#dorothea was written for the GIRLIES

[sieglinde-freud]

guys i love dorothea so much thinking about three houses again has reminded me of that fact. wow. girl ever. shes so arghrggghabtghhj. i dont have much tangible thoughts on her i just need everyone to know i miss her bad and she means everything to me and if you dislike her we cannot be friends sorry

[hamliet]

Hey just want to say I love the genre action and romance too much but recently I keep on getting dragged because I don't like some main female characters because they are not my cup of tea due to the bad version of strong girl character troupe. While I do like characters like Gabi Pieck of aot and Elizabeth from bb also Rey before tros. People won't stop calling me misogynistic because I like romance and agency in stories. It so confusing that I don't know that I should like every independent bad ass character written by mostly men. I just don't know anymore.

Previous anon sorry for the long asks! I just want to be a show writer who writes romance and action especially enemies to lovers troupe but people are so discouraging it is sometimes so painful when people make fun of romance and feminine costumes designing because it is too girly. People work on dresses a lot but people say strong women wear bland clothing. Like I have consumed 70% action while being girly. Isn't this some weird type of misogyny? Once again sorry for these long asks.^^

No worries!!!! I think that firstly, you can’t really tell whether someone is a misogynist etc from their preferences in characters or fictional tropes. If they start dunking on them and then reveal aspects of their characters (like the dudebros who beheaded Rose Tico action figures), well, i think then that’s revealing, but just not being interested in a certain type doesn’t inherently mean anything. 

I think you make a good point. I love romance in shows, and agency, and would like to have both rather than stories wherein female characters have to choose one or the other (cough, Grishaverse, cough). Love doesn’t make you weak, and love stories don’t have to be written as shitty trophy-wife stories, which I think is where a lot of the dislike comes from. Because most superhero/popular movies nowadays (Marvel) write their romances as the girl being barely fleshed out and a reward for the male hero, which is just dull. Compelling romance develops both characters, even if one is focused on, and doesn’t make anyone a prize. 

It’s fine to like badass female characters. It’s also fine to like romantic, girly ones, or any combination thereof. I always have a pet peeve about people saying it’s awful Katniss married Peeta and had kids at the end of The Hunger Games: it’s fine to want to see representation of women who don’t want kids (and God knows we need more of it), but if you read the story, Katniss’s not wanting kids was born from fear and not from what she actually wanted. She didn’t allow herself to want a future; she just survived, until Peeta showed her she could want even if she wasn’t strong enough to do everything/survive on her own. Katniss was always going to overcome that, and I get that people don’t have to like that and I can’t fault them for being disappointed that what seemed like representation wasn’t, but it’s not inherently a knock against a female character. Imo it’s a good writing choice for Katniss’s character, because that’s what makes a strong female character: humanity, 

A strong female character is strong if she’s human. Just like any strong character, male, nonbinary, gender fluid, or whichever they identify as. And they can be very human while being monsters or animals or whatever. I’m talking emotions, complexity, challenges, goals, flaws. That’s what makes a character compelling, from Lizzie Bennet to Dorothea Brooke to Wonder Woman to Izumi Kyouka. Don’t write a character to be a model of something, to send some sort of message. Just write a character. 

Might I offer you a recommendation? Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I just finished it last night, and it is chock-full of strong female characters, from Buffy to Faith to Dawn to Willow to Tara to--it goes on and on and on. Anyways, it has romance, Buffy is very much allowed to be a teenage girl who loves shopping and clothes, and a badass who kills vampires at the same time, it explores insecurity, it’s about humans. The ultimate message of the show was one of love, and it explored that in familial, friendship, and romantic ways which never pitting a ‘type’ of love against another ‘type.’ Oh, and the romance? It’s good. Very good. 

[bagleywrightlectures]

Q&A with Dorothea Lasky, after her lecture “What Is Color in Poetry or Is It the Wild Wind in the Space of the Word?” at the Poetry Foundation, January 23, 2014

You mentioned sound in your lecture. Can you speak more to the relationship, in your mind, between sound and color?

For me the connection is that in terms of both sound and color (and maybe all things in the sensual world) is the idea that we are limited as humans to understand the scope of them. And also, I guess there's the obvious other connection that when we have a name for a color then there’s an agreed upon sound that we're giving to whatever this frequency is that color's trying to approximate. I know I mentioned this idea in the lecture of the problem of indigo. I think it's kind of a funny problem to have--this problem of indigo--and just the idea that there are so many colors that we are not privy to, that we cannot understand because of the limitations of our meat eyes. With sound as well, there's an infinite progression of sounds to uncover. But I think that for me, just because I am more of a visual learner or thinker, it's easier for me to understand how that happens in a poem through the image and through color, and how we really are very limited in what colors we can experience. And I look forward to people that know and think and love sound just as much as I love the visual to consider what that could be in terms of sound--which we won't figure out probably ever.

Thinking of the relation between color and gender, and how color interacts and what reproduces what, and if there are any liberatory aspects of reappropriation, which I don't think is the case all the time because pink can be reappropriated as a masculine thing, like 'oh yeah, I'm masculine enough to wear pink.' So what do you think of the relationship of color and liberatory aspects of...or destabilizing the social norms of performance of gender?

I think it's maybe related a little bit to the section I was talking about how I feel like in American culture we sort of don't want to use color too passionately. We want to sort of limit our spectrum. If we look at many of our buildings or places we enter, they're not bursting with color. And so we create this social norm where we're limiting ourselves--we don't want to influence too much with our passions. I feel like liberating that in all respects of life is what's important. I've never felt trapped in a gendered way by pink, and so I've always liked when people are not trapped in any way by what colors they use in their daily lives. (And of course, just as an aside, we know that pink itself was not gendered as female until the last 100 years or so.) So, I hope that maybe this relationship between colors and gender is changing somehow. When I personally think of pink I think of that Plath line (“By whatever these pink things mean”) and why Maggie Nelson's reading of it is so wonderful, and right, that the pink is just like the skinned animal object--the actual flesh of an animal--and so it's kind of free of whatever girliness someone could've read into that line. [laughing] So, did I successfully evade answering your question?

So I guess I was sort of thinking of social norms with our association with color and what we see in the color, impacted by social norms, and if there's a possibility of being able to break out of using established associations.

I think there is if we decide that we should, then we should. If you want to wear pink every day, then you should.

For a year I wore my mother's clothes, everywhere kind of, to work and felt like I was performing in a way.

It's fun to perform. That is something I will agree with.

Have you ever thought about doing something for children in regard to color? Because I have a ten-year-old niece and this holiday we were coloring in the coloring book, and I colored things completely different than what they were supposed to be and she said, "That's not supposed to be that color. It's supposed to be this color." We start out very young indoctrinating our youth into what's accepted.

Yes, I think so. That's the sad thing about a lot of educational experiences in our country. Even when we have designated art teachers in classrooms (which is getting rarer and rarer), a lot of times it's to enforce social norms about aesthetic choices. That certainly happened to me when I was in elementary school. My elementary school art teacher shamed me in a lot of different ways for my [laughing] “abstract expressionism” and interesting color choices. I had to sit in the corner a lot in class, and I did not get a sticker for my drawings. That really wasn’t cool, and it really makes me angry now to think about it. Because obviously I overcame these pressures (hopefully), but what about all of the kids that didn’t. Actually, I've written a children's book and it’s about the personalities of colors. So, like how red is thought of as an angry color but that maybe red is actually a calm color, etc. 

So, when I touch people I see colors a lot. Cuddling, there's this very vivid one, like I see orange and whatnot. I was wondering what part of your experience do you feel is electric in terms of your color? Does that make sense? Like what colors do you see when you're existing in whatever state?

Well, the weird thing is it's always changing, but I love that idea that--it reminds me so much of Hannah Weiner and how she was able to put her consciousness in a place where she did see things as kind of their aura selves. And I do really believe that kind of perception is existing, but it's very hard for us to kind of go into that space of perception. So, for me I don't necessarily see auras as much as I'd like to. I probably could if there was the space to do so more in the everyday, but when I do so it's just always different, whatever color is connected to a particular object. It’s not a consistent thing. Anyway, I'm on a big orange kick right now because someone told me recently that orange reduces blockages and takes away boundaries, so that's probably related to your orange cuddling thing.