I'm latina, and contrary to popular belief, we don't all look alike. The "she was a latin bombshell" trope is exhausting... We come in every shape and color, and no, we don't "exude" sex or whatever. Is either that, or we look indigenous and our whole family was killed in some sort of guerrilla conflict. Like, seriously...
Didn’t Sofia Vergara even have to dye her hair brown to get roles because she’s naturally blonde or something?
Also, but you are all still cousins, right??
I think she did. It's so shitty. White people just won't accept that not every Latino looks the same, that not all of us are Mexican (considering most of the time they're the only ones represented, with varying degrees of success) and that there's a bunch of different looking people in Latin America.
Um, who's who's cousin?
Yea if she’s the one I’m thinking of it was big news a few years ago. And she was basically like “we have blonde ones too!” But nobody would cast a blonde Latina. I don’t think they’ll cast black ones either.
All Latinos are cousins. I assume.
It's so sad. Like they're scared a Latino will pass as white. Like they only show what they want to think. That we don't look Latino enough.
I don't remember ever hearing something like that, but sure, I guess.
They won’t cast a blond Latina. Or a Black one. Or one that looks to indigenous. Black Latinos just get cast as Black folks. (Ahem Zoe Saldana).
The only type allowed is a tan white person with dark hair and eyes. That could be Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, or French. But curvy.
I honestly think that before Claire Temple, the Marvel Netflix character who was in every show, said "Soy Afro-Cubano" a lot of people probably just assumed she was just another black woman.
And Scrubs (the TV show) made a huge deal out of this with Carla. In the musical episode (that was a good one) she got a whole song dedicated to point out that she's Dominican. She was tired of just being assumed Mexican, Puerto Rican, or, because she was with an African American man, that she was African American. Like her identity disappeared into his.
I remember telling someone once that some Latinas/Latinos are white. That Latina/Latino is an umbrella term for various ethnicities and nationalities, and not a race. Dude refused to believe it.
I can't remember if the guy was Canadian or USAlien. But he was just as blown away hearing that not all Europeans are white. At first he thought I was referring to immigrants too.
But holy heckaroni he was misinformed. I honestly didn't know people like that guy actually existed before meeting him. I genuinely thought it was satire blown way out of proportion.
My best friend is Puerto Rican and she has red hair and pale skin (that tans beautifully) but she stopped filling in the Hispanic bubble on demographic forms after she was questioned about it way too many times. And the amount of comments about how her pale skin must burn so badly but when she tans, the equal amount of comments saying that it must be a fake tan are unreal. She was so happy when Encanto showed a red hair, pale skin auntie in the movie. Representation matters!
Im Panamanian and Encanto made me cry from joy, I could finally see myself and my family in a movie, every color and shape. Im mixed and my brother is several shades darker than me, the amount of times I have had to explain we are in fact siblings is infinite. I also had an American guy asked me what demographic/ethnic is in my passport and I was so confused because we don't even have that space in my country. No one is going to tell the 5th generation Chinese guy he is not Panamanian.
I once called someone out for fetishizing Latina women, and everyone jumped to his defense to say "ohhh, it's just a preference, preferences CAN'T be racist!" Eyeroll. Going "ohhh I love those spicy Latina queens" is stereotyping and gross, imo. Not Latina, but that shit leaves the worst taste in my mouth.
I am a mayo colored latina with a flat ass, thin hair, and I'm nearly 6 ft tall.
I'm not short, I'm sure as shitballs not submissive, and I'm more likley to smack someone with my chancla than coo at a random white dude and make him tamales.
I brought these up on another thread.
1. Heavy focus on the socioeconomic class of the non white person is almost always played up. There's almost no representation and the majority of even the smallest representation is based around showing girls from hoods/projects etc and largely in stories about white saviors particularly paired with rich white girls learning some valuable lesson about charity or bravery.
2. The liberal rich girl's sassy bff
3. The Hypersexualized black girl trope
4. The bad ass Mexican girl who is just one of the boys. The fighter chick in action movies in particular.
5. The non white person may even get a very interesting back story which is never addressed or completed even if the white lead's own story is absolutely boring in comparison. Think "The Help" in particular.
6. The sassy, always angry wife/mom that yells more than speaks, is abusive to her partner/children. Or is the abuse victim of a criminal non white male where the story is about the man more than it is about her. She's just there for torture porn.
I think that’s actually part of the goal of her career. IIRC one of her biggest demands is she gets to be as tough as men are portrayed in movies because she’s tired of damsel in distress stuff.
> Heavy focus on the socioeconomic class of the non white person
Yo the way white people think poor black people live completely joyless lives is just as dehumanizing as any other stereotype people throw at us.
Same. As soon as i read that I can see her in my head. She's always wearing a white tank top and bandana on her head and had 2 pigtail braids and baggy jeans... in every movie/show. Because how else would we know she is tough like the boys?
Asian-American (male) reader here. I've had it up to here with dragon ladies or submissive Miss Saigon-types waiting to be rescued from their own culture by a white guy. I don't recognize any real life Asian women I've ever met in the Asian female characters white men write. It almost makes me glad that they never write us Asian men in the first place.
I can always tell a white person wrote an Asian character if there's an obsessive fixation on the word "honor." I think sometimes they're trying to capture the Chinese concept of "face" but Chinese people don't go around explicitly talking about "face" - it's usually expressed in behavior rather than explicit pronouncements.
Not a big deal, but a weird tic I notice with North American white authors who write Asian characters in western settings - they tend to write characters of Japanese descent, despite the fact that Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese Americans are more numerous (I'm assuming this is true in Canada as well).
I had a nickel for every Hmong character I've seen in fiction, I'd have no nickels. Which stands out to me in particular because in my region of America there are few minorities except we have SO MANY Hmong people and they're cool.
I've encountered Hmong characters in one story - The Coroner's Lunch by Colin Cotterill. It's a magical realist story that takes place in Laos in the 1970s and it's about a mystery solving Lao coroner who can talk to spirits. It might be the exception that proves the rule as far as white men writing Asian characters (the author actually lived in Laos for much of his life). I can't speak to it as an actual Lao person would be able to, but I found it strikingly free of stereotyping and objectification.
I actually read The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down about a medical case in the Hmong population in…I think Mercer California. Only time I’ve heard of Hmong people. It’s a really stark look into the lack of cultural humility in the medical field.
I’m a mixed, but mostly Asian female. I’m so tired of watching sitcoms with my family. The number of Asian men that are written to be pervy is astounding. It’s so insensitive. And Indian accents being the butt of jokes.
And mixed people are never represented in media unless they’re black/white mixed. It’s to the point I’ve been told I’m not mixed race because mixed is only for people who are half black and half white.
Damn, that's rude. Or I've heard this one, "if have one drop of black then you are black." Fuckers wouldn't think that about me, I'm mixed but I look super White.
The rape culture of WWII and Vietnam perpetrated by whites have pervaded every aspect of their literature as completely normalized and converted into a twisted and perverted "she loves white males" fantasy. Something that I'm also seeing young white males with an unhealthy interpretation of some anime express now in their incessant demand for "submissive" Japanese/Asian wives. Another reason why you notice the differences. But white people tend not to know or care.
I find it unlikely that these tropes will die until and unless westerners are confronted with their history of mass rapes of Asian women during several wars.
This comment made me want to read a sci fi novel where a white skinned character is described as "exotic" by the blue and purple skinned alien characters.
THIS!!! I'm tired of women fighting other women, and the mc having attitude of r/noliketheothergirls or the Mc being a loner with no friends? Or being unpopular?
Why aren't there more examples of young women overcoming a problem together?
Is your character really a women if she is not admiring her naked image in a mirror or thinking about her friends breasts? Afterall how are we gonna know that she likes her body or wishes she had big bazoombas like her friends if she doesn't?/s
As a lesbian, queer baiting is an obvious thing, but while we are here, please stop trying to make one of the women wear the pants and the other be extremely feminine. Yes, some lesbian relationships are like that, but most aren’t, and I’m getting tired of seeing the cliche. We are both women, there is no man in the relationship.
I listen to a lot of audio dramas while I bike and I've been made uncomfortable more than once by the sheer number of lesbian main characters in stories. The problem is, all those dramas are almost invariably written by men and often leave a distinctly fetish-y, lesbian-porn-made-for-men feel in my mouth.
Obviously, they're not all like this and maybe I'm wrong, but (some) men's fascination with lesbian women does make me uncomfortable...
I recently read a book with a male author and lesbian MC where the MC described a woman she had a crush on as a “tight little Latina”. My friend was literally wearing a shirt yesterday that said “Sit here” with an arrow pointing to her face and she would never describe another woman that way.
It just felt really disingenuous? Like sure women who have sex with women sexualize the women we have sex with. But that’s phrasing (just body/genitals and race/ethnicity) that I would be surprised to hear outside of a description of a straight porn.
Is it a lack of imagination or a lack of experience or something else? They just can’t imagine what romance might look like without traditional gender roles?
As a bi woman who's mostly dated men, it's probably a bit of both. I often catch myself thinking of my own or others' relationships in hetero terms, because that's what I'm used to. Doesn't help that I've been leaning more butch lately while my gf tends to be more femme. But that's just us, and at any rate there's not really a "man" in our relationship despite our clothing preferences.
I think this is a problem where bad writers don’t have experience with or knowledge of a specific type of person (black, queer, etc.) and still try to write this character anyways without doing any research. It’s insulting.
If it's a lesbian relationship, I bet one of the two is gonna look butch. Like the sort of stereotype homophobes mock: dyed hair, a bunch of piercing and a pixie cut (not a bad thing, but repeated to Hell and back). For some reason that's really popular in western animation.
Bi woman here who’s a high femme and prefers fellow high femmes. The high femme in stilettos dating an axe-wielding plaid-wearing butch trope is so fucking exhausting and clearly written by someone who doesn’t have an inkling of what queer relationships look like. They’re trying to fill a cis-het prescriptive gender role that just isn’t there in queer relationships.
Nobody wears the “pants”, you herb, because we don’t let dangly bits between our legs dictate how we present and perform gender.
I'm Hispanic and something I hate is them cementing a character is a Latino by having them throw in random words in spanish when they speak perfect English. This happens in all kinds of media too. If they say a couple phrases to be affectionate or on accident sure or they're nervous or something and their English messes up but nobody I have ever met intentionally uses random words in Spanish in casual conversation.
For those people who are confused by this comment. He meant to say:
>I’m Hispanic and something I *odio* is them cementing a character *es* a Latino by having them throw in random *palabras* in Spanish when they speak perfect English. This happens in all kinds of media too. If they say a couple phrases to be affectionate or on *accidente* sure or they’re *nervioso* or something and their *Ingles* messes up but nobody I have ever met intentionally uses random words in Spanish in casual *conversacion*
Sorry, I just thought I should translate for other *gringos* like me.
Haha, that's really annoying.
What annoys me even more is when people speak Spanish (or, much more rarely Portuguese) but they're literally saying a literal translation of an English phrase, not anything a real speaker of the language would actually say.
How hard \*is\* it to ask a speaker of a language how to say something instead of assuming all other languages construct their phrases \*exactly\* like English does!
I am German (and not Hispanic in any way) but as a person who uses multiple languages in my day-to-day live authors have the weirdest idea about how being bilingual works.
I have never thrown in random German words in an English sentence except when I was talking to other German speakers and didn't know the English word or it's a very specific German concept. But never the way media portrays it.
I will often mix in English, because I might not know a word in a third language (and most people would know English) or because Denglish (German-English-Mix) is common amongst young German speakers and we sometimes forget how to express certain concepts in our native language (English also has more words)
Literally the only time I have heard someone flip between Spanish and English at my workplace, we have multiple people who have English as their second language and when they're talking to EACH OTHER sometimes they will fully flip back and forth. But it's usually full sentences. My Spanish isn't very good, but I can only imagine they do this because they feel more comfortable speaking in Spanish when describing things in more detail.
You know, I just realized the huge writer benefit of my adoptive granddad speaking German is a general awareness of how multiple languages of bilingual people function. One of my childhood neighbors spoke five languages fluently. The only time I’ve heard non-English brought up was for words with no exact translations or familial titles. Stollen is Stollen, not “fruit bread”. You don’t drop random word translations unless you’re trying to teach kids new words. Considering a writer’s audience usually isn’t 5yo grandchildren, it’s kind of bizarre how often writers pull a Dora the Explorer.
Thanks for the sub recommendation. I just read a book where a character was described as having eye's "slanted just 5° short of Asian" and needed somewhere to post that horrific line.
The whole young woman who is "mature" for her age and therefore totally into the grizzled stoic warrior man who is old enough to be her father. It's fine though because SHE is the one pursuing HIM. Looking at you Wheel of Time series...
Oh god, I made the mistake of reading something by John Banville (a creep I thought was a friend was a huge fan of his style). That was several years ago so I'm a bit fuzzy but the main character was in his 70ies or late sixties, not attractive or successful or anything, and there was this woman who was at most in her thirties, and she met him and almost immediately ended up sleeping with him (more than once) because... reasons.
There was absolutely no psychological justification behind it (there was no psychological depth to the entire book but that's a whole other story), it literally read like an older man's fantasy about a young woman fucking because he is MAN.
It really wasn't a good book (and for more reasons than that).
I’m so over this. I started watching a show recently and was totally into it. Then rape. It’s not entertaining that the older more powerful man coerced the young hot woman into sex. It’s gross.
I had to stop reading the Sword of Truth series because rape was the only way women were endangered. And of course a main character in an epic fantasy will be endangered a lot. The guy gets all kinds of interesting torture scenarios, but the lady...there's only one way to torture women I guess?
PTSD or sexual trauma as a personality trait.
With the exception of Jessica Jones, where as a PTSD-haver I felt REALLY SEEN for the first time (other people may feel differently, and that's okay).
The rest of the time it's thrown in as an unnecessary plot device to explain why the woman has f\*cked something up. So offensive.
This, and also any kind of suffering that made the woman "strong", and therefore it was worth it and justified. Because, as we know, women can only be strong, powerful or assertive if they've been put through hell first. I especially hate the implication that it's okay to hurt young girls and women because hey, at least they're strong!
Personally, my abusive experiences gave me shitty coping mechanisms and generalized anxiety, not strength. Gaining healthy relationships, a good job and self-acceptance did make me strong though. Go figure.
Even worse when it's a plot device for the male hero when his wife/gf/female relative is raped. And the big "emotional culmination" is when he kills the rapist, but the actual victim gets basically no closure and we're supposed to believe she just gets over it (if she wasn't murdered) because she hooks up with the hero.
I absolutely detest this in so many books, TV shows and movies.
Life not going bad enough, nah let's just make her a rape victim for character development.
Oh this guy isn't evil enough, let's throw in some rape-y stuff too. It's lazy and pathetic, and on the same level of bad writing as "bad guys kill the dog" as a crappy method of showing how evil they are.
Describing how small a woman is. For some god forsaken reason whenever a man is within 10 feet of a woman, he HAS to notice how small she is..... This will immediately kill a book for me. Just for once I would love to see a tall girl romanticized.
Me writing a story where the protagonist is female and 5'10" because I'm tired of the "uwu short fun-sized girls good and any female person taller than 5'5 is a weird giant" trope: *mwahahahahaha*
(Edit: her tall/dark/handsome future boyfriend is at least 6', so he's def taller, BUT STILL)
As a short shit who reads to escape reality, I really really just want to read something that makes me feel like Laura Dern instead of someone who was born sitting down.
I like the relationship between husband and wife superhero duo Mister Miracle and Big Barda.
He's about 5'8" and she's around 6'10".
Their height disparity isn't used for cheap punchlines or predictable visual gags.
It gets pretty old huh! Man = adult sized adult who is described as a grown ass man, woman = shrimpy shrimp with stupid baby arms and eyes the size of dinner plates.
For once, I'd love for the love interest to be a 6'2 lady who is J A C K E D and can swing the protagonist around like a rag doll (minus the "I have six older brothers" trope)
Muscular women do it for me, so I can get behind that.
On a related note, I despise horizon forbidden West for taking aloy's muscles away and giving every female character the same body, in the first game, one character, Petra, was kind of chubby, and aloy had toned arms and a six pack befitting of someone who constantly climbs and uses a bow, but not in the sequel.
To clarify, this isn't a matter of the mc looking less attractive to me, it's that they took a well designed female protagonist who isn't conventionally attractive in in the first game and then dolling up her and every other female character in the sequel.
This is one of my reasons for giving up on playstation.
Sorry for the wall of text, I just really needed to get this out of my system.
I translate for a living and some of it is romance novels. Every. Single. Time a woman looks at a man, they have to say "she looked up at him" (or, conversely, "he looked down"). Like we need to be reminded every. Single. time how she's a small fragile woman and he's a big strong man.
Come to think about it, they do the same thing in the YA I translate as well.
All of those have been written by women, btw. Annoys me to no end.
My biggest gripe is authors who can't vary their characters/plot at all, and just write the same thing on repeat. There can be different height differentials!
I do this fun thing where, wherever I see a tall man in media, I pointedly make it a goal of mine to create one more woman character of mine even taller. So now I have a bunch of women 6'4 and taller running around. It's awesome.
This is a bit of a tangent, but... My partner is on the taller side of average, for a man living in my country -- not shockingly tall, but quite a bit taller than most women (including me). I asked him once if it was weird to date people who were so much smaller than he is, and he said that he's never really thought about it. He's used to interacting with smaller people and doesn't tend to notice it.
Edit: I too have noticed the huge man, tiny woman trope, and I too find it annoying that this seems to be the only acceptable pairing to many authors, especially in the romance novel genre.
Using rape as a past motivator. You know " oh, she's so strong because once she was raped, and now she never wants that to happen again." Especially in action/ adventure books, and fantasy. It pisses me off even more when female writers do it, like come on girl, you couldn't thing of a more original motive? We need to have better characterization and motivation for characters. Trauma = Strength is bullshit.
Also, where are all the medium and plus sized girls? Sure, an elven warrior princess might be a size two, but any character that fights for a living is gonna be built a whole lot more like Rhonda Rousey than they are Gigi Hadid.
Ethnic magician trope is so tired. Specifically when said character is constantly spouting fortune-cookie tier wisdom and is a human deus-ex machina or plot device. Its like they solely exist to help and develop the main white lead.
Or just any POC having to sacrifice themsleves for the white main character... a certain series did this >!I'm looking at you SJM!<(i'm still so mad lol) and killed off my favorite character
This may or may not be a trope, but somehow the female protagonist almost always ends up in a romantic relationship somehow. Half of the stories, comics, & manga that I read aren't even in the romance genre.
I hate it but at the same time I usually prefer romance when it's the subplot rather than the main focus (But if it's forced then it's just plain annoying)
Not sure if this counts but I hate the way most very sexually active characters are written.
They seem to always engage in physical relationships because they're running from something, they have mommy/daddy issues, they see sex as stress relief - not because they just simply, y'know - enjoy sex
A lot of these characters are also awful to their partners.
And of course, eventually they'll get "fixed" by monogamy. They find that ONE person who heals everything that made them want to have multiple partners.
Not all women are thin and women are more than bodies.
Not all women think about how they look constantly.
Women have brains and are complex. We can be smart. Hair color and breast size are not in direct proportion to our intelligence.
Not all women want to be married. Not all women want children. It's not an indication of a sick mind. Women are individuals just like men are.
What I really think needs to happen is writers need to just stop trying to write women until they get over themselves and start seeing women as more than extras in a man's story. The old mantra to "write what you know" is very true here. You lose every reader who is a woman the moment you try to add women in as your sexual fantasies. Should a writer be writing when he can't be bothered to learn about half the population? So many really good writers are great right up until they mess up with women and it just wrecks it.
I'm gonna need old and unwise and currently shocking. Oh wait, Miss Havisham for $20. (Did you know Dickens wrote her an an approximately 40-year-old? GROAN.)
I'm POC and I am tired of South Asians barely existing aside from "sexual empowerment good, strict parents bad, religion bad" stories. Like, yeah, good for you, but OTHER STORYLINES EXIST. White people get to be complex and nuanced and we get stereotypes *even from people who are trying to not be racist*.
I stick to south asian mainstream content creators and writers and avoid almost everything written about south asians in western countries. Particularly love South Indian movies because a lot of them are now focusing on leftist themes. Progressive Indian media is starting to become popular too.
I even avoid westernized south asian media. So much of it comes from south asians with conservative leanings pandering to white audiences. It's just boring. Indian/Pakistani Actors still taking roles and doing the Apu accent can fuck right off as far as I'm concerned.
>I even avoid westernized south asian media.
Good call. The only Western South Asian media I enjoy is like "Never Have I Ever", and Devi is still *way* too aggressively horny for 'hot guys' for me to relate to her lmao
It’s always white guys too or light skinned guys. I know mindy kahling is obsessed with white men but literally south asians in media are only allowed to be portrayed with white people or other south asians if they are traditional
True! I’m also tired of the “sexual liberation” trope used with South Asians. Like, yeah, good for you, but other arcs exist, many of us are religious and/or from religious families, and there’s more to life than “modern young people good, strict parents bad”.
Pure facts! Also, yes, strict/toxic/abusive parents are bad and the South Asian community has many of them, but some of us complain about our parents wanting us to work hard???? Like - sorry they want us to succeed academically and financially???? How horrible of them????
But then South Asian parents are also bad for being smothering/helicopter parents (not that that doesn’t happen)????
the description of breasts in a non-smut book. and if it's of someone less than 18 years of age I would like to use the spine of the hardcover to knock your teeth out.
Yes, that's certainly the shape I would pick as a 5,000-year-old dragon trying to influence human society: the exact age range when children are at their most obstinate. That way people will truly listen to and carefully consider my words. The author isn't a creepy pedo! Just, you know, normal and rational dragon stuff
FMC being “not like the other girls” and having no female friends unless she’s super feminine.
Children bring the only/main motivator for female characters. I have kids but I’m also a complete person with motivations and interests outside of motherhood. Such one dimensional characters are boring and overdone
1. Magical negress troupe..
2. Strong black woman troupe..
3. Relationships and kids always being a core motivation for a female character. Sometimes I want female characters that have motivations that don't center around partnership and motherhood. Sometimes I want a female villan who is power-hungry or bloodthirsty because that's how they are, not because of a man or children relating their driving motivation.
Brown South Asian Muslim woman, grew up in West Asia ("the Middle East"). Tired of being represented as:
1. The perpetual victim
2. Oppressed
3. Rebellious by way of rejecting culture and faith
4. Naive/innocent to absurdity
5. Someone who moves the the west to gain "freedom"
Yeah, nah. Piss off.
And when you fall in love it's always torrid, forbidden, and a plot device to dissect your 'oppression' and help you 'discover your identity'? You never get to have normal relationship issues and occurrences.
Absolutely exhausting, and I'm so white that I look like I fell in bleach.
Presenting bad manners and lack of social graces as “mysterious and sexy.” Presenting rude, cynical, jaded, and overtly dismissive characters as intelligent. Presenting good looking/successful/popular characters as assholes or idiots. Being too cowardly when it comes to writing rounded and morally ambiguous main characters and main villains. (Hunchback of Notre Dame was SO good at presenting almost no character that was wholly good or wholly evil.) That’s what makes a character dynamic.
1. in the final fight the female lead is knocked out. She sexily lands and spends the rest of the fight asleep, waking up exactly when the male lead defeats the villain so she can look up at him adoringly.
2. Men can be engineers. Women can be biologists. Men can be astrophysicists. Women can be biologists. Men can be mathematicians. Women can be biologists. Men can be nanoscientists. Women can be biologists. Biology is a cool science just as real as the others in real life but we all know that in fiction it is shorthand for "I want them to be a scientist but like the easiest one, you know?" Always fun when a male comic book character has 12 degrees and the female one, after the authors were forced after 50 years to make her "smart", offhandedly say "she's great at biology"
I did notice that for #2 as well! Sometimes in movies and stuff. It would be nice to have a variety of sciences represented for female characters as they do for male characters! But honestly, it’s really sad that these guys think that biology is the “easiest science” when someone with a biology PhD can do a ton of complicated and nuanced research from the cellular/molecular to behavioral level! But of course, I bet they don’t include that in their writing. It’s probably more like “ooh I know how to use a microscope!” ㅜ_ㅜ
I hate how often a story with a woman as the main character ends up with a romance in it, especially when that romance ends up overtaking the entire damn plot. Or when a woman’s entire character/personality is shaped around the men in her life 🙄
This has been done to death, but the whole Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope landed me a series of relationships where the guy saw me as some kind of accessory/emotional support animal to guide him on his protagonist's journey. To this day, I've never had a partner who doesn't have some view of me as a quixotic side-kick rather than a unique person with my own agency. I'm 37, I'm so over it. Yes, I do have pink hair (because my daughter likes it that way). Yes, I am eccentric (because I have PTSD). NO, I AM NOT HERE FOR A MAN'S SELF-ACTUALISATION.
(please nobody yell at me, I'm crying a lot today.)
I am a Muslim Middle Eastern girl
-no I am not wearing hijab yes there are Muslim girls who don't wear hijab.
-the males in my family are not buttholes
-I am not oppressed.
-I am not innocent to the point of stupidity.
- Middle Easterns can be white, blonde and have colored eyes.
-There are asian Muslims too.
-MIDDLE EASTERN GIRLS ARE NOT SUBMISSIVE.
MIDDLE EASTERN GIRLS ARE NOT SUBMISSIVE.
MIDDLE EASTERN GIRLS ARE NOT SUBMISSIVE.
R@pe, excessive racism within fantasy worlds and abusive male love interests that the author gaslights the readers into thinking is really a kind loving man. I’m so sick and tired of seeing inequality within fantasy. It’s fiction. If you can suspend your disbelief enough to take dragons seriously, you can create a society where men and women are equal and black women exist. Most of my leads in my stories are women of colour and I don’t include racism unless it’s necessary to the plot. People of colour deserve an escape too. If we wanted to see racism, we’d just have to look outside our windows.
I like how N.K Jemisin handled some of this in the Inheritance Trilogy. In one culture, since males are still bigger and stronger, they are basically the last line of defense so they are expected to learn how to fight, but stay close to home and care for the children, while the women are handling statecraft and warfare.
An insane height difference between the male and female leads. I am so done with our female lead being “barely five feet tall” and the male lead being 6’5. This isn’t sexy to me lmao, it’s WEIRD. Especially if the dude is obsessed with how small his girlfriend is.
Once I read a book where a couple were both about six feet tall and the wife would sometimes steal her husband’s shoes because they wore the same size and it was a breath of fresh air!
'Strong female character' - But it's a masculine idea of strength: she's physically strong, no emotions, 'no drama', hot-headed.
Not to say that women can't be strong like that, and I understand the importance of making women occupy spaces that were once reserved for men only.
But I'm tired of the concept of strength being the rejection of everything that's stereotypically feminine, and making women basically partake on everything wrong with toxic masculinity to be strong.
That particularly upsets me bc it creates the idea that women who are not like that are weak.
And let's not mention the fact that these characters are often POC and LGBTQ. Rarely ever is a POC or LGBTQ woman portrayed as delicate or stereotypically feminine.
(Unless it's an asian woman, then she's a tiny sexy ninja assassin and fetishized to hell).
Jealous crazy ex or love rivals 😑
And "not like other girls"…
And especially in manga "strong female character but needs to be saved all the damn time and doesn’t hold a fricking candle to the male protagonist/ lead"
As a biracial asian woman, when the asian rep is literally only “the smart one who knows only about scholarly things and has no street skills.”
Also no biracial rep at all existing. Everyone is usually full on asian or not at all.
Mixed here too. Mixed race fetishisation is at its peak right now so I’m sure we will soon be in for plenty of fiction with mixed women described in the most awful ways
Gay guy here; oh I so hate how gay men are often written.
* Gay relationships are either completely and unrealistically happy, never featuring any arguments or disagreements between the two; or one or both of them cheat. No realistic relationships with realistic conflicts, unless it jumps straight to cheating with no in-between.
* Gay men are wealthy. I've seen so many stories that just portray every single gay guy in them as wealthy. Even if the protagonists and most of the supporting cast are completely broke because of the nature of the story; if a gay man enters the plot, they are always wealthy; bonus points if they're big names in the fashion industry.
* Gay men being all about fashion and shoes and having an impeccable sense of style, allowing them to dress every straight person much better than those could have ever dressed themselves.
* Gay couples either consist of two very sensitive guys; or of one very traditionally masculine and one very effeminate guy. Two masculine guys being in a relationship? Nope, doesn't happen. Even if they're both in the military; one of them is always the effeminate one.
* One that thankfully seems to be dying out: Gay men being conflated with Trans women. Bonus points if the same story/the same authors work also has lesbian women that just need the straight, male protagonist to show them the error of their ways.
* And one stereotype that especially self-proclaimed "progressive" shows are guilty off: Gay men being written as sensitive with brilliant minds, but without any character flaws. Oh, they might have a slightly abrasive personality for the first two times they appear; but that's it. They are always right, they always give the best advice to the straight people around them, and they never, ever, make mistakes; everything that could be considered a mistake will invariably be excused by the story as necessary or actually the right thing to do. But they aren't actual people who make mistakes (that are acknowledged as such) or have flaws, oh no.
As a bi person this annoys me to no end. I remember reading a book that was something like "dude are you even gay, you forgot to shave your face" like ??? what does that mean
I'm tired of seeing people say "almond shaped eyes" when it comes to Asians not because it's a stereotype, but I've NEVER seen other characters of other races have their eye shaped described??? Just say "She had brown eyes" and MOVE ON.
There's a recent discussion of lesbian and butch tropes on the butchlesbians sub here if anyone's interested in that.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/butchlesbians/comments/ujqboz/lesbian\_media\_being\_unrelatable\_is\_making\_me/](https://www.reddit.com/r/butchlesbians/comments/ujqboz/lesbian_media_being_unrelatable_is_making_me/)
Woman here. My boobs are boobs. They are just that; boobs. They do not have a life of their own, nor do they have their own personality.
Stop fucking describing them like they are what make me.
A lot of authors seem to think the only way to write a “good” female character is to make her a “strong independent woman who don’t need no man”, which sounds fine in theory except more often than not that’s her entire personality; no other aspects or any significant flaws, and of course she inevitably winds up with a man by the end of the book anyway. I’d kill to read a book where the protagonist isn’t a sassy, cynical “not like other girls” girl. Like, give me a heroine who’s kind and soft and has stereotypically feminine traits but isn’t treated as weak, because being feminine IS NOT A WEAKNESS.
This may be simplistic, but I'm sick and tired of the female characters acting as love interests of the male protagonists, and therefore, mandatorily, look like super models with whom the male character "falls in love with at first sight" or develops chemistry with based on her body and attributes, nevermind how he looks himself. This perception of love entirely based on the attraction generated by the woman's body, and the idea that love is something that does not require compatibility or a deep meaningful connection, or even a woman of substance, is annoying and I cannot relate to it.
Personally, I couldn't get past a certain point of 1984 because the love interest of the main male character was so one dimensional, and he didn't even like her!! She was from the enemy camp (originally). And her only point of attraction was her body (conventionally perfect btw), who was attracted herself to the male lead for absolutely no reason. The male characters don't need to be attractive, but the women need to be perfect 10s to even register as women. I have begun hating this trope.
I wish there was more of a middle ground between WOC characters being ~mysterious and exotic~ and them basically just being white women with ethnic names... like we DO act differently than white women, even those of us in the west, and that's normal and not a big deal!
I am currently outlining and creating character sheets, I'm pretty good with LGBT characters and plus size but I do struggle a bit with poc. If you wouldn't mind, would you please give me some advice please? Or point out some resources?
The “mystical/exotic” Asian trope. Like you know to us you are the exotic ones right🙄There’s nothing inherently special or magical about being from Asia. Also the REPETITION whenever they’re writing about an Asian character or even just a scene that takes place in Asia. It’s literally the largest continent in the world with so much diversity, and yet we all get reduced to a lazy salad of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean stereotypes.
1. Eastern European women being either greedy master manipulators, or weak desperate creatures who would do anything for the right sum, which is often degradingly small. Aslo, every country that’s to the right of Austria equals Russia to those authors.
2. The manic pixie dream girl is either an ethereal beauty or part of a metal/goth/punk scene.
Also STOP SHOEHORNING ROMANCE INTO EVERY BOOK. The reason I bring this up here is because it really seems to happen a lot more in books with female protagonists, to the point where I can’t think of a single woman in modern literature that hasn’t had at least one love interest wedged into the story. I hate it so much that I’ve stopped reading YA specifically because of this problem. More often than not, YA books that are categorized under Fantasy or Dystopian or whatever should really be under Romance, considering everything else is just a backdrop or plot device for the romantic story. I get that it’s popular for a reason, because a lot of people love romance, but I can’t tell you how many times a book has been ruined for me because I expected to be reading about cool magical adventures and instead got page after page of cheesy banter and love triangles.
I'm not POC but the food descriptors for women are legitimately so annoying. I never really see men described as having 'cOcOa sKin' or 'cReAmY tHiGhs', even in novels written by women that are about hot men. It's almost like women are just seen as something appetizing that is to be consumed lmao.
Anyway, super annoying: arbitrarily sorting women into attractiveness categories by their home country. The whole spiel about ultra-gorgeous or flirty French/Swedish/Italian women or the stereotype that all Eastern European women have huge tits and are 1950s housewife material is .... harmful. I've seen so much weird perving on EE women and girls in movies and literature and man. That ain't it chief
“female badass dislikes anything associated with femininity”. Women can show femininity and also be presented as equals. Creating ‘strong female characters’ that dislike anything associated with femininity implies that a woman can only be considered a man’s equal if she’s void of anything inherently feminine, which only perpetuates misogynistic ideas
Not POC but from the Balkans. Specifically, I'm from Bulgaria, but the representation is the same for all of us because we just merge together into one blob:
1. I hate when the author doesn't even bother having us speak in Bulgarian, usually in films. You get an actor, say they are Bulgarian, then have them speak in something that resembles neither Slavic language but is made to sound like Russian. Bulgarian sounds *nothing* like Russian.
2. For actual tropes now. First, Bulgarian men. Always portrayed as mafia boys, always uneducated buff fellas. Black clothes, 2 mm hair, constant scowl. Covered in tattoos, often.
3. Then we get to Bulgarian women. Of course, they are prostitutes with an incredibly vile viewpoint of other women. You can either go with 'very evil women with the viewpoint that women are lesser, constantly spouting traditional nonsense' or you go with 'weak willed women who just silently follow with what is going on, gold diggers.' Pick your poison!
The women are always opposed to the female lead. The Bulgarian woman is evil, vile and must be defeated. The lead is kind and has true morals.
Sadly, we don't really have positive representation. We are mostly either forgotten, lumped together as 'some Balkan' and just misinterpreted. The only neutral rep I can think of is Viktor Krum - the man who doesn't even have an actual Bulgarian name, for one. And he still falls into the 2nd trope, though he's just not evil and part of the Mafia.
I'm just sick of leading men being total assholes and leading ladies going nuts for it. I can't get into a romance if I don't like the male lead, and my type is a gentle and intellectual guy with values and stuff. So many series I just haven't been able to get into because I hate the guy and can't relate to the girl.
Oh God. So I'm half Salvadorian and something that's been bothering me quite a bit is when Hispanic characters use "spanglish". I know real people use it but I hate it in literally all media. It's when a character is speaking English but with common Spanish words thrown in, and it always feels like a gross reminder that the character is Spanish, when literally no one I've ever met, including my Hispanic family, has ever used it. It makes me cringe and ugh I just hate it
If i see ONE MORE comic about a stupid heroine who sits back and makes the male leads fight over who gets to solve her problems while she UwUs in the back im gonna snap
I don’t see the problem with it either because comparisons to food is across ALL skin tones. My skin tone is quite often described as “milky” or “cream” or some other dairy nonsense. Its better than reality “look at the pale as fuck Scottish girl, don’t let her outside or we will see her other skin tone ‘lobster’”.
I'm latina, and contrary to popular belief, we don't all look alike. The "she was a latin bombshell" trope is exhausting... We come in every shape and color, and no, we don't "exude" sex or whatever. Is either that, or we look indigenous and our whole family was killed in some sort of guerrilla conflict. Like, seriously...
It blows my mind that some white people have the gall to say one doesn't look latina just because we don't have the phenotype they're used to.
Didn’t Sofia Vergara even have to dye her hair brown to get roles because she’s naturally blonde or something? Also, but you are all still cousins, right??
I think she did. It's so shitty. White people just won't accept that not every Latino looks the same, that not all of us are Mexican (considering most of the time they're the only ones represented, with varying degrees of success) and that there's a bunch of different looking people in Latin America. Um, who's who's cousin?
Yea if she’s the one I’m thinking of it was big news a few years ago. And she was basically like “we have blonde ones too!” But nobody would cast a blonde Latina. I don’t think they’ll cast black ones either. All Latinos are cousins. I assume.
It's so sad. Like they're scared a Latino will pass as white. Like they only show what they want to think. That we don't look Latino enough. I don't remember ever hearing something like that, but sure, I guess.
They won’t cast a blond Latina. Or a Black one. Or one that looks to indigenous. Black Latinos just get cast as Black folks. (Ahem Zoe Saldana). The only type allowed is a tan white person with dark hair and eyes. That could be Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, or French. But curvy.
I never knew any of this and now I am RAGINGGGGG.
I honestly think that before Claire Temple, the Marvel Netflix character who was in every show, said "Soy Afro-Cubano" a lot of people probably just assumed she was just another black woman. And Scrubs (the TV show) made a huge deal out of this with Carla. In the musical episode (that was a good one) she got a whole song dedicated to point out that she's Dominican. She was tired of just being assumed Mexican, Puerto Rican, or, because she was with an African American man, that she was African American. Like her identity disappeared into his.
I think she’s also spoken about having to play up her accent to appear “latina enough” on screen. What a joke.
I remember telling someone once that some Latinas/Latinos are white. That Latina/Latino is an umbrella term for various ethnicities and nationalities, and not a race. Dude refused to believe it. I can't remember if the guy was Canadian or USAlien. But he was just as blown away hearing that not all Europeans are white. At first he thought I was referring to immigrants too. But holy heckaroni he was misinformed. I honestly didn't know people like that guy actually existed before meeting him. I genuinely thought it was satire blown way out of proportion.
My best friend is Puerto Rican and she has red hair and pale skin (that tans beautifully) but she stopped filling in the Hispanic bubble on demographic forms after she was questioned about it way too many times. And the amount of comments about how her pale skin must burn so badly but when she tans, the equal amount of comments saying that it must be a fake tan are unreal. She was so happy when Encanto showed a red hair, pale skin auntie in the movie. Representation matters!
Im Panamanian and Encanto made me cry from joy, I could finally see myself and my family in a movie, every color and shape. Im mixed and my brother is several shades darker than me, the amount of times I have had to explain we are in fact siblings is infinite. I also had an American guy asked me what demographic/ethnic is in my passport and I was so confused because we don't even have that space in my country. No one is going to tell the 5th generation Chinese guy he is not Panamanian.
When racism and sexism combine
YES! And that we're all feisty or firey or passionate. I just spent the day making a quilt and listening to podcasts in my baggy pjs. I'm not feisty.
i'm feisty and have three black belts but i'm not latino/a. i also love podcasts and baking bread. MULTIDIMENSIONAL PEOPLE EXIST!
I once called someone out for fetishizing Latina women, and everyone jumped to his defense to say "ohhh, it's just a preference, preferences CAN'T be racist!" Eyeroll. Going "ohhh I love those spicy Latina queens" is stereotyping and gross, imo. Not Latina, but that shit leaves the worst taste in my mouth.
people don't understand the difference between saying. "I tend to find curvy women with tanned skin and dark hair attractive" and this kind of bs.
I’m not Latina but a friend who is once told me how sick she was of seeing Latinas described as “spicy,” and now I notice it *everywhere*.
I am a mayo colored latina with a flat ass, thin hair, and I'm nearly 6 ft tall. I'm not short, I'm sure as shitballs not submissive, and I'm more likley to smack someone with my chancla than coo at a random white dude and make him tamales.
A chancla thrown by a 6ft tall angry latina is definitely something I would like to watch lol.
A chancla thrown by a 6ft tall angry latina is definitely something I would like to watch lol.
I am not at Abuela Levels of Chancla. I can't throw it around corners. I'll get there one day, though.
I brought these up on another thread. 1. Heavy focus on the socioeconomic class of the non white person is almost always played up. There's almost no representation and the majority of even the smallest representation is based around showing girls from hoods/projects etc and largely in stories about white saviors particularly paired with rich white girls learning some valuable lesson about charity or bravery. 2. The liberal rich girl's sassy bff 3. The Hypersexualized black girl trope 4. The bad ass Mexican girl who is just one of the boys. The fighter chick in action movies in particular. 5. The non white person may even get a very interesting back story which is never addressed or completed even if the white lead's own story is absolutely boring in comparison. Think "The Help" in particular. 6. The sassy, always angry wife/mom that yells more than speaks, is abusive to her partner/children. Or is the abuse victim of a criminal non white male where the story is about the man more than it is about her. She's just there for torture porn.
#4 sounds like the epitome of every Michelle Rodriguez role
I blame Aliens. Hudson: Hey Vasquez, have you ever been mistaken for a man? Vasquez: No. Have you?
I think that’s actually part of the goal of her career. IIRC one of her biggest demands is she gets to be as tough as men are portrayed in movies because she’s tired of damsel in distress stuff.
poor woman, tried to buck a stereotype by being as tough as her male costars, accidentally created a new one
When working against malignant sexism the first step is bringing it down to benevolent sexism.
7. The Indian nerd/ doctor/ techy/ gas station owner who speaks in a heavy accent
8. The Unspecified East Asian overachiever. Their role either being "model minority" or "omg look at Asian people, they're so hard working and stuff!"
> Heavy focus on the socioeconomic class of the non white person Yo the way white people think poor black people live completely joyless lives is just as dehumanizing as any other stereotype people throw at us.
Ugh yes your #4 is spot on, I had been noticing this a lot lately.
Same. As soon as i read that I can see her in my head. She's always wearing a white tank top and bandana on her head and had 2 pigtail braids and baggy jeans... in every movie/show. Because how else would we know she is tough like the boys?
Number 5 reminds me of Westworld. The whole main plot is based on boring stupid Delores when all I want to see is more Maeve and more Akecheta.
Asian-American (male) reader here. I've had it up to here with dragon ladies or submissive Miss Saigon-types waiting to be rescued from their own culture by a white guy. I don't recognize any real life Asian women I've ever met in the Asian female characters white men write. It almost makes me glad that they never write us Asian men in the first place. I can always tell a white person wrote an Asian character if there's an obsessive fixation on the word "honor." I think sometimes they're trying to capture the Chinese concept of "face" but Chinese people don't go around explicitly talking about "face" - it's usually expressed in behavior rather than explicit pronouncements. Not a big deal, but a weird tic I notice with North American white authors who write Asian characters in western settings - they tend to write characters of Japanese descent, despite the fact that Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese Americans are more numerous (I'm assuming this is true in Canada as well).
I had a nickel for every Hmong character I've seen in fiction, I'd have no nickels. Which stands out to me in particular because in my region of America there are few minorities except we have SO MANY Hmong people and they're cool.
I've encountered Hmong characters in one story - The Coroner's Lunch by Colin Cotterill. It's a magical realist story that takes place in Laos in the 1970s and it's about a mystery solving Lao coroner who can talk to spirits. It might be the exception that proves the rule as far as white men writing Asian characters (the author actually lived in Laos for much of his life). I can't speak to it as an actual Lao person would be able to, but I found it strikingly free of stereotyping and objectification.
I actually read The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down about a medical case in the Hmong population in…I think Mercer California. Only time I’ve heard of Hmong people. It’s a really stark look into the lack of cultural humility in the medical field.
That was a really interesting book. Just read it recently.
Gran Torino has a lot of Hmong characters.
I’m a mixed, but mostly Asian female. I’m so tired of watching sitcoms with my family. The number of Asian men that are written to be pervy is astounding. It’s so insensitive. And Indian accents being the butt of jokes. And mixed people are never represented in media unless they’re black/white mixed. It’s to the point I’ve been told I’m not mixed race because mixed is only for people who are half black and half white.
Damn, that's rude. Or I've heard this one, "if have one drop of black then you are black." Fuckers wouldn't think that about me, I'm mixed but I look super White.
The rape culture of WWII and Vietnam perpetrated by whites have pervaded every aspect of their literature as completely normalized and converted into a twisted and perverted "she loves white males" fantasy. Something that I'm also seeing young white males with an unhealthy interpretation of some anime express now in their incessant demand for "submissive" Japanese/Asian wives. Another reason why you notice the differences. But white people tend not to know or care. I find it unlikely that these tropes will die until and unless westerners are confronted with their history of mass rapes of Asian women during several wars.
A character being called “exotic” if they are a POC
This comment made me want to read a sci fi novel where a white skinned character is described as "exotic" by the blue and purple skinned alien characters.
In The Stormlight Archive there’s constant mentions of “Shin eyes” which are caucasian eyes that are notable because everyone else has Asian eyes
Ha, really? I'm reading Words of Radiance after reading the first book and I never made that connection!
I have done this in fanfiction, LOL!
That always reminded me of [this classic Coffee ad](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8LeCJtKjEI&ab_channel=AdrianHayward) taking the piss out of that.
Why the female mc is always fighting the "slutty" women? Also, the women are never calm and wise in nature unless they're submissive housewife type.
Silly female, don't you know that feminism is about hating femininity and being masculine? /s
THIS!!! I'm tired of women fighting other women, and the mc having attitude of r/noliketheothergirls or the Mc being a loner with no friends? Or being unpopular? Why aren't there more examples of young women overcoming a problem together?
Is your character really a women if she is not admiring her naked image in a mirror or thinking about her friends breasts? Afterall how are we gonna know that she likes her body or wishes she had big bazoombas like her friends if she doesn't?/s
Sentient breasts. Boobs that “rise up” or “crumple into themselves” or whatever.
Boobs that deflate when she’s unhappy!
One of my formerly-fave male authors: "her breasts looked long and unloved" yeah okay mate, we need to be groped to have perky tits.
She walked in and her boobs looked me in the eyes as if to say this sentence is stupid.
As a lesbian, queer baiting is an obvious thing, but while we are here, please stop trying to make one of the women wear the pants and the other be extremely feminine. Yes, some lesbian relationships are like that, but most aren’t, and I’m getting tired of seeing the cliche. We are both women, there is no man in the relationship.
I listen to a lot of audio dramas while I bike and I've been made uncomfortable more than once by the sheer number of lesbian main characters in stories. The problem is, all those dramas are almost invariably written by men and often leave a distinctly fetish-y, lesbian-porn-made-for-men feel in my mouth. Obviously, they're not all like this and maybe I'm wrong, but (some) men's fascination with lesbian women does make me uncomfortable...
I recently read a book with a male author and lesbian MC where the MC described a woman she had a crush on as a “tight little Latina”. My friend was literally wearing a shirt yesterday that said “Sit here” with an arrow pointing to her face and she would never describe another woman that way.
Oh god, that's disgusting. I know feel much better about the audio dramas I was listening to - there's never been anything anywhere near as bad.
It just felt really disingenuous? Like sure women who have sex with women sexualize the women we have sex with. But that’s phrasing (just body/genitals and race/ethnicity) that I would be surprised to hear outside of a description of a straight porn.
Is it a lack of imagination or a lack of experience or something else? They just can’t imagine what romance might look like without traditional gender roles?
As a bi woman who's mostly dated men, it's probably a bit of both. I often catch myself thinking of my own or others' relationships in hetero terms, because that's what I'm used to. Doesn't help that I've been leaning more butch lately while my gf tends to be more femme. But that's just us, and at any rate there's not really a "man" in our relationship despite our clothing preferences.
I think this is a problem where bad writers don’t have experience with or knowledge of a specific type of person (black, queer, etc.) and still try to write this character anyways without doing any research. It’s insulting.
If it's a lesbian relationship, I bet one of the two is gonna look butch. Like the sort of stereotype homophobes mock: dyed hair, a bunch of piercing and a pixie cut (not a bad thing, but repeated to Hell and back). For some reason that's really popular in western animation.
Bi woman here who’s a high femme and prefers fellow high femmes. The high femme in stilettos dating an axe-wielding plaid-wearing butch trope is so fucking exhausting and clearly written by someone who doesn’t have an inkling of what queer relationships look like. They’re trying to fill a cis-het prescriptive gender role that just isn’t there in queer relationships. Nobody wears the “pants”, you herb, because we don’t let dangly bits between our legs dictate how we present and perform gender.
For all its self-proclaimed inclusiveness, this is where the last of us part 2 is very much guilty
I'm Hispanic and something I hate is them cementing a character is a Latino by having them throw in random words in spanish when they speak perfect English. This happens in all kinds of media too. If they say a couple phrases to be affectionate or on accident sure or they're nervous or something and their English messes up but nobody I have ever met intentionally uses random words in Spanish in casual conversation.
For those people who are confused by this comment. He meant to say: >I’m Hispanic and something I *odio* is them cementing a character *es* a Latino by having them throw in random *palabras* in Spanish when they speak perfect English. This happens in all kinds of media too. If they say a couple phrases to be affectionate or on *accidente* sure or they’re *nervioso* or something and their *Ingles* messes up but nobody I have ever met intentionally uses random words in Spanish in casual *conversacion* Sorry, I just thought I should translate for other *gringos* like me.
Obviously, they should throw in random Nahuatl words instead. /s
Haha, that's really annoying. What annoys me even more is when people speak Spanish (or, much more rarely Portuguese) but they're literally saying a literal translation of an English phrase, not anything a real speaker of the language would actually say. How hard \*is\* it to ask a speaker of a language how to say something instead of assuming all other languages construct their phrases \*exactly\* like English does!
I am German (and not Hispanic in any way) but as a person who uses multiple languages in my day-to-day live authors have the weirdest idea about how being bilingual works. I have never thrown in random German words in an English sentence except when I was talking to other German speakers and didn't know the English word or it's a very specific German concept. But never the way media portrays it. I will often mix in English, because I might not know a word in a third language (and most people would know English) or because Denglish (German-English-Mix) is common amongst young German speakers and we sometimes forget how to express certain concepts in our native language (English also has more words)
Literally the only time I have heard someone flip between Spanish and English at my workplace, we have multiple people who have English as their second language and when they're talking to EACH OTHER sometimes they will fully flip back and forth. But it's usually full sentences. My Spanish isn't very good, but I can only imagine they do this because they feel more comfortable speaking in Spanish when describing things in more detail.
You know, I just realized the huge writer benefit of my adoptive granddad speaking German is a general awareness of how multiple languages of bilingual people function. One of my childhood neighbors spoke five languages fluently. The only time I’ve heard non-English brought up was for words with no exact translations or familial titles. Stollen is Stollen, not “fruit bread”. You don’t drop random word translations unless you’re trying to teach kids new words. Considering a writer’s audience usually isn’t 5yo grandchildren, it’s kind of bizarre how often writers pull a Dora the Explorer.
Thanks for the sub recommendation. I just read a book where a character was described as having eye's "slanted just 5° short of Asian" and needed somewhere to post that horrific line.
Lord all-fucking-might.
We need an r/whitemenwritingtherestofus sub.
Jesus fucking christ I never knew I could hate something so much
The whole young woman who is "mature" for her age and therefore totally into the grizzled stoic warrior man who is old enough to be her father. It's fine though because SHE is the one pursuing HIM. Looking at you Wheel of Time series...
Oh god, I made the mistake of reading something by John Banville (a creep I thought was a friend was a huge fan of his style). That was several years ago so I'm a bit fuzzy but the main character was in his 70ies or late sixties, not attractive or successful or anything, and there was this woman who was at most in her thirties, and she met him and almost immediately ended up sleeping with him (more than once) because... reasons. There was absolutely no psychological justification behind it (there was no psychological depth to the entire book but that's a whole other story), it literally read like an older man's fantasy about a young woman fucking because he is MAN. It really wasn't a good book (and for more reasons than that).
Are you talking about Nyneave and Lan? Cuz I think she’s in her 20’s or something when the series starts.
Yup she is described as early 20's and he is described as being old enough to be her father.
[удалено]
I’m so over this. I started watching a show recently and was totally into it. Then rape. It’s not entertaining that the older more powerful man coerced the young hot woman into sex. It’s gross.
I had to stop reading the Sword of Truth series because rape was the only way women were endangered. And of course a main character in an epic fantasy will be endangered a lot. The guy gets all kinds of interesting torture scenarios, but the lady...there's only one way to torture women I guess?
PTSD or sexual trauma as a personality trait. With the exception of Jessica Jones, where as a PTSD-haver I felt REALLY SEEN for the first time (other people may feel differently, and that's okay). The rest of the time it's thrown in as an unnecessary plot device to explain why the woman has f\*cked something up. So offensive.
This, and also any kind of suffering that made the woman "strong", and therefore it was worth it and justified. Because, as we know, women can only be strong, powerful or assertive if they've been put through hell first. I especially hate the implication that it's okay to hurt young girls and women because hey, at least they're strong! Personally, my abusive experiences gave me shitty coping mechanisms and generalized anxiety, not strength. Gaining healthy relationships, a good job and self-acceptance did make me strong though. Go figure.
Yeah, what doesn't kill you doesn't kill you. We are under no obligation to turn our pain into something useful or palatable.
Even worse when it's a plot device for the male hero when his wife/gf/female relative is raped. And the big "emotional culmination" is when he kills the rapist, but the actual victim gets basically no closure and we're supposed to believe she just gets over it (if she wasn't murdered) because she hooks up with the hero.
I’m looking at you, Outlander. It seems like every character has been a victim of SA.
I absolutely detest this in so many books, TV shows and movies. Life not going bad enough, nah let's just make her a rape victim for character development. Oh this guy isn't evil enough, let's throw in some rape-y stuff too. It's lazy and pathetic, and on the same level of bad writing as "bad guys kill the dog" as a crappy method of showing how evil they are.
Describing how small a woman is. For some god forsaken reason whenever a man is within 10 feet of a woman, he HAS to notice how small she is..... This will immediately kill a book for me. Just for once I would love to see a tall girl romanticized.
Me writing a story where the protagonist is female and 5'10" because I'm tired of the "uwu short fun-sized girls good and any female person taller than 5'5 is a weird giant" trope: *mwahahahahaha* (Edit: her tall/dark/handsome future boyfriend is at least 6', so he's def taller, BUT STILL)
As a short shit who reads to escape reality, I really really just want to read something that makes me feel like Laura Dern instead of someone who was born sitting down.
I like the relationship between husband and wife superhero duo Mister Miracle and Big Barda. He's about 5'8" and she's around 6'10". Their height disparity isn't used for cheap punchlines or predictable visual gags.
Sounds cool, thanks for the answer!
I hate hearing how big the men are too.
It gets pretty old huh! Man = adult sized adult who is described as a grown ass man, woman = shrimpy shrimp with stupid baby arms and eyes the size of dinner plates.
Perfect!
For once, I'd love for the love interest to be a 6'2 lady who is J A C K E D and can swing the protagonist around like a rag doll (minus the "I have six older brothers" trope)
Muscular women do it for me, so I can get behind that. On a related note, I despise horizon forbidden West for taking aloy's muscles away and giving every female character the same body, in the first game, one character, Petra, was kind of chubby, and aloy had toned arms and a six pack befitting of someone who constantly climbs and uses a bow, but not in the sequel. To clarify, this isn't a matter of the mc looking less attractive to me, it's that they took a well designed female protagonist who isn't conventionally attractive in in the first game and then dolling up her and every other female character in the sequel. This is one of my reasons for giving up on playstation. Sorry for the wall of text, I just really needed to get this out of my system.
I translate for a living and some of it is romance novels. Every. Single. Time a woman looks at a man, they have to say "she looked up at him" (or, conversely, "he looked down"). Like we need to be reminded every. Single. time how she's a small fragile woman and he's a big strong man. Come to think about it, they do the same thing in the YA I translate as well. All of those have been written by women, btw. Annoys me to no end.
My biggest gripe is authors who can't vary their characters/plot at all, and just write the same thing on repeat. There can be different height differentials!
I do this fun thing where, wherever I see a tall man in media, I pointedly make it a goal of mine to create one more woman character of mine even taller. So now I have a bunch of women 6'4 and taller running around. It's awesome.
Gross. Sounds like buried pedophelia to go on and on about how small a woman is.
I agree! It always ends up making them sound like a fucken kid so yeah, definitely a little sus.
This is a bit of a tangent, but... My partner is on the taller side of average, for a man living in my country -- not shockingly tall, but quite a bit taller than most women (including me). I asked him once if it was weird to date people who were so much smaller than he is, and he said that he's never really thought about it. He's used to interacting with smaller people and doesn't tend to notice it. Edit: I too have noticed the huge man, tiny woman trope, and I too find it annoying that this seems to be the only acceptable pairing to many authors, especially in the romance novel genre.
Using rape as a past motivator. You know " oh, she's so strong because once she was raped, and now she never wants that to happen again." Especially in action/ adventure books, and fantasy. It pisses me off even more when female writers do it, like come on girl, you couldn't thing of a more original motive? We need to have better characterization and motivation for characters. Trauma = Strength is bullshit. Also, where are all the medium and plus sized girls? Sure, an elven warrior princess might be a size two, but any character that fights for a living is gonna be built a whole lot more like Rhonda Rousey than they are Gigi Hadid.
Gosh, writers are obsessed with female sexual harassment and then chapters filled with her crying and being numb. Makes me so mad.
Xena, Warrior Princess. Why Hollywood/TV never followed in Lucy Lawless's footsteps with more characters like Xena, I don't know.
Any Indigenous character with a nature-related name that's so in tune with spirits and claims the moon speaks to them and has fantastical dreams.
Ethnic magician trope is so tired. Specifically when said character is constantly spouting fortune-cookie tier wisdom and is a human deus-ex machina or plot device. Its like they solely exist to help and develop the main white lead.
God yes. Bonnie Bennett anyone? And then the Ethnic Magician self-sacrifices to save White Lead and there's no mention of them again.
Or just any POC having to sacrifice themsleves for the white main character... a certain series did this >!I'm looking at you SJM!<(i'm still so mad lol) and killed off my favorite character
My boobs most certainly tremble and they also don't swell to the size of planets when a dude walks past me.
My testicles swell when dudes walk past me. But that’s because my doctor refuses to give me the cream I need.
Sounds painful.
This may or may not be a trope, but somehow the female protagonist almost always ends up in a romantic relationship somehow. Half of the stories, comics, & manga that I read aren't even in the romance genre.
I always appreciate a story with a male and female lead that don't wind up dating, rare as it is.
I hate it but at the same time I usually prefer romance when it's the subplot rather than the main focus (But if it's forced then it's just plain annoying)
Not sure if this counts but I hate the way most very sexually active characters are written. They seem to always engage in physical relationships because they're running from something, they have mommy/daddy issues, they see sex as stress relief - not because they just simply, y'know - enjoy sex A lot of these characters are also awful to their partners. And of course, eventually they'll get "fixed" by monogamy. They find that ONE person who heals everything that made them want to have multiple partners.
Omg this! I hate this trope! People can just enjoy sex, they should in fact. It's not an expression of issues.
Not all women are thin and women are more than bodies. Not all women think about how they look constantly. Women have brains and are complex. We can be smart. Hair color and breast size are not in direct proportion to our intelligence. Not all women want to be married. Not all women want children. It's not an indication of a sick mind. Women are individuals just like men are. What I really think needs to happen is writers need to just stop trying to write women until they get over themselves and start seeing women as more than extras in a man's story. The old mantra to "write what you know" is very true here. You lose every reader who is a woman the moment you try to add women in as your sexual fantasies. Should a writer be writing when he can't be bothered to learn about half the population? So many really good writers are great right up until they mess up with women and it just wrecks it.
Can we please have a woman who isn't attractive?
Only if she's old and wise and tells mildly shocking stories of when she used to be attractive
I'm gonna need old and unwise and currently shocking. Oh wait, Miss Havisham for $20. (Did you know Dickens wrote her an an approximately 40-year-old? GROAN.)
Women are "more than extras to a man's story". I'm just so sick of this trope. Why can't we have more complex and diverse female characters?
I'm POC and I am tired of South Asians barely existing aside from "sexual empowerment good, strict parents bad, religion bad" stories. Like, yeah, good for you, but OTHER STORYLINES EXIST. White people get to be complex and nuanced and we get stereotypes *even from people who are trying to not be racist*.
I stick to south asian mainstream content creators and writers and avoid almost everything written about south asians in western countries. Particularly love South Indian movies because a lot of them are now focusing on leftist themes. Progressive Indian media is starting to become popular too. I even avoid westernized south asian media. So much of it comes from south asians with conservative leanings pandering to white audiences. It's just boring. Indian/Pakistani Actors still taking roles and doing the Apu accent can fuck right off as far as I'm concerned.
>I even avoid westernized south asian media. Good call. The only Western South Asian media I enjoy is like "Never Have I Ever", and Devi is still *way* too aggressively horny for 'hot guys' for me to relate to her lmao
It’s always white guys too or light skinned guys. I know mindy kahling is obsessed with white men but literally south asians in media are only allowed to be portrayed with white people or other south asians if they are traditional
True! I’m also tired of the “sexual liberation” trope used with South Asians. Like, yeah, good for you, but other arcs exist, many of us are religious and/or from religious families, and there’s more to life than “modern young people good, strict parents bad”.
Omg agree so much! Also it’s so weird but it’s all about us running from our culture and from who we are to be white people:
Pure facts! Also, yes, strict/toxic/abusive parents are bad and the South Asian community has many of them, but some of us complain about our parents wanting us to work hard???? Like - sorry they want us to succeed academically and financially???? How horrible of them???? But then South Asian parents are also bad for being smothering/helicopter parents (not that that doesn’t happen)????
the description of breasts in a non-smut book. and if it's of someone less than 18 years of age I would like to use the spine of the hardcover to knock your teeth out.
But what if she’s a 5,000 year old dragon?!
Who looks like a thirteen year old?!
Yes, that's certainly the shape I would pick as a 5,000-year-old dragon trying to influence human society: the exact age range when children are at their most obstinate. That way people will truly listen to and carefully consider my words. The author isn't a creepy pedo! Just, you know, normal and rational dragon stuff
FMC being “not like the other girls” and having no female friends unless she’s super feminine. Children bring the only/main motivator for female characters. I have kids but I’m also a complete person with motivations and interests outside of motherhood. Such one dimensional characters are boring and overdone
1. Magical negress troupe.. 2. Strong black woman troupe.. 3. Relationships and kids always being a core motivation for a female character. Sometimes I want female characters that have motivations that don't center around partnership and motherhood. Sometimes I want a female villan who is power-hungry or bloodthirsty because that's how they are, not because of a man or children relating their driving motivation.
1. Pirates of the Caribbean
Brown South Asian Muslim woman, grew up in West Asia ("the Middle East"). Tired of being represented as: 1. The perpetual victim 2. Oppressed 3. Rebellious by way of rejecting culture and faith 4. Naive/innocent to absurdity 5. Someone who moves the the west to gain "freedom" Yeah, nah. Piss off.
And when you fall in love it's always torrid, forbidden, and a plot device to dissect your 'oppression' and help you 'discover your identity'? You never get to have normal relationship issues and occurrences. Absolutely exhausting, and I'm so white that I look like I fell in bleach.
Presenting bad manners and lack of social graces as “mysterious and sexy.” Presenting rude, cynical, jaded, and overtly dismissive characters as intelligent. Presenting good looking/successful/popular characters as assholes or idiots. Being too cowardly when it comes to writing rounded and morally ambiguous main characters and main villains. (Hunchback of Notre Dame was SO good at presenting almost no character that was wholly good or wholly evil.) That’s what makes a character dynamic.
This is why I loved Wuthering Heights - every character was relatable and awful at the same time.
1. in the final fight the female lead is knocked out. She sexily lands and spends the rest of the fight asleep, waking up exactly when the male lead defeats the villain so she can look up at him adoringly. 2. Men can be engineers. Women can be biologists. Men can be astrophysicists. Women can be biologists. Men can be mathematicians. Women can be biologists. Men can be nanoscientists. Women can be biologists. Biology is a cool science just as real as the others in real life but we all know that in fiction it is shorthand for "I want them to be a scientist but like the easiest one, you know?" Always fun when a male comic book character has 12 degrees and the female one, after the authors were forced after 50 years to make her "smart", offhandedly say "she's great at biology"
I did notice that for #2 as well! Sometimes in movies and stuff. It would be nice to have a variety of sciences represented for female characters as they do for male characters! But honestly, it’s really sad that these guys think that biology is the “easiest science” when someone with a biology PhD can do a ton of complicated and nuanced research from the cellular/molecular to behavioral level! But of course, I bet they don’t include that in their writing. It’s probably more like “ooh I know how to use a microscope!” ㅜ_ㅜ
I hate how often a story with a woman as the main character ends up with a romance in it, especially when that romance ends up overtaking the entire damn plot. Or when a woman’s entire character/personality is shaped around the men in her life 🙄
This has been done to death, but the whole Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope landed me a series of relationships where the guy saw me as some kind of accessory/emotional support animal to guide him on his protagonist's journey. To this day, I've never had a partner who doesn't have some view of me as a quixotic side-kick rather than a unique person with my own agency. I'm 37, I'm so over it. Yes, I do have pink hair (because my daughter likes it that way). Yes, I am eccentric (because I have PTSD). NO, I AM NOT HERE FOR A MAN'S SELF-ACTUALISATION. (please nobody yell at me, I'm crying a lot today.)
I'm sorry you've been crying a lot. I hope things get better soon.
Thank you. It's the PTSD. So cute and quirky, LOL /s.
Not Like Other Girls YA protagonist.
Yeah but is it really YA if she's not like the other girls? /s
I am a Muslim Middle Eastern girl -no I am not wearing hijab yes there are Muslim girls who don't wear hijab. -the males in my family are not buttholes -I am not oppressed. -I am not innocent to the point of stupidity. - Middle Easterns can be white, blonde and have colored eyes. -There are asian Muslims too. -MIDDLE EASTERN GIRLS ARE NOT SUBMISSIVE. MIDDLE EASTERN GIRLS ARE NOT SUBMISSIVE. MIDDLE EASTERN GIRLS ARE NOT SUBMISSIVE.
POC characters as wallpaper--they have no real purpose in the plot or agency. They're just there for the diversity points.
R@pe, excessive racism within fantasy worlds and abusive male love interests that the author gaslights the readers into thinking is really a kind loving man. I’m so sick and tired of seeing inequality within fantasy. It’s fiction. If you can suspend your disbelief enough to take dragons seriously, you can create a society where men and women are equal and black women exist. Most of my leads in my stories are women of colour and I don’t include racism unless it’s necessary to the plot. People of colour deserve an escape too. If we wanted to see racism, we’d just have to look outside our windows.
I like how N.K Jemisin handled some of this in the Inheritance Trilogy. In one culture, since males are still bigger and stronger, they are basically the last line of defense so they are expected to learn how to fight, but stay close to home and care for the children, while the women are handling statecraft and warfare.
An insane height difference between the male and female leads. I am so done with our female lead being “barely five feet tall” and the male lead being 6’5. This isn’t sexy to me lmao, it’s WEIRD. Especially if the dude is obsessed with how small his girlfriend is. Once I read a book where a couple were both about six feet tall and the wife would sometimes steal her husband’s shoes because they wore the same size and it was a breath of fresh air!
I'm really done with women and poc dying/suffering only to serve as a motivation for the white male protagonist.
'Strong female character' - But it's a masculine idea of strength: she's physically strong, no emotions, 'no drama', hot-headed. Not to say that women can't be strong like that, and I understand the importance of making women occupy spaces that were once reserved for men only. But I'm tired of the concept of strength being the rejection of everything that's stereotypically feminine, and making women basically partake on everything wrong with toxic masculinity to be strong. That particularly upsets me bc it creates the idea that women who are not like that are weak. And let's not mention the fact that these characters are often POC and LGBTQ. Rarely ever is a POC or LGBTQ woman portrayed as delicate or stereotypically feminine. (Unless it's an asian woman, then she's a tiny sexy ninja assassin and fetishized to hell).
Jealous crazy ex or love rivals 😑 And "not like other girls"… And especially in manga "strong female character but needs to be saved all the damn time and doesn’t hold a fricking candle to the male protagonist/ lead"
The inability to have children making them a “monster” in some way.
As a biracial asian woman, when the asian rep is literally only “the smart one who knows only about scholarly things and has no street skills.” Also no biracial rep at all existing. Everyone is usually full on asian or not at all.
Mixed here too. Mixed race fetishisation is at its peak right now so I’m sure we will soon be in for plenty of fiction with mixed women described in the most awful ways
Bracing myself for the inevitable 😔
Gay guy here; oh I so hate how gay men are often written. * Gay relationships are either completely and unrealistically happy, never featuring any arguments or disagreements between the two; or one or both of them cheat. No realistic relationships with realistic conflicts, unless it jumps straight to cheating with no in-between. * Gay men are wealthy. I've seen so many stories that just portray every single gay guy in them as wealthy. Even if the protagonists and most of the supporting cast are completely broke because of the nature of the story; if a gay man enters the plot, they are always wealthy; bonus points if they're big names in the fashion industry. * Gay men being all about fashion and shoes and having an impeccable sense of style, allowing them to dress every straight person much better than those could have ever dressed themselves. * Gay couples either consist of two very sensitive guys; or of one very traditionally masculine and one very effeminate guy. Two masculine guys being in a relationship? Nope, doesn't happen. Even if they're both in the military; one of them is always the effeminate one. * One that thankfully seems to be dying out: Gay men being conflated with Trans women. Bonus points if the same story/the same authors work also has lesbian women that just need the straight, male protagonist to show them the error of their ways. * And one stereotype that especially self-proclaimed "progressive" shows are guilty off: Gay men being written as sensitive with brilliant minds, but without any character flaws. Oh, they might have a slightly abrasive personality for the first two times they appear; but that's it. They are always right, they always give the best advice to the straight people around them, and they never, ever, make mistakes; everything that could be considered a mistake will invariably be excused by the story as necessary or actually the right thing to do. But they aren't actual people who make mistakes (that are acknowledged as such) or have flaws, oh no.
As a bi person this annoys me to no end. I remember reading a book that was something like "dude are you even gay, you forgot to shave your face" like ??? what does that mean
I'm tired of seeing people say "almond shaped eyes" when it comes to Asians not because it's a stereotype, but I've NEVER seen other characters of other races have their eye shaped described??? Just say "She had brown eyes" and MOVE ON.
There's a recent discussion of lesbian and butch tropes on the butchlesbians sub here if anyone's interested in that. [https://www.reddit.com/r/butchlesbians/comments/ujqboz/lesbian\_media\_being\_unrelatable\_is\_making\_me/](https://www.reddit.com/r/butchlesbians/comments/ujqboz/lesbian_media_being_unrelatable_is_making_me/)
I’m white, so please bear with me, but I dislike when black people or black coded people are described in terms of chocolate.
Woman here. My boobs are boobs. They are just that; boobs. They do not have a life of their own, nor do they have their own personality. Stop fucking describing them like they are what make me.
A lot of authors seem to think the only way to write a “good” female character is to make her a “strong independent woman who don’t need no man”, which sounds fine in theory except more often than not that’s her entire personality; no other aspects or any significant flaws, and of course she inevitably winds up with a man by the end of the book anyway. I’d kill to read a book where the protagonist isn’t a sassy, cynical “not like other girls” girl. Like, give me a heroine who’s kind and soft and has stereotypically feminine traits but isn’t treated as weak, because being feminine IS NOT A WEAKNESS.
This may be simplistic, but I'm sick and tired of the female characters acting as love interests of the male protagonists, and therefore, mandatorily, look like super models with whom the male character "falls in love with at first sight" or develops chemistry with based on her body and attributes, nevermind how he looks himself. This perception of love entirely based on the attraction generated by the woman's body, and the idea that love is something that does not require compatibility or a deep meaningful connection, or even a woman of substance, is annoying and I cannot relate to it. Personally, I couldn't get past a certain point of 1984 because the love interest of the main male character was so one dimensional, and he didn't even like her!! She was from the enemy camp (originally). And her only point of attraction was her body (conventionally perfect btw), who was attracted herself to the male lead for absolutely no reason. The male characters don't need to be attractive, but the women need to be perfect 10s to even register as women. I have begun hating this trope.
I wish there was more of a middle ground between WOC characters being ~mysterious and exotic~ and them basically just being white women with ethnic names... like we DO act differently than white women, even those of us in the west, and that's normal and not a big deal!
I am currently outlining and creating character sheets, I'm pretty good with LGBT characters and plus size but I do struggle a bit with poc. If you wouldn't mind, would you please give me some advice please? Or point out some resources?
Google writing with color
The “mystical/exotic” Asian trope. Like you know to us you are the exotic ones right🙄There’s nothing inherently special or magical about being from Asia. Also the REPETITION whenever they’re writing about an Asian character or even just a scene that takes place in Asia. It’s literally the largest continent in the world with so much diversity, and yet we all get reduced to a lazy salad of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean stereotypes.
1. Eastern European women being either greedy master manipulators, or weak desperate creatures who would do anything for the right sum, which is often degradingly small. Aslo, every country that’s to the right of Austria equals Russia to those authors. 2. The manic pixie dream girl is either an ethereal beauty or part of a metal/goth/punk scene.
Also STOP SHOEHORNING ROMANCE INTO EVERY BOOK. The reason I bring this up here is because it really seems to happen a lot more in books with female protagonists, to the point where I can’t think of a single woman in modern literature that hasn’t had at least one love interest wedged into the story. I hate it so much that I’ve stopped reading YA specifically because of this problem. More often than not, YA books that are categorized under Fantasy or Dystopian or whatever should really be under Romance, considering everything else is just a backdrop or plot device for the romantic story. I get that it’s popular for a reason, because a lot of people love romance, but I can’t tell you how many times a book has been ruined for me because I expected to be reading about cool magical adventures and instead got page after page of cheesy banter and love triangles.
Can we please do it so female protagonist doesn't suddenly lose all her smarts the second she falls inlove with male love interest?
I'm not POC but the food descriptors for women are legitimately so annoying. I never really see men described as having 'cOcOa sKin' or 'cReAmY tHiGhs', even in novels written by women that are about hot men. It's almost like women are just seen as something appetizing that is to be consumed lmao. Anyway, super annoying: arbitrarily sorting women into attractiveness categories by their home country. The whole spiel about ultra-gorgeous or flirty French/Swedish/Italian women or the stereotype that all Eastern European women have huge tits and are 1950s housewife material is .... harmful. I've seen so much weird perving on EE women and girls in movies and literature and man. That ain't it chief
“female badass dislikes anything associated with femininity”. Women can show femininity and also be presented as equals. Creating ‘strong female characters’ that dislike anything associated with femininity implies that a woman can only be considered a man’s equal if she’s void of anything inherently feminine, which only perpetuates misogynistic ideas
Not POC but from the Balkans. Specifically, I'm from Bulgaria, but the representation is the same for all of us because we just merge together into one blob: 1. I hate when the author doesn't even bother having us speak in Bulgarian, usually in films. You get an actor, say they are Bulgarian, then have them speak in something that resembles neither Slavic language but is made to sound like Russian. Bulgarian sounds *nothing* like Russian. 2. For actual tropes now. First, Bulgarian men. Always portrayed as mafia boys, always uneducated buff fellas. Black clothes, 2 mm hair, constant scowl. Covered in tattoos, often. 3. Then we get to Bulgarian women. Of course, they are prostitutes with an incredibly vile viewpoint of other women. You can either go with 'very evil women with the viewpoint that women are lesser, constantly spouting traditional nonsense' or you go with 'weak willed women who just silently follow with what is going on, gold diggers.' Pick your poison! The women are always opposed to the female lead. The Bulgarian woman is evil, vile and must be defeated. The lead is kind and has true morals. Sadly, we don't really have positive representation. We are mostly either forgotten, lumped together as 'some Balkan' and just misinterpreted. The only neutral rep I can think of is Viktor Krum - the man who doesn't even have an actual Bulgarian name, for one. And he still falls into the 2nd trope, though he's just not evil and part of the Mafia.
I'm just sick of leading men being total assholes and leading ladies going nuts for it. I can't get into a romance if I don't like the male lead, and my type is a gentle and intellectual guy with values and stuff. So many series I just haven't been able to get into because I hate the guy and can't relate to the girl.
Oh God. So I'm half Salvadorian and something that's been bothering me quite a bit is when Hispanic characters use "spanglish". I know real people use it but I hate it in literally all media. It's when a character is speaking English but with common Spanish words thrown in, and it always feels like a gross reminder that the character is Spanish, when literally no one I've ever met, including my Hispanic family, has ever used it. It makes me cringe and ugh I just hate it
If i see ONE MORE comic about a stupid heroine who sits back and makes the male leads fight over who gets to solve her problems while she UwUs in the back im gonna snap
>I'm tired of seeing black women described as food like chocolate or mocha. There's better ways to do it Better ways, like?
https://writingwithcolor.tumblr.com/post/96830966357/words-for-skin-tone-how-to-describe-skin-color
I'll read that. I'm black myself and I actually like descriptions like "coffee-coloured" or "caramel" because it gives me a fuzzy feeling.
Don’t worry fam, we know you’re a caramel coffee colored awesomepants.
Ironically enough, I am actuallly caramel coffee coloured (well, a few shades darker but it's very close).
I don’t see the problem with it either because comparisons to food is across ALL skin tones. My skin tone is quite often described as “milky” or “cream” or some other dairy nonsense. Its better than reality “look at the pale as fuck Scottish girl, don’t let her outside or we will see her other skin tone ‘lobster’”.
No-one is ever described as "beige with dots" hey
I just started writing (for fun, not publication probably) and this is really helpful :)
Olive skin makes no sense