beranyth:

mygoodrabbit:

lordroose:

commanderdudebro:

lordroose replied to your post: lordroose replied to your post: I have real…

honestly two bodies one mind SERIOUSLY THOUGH I JUST. ladies are ALWAYS difficult for me. and half the time I feel like people are gonna side-eye me and be like WHO IS THIS SEXIST ASSHOLE but it’s not that it’s just sue problems jfsjfaj

Aha oh man you need to get on skype more so I can shout at you.

oh man like when I write lady characters I get really concerned, mostly because there’s so many issues I know are there and I want to deal with them and at the same time I’m sick of dealing with lady issues every day myself? So I find them really difficult to write. 

reblogging because I want to write too much lmfao AND YES I NEED TO GET ON SKYPE MORE 

that’s how I feel exactly and, as everyone has seen, most of my characters are evil horrible douchebags so it would be like “oh look all Jay’s characters are bitches” or if they’d been abused it’d become WOW LOOK AT THIS MISOGYNISTIC WRITER/CHARACTER CREATOR ALL HER WOMEN ARE/HAVE BEEN MISTREATED or they’d be “sluts” or they’d be this that or the other thing because THESE ARE THE TROPES FOR FEMALE CHARACTERS. Either they’re “too weak” or too “MASCULINE” or something and it’s like but I just wanna write a character who is this certain way without being bashed for IMPROPER SOMETHINGS OH GOD.

And it’s funny because I’m a woman and I’d like to just write a batshit psycho sexually comfortable dominant badass but there’s too many labels and bullshit thrown at female characters to do so in this society. So I just. Live my life and write about dudes. 

Because I can.

God, ALL of this, and it’s frustrating and I hate it but yeah I feel that idea that making a female character a wretched/conflicted/aggressive person or giving her a traumatic past/experience is going to be read… inappropriately? ALL I WANT is to be able to hold my female characters to the exact same standards as my male characters in terms of building interesting, plausible backgrounds and personalities, but as someone who likes nothing better than to write deeply flawed characters and then torment the shit out of them, the tropes that female characters fall into given the exact same character development as male characters are considerably less forgiving. Nasty little doublestandard, and I’m still struggling to figure out how to personally get past it.

Oh man all of this me too augh ._.  Now that I’ve been around harsher criticisms of fiction I realize there are SO MANY WAYS I COULD GO WRONG and whenever I’m like “okay I really want to make a female character” my brain just starts flooding with things I mustn’t mustn’t do and even if I somehow design the character well then I don’t know what to DO with her cause that’s where things can REALLY go wrong and akjfkaksjafalsfjpfhththd.  It doesn’t help that my favorite character type to write are doofy angstbuckets, and I couldn’t write a tough, kick-ass empowered independent intelligent character to save my life ahahaha ._.

I see a lot of commentary about how people love making female characters as a political statement, but knowing it can be seen as a political statement just makes me all the more paranoid.

I just kinda want to comment on this whole thing from a “political statement”/”social justice” viewpoint.  First and foremost, you, and I, and every other female writer out there are not obligated to make our works a modern social commentary about women simply because we are women.

Will it be interpreted as such, by some?  Possibly.  But you, as a woman, owe it to absolutely nobody to justify why you want to maybe one day kinda write something like you.

And it’s hard to strike that balance.  I’m a firm believer in things like consent and autonomy and I have female characters who… honestly enjoy playing around with those things.  Some aspects of some characters I feel like I need to keep secret, and I find myself wondering how much of that is “because it’s not what women do.” .  Tiona has been in questionable situations before and people would probably deride the whole experience as humiliating, but she’s enjoying it.  But would I feel more comfortable gleefully posting her parade of debauchery to tumblr if she were a man?

I guess there’s this whole thing where people can’t understand that for a writer or creator, sometimes you make things that don’t align with your personal beliefs for the sake of storytelling.  And it seems like this sort of mis-alignment isn’t understood when it comes to women writing women.

I guess what I’m getting at is that… it sucks that you feel that way and in some ways it gives me pause, too.