#or just make ocs for the fandoms I'm in

[nervocat]

Tempted to do yet ANOTHER make over for my dead was-to-be-story-blog @/nervoqat but change the user and make it an oc kind of blog. Um.

[idkhowtoname]

oooo I'm being cringeeee

I hope you guys like my beast because I love it (maybe too much)

[bonefall]

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)

[galoogamelady]

[forestlovesyou]

I got hit by a huge wave of nostalgia and fell back into the Undertale rabbithole and I just couldn't resist the urge to make a Handplates skeleton lore accurate oc who I am pretty proud of ngl :] adawd

[navree]

this is dc twitter discourse at the moment so i thought i'd ask your thoughts on it do you think red hood jason hurting children is ooc/a bad writing choice???

And this ladies and gents is why I avoid DC Twitter because I don't think I've seen any good takes there ever, no matter where you are. Sometimes people post panel compilations that hurt my heart, that's the like the only good thing to come out of it, I don't even click on the MAWS hashtag if it trends while the show is airing because last time I did it was people bitching that 25 year old Slade did not look or act the same way that current in his forties Slade does (not to mention, how can you complain about MAWS Slade? he's the best part about the show how did anyone not just fall over laughing with delight the second he showed up and proclaimed himself to be literal Slade Wilson?).

With that said, yeah I would consider that to be a bad writing choice. Talking about characterization for comics is hard because, as I've mentioned, comics is an incredibly decentralized creative medium in a way none others are. Movies, TV shows, novels, they all tend to have a main core group of people or even just one solitary person in charge of the creative direction, and for a lot of them, a very finite "this is where we start and this is where we end" mentality that comics do not. These characters have had constantly changing creative heads, with new directions and ideas for characterization attached, since their inception, and they've all been around for a very long time. This is why comics are kind of the only medium where you can, in fact, really pick and choose your canon, because the canon has changed so much depending on who is in charge at a giant company. Like, canonical eighties Batman characterization would be considered super OOC for someone writing canonical modern Batman, and vice versa. So talking about characterization is hard, especially with Jason when nobody has had any idea what to fucking do with him for decades at this point. But, when it comes to Red Hood Jason, there is something I consider gospel canon, which is the Under the Red Hood arc, since that is what nearly all subsequent canon imaginings of Jason take from. That is our gold standard here. And based on UTRH, yeah, Jason harming children is out of character and it is bad writing.

When Jason comes back, he has two very clear goals. Goal one: the Joker's gotta die, preferably Batman kills him so Jason gets concrete proof that he was loved and mourned (Jason is not mentally healthy so his thought process doesn't make sense just roll with it), but Jason is fine killing the man himself, so long as he dies. Goal two: essentially fulfill Batman's mission in a way where it actually accomplishes his goals. Jason outlines this pretty specifically in Batman #641, he tells Bruce "You. I'll be you. The you you're supposed to be." Jason's goal as the Red Hood is to make Gotham better (in his head), safer, and cleaner, but unlike Batman he is willing to take that goal as far as he can and will kill if necessary. What he wants is to just take Batman's mission to its logical extreme. Eradicate the various elements that have caused suffering in Gotham throughout the years, just with more permanence than Batman does, and less of a focus on rehabilitation, because you can't rehabilitate a dead person. And as part of this, Jason does not act unnecessarily. When he kills, it is people who (arguably) deserve it, and it is never innocents. It is always the criminal element, and people he believes are past the point of no return, as well as those who might be trying to stop him in that. His mission statement is literally "Death will come to those who deserve death, and death may come to those who stand in my way of doing what's right." and he means that. This is not a character you've created to then go out and harm children, because kids have not done anything to deserve it, and they are not the cause of the issues that he is trying to eliminate.

There's also the fact that Jason, even in his early Red Hood days where editorial just decided that he's a straight villain now, was never someone who went after kids, but in fact actively tried to help them. He makes it a point to tell his people that they do not sell drugs to kids and that if they do, he'll kill them (along with telling them not to get previously clean people hooked and only sell to repeats, which also paints him as someone who isn't just hurting others willy-nilly). The first person Jason ever kills, as seen in Red Hood: Lost Days, is a man who was involved in child trafficking, and he does it specifically because he wants to save those kids and future victims from him, and considers him scum of the Earth as a result (I think his name was Egan? Egon? idfk I don't reread Lost Days because I find their whole "look at fully adult Talia fucking the mentally ill sixteen year old under her care who is reliant on her for everything, how sexy" shtick abhorrent, and using Talia as their child rapist doubly so). So Jason, even at his most villainous, at his most "this is a bad dude" characterized, is someone who deliberately avoids harming innocents because it's not compatible with his mission or his personal code, and includes children very specifically in that.

It is also out of character and a bad writing choice because of Jason's own childhood. You might think a rebuttal to this is "Jason wants to kill/hurt criminals, what if kids are criminals" well guess what Jason was a kid criminal! It is actually illegal to steal parts off of people's cars, even if that person can afford it because he's Batman (to say nothing of the multiple very heavy handed hints dropped that Jason solicited as a prostitute during his time being homeless, which is also a crime, it is illegal and he would have been picked up by the cops for it if found out). Unless you want to argue that Jason thinks he himself should have been taken out with a Glock at the big of age of eleven for doing illegal things in the name of survival, you can't say that Jason's philosophy would allow him to harm children and remain in character or decently written, you just can't. Like, your other gospel for Jason's characterization should be his original Robin run from the 80s, since that's literally what introduced him to this world in the first fucking place, so duh. And there's nothing in that characterization to suggest that he would harm anyone unnecessarily, especially kids. Like, Robin Jason spares Two-Face's life, after having found out days ago that Two-Face murdered Willis Todd in cold blood; he tries to save Sheila Haywood's life after she straight up helps murder him; this isn't someone whose characterization allows for him to hurt children later in life. Especially once you factor in his struggles as a child, and how that most likely just breeds empathy for other children, especially children who are having a hard time.

Now, I can guess that some of this comes up in discussions of one of my most loathed subjects, the stupid bad stupid dumb stupid attack on fucking Titan's Tower. Now, even beyond the fact that the stupid attack on stupid Titan's Tower is less about Jason wanting to beat up children and more his specific issues with Bruce and the concept of Robin that can't be transplanted to other people, the attack itself is bad writing. It is out of character for Jason. It does not jive at all with his stated characterization and motivations that he himself outlined (also the only other closest thing to that is his fight with Mia Dearden, where he's pretty tame in just warning her to leave vigilantism and straight up beats her twice before letting her go relatively unscathed of his own free will, just saying) and it makes no sense. His issues are that the Joker is alive and Batman didn't do anything about it. Why the fuck would he care about Tim? Tim means nothing to him, he never even met the little dude, he doesn't have an issue with him. He doesn't even have an issue with the idea of Robin being passed down because Jason literally said he was perfectly content to not be Robin and just be Jason, and his problems don't arise from Robin! The issues at the heart of Jason's conflict with Bruce hinge on the Bruce and Jason relationship of father and son, not Batman and Robin! And not fucking Tim! Tim means nothing, he is a nonentity. The only reason this fuckass plot exists is because DC didn't know what to do with Jason and threw shit at the wall to see what would stick, similar to what we saw with that dumb plot with Nightwing from this time that also has similar issues, in that why would Jason care enough to cause problems for Dick, he doesn't have an issue with Dick, he legit interacts with Dick in UTRH and he's fine! (a better writing decision would have been post-UTRH Jason immediately writing the entire Batfam off and treating them as hostiles whenever they wander into Crime Alley and them having to regain his trust back/him agreeing to let down more and more barriers as time goes on and they all reconnect, but I was like seven when all this was being written so DC didn't seek my input) The fucking dumb Titan's Tower thing that people are gonna use to prove that Jason hurting kids isn't bad writing isn't even about Jason, the only reason this shit gets trotted out again and again is because Tim Drake has a lot of fans who are absolutely convinced their poor uwu baby has suffered more than Jesus when the only person in the Batfam who's suffered less than him is, like, Alfred (although I can make the argument that Alfred has still suffered more by having had to put up with Bruce Wayne almost singlehandedly for most of his adult life). It exists in people's minds even tho it is objectively bad writing and out of character for one of the main players because fanon Tim has to be the most special boy ever (and also because these people wanna use it to make Tim interesting which is impossible because nothing can make Tim interesting).

Jason hurting children deliberately is, indeed, bad writing. It is, in fact, incredibly out of character. It does not compute to his explicit motivations and how he was characterized in the stories that have since been used as a jumping off point for his characterization ever since. And ultimately, the thing is this: if Red Hood Jason is just trying to do Batman's job better than Batman, who is he doing it for if not children? Who is he trying to clean up Gotham for, make Gotham a better place for, if not her children? And if that's the case, as it obviously is, why on Earth would him then harming her children be any kind of good character writing or coherent characterization?

TL;DR, yes it is.

[local-idiotic-texan]

Hello :3

O

OhmyGOODDD??

THANK YOU?? UHM

My heart just flutter but I SAEAR I'M JUST SO??

☹️☹️ today was NOT the day I was expecting Site-61 Fanart to, y'know.. EXIST..? UHM

BUT I LOVE THIS AND I'M KEEPING THIS TO HANG IN MY ROOM. YEAH :3 OHMYGOD IN SO SORRY AAAAA THANK YOU POOKKIIIEEE?? :3

—

For context, check out @ask-site-61 ! :)

AND AGAIN THANK YOU TO @ilovescp FOR THIS BECAUSE .. HWISBOSBSLSBWPDBSPBWL????????????? JNWOSBSL?bbbbbb!?.'xnkkkj⛪️🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄 /VVVVVV VVVVVV VVVVVVVVVVVVV POS

[darkyukifr]

I’m trying to reflect on many things these last months, about my place in this world as an aroace person but also about my place in fandoms. And I found this amazing comic on this subject by bloggingboutburgers.

This is something I’m struggling with A LOT and I’m still trying to explore this side of myself.

For many years now I’m deeply engaging with shipping cultures in fandoms (mostly as a lurker and recently by contributing publicly), because I couldn’t help but think that a character becomes really interesting only when they are involved in a romantic and/or sexual relationship, and they become worthy of a story (I’m taking these last words from this post because they struck me). Even when the character wasn’t involved in one, I found myself waiting for any kind of romantic/sexual plot to appear.

And this is such a HORRIBLE though to have as an aroace person who is romance and sex repulsed IRL. It’s like telling myself I’m not worthy as a person, even if I have many other beautiful kinds of relationships in my life for 27 years now. It’s a strange feeling where I’m ignoring my own existence and I’m just a random soul in this world, like a side character who loves and is loved by their family and friends, and by other humans in general, but who isn’t the main character of their own life.

But I also know it’s one of the consequences of this capitalist society that encourages nuclear families, and any other kinds of communities or relationships are depicted as less valuable, and it sadly sticks way too hard in my mind.

I realised these last months that I became physically disgusted by porn fics or drawings of my favorite ships because of the huge amount of it, and above all because I couldn’t engage with many of the people from these fandoms anymore. I even had to unfollow some of them because all this smut started to feel unbearable. It’s like I wasn’t able to keep going with my masquerade, but I wasn’t even aware I was doing this masquerade until I reached this point xD As if I was in a kind of denial all this time? Like I was thinking “yeaaah I can do it easily” when I can’t and I was just seeking community and some kind of validation? I usually enjoy this kind of art, but engaging actively with people highlighted the fact that these fantasies were not intangible fantasies anymore.

I’m still trying to analyse my feelings: is shipping interesting to me when I’m alone, and discussing about it with other people who are romantically and sexually active makes me realise that “oh, fandoms are not different than real life places on this subject. I can’t engage in these horny discussions endlessly without feeling sick at some point. And they are not interested in talking about something else than sex or romance, or the discussion just dies”? Do I like talking about it but I just need to understand what my boundaries are? Or am I just afraid to focus on the other possible paths outside of sex and romance because relating to them would be scary?

Fortunately I don’t have this problem with my friends and I met wonderful people in fandoms with whom it’s possible to talk about other things, or with whom I can talk about romance/sex without feeling pressured to empathise (they understand these are more likely jokes or sociological discussions to me and they respect it xD). But these “side character” thoughts stay and do make me feel lonely as I grow older.

I forced myself to work on one of my adult aroace OC for more than a year and it really heals me. It is indeed possible to make a person worthy of a story without being involved in any romantic or sexual relationships, even if they still have to confront the society norms in their everyday life. But it’s also surprisingly not that difficult? At least not more than thinking about any other character’s life.

All this time I advocated for queer relationships and I do think it’s VERY important to do it. And I will keep drawing all kinds of relationships. But I also think I should advocate for my aroace self a little bit more.

To sum up my reflexion, I should try to give myself some more love by thinking about other things than shipping, and to give myself more space to explore and give importance to other topics even if they feel more personal. What is important is to love, no matter the form it takes, and all these forms are valid.

(I’m still trying to figure out how to navigate in fandoms, maybe I will find solutions someday, maybe I won’t xD since I can’t control the disgust phases when they come to me gzeibgiebzgzui)

[hadesknockedupintheunderworld]

I gotta say, a personal pet peeve of mine is when people get really into Scourge (making aus and fanart and fics and posts and whatnot) and go "OMG Scourge needs someone to be like his Tails" and then they either make a whole new oc or assume Fiona takes that spot

Miles Erasure

[hazy-sayonoria]

Did I ever show you the month old redesign of my TADC chocolate bunny oc ? No ? Well here

Yayyyy... (the amount of times I wanted to post this and forgot...)

YES OC X CANON IS INVOLVED SHUT UP >:(

She has two different shocked expressions but I'm too lazy to make the other one,but its probably gonna be the most shown one lol

Also my account is dying help

[lumiidragon]

Do I feel shame for self-indulging in SCP characters with my self-insert? Nah, not really.

I remember back in the day when I first joined the SCP community, I was super nervous about it. Funny how things change for you when you realize that something meant for fun and enjoyment is better when you continue to treat it as such~

[ravioliet]

a couple creatures i drew the other day! we've got the mystical snorb (snail orb) who will let you ponder it for the price of some zucchini or perhaps lettuce, and then we have a caracaracaracal (crested caracara x caracal griffin) who is named Cara btw :)

[throughpatchesofviolet]

I'm hoping taking an extended break from Limbus (aside from dailies and weeklies, of course), helps me return to it with passion, again ... make no mistake, I am thinking about the game and characters nonstop--even when engaged in other activities--I've just been having trouble posting about it due to a myriad of things.

[nostalgia-tblr]

"I love this character I just hate everything about how they are written!"

Okay unless your love is entirely for their hot body (which is valid, obvs) then you probably do in fact like some of the way this fictional character was written, since pretty much everything about them (hot body aside) has been written by someone.

[fantastic-mr-corvid]

Honestly I wish I wasn't hyperfixated on my ocs. I wish I could engage in fandom and get obessed with canon characters in a way that was more than I love them and their story [and they deserved better]. I wish I formed opinions instead of just nodding along going ooh that's cool. I wish I was hyperfixated on Georgie or hell even Mura instead of just shoving my jjba ocs in the faces of ppl who aren't in that fandom and I wish I has the energy to try and find people who are. I love my ocs but sharing them with people is an almost sisiphean task because on at least half my posts I sound like a raving loonatic and the other have missing context. Every hour I'm awake I'm thinking about them and adding more to their story when I have shared so little of it.