriken and watch heads roll.

Hana: best samurai. like lon'qu but actually with personality. rough and abrasive but has a heart of gold.

Beruka: cold blooded contract killer trying to learn how to feel. similar to Reina/Peri but she doesn't kill for fun, she kills to survive. she's just really good at it.

Lilith: f

Cassita: she bakes you cookies. SHE. BAKES. YOU. COOKIES. okay. when will your fave ever? except for camilla, she baked you cookies too, but camilla has crippling depression, mommy issues, a whole lotta weird borderline incest stuff going on (even though you're adopted so it's okay according to japan... oh, who am I kidding, I fucked leo to have dragon forrest and because FOLGERS COFFEE COMMERCIAL). anyway. cassita only knows that you're armed, dangerous, here to kill the king, and once knew her darling elise, but she shelters your entire fucking army and then BAKES. YOU. NICE HOT FRESH CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES. bless her big beautiful heart. you can be badass without kicking someone's ass.

AND LAST BUT NOT LEAST

1- Oboro

fuck, man, she is just the best. best outfit, best stats, best combat ability, best class, and has a personality and hobbies and interests and likes and dislikes and flaws... I literally cried a little bit when I had to kill her in conquest. she is my favorite character in the whole game and she just kicks so much ass. I can't adequately put it into words, it's just... agh, she's great. 10/10