Needs Help: Action Girl

The opposite of which is Women Are Delicate, not Action Girl.

If you could leave the debate about other tropes alone for a moment, I'd like an answer to my question about the possible root cause behind the ZCEs. Because that's the main reason I brought Action Girl to TRS, and whatever the culprit is is the problem we're here to solve.

Both reasons I've given indicate that being a supertrope is not a good idea, so what other reasons could there be?

There might not be a single "root cause". There could be several misunderstandings from several different points of view.

For that reason, we need to pin down what trope we're trying to create and then note where the previous definition veered away from that. Otherwise, we get so focused on what we think the problem is that we miss any other potential ones that'll just pop up later anyway.

@Arha: No, the entire purpose for Women Are Delicate and Men Are Tough was to establish the gender dynamics that provide the foundation for every other trope. For the moment, Action Girl is a trope which has two parts—part one is the in-universe "what this trope is" (i.e., Force + Woman). Part two is the out-of-universe "baggage which makes this trope significant" (i.e., it's considered odd in Real Life for both real women and female characters). That's the trope, in its entirety, as we've used it up to now.

Force + Man may have part one, but it lacks part two, which makes it an entirely different trope.

edited 21st Aug '14 12:41:45 PM by KingZeal

again the trope narrowing, Action Girl = woman is tough in ways you would expect a man to be tough, or as I said earlier, tough in ways that defy Women Are Delicate. Which on a macro level may mean female + force, but in individual works may be more nuanced.

i.e. in a fighting game you wouldn't want to list every female character as an action girl, because by virtue of being in a fighting game fighting is par the course.

edited 21st Aug '14 9:00:51 PM by acrobox

The crowner has been changing fairly quickly recently, so taking a tally:

• Rework it into a supertrope, and move the majority of examples to appropriate subtropes. 15-6 yea/nay.
• Redefine it into a more specific trope, and correct examples accordingly. (A rename may be necessary in this case.) 15-9 yea/nay.

Rework it into a supertrope now has 15 votes in favor of it.

Well, it's been three days, so technically we can call it, but I think we should wait a bit longer just to be on the safe side. 27 votes passes the minimum threshold, but for major tropes like this, I like getting as many as possible. I'm gonna post in the crowner side.

Current count:

Rework into supertrope: +13 (22 for, 9 against)

Redefine specifically: +4 (18 for, 14 against)

All other options are in the red.

Then as a supertrope it's basically going to be 'girl who fights,' right?

Sounds like it.

The real problem is the same reason this trope has been through multiple TRS threads to begin with: we seem to have reached the conclusion that a "girl who can fight" is sometimes, but not always, remarkable by itself, for nebulous reasons that exist outside the work itself or even outside the brain of the author. The best thing we could do in that circumstance is try and figure out whether or not the author is sending a "girl power" message, even if subconsciously, or if s/he genuinely does not find it remarkable. Thus, even if a World of Action Girls finds nothing remarkable about the premise, the improbable demographics almost certainly reflect some sort of correction against the male norm of fighters in fiction. At some point down the line, if true gender equality is achieved, there may well be an equivalent male trope, but not yet. (Although I'd have a hard time excluding current-day sausage-fests from such a trope, and I had trouble with the creation of Hero Protagonist, so perhaps it already exists and is just an Omnipresent Trope at the moment.)

As I said earlier, I think considering this trope as an aversion/subversion of Women Are Delicate could allow us to determine whether or not certain characters fit regardless of whether or not the story finds them remarkable. I already suggested that the actual presence of actual danger is a criterion, but I also think the ability to handle danger might be part of it as well; for example, I'm inclined to consider a Squishy Wizard a Faux Action Girl at best.

At any rate, has this been headlined yet? I'm leery of calling a crowner on a trope this big if it hasn't.

That's not what Faux Action Girl means. That's someone who's played up as being an Action Girl, but isn't in practice. Someone who's played up as a Squishy Wizard and acts the part is not a Faux Action Girl any way you squish it.

A female Squishy Wizard can either be an Action Girl or not, depending on how she acts. Her squishiness doesn't really matter as much as whether her actions put her in a situation to be squished or not. Is she in the action or is she outside it?

If she's a competant Squishy Wizard she can be an Action Girl since Squishy Wizard is just a fighting style. If they say she's a competent Squishy Wizard and she never does anything remarkable she's a Faux Action Girl.

The point I was trying to make is that a Squishy Wizard basically combines a long-distance, non-"active" form of fighting with an inability to take much pressure without going down.

I'm trying to figure out if I can salvage an actual trope that's more than just "girl who fights" and ends up including every girl or woman that's been involved in any sort of combat ever in the history of fiction (even if the eventual trope does end up involving every girl or woman that's been involved in any sort of combat ever through at least the 90s). If I were to try to pin down a definition based on the notion that taking heat (or at least potentially taking it) is as important as dishing it out, it might result in broadening Faux Action Girl ever so slightly, to encompass characters that, even if they do occasionally get some licks of their own in, still end up inevitably becoming the Damsel in Distress.^note Even though the current definition says nothing about being the Damsel in Distress, this idea still fits with the notion that it's the men who save the day; note that the page's original creator, pre-YKTTW, seemed to include capable female protagonists that happened to have male sidekicks or team members that helped save the day as well, listing freaking Kim Possible as an example, and if some of his examples had been allowed to stand the page would probably be considered an Audience Reaction today.

It's not necessarily the case that Action Girl has to be something more than "girl who fights", but as I said a theme when talking about this trope in the past is that "girl who fights" is "sometimes, but not always, remarkable by itself", and it would be nice to pin down when it is or isn't. And if we decide that "girl who fights" is always remarkable by itself, it becomes harder to parry Arha's point that we would then need a male equivalent, because who's to say the cultural assumptions of Men Are Tough and Women Are Delicate would always hold?

edited 25th Aug '14 11:28:03 PM by MorganWick

I do agree, it should be more than "woman who can fight". It should be "woman who can fight well". Almost anyone can and will put up some sort of struggle if they really have to; Action Girl should be for women who do better in a fight than you'd expect from most people.

We have other tropes for singular fight scenes. Having one fight scene during one story can be put there; it doesn't need to be put under a supertrope. Plus, such a supertrope is going to be a characterization trope; one fight scene per story may or may not be enough to make a characterization out of it.

"Fighting well" is subjective. Take Indiana Jones, for example. Part of the fun of the character is that he gets his ass kicked throughout the story, even by regular mooks that more competent Action Heroes would cut down like weeds. Sometimes he wins by sheer dumb luck, like against the Giant Mook in Raiders Of The Lost Ark or the tank in Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade.

We're coming dangerously close to trying to define a trope while simultaneously believing it; by that I mean that we're placing the potential Action Girl trope under more scrutiny than we'd place a theoretical male counterpart. To me, that demonstrates one of the more insidious sides of this gender dynamic—that we expect women to WOW us before we consider them "tough" while men don't need to do half the same.

On that subject, I see there's several Missing Supertropes here. Part of the reason we're having trouble defining Action Girl is because the "standards" of action heroism vary based on many factors:

1. Action fiction had undergone Serial Escalation creep over the years, decades, centuries, and millennia. What was a badass action sequence in, say, a 1927 Cowboy Flick would seem tame compared to a 1970s kung fu movie, a 1980s run-and-gun film, or 2000s sci-fi action flick.
2. Overall genre, as well as precedent set in the same setting, can also set the bar higher or lower. What would be a badass act in a Like Reality, Unless Noted story could be "meh" in a superhero story.
3. Likewise, someone who fights their way out of a bad situation once would be outclassed by someone who does so multiple times during the course of an entire story.

edited 26th Aug '14 7:54:31 AM by KingZeal

Actually, Action Girl as a supertrope would have Faux Action Girl as a subtrope. It may also just come off as a Done Badly trope or may even just be Informed Attribute. I'm not sure. After all, if Action Girl is just 'girl who fights' then Faux Action Girl is just 'girl who fights badly' because it's no longer a real contrast to the expectation or assurance of competence.

Just so we're clear, I'm merely pointing out the assumptions, implications and consequences of this change. It really can't be anything but 'girl who fights' if it's a supertrope and that causes a lot more problems for us. Other implications also bother me. Is this now mutually exclusive with badass, or at least overlapping so much we don't need to mention both?

I could even see us calling this Badass Girl, which just sounds weird to me. It'll be a badass subtrope after this, in any case.

edited 26th Aug '14 8:39:49 AM by Arha

I think the post above had a good point. "Faux Action Girl" isn't just "girl who fights badly". Just to put out an overly-complicated wording, the complete trope seems to be:

"A female character who is professed to have a certain competence level or level of responsibilities, but then fails to live up to them. Usually, but not always, she fails at her competence level while male characters succeed at their own level or those even higher."

I chose this wording because, for example, Black Widow fighting mooks and winning while the other Avengers fight the superpowered Big Bad doesn't make her a Faux Action Girl. (It potentially makes her another sexist trope, something like Men Solve Women Assist, which I don't know if we have.) But on the other hand, Wonder Woman fighting Sinestro and losing while Batman fights Lex Luthor and succeeds would make her a Faux Action Girl because she isn't carrying her weight on the team.

edited 26th Aug '14 8:47:32 AM by KingZeal

Another crowner tally:

• Rework it into a supertrope, and move the majority of examples to appropriate subtropes. 23-9 yea/nay.
• Redefine it into a more specific trope, and correct examples accordingly. (A rename may be necessary in this case.) 18-14 yea/nay.

eta: Fixed the wrong "nay" count for the second option.

edited 26th Aug '14 9:02:41 AM by SeptimusHeap

A Faux Action Girl is just a female who's badassery is an Informed Attribute.

edited 26th Aug '14 9:06:20 AM by VeryMelon

Too vague.

That makes sense until you start getting into arguments over what qualifies.

I dunno, outside of hair-splitting that sounds extremely clear to me.

But the hair-splitting is exactly the problem.

Faux Action Girl is an inherent Double Standard. Which means that if individual works start Moving the Goalposts, you can have two or more female characters with the exact same conditions, but some qualify while others don't.

Septimus, I think you want to look at your tally, look back at the crowner, and tell me what you did wrong.

About Faux Action Girl, I'm with Septimus and Melon.