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Trope Talk: Strong Female Characters

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Why is writing girls difficult?

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This is a legit question, I swear. More than half the population is girls

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But it feels like there are only like five girl characters in existence

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There's the mom, the damsel, the hardened badass, the sexy one and the silly one, but if you look at the dude archetypes

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You've got way more variety

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There's the paragon, the big friendly guy, the smart guy, that dark misunderstood one, the Moral gray area, the team dad, the lancer

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and so many more. Hell, even the everyman is a dude why?

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This isn't meant to be accusatory in any way

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I've honestly been trying to figure this out because I have so much trouble with this.

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The first piece of major writing I did had precisely one female character.

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She was pretty and demure and cried a lot and had healing powers.

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It was a disgrace really.

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The thing is, when people notice this problem the first solution tends to be to take a fully developed male character and turn him into a girl

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Take the big guy now he's a girl.

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Smart guy --> smart girl. And this can totally work

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But sometimes you get weird translation errors where traits affiliated with the archetype clash with their gender.

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Like when you take a grizzled soldier badass and make him a her

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There's a weird tendency for her to spout a bunch of cookie cutter

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"Don't be such a girl," stuff every other minute

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Because of course in fictional militaries the overwhelming attitude is very classic Macho.

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So when you fit a female character in there you get a weird bit of character whiplash when her own Machismo is expressed by calling

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Unimpressive behavior womanly.

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Like, girl

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Own yourself

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By the way this character is pretty much what people are referring to half the time when they scornfully call someone a "Strong female character."

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The other half they're talking about a Bayonetta type who is threateningly sexy.

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The I'll kick your ass and look good while doing it variety, which is just a variant on the aforementioned sexy archetype.

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Actually more specifically

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It's a repurposing of a villainous female archetype. The dominatrix kind of villain who's both sexy, and intimidating.

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You can totally take that archetype and turn it into a hero

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But that's actually a new development since for a few centuries there, women weren't allowed to have sex drives

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So of course only evil women could be dangerously sexy.

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But anyway, there is another instance of that cookie-cutter gender swap thing where the translation error doesn't manifest in the character

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But in the reception of the character.

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Like, well... not to open a can of worms, but like Rey from The Force Awakens.

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I was so surprised when I went online after I saw the movie, and everyone was complaining that Rey was an OP Mary Sue

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because when I saw that movie

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It looked like a faithful recreation of episode four, magic space orphan and all.

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Rey and Luke were the same character with a slightly different attitude

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But a chunk of the internet went berserk.

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Now admittedly the internet is in a constant state of going berserk over something or other, but this one kind of hurt.

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Because I really liked Rey.

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I liked her curiosity, her experimentation with her powers.

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One of the most complained about scenes when she manages to mind-trick the guard was one of my favorites because

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It was obvious she'd grown up hearing stories about what the Jedi could do and as soon as she learned she was force sensitive

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She started trying new things she'd heard about in stories

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And I really liked that because it was exactly what I would do. She felt like a real person to me.

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But her confidence and the rapid growth of her powers flipped some rage switch that wonderboy fighter pilot chosen one Luke Skywalker hadn't.

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And we can argue about why all day long, but I'd rather not

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Because fundamentally, I think the problem here isn't gender specific at all

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I think it's just symptomatic of a much larger characterization problem.

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The root of the error, I think, is that writers oftentimes draw inspiration more from other stories than they do from reality.

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And it's a sad truth that up until a few decades ago there were basically four or five girl characters.

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You got your fairy tale princesses, your moms, your femme fatales, and your occasional viking warrior woman.

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And the characters ended up getting recycled as a consequence of the fact that most writers are inspired to write by absorbing what other people write.

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The original error and girl characterization is yes rooted in centuries of dude centric storytelling

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But the reason why it propagated is I'm pretty sure this and then within the past few decades

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You suddenly got this moment of clarity where people started asking

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"Why does this character have to be a dude?"

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And that's how you got the cookie cutter gender swap stuff which by the way was

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The second approach toward female characters that I ended up writing into that world.

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I had a warrior prince I decided to add some estrogen to.

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Again, shamefully lax writing on my part, but in my defense

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I was like 12

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But I think this idea that we should write from archetypes is the root of the problem

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Because if we were drawing characters from our lives instead

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I'd say the vast majority of us have been exposed to all kinds of fascinating people of every gender.

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Archetypal writing is what leads to half a million identical heroes fighting the other half million villains.

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There's nothing wrong with starting from other stories, but there are so many benefits to drawing from reality too.

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Now, I'm better at actually drawing that I am at writing

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So let's use that as an analogy for a minute.

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Say you want to learn how to draw which I heartily recommend. Say you start by drawing cartoon characters you like.

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Or by getting one of those how to draw anime books and filling in the lines. You can get really good at that

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But in the end you'll be making what is functionally someone else's art style

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And if that art style doesn't cover how to draw, I don't know, dogs

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How are you gonna draw that dog you want to draw?

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Well, you can google how to draw a dog and follow the instructions

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But that'll get you have someone else would draw a dog. Do this with enough things and you end up with this weird Franken-style.

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Where your art is a patchwork of other people's art.

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Sometimes the style discrepancy is very visible

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Especially when you have, for example, very stylized cartoon characters in front of incredibly detailed backgrounds.

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Or very Disney looking humans with more Looney Tunesy animals.

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But there's another way to learn art and it's pretty much the only way to develop a unique style

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And guarantee that whatever you end up making, it'll be something nobody else could have made.

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Unless, of course, they were imitating you.

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Obviously it's life drawing.

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But more specifically, it's developing artist eyes

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You sort of need to be able to look at the world and see in your head how you draw what you're seeing.

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Animators watch people moving and learn how to get across incredibly complex motion without compromising the simplicity of their visual style

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Painters see swathes in color and contemplate the brush and palette knife tricks they'd used to recreate it.

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Graphic artists see light and shadow and learn how to get across a realistic human face with only a few blocks of black and white.

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And writers see the people around them and see the characters that their personality could contribute to.

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There are story characters that are so vivid and unique that you can practically hear the person who inspired their creation.

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Any given Terry Pratchett novel is full of them

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A character inspired by life is going to feel so much realer than a character inspired by another character

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No matter how good the original character is learning from someone else's style will only show you how to do what they've already done.

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If you want to do something new or take the character in a unique direction

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You'll need to draw on your experiences from reality instead.

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So even though statistically speaking the vast majority of us know at least as many girls as guys

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The tendency towards archetypal writing leads us to disregard these people when the time comes to design our characters.

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And though there's nothing wrong with drawing inspiration from the works of others

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If you don't add any of your own observations or experiences your character is going to be wrote.

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But there is, I think, another element contributing to a certain amount of the trouble people have with writing girl characters, specifically

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And that's that in our culture there are things that girls are supposed to be

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The most obvious one of these is pretty. If you're not pretty, it's almost like you're doing something wrong.

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Now this is why girl characters in almost any story are going to be traditionally attractive regardless of species, profession or circumstance.

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It just feels like the norm. The baseline. Now obviously there are exceptions

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But the mere fact that there are notable exceptions kind of reveals that there's a rule here.

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Now I like pretty girls as much as anybody else, but we don't write characters we idealize all the time.

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Or at least we shouldn't because that'd be kind of boring

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But there are other girl rules in place that have much more of a character impact than simple appearance, because beyond the physical

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There are social rules we kind of absorb and assume are the norm again most obviously

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There's been this idea for a very long time that when things get serious the girls hang back and the dude folk sort things out

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It's a chivalry thing

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But it becomes almost cartoonish when it shows up in Modern Cinemas favorite action comedy trope of the decade

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The ludicrously competent girl training the completely inexperienced schlub

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Everywhere from the Matrix to the Lego movie the ludicrously badass strong female character with years of experience, building on already extant native talent

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Hangs back in the finale while the schlub with a week of training saves the day.

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And it feels natural.

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No matter how badass she is, she ends up being a support character because girls support dudes in our culture and again there are exceptions

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But again there are notable exceptions and again this isn't accusatory

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It's just something to be aware of. We want to write good stories

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It's good to be aware of the things we silently assume have to be there

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There are a few more rules in place that are less rigid but still present for example

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Girls aren't generally supposed to take up space so their visual designs will tend towards compactness either short or on significant occasions tall but willowy

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You end up with a lot of socially motivated trends over an entire gender of character, and yes dudes too, and again

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It's because we're writing from archetypes. Not experience. We know people or are people who aren't traditionally attractive

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We know dudes who cry and girls who are six foot six and bench eye beams in their spare time

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And we know the impracticalities maintaining a glamour routine on a daily basis, let alone, while stuck on a desert island or an Alien planet

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We know this stuff, but because we're writing from other stories all this cool real stuff doesn't get included which is a shame really

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So yeah.