Glaze Bittersweet

it's better for a person but not necessary a character

A character was beaten to death by angry other characters is a consequence of their actions. IMAGINE.

Consequences =\= "well I was wrong now I'm going to therapy and I will help you cope with the harm from my actions and at the same time I will think “How wrong I was what a terrible person I am”

And no

Characters don't do things for no reason lmao. Well if we're talking about good writing.

Also villain being executed for their actions isn't inherently author's manifestation "WELL THAT'S HOW YOU SUPPOSED TO THREAT PEOPLE IRL AND ALSO I MANIFEST THERE IS AN ONTOLOGICAL GOOD END EVIL".

And also, omg really? All of them? Can you give me some examples then? I'd love to see more personally so Im all ears to hear where you found all these characters!

I was basically saying that it's okay for a girl character to be complex and enjoy feminine things such as dresses and cutesy things and makeup AND be a strong fighter.

And I was saying that because usually it's either the feminine character is treated as stupid or childish (see: the dumb blonde trope) or vain and cares more about her looks than people or just simply weak (also there's the immediate assumption that she either believes that she's better than others or that she is kind and sweet or dumb, you can't deduct that just from her looks).

On the other hand, "strong" girl characters hate makeup, good at fighting and sports, sarcastic and rude (which again, could be true, but these traits can fit more feminine characters too).

And I'm so sorry the colour pink in text triggers you so much :( it was just to have fun you know? Colours? Fun? I'm not sure why you interpret it as passive aggressive really, maybe think of why you assume that.

idkkkkkkkk try spop, homestuck, any mahou shoujo, steven universe, almost every chinese popular gacha game, almost every marvel movie abt female characters (almost all of thm are somehow fem), TOH, ladybug, FUCKING WINX CLUB, TOTALLY SPICE, game of thrones(fem characters aren't fighters but they're fucking queens and deep and complex)....

also it depends on the genre and the degree of realism. there is a reason why a warrior will be less feminine if we talk about media with the more realistic tones. feminine elements such as cosmetics, beautiful complex hairstyles and clothing came from the upper classes fashion when fashion was more class based than gender based. so it's not very practical style choise for a fighter. but again it depends on the tone of the media and the genre.

"not like other girls" and "stupid blonde" is a quite dead 00s cliches nowdays.

alwo where the fuck all of this strong masculine rude warrior girls. WHERE THEY ARE SHOW ME THEM. i mean masculine and noy "she wears pants and doesn't like makeup".

idk you sound like "MAKE FEMALE CHARACTERS FEMININE AGAIN"

Additional clarifiers:

My stories couldn't even theoretically be the top one, because I love writing stories about politics and social hierarchies. And I have more women and queer people on all sides both left and right.

I don't want to write stories about politics where most of the characters are men. I don't interested in writing stories where most of the characters are men. But if that weren't the case it would be highly questionable to present lore as patriarchal and misogynistic. What kind of patriarchy is it if most politicians are women and most historical figures are women? And yes queer and gender non-conforming women.

So I'm a hostage of fantasy worlds and allegories.

"A young naive heroine is thrust into the world of dangerous magic and court intrigues." "An innocent girl is thrust into war, political machination, and revolution!" "The clueless main character is thrust into the treacherous world where she can't trust anyone!"

Can we stop with that thrusting for a second? Leave it for sex scenes and finally give me the heroine who knows what the fuck she is doing. I'm not saying she should be a "badass" girlboss who masters every art in ten minutes, has a pathologically inflated ego, and can do no wrong. Sure, she can make mistakes, experience failures, and realize she was wrong about something. But I would like to see more heroines who are interested in being in that story as opposed to those who have to be dragged into it kicking and screaming.

2."Female rage" What the fuck does it even mean? You are literally telling me some woman in your book is going to be angry. Am I supposed to be impressed? Honey, I'm not. Anger is the most accessible emotion on Earth. If I want to hear from an angry woman just for the sake of anger, I'll call my mom. What is the plot? What are the stakes? What is the heroine's journey? What are we raging at? Is that rage going to result in anything, or will your heroine just spend 700 pages screaming into the void?

3. "Morally grey MMC"—is he though? He is going to lose his entire personality and become the FMC's mindless cheerleader as soon as she appears, isn't he? His "dark past" is something like killing a serial child-eater when he was 20 so that nobody could ever doubt how morally upstanding he truly is. He is going to shower the FMC with admiration, praise, and reassurance even when she acts like a lunatic and read her Miranda rights consent manifesto every time they are about to have sex. Dude, you've already told her she could stop you at any moment the last five times. I think she got it by now.

4. Fake stakes in general: "Deadly competitions!"—and every eliminated contestant safely returns home with their travel expenses compensated by the competition organizer.

"Epic love story!"—and that's two people who had 1.5 conversations and 3 sexual intercourses.

No, people hate it when you give them a useless caricature of a woman and tell them she is the paragon of kindness and righteousness.

So many authors today are allergic to female intelligence or any sort of social or political awareness. A heroine must be either passive-and-stupid ("Soft") or aggressive-and-stupid ("Strong")

If the heroine is soft, her morals must resemble those of a 5-year-old child. She would condemn stealing and violence outright, because in her smooth brain it's always "wrong," without thinking that sometimes people steal to survive and kill to defend themselves and their families. She never had to do either; how would she know?

Her "compassion" is the performative aristocratic angst of a sheltered princess who decries the unfairness of the world from her ivory tower and then asks her overworked indentured maid to fetch her a silk handkerchief so she can theatrically wipe tears from her self-righteous face. She doesn't know what "indenture" is, so she doesn't worry about that. She definitely doesn't think about how her family's tax policies contribute to growing poverty and how she herself benefits from it. That's too complicated. They didn't teach her that in her Sunday school.

Her "goodness" is privileged ignorance because she never had to choose a lesser evil or make a hard call in her life.

Her "empathy" is always passive: "Somebody should do something about it!" Somebody, but not her and not in a way that personally inconveniences her, or else it would be terribly unfair to her, and we can't have that. She has already suffered, poor thing: the screams of tortured slaves didn't let her sleep last night, and the sight of someone's blood made her sick and ruined her day! And just last week she learned a peasant child died from a preventable disease, and she cried so hard she couldn't attend the ball! Can you imagine her agony?

Her "kindness" doesn't lead to social activism, only to self-pity.

If the heroine is "strong", she must be irrational, impulsive, and possess an extremely fragile ego. Her "feminine rage" is always about someone hurting her personal feelings, infringing on her personal rights, or causing her personal discomfort. She cannot rage against systemic oppression, inequality, or the treatment of women in her society in general, not unless she is personally victimized.

If she is allowed to strive for power, it's only because "she's tired of being powerless," which is fine, but once again centers her feelings above anything else. She never seeks power because she sees that the current system is broken and has a vision of how to change it.

If she refuses to commit a morally questionable act, it's never because she calculated the risks and realized it will cause more harm than good in the long run; it's always because "it would make me a bad person!"

If she must execute her enemy and she refuses to do so, it's never because she has moral objections against the death penalty; it's always because she believes it "would make her no better than them." Once again, she sees everything through the lens of her feelings, and we are supposed to believe that her self-centeredness is a virtue.

The common pattern here, regardless of "softness" or "strength," is that female characters aren't allowed to think big. They never get to ask, "How does it work, and how can I make it better?" They are only allowed to think about, "How does that make me feel?"

Social activism as well, ideological struggle, and active systemic resistance are way too political, and we all know that any proper female character should feel a healthy amount of disgust towards anything remotely political. She must see the political world as something filthy, corruptive, and threatening to her inherent feminine goodness; therefore, she must recoil from it like a cat from water. A female character cannot enter the political arena willingly and consciously; she must be "thrust" into it, coaxed, coerced, or dragged by the hair. This way we don't risk her becoming unfeminine, unrelatable, or unlikeable. Most importantly, this way she is exempt from any criticism. If she seeks power herself, she can be held accountable for what she is doing with it. But if she was forced into power - how dare you blame her for something she never asked for when she inevitably fucks up?! She is just a poor innocent angel who was forced to wear a crown too heavy for her pretty little head!

However, if we see a male character with similar traits—ruthlessness, desire for power or revenge, slyness, or manipulativeness—his female love interest is expected to only accept the "good" in him and wring her hands in a fit of moral panic at any "darker" tendencies he manifests and either try to "fix" him or get corrupted by him like a slice of bread by mold.

What if she is just…okay with that? What if she doesn't see these tendencies as something inherently wrong?

What if she sees his rational pragmatism as necessary?

What if she respects his ambition for power and control simply because she can relate to them?

What if she appreciates a clever machination and values his political competence?

Finally, why can't she be even more ruthless or manipulative than her love interest?

What if she is manipulating her way through court intrigues not because she is a poor, desperate soul who has no other choices, but because political intrigues exhilarate her?

What if she is not "a sweet innocent girl who would rather plant turnips in her garden but was made into the weapon by this cruel world?" What if she became a warrior because she loves competition and challenge?

What if her violence is not a poorly managed impulse of a wounded child but a conscious strategic choice?

What if she sees her partner crushing his enemies and, instead of crying, "There must be another way," what if she devises a plan that is even more destructive?

What if she learns about his plans and finds strategic flaws in them instead of moral ones?

What if instead of arguing about good and evil, they argue about the effectiveness of their strategies?

What if she is not clutching pearls about his methods but finds them intriguing and looks for ways to outsmart him?

What if he outsmarts her, and she doesn't pity herself as a victim of his deception, but counts it as a miscalculation on her part and begrudgingly respects a smart move on his part?

What if she finds out he wants to take control over the country and, instead of lecturing him on the dangers of corruption, wants a part in it?

What if politics and warfare are not some scary, complicated things done by evil men to her? What if she is capable of handling them just fine?

What if she sees him not as a monster to defeat or a moral project to tame and fix, but as an adversary and possible ally?

What if her partner's power doesn't scare her and doesn't make her weep for his immortal soul? What if she is proud of how efficiently he wields it?

What if she is not the light for his darkness, and her own darkness simply recognizes his?

What if she is not purifying him, and instead they build something glorious (if slightly terrifying) together?

but then I realised that same challenge would be infinitely more funny with folks who have atypical or horror OCs

And that is what upsets me.

I have nothing against a female character whose main strengths are compassion and tenderness, by why shouldn't such a character come in the form of a gallant butch woman?

Can't the female characters who rely on guile and deception do so without being portrayed as seductive femme fatales using their "feminine wiles" to get their way, and be instead as genuinely machiavellian and creepy and unsexualized as the equivalent male characters are allowed to be?

Why must an unassertive and introverted female character automatically be also soft and bashful and meek, instead of being an outright surly, misanthropic weirdo?

No matter how progressive and feminist they believe themselves to be, there is still that little nasty voice at the back of their head telling them women are "a lesser sex." They cannot handle a male character treating his female counterpart as an equally capable, formidable opponent.

A female character can plan military strategies, destroy enemy armies, capture dissenters, plot assassinations, deceive, manipulate, threaten, torture, spy on her rivals, and fatally injure her adversaries, and it's all good. Girl power! Feminine rage! But as soon as the same methods of warfare are applied to her, she immediately turns from a badass queen to a pure, innocent little girl whose delicate sensibilities must be approached with utmost care.

Say you have a male and a female character as two rivals from warring political factions. The FMC breaks into the MMC house, kills one or two of his guards, and tries to stab him. He captures her and locks her up in the dungeon.

And that's, ladies and gentlemen, the moment when they cease to be enemies and become a victim and abuser. He has no right! She is going to be traumatized for life by such a violation of her personal freedom!

Everyone knows that real enemies-to-lovers is when she tries to stab him every five minutes and he just laughs and calls her "feisty."