Dear Hollywood

I know you all LOVE to have hot women who can whoop ass in your movies. Many men have the fantasy of “taming” a female “beast” of a woman. I’m not going to talk about THAT stuff here.

But can I just suggest that if you have such a woman in your movies, she actually weigh MORE than 110 lbs. AND have at least SOME muscle development? I’m getting tired of seeing women with who are supposed to be able to deftly weild weapons that are twice as thick as their spindly arms. And I cannot get behind a chick that can supposedly leathaly shoot an arrow from a bow whose draw weight is higher than her total body weight. Unless those weapons were made by Nerf, I ain’t feelin’ it.

Yes, I understand while said men like the fantasy of seeing women fight, they don’t want to see manly-looking women doing it. I get that most het men don’t like the female bodybuilder look. I also understand that getting you all to accept all body types and sizes as normal and acceptable is like you all finally treating Black women as if we were really human and, well, WOMEN, so let me give you a couple of examples of “doing it right” that you’ve actually did a pretty good job on in the past. One was Xena: Warrior Princess. Both Xena AND Gabrielle looked like HEALTHY women who had actually gone through puberty and gotten ALL their female hormones. They also looked sexy. And I’m not talking “PC” “everyone is beautiful in their own way” sexy. I’m talking random men (and a few women of any orientation) going, “I’d hit that soooooooooooooooo hard and sooooooooooooooooo many times.” And both women actually LOOKED like they could fight with the weapons they weilded.

The second example is Linda Hamilton in the second Terminator movie. She was toned as you’d think someone would be who had been living with guerrillas and learning their trade for the 10 or so years she had John Connor with her. She looked like someone who could hold her own in a firefight, which she did in that movie and she didn’t have those big, bulging, “icky” man-muscles that folks don’t want to see in their hawt fightin’ chicks.

So next time you want to cast the latest size 00 ingenue to weild a 40 lb trident like it was a baton, you may want to send ol’ girl to the gym and make her take some MetRX or something so she won’t look like a blade of grass next to her weapon.

Juss sayin’.

The Original Character Debate in Fanfiction

I seriously do not see what the whole beef is. I know it’s because most ficcers who write OCs write shitty ones that turn into Mary Sues, and a lot of them are glamorized author insertions. That’s called BAD WRITING and it can happen in original fic too (Jane Auel, I’m lookin’ dead at YOU!). Usually, when the bad writing happens, there’s a lot of OOC going on all around. Suddenly, uber-competent canon characters are blubbering idiots while Mary saves the day and their asses. The babe magnets in canon suddenly change their whoring ways and become utterly devoted and faithful to Mary. Basically all sorts of bullshiggity goes on.

But mostly it comes from not thinking of characters as PEOPLE and not just puppets to push around on a paper or computer screen. An individual will do certain things and not do others or do things a certain way and not another way because of that individual’s makeup. An individual with a very strong code of ethics will find it very hard to violate them. Someone with loose morals will probably just go for expediency and damn the means. If you’re going to have them do otherwise, then you’ve got to set it up in the story to show WHY they’d act OOC. You can’t have a character be a mewling coward the whole story and then suddenly whoop a squadron of space troopers without showing me the transition from personality A to B.

TV Trope #4873

I’m watching a DVD of the defunct cable show, Deadwood. Part of the storyline involves an uber-racist White man (as if MOST White men weren’t like that in America in 1877), who is also poor, White trash and an alcoholic, just so we make sure that only THOSE types of WP are racist. Said White man had almost tarred and featured and lynched a Black man (played by Franklyn Ajaye) visiting a relation/friend of his in the camp, a Black man named Hostetler who owns the local livery stable.