BW Media Spotlight

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?

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