Strong female characters

[beccaelizabeth]

May have to send back to drawing board my idle stone circle story ideas. While checking all my Delicious links (going quicker than expected since few even had pictures far back) I re-read the key points of a meta about Strong Female Characters. Why Strong Female Characters Are Bad For Women. I re-read the quote I'd snipped:

They thought the feminists meant [Strong Female] Characters. The feminists meant [Strong Characters], Female.

So the feminists shouldn’t have said “we want more strong female characters.” They should have said “we want more WEAK female characters.” Not “weak” meaning “Damsel in Distress.” “Weak” meaning “flawed.”

Good characters, male or female, have goals, and they have flaws.

And I realised that I'd only invented female characters with guns, [Strong Female] Characters. They were somewhat lacking agenda. No goals apart from 'help my brother' or 'help my boyfriend'.

I kind of hate it when I notice me doing the exact same things I complain about when everyone else does them.

It's cause I started with filing the serial numbers off SGA slash fic, with Rhodri and Sean. If they're the central characters and I connect everyone up with them then what I have done? Put men in the important seats again. (If I was starting with SGA properly I hear there's some actual female characters around there. They're just not so much evident in fanfic in any capacity but relationship obstacle or occasional damsel.)

I could write about me planning an interstellar colony mission. Then it would be my agenda. And I could bring pretty people along to support my goals.

The only problem is, with the current state of technology, it would be my crazy person agenda and my crazy person goals. And if I set it somewhere that interstellar travel is known about I'd have a very different world and I'd be in a very long queue to have a chance at colonising anywhere.

If someone's boyfriend discovers a stargate and only gets as far as 'hey, cool, a stargate', and then someone else decides to use it for interstellar colonisation, that's having your own agenda. As is using said discovery for the B5 monks mission, the finding all the names of god mission. And those would not necessarily mesh well with an attempt at nice slow steady repeatable science. Right then. Sean's sister wants a colony, Rhodri's girlfriend wants to meet new people and chat about god. Those two could clash with each other really hard too, if one of them wants to get away from all that belief craziness. Plot.

Comments

[baronjanus]

http://chzsetphaserstolol.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/donna.jpg

http://cheezcomixed.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/koma-comic-strip-id-rather-have-a-sandwich.jpg

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ciglbGlCVHs/Tuge5QEfUlI/AAAAAAAAA_o/3-nrXUMJUp4/s1600/bride.jpg

[beccaelizabeth]

Donna: So cool, so depressing at the end.
Voyager is one of those shows I really tried to like. It's like all the parts should be candy, but put together they're just nothingy.

Ripley: yaays!

do not know the third one.

[baronjanus]

None of these are really my thing, but I appreciate the meme going around.

[ceruleancat]

Associations re strong women characters: strong isn't only flawed. Certainly, good characterisation is having flaws as well as strengths, regardless of sex or gender or any other technical specification. But the strong, the independent, non-damsel and not defined by the men or relationships in her life, all that is important in its own right. The gun toting is paraphernalia that can hide the same old diminishing shit - I am reminded of the lady in the first Indi movie, who was cool to start with and had potential, but all she ended up being was defined by her dead father and ex-lover, and being a pawn and a damsel; compare and contrast to Serenity women and Abby on NCIS (or Ziva for that matter, given her daddy issues are no different than the male characters around her, and she gets to move outside of that sphere and even distance herself), and that show has wasted a whole bunch of female characters with excellent potential.

[beccaelizabeth]

*nods a lot*
Haven't seen NCIS, but yes to Indie and Serenity.

[baronjanus]

On topic: saw the first half of Tin Man. Have you seen that? If I could do words better, I could probably complain for half an hour on ALL the female characters going on there so far.

[beccaelizabeth]

nope, I have not seen that.
I am no longer surprised at the portrayal of women, just weary of it.

[baronjanus]

It's just such a waste. A show centred around one woman who rules a country/land/dimension, one woman/girl who grew up in "our" world and is thrown into a fantasy world, and several other women running around. All, in theory, "strong". None actually strong. All having severe cringe moments more often than not. Admittedly, I'm only halfway through, but still.