the greatest skill a woman can learn for herself is self reliance
to clarify … so many strong women in my life rely on men. that dependence is dangerous. ladies here are some good ref resources I’ve found helpful on my journey towards self reliance
can randomly generate just about ANYTHING. awesome for dms
Tabletop Audio: background music and sound effects for the ambience.
PCGen – a character creation program that handles all the tricky and tedious parts of building characters, including NPCs.
d20pfsrd.com – all the free information you would ever need to play Pathfinder, an alternative to D&D
DiceCloud: Interactive character sheet that can be edit and shared with yourself or others easily. Pulled up anywhere with internet connection on PC, Mac, or mobile device. Use it to also mark down health, death saving throws, spell slots, experience, and more on the fly.
DnDMagic: List all spells currently available from Player’s Handbook and Elemental Evil.
5th Edition Spellbook app: Make spellbooks for all your characters, manage spells, prepare spells. Keep track of Spell Save DC, and Spell Attack bonus on your mobile device.
Squire – Another character creation and management app. Contains most of the basic info and spells already, with options to create spells, items, classes/subclasses, etc. This is the free version, but pro has more options for DMs, including initiative order control.
In Twilight, Bella has absolutely no qualities that make her interesting as a character. She’s shown to have very little personality, in the books or onscreen, and is only made “interesting” (a relative term here) via the inclusion of her sparkly, abusive boyfriend. It feeds into the harmful mentality of adolescent girls that you need a significant other in order to find fulfillment, particularly if he’s significantly older and likes to watch you sleep. Yikes.
Examples:
Bella is welcomed to school by a friendly, extroverted girl and given a place to sit amongst her and her friends. Despite this girl’s kindness, Bella shrugs her off as a stereotypical shallow cheerleader, and spends her time staring wistfully at the guy across the cafeteria from them. Once Edward becomes her official boyfriend, she immediately loses interest in her new friends as her life shifts its orbit to revolve completely around him.
How to avoid her:
Female characters are allowed to have lives outside of their significant others. They’re allowed to have friends, quirks, hobbies, and interests. Give them some.
The best fictional relationships are based off of characters who compliment each other, not one character who revolves around the other. Make sure your female character’s life does not centralize around her significant other.
Strong female characters don’t look down on other girls, even if they are outgoing cheerleaders. Being pasty and introverted doesn’t make you a better person, y’all – if it did, I’d be a decorated hero by now.
Give them aspirations besides getting an obsessive, much-older boyfriend. In fact, don’t give them an obsessive, much-older boyfriend at all – if you do want them to have a significant other, give them one who cares about their interests and accepts that they have lives and goals outside of them.
2. The Molly Hooper (i.e. the starry-eyed punching bag)
Who she is:
Like most things about BBC’s Sherlock, Molly was an amazing concept that went progressively downhill. I used to love her quiet tenacity and emotional intelligence, and was sure that with her strong basis as a character, she would overcome her infatuation with the titular Sherlock and find self-fulfillment. Nope!
Examples:
She remained stubbornly infatuated over the course of five years with an ambiguously gay man who, en large, treated her badly, leading to her public humiliation with zero pertinence to the plot or resolution. Moreover, her infatuation with Sherlock quickly usurped almost all of her other characteristics, leading her to an increasingly immature characterization that was difficult to relate to.
How to avoid her:
By all means, please write female characters who are quiet, kind, and unassuming (a female character does not, contrary to popular belief, need to be rambunctious, callous, or violent to be “strong”) but remember than none of these traits need to make the character a pushover. Let them stand their ground.
Similarly, attraction to men (or anyone, for that matter) does not invalidate a female character’s strength. Just be sure she values herself more than their attention.
As I said earlier, don’t be afraid to make characters who are gentle and soft-spoken, but be wary of making them “childlike,” or giving them an infantile, emotionally characterization.
My best advice for writing gentle, soft-spoken, unassuming women would actually to look to male characters in the media fitting this description; since male characters are rarely infantilized as much as women are by popular media, you’ll get a much better idea of what a well-rounded character looks like.
3. The Irene Adler (i.e. the defanged badass)
Who she is:
Yup, another one of the BBC Sherlock women, among whom only Mrs. Hudson seemed to come through with her dignity and characterization intact. In the books, Irene and Sherlock have absolutely zero romantic connotations, only bonded via Sherlock’s irritation and respect with her substantial intelligence. In the show, it’s a different story entirely.
Examples:
Irene is a badass character who’s turned into a teary-eyed Damsel in Distress via her uncontrollable love for the show’s male lead. It doesn’t help matters that she’s a self-proclaimed lesbian who falls in love with a man, which, unless you’re a woman who loves women yourself and writing about a character realizing she’s bi/pansexual, I would recommend against doing under any circumstances. She ends up being defeated and subsequently rescued by Sherlock – a far cry from her defeat of him in the books.
How to avoid her:
If you’re writing a badass female character, allowher to actually be badass, and allow her to actually show it throughout your work as opposed to just hearing other characters say it. And one punch or kick isn’t enough, either: I want to see this chick jump out of planes.
That said, “badass” does not equal emotionally callous. It doesn’t bother me that Moffat showed Irene having feelings for someone else, what bothers me is how he went about it.
When writing a character who’s shown to be attracted to more than one gender, just say she’s bisexual. Pansexual. Whatever, just don’t call her straight/gay depending on the situation she’s in. Jesus.
4. The Becky (i.e. the comedic rapist)
Who she is:
Most people who know me can vouch for my adoration of Supernatural, but it definitely has its problems: it’s not as diverse as it could be, its treatment of women is subpar, and yes, there is some thinly veiled sexual violence: all three of its leading characters have dealt with it at one point of another (Dean is routinely groped by female demons, a virginal Castiel was sexually taken advantage of by a disguised reaper, and the whole concept of sex under demonic possession is iffy to say the least.) It’s rarely ever addressed afterwards, and is commonly used for comedic fodder. Possibly the most quintessential example of this is Becky.
Examples:
Becky abducts Sam, ties him to the bed, and kisses him against his will. She then drugs him, albeit with a love potion, and is implied to have had sex with him under its influence.
How to avoid her:
Male rape isn’t funny, y’all. Media still takes rape against women a lot more seriously than rape against men, particularly female-on-male rape, and I can assure you its not.
Educate yourself on statistics for male sexual assault: approximately thirty-eight percent of sexual violence survivors are male, for example, and approximately one in sixteen male college students has reported to have experienced sexual assault.
Moreover, be aware that forty-six percent of all instances of male rape have a female perpetrator.
In other words, treat themes of sexual assault against men as seriously as you would treat themes of sexual assault against women.
5. The Movie Hermione (i.e. the flawless superhuman)
Who she is:
Okay, in and of herself, Movie Hermione is amazing: she’s beautiful, intelligent, and heroic, as well as possibly the most useful character of the franchise. She only bothers me in context of the fact that she takes away everything I loved most about Book Hermoine, and everything I loved about Book Ron, too.
Examples:
Book Hermione was beautiful, but not conventionally: she had big, poofy curls, big teeth, and didn’t put a lot of effort into maintaining her appearance. Movie Hermione looks effortlessly flawless, all the time. Book Hermione was intelligent, but also loud, abrasive, and unintentionally annoying when talking about her interests (which meant a lot to me, because as a kid on the Asperger’s spectrum, I frequently was/am that way myself – it was nice to see a character struggling with the same traits). She was also allowed to have flaws, such as struggling to keep up with academia, and being terrified of failure.
Movie Hermione also took all of Ron’s redeeming qualities, and everything that made him compliment her as a couple: his street smarts used to compliment her academic intelligence, for example, staying calm while she panicked in the Philosopher’s Stone when they were being overcome with vines. He also stood up for her in the books against Snape, as opposed to the jerkish “he’s right, you know.”
How to avoid her:
Allow your female characters to have flaws, as much so as any well-rounded male character. Just be sure to counterbalance them with a suitable amount of redeeming qualities. This will make your female character well-rounded, dynamic, and easy to get invested in.
There’s no reason for your female characters to always look perfect. Sure, they can be stunningly gorgeous (particularly if their appearance is important to them), but it’s physical imperfections that make characters fun to imagine: Harry’s scar and wild hair, for example. Female characters are no different.
If you’re writing a female character to have an eventual love interest, allow their personalities to compliment one another. Allow the love interest to have qualities that the female character is lacking, so that they can compliment one another and have better chemistry.
Basically, write your female characters as people.
God willing, I will be publishing essays like this approximately every Friday, so be sure to follow my blog and stay tuned for future writing advice and observations!
That thing about how cats think humans are big kittens is a myth, y’know.
It’s basically born of false assumptions; folks were trying to explain how a naturally solitary animal could form such complex social bonds with humans, and the explanation they settled on is “it’s a displaced parent/child bond”.
The trouble is, cats aren’t naturally solitary. We just assumed they were based on observations of European wildcats – but housecats aren’t descended from European wildcats. They’re descended from African wildcats, which are known to hunt in bonded pairs and family groupings, and that social tendency is even stronger in their domesticated relatives. The natural social unit of the housecat is a colony: a loose affiliation of cats centred around a shared territory held by alliance of dominant females, who raise all of the colony’s kittens communally.
It’s often remarked that dogs understand that humans are different, while cats just think humans are big, clumsy cats, and that’s totally true – but they regard us as adult colonymates, not as kittens, and all of their social behaviour toward us makes a lot more sense through that lens.
They like to cuddle because communal grooming is how cats bond with colonymates – it establishes a shared scent-identity for the colony and helps clean spots that they can’t easily reach on their own.
They bring us dead animals because cats transport surplus kills back to the colony’s shared territory for consumption by pregnant, nursing, or sick colonymates who can’t easily hunt on their own. Indeed, that’s why they kill so much more than they individually need – it’s not for fun, but to generate enough surplus kills to sustain the colony’s non-hunting members.
They’re okay with us messing with their kittens because communal parenting is the norm in a colony setting, and us being colonymates in their minds automatically makes us co-parents.
It’s even why many cats are so much more tolerant toward very small children, as long as those children are related to one of their regular humans: they can tell the difference between human adults and human “kittens”, and your kittens are their kittens.
Basically, you’re going to have a much easier time getting a handle on why your cat does why your cat does if you remember that the natural mode of social organisation for cats is not as isolated solitary hunters, but as a big communal catpile – and for that purpose, you count as a cat.
Hey! This list does contain some potentially triggering material, so feel free to cross out anything you don’t want to use/write. Could be used either as RP material, referance material, or if you’d like to shoot me a character and a number I could whip up a little drabble too!
Shadowplay (the use of mnemosurgery to alter one’s memories, beliefs, or personality)
Empurata (the surgical removal and replacement of the face and hands with a single optic and pincer-claws, used as punishment by the functionalist regime)
Vivincorporation (alterting a cybertronian into an inanimate object while keeping them alive and aware of their situation)
Circuit Boosters / Syk Dose (powerful and dangerous illicit drugs)
Slave Coding (coding that binds it’s victim to one or more masters, who cannot be disobeyed)
Cosmic Rust (a virulent infection that can creep over bots quickly)
Turned into a Sparkeater (an aggressive, feral, seemingly undead cybertronian with strange powers who feeds on the sparks of others)
Cybercrosis (an illness of the spark and body that slowly incapacitates and kills it’s victims)
Domestication (the trapping of a cybertronian in a beastmode form and reducing their intelligence to make them a pet)
Memory Wipe (what it says on the tin, could have multiple causes)
Spark Isolation (the removal of the spark and processor from the body, and isolation therof, as a form of punishment- sensory depravation)
Spark Transfer (the tranfer of a spark from it’s native frame into a different frame, resulting in a new body)
Reformat (the alteration of a Cybertronian’s body into something different, be it a new altmode or a new frametype)
Tainted Energon Mutation (created the Dinobots in IDW, known to result in spectacular or monsterous mutations)
Dead Universe Infection (gradually turns bots into the walking dead, or undead. Apparently also makes them purge black goo)
Dark Energon (the blood of Unicron, can influence bots to his will or drive them insane)
Terrorcons (ZOMBIES but not like your garden variety shamblers we’re talkin’ gross Resident Evil special zombies with probiscuses and stuff)
Jab loves robots 