I don’t think you guys understand how bad I want the Vanessa and Michael dynamic in the movie to be a sibling dynamic. Properly, I mean. They’re so different from each other, in action and motivation, but I think there is more than that. I need them to have grown up together and to look at each other say “do you remember how it was when we were little?” I need them both to know, in their own way, that their father is the reason the other is how they are, and not blame their sibling for it. I need them to care about each other, to repeatedly try and fail to get the other to “see reason,” because they love each other and cannot stand being enemies anymore (though they’re both too stubborn to admit it. They are their father’s children, after all.)
And I think that if Vanessa is taking the place of Elizabeth, which I think she should, then I think she should kill Michael. Just like, though under different circumstances, Elizabeth kills her brother in the games. But the thing is, I don’t want it to be a moment of triumph for Vanessa, I want it to be a failure. I want her to kill him in a moment of desperation but only grow more desperate when she realizes that he is dead. I want her to tell herself that she should have done more to save him, should never have even thought about hurting him. I want her to have blood on her hands and immediately realize that Michael was right and she really is just like their father. I want her to grieve and tell herself repeatedly that she has no right to do so, if she didn’t want him to die then she shouldn’t have done what she did. I need Vanessa to kill Michael, and never forgive herself for it.
take it from a woman of my age, there is nothing love can’t change. even where the bricks are stacked, love is blooming through the cracks. even when the light is gone, love is reaching for the sun. it was love that spun the world when i was a young girl
This was my entry for the finals of Now Voice This 4! The prompt was “classic!”
I dumped a hell of a lot of time into this one, but it didn’t end up winning. The winner was actually a friend of mine, though, so hey, silver linings.
Don't feel like you gotta read this, I know I don't have any long term OC fans who have kept track of what I'm doing with my guys. It's more just stuff that's been rattling in my head and I feel like would be nice to jot down so people who do decide to trawl through my old art tags can see why my characters have changed in the ways they have.
I've been making characters since I was 11, which as of this post, means that some of my earliest characters are 13 years old. I still even have some of them. This blog has stuff dating back to when I was 13 (I joined tumblr a week or so after my birthday on a now deleted blog, before that I was on deviantArt and roleplaying forums almost exclusively)
I was exposed to the idea of self-inserts and mary sues (and that they were bad and nobody liked them) extremely early on, so I almost immediately swung in the opposite direction, people pleaser that I was. This first generation of characters would set up three types that I would end up remaking over and over with different coats of paint.
Prickly girls
Just so many prickly tsundere girls. Often short. Often bullies to the boys they liked. They were girlbosses who could win any fight but they also were bullied by the normies for being so weird and being outsiders. Pretty but still only liked by the one nervous guy they had chosen. The archetypal anti-sue, just a gaggle of Ebonys.
2. Tragic girls
These girls were usually innocent and silly and fun, but also haunted and sad. They were traumatized in very childishly "and then their whole family died in front of them :,,( " ways. They were never allowed to address the trauma, and everyone around them always had to baby them. Yeah, I was making those types LOL. Nooo I refuse to make progress on my healing bc then I won't have any character left!!!
3. Soft boys
I was still pretty married to the idea that I had to like boys, so the boys I made were all ones I thought I would like. This led to just a fleet of androgynous boys who wept and blushed often. I also rolled with a crowd of older tween girls who were deep in the Yaoi haze, and while I found they way they talked about the couples uncomfortable and objectionable even then, I still did my share in pumping out generic ukes to go with their bog standard semes.
I made characters in these three frameworks for like, a few years. Even after the main forum I had camped on died and I started making characters with school friends. I wasn't really pushed to change anything until a while into using tumblr.
I don't know if anyone else remembers this period of time, I had to have been like 14-15, but there was this attitude shift all the sudden that boiled down to how if you didn't have a diverse set of characters, you were a bad person.
Now I'm going to say immediately that I do think its good to have a diverse set of OCs! It's good to learn about people from other cultures and backgrounds and to put yourself in their shoes! It's also good to learn about all the ways humans can look and how charming and beautiful and different we can be!
The issue with the way this was pushed way back in pre-dashcon tumblr was that it wasn't about thoughtful diversity and exploring others lived experiences. It was about making sure you looked like you weren't racist to the other 14 year old white girls who still hadn't unpacked what watching South Park had done to their brains and were actively sending death threats to Lucy Liu for being on a Sherlock Holmes show that wasn't the one with the white men who might kiss any day now guys. When you see people mocking the Ultimate SJW Tumblr Character (you know what I'm talking about, the just caricature level mocking of disabled queer people) it's from this era of posts.
I saw this and I saw people dumping buckets of anon hate and bullying on just anyone who caught the mobs fancy and I very ungracefully slapped new ethnicities on a chunk of my characters. And it took me an embarrassingly long time to look at some of the choices I made and to go "Yikes!" Almost no one was an offensive stereotype or anything, but I definitely had picked characters that lined up with tropes without realizing it. (Important note, I did have some characters that were disrespectful to Roma culture, and an atrocious belly dancer character. I've completely gotten rid of them and I do recognize now how they were disrespectful and played into racist stereotypes.)
And this is still something I'm working on monitoring and fixing in my characters. I'm not gonna lie and say I've become the ultimate anti-racist. I'm white, I've only lived in majority white areas, specifically Oregon which has an extensively anti-black history as well as a lot of issues with orientalism, and I grew up on early 2000s media and all the baggage that came with that.
Speaking of 2000s baggage and weird yaoi culture. I am sorry mlm for the atrocities of boys I have made. It was that classic case of "I'm supposed to like boys so I'm going to make boys who are basically girls and then pair them with each other so I never actually have to deal with the anxiety of them actually being attracted to me." I only had like two characters I would say felt like they could genuinely be gay men. It was only after I was like a year deep into accepting that I was genuinely a lesbian that I looked at my gaggle of boys and went "oh shit, these are all lesbians, these are lesbian dynamics." Which like, yes I don't feel great that I used mlm pairs for my own character development. I know it's not uncommon, especially if a lot of your exposure to the idea of being queer was through tumblr, but it's still not great.
All this to say: I love my characters and I want to be more thoughtful with them. Most of my characters are 5+ years old and they all just need an overhaul. I'm taking most of them back to their prompts and rebuilding from there, I'm also turning a majority of them into lesbians. I want to explore all the fun wlw dynamics I never got to play with growing up. And girls are just more fun to design for me! Sorry!
As I put out new refs you may notice some characters look varying levels of different, some have been replaced with new characters taking over their roles, and some are gone completely. You are always welcome to reach out to ask me about any choices I've made and any concerns you have about the things I've made, past or present. And if you take anything from this it's that you should always be vigilant about how unconscious biases can slip into your creative works.
Thanks for getting to the end of this long ass post, it's one I've been thinking about for a while but had to take some time to put to paper. It's important to me to keep up my old art posts to see my growth as an artist and a person, but I also don't want to act like I still agree with every character choice I've made in the last 13 years.
I hope you can support me as I continue to grow as a person!
