Feature Chance for Women’s History Month

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Phyllis, a twelve year old apprentice healer, befriends Marcus, a young Roman soldier, and soon gets him all wrapped up in her ploys to defend Mesmer, the school that might prove to be a better fit for him than it is for her.

(ongoing, bi-weekly updates, full draft completed, Historical fantasy)

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“He thinks he can stop her. And I doubt that. I really doubt that.”

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I’ve always had a love for stories dated back in time, but as a reader of historical fiction, the amount of abuse of female characters I’ve had to stomach has been harrowing. I also like to read banter and comedy, and find that female characters are often portrayed as the voice of reason in YA. Women tend to be written out of history, especially in stories set in the Roman Empire. With ‘Phyllis’, I aim to write them back in, and let female readers have fun in my realm while I am at it. After all, if you could force a mansplainer to hold his tongue, wouldn’t you be tempted to do just that?

I am a female creator! xox MJ

My Comic: The Alley Cat2

Logline: After a tragic break up with his girlfriend and the sudden disappearance of his beloved uncle, Hunter Shade struggles to put his life back together under the pressures of also being the local super hero, The Alley Cat. Will he be able to win back Caroline and find his missing uncle all while keeping his identity a secret?

My Leading Lady is Caroline Gates. A quote that showcases her strengths:
"Not only are you a wicked artist, but you have this charisma that makes everyone and their grandmothers love you. Not to mention your talents with a tennis ball - something I'll never understand."

Hello Tapas!
Making this series as a woman means a lot to me because it gives me the opportunity to represent my favorite characteristics and strengths about what makes a woman beautiful. My female lead show cases her beautiful feminine characters by having so much love, forgiveness, wisdom and both internal and external beauty. She is a strong woman emotionally, as well as physically! She has a lot of stamina from being a great tennis player, and she is also a talented artist and independently living on her own. I want to share the characteristics that I value the most in woman I know personally and that I look up to. I want to teach other girls to have all the love and forgiveness in the world for the people you care about...just like them.

"Yuna fancies herself a princess and lives alone waiting for the day her royal family finds her. Things aren't as they seem though..."

"Even when it rains the sun is so bright"

I created this short story to be a bit of a dark satire on fantasy tropes of the damsel in distress and roles of femininity in society as well as metaphor for not giving up on a dream even if its fruitless.

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[LOGLINE ]

Shamed, belittled and considered inferior in every way- Princess Suren slowly drags herself out of the earth she fell upon and walks with her dimmed light to find the fuel to set herself ablaze for the sake of her people. As Suren's journey unfolds, many of her kin she finds suffer from the same treatment in the Jade Kingdom culture and she realizes its not just a mere prophecy coming down to end her species.

[QUOTE ]

“I wonder what would make Councilor Clemency think...”

And Suren turned to peer over her shoulder, and keeping her saccharine smile asked, “...that her blunt knives would ever land into my back?”

[BEING A WOMAN IN THE INDUSTRY ]

The main reason I began writing my stories and making my own art, was to let my own voice be heard without being silenced. I build my own domain, writing the story I need to be able to speak out loud so I can give myself healing and acknowledgment. Growing up, I was raised in a household dominated by male oppression and it left my family with emotional scars we still are struggling to heal from.

My novel Jade Kingdoms is my outcry to having that culture thrown back into the abyss it ever dared to crawl out from. It's why my main character is a woman with soft strength, because I refuse to be told that being soft and timid are weaknesses. They are strength, enduring is strength and just because a woman is soft doesn't mean she's incapable of being empowered.

Hearts of Gold and Blades of Steel

Series logline:
7 women of 2 mercenary groups are forced together after a monster-slaying contract goes awry, but not all the women are strangers to one another. Matilde and Eudora once rode together as sword-sisters and lovers; reunited they must find a way to work together and keep both their teams in check to survive.

Quote: “I’m no lady.” Matilde snorted, dismounting and handing him the reins of her large mount, Alina. “But you treat my horse like one and we’ll get along just fine.”

What this means to me as a woman:
Being able to share stories of women like me, when there has been a real drought up until now, is something I am very grateful for. I love being able to show women of all strengths/sizes/colours/sexualities/personalities/etc in my stories/series because women are more than a two-dimensional cardboard standee. As women, we have great stories to tell and I love being a part of that. My stories are for everyone, even if they mostly feature women. I feel that online series/novel/comic platforms have really opened up the floodgates for tales of women that don't always get shared in mainstream media and it makes me so happy to see them become more and more popular.

DKFGJGKHJGFKLJHLG I just spat out my drink in joy omg, thank you so much?!?!

1. Series link:

1. Series logline - Young knyaginya Kalina Petrosinova grows up between two worlds - that of court life and noble responsibilities and that of magic, where she learns how to be a proper witch and handle those responsibilities. The older she gets the more she realises how hard it is to survive the clashes of them both. and having an older brother, ruling over the whole realm as a tzar, an older sister ruling over the family province and another sister proclaimed the most beautiful woman in the land, doesn't help either. And not to mention a family curse, a few loyal friends and an ancestral spirit who wouldn't get off her case... Which path leading to her destiny would she choose?

2. An inspiring/powerful quote that showcases the characters’ strengths (max 100 characters) - This one still hasn't appeared in the main story but is one of my favourite ones: "...For had I been born a man, I wouldn't have come up with even half the wisdom I have as a woman...". The line is spoken by Bozhana Petrosinovaa, who is considered the most beautiful woman in the land and that is what most people choose to focus on her from all of her characteristics. The line is from a conversation she has with an ambassador, who says despite her smarts, it is a pity she was born a woman, because she couldn't use it, however, she corrects him.

3. Tell us what creating series means to you as a woman in the webcomic/webnovel industry. - To be fair, that is a question that hasn't crossed my mind until now. I am lucky to be born in a place where there is no discrimination against artists and writers based on sex, as well as a family which encourages my love for literature, even though it is not my career choice. And to be honest, while my writing is a form of escapism, it is not from some bad situation at home, rather it is a dive into a world different from the one we are living in, a world and culture I want to share with people. Thus for me, to be a part of the webcomic and web novels community means that I am ready to share and become a part of the story the rest share. I also want to share that there are some traditions and mindsets we should preserve, while there are some we should let go if we want to have a better future.

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This is the story of Sylfir, Prince of Balthôr. He has plenty of charisma but some people are fraightened by him because it says that his cruelty is as legendary as his beauty. Some believe he hides his game and is here to conquer Almbûrgh.

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I like to play with the psychological aspect of someone who is charismatic but maybe dangerous. Sylfir can be weak but strong at the same time which makes him more interesting, and it's difficult to know if he's dangerous or not. This comic is a romance with quite a lot of triangle love (with Sylfir loving women but other men loving him and ready to kill for him).

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I'm proud to be a female creator. I have seen a lot of movies and comics made by men and for men. So I decided to create series that I personally as a woman would like to read. A story focusing on a charismatic prince with other men desiring him.

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The Fetisches are dolls with an appearance of handsome men who serve their masters. Unfortunately they get mistreated and abused and some of them want revenge. The story begins with one fetisch winning a competition and is bought by a woman but he feels much stronger for her fiancé. A fetisch should protect his master and not another man/woman than his master. But this fetisch is so intrigated by his master's man and maybe will choose to protect him instead. This will lead to consequences...

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I like to show beautiful men. This story is made principally for women who like hunks.

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I'm proud to be a female creator. I have seen a lot of movies and comics made by men and for men. So I decided to create series that I personally as a woman would like to read. I saw so many movies with sexual feminine objects and I wanted to experiment with sexual masculine objects instead. A story focusing on fetisches who are beautiful manly sexual objects. Both the bad and the good fetisches are beautiful and will fight each others.

Logline - A Russian girl with a bunch of complexes and a pretty low self-esteem is saved from an evil “strega” spirit by a mysterious young woman. Her unexpected arrival evoked lots of existential questions, confused thoughts that led to the main character’s self-understanding and acceptance.

Quotation - "I'm sure this is not the end. Not for her, not for you, not for anyone who truly loves. I... now I know that death is not the end. Her ghost... no, her soul has been waiting for you for so long! Your love won't let you both get lost. It's just that now you have to wait each other for a while, but then you will find your way to her again. Over the past few days a new world has opened up for me which has been so close all the time, but I, like a blind fool, never noticed anything! The mere Marilag’s existence proves us that it is possible to love each other even if death separates us... it proves that we don’t disappear-don’t disappear into nowhere as if we never existed..."

Having being brought up in an intolerant country where everyone should follow the classic “rules” where a girl should be humble, and nice, and smiley, and her only goal in this life is to be just a good wife for her husband and a good mother for her kids. Well, the beginning is not very rainbow-like especially if you happen to be a lesbian. My inspiration in writing is to bring as much lesbian fiction as it is possible: I just hope that anyone who is struggling at this moment, unable to leave their dark and lonely closets, could read my novels and feel at least a little bit better, a little bit comforted, a little bit inspired. Via my works I want all LGBTQ+ women understand that their happiness, their mental health, their feministic ideas, their human rights matter. Thank you ~~~

https://tapas.io/series/Firefly-Darkness2

The world all but ended in the 21st century, due to an unknown cataclysm.
In the three centuries since, American civilization has rebuilt itself into a technological hub equal to that of the world before the cataclysm-- though much history surrounding that era has been lost and the world itself has drastically changed.
Momoko Hitsuragi lives in this post-cataclysm world, a rising star in the high-risk sport of Roloquet whose life is forever changed the day the 'sky' above the New York complex falls...
" [...] you seem so desperately sad.... But even if things go poorly, I can't do nothing. It's not in me. I'm sorry. You can't grow by standing still."
As a writer, I love diving into new worlds and characters' lives, creating series that can focus on the human condition within the scope of the otherworldly.

Series link

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"Told you I wasn't bluffing."

What Making Lilah's Magic Shop Means to Me
As a little Chinese-American girl growing up in the 90s, I was hungry for representation of myself in media, and at the time, there was very little, so I began creating my own stories. Now that I'm older, this hasn't changed and I still love creating strong, imperfect, female protagonists and antagonists, the characters that I wish I had when I was younger. I just want more representation of the huge spectrum that is being a "woman" - Women can be feminine, masculine, abrasive, shy, smart, dumb, cold, kind, etc etc. So when creating Lilah's character, I tried to think of someone that you might not see often as the main character in a fantasy epic - and I came up with a very loosely Southeast Asian inspired magical girl who essentially saves the world using her smarts. I hope that my series inspires others to think outside of what the 'fantasy' genre has to entail and see themselves in the characters I create.

Hi there, I'm Kat and I make Dungeon Delves:

Logline: Relatable ranting about tabletop roleplaying games.

Quote: "I got dice, I got snacks, I got my character sheet... I got my game face!" (Ep 85)

My series started out as a way to keep me drawing everyday. While making it I have thrown myself into the TTRPG community, and am always incredibly happy and humbled when people respond with how they relate to my content. This is important to me, because it helps show that the general feelings conveyed in the silly stories are universal, and not unique to any one gender. I try to focus on the light, funny moments of inclusivity that we can all come together and laugh about.

Logline: A popular "mean girl" has to protect the naïve new girl from her controlling, manipulative bad boy ex—and also her own lack of confidence.

Quote: "So sorry I'm not the good little follower you fell in love with. I know I can do better than you now, so that's what I'm doing. Must really hurt your ego, huh?"

The main protagonist, Pearl, starts out the story shy and naïve with little confidence, but she still has her own strength—she's kind, but also cautious and can be downright cunning. The story also deconstructs misogynistic YA romance tropes and tackles topics like confidence, self-worth, body image, and finding strength in "feminine" things like fashion and makeup that are usually dismissed as frivolous. Not to mention the importance of girls supporting girls!

For me, being a woman creator has never been unusual or a big deal. I have a background in fanfiction and platforms like Tumblr and Wattpad, which are all very female-dominated, so I never felt out of the norm. However, it's also always been important to me to have characters in my stories whose identities are underrepresented in fiction—or often poorly represented, as is the case with women and girls. I try to make a conscious decision to stay away from harmful tropes and worn-out archetypes or at least subvert or deconstruct them. Not even in an on-the-nose girl-power-smash-the-patriarchy way, but by treating strong women and capable girls as a completely natural thing, because in a truly equal world, such things should be normal and natural. I stand for equality, and those values always make their way into my writing, even if I don't usually call attention to it.

Logline:
Follow the Career of Catarina Suzuki as she breaks into the cutthroat Japanese pro boxing world! She'll have to navigate her new coach's family problems, her gym's crumbling reputation, and her own flaws to make a name for herself!

Quote: "I don't care how strong Sascha is... I'm not gonna lose my dream here!" - Catarina Suzuki, chapter 2, page 31!

I'm openly trans and lesbian, and I've tried making webcomics in the past, but before I knew I was a woman I could never get myself to work on them for long. Being a woman is as important to my writing on Catspaw, it's borne from my desire to see myself and other girls represented in sports action comics and manga! Comics tend to back away from being too "out there" with main characters, "Cat" is a mixed japanese/african american trans woman, but so is the singer Avu-Chan in real life! People aren't just one thing in real life, and boxing is a sport with a lot of potential for diversity. I want to give girls like me a comic that is a little different than the usual and I hope it inspires more girls to get into boxing too!