LucyLuna+

I wanted to use what ‘reach’ I may have here to share the Carolina Wildlife Center’s urgent plea for donations. If they are unable to raise $75,000 to cover ongoing and future care of their wildlife patients, the center will have to close July 20th, 2026. The services provided by CWC to the community are incredibly valuable, and without them, many wild animals will suffer without the care they need.

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Botanical [ 8 colors ]

If your protagonist is a fighter or magic user, do you show other women in those roles? If your society is more relaxed about sex discrimination, have you built a world that looks like it?

Have you built a world where your female characters don’t all have to be The Best At Everything, or is almost every female character placed where she can be extraordinary next to a bunch of male counterparts? Are you comfortable letting a female wizard or warrior be average or unimportant, or does she have to be one of the most skilled and powerful of them all, able to match or best all the men around her? On the other hand, are you comfortable having a female wizard or warrior be indisputably the most skilled or powerful out of the wizards or warriors, without drawing attention to her gender, placing her in competition with men, or having her be an exception to the rule because she’s female?

Are you letting your female characters be mediocre and un-extraordinary? Your world is full of powerful sorceresses, fierce battle maidens and calculating noblewomen, but do women do things in this world other than be Exemplary and Great and Awesome? If you’ve established that women do business and fight, do you have female soldiers carousing at bars and vaguely dull female Evil Minions Of The Dark Lord bumbling around doing evil bidding and female apprentices slacking on work or is every background woman we see competent and controlled and intelligent and doing whatever it is she’s doing without error, whereas only men are allowed to be foolish, impulsive, mess things up, or just be shown unflatteringly during the couple sentences we know them? In other words, does the world show women being unapologetically human beings or are all your female characters basically making up for being women by not doing anything that would badly represent their gender?

being represented is part of feminism. having different kinds of womanhood exist and be validated by a narrative is a kind of power. being allowed and encouraged to exist is a kind of political statement.

but feminism is first and foremost about political equality, not simple representation and visibility. it's about power being shared amongst minorities rather than hoarded by those who inherited it.

that's why imo, the dark lord should not be hiring women. the dark lord should be oppressing the fuck out of them. slaughtering them and the children en masse. that's what makes them the dark lord in the first place. that's why fighting the dark lord is a good idea. especially if fighting them requires banding together with those outside your gender or cultural heritage or skin tone or anything else.

it's fine to have misogynistic dark lords who hate women. it's fine to have dark lords who are obsessed with whiteness and notions of racial purity. it's fine to have dark lords who have never heard of OSHA or Title VII of the Civil Rights Act or equal protection under the law or anything else like it. it's especially fine in the genre of fantasy because fantasy is at its heart a window into what the world might look like if ordinary people could rise up against the evil of the powers that be and demolish them forever by the simple act of throwing a ring in a volcano or what have you. fantasy is escapism and realism banded together. it's pretty much always about taking down the dark lord because the dark lord first and foremost has to suck as a person. morally speaking. it's kind of less justifiable to explode them with your burning white mana of heroic moral purity if they're actually hiring women and following fair employment practices and stuff.