<333 Thank you so much! I'm glad! Whenever I have tried recently to write something autobiographical, I am always nervous about what I might accidentally end up revealing about myself, which was why this meme and Ms. Adichie are so liberating. It felt good to just charge forward.
It's a funny thing that fantasy and fandom train us into, instinctively favouring Strong Women (and Strong Women is always defined on western-masculine lines). YES THIS. I have been discussing this with a couple of people here and there about exactly this. These representations of strong/liberated/awesome women in fic and especially meta sometimes really frustrate me because I felt like they are really culturally specific and exclusionary. This isn't to say that I can't bring in my own interpretation of female strength into the game though. It's like there's a line between 'writing to instruct' and 'writing to reflect', and that the All Awesome Women All The Time thing seems to fall under 'writing to instruct', but can actually end up being counterproductive because it ends up two-dimensionalizing the women and trivializing their Not As Awesome/Liberated relationships/situations/decisions.
Hmm, yes, see I know that it bothers my mother, so that's what bothers me, and it also bothers me that I don't know what I'm supposed to do about it. I can't buoy her up all the time, even if she would do the same for me, but I'm not as loyal and dedicated as she is, none of us are, so. I dunno. And yes 'exercising my newfound independence' and exercising all these things she wasn't expecting, pretty much. She wanted a better life for me but she didn't expect the paradigm shift that would come with it.
Re: 2/2
It's a funny thing that fantasy and fandom train us into, instinctively favouring Strong Women (and Strong Women is always defined on western-masculine lines).
YES THIS. I have been discussing this with a couple of people here and there about exactly this. These representations of strong/liberated/awesome women in fic and especially meta sometimes really frustrate me because I felt like they are really culturally specific and exclusionary. This isn't to say that I can't bring in my own interpretation of female strength into the game though. It's like there's a line between 'writing to instruct' and 'writing to reflect', and that the All Awesome Women All The Time thing seems to fall under 'writing to instruct', but can actually end up being counterproductive because it ends up two-dimensionalizing the women and trivializing their Not As Awesome/Liberated relationships/situations/decisions.
Hmm, yes, see I know that it bothers my mother, so that's what bothers me, and it also bothers me that I don't know what I'm supposed to do about it. I can't buoy her up all the time, even if she would do the same for me, but I'm not as loyal and dedicated as she is, none of us are, so. I dunno. And yes 'exercising my newfound independence' and exercising all these things she wasn't expecting, pretty much. She wanted a better life for me but she didn't expect the paradigm shift that would come with it.