lowering the bar for strong female characters?

[dilletante]

i keep seeing tweets referencing this article in thedissolve about strong female characters, and it keeps leaving me with this weird elephant-in-the-room feeling. especially when i get to the end and it says that a good test for whether an allegedly strong female character is a good one is whether you would want to be her

Comments

[desireearmfeldt]

The world still needs more strong female protagonists, yes. :)

Also, "would I want to be this character?" is an odd metric. I understand why it could be useful as a test for "strong" characters, but there are plenty of cool, compelling fictional characters that I totally want to read/watch/write about and would not actually want to be in real life. Or, you know, interestingly screwed up characters. Most (but not all) of whom I would describe as "strong characters."

[desireearmfeldt]

Also (after taking a look at the actual article), I think the reason the article is talking about supporting characters only is because it's talking about a specific phenomenon that pertains to female supporting characters in fiction with male protagonists: i.e., wanting to have a "strong female character" and then making her plot-irrelevant or a reward for the male protagonist or a victim to rescue, etc. etc. If the female character *is* the protagonist -- well, okay, you could have a really faily movie that narratively subordinated the female protagonist to the male secondary characters in any or all of these ways, but perhaps we've progressed far enough that movie-writers are not doing that so much to their actual female protagonists. When they write any.

(I don't know, I haven't seen a lot of recent movies, especially actiony ones, let alone ones with female protagonists, so I don't have evidence to base an opinion about how they're being treated these days.)

[mzrowan]

Maybe she's not so much setting a low bar as thinking, "This would be a nice, achievable first step." ;-)

[dilletante]

if so, that's a real cop-out. there have been movies with strong female protagonists all my life. when i said "strong female character" makes me think of maleficent, i was just trying to pick a very recent example; really it makes me think of nancy from a nightmare on elm street (1984), or wendy torrance from the shining (1980) (who spends the whole latter half of the movie screaming, but she's screaming while fighting off her possessed-axe-murderer husband and successfully saving her child).

it may be that nowadays writers are more often priding themselves on having stronger female supporting characters, and i agree that it's fair to ask them to be held to the same standards as male characters. but i really don't want that to be all that the phrase "strong female character" comes to mean.

[mzrowan]

While there have always been some around, I think we've actually regressed from where we were in the 80's. The other day I saw Jurassic Park for the first time, and I was struck by how awesome the female characters were (they had skills! and bravery! and used them in pivotal moments!), in a way that made me realize that it would be usual to see that much, and that particular kind of, awesomeness today.

[chienne_folle]

*nod* That's what I was thinking, too.

[flexagon]

I feel like it's pretty common for me to find supporting characters more interesting than main characters. In some ways they offer a broader canvas -- they don't have to WIN, after all. So I don't really find it strange for an article on strong characters (of either gender) to focus on non-protagonists.

[rednikki]

Or Lieutenant Abbey Mills in Supernatural. Or Sarah Manning in Orphan Black. Just to name a couple more. TV seems to do a better job with strong female characters than film.

I think the writer kept coming up with supporting characters because she couldn't come up with a lead female, besides Sandra Bullock in Gravity.