Screenshot from the video game Persona 4. In the halls of Yasogami High, the protagonist talks to a male student labeled "Stylish student". His dialogue window reads: "Hanging out with women, going on dates with them, that's fine. Killing them? Not so much."
happy international women's day
1. Major news out of San Jose State University.
The University has REJECTED Trump's demands to ban trans people from bathrooms, dorms, and other facilities.
This comes after Trump threatened them for once having a trans student athlete.
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(He's leading an army full of officers loyal to the brother who wants him dead, she's a GNC woman in a patriarchal society who got her position by orchestrating a coup on her uncle, which is obviously not the same thing.)
Gay and Lesbian solidarity, except you both are military allies and one of you is a conquering force and the other leads a group of quasi-raiders. And when both of you don't get he automatic respect other military leaders do.
Illustration of Dedue holding Mercedes' hand. They are both wearing traditional Duscur garb, with Dedue wearing a blue bandana and Mercedes wearing a purple flower crown. Dedue is looking down wistfully at Mercedes as she's smiling. They're in front of a cherry blossom tree with petals scattered around them.
Here's my #Mercedue illustration done in collaboration with @nlanswrites.bsky.social for @bluelionsbb.bsky.social !Mercedue in spring will surely thaw away all the cold 🙂↕️
To find out the story behind this piece, check out the amazing "for duty...and for love"! archiveofourown.org/works/800357...
The worst part of long form stories is that polishing scenes before a whole draft is done is not wise because you can't be sure what their final form needs to be until you're done with drafting. But sometimes you really want to polish anyhow.
Had a thought and ended up sketching out the weirdest... uh... can this be called a kink negotiation scene? I think it is one. I don't know exactly where in the story this goes or if I'm keeping it, but here it is.
Content warning for really unhealthy relationship
Writing characters being mean is funny when you're a person who can't even pick mean dialogue options in video games.
'The character is behaving understandably here, but *I* still feel bad about it' is a funny kind of feeling.
...With the interesting problem here being that I'm pretty sure there's a number of things where sex IS going to be what's moving plot/character/theme in a story that sits pretty firmly outside the romance genre, especially since I can't even call the central relationship a "romance"
...Actually 'how many sex scenes do I get in this story' and 'how kinky do I get to make them (when the characters get to a point where exploring kink might be part of their headspace and relevant to character development)' is going to be an interesting problem to solve.
(...hopefully things like 'there's lots of complicated and messy sex' and my general enjoyment of characters being clever with political plotting keeps me from turning this into an essay.)
(Ofc, I could have just made this fantasy setting completely free of gendered bias, and I think there's merit to stories that do that, but since I'm trying to broadly tackle 'blind spots in dominant culture and how those lead to binary thinking,' I think exploring gender is very useful.)
Like, i fully intend the the character to interrogate the layers of assumptions that go into the sentiment of 'less of a man,' but I want this to be a quiet thread, not a character giving a modern treatise on feminism in a setting akin to 1200s Central Asia.
I probably should pick up some old classic novels written by men that have a lot of female characters and use that as a reference point when I'm editing.
Though I think, as long as I remember that this kind of subconscious sexism is often less present in casual, individual relationships and is just kind of an underlying framework that often just absorbs things that contradict it without examining them or by assuming they're exceptions
While he's essentially been forced out the men's social sphere and into the women's social sphere by story stuff that makes him socially 'less of a man' (and he does buy into the assumptions there).
Without slipping into didacticism and without writing the character as if he doesn't have this bias
Welp, this is going to be an interesting challenging on the limits of my imagination. I have to figure out how to write the sustained perspective of a man who doesn't think he thinks of women as less, just as having naturally different social roles that "obviously" preclude things like leadership.
Well, that was a profoundly grim sex scene I just wrote, good gosh.
(Actually they're worse, but you know.)
Wow, modern day cops sure are following a long, historical tradition
What's scary about this story is the surveillance it hints at. This trans woman had changed her name, legally, but chose not to change her gender marker. She was apparently flagged in the DMV system as trans and her license was invalidated under a law that supposedly only concerned gender markers.
The Knight having a no good very bad day
What beauty remains in an endless age? #ProjectViolets
Maybe I should make space to re-read Ninefox Gambit and the Queen of Attolia (two funny books to put next to each other, but you know.)
I have just never written a protracted military campaign before, and trying to keep the emotional stuff tightly focused without ignoring the military stuff is definitely going to be a challenge.
Which is probably for the better, since this is a military campaign that was meant to be something that gets rid of a problematic heir (one of the MCs), and so a hard won victory is fundamentally more satisfying. And it gives room to flesh out some things.
...And this has to be a duology if I finish it, because I had an insight as to what political resolution Act 4 needs to have and that actually needs its own book to fully explore.
Which means the Act 3 military campaign I wanted to keep somewhat straightforward cannot be that.
Obvious conclusion is obvious, and it's not like what the Europeans and Americans did would have been right if if it had been effective. But I think it's interesting to be viewing it from the angle of 'even compared to other conquering empires, the Europeans and Americans were destructively violent'
Which, isn't to like say there are 'good' conquerors, but more of an observation on how ultimately self-sabotaging it is to be so convinced of your own superiority that you destroy what could have helped you.
The book presents it as one of the reasons they were so "successful" and this is really fascinating in light of like, European empire building which, from my understanding is very 'destroy and replace with out version' and it's pretty obvious how parasitic was.
Also Mongolian history is really pretty neat. This book is heavily focusing on the administrative side of conquest and empire building, and specifically how the Mongols handled it, and I think one of the most interesting through lines is how often they try and preserve what was there already.
