Katherine Frances's Blog, page 57
March 27, 2018
k-frances:
As an author ALL I WANT is a series of scented candles that represent my characters
Is...
As an author ALL I WANT is a series of scented candles that represent my charactersIs that so much to ask
Kim Shimmers and the Veil of Death
A Harry Potter fanfic by me (and the 4th instalment in the Kim Shimmers series)
How could we ever hope to flicker on against a
darkness so complete, against an evil so prevailing?
This Harry Potter fan fiction (as long as all goes according to plan) will be posted at the beginning of every week. The pictures above are not mine, though I edited some.
Chapter 10
An Old Cloak
Kim had learned a thing or two from Fred and George. In the mission to retrieve the marauder’s map from the Gryffindor boy’s dormitory she would’ve liked to enlist Hermione’s help, but Kim had no idea where she was since she wasn’t in the library, and didn’t feel like trapesing around the castle to find her. That would take too long, and there was a good chance she was already in Gryffindor tower. So Kim headed down to the Great Hall, which just so happened to be clearing out around this time of evening, which meant there would be loads of students heading back to their common rooms. All she had to do was fall in line with a group of them and let them lead the way.
She undid her tie and took off her robe, folding it over her arm so the blue wasn’t visible. She fell in line with a group of girls who were chatting amongst themselves about the quidditch match and what they were going to spend their Sunday doing. Kim followed close behind which didn’t alarm the group because the hallway was fairly full.
“Diligrout,” said one of the girls to the Fat Lady. Kim made sure to bow her head and look like she was very fascinated by a loose thread on her robe. The Fat Lady might remember her, so she didn’t want to give her the chance to. She slipped into the port hole just behind the other girls and then held back a pace or two so they wouldn’t feel her presence once past the dim hallway that led into the common room. Kim stowed her robe and tie in the corner where, for at least a few minutes, she was sure it would go undisturbed.
The common room was busy, which actually made it easier to blend into the crowd. She had made it all the way across the room toward the stairs leading to the boy’s dormitory, when a voice rose up above the din of the rest.
“Hey, you’re that girl! The one who broke into the common room a few years ago for that party!” Kim made a pained face and turned, half guilty, half proud of the recognition.
“Uh, yeah well… back again,” she shrugged giving a little laugh. The girl who had pointed Kim out just gave a good natured laugh. That wasn’t all too surprising since Gryffindors weren’t obsessed with rule following like Hufflepuffs, nor did they tend to be fuddy-duddies like Ravenclaws.
“You’re not supposed to be in here,” said a boy near the girl who had pointed Kim out.
“Right, well… I’ll only be a minute,” she said, and without a seconds hesitation she turned and bounded up the stairs to the distant echo of the boy saying, “You can’t go up there…” She quickly came to the door leading into Harry and Ron’s dormitory. The side of the door way was marked with all the names of the boys that resided within, something she had learned from having been in the boys half of the dormitories once before. She paused, hesitating. She raised a fist to the door and after holding it there for a moment in uncertainty, wrapped on the wooden surface.
“Uh- hello? Anyone in there?” she called. There was quiet for a moment, then the sound of rustling and footsteps. The door opened to reveal Seamus Finnigan at the door.
“You?” he said. “What’er you doing ‘ere, you’re not even Gryffindor,” he said with a mix of surprise and indignation.
Writing Prompt
“And how do you know Character A?” one of xer friends asked. The group of friends was sitting around a table in a dimly lit bar. Character A was casually sipping on coffee, glancing at their old enemy, now newly reformed, who sat at the head of the table.
“Oh, that’s easy,” ex-villain said nonchalantly. “We were lovers.”
Character A promptly spewed xer coffee everywhere.
Mod Carolyn @theories-fans-andwombats
March 26, 2018
furiosa vs. tropes for women in action
This is the second in a series of posts about Mad Max: Fury Road. All contain spoilers.
Read Part 1, a general review of the movie, here.
Read part 3, about Max, here.
Mad Max: Fury Road has already inspired some of the most intense fandom I’ve seen, and been part of, in years. I think it’s partially due to the sheer intensity of the sensory and emotional experience the movie delivers. But let’s be honest. A lot of it is due to Furiosa.
The character has already inspired an outpouring of fan art and cosplay. Even among movie fans who aren’t part of those scenes, people who love her REALLY love her. (And I wholeheartedly include myself in this category.) I can’t remember the last time that multiple, grown-ass adults on my Facebook feed had profile pictures referencing a movie character. Several of them–men and women–have this one:
Art by Hugo Dourado.
Why has Furiosa inspired so much passion? I think a lot of it has to do with the way she blows a giant flaming hole in the standard images for women in action films.
While recent years have given us some fantastic action heroines, they tend to be confined within a few set tropes, with remarkably little variation.
Of course, by far the most common trope for women in action is still to be the person being rescued–to be the prize the protagonist, usually a man, gets at the end of the journey. There are whole franchises built around this concept. I think we can all agree that’s boring and not worthy of a blog post.
But even among women characters who have agency in action movies–as protagonists or as villains–there are still some basic patterns that recur again and again. In particular, there are three basic templates that a large majority of female action characters fall into. The point is not that these tropes, in and of themselves, are wrong. It’s that they’re often all there is.
1. The Girl Hero
This is the default trope for YA. Katniss in The Hunger Games, Tris in Divergent…you’ve seen it many times.
Katniss Everdeen, The Hunger Games
The Girl Hero is virginal (often unusually non-sexual for a teenager). She’s usually small or skinny, sometimes for a logical reason (Katniss grew up starving), sometimes not so much. She seems like an underdog, but proves to be surprisingly good at violence and/or have some unique skill, and through her bravery and grit takes on foes much bigger than she is.
Tris, Divergent
It should be said that plenty of male YA characters share these characteristics–Harry Potter is also small and skinny, a novice in the world of magic, but unusually skilled at a few things. He doesn’t win his battles through physical strength, but through cleverness and bravery. And there’s an understandable appeal in having a scrawny underdog, of any gender, turn out to be a hero, especially in a book or movie geared toward young people. But with a few exceptions (see: Tamora Pierce) the Girl Hero with these qualities is THE template for young women in action/fantasy/sci-fi/speculative fiction.
2. The Sexpot
When the Girl Hero grows up, she can be properly objectified as a different trope, the Sexpot.
Lara Croft: poster girl for this trope
You’ve all seen this trope in the many, many superhero and comic book movies that are currently squirting out of the studio pipeline. She’s that one token woman on the team with four guys.
Yeah, that one.
The Sexpot gets to fight–and sometimes even gets artfully bloody and dirty–but she has to do it in a latex suit and while appearing cool and sleek and having a good hair day. (She has long hair, so she can flip it, and so we’re extra sure she’s a girl.) Her fight style is extra bendy and flippy and maybe when we break out the slow motion. She may use her sexiness as a weapon (a la Black Widow) or it may be just a bonus quality. She can be powerful, but only if we can look at her conventionally attractive body move around in tight clothing while it’s happening.
3. The Ice Queen
The Ice Queen is almost always the trope for female villains. She sits at the top of some kind of power structure–a state or a criminal enterprise–issuing commands to her minions but rarely doing the violence herself. She’s probably got a sharp suit or a uniform and a severe haircut.
Delacourt, the villain of Elysium.
She’s allowed to be older than 35.
President Coin, Mockingjay
The Ice Queen has institutional power but rarely fights; physicality is the low pursuit of men in her world. She may be smart, crafty and manipulative, but she will not punch you in the face. She’ll snap her fingers and get someone else to do it, although she may sit on the edge of her desk to watch.
Jeanine, the villain of Divergent
Maya, Zero Dark Thirty–an Ice Queen protagonist, sort of
The point here is not that there’s no variation on these themes. And there have been iconic female action characters who stood totally outside them before. Alien’s Ellen Ripley and Linda Hamilton as the original Sarah Connor in Terminator 2, doing pull-ups on her mental hospital bed frame, come to mind as the most obvious.
But it’s striking how often the women that do exist in the thriller, action, sci-fi and speculative fiction film universe fall into one of these three boxes. Which is why any character who doesn’t map onto one of these templates is so exciting.
Here’s Furiosa.
She fights a hell of a lot. She does not flip her hair.
She’s intensely physical, but you never get the sense that her fights are choreographed to perform her sexuality for you. They’re choreographed for her to fucking win.
When Max shows up, they have a knock-down, drag-out fight with each other. Max doesn’t pull any punches. Why? Because he makes no assumptions that she’d be less lethal to him than a man. They beat the shit out of each other in a big, messy, grunty, scrabbly fight.
For significant portions of the movie, Furiosa is driving a truck, which means Charlize Theron is essentially acting from the biceps up. You literally cannot look at her boobs. You have to look at her face.
She gets to be dirty. Really really dirty. This picture alone highlights how weird it is that all the other women above are so clean.
She gets to be ugly and make weird faces in the middle of fighting.
She gets to yell and be angry the way one might be in the middle of a nonstop road battle when you’re full of adrenaline because you’re fighting for your life.
In short, she gets to look like an actual person who is actually fighting, instead of a statue that can do a back walkover with the help of a wire rig.
So it’s hardly surprising that she’s racked up a lot of fans. She takes all the images of clean, pretty, carefully sexualized women we’re used to seeing, even in action, rips them to shreds, sets them on fire and then drives over them with an 18-wheeler.
This is all even more remarkable given that Furiosa is played by an actress who is very feminine-presenting in her everyday life. Charlize Theron is one of the very few actresses who’s been allowed to pick roles where she radically changes her gender presentation.
Here she is in Aeon Flux, playing about the most Sexpot-y character imaginable:
Here she is in Monster:
I think there are a lot more actresses out there who could take on these kinds of transformations, radically altering the way they look, move, and perform their gender, the way male stars do all the time. But the equivalent depth and diversity of roles for women just doesn’t exist in Hollywood right now.
Furiosa’s popularity shows how starved we are for images of women who are actually powerful and physical in the same ways that men get to be in blockbuster after blockbuster after blockbuster. It’s not that all the images of women in action have to look like this–it’s just that we hardly ever see a female fighter who looks this way. Furiosa reminds us that there is so much more out there than we’re getting in terms of what women can do and look like on screen.
List of Elemental Abilities
Air/Wind
Aerokinesis -manipulate the air, wind, and gas.
Aeroportation - teleport using air/wind currents.
Air Mimicry - transform into a cloud of gas, fog, or mist.
Atmokinesis - manipulate the weather by mixing water, fire, earth, air, and lightning/electricity.
Deoxygenation - suck up all the oxygen from a place.
Lung Adaptation - breath anywhere
Wind Generation - create blasts of air.
Divine Winds Manipulation - create and control heavenly winds.
Dark Wind Manipulation - create and control eerie winds.
Earth
Geokinesis - control, manipulate, and reshape the earth at will.
Atmokinesis - control and manipulate the weather by mixing water, fire, earth, air, and lightning/electricity.
Crystallokinesis - manipulate minerals and crystals.
Ferrokinesis… manipulate metal at will.
Fraxikinesis - manipulate burnt matter.
Geo-Thermokinesis - manipulate, control, and create lava, magma and volcanoes.
Golem Creation - make golems out of inanimate materials like rocks, wood, plants, magma, etc.
Granulation… can turn things into sand.
Halokinesis - control and manipulate salt.
Hyalokinesis - control and manipulate glass.
Koniokinesis - manipulate and control dust particles.
Plassikinesis - manipulate and control all forms of plastic.
Psammokinesis - can control and manipulate sand.
Terrakinesis - control, manipulate and alter/reshape the surrounding terrain and landscape at will.
Terraportation - teleport via the earth and earth-based materials.
Sacred Earth Manipulation - Create, manipulate, control, reshape divine earth minerals.
Black Earth Manipulation - Create, manipulate and control tainted and evil earth minerals.
Fire
Pyrokinesis - create, control and manipulate fire, flame and heat.
Atmokinesis - control and manipulate the weather by mixing water, fire, earth, air, and lightning/electricity.
Fire Breath - breathe out flames.
Geo-Thermokinesis - manipulate lava, magma and volcanoes.
Heliokinesis - manipulate and control the sun and sunlight.
Hell-Fire Manipulation - Generate and control flames of hell.
Holy Fire Manipulation - Generate and control flames of Heaven.
Inflammation - burn things.
Melting - heat molecules to melt things.
Plasmakinesis - can control plasma.
Pyrotechnics - create fireworks.
Self-Detonation - explode self and reform.
Thermokinesis - create, control and manipulate heat.
Water
Hydrokinesis - manipulate and control liquid water and mold it into any desired shape or form.
Aquatic Adaptation - adapted to underwater living.
Aquatic Respiration - breathe underwater.
Atmokinesis- control and manipulate the various aspects of the weather by mixing water, fire, earth, air, and lightning/electricity.
Dehydration - absorb water.
Hydroportation - teleport across short or long distances through liquid water.
Water Mimicry - turn into liquid water.
Holy Water Manipulation - create, manipulate and control graceful waters.
Dark Water Manipulation - create, manipulate and control evil and dangerous waters.
Darkness
Umbrakinesis - can manipulate and control darkness or shadows.
Animated Shadow - Animate one’s shadow.
Light Absorption - block out light in an area.
Night Vision - see in the dark.
Sacred Darkness - create holy darkness.
Shadow Camouflage - be unseen in shadows.
Shadow Mimicry - become a shadow.
Umbrageous Teleportation - teleport via the shadows and darkness.
Electricity/Lightning
Quintessence Force -Can generate whitish-blue lightning that also contains pure life energy.
Electrokinesis - control, generate or absorb electric fields and shoot lightning bolts.
Activation & Deactivation - turn stuff on and off.
Positron Manipulation - control positrons, the antimatter counterpart to electrons.
Electrical Absorption - absorb electricity.
Electric Mimicry -transform entire body into a lightning-like being of pure electrical energy
Electrical Transportation - teleport with lightning.
Divine Lightning Manipulation - create and control the brightest lightning.
Black Lightning Manipulation - create and control the darkest lightning.
Energy
Dynamokinesis - manipulate existing energy.
Energy Blast - create blasts of energy.
Energy Emission - release energy.
Quintessence Force - create and manipulate unique form of electrical and life energy.
Mana Manipulation
Chi Manipulation
Electricity Manipulation
Energy Manipulation
Ice
Cryokinesis - control ice, snow and other forms of frozen water.
Freeze Breath - freeze things in solid ice.
Freezing - lower the temperature in kinetic atoms to freezing temperatures.
Frigokinesis - control snow either as precipitation or already on the ground.
Ice Beam - shoot beams of freezing energy.
Ice Generation
Light
Dark Light Manipulation - create the darkest light in existence.
White Light Manipulation- create sacred light from the divine.
Photokinesis - create and manipulate pure light.
Force-Field Generation - create protective shields of solid photons.
Invisibility - be unseen.
Laser Emission - bend light wavelengths to create lasers.
Light Absorption -absorb the light around you.
Light Generation - emit blinding light or glow in the dark.
Light Mimicry - take on the traits of light.
Photoportation - Teleport by using photons.
Projective Invisibility - turn other things invisible.
Evil Banish - Rid and banish all spirits of evil and black magic.
Light Manipulation
Weather
Atmokinesis - manipulate the various aspects of the weather by using water, fire, earth, air, and lightning/electricity.
Atmokinetic Resistance - immunity to all weather-based abilities and effects.
Atmokinetic Sensing - sense the future weather patterns.
Other
Aether Manipulation
Cosmic Manipulation
Gravity Manipulation
Nether Manipulation
Space-Time ManipulationFrom Superpower Wikia. See their complete list of superpowers HERE.
March 25, 2018
Quick writing tip: don’t give your characters honorable deaths
instead of dignified last words and a quiet sigh as your characters pass, consider: make them scream, plead, cry not to go. have snot drip down their face. strip away their pride. leave them sobbing, vulnerable, scared, human. :))
(obviously this is a only tip and won’t work for every death scene but it sure is fun to write)
why do you do this to us :/
