the thing with feathers

Nobody has to like a girl, fictional or otherwise. But words like ‘annoying’ or ‘Mary Sue’ are both used as shorthand for ‘girl I want to dismiss.’ We’ve all read about characters who seemed overly perfect, or who had flaws the narrative wouldn’t admit were flaws, and those characters are irritating. But I’ve seen just as many fictional boys like that as fictional girls (with the caveat that boys tend to get more pagetime, so they get more explored) and those boys don’t get seen in the same way. As I was saying on twitter a couple days ago, I want characters to be flawed and awesome: I want them to be flawesome.

Talking about girls in this way is not useful. It just helps along the mindset that girls can’t be awesome, the lie all girls get told, whispered in their ears over and over again, all through their lives.

It is not true. It never was. No person, or book, should ever have told them otherwise.

To borrow a phrase from Jeanette Winterson: ‘Trust me. I’m telling you stories.’ They’re full of lies, but not about the important stuff.