ok diva

for DC, if you read the comics you’ll actually find that women are included a lot in the source material and even play pivotal roles in fan favorite storylines, and then strangely get left out more in fanon than canon. as sexist as DC is in canon, what with the frequent hyper sexualization and demonization of the women in this series …….. for the love of god at least women exist there. to many batfam writers it’s like the worlds population flipped from being a 50:50 gender ratio to being 99:1 and women are an endangered species being preserved in some conservatory somewhere.

women play a WAY bigger role in batman comics than most of you care to learn. huntress is pivotal in several arcs, so is catwoman, so is oracle. some fics will even specifically go out of their way to reference some of these arcs — and then leave out the women like they were never there! and it’s impolite to ask writers or artist where the missing women are so i just click out and move on, but like, seriously? every time? that’s not even counting the amount of AUs where by the writer’s full control, women who had been critically important to these men just straight up don’t exist.

you guys expect women to just be cool with being in fandoms that go out of their way to write us out of the narrative? you think we’re just going to have a fun time?

this was also about Zelda. the zelda series proper has countless pivotal, important, plot relevant, iconic women, and their presence and choices, particularly zelda, often genuinely impact the storyline of the game. sometimes in huge ways like, the story wouldn’t have happened at all without her. women were actually so central that a way bigger portion of all major NPCs tended to be women; 4 out of 5 of the sages you save in Ocarina of Time are women, and even Sheik is actually Zelda in disguise!

but fandom sexism has been around a long time in zelda too. an old popular theory had fans pretending sheik was a separate character to zelda entirely — to the point we had people in the fandom with this headcanon literally saying “ugh oot zelda was so boring she didn’t do anything” when she was literally sheik and had one of the MOST central, active zelda roles to not only the story but even the combat! people let a sexist headcanon make them forget what women actually did!!!!

but this criticism is more lobbied at a particular fan circle who have, truly a genuinely creative idea — what if all the links met? though they also weren’t the first to have the idea (in my earlier zelda fandom experience there was a similar AU), but this group has majorly popularized it. but this has led to a shocking amount of erasure of the women depicted in fan creations. in what was once a fandom that would reliably depict women in a meaningful and story central way…. now a huge portion of fan works are just …dudes. now the portion of fanworks about women are way smaller. and to see zelda play a meaningful role in a narrative it’s mostly some flavor of shippy. zelda fanworks have tilted from once being a pretty woman positive and woman centric fandom … to overwhelmingly ‘zelda & related works’ being about dudes and their relationship to other dudes, both platonic and romantic. and i can’t stress this enough, 90% of these guys never met in canon. writers are going out of their way to bolster relationships between fictional guys instead of exploring link’s relationship to the many women he’s known, or depicting the relationships between these women. thank god though this is still a better fandom than batman because at least there’s still an exceptional handful of writers still writing zelda epics where she’s the main character. whereas in DC, there is an extremely noteworthy absence of ANYTHING where women are the main character. i genuinely can’t remember the last time a girl was the central character of a narrative, let alone for a work that got extremely popular the way fics about men can. and at least in zelda, we can filter out most works relating to this AU (though it’s pretty tough to content filter as it’s only 2 letters long (LU) and there’s a whole lot of words that get filtered with it. &many on Ao3 don’t tag it properly)

anyway. all this to say.

this isn’t me saying “don’t make what inspires you” or me trying to force writers at gunpoint to write more women. it’s me saying like… make what speaks to you — but why does ‘what speaks to people’ usually mean large groups of men and no women? why is this dynamic invented even when women are there and important in canon? why is ‘what speaks to people’ the idea to diminish the roles of women in media specifically to prop up men instead?

tl;dr:

in my experience, the source materials’ original authors DO usually include women.

women are usually denied these attributes. we are seen as lacking the necessary resolve or competence or inner strength. or seen as shallow damsels in distress too often so that the aid and assistance does not feel earned. so that it’s never reinforced that we deserve people going out of their way for us after an ordeal.

December Junk Journal - 2025

Send a character + one or more of these question IN THE INBOX. Don't reply on the post!

1. Why do you like or dislike this character?

2. Favorite canon thing about this character?

3. Least favorite canon thing about this character?

4. If you could put this character in any other media, be it a book, a movie, anything, what would you put them in?

5. What's the first song that comes to mind when you think about them?

6. What's something you have in common with this character?

7. What's something the fandom does when it comes to this character that you like?

8. What's something the fandom does when it comes to this character that you despise?

9. Could you be roommates with this character?

10. Could you be best friends with this character?

11. Would you date this character?

12. What's a headcanon you have for this character?

13. What's an emoji, an emoticon and/or any symbol that reminds you of this character or you think the character would use a lot?

14. Assign a fashion aesthetic to this character.

15. What's your favorite ship for this character? (Doesn't matter if it's canon or not.)

16. What's your least favorite ship for this character?

17. What's a ship for this character you don't hate but it's not your favorite that you're fine with?

18. How about a relationship they have in canon with another character that you admire?

19. How about a relationship they have in canon that you don't like?

20. Which other character is the ideal best friend for this character, the amount of screentime they share doesn't matter?

21. If you're a fic writer and have written for this character, what's your favorite thing to do when you're writing for this character? What's something you don't like?

22. If you're a fic reader, what's something you like in fics when it comes to ths character? Something you don't like?

23. Favorite picture of this character?

24. What other character from another fandom of yours that reminds you of them?

25. What was your first impression of this character? How about now?

26. What's something the character has done you can't get over? Be it something funny, bad, good, serious, whatever?

27. What is a color or colors that you think of when you think of this character, be it their canon color(s) or not?

28. If you could have this character meet another in another media, who would you have them meet?

29. Could you live as this character, would you? If not, what would you change so that you could?