I Can’t Make A Post Without Offending Somebody

I can’t make a post without offending somebody

First I made a post on my RWBY blog about how fan fiction usually isn’t as good as the canon and I had a 15 year old Asian (wouldn’t specify where they were from, only that they’re Asian) girl attack me for it. And now I had somebody get mad because I compared a quote from Canaan that centers around not using hatred as a weapon to fight their battles.

I could literally say “I like ham sandwiches” and somebody would get offended now a days.

So lets get all the offensive material out of the game right before Christmas during the worst year of the last decade. Attack me in the reblogs if you want but remember that this is more of a confession post.

1. So here’s the least disagreeable opinion I have. Scientology is a hoax and L.Ron Hubbard just wanted to take your money. The religion is based off money and how dedicated you can be to it, unless you’re really rich, then you won’t be mistreated nearly as much as if you were poor. I

I know that a lot of other people out there agree with me on this one but Scientologists do exist and for the most part they’re very aggressive.

2. I don’t think that adding in a homosexual character to your story is necessarily progressive in and of itself.

Okay let me explain this using my own writing. Almara.

I have written homosexual characters into the series but the fact is that I wrote them as characters before I decided what their sexuality would be. Over seven years I created my characters and ended up having them go through many different experiences. Kali (A thin metis woman with black dreadlocks who’s capable of fighting with an assortment of different weapons) and Aria (A tall, broad built, and busty black woman with shoulder length black hair and green eyes. She’s more capable of using healing magic to support her friends, but that plays more into her narrative for the first act as she’s Kali’s emotional support) only became a couple after I worked on it for a while and realized that they are the best for each other I had them end up together quite early.

My main character, Margaret, was going to be married to a man but I ended up having her marry Lilith after I wrote a character named Lilith for a while I realized that they were foils for each other and would be able to both feed off of each other.

I’ve since reworked that male character into Ty (a black man who has mastered offensive magic) who will gain a relationship with Penelope (a tall and slender white woman who can turn into a gaint spider).

My point is that you should write a character relationship naturally, regardless of whether or not it’s homosexual while writing lead characters that think progressively. If they end up being in a homosexual or heterosexual relationship it just sort of happens. I personally don’t think that you should set out with a character’s sexuality in mind while writing them, instead leading your character evolve into their sexual while exploring who they are.

Using other examples is that people will often use homosexual arguments to argue that something is better. Like how various people have been saying that Miles Luna is not allowed to criticize “Legend of Korra” because his own writing (RWBY) isn’t nearly as good and it has homosexual representation.

I mean I agree that Legend of Korra is much better than RWBY, hell I argue that it’s much, much better than The Last Airbender as well. But having homosexual characters doesn’t make something better by default from a narrative stand point.

All that said, I do like it when people have homosexual characters in their writing or when a yaoi or yuri manga or anime is written well enough that I can understand the people getting into a relationship. I’ve been hearing the term Yuri on Ice coming up a lot recently in discussions and if you read this far, leave a note explaining why it’s good, I haven’t seen anything for it yet but I am looking for an anime to watch in my free time, I just don’t know whether or not it’s worth my time or if it’s just fan service-y.

3. This one isn’t as contraversial as the last one, in fact I think it’s a lot more progressive in a way of thinking. I think that everything should have at least one strong female character in it if not more. You don’t need to have a female lead in your story but I do feel like you should have a strong female character in there who’s not there as some sort of end goal for the main character, if the main character and the strong female end up together it’s not wrong but that shouldn’t be the end goal of the franchise and she should never become a damsel for him to save. A good story can usually be ruined for me if a previously strong female character is downgraded to a damsel in distress. Like how Sword Art Online was actually decent for the first half a season before the innate sexism of the franchise kind of set in.

This idea can be subverted with examples such as Zelda from “Twilight Princess” where the end goal of the game is saving Hyrule and defeating Ganon. In this one she actually gives up her freedom and in return Ganon doesn’t hurt her people. She’s also basically a Queen in this one, having absolute power over Hyrule. But for the most part it takes a lot of narrative skill to be able to pull this sort of thing off and shows that the writers do, in fact, know their characters.

The only reason this is on here is because there are a lot of people who seem to think that by voicing my opinion this matter that I’m actually trying to censor their own writing or the writing in their favorite video game, movie, or show.

4. This was mentioned above but I do think that most fan fiction is worse than it’s source material. Especially when the source material isn’t currently finished.

Much like anything else that gets popular RWBY has a lot of really bad relationship fan fiction. These are often written specifically with a certain ship in mind but they don’t actually have a story that they want to tell with said ship. As I said earlier, you need to have the characters perfectly in your mind when writing for them, if you can’t think of a legitimate situation where the characters could end up in a relationship and continue to write off that then you shouldn’t be writing the story your writing.

Other fan fiction includes having things written with depressing overtones to the fan fiction in attempt to write characters in a depressed state without, again, having a story in mind.

A premise is only a starting point and not a finished product and the first draft is not the final draft you’ll ever write for that story.

And this is only going from a narrative stand point. I’m not taking grammar into consideration because English isn’t everybody’s first language. In fact I care a whole lot more about how well you can tell your story.

5. Big breasts on a female character are not sexist. I mean I shouldn’t have to say that having large breasts isn’t sexist, though generally the larger your breasts are the harder it is on your back in the long run, much like how having a large tummy is hard on your back if you’re either a man or a woman as breasts are a build up of fat.

That said there is a sexist way to draw female characters…

This series (Highschool of the Dead):

is quite a bit more sexist. Every female character in this series is curvaceous and constantly have to be saved by the male characters, the show is not well written and the only aspect this show has is to show off how well they can show off the female body.

This series (Deadman Wonderland):

Is not sexist. The character in the image, Makina, is both in a position of power and willing to go against her superiors to make sure that her sense of justice wins out in the end, which it does. She’s both cold and compassionate, both harsh and gentle. She’s a well written character who had a character in mind before they designed how curvaceous she is. Her design even creates this idea of being a rose with thorns.

Even when she becomes crippled later in the series (which she ends up working to get over) she doesn’t stop fighting from the side lines using her tactical intelligence to aide the people who can still physically fight. She can have horrible things happen to her (like ever character in Deadman Wonderland) but instead of crawling into her corner and crying she continues to do her best to make herself useful to her cause.

This is a good example of a character who is meant to be aesthetically pleasing.

I could also bring up Shiro from Deadman Wonderland.

Another really good example of this done well is the series One Piece, as much as I’m not huge on the franchise all of it’s female characters have decently developed personalities even though they all have decently large breasts.

6. Fan service is not sexist if done using a small guide. This goes for fan service series centering around male characters as well.

Step 1: Don’t do it all the time.

You can do it frequently but no every scene.

Bringing Highschool of the Dead again, well, this series is just terrible for this sort of thing. Big bouncing breasts everywhere like they aren’t wearing support, which they obviously aren’t, this series would actually put it’s female characters through physical pain to make them look attractive rather than just giving them appealing designs that don’t revolve around how large their breasts are. This series is just wrong on so many levels.

Countering this I can bring in another series called Negima. We actually get frequent fan service in this manga series but it’s not every other panel. Akamatsu went from creating love Hina to creating a series where there are 32 different female characters, each of which get at least a chapter dedicated to them as well as serving as supporting characters throughout the entire series. It allows us to get to know each of them and makes each of them memorable for more than just what they look like or through how overly sexualized they are.

Step 2: Don’t make the male lead overly perverted

Again with this you can write a main character as a bit of a pervert, but you shouldn’t make them overly perverted to the point of being sociopathic.

A bad example here is not Highschool of the Dead, thank god, as that series just had a bland cardboard cutout of a male lead. This time I’m going to talk about a lesser known series called “He is My Master” (which I watched 4 years ago, be and a friend do an anime trade off thing, I gave him Canaan and he gave me this).

He is My Master revolves around a young woman (18) getting a job as a maid in a teenage boys (16) house. I assume you can see where this is going. The male lead is extremely perverted and is only hiring a made so that he can spy on her while she bathes in his in mansion bathe house (it’s explained why he has a mansion in the series) or while she’s sleeping. You should never have a main character actively trying to make fan service happen. Even Love Hina, which I’m not too fond of because it is a male fantasy series, knows that you can’t do this. This is a bad example of writing a perverted character and being this level of a pervert is not good.

Again Negima portrays a character who isn’t at all perverted but ends up getting people into fan service-y situations. If he blows a character’s clothes off it’s because he’s still an inexperienced magi and he had mispronounced a couple of words turning a memory erasing spell into a fabric destroying spell. He makes Asuna’s breasts bigger because the girls are trying to argue over who gets to take care of Negi and using breasts as a reason that they would be a better mother to him (it’s a folk belief in Japan that breasts represent motherhood as breasts do actually grow during pregnancy, to these girls larger breasts mean that he would be a better mother to him, he’s 9, they’re between 14 and 15), this backfires. Even the perverted character in the series, who’s a supporting character, is constantly being punished for being a pervert and he never outright puts the girls into perverted situations.

7. Writing female villians is not sexists if you write your villains like humans.

Lust from Full Metal Alchemist isn’t sexist as she has a character aside from being a seductress.

Shiro from Deadman Wonderland becomes a villain after having been on the side of the protagonist for most of the series because she’s tired of pretending to be happy.

Kuvira from Legend of Korra is a military leader who shows that she’s willing to do what ever she needs to to bring law to the world but shows a mass amount of compassion throughout the series.

Lapis Lazuli, Peridot, Jasper and Bismuth in Steven Universe are all portrayed as individual beings with their own mental turmoil.

The villain to the first arc of my writing who’s grown up in a racist atmosphere but learns a lot more about compassion nearing the end of her life while still having sociopathic tendencies.

You have to write them as characters instead of putting them there as just villains. As much as I do enjoy a force of nature villain from time to time they aren’t the best villains over all, especially if they don’t function to counter the main character in any way.

In Conclusion:

I hope you guys can understand these opinions, though I am willing to take the hate I might get for stating them. I’ll try and get my “Progressive Fiction Characters” post for Effie done for tomorrow.