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Talking Meme: Strong Female Characters
Jan. 5th, 2015 10:26 pmAlas asked me to talk about "strong female characters"! So...here goes!
I confess, I don't do very well by female characters in my fanfic! As a fanfic writer, I'm kind of obsessed with picking apart male narratives and male/male interactions; it's like studying a foreign language and neglecting to get better at my own native language, you know? And I'm always a little leery of the term "strong female characters" because I fear it getting used to reject female characters who aren't considered "strong" by certain standards but are still interesting. But given the topic, here are a few female characters from my favorites canons that I've particularly enjoyed:
Steph Brown, DC Comics. I never read her as Spoiler or as Robin, and the scans I've seen of her at those times never endeared me to her. But I fell in love with her as Batgirl in Bryan Q. Miller's run: the patron saint of sheer cussed stubbornness, who refuses to even stay dead, who makes a way no matter who tries to stop her, be it her father or Batman or Black Mask or Dan Didio.
Dors Venabili, Prelude to Foundation/Forward the Foundation. Isaac Asimov was not good at writing women. His most memorable female character was Susan Calvin, roboticist, who was one of those characters that's much better than the writer realizes. Asimov, I think, mostly just wanted her to be a frigid girl-scientist, but generations of fans have read a lot more awesome into her than Asimov ever meant. However, in two of his last books, Asimov finally created a female character who's interesting and fully rounded: Dors Venabili, Hari Seldon's wife. And all it took was making her a robot! Asimov always loved robots more than people, not that I blame him.
Charlotte Flair, WWE. If you haven't been following me on Tumblr you've largely missed my tumble into professional wrestling fandom--missmithen is about 25% superheroes, 25% Tolkien, 25% professional wrestling, and 25% other right now. Charlotte Flair is the daughter of (in)famous wrestler Ric Flair, and she's amazing. She's fierce and contemptuous in the best ways (her finishing move is called Natural Selection), and has developed into a very charismatic wrestler who isn't there to be eye candy. The way she shut down a crowd chanting for a different wrestler last week ("YOU DO NOT CHANT when a genetically superior wrestler addresses you!") made me want to crow with delight, as did her delighted smile when they shut up (it's not always easy to shut up a bunch of professional wrestling fans).
Morwen, the Silmarillion. Probably my favorite Tolkien woman. Her husband Hurin was taken prisoner in a terrible battle, and she attempted to raise her children on her own in enemy-occupied lands. She was proud and stern, and spoke little, and her family suffered more than perhaps any other family in Middle Earth (Morwen sends her son away to try and save him, and after a long series of cursed mishaps he meets up with his sister and marries her without knowing her identity, and they both commit suicide when they find out). Her death--she finds the graves of her children and her long-lost husband sitting at it, and dies in his arms there--is one of the saddest in Tolkien for me.
I'm missing many, I know it, but those are the ones that pop to mind when I consider my current main fandoms! There's a theme there of being strong-willed, stubborn, and never giving up, I think...
I confess, I don't do very well by female characters in my fanfic! As a fanfic writer, I'm kind of obsessed with picking apart male narratives and male/male interactions; it's like studying a foreign language and neglecting to get better at my own native language, you know? And I'm always a little leery of the term "strong female characters" because I fear it getting used to reject female characters who aren't considered "strong" by certain standards but are still interesting. But given the topic, here are a few female characters from my favorites canons that I've particularly enjoyed:
Steph Brown, DC Comics. I never read her as Spoiler or as Robin, and the scans I've seen of her at those times never endeared me to her. But I fell in love with her as Batgirl in Bryan Q. Miller's run: the patron saint of sheer cussed stubbornness, who refuses to even stay dead, who makes a way no matter who tries to stop her, be it her father or Batman or Black Mask or Dan Didio.
Dors Venabili, Prelude to Foundation/Forward the Foundation. Isaac Asimov was not good at writing women. His most memorable female character was Susan Calvin, roboticist, who was one of those characters that's much better than the writer realizes. Asimov, I think, mostly just wanted her to be a frigid girl-scientist, but generations of fans have read a lot more awesome into her than Asimov ever meant. However, in two of his last books, Asimov finally created a female character who's interesting and fully rounded: Dors Venabili, Hari Seldon's wife. And all it took was making her a robot! Asimov always loved robots more than people, not that I blame him.
Charlotte Flair, WWE. If you haven't been following me on Tumblr you've largely missed my tumble into professional wrestling fandom--missmithen is about 25% superheroes, 25% Tolkien, 25% professional wrestling, and 25% other right now. Charlotte Flair is the daughter of (in)famous wrestler Ric Flair, and she's amazing. She's fierce and contemptuous in the best ways (her finishing move is called Natural Selection), and has developed into a very charismatic wrestler who isn't there to be eye candy. The way she shut down a crowd chanting for a different wrestler last week ("YOU DO NOT CHANT when a genetically superior wrestler addresses you!") made me want to crow with delight, as did her delighted smile when they shut up (it's not always easy to shut up a bunch of professional wrestling fans).
Morwen, the Silmarillion. Probably my favorite Tolkien woman. Her husband Hurin was taken prisoner in a terrible battle, and she attempted to raise her children on her own in enemy-occupied lands. She was proud and stern, and spoke little, and her family suffered more than perhaps any other family in Middle Earth (Morwen sends her son away to try and save him, and after a long series of cursed mishaps he meets up with his sister and marries her without knowing her identity, and they both commit suicide when they find out). Her death--she finds the graves of her children and her long-lost husband sitting at it, and dies in his arms there--is one of the saddest in Tolkien for me.
I'm missing many, I know it, but those are the ones that pop to mind when I consider my current main fandoms! There's a theme there of being strong-willed, stubborn, and never giving up, I think...