Why is What Makes a "Strong" Female Protagonist SO Complicated?

Seriously, from the same mouth I'll hear people say that a strong female character isn't a character who acts masculine, who isn't sexual, who isn't nonsexual, who isn't typically feminine... so what IS it?
Like on one extreme you have people saying a character like Katniss from the Hunger Games isn't a strong female character because she's just a male character reskinned as female, her 'strength' coming from the denial of typically feminine ideas. On the other end you have people complaining that I dunno... the girls from Frozen aren't strong female characters because a man influences their actions, one of them is obsessed with being with a man, and they wear dresses, among other things
If I were in charge of something and were told have have a strong female character, I'd be TERRIFIED, because it really seems like a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation, where doing anything masculine is seen as a betrayal, and anything feminine is viewed as retrograde

 

i stg you already made like four threads about this already.
unless im imagining that or something.

 

To quote a friend of mine "*****es be crazy"

 

What makes it so complicated? Because viewers are tw-

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There will always be people out there who will complain about things so people will respond and them and make them feel like what they said mattered to someone. My advice is worry less about the negativity and try to enjoy the positive things about life.

 

Is there a need to keep asking this same question over and over again?

 

Strong female characters are characters that are believable, easy to empathize with and multi-faceted.

Characters who are marketed as a representation of actual females, in other words. Female gamers want someone they can aspire to be/admire as a game character. I think it's safe to say that most of them aspire to be more than a collection of fetishes.

 

I agree with Makaze. The personality should be believable, should not be offensive to some people, easy to like, and she should be one who female gamers look up to.

 

That sounds like the ideal for a good character period, but people get focused on other things. It doesn't matter that she has a complex motive... SHE WORE A DRESS!?
It doesn't matter she has an interesting and flawed personality... SHE WANTS TO GET MARRIED!? To a MAN!?
And the the reverse sort of thing when you have a female character that doesn't have overtly feminine traits.
Honestly probably comes from how absolutist our society is. There's a dogged refusal to believe that characters are a sum of parts, rather than extreme defining characteristics. I suppose there's a bit of (justified) paranoia that any characteristics applied to a character are there to fuel some guy's fetish, but I dunno, it seems like we're more focused on shaming girls for liking certain things than trying to actually find a wya to make this work better.[DOUBLEPOST=1402959464][/DOUBLEPOST]

You can't quantify 'inoffensive'
And there's already a bit of a paradox in expecting a 'believable' character from a game or movie, since they're scripted, voiced by charismatic actors. Our media isn't about capturing realism, it's about capturing ideals

 

Oh, I'm sorry. Please show me these character who fit what I said and are female in a popular game. I didn't realize they existed.

p.s. Lara Croft does not fit.

 

Well I've actually been talking about movies, if that wasn't indicated by my original post.
Samus is Metroid Fusion maybe? Jade from Beyond Good and Evil? A Final Fantasy character? Some of the girls from Assassin's Creed games? Female squadmates in Mass Effect? Most of the Goddesses in Kid Icarus Uprising? Midna in Zelda Twilight Princess? I dunno, quite frankly gaming is way behind movies in terms of women's rights, and we're just now getting movies praises for having female main characters

 

Can't speak for Samus but from what I understand she is not exactly a narrative-based character. In fact her gender is irrelevant because it's a combat based series.

Beyond Good and Evil is far from popular. It's the definition of niche.

Can't speak for Mass Effect but from what I have seen the females are not realistic or easy to empathize with at all.

Assassin's Creed has blatantly refused to use a female main character. "We'd have a thousand man-hours in rendering her ovaries alone! How can we manage that with Ubisoft's meager resources?"

This isn't about rights. It's about representing the player themselves.

Same with films, really.

Look into the Bachdel test as a general rule if you haven't already.

 

I specifically mentioned Metroid Fusion because it's the only narrative focused Metroid prior to Other M, gives us a fair bit of characterization to Samus.
Beyond Good and Evil, yeah. I'm not actually terribly familair with it, I've just watched a Let's Play, but the way people constantly demanded a sequel led me to believe it was more popular than it was (500,000 sales isn't THAT bad though)
Mass Effect... well the empathy thing is going to be insanely subjective, isn't it? But they are multi-faceted, and I find them believable.
Assassin's Creed blatantly refused to use a female AVATAR in a multiplayer mode. Earlier this year they released a game with a female protagonist, and there have been plenty of other female characters before that.

Bechdel test is definitely an interesting look at the trend. A shame people mistook it as a way to measure a film's quality.

 

Make well rounded characters that aren't based purely upon their sex. The Bechdel Test is used to judge whether a piece of media, specifically fiction, represents women in a non stereotypical way, effectively.
The test is that there must be at least two female characters and they have to talk about something that isn't related to a man. Surprisingly, very few films pass the test considering the simple, if specific, criteria.

I'll give Rihanna Pratchet her due, the Tomb raider reboot showed a well rounded Lara who was a survivor, not a victim. Though the story rarely conveyed this, her characterisation was ok at it: not fantastic, but better than almost every other game.

Just read up on it, plenty of opinions.

 

It's not complicated at all, really. All you need to do is write a believable, powerful, nuanced, three dimensional character and make them female. Tackling issues like society's conception of femininity (like Katniss in The Hunger Games to an extent), the position of women (like marriage in Austen's novels), or defying the gender binary in general get you bonus points, but there doesn't have to be a difference in writing male and female characters.

If you're familiar with the show It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia there's a great story behind the character of Sweet Dee. Dennis, Mac, and Charlie are all fun and unique characters, well-written for the genre. When the actress who plays Sweet Dee (can't remember her name atm) auditioned for the role she told them that she found it frustrating that Sweet Dee had comparatively few lines and was under-developed in comparison. When she vocalized this, she was told "we really just don't know how to write female characters" to which she told them you just write them as you would a male character. The show underwent a number of revisions after that and Sweet Dee is, again for the genre & compared to the male main characters, a "strong female character."

The idea of the Strong Female Character doesn't necessarily mean she must be some badass. One of my favorite tumblr posts of all time:

http://madlori.tumblr.com/post/51723411550/rebloggable-by-request-well-first-of-all

A number of male protagonists could easily be female with little to no changes to their character -- which is an issue of representation as much as writing good characters. This is why a series like Mass Effect, where you can play as either gender with little to no changes to the storyline or character of Shepard, is so important. I find female Shepard more compelling because of Jennifer Hale and being in lesbians with Liara because the idea of a military woman leading the galaxy through a war with the Reapers has far more power, to me, than a man doing it, because it rejects the typical notion of military and masculinity (not to say that female Shepard is masculine or feminine, that more depends on the user's choice). But point being, there's objectively no difference in the character being male or female -- so why not have both -- and therefore a nuanced, well-written Shepard is a Strong Female Character. It's a similar situation for me in Knights of the Old Republic 2, where you can also choose between playing male or female, though female is the "canon" option. The importance of the Exile's character is that she

Spoiler: KotOR 2

easily forms connections with people through the Force, is a naturally compelling, charismatic, and empathetic person through Star Wars mumbo jumbo I won't bore you with

Empathy is a traditionally feminine trait and having her embrace it and be empowered by it, again, gives more weight to her character for me. So gender can be of consequence to the character if the writer would like but it's not by any means mandatory.

Edit Another great example to talk about here is Orlando by Virginia Woolf; it's a loose biography of her friend and lover Vita Sackville-West, a woman, but the main character (Orlando) is a man. The themes of gender and sexuality are therefore central to the work (as they were to Vita Sackville-West and Virginia's relationship with her).

http://www.shmoop.com/orlando-woolf/

 

Jade's good enough. She's a cool character.
Final Fantasy has some terrible representative characters. Tifa is a big sex appeal character made for hentai.

Mass Effect does it well, as does most all Bioware games. Morrigan, Aveline, Traynor, Tali, Ash, Chakwas, Juhani, Bastilla. All good characters, all independent, all could be men because their characters are effectively gender neutral. That also make a good one, someone who is easily relatable no matter the sex.

In terms of movies the only female I can think of right now is Ripley from Alien. She was bloody good.

My creative writing lecture talked about this. He was at a book fair and was on a panel with other male writers and asked questions. One asked all of them 'How do write female characters?' and many of the others said they try to imagine being a woman. My lecturer said that he imagined a good character, and the rest would follow. I have to agree. Many reasons women are so poorly characterised and portrayed is because writers think of them as women and build from their. It leads to the unfortuante pitfall of using lazy stereotypes and creating characters who are tokens for something else. If you read novels, you'll see good female characters are ones who act just like a well rounded person would.

Actually i've just realsied, most of the time, my best writing has just come from sexless characters. I wrote about an astronaut window cleaner who loved their children, but I never once stated their sex or gender. I thought of him as a man, but It easily could've been a woman without any shift in my writing. It's just better without being sexed apparently.

 

I read an interesting article a while ago about the Bechdel Test and how even if a film passes it, it still isn't necessarily indicative of a strong female character. The article put forward a proposed 'Mako Mori Test,' which I think is more fitting (if still lacking in some departments):

 

It's only good for judging a trend though. Plenty of terrible movies pass the bechdel test, while good ones fail, and there can be a variety of reasons. Star Wars Episode4 fails the test, but that's because at it's core the story only follows three characters.

See, I don't get why avoiding conventions is automatically bonus points, for one thing. The action shouldn't be praised, the execution should, and the point I was getting at with the OP was that while there's this angle from your view, there's an equally strong opposing view that says what you're saying goes against the ideas of women's rights. That's two terrifying rocks to be caught between, if you're in charge of making a product, I think.

On the number of male characters who could be femael... that I really agree with. I think there's way less importance to gender than people seem to think there is, except in certain contexts. I'd like to see more games opt to offer a male and female character in the future, though hiring an actress to redo every line of dialog would be a pretty significant effort in more story driven games.

On the Mass Effect thing... that's an interesting view, but I kinda feel like it doesn't make that much sense in the context of the universe. In the Mass Effect universe you have a pretty optimistic future where nobody seems to really care what gender you are or your orientation. In the context of Mass Effect, a women leading the defense against the Reapers isn't really anything special at all
Also Shepard isn't really masculine or feminine... or really anything, besides a few gender sensitive scenes. Shepard is a very neutral character, with only ME3 really giving them any defining characteristics.

But yeah, what a lot of you guys are saying is that a strong character is a strong character, gender doesn't matter, and I agree, but that's not really what the world at large expects when they talk about a 'strong female character'

 

Not bad at all.

 

Final Fantasy has representations covering pretty much every par of the spectrum, honestly.