post/734733274896809984/do-you-ever-worry-your-own-writing-might-come-off that makes sense. i was asking because i'm afraid of accidentally writing misogyny myself and i kind of admire what you do
Hmm... I wish I had better advice to give you on this front, but honestly, the only thing I can tell you is to consider the perspective of your female characters.
Women are people. They have thoughts and feelings of their own, so like... just let them have their own arcs. A lot of the worst misogyny in WC comes from the way that the writers just don't care about their girls (or, in the case of tall shadow, actually get undermined and forced to rewrite entire chapters), so they're not curious about their lives, or WHY they feel the way they do or what they want, or any direction for their character arcs.
Turtle Tail as an example. She'll often just end up feeling whatever Gray Wing's plot demands. She's gotta leave when Storm dumps him to make him feel lonely. She shows up again to love him in the next book. Lets her best friend Bumble get dragged back to Tom the Wifebeater, but is sad enough about her death to be "unreasonably angry" with Clear Sky, and then calms down and accept Gray Wing is right all along.
And then she dies, so he can have his very own fridge wife.
In this way, Turtle Tail's just being used to tell Gray Wing's story. They're not interested in why she would turn on Bumble, or god forbid any lingering negative feelings for how she didn't help her, or even resentment towards Clear Sky for killing her or Gray Wing for jumping to his defense. She isn't really going through her own character arc.
She does have personality traits of her own, don't misunderstand my criticism, but as a character she revolves around Gray Wing.
So, zoom out every now and then, and just ask yourself; "Whose story is being told by what I wrote? Do my female characters have goals, wants, and agency, or are they just supporting men? How do their choices impact the narrative?"
But that's already kinda assuming that you already have characters like Turtle Tail who DO have personalities and potential of their own. Here's some super simple and practical advice that helped me;
Tally the genders in your cast. How many are boys, how many are girls, how many are others?
And take stock of how many of those characters are just in the supporting cast, and compare that to the amount you have in the main cast.
If you have a significant imbalance, ESPECIALLY in the main cast, fire the Woman Beam.
It's a really simple trick to just write a male character, and then change its gender while keeping it the same. I promise women are really not fundamentally different from men lmao. You can consider how your in-universe gender roles affect them later, if you'd like, but when you're just starting to wean yourself off a "boy bias" this trick works like a charm.
Also you're not allowed to change the body type of any girl you Woman Beam because I said so. PLEASE allow your girls to have muscles, or be fat, or be old, or have lots of scars. Do NOT do what a cowardly Triple A studio does, where the women all have the same cute or sexy face and curvy body while they're standing next to dwarves, robots, and a gorilla.
Or this shit,
If you do this I will GET you. If you're ever possessed by the dark urge, you will see my face appear in the clouds like Mufasa himself to guide you away from the path of evil.
Anyway, you get better at just making characters girls to begin with as time goes on and you practice it. It's really not as big of a deal as your brain might think it is.
Take a legitimate interest in female characters and try not to disproportionately hit them with parental/romance plots as opposed to the male cast, and you'll be fine. Don't think of them as "SPECIAL WOMEN CHARACTERS" just make a character and then let her be a girl, occasionally checking your tally and doing some critical thinking about their use in the story.
(Also remember I'm not a professional or anything, I'm just trying to give advice)
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„My father doesn‘t lie to me..“
MA BOIII IF ONLY YOU KNEW
That line had me spit out toothpaste through my nose, thank you for that
One of the conditions of the brainwashing is the inability to think that Draxum is lying. He can't even suspect it.
Only to him though, that's why he could call out Draxum lying to Raph. But anything Draxum tells him directly, he absolutely can't refute it. At most he can suspect him of lying by omission.
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SO. ON THE TOPIC OF LOSS OF AUTONOMY. i am having the analysis brainworms now i hope u dont mind me going off in ur inbox. hi :]
there is something to be said about how vash's name is used against him constantly. that loss of who he even is as a person. i think about this so much. his name, his very identity is taken away from him. just the mere mention of the name vash the stampede is enough to send an ENTIRE town into a panic. it happens so much and its DEVASTATING to me. hes been labelled a monster across the entire world, and people who stick by his side after hearing his name are few and far between. theres been so much fear tacked onto his name, so much so that OTHER outlaws have used it on multiple occasions to make themselves more powerful. using his name to commit crimes that the real vash would be horrified to even consider. power in names and all that.
vash even. leans into it himself at a certain point. in order to protect the people of augusta he runs through the city shooting bullets into the air and solidifying his image of a deranged killer in the pursuit of. saving everyone. the only way theyll listen to him is if they think hes going to kill them all. if theyre afraid of him. theres also the part in hang fire (? i think its that one) where hes walking through the halls of the sand steamer singing about killing people in order to scare the bandits into not hurting the hostages.
and then you think about. eriks. how lina and her grandma took him in and accepted them as part of his family. how the town around them accepted him only because they had no idea who he actually was. he was a good guy... up until they learned he was vash. and then we get the conversation between the two men in the bar talking about how they should chase him out of town, despite living around him and knowinf him and seeing how good he is for . two years.
but lina and her grandma still accept him after that. theyre one of the only people besides milly/meryl/wolfwood who genuinely love and care abt him despite his name. they still want to keep him safe, grandma asks wolfwood to protect him and keep him out of trouble, even after learning hes the legendary outlaw gunman. because shes seen the true vash ans doesnt let the name scare her.
aughhh im rambling now i probably should have made this into my own post but this makes me SO fuckign crazy dude . give me ur thoughts id love to hear them.
I. YEAH. YEAH. OH MY GOD. Like. nothing is his own anymore. His name is used against him, his face is plastered on wanted posters. There is nothing about himself that he can truly call his. Not even his Plant powers! Because those are used against him time and time again by Knives in EVERY ADAPTATION!!!!
Like. Vash is no longer the name of a kid who once argued with his brother and laughed with his mother and celebrated his birthday and rolled around in grassy fields. It's the name of an outlaw who will kill at the drop of a hat. It's the name of an out-of-control human natural disaster who's leveled cities. If he doesn't even have his name, then what part of himself is really himself anymore?
AND THAT'S WHY I LOVE ERIKS! He finally has something of his own! He's got a name that attached to no one, and a life where he can settle down and stay out of the public eye. He finally has something that is truly his. And no one lets him keep that except for Lina and her grandma.
This guy really has no control over his own life doesn't he!!! He's a passive character in the story of his own life!!! He has nothing of his own, no identity past "humanoid typhoon" because everything about his identity has been stripped from him and morphed into something he's not. He has no say in anything in his life, not even who he is as a person, AND IT DRIVES ME BONKERS N FUCKING YONKERS!!!!
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another thing lsk does is consistently take away kdj's choice: declaring herself the murderer, writing the book, and then she literally locked him up and went off to kill the person that matters to him the most, like ma'am you had all that time in prison to reflect and you did jack with it. the nerve she had to not only be jealous of yjh but Hate him for?? being there for her son when she refused to??? i shudder to think what would've happened to kdj if she actually killed yjh
See this is what I'm saying though, LSK represents an aspect of narrative sense/reality that influences ORV as a work. The sense of "this is the way things have to be" which strips agency from the characters of a story. This aspect of fiction is then equated with "reality," LSK is both KDJ's real mother that connects him to his life before TWSA and a representation of Korean literature's ancien regime. It's significant that she's put opposite to YJH, whose story is one that appeals solely to Kim Dokja despite in all likelihood lacking any substantial literary merit. Webnovels that are unrealistic, too far out there, way too silly to be "real." Her need to assert "reality" over KDJ's affection for YJH stems from the fact that LSK has consistently used "reality" as the rationale behind the decisions she made that have hurt her son. But the thesis of ORV is then blurring the line between the real and the absurd, it's fanfiction about historical literature, it's a gritty apocalypse novel with an OP self-insert protagonist, it's a loser with no friends in real life being loved by fictional people as much as he loves fiction. Thus, I feel that in ORV's metanarrative the conflict between YJH and LSK represents the clashing literary worlds of time held classics and modern webnovels that may have each raised a reader in their own way.
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there is not a SINGLE REACTION when andrew. ANDREW LITERALLY IN FRONT OF OTHER PEOPLE !!!!! THEYRE RIGHT THERE I REREAD AND I REREAD IT TO CHECK HE WASNT JUST WAITING FOR PEOPLE TO BE GONE !!!!! THEYRE RIGHT FUCKING TEHRE !!!! when andrew targets neil like he hit the shit out of him with a racquet he pinned him in an elevator. NO ONE SAYS ANYTHING !!!!!!! ANYTHING !!!!!!!
tearing into furniture trying to stop myself from explaining andrew to you so just know there IS an explanation for why no one steps up to him and nicky's gonna show you pretty soon when he starts flirting. el oh el
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