mime owners: this is claude st. pierre, we adopted him two years ago. he’s a third generation french mime with roots in the early carnie awakening. we only feed him hand toasted vegan peanuts and paleo candy floss
Uh….Steven Universe OC??? I don’t have many of these tbh ^^;
Whether it happens in canon or not, I love the concept of Steven getting dragged back to Homeworld to fulfill his role as a Diamond and utterly failing at it! And part of Blue and Yellow’s attempt to get him back into being a Diamond is to give him a new, non defective Pearl who’s so committed to Homeworld’s system that she won’t rebel or allow Steven to start a rebellion. Her problem obviously being that she can’t buck the system or her intended purpose but her purpose is to do what her Diamond wants and to make him happy, but he wants her to be her own person…it’s a headache for both of them.
Design wise, I just wanted to have a Pearl with similar hair to Anthy from Revolutionary Girl Utena since there’s plenty of parallels I could draw between Pearls and their purpose and Anthy’s role as the Rose Bride. Pink Pearl’s outfit looks a little too Era 1 for her to be a new gem but the idea was that Blue and Yellow (mostly Blue) wanted to cling to the past essence of Pink Diamond, hence why Pinky here has a similar outfit to PD.
I dunno if I’ll do anything with this character but she was fun to create and I like drawing her so we’ll see 🙂
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
the fact women are viewed as being more sexy at 15 than 40 is the creepiest thing in the world
Horrifying really
Looking through the notes, and people seem to be justifying this as evolutionary biology. They believe that human females are most fertile at the age of 15. Considering your body isn’t even done growing at this age, I find this incredibly hard to believe. Really? The best time for you to push a baby out of your vagina is when your periods probably aren’t even regular yet? Like the younger you are, the more likely you are to DIE from child birth. Well anyway, most websites claim you’re most fertile in your 20s, peaking at 27… So congrats on trying to blatantly justify pedophilia by using bullshit science.
1. Give them goals and desires (that don’t involve men.)
As a society, we still have an unfortunate proclivity towards the belief that female interests should and must centralize around others, particularly heterosexual men.
Female interests are viewed as frivolous and childish; past a certain age, they’re viewed as pathetic. Unless, of course, they centralize around pleasing and supporting their husband and family.
Now, I’m a fiercely ambitious person, and you can rip my special interests from my cold dead hands. As such, I make a calculated effort to refute this assumption with my writing, and give female characters something to live for outside of a husband and family.
Here are some interests, activities, and goals you can give your female characters that are independent of men:
Education (such as a college degree, and MFA, a PHD, medical school, et cetera.)
Career – and not just the stereotypical, pantsuit clad career-gal variety, either. Give women dreams and ambitions in any field. Show me women who are aching to succeed in medicine, ballet, fiction writing, teaching, the Arts, et cetera.
Hobbies. Show your women gardening, painting, playing piano, learning Mandarin, horseback riding, and more. Showing the rich inner life of women can go a long way towards showing the reader that they’re autonomous people.
Fandoms. Let your women be passionate fans of things: TV shows, movies, books, video games, singers, comics, and so on. Moreover, show women characters of all ages with passionate interests that they aren’t ashamed of. I couldn’t live without my fandoms and interests, and it’s unfair that women are expected to “grow out” of them.
Relaxation. Let your women loaf in their spare time, and not just in the pretty, sexy way. Let them lay around in PJs watching reality television and procrastinating on the internet.
2. On that note, let women have sexual and romantic desires.
I’ve heard it put, quite succinctly, that women are expected to be sexy, not sexual.
Women masturbating, watching porn, making the first move towards men, or desiring other women is often considered weird or uncomfortable, because it implies that we have our own sexual autonomy outside of being objects for male pursuit.
Let your female character have desires. Let her express sexual attraction and romantic passion. Let her fantasize. Let her masturbate. Let her enjoy sex. It’s been proven that women enjoy all of these things just as much as men do, so let it show.
(A.N: I may make a post for male authors on how to do this, because I know a dude who thought women masturbate by rubbing their tits.)
Similarly, it’s equally as important to present these things as normal, and that you show the female characters as sexual, but not necessarily sexualized.
Eliza from The Shape of Water was a great example of this: within the first five minutes, she’s shown masturbating in her bathtub. This could have been a fetishistic moment, but instead it’s depicted as a normal and natural part of her daily routine, right on par with her boiling eggs for lunch.
It was something I had never seen before, and a pleasant surprise in an already splendid and emotional film about a woman falling in love with a sexy fish.
3. Let them form intimate friendships (with both women and men.)
Intimate female friendships are one of God’s greatest gifts to humanity.
Show your female characters sharing a bed, watching films together, painting each other’s nails, having late night conversations. Show them getting dressed up to do typical date night activities, like seeing movies and going out to dinner.
If you have the sudden impulse to make it gay (which I, for one, frequently do) you already have a baseline of friendship and intimacy to work with. Talk about a twofer!
On the other side of the coin, let your women have casual, platonic intimacy with men without jealousy on the part of their spouses or romantic implications. This also kills two birds with one stone, as it both crushes toxic masculinity and the stereotype that women are “mysterious creatures” who can’t relate to men.
4. Vanquish your fear of Mary Sue.
Mary Sue only exists in one place, and that is a Star Trek fan magazine she originated in.
Today, she’s predominantly thrown around by two kinds of people: dudebros who don’t like it when media reflects that women are people with the same capacity for autonomy and competency as men, and writers who are concerned about accidentally creating a Mary Sue themselves.
Mary Sue was originally intended to mean a character who is blatant wish-fulfillment and projection on the part of the author, which is a valid concern – however, creators of all genders have fallen victim to this. The only difference is that men get paid more to do it.
(Case in point, this dude.)
So vanquish your concerns about Mary Sue. Give your female character a wide range of skills. Give her intelligence. Make her assertive. Let her kick ass without being one-upped by a cocky newcomer. Let her be kind and empathetic.
In other words, don’t be afraid of making her awesome – just make her a well-rounded character on top of it.
However:
5. Know the difference between strong female characters and Strong Female Characters™.
The symptoms for a Strong Female Character™ are as follows:
She punches and kicks things a lot.
Or, alternatively, is referred to as being able to punch or kick things, but never gets the opportunity to do it.
Emotional callousness/lack of sympathetic attributes.
Hates children.
Looks down on traditionally feminine women.
Has approximately three personality traits.
This is not, contrary to popular belief, a strong female character. A strong female character is a well rounded, fully fleshed-out human being with positive and negative attributes, a capacity for mistakes and vulnerability, and the ability to learn and grow.
Strong female characters can be traditionally feminine or butch tomboys. They can be loving and maternal or rough around the edges. They can be effervescent explosions of joy or stony as marble statues.
Strong female characters don’t even necessarily have to good – a complex villain has the same components and motivations that make a complex hero (I talk about that here.)
Keep this in mind when writing female characters. And if you want an example of what to avoid and what to emulate, you can always look at Joss Whedon’s version of the Wonder Woman script versus the final product.
when you know you could destroy someone online if you really wanted to but you realize that theyre just a sad unhappy person and your reply would only enforce their paranoid, hostile mindset so you don’t say anything
