Fangirling and Writer-Nerd Chaos

also there's no one stopping you from loving a badly written woman. in fact sometimes a badly written woman will crawl inside your brain and live there forever.

i'm begging tumblr users who couldn't name an evil woman to read the locked tomb because in just a short list of the insane amount of characters in these books there is (out of context spoilers ahead)

every time.

the expanse ladies; a summary (insp)

her armpits would NOT be clean shaven

favorite character from any media BUT it has to be a woman. in the tags now go (pls talk to me about your favorite fictional women pls pls pls pls)

"we need more angry, traumatized female characters" you guys could barely handle katara

And a lot of you couldn't stand korra

free my girl she did all of that but fandom can't even hate her for the right reasons

girls can do an A+ Horrible Thing but fandom gotta make up C-tier reason to hate her or alternatively girls can be so flat and underwritten yet fandoms said she did A+ horrible things I wish she did

cartoons made me gay starter pack

how could i forget this queen

left out two more

Could really use more media where wives viciously protect their husbands

Also violently. I want very violently. I want her to go scorched earth. I want five scenes earlier to see her husband being diplomatic and calming down a situation so no one gets hurt because his wife is in danger. And then something happens and now he’s unconscious and being threatened and his wife just absolutely levels a seven block radius with the force of her refusal to let anyone hurt him.

some of you have never had an unpopular female character as a hyperfixation and been forced to scroll through pages upon pages of bad hot takes about how terrible her character is while trying to peruse her tag for actual fanworks and it shows

the girlies reading

"I could fix her" well actually I like evil women and I'll let her commit crimes in the name of love

rhaenyra is a protagonist but galadriel is a heroine and there’s something very cool to me in both their surface similarities and narrative differences

like i think for grrm even his most heroic heroes are at heart just protagonists who managed to stagger their way into narrative justification by the skin of their teeth. and so for rhaenyra even though within the show so far she’s been showered with all these really meaningful narrative props and main-character-esque motifs [she saw the white stag! she received her father’s dying benediction! she wants to unite the realm not divide it!], structurally we’re almost meant to read these moments as a kind of in-universe storytelling trick that will eventually themselves be eaten by the larger narrative forces [i.e. by chaos + tragedy], as will rhaenyra herself. she doesn’t control the story and it doesn’t serve her but she’s been sort of…almost conned? by her birth and her rank and her father into believing it does. and that’s the heart of her story for me is this character with real flaws and selfish impulses who nonetheless wants to do the right thing and is blinded as to what that actually is by all these forces beyond her control which ultimately doom her for  it.

whereas tolkien obviously is not a postmodern writer and his characters are not an assemblage of competing moralities and worldviews, they are Heroes and the narrative is there For Them. which is what grrm pushes back against and is something that nowadays scans as pretty old-fashioned and has justifiably received plenty of criticism. but! there’s something actually really really compelling about structuring the narrative around the desires and actions of a character - a Hero - when that character is in fact not morally perfect or above sin. which justice to tolkien of course he explores his series [via boromir, eowyn, obv gollum, + a little with everyone really given the themes of temptation &etc]. but which gets REALLY interesting when you apply the same lens to galadriel as she appears in the rings of power: a deeply flawed, violent, power-hungry, problem-causing protagonist who is nonetheless undeniably a Heroine, because the narrative has deemed her as such.

& so because we all know that the narrative will ultimately protect galadriel from herself a cool effect becomes essentially that we start questioning the narrative underpinnings of the story. who gets to decide that galadriel is heroic even when she’s threatening genocide to an unarmed prisoner? in grrm this would be an easy question because she simply would not be a heroine but in tolkien’s world [even tolkien fanfic which lol is what the show is no argument] she is! structurally she cannot escape her heroism because she is the future Lady of Light and the story will not permit any alternative! which makes it sort of fascinating that her storyline in trop is about the temptation of that escape. she is making the audience question the hegemony of the narrative by herself pushing back against that hegemony, the storytelling forces in which her own character is caught. and that’s an effect you can’t get in grrm’s world because the world itself has already rejected that hero-centric hegemony, so it simply isn’t present for his protagonists to grapple with in the same way.

anyway i find it cool that rhaenyra and galadriel can be set up as these almost mirror images of each other - galadriel would be just as doomed as rhaenyra if you dropped her down into grrm’s universe and i think rhaenyra would be just as hemmed in and problematically heroic as galadriel in tolkien’s world. [perhaps a little less resistant to temptation tbf considering rhaenyra’s solution to her daemon problem was just to marry him. rip to galadriel but rhaenyra would have said yes to sauron in an instant god bless.] but i think they would both also love the different freedoms granted to them by the other’s narrative - because rhaenyra’s entire problem is that she thinks she’s a heroine when she’s just a protagonist, whereas galadriel is required to be the heroine to end all heroines but seems like a part of her would secretly be thrilled to be just another protagonist instead. they resemble each other so much in a certain light but their function in their respective stories is so different, and really illuminates the different narrative approaches of their respective worlds.

some of the people who are like “i want more nuanced female characters” will literally see a female character with one (1) realistic flaw and then discourse about how she’s the devil