Hey it's Rowan and today I'm gonna be talking about something which
has really been annoying me. Weak
female characters. So I was talking to this guy the other day and I happened to
mention in the conversation that I like "Buffy"
and he did too. I mention that my favourite season was season 5
to which he almost physically recoiled in horror.
I was like "I don't really know how you can have that much of an aversion to season 5.
It has some really good storylines
...probably one of the best episodes: "The Body"
And it has the introduction of Dawn Summers." Turns out this was what he disliked
about season 5
*mocking impression of him* "But Rowan you enjoy strong female characters so much
I thought you hated Dawn...she's so weak!"
hmm
So I enquired further: "What about Dawn Summers do you think is weak?"
He says "Well she's can't fight.
She can't do magic and she's just like..."
So since a character is an
ordinary teenage girl she is automatically
a weak character? Bullshit! The kind of people who think that
Dawn Summers is a weak character are also the kind of people who think that Sansa
Stark is a stupid weak character
and that Kaylee Frye from Firefly's only redeeming feature is that she's a
mechanic.
No. Things that are attributed to women and specially teenage girls do not
automatically make a character weak.
What makes a character weak is bad writing. Jem Walker
in In The Flesh doesn't become somehow a
weak female character because of the things she goes through in season two
with her PTSD. We don't see her in the first season as this
badass kick ass character and then suddenly the second season happens and
we get the realistic
aftermath of her going into this kind of war zone when she was so young
and think she's a weak character because she's acting like a
normal teenage girl
Because she's still an interesting written character, she still has really
interesting relationships with
Ren and her parents and with the rest of the guys she was hanging around with
in this kind of makeshift army. S o yes sometimes when we talk about strong female
characters we are talking about warrior women type characters. We talk about
Katniss Everdeen
who is able to shoot arrows at a great distance
and is a badass who survived the Hunger Games. Although some critics seem
to think that in this latest film Katniss hass somehow become a weak
character because she again is suffering from some severe mental trauma
for having been in two Hunger Games. That again
is absolute rubbish. Female characters that kick ass can be strong female
characters
but not all female characters that kick ass are strong female.
if a female character kicks ass but is badly written
we're looking at a weak female character. It is not the character themselves
the person who's weak or strong
it is the characterization of that person. It drives me
so crazy that there's always been this idea of,
even in stories which are helmed by female protagonists
in high school drama and in YA fiction
the idea that the main character is somehow
the good protagonist character because they are uninterested in the trivial
matters that most girls are interested in.
It's so stupid that we become obsessed with this idea of tearing down
girls who were interested in girly things like somehow it's the worst thing in
the world.
"I don't care about make up and boys
and hair like these other girls.
I only have like three pairs of shoes." Good for you. It does make you better than that person
It doesn't make you worse than that person, it just makes you different to that person
And guess what #feminism this is all related to the patriarchy and
its related to gender norms in the gender binary so
the idea that everything that is attributed to women is somehow
weak and lesser is because everything that is attributed to men is meant to be
better and more positive so for many people when they hear about having to
make the female character who is more "strong"
they tend to think about placing attributes of maleness onto that female
character
So saying that she's good at fighting or saying that she's very physically strong
in the case of characters like Sansa or
Dawn we also have the fact that they are ordinary characters who have been
placed in extraordinary circumstances
They are in world of extremes so they in worlds where
both in fact have a sister who is that stereotypical kickoff bad ass
character
which seems to be great because they are a total hit, because they have
this attribute of physical strength in fighting
which is meant to be make them a strong character.
It is so tied in with maleness and what is seen as
the best the anyone in society can go towards
There are people who praise Kaylee from Firefly for example
because they say it's so cool because she's this mechanic character
as if that's what makes her a good character as if
if she wasn't a mechanic, if she was only the character who's interested in
the frilly dresses, somehow that would make her a
weaker character. This whole trope idea of the Virgin, the mother,
the slut, the crone... the idea that these
female characters are somehow bad, that
to be interested in being a mother is terrible to
be a very innocent character who's interested in cute things is somehow
terrible, to be a woman who was very
sexually assured is somehow terrible, in and of themselves
is really misplaced. Characters can inhabit
an entirely feminine realm, they can have no
attributes which link them to the masculine at all...
nothing to do with their appearance, or to do with the physical strength or to
do with attitudes towards life ...they can be the most girly girls in the entire world and
they can still be strong characters because they're going to be written well
So I mean they're going to have agency or they're going to have
interesting things to say
they're going to make interesting decisions they're going to be at the
heart the action
all these things are attributes which might make the character well-written
You don't even need to like the character they can be a complete asshole and
they can still be a strong female character. If you can come back to me and
tell me "I don't like Sansa and Dawn
because of the way they're written and give me an idea of what it's about the
writing of them that
was somehow misplaced in this story in which you enjoy all the rest the
characters
please do. It's fine not to be interested in the characters or to like them, but to call
them a weak
character just because they have the attributes that women are stereotypically
meant to have...
Um... fuck you.
The Knife of Never Letting Go in which there is a male protagonist but a lot of
the politics
and themes in the book revolve around gender and toxic masculinity
and how dangerous it is to judge
boys by the ideas violent manhood.
Subtitles by the Amara.org community