#what if women were evil

[widebruh]

[swedenis-h]

I take your “I don’t remember my mother” and give you “Luke thought Leia and Padmé visions were the same person”

[mask131]

I am re-reading the Silmarillion, and something strikes me. The women of Tolkien's world have been talked about TO DEATH especially with all the recurring debates surrounding the Rings of Power series.

As we all know, Tolkien was not a "feminist" in the modern sense of the word. He had a very male-centric point of view and appreciation of the world, he had male-driven and male-centered stories, and actual women characters were sparse and rare. There are only five really big female characters in "The Lord of the Rings" - the quintet of Galadriel, Eowyn, Goldberry, Lobelia and Shelob. [No, don't talk to me about Arwen, she only really was a character in the movies, in the book she's just there in the appendix and she was literaly an afterthought of Tolkien to act as Eowyn's romantic double...]

Consider this. Galadriel, Eowyn, Goldberry, Lobelia and Shelob. This tells you everything you need to know about Tolkien's women, in good and bad.

The Silmarillion has the same motif of having a lot of female characters, only for most of them to be just footnotes, secondary characters with no lines, under-developped one-liners... with in a contrast a handful of super-cool, super-badass, complex and developed heroines at the center of the plot.

Aka, on the bad side, when listing the Valar, while Tolkien gives an interesting personality, great domains and cool attributes to all the male ones, half of the female ones are just... there. And do one stuff. And never appear again. I mean come on... Vana and Nessa? Estë and Vairë were done dirty... That's the actual type of "non-feminism" Tolkien has. It isn't about him hating women or trying to be offensive in his depictions - it is about him just, not putting as much thought, effort and care into his female characters as his male ones, a bit the same way he creates the vast expanses of the East and South of Middle-Earth and then never bothers actually developing more of it or seeking to tell tales of it - but that's for another discussion about Tolkien's "racism". Here we talk about women.

But here's the thing, aka the good side... When Tolkien does find the time and care to develop and flesh out a female character, by Iluvatar he goes all out! Again, we are back on what I said earlier: the women of Lord of the Rings can be counted on one hand... but these fingers are Galadriel, Eowyn and Shelob, so you can't claim he isnt writing powerful, important or uninterestng female characters. Which leads me to my original remark - as usual I get driven away in digressions of all sorts and kinds.

Have you ever noticed that Melkor's greatest enemies, the ones he fears the most, and his most effective foes... are women? Tolkien might not like to put them front and center of his tales, and he might have been a man of the early 20th century England in culture and mind, but boy does he has something to say about how women are actually the first enemies of the literal embodiment of evil and destruction! I mean think about it. Varda of the Stars, and Yavanna of the trees. Nienna has her ambiguous relationship to him - her tears work against him, and yet without her plea for him he likely would not have been released from the dungeons of Mandos. You have Melian with her Girdle, and Luthien with her Hound. And of course most of all Arien, guardian of the Sun, not only one of the rare fire spirits that Melkor couldn't corrupt (despite him basically ruling over all fire), but that frightens him so much he keeps hiding away and doesn't even dare to attack her... [I also reblogged some times ago a post praising the brilliance of Tolkien keeping the old European sun-moon motifs but switching the genders. The weaker, inconsistant, lustful, whimsical, disorderly, untrustworthy Moon is now a male principle, while the steady, dangerous, strong, powerful and beautiful Sun is a woman.]

It is actually REALLY easy to do a feminist retelling of Tolkien's work. Melkor doesn't fear Manwë as much as Varda. Aulë's works and servants get corrupted by Melkor, while Yavanna's do not. Melian and Luthien actively works against him. He friggin' pisses himself when the Woman of the Sun shows up. Sure, there are some evil female characters that serve him down the line and are relegated to the "obscure footnotes and undescribed secondary characters" zone - Thuringwethil the vampire or queen Beruthiel. I coul also dropped deleted characters from early drafts, like the ogress Fluithuin. But among them stands Ungoliant... THE only true female big bad on the dark side of Arda. THE badass, nightmarish, creepy eldritch abomination. And who ends up double-crossing Melkor, almost KILLING him, and again making him basically shit in his pants - as Varda and Arien do.

The first enemies of Morgoth are not the Valar, or the Maiar, or the Elves... It's women.

[leifyposting]

i am once again doing some numbers on twitter, this time for a frankly lukewarm take on jean:

and someone responded:

y’all. all love, but when i say “jean is no more emotionally competent than diluc and kaeya” i do actually mean “jean is no more emotionally competent than diluc and kaeya”

i simply believe that jean is as emotionally stunted as the boys. in fact i think that’s very hot of her!! and i don’t understand why we’re reducing her flaws down to “worse than a normal person but better than these male characters i like a lot”

[alicentsaegon]

Biblically accurate non defanged Alicent Hightower and Rhaenyra Targaryen btw

[rewritingcanon]

me watching a little girl in the single digits innocently explain to me that jk rowling is who she aspires to be when she grows up:

[pokemon-radical-red]

I hate it when I headcanon a character who’s canonically a girl as a trans man and make ships of him and a character who’s canonically a guy and I refer to it as a gay/mlm/guyxguy/whatever ship and someone gets mad. Like omg let trans people have FUNNNNN. Why are queer headcanons and genderbends cool until they’re saying that the character is trans???

“OMGGG you’re so misogynistic I can’t believe you would erase FEMALE representation!!!”

and like half of the characters in the franchise are women, and a total of… NONE of the characters are trans men. Also, my headcanon doesn’t change the source material. If my stuff upsets you, you can block me and go engage with the source or maybe every single other fanwork, since mine is the only trans man hc for this character that I’ve ever seen.

or when people are like “WTF??? this is so transphobic!!! how dare you imply that a character who looks like that could be a trans man?!?! do you think that trans men are women or something??? she uses she/her, and you’re misgendering her!”

No, I don’t think that being a trans man makes you a woman or vice versa. That’s why it’s a headcanon, and the headcanon is that this character is actually a trans man and not a woman at all! You’ll never guess what pronouns most trans men had to use at some point in their lives, and you really won’t like it when you find out about pre-(or no-)transition trans men… or trans men who are in the closet… or trans men who don’t know that they’re trans yet.

“But the character is a kid!!! Saying they’re trans is sexualizing them.”

I’ve seen this one from other queer people. Like did you miss when all of the homophobes said this about your identity, or do you think that bigotry is only bad when it’s directed at you?

“Why would you say ‘testosterone could fix her’??? Are you trying to call her a delusional woman?”

Why would your brain even go to that first? This literally has to be a bad faith reading, because there’s no way that someone could see what I said and get this unless they were specifically looking for something to be mad at me for.

(Note for anyone unaware: “Estrogen would’ve fixed him!” was a meme going around at the time I said this. I’m not sure if it’s still super big, but this was a joke to the effect of that.)

“So girls can’t be tomboys anymore? You just wanna trans everyone?”

This is like actual real life transphobic rhetoric. This isn’t even just shitting on my headcanon, but in fact, sending transphobic hate to a trans man. Thanks 👍. Maybe you should go send JK Rowling another message about how much you loved her essay instead of bothering me.

[auckie]

Neil gaiman is such a fucking hack. All he does is ride off Terry pratchets coattails, gets. I really hate the word cuck but idk how else to describe the Amanda Palmer situation. Cucked by women and regurgitates that into flat one dimensional characters. Queer baits and panders to trashy online YA level drivel types. He’s the definition of the word fandom. If men like his garbage they’re always the kind of guy who has a beard and lets you know he has a beard. He probably owns a kilt despite not being remotely Scottish. Funko pop owner for sure, has a mini tardis and probably that dr who scarf. A pentagram tattoo, maybe some runes.

And like. Neil gaiman is a capable writer do not get me wrong. But his idea of creative writing is theorizing about how the afterlife is all bureaucracy bc that’s never been done by a bitter atheist. It’s always secularly Christian too isn’t it? I mean i guess that’s what he knows.

So im saying this knowing that he’s not solely responsible for it, really, and having read the comics and not enjoyed them at all but continued to have done so out of some weird sense of obligation, I’m very angry to admit that I’m enjoying the stupid Netflix production of dead boy detectives. It is absolutely a mishmash of other similar cw-type shows, but that’s just the thing. I eat that shit up. Riverdale, Sabrina, teen dramas with obnoxious editing and low brow production value. I even liked the second season of good omens despite like, hating a solid 40% of the secondary character and plot direction. It’s sorta like eating little Debbie cakes yknow? Or binging reality tv.

DBDA is better than all that, like it’s a crust above but it’s wrapped in the trappings of really shitty things, and whenever it manages to be a bit better it’ll sink a smidge lower by referencing its ilk or doing exactly what you’d expect of it.

Whenever I see the ‘two skinny whitish boys with obvious sexual tension and an annoying women in the middle’ I stop and ask myself— does this writer have a track record of making the same dynamic.

An obnoxious woman is not a bad thing. She can be a good thing even, but if she’s a mirror image of a million other toxic characters that indicates two things: projection, or a formula. Especially when paired between two male characters that clearly interact in ways that urge the audience to say ‘they should kiss!’

Then she becomes an obstacle. It’s rare for a character in this role to rise above the narrative, and even rarer for authors to try and write one capable of that.

A lot of fans will see people hating on her and cry ‘misogyny!’ Instead of asking why she was written, and why hundreds of other past iterations and future clones of her continue to be written. A similar character is the empty lesbian who stands in both popular media and fanfiction to prove that the author is not just obsessing over gay men and throws a bone to the supposed lesbian audience as well.

And then you have the flat poc or other LBT, sometimes disabled characters who serve to act as a tick mark off a checklist. It’s lazy, it’s annoying. But that’s a whole different can of vaguely related worms

[waspgrave]

it's the dragon age autism at work but i'm disliking playing the crows literally just because I think they should be shitty bc when you think about it, they are still kind of shitty. When i saw they were going to be a faction in this game i thought 'ohhh hell yeah that's the Stinker Faction' but they're like, good guys....i wanted them to suck :(

I can at least kind of understand why the Lords of Fortune are good guy pirates thanks to Isabela's antics in kirkwall but even then just knowing there was potential for morally gray factions is chipping away 1hp from my healthbar every time i think about it

[widebruh]

[shorthaltsjester]

honestly as someone who has been in various fandoms for a long time now and who also watched campaigns 1 and 2 without really getting into cr fandom it isn’t Shocking but it is annoying how often people will look at the stories that cr tells and make absolute claims about the goodness of characters (goodness here meaning Moral goodness, not I Like This character and think it’s well made goodness, which is a separate post entirely). particularly regarding the gods and pc parents. and honestly like, typically in fandom i get annoyed by people bending over backwards to woobify characters who are active in their choice to be unkind and generally horrible but in the cr fandom it’s tended to be the opposite where like. a character is just. a human being (in the sense of being Average not in the sense of Fantasy Races) and huge swaths of the fandom act like that’s the most unforgivable thing someone can be. and maybe it is, but one of the most powerful things about fiction is that it tends to encourage people to expand their empathy and exercise their ability to forgive. because fictional characters, no matter how much people like to project onto them, tend not to cause anyone harm, so it’s easier to learn how to forgive and accept things you don’t understand without also villainizing them.

this is mostly prompted by the recent 4sd and the fact that matt’s response to what’s up with the dawnfather was a very insistent “He’s not bad!” and also seeing the online reaction to the mention that the matron would punish vax for saving keyleth that has taken the as usual completely bonkers tune that the raven queen (Who When Met With A Brother Asking A God To Kill Him In Favour Of His Sister, Gave Him A Job, and Later Extended His Natural Life To Help Protect The World And Have More Time With His Family And Allowed Him To Visit His Sister On Her Wedding Day) is a horrible evil abusive bitch of a god. like. can we grow up? can we understand the world and fiction that represents the multitudes of experiences found in it in shades of grey? is that too much to ask (i know it is).

but also specifically the like Extremely Adamant way that both matt and laura were like no no no no relvin isn’t Horirble he’s average. he’s not good he’s just. he’s A father, not a good or bad one. and on the surface it’s hilarious that they’re both so like. enthused to point out that he’s Average because typically when people respond to a claim of a characters badness with the level of immediacy they both did it’s a rebuttal of “no, this character is good actually.” but it was just to affirm that relvin did harm imogen, but not because there’s some aspect of his character that is inherently cruel or especially Bad. and like. yeah actually. yeah you should react like that to a claim that this average person who Has hurt someone, the way that nearly every single person has hurt someone in a way they cannot repair, with immediacy to say this person is a Person and thus imperfect and capable of great harm, but that isn’t some all encompassing judgment on their morality or capability to also do good or be fine.

anyway this is kinda just a rant post but also is just me saying i’m very grateful that when surrounded by a fandom that tends to paint characters as Good or Bad and even while using a game that can encourage that with its alignment system, cr has always told stories that see goodness as a persistent choice that might sometimes falter and that can be chosen even after a lifetime of Badness. i can’t remember exactly what the quote was so forgive me if it’s incorrect but when jester is talking to caleb after he claims he’s not a very good person and she says “good people do bad things sometimes. even bad people do good things.” that’s it! that’s one of the most consistent themes across campaigns. and yet.

[aspiringwarriorlibrarian]

Hades is in fact the best interpretation of the Demeter and Persephone myth, because while it changes the details it gets the essence of the story as the Greeks would have understood it. The essence being "Actually, both Demeter and Hades are acting reasonably and this is all Zeus' fault.".

[fanofcarson]

Fucked up how an adult can make a simple benign poor choice of words one time and give a child a complex forever

[mothsantics]

kind of really sick of transmisogyny being so common on literally every online space i go to

this post has been inspired by someone talking about how sick they are of "exclusionists", that then goes on to include words transfems use to describe specific transmisogynystic behavior next to terms like "transmed" and "trender"

if you sincerely think that the terms transfems have used to describe the hostility (and notably, exclusionism!) fellow queers show towards us is equivalent to terms ACTUAL TRANSPHOBES use, then you need to reflect on exactly why you might think that

[usercelestial]

my toxic trait is that i genuinely believe that if you hated the female love interests, im better than you, like not to be arrogant but yes actually you are beneath me, hope that helps!

[doomdoomofdoom]

Every now and again I wonder if maybe all trans people face roughly the same amount of bigotry and one just gets more attention, but then i have to read terf posts and.

wow.

obviously every group of trans identities faces their own struggles and unique oppression but there's this incredibly vitriolic kind of hatred reserved for transfems and its sickening.