Maybe That Girl Is Enough

She/Her Mostly RWBY

[normystical]

wedding dresses are white specifically so that if the bride goes axe-crazy you can rest assured you will see the blood stains all over her and it'll be sick as fuck

[inkskinned]

how eerie to hear they're going to remake carrie. how eerie to hear they have made the mother into some kind of gentle well-meaning figure.

carrie is almost explicitly about the cycles of abuse. it is almost explicitly about how women and girls are taught to reproduce the patriarchy. it cannot be isolated from either message.

it shows cruel teenagers not as a random whacky plot point but instead to highlight that we are taught to mock other girls for not being fuckable; lest we ourselves be considered not-fuckable. we will eat our own kind to survive. nobody helps her because to help carrie would be to turn against the patriarchy.

carrie's mother has experienced abuse at the hands of her husband and religion not as a "sad backstory" but instead because it lampshades her behavior when she then turns and abuses her daughter while citing that same religion. we are forced to ask the question: what is the difference between the patriarchy and religion? aren't they both systems of control? we often see mothers as being the "ultimate" in innocence and kindness - but this book challenges that narrative. abusive mothers exist, and and always have. abusive women exist and always have. white women, after all, love voting for donald trump.

men are almost absent from the book, but their presence lingers. it feels almost like the red mark made after a slap - the men do not have to be there; the women will continue to abide by the rules without question. it is a devastating, haunting condemnation of the notion of feminine fragility. it accurately asserts that women are cruel, are capable, are power-hungry - and often are hiding behind perceived innocence to mask that cruelty. the abuse carrie experiences rests in a doubled betrayal: it is because of another woman. the supposed "sisterhood" is revealed to be thin, a guise of equanimity that is only offered to the "right" type of girl/woman.

many of us were not the right type of girl.

to go back on these main and obvious themes of the book - to rewrite the mother as some caring and sad creature is... a curious choice. i can't explain it, but it feels almost like censorship to me. it refuses a deeper meaning of the book (and one that questions the patriarchy) in favor of the incredibly thin plot of "what if scary girl had scary powers." i literally don't even know what level of misogyny it is that we have to defang everyone around her in order to tell her story. i'm baffled by it.

in the era of trad wives endlessly posting abusive content of their children online - the adaptation had plenty of meat to modernize her mother. in the era of AI and revenge porn and social media - there's a huge amount of space for a competent writer to play around in. after all, if the abuse is recorded and posted to media - and as the audience we're watching it without interfering - the story is now about us. it asks us who we are comfortable bullying.

it's okay if you feel like you don't have the writing chops to talk about how many religions are abusive and tacitly enable domestic violence. it's okay if you feel like you couldn't write a believable teenage bully. it's okay if you're just interested in "scary girl has scary powers."

but maybe, i don't know, choose a different fucking story?

[bigtabart]

Nothing is stronger than a flower's dream.

[temporary-tats]

Little Ruby sketch to celebrate V10! :)

[ko-fi] [commission info] [links]

[lara-cherriinie]

my name is Susie Deltarune and my power is being oblivious as fuck

[loafbud]

the reaction of the century

[skullebesta]

ermm

[hagiomoto]

My more controversial Opinion that I think a lot of you would hate is that I think we should stop taking writing advices from screenwriters.

[hagiomoto]

Because today’s writers are learning to write from visual media instead of actually reading, and I think that’s a problem (too). Unless you want to write for TV or movies, we should listen to novelists and short fiction writers instead.

[talistheintrovert]

Apologies for hijacking your post, but as somebody who did a joint honours degree in both creative & professional writing, AND screenwriting, I could not agree more.

Th Creative Writing part of my degree covered genres, styles, poetry, professional writing, articles, fiction, non-fiction, short stories, novel-writing and even some level of scripting. We also did a lot of analysis and even had an entire lecture (including workshops) on how to give and receive constructive feedback.

The Screenwriting half of my degree did none of that. We watched movies and shows and we learned how to structure scripts and how writer's rooms worked, which is all useful, but in hindsight I truly wish I could have just done all of that in a six month semester long unit in Creative Writing because that's about the amount of information that was disseminated by the screenwriting course over the 3 years.

And those people in the Screenwriting half who were NOT doing Creative Writing (doing film or drama etc.) were notably less advanced in their skills by the final year. That's not to say they were BAD writers (although some of them were, that's true of all Writing degrees, sometimes people refuse to be taught because they think they know everything already despite being at a place to learn) but they were less adept at giving feedback on other people's writing beyond "i didn't like it" or "it was clunky" without being able to verbalise why and how it was clunky. They were less able to paint a picture of the world they were creating or fine-tune character specific dialogue, which is all stuff you expect to be able to do as a screenwriter. It's not just that we should stop listening to screenwriters it's that even screenwriters should be taking more writing advice from more diverse sources like poetry or novel writers. The books people DO recommend for screenwriting (like Save the Cat, which most good writers I know have beef with) should not be seen as the blueprint but as supplement advice you can take or leave - which is what was so useful about covering so many things in the Creative Writing half of my degree.

The most important phrase in my entire degree that came up in almost every Creative Writing lecture was "Form is never more than an extension of content" (Robert Creeley) which applies to literally everything and I am not joking. I have it TATTOOED. The form you choose (script, short story, poem, novel etc.) should reflect and inform the content (and vice versa) and if it doesn't you should probably try a new form and see what works best. That includes the form of advice you choose to seek out - if it's not designed for, say, the structure of a novel, how is it supposed to help you when you're 100k words deep into one? That's not to say cross-media advice can't be helpful (I literally said earlier than screenwriters should take more writing advice from more varied sources) but to keep in mind that even the best screenwriters in the world can't fix the problems you're having with your novel if those problems are novel-specific.

[hagiomoto]

Appreciate your insight! Yeah, this post came about because I was talking about this with my friends. They also mentioned that a lot of screenwriters transitioned into teaching creative writing, and that habits from their screenwriting days carried over to today's writers because their advice became so widespread*. The Save the Cat! series is one example of that.

*I don't have the data to backup their statements but lol

[chantaldraw]

"...because you did start something."

[chantaldraw]

See you soon ❤️🤍🖤💛

[chantaldraw]

New Day ❤️🤍🖤💛

[angele-darliing]

She would be lovely.

[veloxfox]

Isn't she lovely? ✨️

I think Jax would look good in anything 💕

[lesbianroyai]

rwby makes me want to cry so bad. imagine being created with the budget of a nickel and two toothpicks. the map of the region was a stain on a napkin. the creator wrote out to the ninth volume but died before the last of the third volume. but his friends kept the show going, kept true to what he wrote. the show survived the shutdown of the parent company. had crossover movies with wb and was dropped by them as well. got picked up by yet another studio. has been in hiatus hell for 3 years but is confirmed to continue. this is insane and unheard of for this type of show. also the core message of the show is to not give up, to keep going even when the going gets tough, never give up. rwby is not giving up. rwby, monty, you will always be famous <3

[jastard]

Top 4 krusielle all time past & future

[osshisan]

where i genuinely think we're at (normal route)

[lylikers]

a comic about mew mew, kris & LOVE

[chlothequeen]

I know it’s been a long wait and some were hoping for more, but I feel like going from Rooster Teeth’s collapse to returning to full production under a new company after 3 years is a relatively good turnaround given the state of the animation industry.

[ferweenie]

Gooseworx is stronger than me because if my introspective transgender theme narrative about identity and accepting your circumstances was infiltrated by media iliterate 12 year olds who treated my work like it was fnaf and said my self insert of me at my worst was literally the worst person who deserved nothing but the worst and could not recover ever i would actually fucking explode. I would kill people. How does she do it.