How "strong and independent" do female characters have to be?

I'm collaborating on a work that has this overarching theme: Everyone needs help sometimes. Everyone, no matter how strong they are, has weaknesses and moments of vulnerability. And that's ok.

Problem is, how do you do this with female characters without accusations of Never a Self-Made Woman or Distressed Damsel - or worse, actually falling into those tropes?

One character is a female Broken Ace who has major pride issues, acts tough, and holds herself to unreasonable standards of success. Her character development involves overcoming this, and she has a mentoring arc which helps her start unlearning her toxic beliefs. (For the record, she ends up helping the mentor later on.) Another equally important character is a guy who also puts a ton of pressure on himself because he doesn't want to burden anyone, and he also learns to accept help and receives a similar mentoring arc. There's also an arc where he gets kidnapped, has several memories erased (which doesn't help his mental health any), and needs rescuing.

I just know some people are going to vilify the girl though, while supporting the guy and calling him brave for reaching out. After all, some people criticise magical girl shows because apparently girls should be strong enough to fight alone, whereas male-dominated shonen works that run on The Power of Friendship don't get this accusation. Female characters get mocked for crying, even over genuine tragedy, whereas male characters get sympathy. I recall Real Women Don't Wear Dresses used to be an audience reaction trope, because yeah, it happens. And it leads to flawless tokens.

(Should there be a new audience reaction trope about this double standard? "How Dare A Woman Cry" or something along those lines?)

So for these reasons, I'm extremely wary of using the "everyone needs help, everyone has weaknesses" aesop, with the keyword being everyone. But I don't want to turn it into "it's ok to need occasional support... unless you're a woman! In which case, sister's gotta do it for herself!"

Also, for context, it's a Pokemon fan work, and people don't exactly succeed alone in that world anyway. Pushing extreme individualism in a Pokemon work would be an automatic Broken Aesop.

I'm a woman myself. I'm also disabled and have multiple mental health challenges, so will never be as independent or tough as some feminists want all women to be. I also hate hate hate HATE toxic masculinity, have seen it damage too many men, and absolutely don't want women held to those standards. The other person working on the project is actively challenging toxic masculinity by writing the major male character as having mental health issues and moments of vulnerability.

So, how flawed can female characters be? Can they sometimes receive help without it being paternalistic, and can that help sometimes be from men? Do women in fiction have to be 100% tough all the time, or can we be portrayed as, y'know, people?

Edited by CalicoCaitSith on Dec 31st 2023 at 12:32:11 PM

I have two thoughts here:

First, I suspect that, pretty much whatever you do, there will be some criticism. (Presuming that the work finds a sufficiently-large audience, of course.)

There are enough people, with enough different perspectives, beliefs, and requirements that no one work will likely satisfy all.

And second, my own feeling is that, as long as you do indeed have everyone needing help—and in particular if that includes men, women, and any others who may be present—and no gender overall more help, then a claim of "Never a Self-Made Woman" would be poorly-founded.

They can be as flawed as you want to. I am not familiar with the genres you mentioned and I also don't know anyone who mocks female characters for crying, so I can't say what would keep people from doing that. Write what you would like to read.

Since this is a fan work from a hobby author, you probably won't get much criticism that Disney gets, but you shouldn't write for the critics anyway. Don't write for feminists either. Feminism is supposed to help women, if you feel burdened by part of one form of it, then ditch it.

That said there are some things you can do. You could make the female lead the best at something, and the message be that even the best needs help. You could also take the idea that women don't need help straight on. Have the female experience pressure to be a strong female character, but learn that she just needs to be the best she can be and get in touch with her feminine side. Be sure to have a toxic masculinity foil.

Well, this kind of attitude happens a fair amount in the Pokemon fandom. For example, Professor Juniper gets the Never a Self-Made Woman label because her father helped her into her role. Even though, for one, Juniper was originally going to be written as a man and literally the only thing the creators changed was her gender, for another, most of the male professors seem to be from scientist families and don't get flack for it.

It may have been a more common attitude in the 2000s-2010s though. I just remember seeing it a lot in fan communities and writing communities. Writers bashing other writers for having female characters lose fights or experience trauma sometimes. And it still crops up in discussions about media, there are debates about whether magical girl shows are feminist or misogynistic, and a complaint I've seen a lot is "magical girls are weak because they depend on each other instead of working alone".

This article discusses the Flawless Token trope, and how women are rarely allowed to have genuine flaws, weaknesses or emotions. I want to avoid that, as well as the assumption that we have to be hypercompetent.

It's like that saying, "Women have to achieve twice as much as men in order to be taken half as seriously". The same is true of fictional women.

Thanks for the advice though, and yeah the fighting type gym leader is a toxic masculinity foil. It's just sometimes difficult to know whether a complaint highlights a legitimate problem or a matter of not being able to please everyone. If people complain about this though, it'll probably be the latter, because the only ways to avoid it would be to make all the women flawless and hypercompetent (no) or have an all-male cast (also no).

My advice? Don't start from the premise of "making a female character". Instead, figure out their personality and story role first, and then make them female. You'll always end up with a much more interesting character if you start from, well, their actual character.

The modern push against "Strong Female Characters" is because so often they're bland as hell, written to appease the audience rather than to suit the story. That's different from writing a "strong female character" (note the lowercase) who more or less just so happens to be a strong character who's female. In other words, the first is an attempt at pandering, and the second is just a legit character.

So, the answer is, they can be as strong and independent as their personalities and skillsets allow, but each of them should have their own unique personalities and skillsets to begin with. Just like the male characters would.

All that said, I like the character you described in the opening. She's the sort of character I actually tend to be drawn to — I love me a good ol' fashioned sympathetic asshole Jerkass Woobie type. And while yeah some fans would vilify them, that's the sort of thing you shouldn't be thinking about. Just write the story the way you envision.

Edited by WarJay77 on Dec 31st 2023 at 1:06:43 PM

So female characters get mocked for crying or having emotions and male characters don't? So, like, the opposite of real life? So now, nobody is allowed to cry or have emotions? What is this world coming to?

I have a piece of advice for you: <Deep breath> SCREW OTHER PEOPLE'S TOXIC PERCEPTIONS!!!

On a side note, I utterly despise the phrase "strong female character", because in my mind the word "strong" refers to physical strength not a tough, aggressive personality. A more appropriate word is "interesting"; writers should aim for interesting characters, whether they be male, female, sexless aliens, AI, etc.

To that end, you shouldn't think that you need to make your female protagonist proud, tough, and a perfectionist to conform to what you think is your audience's expectations. Only do that if that's what you really want to do, or if you intend to deliberately subvert that type of character through Character Development.

Oddly enough, I just finished Psycho-Pass Providence, where the second to last shot of the movie is the female protagonist breaking down in tears for several seconds. And I don't consider her any less Bad Ass for it.

Edited by shiro_okami on Dec 31st 2023 at 6:41:53 AM

What is most important is good storytelling, and that means prioritizing being entertaining and having well written characters over political considerations.

The thing with criticism, is that it is easy to argue that something is sexist. It is harder to know how to write a good story.

I also wonder what qualifies as being powerful in a pokemon story. The Pokemon do all of the fighting, right?

There's a couple different ways to approach Pokemon training and battling in a fanfic, because there's the original games, where the combat is turn-based and training is internally based on stat numbers, and there's the anime, where the combat is in real time and Pokemon are sometimes able to do things that aren't possible in the games in the name of making things more exciting. Writers also have the option of making the life of a trainer darker or more realistic, with more threats to the trainer or each Pokemon species having their own care requirements like real-world animals. Pokemon battling prowess has a bit more in common with prowess at a strategy game than bodily strength.

Regardless, the characters still have to find the Pokemon they want in the wild and train them, which takes a lot of time and work and roughing it far from home, as some of the strongest Pokemon tend to be located in out-of-the-way areas, and Pokemon battling is based in equal parts on strategy and raw strength. In the anime and to a lesser extent the games, there's a big emphasis on the trust bond between trainer and Pokemon, and there's lots of times in the anime where kind trainers who are friends with their Pokemon are able to defeat trainers who only care about strength and train their Pokemon to the bone, because of that trust. Sometimes in the anime, Pokemon that don't like their trainers have even run away, and in both the anime and the games, a Pokemon that grows too strong too quickly might not obey their trainer in battle due to not trusting their battling skills enough.

There's an implication in some of the games that raising a full team of Pokemon strong enough to take on all of the gym leaders and challenge the Pokemon League and knowing how to make them strong and all that is genuinely uncommon and that most people who set out to become trainers just give up partway through. The Galar region treats their Pokemon League challenge like a professional sports season and requires trainers to defeat certain gym leaders by certain dates during the season (which don't actually exist in the gameplay) in order to keep progressing, and the vast majority of trainers miss those deadlines because they can't get their Pokemon strong enough to defeat the gym leader in time, forcing them to try again next year if they don't just give up entirely. A defeat is often demoralizing for both the trainer and the Pokemon, and in the anime, defeats can result in major injuries that take time to heal from, or even risk ending the Pokemon's fighting career or life. (It's a kids' show, so it's not like anyone has actually died or been forced to retire on screen, but the implication has been thrown around for drama.)

Additionally, the Pokemon world across the board seems to have pretty poor infrastructure outside of the towns- trainers usually have to trek through and camp out in winding wilderness and brave adverse weather to get to the next Pokemon gym or find rare Pokemon on top of relying on their Pokemon for personal protection and training them while on the road. Earlier games had preteens as young as eleven years old doing this, so traveling with other trainers for safety in numbers and learning to work together would make sense. And every region has their own organized crime outlet running around trying to steal people's Pokemon, and sometimes they go after the humans, too.