What Makes a Strong Male Character?

When a character sets off on a journey, they come to face a multitude of challenges and obstacles meant to sway them from their path. What determines a character's strength is what lets them face these challenges while maintaining their integrity. If the story starts with the main being a weak-willed character, he/she is only so because he/she has no core beliefs or drive; nothing to stand for and nothing to push them forward.

How we apply this to gender depends on social status and the status quo for that gender. Strong female characters are usually depicted as non-submissive, independent, and pretty much just the complete opposite of the stereotypical damsel in distress that mainstream society might expect. These girls break that mold with their own sense of style and beliefs, and that's the most important part because it also shows a strong sense of personality; a core that cannot be compromised despite what the world tells them.

For males, there's the pressure of being dominant alpha-male to the point of being near-tyrannical, but again, these kinds of characters are usually made that way by their environment, be it their history with a parent (namely the father, of course) or by their equally dominant-minded peers. They don't own that personality because it's not really who they are or who they're comfortable being; that's just the persona that was adopted to cope with their harsh upbringing. Here's what I think to be a prime example of a strong male character: Vash the Stampede from Trigun is an extreme pacifist in that he refuses to harm or kill anyone, despite the fact that he is constantly surrounded by murderers and bounty hunters (and this is true for all the other men in the series, by the way). His ability to work his way around killing his opponents even though none would show him such kindness is seen as a strength because it's the result of him keeping to the kind of person he is and wants to be. It's an uncompromisable integrity and sense of self despite society telling him that "this is what men have to be in this world".

In a nutshell, what makes a strong gender-specific character is how they resist the gender mold and just stay true to themselves.