Strangeness & Charm

you ever just think about how the gulf between women’s rights in different countries is so massive and there are men working their fingers to the bone to strip back reproductive rights because they look at their society where women can live their lives free from being shackled to men through financial dependence and constant pregnancy and childbirth and think ‘this won’t do at all’

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?

Cobalt crust fungus, Germany

friend whos always available: i can do whenever

friend whos constantly busy: im sorry i have work and then school and then the labyrinth and then more work :( i can do tuesday at 3:00 am for five minutes tho

friend with the randomly generated sleep schedule: (no response)

friend who went missing in the woods behind their house 12 years ago and hasn't been heard from since: (no response)

Bonsai does not require genetically dwarfed trees but rather depends on growing small trees from regular stock and seeds. Bonsai uses cultivation techniques like pruning, root reduction, potting, defoliation, and grafting to produce small trees. [src]

Girls are treated like bonsai trees. They’re capable of as much as boys, but parents cut them down to size. It’s easy to grow a regular tree. it’s hard to grow a bonsai. This is what is meant by “it’s so hard to raise daughters.”

If you plant a bonsai tree in the grown and forego pruning and training, the tree will develop its full root system and begin growing to its full size. Bonsai trees are not a special species, instead they are full-size trees that are continually manipulated to remain small. [src]

No matter how long a tree has been clipped and pruned and de-leafed and sliced, no matter how long it has been in a bonsai, it is still a tree. When set into soil and left untrimmed, it grows.