Needs Help: Action Girl

I've seen this thread before! Maybe we should put a sticky on frequently asked questions or something? At least that way people who have a problem with the page can bring new arguments. Then we might move towards progress or a resemblance thereof.

I agree with post 24. The trope has gotten out of control to just be 'a woman who isn't helpless' or 'a woman who has an action scene' which implies that if the trope isn't on a character page it means they are helpless, and all other feminine or Always Female tropes implies helplessness if Action Girl isn't tacked on.

Which isnt true.

Even princess Leia, the trope image for The Chick, picks up a gun immediately after being rescued.

We could change the definition and make it a more meaningful trope, but that would require also changing all 13000 entries for it. It might be best to keep it an exampleless Super-Trope / Trope in Aggregate / Fan Speak and create a new trope that would actually be relevant.

edited 17th Aug '14 1:17:14 AM by acrobox

I would like to note that The Chick doesn't require the woman in question to not be able to fight.

^ Right. Thats exactly my point. So whats the purpose of Action Girl if even The Chick can (and should) fight.

Should it mean a woman who is exceptionally a Bad Ass, in which case just lump them in with Bad Ass because its a gender neutral trope.

Or should it mean a woman who can fight when its unexpected to be the case. Basically Samus Is a Girl but without a mask.

Or is it a specific archetype or personality.

edited 17th Aug '14 1:22:29 AM by acrobox

Action Girl is not defined as a contrast to The Chick. It was originally defined as a contrast to the idea that women can't fight. As gender conventions evolved, Action Girl started to encompass other archetypes that have a "female fighter" aspect in common.

I would keep this page about that wider aspect, but ZCE can be removed as always.

edited 17th Aug '14 1:25:20 AM by SeptimusHeap

I just used The Chick as an example of another Always Female trope just as a thought experiment.

but i feel like some examples of action girl use it as a contrast to a 'played straight' version of the chick. Which shouldn't necessarily be.

how wide is that wider aspect as gender roles evolve? modern examples of the action genre its expected and almost guaranteed that youll have female fighters to the point that being a female fighter alone is about as notable as being a male fighter.

edited 17th Aug '14 2:41:57 AM by acrobox

Is this going to have a knock-on effect to Faux Action Girl as well? If the definition of 'Action Girl' is going to be clarified, Faux Action Girl will also be affected by that clarification - and that's a trope that attracts its own misuse.

On the subject of World of Action Girls absorbing some of the Action Girl examples, I think part of why the trope is not as well-used is because of the final paragraph which states it's only for works where the females out-number the males. There are plenty of works where numbers are equal (World of Badass trope instead) or males out-number the females. In the latter case, every single female could be an action girl, but it still wouldn't fit the World of Action Girls trope (as currently written).

I think Faux Action Girl is specifically tied to the concept of an Action Girl. Otherwise it's basically just Informed Ability, but with women and action.

From my view, Faux Action Girl is more robust.

"In a world where fighting can resolve the plot, a girl can fight well" isn't really a trope. "In a world where fighting can resolve the plot, the audience is told a girl can fight well, but she actually can't (and thus can't resolve the plot that way)" seems like a trope to me.

I won't argue that it might need a definition tweak, but I highly doubt it's at the same stage of broken that Action Girl is.

What if we changed Action Girl so that it only applies when the female fighter is proving someone else in the story wrong about women's ability to fight? Someone comments (explicitely or implicitely) on how a woman can't handle herself because she's a woman, but that woman shows she can handle herself just fine. Alternatively, a woman shows off her fighting skills, and the people watching are surprised that a woman could do that. In other words, a character would only be an Action Girl if the work itself is drawing attention to the perceived dichotomy between "girl" and "action hero", and then subverting it.

That is one possible definition, but as said before I don't see a reason to restrict the meaning of Action Girl.

Well, if we don't change the definition of Action Girl, then we need to launch a new trope called Action Guy to cover cases of men who can kick ass.

The Action Girl trope exists because for a long time in our media men being able to kick as was the default. Non-Action Guy exists because of that same default.

Additionally Badass exists for male fighters. It can also be applied to women, but Action Girl is the concept used there.

Septimus, I'd like to thank you for making my argument for me.

Or, to put it another way, consider the case of adding an Action Girl example to a work page or characters sheet. The question is, how would you write that example differently from a Badass example applying to the same character?

If there's no difference in how the example would be written, that's the biggest red flag for The Same But More Specific that you could ever have.

I don't remember the examples writeups being written differently save for gender and the "kicking ass" phrasing. I can't say whether the examples if written well would be that similar though.

Also, worth noting that Badass has its own description problems last I checked.

I think the Action Girl trope is very useful when discussing older works (before 1990 or so), when the rule was "women don't (or can't) fight". I agree that today it is so common to have a fighting female protagonist that the trope has lost much of its significance.

But it could still be useful to keep the modern examples, because it is fairly common for people to be looking for fiction with a strong female protagonist. It is not ideal, because far from all strong female protagonists are action girls, and while an action girl is a strong female she doesn't have to be the protagonist. But it's a place to start.

I just want to remind everyone that this trope is the EXACT REASON that the Men Are Tough and Women Are Delicate supertropes were created.

Those two omnipresent tropes are the reason that Action Girl and Non-Action Guy exist.

Subsequently, they are also the reason why Non Action Girl and Action Guy do not exist.

Um, which way does the causality of your argument run again? Because you seem to be arguing both ways (first sentence, Action Girl caused those supertropes, second sentence, those supertropes caused Action Girl). ^note You really need to work on how you phrase things, Zeal.

For the record, I think the latter is more likely correct. That aside, though, what point are you trying to make in regard to how we change Action Girl? (Note the emphasis.)

Maybe restrict the use to the rare few females in a work that fight for the side of good just like all the other men? Like on average, I think the Action Girl should stand out as female kicking ass compared to the other women in a work.

To clarify my above post:

Action Girl and Non-Action Guy existed as tropes before Men Are Tough and Women Are Delicate were created. When I first joined the wiki years ago, there was endless debating over whether those two tropes (and others like them) were tropes/weren't tropes. In response, I suggested to the admin team that we create the tropes Women Are Delicate and Men Are Tough, to demonstrate the overall gender roles and assumptions that damn near every gender trope comes from, whether directly or indirectly. They agreed.

Men Are Tough and Women Are Delicate are the "core gender role" tropes; with few exceptions, every gender trope we have exists because those two tropes are the default, blanket assumption. Even Useless Boyfriend and Women Are Wiser exist as tropes strictly because they're considered "unusual" in the shadow of said omnipresent tropes. The same is true of Action Girl and Non-Action Guy.

Does that clear it up?

edited 18th Aug '14 1:46:37 PM by KingZeal

If I get what you're saying, Action Girl was supposed to be a specific type of aversion of Women Are Delicate (following that page's creation).

However, I really hope you can tell me there was more to the original aversion than "girl who fights". Because, as we've gone over multiple times, that's pure PSOC. One trope (Badass) being an aversion of another trope (Women Are Delicate) doesn't make a third trope. So what was the definition of Action Girl after Women Are Delicate was introduced?

IIRC, it depended on what troper everyone agreed with that day.

The last version I remember being settled on was "A female character who definitively uses violence to defeat opponents that even male characters struggle with". She can't use cleverness or cunning to defeat them (that's Lady of Adventure). I recall not agreeing with that definition, for reasons that escape me at the moment.

"Person who fights" is almost always of story significance, especially as named characters. I doubt that People Sit on Chairs is applicable even under generous stretching. The thing you want to contest would be the Action Girl/Badass distinction.

Personally, I think there is a case for keeping them apart, if weak. The audience expectations described by Women Are Delicate are still different, even if they are becoming increasingly less common. Also, there is a strong proactivity aspect in Action Girl that almost taken for granted in men and thus not noted on the Badass examples. Finally, Badass has seen some definition drift for "coolness" that I see more pronounced than in Action Girl examples.

Personally, I was always in favor of merging Action Heroine and Action Girl. I know that argument has been put forth before, but I don't remember the reason it was shot down.