[ SECRET POST #2181 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2181 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 04 pages, 100 secrets from Secret Submission Post #312.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 1 2 - too big ], [ 1 2 (again) - repeat ], [ 4 - trolls ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I formerly wrote overwhlemingly male casts because of Mary Sue fear not out of sexism. When I was still fairly new I noticed that female characters got looked over with a lot more scrutiny than males, and being accused of being a "suethor" was something that got a lot of scorn.

As a kid who was treated crappy in real life by other kids and turned to fanfic/writing for an escape I didn't want to deal with that shit there too. Writing females became scary for me and so I defaulted to males because it was what was more comfortable to me. It wasn't because I hated females or thought them inferior, it was because the online writing community is ludicrously irrational about something as simple as an absurd wish fufillment character that I would eventually grow out of in a couple years anyway. I'm just saying this to say that lack of female characters in fiction nowadays may not always be about sexism.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Sue

However now I've grown out of that since I've started really working on my writing (and learning what a Mary Sue actually is). I have a concept I'm developing for a work with a team of female characters and I've fleshed out the females in my main work.

I agree that there needs to be more variety in female characters and I think that can achieved by getting people to think of them as characters first rather than "female characters" and to toss aside the Strong Female Character (TM) archetype that Hollywood tries to push as well as the concept of 'purely boy traits" and "purely girl traits". We need to see that being feminine is not inherently inferior to being masculine. Don't treat female characters like special cases (that can be offensive in itself) and don't treat them like gods either ("oh no you can't have a female be potrayed as being wrong that's sexist. "). If you have more than one female character and a variety of different female characters, you shouldn't have to worry about one being accused of perpetuating a 'damaging image of all women'.

and like I mentioned above If we want to get people comfortable writing female characters, we should stop going apeshit and cussing out and shaming young beginner writers who write Mary Sueish females. Because guess what, harshly telling people who try to write a female character and make a rookie mistake that they should be ashamed for "staining people's eyes with their literary abomination" actually tends to make them less likely to want to try again.

tl;dr: there may be other reasons that people don't write female characters as often as male including the "Writing a mary sue is the worst sin you can commit EVAR" stigma that has cultivated on the internet. We need to get people to look at female characters as "characters who just happen to be female" rather than super holy freaking unicorns. Also the gender war is dumb. Equality of the genders FTW.

/just my two cents.

[ariakas]

Yeah, the rage against Mary-Sues has a nasty misogynistic streak that I think is well-recognized by this point. Aspiring male authors write Gary Stus just as (if not more) often, but they're never dogpiled and shamed and ridiculed for it - they're just that, inexperienced. We realize, for them, that it's just wishful thinking. But only girls' fantasies are worthy of shame and ridicule, it seems.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah exactly.

[(Anonymous)]

Especially since a lot of people don't seem to know what a Mary Sue actually is, and therefore just label any female character they don't like or any original female character, if we're talking fanfic, as one.