Building A Better Heroine

There’s been a huge push lately for “strong female characters”, but there’s also been a pushback because they aren’t GOOD characters. The usual suspects will insist this is because they hate women protagonists only to ignore the list of woman protagonists people like. Women kicking butt didn’t start with The Hunger Games, but tell that to the actress who played the lead. However, it feels like to many audiences of both genders that today’s “girlbosses” lack femininity. They lack compassion, they lack mercy, they lack a caretaker’s instinct. Instead the girlboss is basically a man with breasts, even taking on the same level of physical violence despite a traditionally smaller frame, except in video games, comics, and animation where they get a more masculine frame.

With the exception of feminists, usually the militant variety who seem to hate themselves and I’ll limit the political stuff as best I can, even women who are into the action genre reject the modern girlboss idea, and have a different opinion as to what a strong woman is in both fiction and reality. We’re of course focused on the fictional. This is of course ignoring those women who aren’t into action stories no matter what gender the gun-toting karate-kicking hero is because it’s not their kind of story. It’s like me and horror. I’m not into it so I don’t watch/read/play/listen to it. It boils down to statistics. Girls aren’t banned from the boys toys section, it’s just most of them aren’t into military toys and the ones that do have to deal with mom worried she wants to be a boy. And that was before modern perspectives that have pushed the tomboy back into that stereotype my generation tried to free them from.

So what would make a good action heroine, superheroine, sci-fi/fantasy main character of the female persuasion? I may be a dude but go through this site and you will see many female characters I grew up with, admire, and want to see more of done right. Women are awesome characters when they’re allowed to be characters and not stand-ins for “every woman” (or rather every militant feminist and activist/self-insert character). There are plenty of shows, movies, and other media where the woman saves the day while the men in the audience and in the world cheer them on. Why did they work when the modern incarnation doesn’t?

First, let’s not pretend a woman can’t be part of a legitimate fight scene with male opponents and come out the victor. It’s totally possible, but like a man there are certain rules that need to be followed. I, for example, as a male, would probably be the comic relief dude compared to the ladies there. However, neither of them look to be 95 pounds soaking wet. They are fit, clearly martial arts experts, and both characters (after a quick Wiki search) are police inspectors, presumably trained to fight. Cynthia Rothrock’s character struggles more with the final boss presumably (I don’t speak Chinese) because he’s highly trained, and because they wanted the final fight to feature both Rothrock and Michelle Kwan (aka Michelle Yeoh), a debut for the former and the first lead role for the latter. It makes the fight look cool and the villain loses.

They aren’t taking on an opponent a more powerful man couldn’t happen (Yeoh’s character’s boyfriend is killed in the movie) like nothing. They struggle, and the more they struggle the more we want to see them win. Taking out the flunkies is always easy even for the male heroes. They’re just cannon fodder to show how far the hero has come or his/her skills before dealing with the big bad, who is also coming in fresher because they haven’t fought five or six goons first. He’s the only one they struggle with, not counting the walking eyebrow who cheats with his knife.

When I played Soul Edge I always chose Seong Mi-na. She has a long range attack and uses her pole to do trick attacks I was relatively good at, given how poorly I am at these games. It’s a fighting style unique to her and one I enjoy. I tend to follow that with most fighting games because the girls have a more fun fighting style rather than the brawlers and power hitters that the men tend to be. The exception is Virtua Fighter, where I like to play a few different fighters including Chun-Li, and Marvel Vs. Capcom because of course I want to play as the MegaMan/Iron Man team-up. Making her like the male fighters wouldn’t be fun. What makes her stand out is a fighting style unique to her body type and personality. She’s not a dude, she’s a chick, and she fights like one, believably winning because she’s good enough to be chosen for a martial arts tournament with a cursed sword as the prize, proving she’s a capable fighter.

This is the most important detail when designing a female action hero: what sets her apart from a male counterpart. Sarah Conner may fight Arnold Schwarzenegger in her movies because half the time he’s playing the evil Terminator, but in his own movies where he’s the hero, he still struggles to fight off dudes his own size (when the director can find one). I just went back and rewatched his final battle with Bennett in Commando I won’t post here because we’re focused on the women fighters, but it isn’t an easy fight. There are times where it looks like he could lose, and most of the time he’s been mowing down flunkies like a shooting gallery. There’s also a scene where he has to use his smarts to get away from one of the bad guys to rescue his daughter, who showed she was her father’s daughter with various escape attempts, foiled mainly so the plot could continue happening.

If one of the biggest action characters in history needs to struggle with men approaching his strength level, what chance would a woman have? For Seung Mi-na to win she’s have to use her weapon, strike at pressure points, kick him hard between the legs, swipe at his face…she could win. She’s a martial artist who has fought some of the greatest fighters in her reality. She didn’t learn overnight to be that good. It was years of family training. She would earn that victory. In Commando we see that Arnie’s character is a former military fighter who did the dirty jobs. He earned those victories. If you play her right, Seung Mi-na earns the cursed sword. Rothrock and Kwan’s characters earned their victory and they were trained by their respective governments to kick butt. Compare that to Star Wars and Rei, who learned to be a Jedi with less training time than Luke had, and it took him years to do what she did practically overnight, with the only struggle being jumping vision-head first into a spiritual aspect of the Dark Side like a moron. If we’re coming to your character, male or female, already a badass there better be a reason why, and even then there are limits.

And then you will become a goofball who would never rape Elongated Man’s wife.

This is why making Wonder Woman into “Lady Kratos” or even “Xena: Warrior Princess” is a mistake. People love Xena but her backstory and the Hercules/Xena world lore leads her to be angry and ready for a fight. Diana, on the other hand, pre-52, isn’t supposed to be from the same type of Amazons as in the Greek myths. In fact, we see that the Greek myth style Amazons exist off of the island. Themyscira is called Paradise Island for a reason. While they train to fight, their society is based on truth, beauty, and love, traits that creator William Moulton Marston believed were the essence of womanhood. His wife and mistress did nothing to dissuade that notion, and it’s how Wonder Woman was for years. Batman was the fighter of the trinity and Wonder Woman was the heart. She can beat you down, but would search for the peaceful solution while promoting her ideals to “man’s world”. It’s why she has a magic lasso, not a sword like she does now. The New 52 and every post-comic appearances from the DCEU to Scooby-Doo seems to have forgotten that.

Even in the 1970s they made girl heroes to tell stories they couldn’t with male leads. Could you see Starsky and Hutch going undercover as beauty contestants when someone is trying to kidnap a defector from the USSR or ruin the event for revenge? I hope not. You call Charlie to send his “Angels” in to investigate. For all the issues I have with the Law & Order franchise, having a woman or two on a team that involves a lot of assaulted woman is a good idea, if any of them were any good at empathy and quite often they aren’t. Cagney and Lacey, or Angie Dickenson’s character on Police Woman had perspectives their male counterparts didn’t and were just as tough in their own way as the men in the department. Making women into men takes away that special element. There’s a reason Six Million Dollar Man spun off The Bionic Woman and until she changed networks they worked well together. Fans asked for Jamie Sommers to get her own show alongside Steve Austin, and they told stories with her and her backstory as a teacher and woman than they could with the testosterone-driven astronaut guy.

Speaking of bionics, watch Bionic Six sometime. I like all six heroes, but Rock-1 and Mother-1 don’t fight the same way the men in the family do, and all six of the multiracial super feature family (through adoption the white family had a black and a Japanese kid because even in the 80s we needed the full set of the “popular” races on teams) are diverse in personality. Mother-1 uses psychic powers and illusions, the power of the mind, while speedster Rock-1 otherwise attacks from a distance with shoulder-mounted sonic weapons. They have the same win record as dad and the brothers.

Finally, compare the two She-Ras. The original was feminine but could still take the fight to Hordak and the Horde. Despite growing up under the Horde she somehow maintained her kind heart shared by her parents and twin brother despite not meeting them. If nurture alone would lead to someone being evil, explain the good parents with evil children, or the reverse, in both fictional and real worlds. She’s also quite feminine but as strong as He-Man, at least proportionately. Compare that to “six foot tall girl with a sword” of the Netflix show. While I have nothing against tomboys, that’s not what She-Ra or Glimmer were originally, and I don’t see anybody on that show traditionally feminine. Wonder Woman and She-Ra shows you can be feminine but still be a hero and fight bad people. Of course, they both also have superpowers and a lifetime of combat training.

What I’m asking for is variety and believable fighting abilities. If the girl would honestly be overpowered, give her other skills and have those skills earned. Maybe she uses her wits more, or her feminine wiles, or knows what points to attack on an oversized opponent. Give her superpowers or cool gadgets, and the previous experience to use them properly. If they’re sexy, it’s because that’s either their personality or it’s a byproduct of being fit and wearing outfits that best serve her fighting style. (Yes, we need to stop with the high heeled boots.) Sarah Conner from Terminator 2 onwards isn’t the same one from the first movie, and it makes sense that the girl living a normal quite party life wouldn’t be the badass robot smasher and trainer of the savior of humanity she becomes when next we see her, because what she experienced changed her. Ellen Ripley had to be tough enough to survive space even before the Xenomorph showed up on her ship, and surviving that changed her as well.

I grew up with different types of heroes male and female alike. Each offered something special, and didn’t stand as an analog for “every man” or “every woman”. They were good characters, not one perspective’s fantasy who doesn’t have to struggle. It’s the struggle that makes their story interesting. It’s what sets them apart from other protagonists that make them interesting. That’s why I want to see both genders, a multitude of races, species, and upbringings each have a chance to tell their story and save the world. How do make a good female hero movie? Take everything that worked with the males, put a chick in it, and just make her awesome for the same reasons the men worked. You won’t discover that with a surface level view of the fight scenes when the hero has reached their final level for the movie. You watch the whole thing, all the struggles and all the EARNED successes, and see “how would a woman be different in this story” rather than “how do we make this woman more like a man”. Variety is the spice of life, and the spice of good storytelling. Women can do the hero’s journey, too. They just do it their own way, not the guy’s way.