Tumblr: why do misogynists like to invalidate strong female characters???????????
If we’re going to be fair here, the reason so many people get upset when a female character is called a Mary Sue is because that label is thrown around so haphazardly and so very often handed to characters who really don’t deserve to be labeled as such. The controversy of the term comes from its overuse and misuse.
The term can be used correctly, but it is too often misused by people who see a capable strong female character and have a gut instinct to burn the witch and return to their male hero power fantasy.
“So, there’s this girl. She’s tragically orphaned and richer than anyone on the planet. Every guy she meets falls in love with her, but in between torrid romances she rejects them all because she dedicated to what is Pure and Good. She has genius level intellect, Olympic-athelete level athletic ability and incredible good looks. She is consumed by terrible angst, but this only makes guys want her more. She has no superhuman abilities, yet she is more competent than her superhuman friends and defeats superhumans with ease. She has unshakably loyal friends and allies, despite the fact she treats them pretty badly. They fear and respect her, and defer to her orders. Everyone is obsessed with her, even her enemies are attracted to her. She can plan ahead for anything and she’s generally right with any conclusion she makes. People who defy her are inevitably wrong.
The problem isn’t that characters are unrealistic. Heroes often are unrealistic and it’s ok to criticize media.
However, female characters are criticized where male characters aren’t.
Everything in OP’s post could apply to Luke Skywalker (and definitely applies to Anakin) but those characters won’t be criticized the way Rey has been (even though everything Rey does in The Force Awakens is believable). We are more willingly to believe in a male chosen one who can just do amazing things because he’s the hero.
Boys can have wishfulment stories but girls can only have realistic stories.
^^^^
So, there’s this interesting thing where a certain degree of saturation in stories will train the audience to just accept stuff that’d normally strike them as bizarre or unrealistic, and move on without questioning it. It’s sort of like ‘willing suspension of disbelief’, except that phrasing doesn’t really encapsulate it precisely. It’s more like… commonality breeds acceptance.
For example, a humble young boy who rises to prominence and becomes a hero is such a standard piece of storytelling, that virtually no one ever sits down to watch a movie and actually goes ‘well, but, this is just a young farm lad – surely he can’t do a single thing to help stop the Forces of Evil!’ People in the movie might do that. But unless the audience is very, very young, or has somehow managed to avoid most books, movies, songs, comics, television shows, and oral traditions for the whole of their life, they’re going to sit down and think ‘ah yes, here’s our guy’.
Even though, in real life, it actually IS still pretty far-fetched for Ye Humble Village Lad to turn out to be the only thing standing between mankind and destruction.
The interesting thing, though, is that if you change enough elements of what is so common as to be thoughtlessly accepted, the image you present will no longer resemble the familiar narrative. Even if, below the surface, the other components are exactly the same.
This, along with the above-mentioned misogyny, is another contributing factor to the Mary Sue thing.
Because there are fewer female heroes who are just unabashed power fantasies, embodying unlikely rises to success or mastery of untold skills, if you take a very typical story that stars a dude and swap him out for a lady, the elements once rendered invisible by familiarity, are now noticeable again. The audience is jolted out of complacency, and begins to think more critically about what they’re being asked to believe. (You can accomplish the same thing with other demographics, too, i.e. putting characters of colour in roles typically given to white actors, or having LGBT+ characters with the same abundance as straight ones, and so on and so forth.)
So even people who like to think of themselves as totally fair and unprejudiced can end up enforcing double-standards in entertainment. Because if you don’t catch yourself, you will not even realize that you managed to sit through three Iron Man movies without ever questioning the premise of Tony Stark’s genius, but somehow Shuri in Black Panther just struck you as ‘unrealistic’.
• interrupt a line of thought with a sudden new one
• say ‘uh’ between words when unsure
• accidentally blend multiple words together, and may start the sentence over again
• repeat filler words such as ‘like’ ‘literally’ ‘really’ ‘anyways’ and ‘i think’
• begin and/or end sentences with phrases such as ‘eh’ and ‘you know’, and may make those phrases into question form to get another’s input
• repeat words/phrases when in an excited state
• words fizzle out upon realizing no one is listening
• repeat themselves when others don’t understand what they’re saying, as well as to get their point across
• reply nonverbally such as hand gestures, facial expressions, random noises, movement, and even silence
Excellent sticky note for dialogue writing in fiction.
All of this. I get a lot of compliments on my dialogue and this list pretty much covers what I do (but some of it, I didn’t even realize I did, lol). I highly recommend reading your dialogue aloud (or imagining it in realtime like a movie scene) to see if it feels natural, which is what I do when editing.
On a scale of “is occasionally forced to bathe” to “Instagram model with sponsors to hoe for” how involved is your OC’s Skincare routine?
What are your OC’s food preferences (flavors/textures/spiciness/calories/ when and how they eat) and how did they get that way?
What’s something pointless/petty/unimportant that IRRATIONALLY ANNOYS THE HELL out of your OC?
What’s your OC’s response to being asked for money by a homeless person?
Does your OC get lost easily? What do they do when they do get lost?
What would STOP your OC from Doing The Right Thing in a tense situation?
Realistically, could your OC (in their normal circumstances- i.e. at thier own house/battlecamp/spaceship etc.) keep a small child alive for a week if they had to? A Dog? A Houseplant? A rock with a smiley face painted on?
If your OC had to take the S.A.T. tomorrow with one night to prep, how would they do? both emotionally and academically.
What would cause your OC to chose to do something petty/pointlessly cruel?
On a scale of “Complete and Justified nervous breakdown” to “Conquer The Entire Galaxy and become an Immortal God-Emperor”, how well would your OC handle being abducted by Aliens?
What song is 100% garunteed to get your OC beyond turnt and will be sung loudly and emabarrasingly, either in public or the shower?
What perfectly-normal-to-them-thing does your OC do that confuses/pisses off/terrifies thier neighbors?
Under what circumstances would your OC appear naked in public?
What thing did your OC’s parents do that your OC wishes they had a better explanation for?
How often does your OC “zone out” or do things on autopilot and how severe have the problems that have arisen from that been?
How strong or weak is your OC’s Impulse control? What’s the worst thing that happened becuase of thier Impulsivity or inability to be so?
How does your OC sabotage themselves?
What’s the trashiest item in your OC’s wardrobe, when was the last time they wore it and why do they still have it?
How Dehydrated is your OC right now? Are they going to fix this?
What’s your OC smell like? no, not that “Vanilla and Anxiety” evocative stuff, realistically. Body odor? what have they been touching all day? When was thier last shower? Did they put on any kind of artificial scent?
Making your angst hurt:the power of lighthearted scenes.
I’m incredibly disappointed with the trend in stories (especially ‘edgy’ YA novels) to bombard the reader with traumatic situations, angry characters, and relationship drama without ever first giving them a reason to root for a better future. As a reader…
I might care that the main siblings are fighting if they had first been shown to have at least one happy, healthy conversation.
I might cry and rage with the protagonist if I knew they actually had the capacity to laugh and smile and be happy.
I might be hit by heavy and dark situations if there was some notion that it was possible for this world to have light and hope and joy to begin with.
Writers seem to forget that their reader’s eyes adjust to the dark. If you want to give your reader a truly bleak situation in a continually dim setting, you have to put them in pitch blackness. But if you just shine a light first, the sudden change makes the contrast appear substantial.
Show your readers what light means to your character before taking it away. Let the reader bond with the characters in their happy moments before (and in between) tearing them apart. Give readers a future to root for by putting sparks of that future into the past and the present. Make your character’s tears and anger mean something.
Not only will this give your dark and emotional scenes more impact, but it says something that we as humans desperately, desperately need to hear.
Books with light amidst the darkness tell us that while things are hard and hurt, that we’re still allowed to breathe and hope and live and even laugh within the darkness.
We as humans need to hear this more often, because acting it out is the only way we stop from suffocating long enough to make a difference.
So write angst, and darkness, and gritty, painful stories, full of treacherous morally grey characters if you want to. But don’t forget to turn the light on occasionally.
things that make any romance in a movie good, even if it is a straight romance
1- relationships are compelling, believable, and although the surroundings may not necessarily be realistic, the relationship and pacing are.
2- fun plot that would be compelling on its own is combined with romance to make it extra fun
3- leading woman has a personality and also falls for the guy instead of the guy refusing to take no for an answer 1000 times until the girl gives up which is a bad plot device and also the reason i made the mistake of dating a straight dude named john that i had no interest in who wanted me to be his manic pixie dream girl and was annoyed when my fun quirky personality didnt make him more soulful.
Examples of extremely good albeit straight romances in movies:
will and elizabeth swan from pirates in the caribbean
kate and leopold (the movie where hugh jackman is the inventor of the elevator and accidentally time travels to modern day new york and falls in love with a woman who finds him not knowing a fucking thing about modern technology and assorted time travel shenanigans charming)
How do y’all feel about long portions of dialogue. When I write scenes with two or more characters, they tend to be mostly conversations, and the conversations are mostly page long back-and-forth dialogue. Would this be bothersome? Do you prefer dialogue to be broken up with character observations and scenery and so forth? Or is dialogue fine on it’s own alright?
if it’s just talking heads, that’s generally considered less interesting. in my former writing group, one of my friends explained the concept of a pope-in-the-pool. if you just need to convey info, you need something else going on in the background to make it interesting. (at the time, I was working on an early draft of my gangster noir novel. I had the crime lord receive a severed hand and pass it off to his second-in-command to deal with. amped up the interest a lot.)
some small action helps to break up the dialogue and provide beats also, even something as small as doing dishes. you can use it to add nuance to your characters also, use what they’re doing to enhance the conversation.
for instance, if A asked B some thorny question, B could focus on the dish he’s drying instead of looking A in the eyes. or A could get so heated by their conversation that she gets careless and breaks a dish, and now they have that frustration to deal with.
or if it’s a different convo altogether, you could use A’s care with cleaning the dishes to highlight his overall meticulous nature, or B’s quick swipe and call it good to show she’s less thorough.
tl;dr I think action beats enhance dialogue and just straight talking robs you of some nice writerly tools
Writing books often exhort you to “write a shitty first draft,” but I always resisted this advice. After all,
I was already writing shitty drafts, even when I tried to write good ones. Why go out of my way to make them shittier?
A shitty first draft just kicks the can down the road, doesn’t it? Sooner or later, I’d have to write a good draft—why put it off?
If I wrote without judging what I wrote, how would I make any creative choices at all?
That first draft inevitably obscured my original vision, so I wanted it to be at least slightly good.
Writing something shitty meant I was shitty.
So for years, I kept writing careful, cramped, painstaking first drafts—when I managed to write at all. At last, writing became so joyless, so draining, so agonizing for me that I got desperate: I either needed to quit writing altogether or give the shitty-first-draft thing a try.
Turns out everything I believed about drafting was wrong.
For the last six months, I’ve written all my first drafts in full-on don’t-give-a-fuck mode. Here’s what I’ve learned so far:
“Shitty first draft” is a misnomer
A rough draft isn’t just a shitty story, any more than a painter’s preparatory sketch is just a shitty painting. Like a sketch, a draft is its own kind of thing: not a lesser version of the finished story, but a guide for making the finished story.
Once I started thinking of my rough drafts as preparatory sketches, I stopped fretting over how “bad” they were. Is a sketch “bad”? And actually, a rough draft can be beautiful the same way a sketch is beautiful: it has its own messy energy.
Don’t try to do everything at once
People who make complex things need to solve one kind of problem before they can solve others. A painter might need to work out where the big shapes go before they can paint the details. A writer might need to decide what two people are saying to each other before they can describe the light in the room or what those people are doing with their hands.
I’d always embraced this principle up to a point. In the early stages, I’d speculate and daydream and make messy notes. But that freedom would end as soon as I started drafting. When you write a scene, I thought, you have to start with the first word and write the rest in order. Then it dawned on me: nobody would ever see this! I could write the dialogue first and the action later; or the action first and the dialogue later; or some dialogue and action first and then interior monologue later; or I could write the whole thing like I was explaining the plot to my friend over the phone. The draft was just one very long, very detailed note to myself. Not a story, but a preparatory sketch for a story. Why not do it in whatever weird order made sense to me?
Get all your thoughts onto the page
Here’s how I used to write: I’d sit there staring at the screen and I’d think of something—then judge it, reject it, and reach for something else, which I’d most likely reject as well—all without ever fully knowing what those things were. And once you start rejecting thoughts, it’s hard to stop. If you don’t write down the first one, or the second, or the third, eventually your thought-generating mechanism jams up. You become convinced you have no thoughts at all.
When I compare my old drafts with my new ones, the old ones look coherent enough. They’re presentable as stories. But they suck as drafts, because I can’t see myself thinking in them. I have no idea what I wanted that story to be. These drafts are opaque and airless, inscrutable even to me, because a good 90% of what I was thinking while I wrote them never made it onto the page.
These days, most of my thoughts go onto the page, in one form or another. I don’t waste time figuring out how to say something, I just ask, “what are you trying to say here?” and write that down. Because this isn’t a story, it’s a plan for a story, so I just need the words to be clear, not beautiful. The drafts I write now are full of placeholders and weird meta notes, but when I read them, I can see where my mind is going. I can see what I’m trying to do. Consequently, I no longer feel like my drafts obscure my original vision. In fact, their whole purpose is to describe that vision.
Drafts are memos to future-you
To draft effectively, you need a personal drafting style or “language” to communicate with your future self (who is, of course, the author of your second draft). This language needs to record your ideas quickly so it can keep up with the pace of your imagination, but it needs to do so in a form that will make sense to you later. That’s why everyone’s drafts look different: your drafting style has to fit the way your mind works.
I’m still working mine out. Honestly, it might take a while. But recently, I started writing in fragments. That’s just how my mind works: I get pieces of sentences before I understand how to fit them together. Wrestling with syntax was slowing me down, so now I just generate the pieces and save their logical relationships for later.Drafting effectively means learning these things about yourself. And to do that, you can’t get all judgmental. You can’t fret over how you should be writing, you just gotta get it done.
Messy drafts are easier to revise
I find that drafting quickly and messily keeps the story from prematurely “hardening” into a mute, opaque object I’m afraid to change. I no longer do that thing, for instance, where I endlessly polish the first few paragraphs of a draft without moving on. Because how do you polish a bunch of fragments taped together with dashes? A draft that looks patently “unfinished” stays malleable, makes me want to dig my hands in and move stuff around.
You already have ideas
Sitting down to write a story, I used to feel this awful responsibility to create something good. Now I treat drafting simply as documenting ideas I already have—not as creation at all, but as observation and description. I don’t wait around for good words or good ideas. I just skim off whatever’s floating on the surface and write it down. It’s that which allows other, potentially better ideas to surface.
As a younger writer, my misery and frustration perpetuated themselves: suppressing so many thoughts made my writing cramped and inhibited, which convinced me I had noideas, which made me even more afraid to write lest I discover how empty inside I really was. That was my fear, I guess: if I looked squarely at my innocent, unvetted, unvarnished ideas, I’d see how bad they truly were, and then I’d have to—what, pack up and go home? Never write again? I don’t know. But when I stopped rejecting ideas and started dumping them onto the page, the worst didn’t happen. In fact, it was a huge relief.
One of my favorite things about writers is that you can post any vaguely relatable “writer’s problems” sentiment and writers will use it to call themselves out. It’s like going up to a stranger of a fellow writer and saying, “Hey, are you down to absolutely roast yourself?” And the answer is always an enthusiastic, unwavering, “Oh, hell yes, let me tell you about this fuckin’ bitch.”
This is a big question,
so I hope my response does the ask some justice. I’ll do my best to cover as
much as I can, but if you have more questions, just let me know.
First, I want to make
sure we’re on the same page when we talk about “character arcs,” because I
think that term gets used a lot of different ways in different areas and I
don’t want to confuse anyone.
When I talk about character arcs what I mean, and I think
what you mean too, is the path a
character takes through the narrative—from Point A all the way to Point Z
in their personal story, which
doesn’t necessarily have to line up with your main plot. Generally character
arcs correspond with major changes in a
character (also known as character growth), but that isn’t always the case.
Probably the easiest way
to approach character arcs is to think about them visually. We call them “arcs”
because that’s how they tend to graph out:
(If you write a lot, you
probably recognize this same arc as the “narrative arc” most stories go
through—that’s because the path stories take and the paths characters take
are often identical.)
The real problem with books-turned-movies isn’t “omg they didn’t include every single word in the book” it’s “omg they completely overlooked the main theme, threw out any significant allegories, took away all the emotional pull, an turned it into a boring action movie with a love triangle in it”
“they left out the BEST PART which was MEANINGFUL and THOUGHT-PROVOKING, and which would have taken 2 minutes of runtime to do and was literally characters having dialogue… and instead we got a gratuitous extra half-hour of CG explosions”.
I’m always very suspicious of complaints that every movie adaptation ever sucks, because they typically miss what I consider to be an important point—that different mediums of storytelling are, by nature, different, and are good at accomplishing different things. And thus, for an adaptation to succeed, a lot is going to have to change.
But.
I also think there’s another problem going on here which is that film, as a medium, in its modern form*, kind of sucks.
(Cut for length, because hoooo boy, this thing is long.)
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