I need to talk about the fact that Bucky’s still got his right hand 100% free and could be punching Spider Man into next Tuesday already. But he still stood frozen, looking shocked as all fucks and lemme tell you right now that that was not because someone’s managed to block his metal fist because lbr the metal arm was never unstoppable before, especially when super-enhanced/-equipped people are involved – so basically he doesn’t take that punch cus he’s actually just now able to hear the other guy’s voice and it clicks that this is just a fucking k i d
#THANK YOU SOMEBODY FOR SAYING THIS OTHER THAN ME#LIKE THANK FUCKING CHRIST SOMEBODY REMEMBERS THAT THIS IS A GUY WHO STOOD UP FOR ITTY BITTY STEVE SINCE CHILDHOOD#AND NOW HE HEARS THIS ITTY BITTY VOICE AND IS LIKE#FUCK IT’S A BABBY I CANNOT HIT THE BABBY HE IS SMOL WHY IS HE OUT RISKING HIS LIFE WHERE IS HIS GUARDIAN RN#WHY IS HE NOT IN SCHOOL FFS
no but really, by now steve probably realizes that if he had jumped, he would have survived, just as bucky did. and that means that if he had jumped, he could’ve gotten to bucky first, and bucky never would’ve become the winter soldier, and never would’ve been tortured, and howard stark wouldn’t have been assassinated, and countless other tragedies wouldn’t have occurred. if he’d only jumped the way bucky did. and bucky, despite the years of brainwashing, still jumped, even though it went against everything he’d been taught for the past 70 years.
and no, steve will never forgive himself for this, which is exactly why I must go crawl into a hole and die
It’s actually a pretty interesting and entertaining movie if you go in fully aware it’s a relic of the early 2000s and base your expectations around that.
I'm happy that I haven't seen posts like yours (about liking "problematic" stuff in fandom) when I was younger, because I'd probably keep reading gross stuff like it's just a fic. Do you really think young people reading, for example, pedophilia ffs aren't influenced and won't project anything to real life or you just lie to yourself to feel better about readng about gross things yourself? Yeah let's let 14 years old read romantic stories about teens and teachers, it's okay ...but anyways :)
Oh, nonnie, you’re barking up the wrong tree here.
First of all, most fanfiction comes with an appropriate age rating, and if there are fourteen year olds visiting a fanfiction archive like AO3 - which, by the way, comes with a general disclaimer in the TOS that informs reader that they are likely to encounter upsetting, offensive, or morally questionable content - or if there are fourteen year olds on tumblr, which is an unmoderated, semi-private blogging platform - it’s not my responsibility to “keep them safe” from anything that isn’t age-appropriate.
Second, I’m really very sorry that you didn’t read my post earlier, so it would have given you a bit of perspective, and made you realize that it’s perfectly okay to read all kinds of fucked-up fiction, as long as you are mature enough and capable of discerning between fiction and reality. And usually, even fourteen year olds are old enough to make that distinction. Or if they aren’t, it’s their parents’ responsibility to make sure they don’t encounter content that isn’t suited for them.
But seriously, nonnie, do you have any idea what kind of stuff I read when I was fourteen years old? Stuff that I could get in every book shop, unsupervised, uncensored, and without content warnings attached to it? Do you realize that published books come without any kind of age restriction? I’m inclined to laugh at you. I was a fourteen year old myself, and back then, no one even tried to put restrictions on me and my reading preferences. Goodness, our house was full of books of every genre and flavor, and no one bothered to even look at what kind of stuff I pulled from the shelf.
But, hey, if you want to start banning fiction, how about you start with the things that have a much bigger audience than niche fanfiction which is posted in fannish spaces like tumblr or at the AO3 (which, by the way, was made with the explicit purpose of hosting all kinds of fanfiction, especially the stuff that was banned elesewhere)?
If you are really so concerned about the influence that fiction has on younger people, I’d start here. That’s a literary classic romanticizing rape and incest among other disgusting things. Also this one, it’s full of violence, propagates rape culture and really toxic masculinity!
And let’s not even talk about contemporary novels! From Nabokov’s Lolita to Irving’s The Hotel New Hampshire, George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire to Effinger’s Marîd Audran series, published fiction is full of problematic stuff, and it’s all easily available for young people!! Shouldn’t you make it your quest to go out there and prevent that from happening?
But not, instead you’re in my askbox, wasting your time.
[…] or you just lie to yourself to feel better about readng about gross things yourself?
Oh, nonnie, I’m sorry, but this is pitiful. You’re talking to an adult, a sane, mentally stable and self-assured person, and your moral condemnation is pretty much meaningless to me. I’m not in any danger of conflating fiction and reality, and my conscience is perfectly clear when it comes to my support of fannish creativity and freedom or expression. :)
I for one am glad that I wasn’t exposed to much hand-wringing about fiction giving teens bad ideas when I was younger. I can only imagine, for example, what kind of confusion this constant refrain of “if you enjoy it in fiction you must also want it in real life, don’t kid yourself” would have caused. Or the negativity and suspicion towards kinks and sexuality. The pressure to only like things that are “pure and good”.
And yeah. I think I had read most of what Stephen King wrote by the time I was 14. Then I read every Anne Rice novel I could get my hands on. My parents knew and I’m thankful that they gave me this freedom. While I (like everyone else, I suspect) had and have my childhood issues to work through, none of them stem from the fiction I read.
my family has had dark comedy graphic novels about death, violence, sex and drugs in the bathroom since I was like 9
and I know it would have fucked me up so badly if I as a young 12-14yr old had been told that I supported the weird shit I read in real life and that I was disgusting and dangerous.
I was told by my authoritarian father that I shouldn’t read books with sex in them but he never actually screened the books I read.
I experienced queer people like myself through books far before I experienced them in real life. I experienced horrible things in the books I read, murder, necromancy, the desecration of corpses, people literally being pulled apart, etc.
But the most freeing thing about books for me was this:
I could always put it down.
There was one book with very intense description of children who were reanimated as skeletons that would roam this area and cry and that freaked me out so much that I stopped reading the book. And just like that poof! I didn’t have to imagine it anymore!
Another book had a graphic scene of a guy jerking off. (one of the hannibal books as I recall) I was grossed out by it and just sorta never picked the book back up. Years later I’ve watched all the Hannibal films and enjoyed their fucked up story but like, the book was still too much? It’s interesting how the brain works in that regard. We imagine things very vividly.
One of my favorite book series to this day has the forced pregnancy of like 12-14 year olds as part of the plot. It’s clear this isn’t okay and it’s pretty horrifying in the story. It was also required reading in school.
Did you know that a lot of required reading in school has problematic things in it?
The Jungle, Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies, The Giver, The Diary of Anne Frank, just to name a few.
If we shelter people from the worst of the world they don’t have context for the best of the world. And sometimes people can appreciate those dark stories because they see something of themselves in them.
The Giver meant a lot to me because I also very like I was in a position where I was very controlled and incapable of doing things. I felt like I saw the world differently from those around me. (And I did, my household was pretty conservative and old fashioned)
I think the important thing that people are forgetting is “You can always put it down” that also applies to the internet! You can always blacklist the tag, unfollow people that reblog it, etc. You can always put it down and walk away and go pick up a story you enjoy better to entertain yourself.
That’s the most powerful thing about media, honestly. We have a choice to partake.
Fanfiction authors don’t “let” 14-year-olds read problematic fics. Have you ever met a 14-year-old? They’ll google porn videos and click on every “I’m 18+ years old” button they find just to see what’s behind it, and before the internet was invented they’d peek through the windows to each other’s locker rooms and steal adult magazines from gas stations.
Antis got the causal relationship wrong. Rape doesn’t happen because of rapefics; rapefics happen because of rape. Most rapefics are written by rape survivors; I have yet to hear of a single rapefic written by an actual rapist. Not. One.
If anything, reading problematic fics has made the average teenager more aware of consent issues in their own lives. A properly-tagged darkfic is the antidote to mainstream rape culture, not the cause of it. ‘Twilight’ says stalking is sexy; the Edward/Bella darkfic tagged ‘noncon’ and ‘gaslighting’ portrays their relationship as it really is. A million-dollar music video with a sexy student seducing her teacher is rape culture; a teacher/student fic tagged ‘underage’ clearly makes a statement that the relationship portrayed is not normal.
Stop saying fanfiction authors are the cause of all bad things happening in the world. I promise you: we’re not.
The original Nonie would have probably had a heart attack if they saw my library cards from primary and secondary school. My school libraries held and freely dispensed books with descriptions of rape, sex, murder, you name it. Also, communism has literately just ended a few years before so the shelves have not yet been purged of all propaganda. Just imagine what kind of a mind fuck those books were.
Also, because I’m sure someone will write this comment if they didn’t already: yes, compulsory reading for schools gets to have a lot of problematic themes because there’s analysis and discussion at school where all those issues can be dissected. Well, fanfiction has meta threads on pages like Tumblr and LiveJournal and comment sections. And also benefit from direct line of contact to the author.
How to deepen your voice (pre-t)
Voice masculinizationVocal androgyny in speech and singingThis Phone App Helps Transgender Users Change The Pitch And Tone Of Their Voices (buzzfeed article)
When my wife was struck by mysterious, debilitating symptoms, our trip to the ER revealed the sexism inherent in emergency treatment.
Early on a Wednesday morning, I heard an anguished cry—then silence.
I rushed into the bedroom and watched my wife, Rachel, stumble from the bathroom, doubled over, hugging herself in pain.
“Something’s wrong,” she gasped.
This scared me. Rachel’s not the type to sound the alarm over every pinch or twinge. She cut her finger badly once, when we lived in Iowa City, and joked all the way to Mercy Hospital as the rag wrapped around the wound reddened with her blood. Once, hobbled by a training injury in the days before a marathon, she limped across the finish line anyway.
So when I saw Rachel collapse on our bed, her hands grasping and ungrasping like an infant’s, I called the ambulance. I gave the dispatcher our address, then helped my wife to the bathroom to vomit.
I don’t know how long it took for the ambulance to reach us that Wednesday morning. Pain and panic have a way of distorting time, ballooning it, then compressing it again. But when we heard the sirens wailing somewhere far away, my whole body flooded with relief.
I didn’t know our wait was just beginning.
I buzzed the EMTs into our apartment. We answered their questions: When did the pain start? That morning. Where was it on a scale of one to 10, with 10 being worst?
“Eleven,” Rachel croaked.
As we loaded into the ambulance, here’s what we didn’t know: Rachel had an ovarian cyst, a fairly common thing. But it had grown, undetected, until it was so large that it finally weighed her ovary down, twisting the fallopian tube like you’d wring out a sponge. This is called ovarian torsion, and it creates the kind of organ-failure pain few people experience and live to tell about.
“Ovarian torsion represents a true surgical emergency,” says an article in the medical journal Case Reports in Emergency Medicine. “High clinical suspicion is important. … Ramifications include ovarian loss, intra-abdominal infection, sepsis, and even death.” The best chance of salvaging a torsed ovary is surgery within eight hours of when the pain starts.
* * *
There is nothing like witnessing a loved one in deadly agony. Your muscles swell with the blood they need to fight or run. I felt like I could bend iron, tear nylon, through the 10-minute ambulance ride and as we entered the windowless basement hallways of the hospital.
And there we stopped. The intake line was long—a row of cots stretched down the darkened hall. Someone wheeled a gurney out for Rachel. Shaking, she got herself between the sheets, lay down, and officially became a patient.
We didn’t know her ovary was dying, calling out in the starkest language the body has.
Emergency-room patients are supposed to be immediately assessed and treated according to the urgency of their condition. Most hospitals use the Emergency Severity Index, a five-level system that categorizes patients on a scale from “resuscitate” (treat immediately) to “non-urgent” (treat within two to 24 hours).
I knew which end of the spectrum we were on. Rachel was nearly crucified with pain, her arms gripping the metal rails blanched-knuckle tight. I flagged down the first nurse I could.
“My wife,” I said. “I’ve never seen her like this. Something’s wrong, you have to see her.”
“She’ll have to wait her turn,” she said. Other nurses’ reactions ranged from dismissive to condescending. “You’re just feeling a little pain, honey,” one of them told Rachel, all but patting her head.
We didn’t know her ovary was dying, calling out in the starkest language the body has. I saw only the way Rachel’s whole face twisted with the pain.
Soon, I started to realize—in a kind of panic—that there was no system of triage in effect. The other patients in the line slept peacefully, or stared up at the ceiling, bored, or chatted with their loved ones. It seemed that arrival order, not symptom severity, would determine when we’d be seen.
As we neared the ward’s open door, a nurse came to take Rachel’s blood pressure. By then, Rachel was writhing so uncontrollably that the nurse couldn’t get her reading.
She sighed and put down her squeezebox.
“You’ll have to sit still, or we’ll just have to start over,” she said.
Finally, we pulled her bed inside. They strapped a plastic bracelet, like half a handcuff, around Rachel’s wrist.
* * *
From an early age we’re taught to observe basic social codes: Be polite. Ask nicely.Wait your turn. But during an emergency, established codes evaporate—this is why ambulances can run red lights and drive on the wrong side of the road. I found myself pleading, uselessly, for that kind of special treatment. I kept having the strange impulse to take out my phone and call 911, as if that might transport us back to an urgent, responsive world where emergencies exist.
The average emergency-room patient in the U.S. waits 28 minutes before seeing a doctor. I later learned that at Brooklyn Hospital Center, where we were, the average wait was nearly three times as long, an hour and 49 minutes. Our wait would be much, much longer.
Everyone we encountered worked to assure me this was not an emergency. “Stones,” one of the nurses had pronounced. That made sense. I could believe that. I knew that kidney stones caused agony but never death. She’d be fine, I convinced myself, if I could only get her something for the pain.
By 10 a.m., Rachel’s cot had moved into the “red zone” of the E.R., a square room with maybe 30 beds pushed up against three walls. She hardly noticed when the attending physician came and visited her bed; I almost missed him, too. He never touched her body. He asked a few quick questions, and then left. His visit was so brief it didn’t register that he was the person overseeing Rachel’s care.
Around 10:45, someone came with an inverted vial and began to strap a tourniquet around Rachel’s trembling arm. We didn’t know it, but the doctor had prescribed the standard pain-management treatment for patients with kidney stones: hydromorphone for the pain, followed by a CT scan.
The pain medicine started seeping in. Rachel fell into a kind of shadow consciousness, awake but silent, her mouth frozen in an awful, anguished scowl. But for the first time that morning, she rested.
* * *
Leslie Jamison’s essay “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain” examines ways that different forms of female suffering are minimized, mocked, coaxed into silence. In an interview included in her book The Empathy Exams, she discussed the piece, saying: “Months after I wrote that essay, one of my best friends had an experience where she was in a serious amount of pain that wasn’t taken seriously at the ER.”
She was talking about Rachel.
“Women are likely to be treated less aggressively until they prove that they are as sick as male patients.”
“That to me felt like this deeply personal and deeply upsetting embodiment of what was at stake,” she said. “Not just on the side of the medical establishment—where female pain might be perceived as constructed or exaggerated—but on the side of the woman herself: My friend has been reckoning in a sustained way about her own fears about coming across as melodramatic.”
“Female pain might be perceived as constructed or exaggerated”: We saw this from the moment we entered the hospital, as the staff downplayed Rachel’s pain, even plain ignored it. In her essay, Jamison refers back to “The Girl Who Cried Pain,” a study identifying ways gender bias tends to play out in clinical pain management. Women are “more likely to be treated less aggressively in their initial encounters with the health-care system until they ‘prove that they are as sick as male patients,’” the study concludes—a phenomenon referred to in the medical community as “Yentl Syndrome.”
In the hospital, a lab tech made small talk, asked me how I like living in Brooklyn, while my wife struggled to hold still enough for the CT scan to take a clear shot of her abdomen.
“Lot of patients to get to, honey,” we heard, again and again, when we begged for stronger painkillers. “Don’t cry.”
I felt certain of this: The diagnosis of kidney stones—repeated by the nurses and confirmed by the attending physician’s prescribed course of treatment—was a denial of the specifically female nature of Rachel’s pain. A more careful examiner would have seen the need for gynecological evaluation; later, doctors told us that Rachel’s swollen ovary was likely palpable through the surface of her skin. But this particular ER, like many in the United States, had no attending OB-GYN. And every nurse’s shrug seemed to say, “Women cry—what can you do?”
Nationwide, men wait an average of 49 minutes before receiving an analgesic for acute abdominal pain. Women wait an average of 65 minutes for the same thing. Rachel waited somewhere between 90 minutes and two hours.
“My friend has been reckoning in a sustained way about her own fears about coming across as melodramatic.” Rachel does struggle with this, even now. How long is it appropriate to continue to process a traumatic event through language, through repeated retellings? Friends have heard the story, and still she finds herself searching for language to tell it again, again, as if the experience is a vast terrain that can never be fully circumscribed by words. Still, in the throes of debilitating pain, she tried to bite her lip, wait her turn, be good for the doctors.
For hours, nothing happened. Around 3 o’clock, we got the CT scan and came back to the ER. Otherwise, Rachel lay there, half-asleep, suffering and silent. Later, she’d tell me that the hydromorphone didn’t really stop the pain—just numbed it slightly. Mostly, it made her feel sedated, too tired to fight.
If she had been alone, with no one to agitate for her care, there’s no telling how long she might have waited.
Eventually, the doctor—the man who’d come to Rachel’s bedside briefly, and just once—packed his briefcase and left. He’d been around the ER all day, mostly staring into a computer. We only found out later he’d been the one with the power to rescue or forget us.
When a younger woman came on duty to take his place, I flagged her down. I told her we were waiting on the results of a CT scan, and I hassled her until she agreed to see if the results had come in.
When she pulled up Rachel’s file, her eyes widened.
“What is this mess?” she said. Her pupils flicked as she scanned the page, the screen reflected in her eyes.
“Oh my god,” she murmured, as though I wasn’t standing there to hear. “He never did an exam.”
The male doctor had prescribed the standard treatment for kidney stones—Dilauded for the pain, a CT scan to confirm the presence of the stones. In all the hours Rachel spent under his care, he’d never checked back after his initial visit. He was that sure. As far as he was concerned, his job was done.
If Rachel had been alone, with no one to agitate for her care, there’s no telling how long she might have waited.
It was almost another hour before we got the CT results. But when they came, they changed everything.
“She has a large mass in her abdomen,” the female doctor said. “We don’t know what it is.”
That’s when we lost it. Not just because our minds filled then with words liketumor and cancer and malignant. Not just because Rachel had gone half crazy with the waiting and the pain. It was because we’d asked to wait our turn all through the day—longer than a standard office shift—only to find out we’d been an emergency all along.
Suddenly, the world responded with the urgency we wanted. I helped a nurse push Rachel’s cot down a long hallway, and I ran beside her in a mad dash to make the ultrasound lab before it closed. It seemed impossible, but we were told that if we didn’t catch the tech before he left, Rachel’s care would have to be delayed until morning.
“Whatever happens,” Rachel told me while the tech prepared the machine, “don’t let me stay here through the night. I won’t make it. I don’t care what they tell you—I know I won’t.”
Soon, the tech was peering inside Rachel through a gray screen. I couldn’t see what he saw, so I watched his face. His features rearranged into a disbelieving grimace.
By then, Rachel and I were grasping at straws. We thought: cancer. We thought: hysterectomy. Lying there in the dim light, Rachel almost seemed relieved.
“I can live without my uterus,” she said, with a soft, weak smile. “They can take it out, and I’ll get by.”
She’d make the tradeoff gladly, if it meant the pain would stop.
After the ultrasound, we led the gurney—slowly, this time—down the long hall to the ER, which by then was completely crammed with beds. Trying to find a spot for Rachel’s cot was like navigating rush-hour traffic.
Then came more bad news. At 8 p.m., they had to clear the floor for rounds. Anyone who was not a nurse, or lying in a bed, had to leave the premises until visiting hours began again at 9.
When they let me back in an hour later, I found Rachel alone in a side room of the ER. So much had happened. Another doctor had told her the mass was her ovary, she said. She had something called ovarian torsion—the fallopian-tube twists, cutting off blood. There was no saving it. They’d have to take it out.
Rachel seemed confident and ready.
“He’s a good doctor,” she said. “He couldn’t believe that they left me here all day. He knows how much it hurts.”
When I met the surgery team, I saw Rachel was right. Talking with them, the words we’d used all day—excruciating, emergency, eleven—registered with real and urgent meaning. They wanted to help.
By 10:30, everything was ready. Rachel and I said goodbye outside the surgery room, 14 and a half hours from when her pain had started.
* * *
Rachel’s physical scars are healing, and she can go on the long runs she loves, but she’s still grappling with the psychic toll—what she calls “the trauma of not being seen.” She has nightmares, some nights. I wake her up when her limbs start twitching.
Sometimes we inspect the scars on her body together, looking at the way the pink, raised skin starts blending into ordinary flesh. Maybe one day, they’ll become invisible. Maybe they never will.
I’m angry and sad and so bloody relieved she’s even ALIVE. I was preparing myself for him to say they faffed around all day and killed my wife. Because they don’t take women seriously. Women endure the pain of childbirth. We know what real pain is. We know when something is WRONG!
The accuracy of this is so intense and so scary… I feel like I’m a weird position, as a transman with SO many medical issues my whole life, to have been able to see it from both perspectives and here’s something I realized reading this…
IT CHANGED.
I hadn’t thought about it until I read this and instantly found myself looking at all my ER experiences (and there have been more than I’d like to admit).
As a “woman” I spent a great deal of time in the waiting room, clutching my sides or writing in chairs. I was told for over a year (four emergency room visits and countless primary appointments) that I had kidney stones, only to later be rushed into emergency spinal surgery to prevent paralysis for something that could have been corrected with simple physical therapy. I was threatened with not receiving pain medication if I didn’t calm down and/or accept the (incorrect) diagnosis. My desperation in these places was so great, and so difficult, that my depressed mind, with this as a catalyst I sometimes thought death might be preferable than going to the ER and I had to physically forced to seek help.
After growing more firm in my visual representation of a man, I’ve been to the ER three times and my primary countless. I can tell you right now several things: the staff was nicer, more sympathetic, and actually listened to me. I went to the worst hospital in my current area just two months ago and people said they were astonished that I had decent help… No, correction, women told me they were astonished I got helped as “fast” as I did (two-three hours in the waiting room). Doctors at all of these ER visits talked to me about what I might have, what they thought, what I thought….
I’ve received better medical help in the three years I’ve visually stood as a man than in more than twenty-five years appearing as a woman.
Our medical system was already shit. It was back then. It is now. That is no excuse for women to be treated this way. There is absolutely no reason a doctor should ever, ever dismiss a patients concerns. The truth of it is that we are in our bodies, all people regardless of any visual traits, and we know when they’re acting up. This is not okay.
And I will end this rant here to keep from diving into more details about our ludicrous medical system.
People who know me IRL know what I went through with this. The short version:
On Tuesday, April 19, 2011, I awoke at 4am to intense nausea. I vomited for about 2 hours until literally there was nothing left to come out of my system. I spent the rest of the day in bed, unable to move, until my roommate came home in the evening. I could barely croak out a call to her so I could get some water. She brought me water and a thermometer. My temperature was almost 104. She dragged, and I mean literally dragged me out of bed and to the hospital where I was put on fluids, lectured for not drinking water after throwing up that much, and told I had the flu. My Roomie and a friend took turns the next day making sure I was drinking water and taking tylenol. That evening, my fever wasn’t any lower. They took me to the hospital again with strict instructions from my mother to pester the staff until I had adequate treatment. The only reason I was listened to this time was a combination of Roomie glowering at the nurses and my complaints that my neck hurt and I couldn’t move it, forcing the doctors to test for meningitis. On Thursday around 2am, they admitted me to the ICU and put me on antibiotics because my organs were near failure. It wasn’t until Saturday when I was given a diagnosis by a gynecologist I requested because I thought I had a yeast infection. The illness that nearly killed me was toxic shock syndrome. But the people who almost killed me were the doctors and nurses who told me I was overreacting to a minor illness. TSS starts to kill you within 10 hours and is completely fatal if untreated for 72 hours. I wasn’t put on antibiotics until over 60 hours in to when they think the infection started.
P.s. the Roomie who saved my life guessed on the way to the hospital the first time that it was TSS.
So you want to make an OC?: A Masterpost of Ways to Create, Develop, and Make Good OCs!
i made this masterpost in hopes that it helps you in making your own OCs ah;; it can also apply to developing RP characters i suppose! if you’d like to add more resources then go for it sugar pea (´ヮ`)!
How to Write Better OCs:
basic tips on how to make your oc even better
tragic backstory? learn how to write one/make yours great
writing specific characters
a wordier, great guide on how to develop your character
kick out those vague descriptions and make them AWESOME
Character Development:
how to actually make an OC
Q&A (to develop characters)
more Q&As
giving your character a backstory
how to write an attractive character
Diversity
adding more racial diversity
avoiding tokenism, AKA, how to add diversity to your cast not just because you “need” it
writing sexuality and gender expression (doesnt include non binary, if you have a good ref to that, please add on!)
masterpost on writing more diversity into your story
cultures of the world
guides to drawing different ethnicities (not just a great art reference, but also really helpful in appearance descriptions!)
Mary Sue/Gary Stu
Test to see if your character is a Sue
Explains subdivisions of Sues/Stus
Powerful Characters Don’t Have to Be Sues
Villains
villain generator
need an evil sounding name for your evil character? bam
villain archetypes
what’s your villain’s motive for being a villain?
Relationships
character perceptions (What your character thinks of themselves and what others think of them)
how to write strong relationships between two characters
8 ways to write better characters and develop their relationships with others
OCxLove Interest Handbook
develop your couple with good ol’ Q&A!
how to write realistic relationships
how to write relatives for your characters (this is more OC related to a canon character, but will help in writing family members in general)
ARCHETYPES
12 common archetypes
8 archetypes for male/female characters
female archetypes (goes pretty indepth from two main categories)
a list of archetypes
NAMES
how to name your character
random name generator
most common surnames
surnames by ethnicity
APPEARANCE
tips for better design
basic appearance generator
pinterest board for character design (includes NSFW and images of skeletons/exposed muscle (?) so tread carefully!)
clothing ref masterpost
DETAILS
give your character better powers
a list of professions
proactive vs reactive characters
positive and negative traits
interest generator
skills generator
motivation generator
123 ideas for character flaws
list of phobias
again, this is to help inspire you or help establish your OCs! i hope you get a lot of info and help from this ahh ( ´ ▽ ` )ﾉ
