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Screw you, bad vibes! I'll bring light back to my life!
"Aren't you scared?"
"Oh, yeah. But while I'm mouthing off, I'm Feisty Heroine. Nothing bad happens to Feisty Heroine."
"My happiness is not so trivial that it can be found only in a dream!"
You might be able to pile life complications onto this young woman/girl, to the point where the audience would forgive her if she just refused to go on. She might even have an episode or so where she does throw in the towel, because human beings can only take so much of what the universe is handing out for her.
But the Plucky Girl is coming back. She will be bringing a world of hurt with her for the Big Bad.
The Determinator is the male version of this trope.
Examples:
- Two Words: Tamora Pierce.
- Daine is probably the most obivous example. Her house was burned by raiders, her family killed and she survived only by accident, she was almost raped/murdered by an ex-suitor of her mother's, and was rather truly Raised By Wolves - all before the book starts. She then proceeds to demonstrate a great deal of ass-kicking (particularly so in the later books; in the third one, after she is told that the Emperor killed Numair (although she was misinformed]], she proceeds to wake up an army of fossilized dinosaurs and rip the everloving shit out of the palace. She's not done. In the fourth book, after even more tragedy occurs, she kills Ozorne with only a badger claw, naked, and entirely out of magic. Yeowch.
- Pictured above: Candace White Andree aka Candy from Candy Candy. She has her breakdowns, but as soon as she's back to her feet, she comes back stronger than ever.
- Tsubasa from "Aozora Yell" is this.
- Tsukushi Makino from Hana Yori Dango receives about three people's worth of crap over the course of the anime/manga, including but not limited to: being systematically bullied by her whole school, nearly getting raped, being physically beaten thrice times, and having revealing photos of her spread around. Yet she takes on the bullies and wins out through sheer persistence (her "weed power")... and occasionally a fist to the face of Tsukasa Domyouji, her combined nemesis/love interest.
- Asuka Langley Soryuu of Neon Genesis Evangelion. At the midpoint of the movie she's outnumbered 9 to 1, down to three and a half minutes of power, and smiling. She's been through much worse... and then she goes through much worse. But only after she tears them a new one.
- Lale of The Assassins Of Tamurin
- Shin and Himei ("I want to live!") of Sailor Nothing
- Roald Dahl's Matilda is ignored by her parents and terrorised by the awful Miss Trunchbull, and just 6-7 years old. So what's a little super-smart girl to do? Obviously, play some 'subduing' pranks on your boastful, corrupt father to take him down a peg, then develop your latent psychokinetic powers to help that nice teacher who recognised your genius.
- This troper recalls an eccentric artistic girl in "The War Between the Pitiful Teachers and the Splendid Kids" who dresses bizarrely, is incredibly tough and outspoken, a possible love interest for the Kid Hero and is irrecoverably(?) aged up and brainwashed into a "Young Adult" (think progeria that affects your body, mind, and clothes) when she gets defeated by a league of evil adults.
- From Harry Potter: Lily Potter, Ginny Weasley, Hermione Granger, and Luna Lovegood and, perhaps inevitably, from Word Of God: future descendants Lily Luna Potter (Harry/Ginny), Victoire and Dominique Weasley (Bill/Fleur), Lucy and Molly Weasley (Percy/some girl named Audrey), Roxanne Weasley (George/Angelina Johnson), Rose Weasley (Ron/Hermione).
- Nami from One Piece. At one point during a fight, she had her leg and foot pierced right by a villain with an ability... to make her body parts spiky. Her response: "This is nothing! One leg or two legs or even three aren't anything!"
- Not to mention Nefertari Vivi from the same series. This girl runs off at the age of fourteen (!) to go undercover for two years in a secret organization of assassins to try and uncover a plot to overthrow her kingdom, while her childhood friend at home is the leader of a rebellion bent on deposing her family because of the manipulations of the villain, and she has an army of dangerous assassins who are trying to kill her and her newly aquired friends before she can get home to prevent a completely unnecessary civil war from ripping the country apart and killing thousands of innocent people. She does have her breakdowns at times but she always manages to get up again - with or without her friends' help - with a fierce determination to fix the whole mess.
- River Tam isn't terribly plucky, and spends most of her time helplessly crying in corners because of the horrible experiments she was put through. Then some jackass shoots her brother.
- Maya Kitajima, the stubborn and talented actress from Glass Mask.
- Tomoka Osakada and An Tachibana from Prince Of Tennis, specially in the anime.
Seigaku first years (during the Mizuki/Fuji game): No way! He's lost five games just like that! There's no turning back!
Tomoka: No, not still! He hasn't lost! Come on, Fuji-sempai!
Fuji: * wins 7-5 *
- Sora Naegino from Kaleido Star practically embodies this trope.
- ... As does Nino the Mage/Sage from Fire Emblem 7.
- The Bride from Kill Bill is a somewhat grim example of this trope. You can beat her up, slash her up, even bury her alive, but this lady will not stop until she has her revenge.
- May "Mayday" Parker, aka Spider-Girl. But she gets it from her father, a classic Determinator if ever there was one.
- Lauren from KateModern. She might have a condition that means she will die in a few weeks, and she's being hunted down by the organisation that kidnapped and murdered her sister, but there's no way she's coming quietly.
- Gail Emory of American Gothic, at least in the first half of the series...
- Veronica Mars of Veronica Mars, the unflappable young PI who is roofied and date-raped, best friend is killed, family splits up, ostracized by her old friends, yet somehow trudges through and comes out mostly on top. And her relationships? Suspected murderer of best friend, and also a man who could possibly be her biological brother (he's not). Well, let's just say she's incredibly determined.
- Loren in The Andalite Chronicles. She was abducted by aliens, so she took over their ship. Mind you, that's in her first scene, and while she does lose it at one point, she manages to keep her spirits up while she gets shuffled further and further back on the priority list of the aliens who "rescued" her, and higher and higher on the hit list of Sub-Visser Thirty-two.
- Lisbeth Salander in Stieg Larsson's Millennium series.
- Her pluckyness goes so far (as in "able to take on a terminator bare handed and willing to do so") that this troper took the liberty to put her in the other page
- Jade of Beyond Good And Evil. Her character arc can be described as "Increasingly bad things happen to her and everyone she loves," starting with her beloved uncle getting brutally beaten and kidnapped. Her nakama nearly dies, she becomes hunted by The Evil Army, and finally, the orphaned children she loves as her own get kidnapped, and her uncle dies. Briefly. After a Heroic BSOD, she goes from being utterly helpless to utterly unstoppable, a thoroughly awesome combiation of Mama Bear and Determinator coursing through her veins. Things end badly for everyone evil.
- The title character of the freeware action/adventure Iji is a teenage girl who wakes up six months after an alien attack kills her family to discover that scientists have implanted nanotech in her to combat the invaders, but her only support is her little brother Dan, who has grown bloodthirsty, cynical and emotionally distant. Even after she discovers that humanity is on the brink of extinction and the earth is a charred husk, she presses on with the mission Dan gives her. This first quest fails miserably, the second makes the situation even worse, and, depending on the player's actions, Iji fails to save her brother from an assassin, which traumatizes her horribly, she still carries on. The player can choose to play her as an Action Girl or pacifist; regardless, the final boss is awed by her determination.
- In Mahou Sensei Negima Asuna occasionally goes into this mode. It becomes most evident when she goes through Evangeline's Training From Hell.
- Anya also occasionally acts like this.
- Saori Kido/Athena from Saint Seiya. If you can withstand 12 hours with a golden arrow stuck in your chest without complaining a single time and even sending your own cosmo to your warriors when they're in trouble, you've got to be one *really* resilient girl. Lampshaded few after she gets the arrow, when she tells a fretting Seiya to just go and fight out there in the Sanctuary whereas she'll endure the pain and be patient.
- Also, little Helen from the anime version. The girl was thrown into an active volcano by two Silver Saints who wanted to lure Ikki out, but she managed to grab on the walls and climb her way back out, giving Ikki a big part of his Heroic Resolve back. If that's not a Plucky Girl, I dunno what it is.
- All the females in G Gundam, in one way or another. Special mention goes to Cécile Holgar, a sweet-looking moeblob who stands up against punks in her very first scene and doesn't hesitate to bitchslap her boyfriend when he has an Heroic BSOD.
- Jubilation Lee aka Jubilee. Her parents are dead and she's living on the streets. Then she steps through a portal and finds herself in the middle of the desert, hiding from a bunch of cyborg killing machines. She escapes from them and finds herself stuck in the middle of the world's most notorious hellhole, her only companion a man who's mostly dead and entirely crazy as a result of being hideously tortured. Then she's captured by a supervillain who determines to brainwash and enslave her. So what does she do? She bawls him out and blows up his castle.
- Allision Young, a resistance fighter captured by Skynet in the future who absolutely refuses to give in, even when pushed to the point of total emotional collapse. She tries to escape twice, refuses to eat when the machines try to interrogate her, and spins a story designed to trick the Terminator that tries to mimic her into walking into a trap. It doesn't work, and Cameron kills her for her troubles, but she gave it her best shot. And even when dying, she stares her killer defiantly in the eye and refuses to yield an inch.
- Subaru Nakajima of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS is this: she has moments where her determination falters, and is quite prone to crying, but that doesn't stop her from being just as Hot Blooded as any Super Robot hero, and once she finds her feet no force in the world can stop her. There's a reason she's the page image for Action Girl, after all.
- Maree Mallory of Deep Secret has "sheer if not-always-nice pluck" as one of her defining character traits. How much of a fighter is she? At one point, she permanently loses half her soul. Most people die within hours of this happening. Maree not only fights back, she walks miles'' to recover in Babylon. To put things in perspective, the only other person to survive this that we know of? A powerful and charismatic emperor who once conquered eleven different core universes and untold others.
- If it's made by Hayao Miyazaki, it probably has a Plucky Girl in the cast, if not as the protagonist herself.
- Stephanie Brown of Batman. Her ex-con of a father is starting to cause trouble again? Her mother's an addict? Her dad's trying to kill her? The boy she's got her eyes on and who happens to be Robin's not interested in her? Batman tries to get her to quit being a crimefighter again and again - then fires her as Robin? She gets tortured, humiliated and almost killed and is forced to leave Gotham to heal? ... C'mon, you don't actually think that's gonna stop her, do you?
- Kagome Higurashi and Sango. 'Nuff said.
- Any female Doctor Who companion, by definition.
- Scrooge McDuck's most popular love interest Glittering Goldie
- Mavra Chang from Jack Chalker's Well World series absolutely refuses to give up despite all of the Body Horror and Involuntary Shapeshifting inflicted on her. Seemingly cripplng mutations and body modifications only seem to make her even more determined. Hell, Mavra's probably ar her most dangerous when she doesn't even have any hands.
- Himiko from Vampire Princess Miyu, as quoted above.
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