Celebrating all those trailblazing female characters who are simultaneously beautiful, strong, practical, complex, and most importantly, are armed with two or more feet of steel. HELL YEAH!
DC Comics put up ALL the Amethyst shorts in high quality, inluding 1 and 7!
Have some sketches. No time to make anything new for the internet. This’ll probably be the last animated Amethyst news ever.
Thanks for putting up with me! :D
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(via sirnucleose)
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There is literally nothing better than a sexy, badass lady.
CHING MOTHERFUCKING SHIH
This lady was such a badass, I can’t count the ways, but let’s try.
She got married to an already successful pirate, Zheng Yi, and took over when he died. She was crazy strict to keep an iron fist over her fleet of pirates, and the punishments for stepping out of line were brutal. If you stole or looted from a town that provided assistance or tribute to the pirate fleet, Ching would chop your fucking head off with a battle axe and dump your lifeless body in the ocean. If you stole from the pirate treasury, or she thought you were stealing from the pirate treasury, Ching would chop your fucking head off dump your lifeless body in the ocean. Raping any captured female prisoners was punishable by immediate death. Fuck, if you had consensual sex while on duty you got your head chopped off and the woman was chucked off the boat no matter where they were at. Ching wasn’t fucking around, and she wanted to make damn sure you weren’t fucking around when you should have been working.
Two years after she took over, she got so notorious for ransacking towns and taking taxes on them that she pissed off the entire Chinese government, and sent out a massive fleet to bring her in line. Most pirates probably would’ve said this was out of their pay grade and taken off to hide out or ransack some other country.
Ching Shih said fuck that.
She not only faced them head on, she wiped the floor with them, killing hundreds and capturing sixty-something ships from the Imperial Fleet. Prisoners were given the choice of joining up or being executed on the spot. The Admiral of the Chinese navy, Kwo Lang, was so afraid of being captured by her or going back to admit he’d been beaten by her that he committed suicide.
For the next two years, Ching Shih not only kept on pirating, she fought off Chinese forces as well as Dutch and British warships that the navy called in to help. Finally the government gave up and offered her amnesty as well as amnesty for her then SEVENTEEN THOUSAND crewman. Ching Shih got to keep all her plunder, so she retired to the countryside where she opened up a brothel and lived until she was 69.
tldr: I’ve come to terms with the reality that I’ll never be as terrifyingly badass as this woman was.
Let’s face it, as much as I love fictional ladies with swords, actual real life ladies with swords are like a million times more badass.
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Our next lady with a sword is Saya from ‘Blood the Last Vampire’. No matter how many new versions are made of this, new animated series, live action etc. I still think the original movie is by far the best, even if it does raise so many questions and give no clear answers. This was one of the first anime I ever saw, a low quality VHS recording taped off late night Channel 4. I was about 16. It blew my mind.
Saya is an immortal vampire who looks like a teenage girl and who fights other vampires who seem to be a lot less sentient and a lot more bestial and monsterous than she is. She feels sort of sorry for them even though she knows that her job is necessary. She’s sort of cold and serious. She’s a fantastic swordswoman too. Saya is more than likely to be one of the sources of the western stereotype that all anime is hyper-violent and features teenage girls in school unifoms with katana; the movie was successful in both Japan and abroad and was created by an international team.
Fun Fact: Saya speaks both Japanese and English fluently, and unlike characters who are meant to have this trait in most anime, is played by a voice actress who actually does have a good grasp of English!
Fun Fact 2: Saya is VERY picky about katana she uses being the genuine article, not just through fussiness, but because a true katana with a folded blade is sharper, stronger and less brittle which is necessary to cleanly cut the Vampires, who can only be killed by taking a lot of damage in a short space of time.
Okay time to bring back GWS. Let’s start with Mulan.
Mulan is based on a Chinese legend about a badass lady who went to war against the Huns in place of her ailing Father. Some consider the Disney version quite insulting, see some discussion here.
Mulan in the Disney version is a clumsy girl who doesn’t quite feel right for the role life has given her of becoming an elegant wife, and is worried for her dad’s safety, so she cuts her hair and pretends to be a man, aided by her tiny, sassy, Eddie Murphey-Voiced dragon protector because no Disney Heroine is allowed to go anywhere without a sidekick (Why do none of these girls have friends!? They’re all outcasts who only talk to their pets).
She learns to fight, saves China and then inexplicably turns down the honour of a really important job from the Emperor to…go home? Okay, the ending is disappointing, but the film has some pretty fun, kickass moments.
Fun Fact: Mulan joins your party in Kingdom Hearts 2, initially as ‘Ping’ (Mulan pretending to be a man) with rather limited abilities, and then revealing her identity and becoming pretty awesome. She’s a skillful and reliable close combat character.
Julie D’Aubigny was a 17th-century bisexual French opera singer and fencing master who killed or wounded at least ten men in life-or-death duels, performed nightly shows on the biggest and most highly-respected opera stage in the world, and once took the Holy Orders just so that she could sneak into a convent and bang a nun. If nothing in that sentence at least marginally interests you, I have no idea why you’re visiting this website. (via Badass of the Week: Julie D’Aubigny, La Maupin) (thank you, Rachel!)
Wow, something to post on Girls With Swords! Hurrah!
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Agh, I need to think of some more girls with swords to post. I’ve thought of some. Just need to look for pics and do a little research. In the meantime, why not check out another tumblr you might like…
http://womenfighters.tumblr.com/
Women fighters in reasonable armour kicks so much arse. They post regularly with lovely art and stuff of ladies with cool battlegear that isn’t stupid chainmail bikini crap.
By the way, some of you following this stream may not be aware that I have another tumblr where I put my art and stuff. There are often girls with swords included in my art, so maybe you’d enjoy it!
