Nexus / NoiR | 30yo; Aquarius. They/them | non-binary. Scara kinnie, he/him pussy connoisseur. Genshin, HSR, BG3, Hazbin Hotel, vtubers and more. Multishipper/polyshipper. Proship, pro kink, pro fiction in all forms with no exceptions. Darkfic and dead dove enthusiast, an earnestly deranged individual. I block minors on sight, don't interact with me.
Seeing drag queens in real life gives me the exact same feeling as how the hobbits describe elves in the lord of the rings
I don’t know how to describe to you if you’ve never been to a drag show but like seeing recordings of them is one thing & seeing them in real life is Another. Like pov you’re looking up at the tallest most enchantingly beautiful ambiguously sexed person you’ve ever seen. She’s like covered in glitter and you can smell her perfume. And you’re in a room with like several of them & you begin to understand how Frodo felt in that castle
Oh to be a hobbit (short cis woman) surrounded by beautiful elves (drag queens) towering over me (in heels) at lothlorien (museum garden party).
Y'know, I’m kinda surprised I haven’t seen Jack Chains more in fantasy tbh, like it’s a really interesting and low budget armor style, I’m legit surprised I’ve almost never seen it in media
Couple examples I pulled from google images
Actually kind of! It’s built with a very interesting principle behind it and I’m gonna explain it below because it’s neat
We need to lay more blame for “Kids don’t know how computers work” at the feet of the people responsible: Google.
Google set out about a decade ago to push their (relatively unpopular) chromebooks by supplying them below-cost to schools for students, explicitly marketing them as being easy to restrict to certain activities, and in the offing, kids have now grown up in walled gardens, on glorified tablets that are designed to monetize and restrict every movement to maximize profit for one of the biggest companies in the world.
Tech literacy didn’t mysteriously vanish, it was fucking murdered for profit.
I firmly believe that how feminist a book is is better demonstrated by its background characters rather than its mains
What I mean by this is that a book may have “feminist” female leads who are strong, competent, complex, whatever, but how do they portray women just…existing in the world? Are there women in the background, or is the fantasy novel with its strong independent Action Girl protagonists set on a background of generic male soldiers, guards, councilors, shopkeepers, messengers, and wizard apprentices? Are minor characters ever women when there’s no particular reason for them to be? When women appear in the background of your story, do they have any unique qualities that hint at a complex picture we’re not seeing or do they slide seamlessly into Pampered Noblewoman, Prostitute and Vaguely Maternal Older Woman Who Runs A Tavern Or Something?
If your protagonist is a fighter or magic user, do you show other women in those roles? If your society is more relaxed about sex discrimination, have you built a world that looks like it?
Have you built a world where your female characters don’t all have to be The Best At Everything, or is almost every female character placed where she can be extraordinary next to a bunch of male counterparts? Are you comfortable letting a female wizard or warrior be average or unimportant, or does she have to be one of the most skilled and powerful of them all, able to match or best all the men around her? On the other hand, are you comfortable having a female wizard or warrior be indisputably the most skilled or powerful out of the wizards or warriors, without drawing attention to her gender, placing her in competition with men, or having her be an exception to the rule because she’s female?
Are you letting your female characters be mediocre and un-extraordinary? Your world is full of powerful sorceresses, fierce battle maidens and calculating noblewomen, but do women do things in this world other than be Exemplary and Great and Awesome? If you’ve established that women do business and fight, do you have female soldiers carousing at bars and vaguely dull female Evil Minions Of The Dark Lord bumbling around doing evil bidding and female apprentices slacking on work or is every background woman we see competent and controlled and intelligent and doing whatever it is she’s doing without error, whereas only men are allowed to be foolish, impulsive, mess things up, or just be shown unflatteringly during the couple sentences we know them? In other words, does the world show women being unapologetically human beings or are all your female characters basically making up for being women by not doing anything that would badly represent their gender?
In particular, if you’re trying to show a society with gender equality, that means the dark lord is willing to hire women who are bumbling idiots as guards, and not just that some female wizards climbed their way to the top and became As Good As Men because they’re so badass they can snap god like a bunch of uncooked spaghetti.
This is all Extremely True, and I applaud it. Another very telling one that invariably drives me nuts when it’s contravened is as follows:
Do your Strong Female Characters have mothers, sisters, female friends, or any kind of support network?
The token Strong Female Character is almost always a woman alone. Other women in the story are connected to the male characters, not to her. But most real women have other women in their lives. They may be family, found family, best friends, work friends, hobby friends, rivals-turned-allies, but they are there. Men may have only one female friend, and thus see a friend group with one female member as complete, but I’ve never met anyone who has ever identified as female, whether that identity is current or not, who doesn’t have other past-or-present women in his, her, or their life. We cluster.
Even the Bitter Rival may be one of those women, in a pinch, when Girl Code is invoked. The work rival driving the heroine home when she’s drunk, the hostile neighbourhood ladies closing like a fist around the ‘bad girl’ who’s being menaced by a strange man, the childhood enemy who drops the shouting match mid-sentence when she realizes the heroine is actually bleeding right now. (Violation of that code signals a truly irredeemable villain, and it’s extremely difficult to bring a character back from that.)
A heroine alone needs explanation. It is an unnatural state, and an indication that she’s in some kind of serious trouble.
