/lit/ - Literature

>>10580866
It's not. Write as if she were a normal liberal dude if you're going for a lite pixie cut girl. If you want a butch lesbian write as if it's dude who's constantly trying to prove that he's masculine. Now post more qt pixie cut grills preferably with qt feet.

Because consistent abstract models for what constitutes a tomboy are vanishingly rare and deceptively difficult to ascertain philosophically. Empirically, the vast majority of purported tomboys are actually frumpy sexless women and would-be thots, with all the worst most awful traits of femininity that make women unsuited to being written idiographically as characters, let alone protagonists, merely submerged due to mental defects. But even once the empirical cruft has been dispensed with, even if there is some kind of general agreement that the sample of tomboys subject to inquiry is at least polythetically representative of "tomboys," there will be virtually no agreement on what conceptually determines the essence of tomboyism. Many men will strongly emphasise and even sexually prefer epiphenomenal traits like inclination toward physicality, or the dangerous red herring of not wearing makeup (let alone wearing "minimal makeup," a common secondary characteristic of the worst sort of basic bitch thot, the basic bitch thot who proudly asserts that she isn't a basic bitch thot). More thoughtful and less thot-fooled are the men who will try to isolate the necessary and sufficient characteristics of the ideal tomboy, either ideal-typically or in esse, proceeding dialectically between morphology and ontology. But once you have discarded all thots, you have necessarily entered into a dangerous no man's land of completely insane women, strange Jewish women who fall in and out of love with you seemingly at random, crazed big-titty Catholic girls who defy every stereotype about capricious femininity you've ever known but then break your heart and leave you in the end anyway, sports bra-wearing Chinese lesbian sadists who only date you because they hate women more than you do, loathsome hags whose antics and vagations conform to no ideal type, and whose unique essence may eventually include fist-fucking a lipstick femme pillow princess who is actually straight and confused herself. The true tomboy is the intersection of planes that logically cannot meet, the masculine in the feminine. To write the tomboy protagonist would be to write the protean androgyne, Shakespeare's muse and Coleridge's ideal, whom even they glimpsed only dimly and infrequently. It would be to catapult humankind into the next stage of our evolution, the merger of being and becoming only dreamt-of since we first began to think. If you achieve even a dim echo of this, a silent place of contemplation free from thots, you will have helped to clear the way for her appearance.

>>10580930
This was very intresting anon.

>>10580930
ebin

>>10580866
The problem is the weak man they might fall in love with. This only works on teenager content. If you want to write criticism about it try making a weak man completing this woman and then realizing she is in fact weak as a female and he dumping her.

>>10580866
it's not
you must be gay, OP

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by this.

Do you mean,
a) it's hard to write a convincing, three-dimensional tomboy character?
or
b) it's hard to write a "good" tomboy character, one the reader actually cares about?

If a) it's because you haven't seen enough tomboys in real life, and that's because they are rare-ish. Fortunately you learn a lot about people just watching them; you don't really need to interact, so go somewhere public and watch the people, and see how tomboyish girls behave.

If b) it's because all characters are hard to write well, haha.

You have to decide exactly what sort of a tomboy you have in mind. Is it a girl who doesn't have strong feminine instincts, or one who has *latent* femininity?
Obviously the second type is more fun, and easier to make the reader care about.

tl;dr

If you just want an easy cute tomboy character in your book, copy Serval-Chan from Kemono Friends. If you take her ears away, no-one will notice.

>>10580930
Jesus christ. This is the content I crave.

>>10580930

this is like a monologue from gravitys rainbow well done anon

>>10580930
Kekekek a lot of bullshit mixed in with interesting insight at the end about Shakespeare, Coleridge and an ideal overcoming normative gender traits and identity

>>10582655
Shakespeare and Coleridge probably liked tomboys because they wanted women with the sophistication and culture of men at a time when women did not go to university. The tomboy is truly a degenerate type and therefore has no place in great literature except as an example of failure. However, we can speculate on a noble tomboy who became tomboy out of revulsion for typically feminine vanities like gossip and excessive concern with physical experience; usually we expect such a tomboy to have excessive or precocious intellectual development. However, as this noble tomboy matures and begins to see how the flaws of femininity are only excesses or defects in authentically feminine virtues, we expect her to once again integrate herself into femininity without wholly discarding her previous revulsion for feminine vices.

>typically feminine vanities like gossip and excessive concern with physical experience
physical appearance*

> we expect her to once again integrate herself into femininity without wholly discarding her previous revulsion for feminine vices.
Just as a man might feel an initial revulsion to male brutality and chauvinism and develop a fascination with feminine characteristics as a reaction: as he grows older we expect him to see how this pig-headed maleness is actually just a degenerate form of male virtues like physical courage, and to embrace masculinity once again. So the tomboy eventually should realise that the vapid preoccupation of women for gossip and lipstick is actually a degeneration of authentically feminine virtues: to be beautiful for the sake of one's partner, which is not vicious but virtuous.

>>10582678
Pretty much desu, tomboys are great for development, the initial break shows an understanding and disillusionment of negative feminine traits that makes them so relatable, but it is that dialectic back into an improved feminine which poses the real attraction

>>10582722
>>10582691
Makes me consider a similar process towards the masculine, might make a post about that later for book recs

I could do it pretty well, I think. I was bullied by a Tomboy when I was in primary school.

It's always distracting to write when you have an erection.

>>10580866

I dated a tomboy once, and yes she was a confused bisexual who would find out she's actually lesbian and choose a girl over me.

I hope this is not a general feature, but she was extremely vapid. You know these people fully drained of life, the kind that occupies their whole day with anxiety over a simple activity such as doing groceries or going to a class or a certain exam? She would do one relevant thing per day and then spend the rest on the same repetitive anxiety-related tasks such as eating-toast ritual or vacuuming-room ritual. She was also one of these very passive people who engaged in a cult of "lightness" and pleasant/smooth things such as listening to the Beatles, walking under rains, Ghibli movies and classical-ish French stuff.

She of course was very sensitive which is cute for the first months but then you realize she is utterly incapable of holding ground in a discussion, forcing you to either measure yourself and carefully thread the line of not-offending-her, or break her porcelain heart and risk losing all your progress towards any kind of reciprocity. Said reciprocity never came of course, not because she didn't want to but because whatever feelings she could express were only representations of actual feelings, embellished by her naive and largely neutral views of the world.

With all that said, she would get really built up from all the repressed feelings and from all the lightness of being constantly surrounding her, and contrast that to a pretty formidable (but infrequent) sexual appetite. If you ask me, I'd say it's not worth the effort at all, not even for herself, because most of it is wasted away in realizing sex is not something easily embellished and nothing like the softcore stuff she enjoyed watching from time to time. Can't blame her for simply staying with another girl at all.

So in my own little anecdotal experience I'd personally have a lot of trouble writing a tomboy, because it would come out as really bad French cinema. Alas, it would have been an accurate description of reality.

>>10580866
Because these days 9/10 times they turn out to be traps

>>10580866
just watch more anime with boku girls

It’s not. You’re just swine

>>10582848
>She was also one of these very passive people who engaged in a cult of "lightness" and pleasant/smooth things such as listening to the Beatles, walking under rains, Ghibli movies and classical-ish French stuff.
Awhh that sounds lovely
>tfw tomboy gf who retained comfy feminine sensibilities

>>10580930
>But once you have discarded all thots, you have necessarily entered into a dangerous no man's land of completely insane women, strange Jewish women who fall in and out of love with you seemingly at random, crazed big-titty Catholic girls who defy every stereotype about capricious femininity you've ever known but then break your heart and leave you in the end anyway, sports bra-wearing Chinese lesbian sadists who only date you because they hate women more than you do, loathsome hags whose antics and vagations conform to no ideal type, and whose unique essence may eventually include fist-fucking a lipstick femme pillow princess who is actually straight and confused herself. The true tomboy is the intersection of planes that logically cannot meet, the masculine in the feminine. To write the tomboy protagonist would be to write the protean androgyne, Shakespeare's muse and Coleridge's ideal, whom even they glimpsed only dimly and infrequently. It would be to catapult humankind into the next stage of our evolution, the merger of being and becoming only dreamt-of since we first began to think. If you achieve even a dim echo of this, a silent place of contemplation free from thots, you will have helped to clear the way for her appearance.

>>10582848
Feels weird to read yourself in some anon's post, even when you know they couldn't possibly be talking about "you" specifically.

classical-ish French shit --> Ancients from around the planet
Beatles --> Arch Enemy, Otep
walking under rains --> Running in the rain to build endurance

Never considered any of those daily anxieties to be vapid, or life to be fully drained since there's adrenaline pumping and goals to surpass.

Have to admit the lack of holding ground in most conversations is frustrating; even if it's a good debate/conflict/argument that's interesting, it feels like normal people move way too fast. Except for rapport building, to get to those interesting discussions, which consists primarily of small talk (fuck talking about things nobody cares about) and moves way too slow. That small talk, the wasting time doing something boring when it could be interesting, that's what I'd considered vapid.


Anything you'd have said to her, if you found her heart wasn't made of porcelain?

>>10580930
if only we could get this kind of post once every day instead of once every month

>>10580930
Can you give me a "consistent abstract model" for literally any other archetype? Tomboy protagonist exist.

>>10583789

These things are not vapid in themselves, but her relation to them (and to me, and to her soon-to-have-become girlfriend, and to everything) certainly was. Perhaps given more space to write and knowing I'd be referring directly to her, I'd explain how she was simply not quite into anything she ever did. Whereas obsession is a serious issue even if you focus it on something socially acceptable (e.g workaholics), having a profound lack of profound interest for anything results (or stems from?) in a very frail personality.

Granted, I bet what I consider to be frivolous anxieties about life must have been very thrilling to her, because when you have her lack of motivation/drive everything becomes the unmovable object of godly paradoxes. What really got me angry at one point was that even admitting to herself that she wanted to be with another person was thoroughly avoided with the "lightness" of speaking in maybe's and "perhaps one day we'll be ok again..." . She's definitely a dreamer, which is at once captivating yet snaring, since waking up is not part of the plan at all, and at times she more or less purposefully sabotaged such wake up calls.

I hope she has realized she could feel things instead of thinking about feeling things, because in spite of being in the best of days with the person I am right now, I don't think I'll really allow myself to forget about her, if only as a cautionary tale that I shouldn't have burdened her with my company if she wasn't ready even to be on her own company. In other words, I kinda wish she would have endured me even though it would suck for us both, but now that it didn't happen I just hope she learns/have learned to enjoy things without rationalizing them into awful French cinema mode (soon as that happens she'd probably be able to say "fuck you" or at least "well we can agree to disagree" to someone in a discussion).

>>10583936
>>10582848
This makes me want to go outside and form some human connections for better or worse

I started dating a short haired Jewish girl that's bi and has anxiety and depression. This thread just scared the shit out of me.

>>10583994
Thoreau-ly agreed.
>Sorry, the pun was available.

>>10583936
Oh, damn. Seems like she was stumbling through life with her eyes half-closed, not even self-aware or mindful enough to know she was half-assing everything in an attempt to stay neutral or non-committal or whatever she was going for.

You've helped me see through some frivolous behavior of my own, so thank you for that, anon. Really hope she learned from you, as well, though I'm more inclined to hope your current relationship continues to be most enriching and enduring.

>>10584039
This is the worst reddit joke I have ever seen on this website. 0 gold for you, plese return from whence ye came

>>10584060
What the fuck is reddit?
0 shekels for you, fuckface.

Back in yer old hag's half-rott

>>10582848
Jesus this sounds like a girl I'm talking to right now

>>10584039

>Oh, damn. Seems like she was stumbling through life with her eyes half-closed, not even self-aware or mindful enough to know she was half-assing everything in an attempt to stay neutral or non-committal or whatever she was going for.

Definitely. I'm sure you'll push through as well, but I won't dwell on this because I have no plans to engage on lovelies with one of the 12 people posting in /lit/

>>10582678
On the contrary, the tomboy realizes that physical strength and intellect are truly the most important aspects of any human being and that it is necessary to maximize both traits in both sexes to create superior offspring, which may then reach for ever greater heights of human potential.

Someone post it

>>10580930
nice verbal masturbation that essentially said nothing.

>>10580930
>protean androgyne

yeah. or like children.

>>10580930
/lit/ is surprisingly fascinating tonight

>>10581032
>>10582641
>>10582644
>>10583757
>>10583793
>>10585031

>>10582731
I wanna see this.

>>10582731
I'd be interested

>>10580888
tfw when your quality post is ignored because somebody published an essay immediately afterwards

>>10580888
>>10585189
Aw :(
Your post had better practical advice.

Because it makes me hard desu

>>10580930

>>10580930
>pretentious bullshit with no substance
>/lit/ eats it up

>>10580930
>More thoughtful and less thot-fooled

>>10580930
So following this logic, are gay men the master race?

>>10580930

>>10584793
T. Envious Roastie

>>10580930
stealing this

>>10580930
>sports bra-wearing Chinese lesbian sadists who only date you because they hate women more than you do, loathsome hags whose antics and vagations conform to no ideal type, and whose unique essence may eventually include fist-fucking a lipstick femme pillow princess who is actually straight and confused herself

this is literally the protagonist of my novel of the last 5 years.......

wtf does this mean for the novel now

>>10580930
Who hurt you anon?
What was her name?

>>10585056
t. dyke

>10 images
>no Tomboys

I don't know if I'm more proud at /lit/ or disappointed in myself for coming here looking for this

>>10582722
This?

>>10580866
Why would it be? They are unoriginal and trite?

>>10586338
haha no theiryre cute silly

10580930
The rough schemata of a 'real' tomboy would be based on whatever the feminine is considered and how the 'masculine' anneals it. For most, the feminine is some vague model of seduction and the woman is using characteristically male tendencies in avoiding the affection of the boys around her. The aversion is necessarily caused by some kind of attention harnessed by said seduction, and is is nearly always assumed to be a perversion. It would be peculiar attentions from a father or cruel treatment from a mother.

The resulting characters are always flat because the model is inspired from a meme of adolescence. The feminine is a reasonable mystery pretty much defiant to all forms of ontology. In reality, females are nothing close to the feminine. The feminine is the prey that doesn't kill the predator. The morphic form is transmitted by something along the lines of a parent held in a relationship by their children. Martyrdom. Sacrifice by design. A bargain, gift, or pleasant happenstance. The allusion of something better. Tantalizing seduction of which the universe is born. In society it must remain virgin because consummation spells its death. I don't know what type of story could saliently extend the feminine to a person.

>>10586129

>>10586129

>>10586365
h-hi sarah

>>10587235
these things are fucking cringe

>>10580866
is this what a mgtow incel who has read heidegger sounds like

>>10589561
for >>10580930

>>10589566
maybe

bump

>>10585189
T-thanks for the compliment

>>10582848

I would like to add that, because every tomboy looks the same, every single one reminds me of the person I talk about. As an added effect, this thread has made me realize most of them probably have the same personality too, which is pretty disturbing.

>>10587631
gentlemen

>>10580930
this is good but stupid.

'tomboy' isnt some magical intersection of masculine and feminine. when u read about a 'tomboy' in some stupid Boxcar Children kids book what they mean is a girl that:

> conforms to a norms as an end to gain group approval (EXTREMELY feminine trait)
> those norms happen to be superficially masculine (immature)
> wants to be seen as having a unique identity (insecure)

its just a recognizable brand of immature and insecure femininity.

>>10582848
this post only confirms this >>10591846

post cute tomboys

>>10580866
Because you don't identify with them. You're not them. It's like trying to write a transgender lesbian. You'll never understand. Anything you produce will be like cardboard. Horrible tasting, recycled, and hollow. It will look like whatever you describe them as, and behave like a call of duty character.

>>10591846
This. It's also a role that doesn't make sense in our culture. Worse, what we do know about tomboys is from it's existence as a trope in bad writing. Op should not try to force tired tropes that only had relevance for a few decades after WWII

>>10580866
>>10580930
Just write her as a normal girl but make her good at sports and give her short hair. Like holy shit you fags are over thinking this way to much.

>>10594346
damn... you really blew the lid off that one

>>10594346
damn