Putting Action Girl in the Trenches

I would say that there is definitely a common thread where "tough and badass, must be male" is treated as the default, and showing a woman capable of throwing a punch is STILL sometimes treated as a surprise subversion of that mindset. We even have Samus Is a Girl for those gender reveals. But it is true that the wiki has a tendency to see any woman who shows some degree of confidence and action-qualities MUST be an Action Girl. So it's like rather than commenting on the trope the wiki has fallen into the same "men are badass" default perception.

Maybe we can keep only examples of works where most of the female characters are not Action Girls, and has only one or two that are.

True, it bugs me when I see some entries on work/character pages that apply Action Girl to female characters just because they did the equivalent of reacting to an attempted kidnapping by stomping on the offender's foot with their high-heeled foot, before running away into the safety of the nearby hero group while the offender is jumping around on one foot while cradling the injured one.

Edited by MarqFJA on Nov 11th 2023 at 2:59:31 PM

I feel like it's less a case of tropers assuming badass women are unusual, and more people using Badass tropes as a way to gush. Tropers will see a character fighting back and go "That's cool, I should catalogue this moment on their character page". Granted, it's possible that tropers have a lower threshold for what makes a female character badass when compared to male characters.

I mean, you're not wrong. Badass is a very ambiguous concept that means different things to different people.

It's definitely not a case of "tropers think badass women are unusual". The opposite, in fact. People see them even in situations where they don't exist; meanwhile the trope itself presumes that it's breaking media norms which is why we have this clash where the usage no longer fits the original intent because media itself has grown out of it, while tropers just like to talk about that time Alice punched Bob.

In any case, if we don't go the index route, I'm still not sure what a potential alternate would be given that without the whole "badass women are rare" angle the fact that a woman is holding her own in battle is becoming less and less meaningful. Now it's just sort of expected to happen in works where there's any sort of action.

On the other thread I was behind the idea of putting a time cap on this trope, but I acknowledge that doing that would be a big headache.

Tangentially related to this topic (I don't use the forums much, but I saw this and decided it was the best place for it, I recently saw a video by Kyoto Video which talked about what he called the "Lady Action" (sub)genre. I'll post the quote here:

Is this tropeworthy? It kind of falls under Girls with Guns (except that the girls don't necessarily use guns), and Lovely Angels/Amazon Brigade (except that this is a subgenre).

I do feel like there may be a trope for characters like Dirty Pair or Gunsmith Cats, but it's tricky to define it in a way that isn't just "badass and female."

I think one part of it is that those were products of a very specific time and place where the market for badass female characters had been underserved for a long time, allowing for stories where "she is a WOMAN and yet she is KICKING ASS; egad, my monocle" was the main purpose of the entire work in a way that makes it inherently tropeworthy. Over time, though, that faded.

But I don't think a time cap works because the period where it has that meaning varies from culture to culture, market to market, genre to genre and so on. Plus, people can still make retro-styled stories intended to evoke that era.

I think if we wanted to salvage the trope under its current name, and wanted a fairly concise definition, the key point (aside from being a girl and an action hero) is that the work needs to place emphasis on the idea that they're an action girl, by, in the work itself:

• Emphasizing the idea that it is shocking and unexpected for a female character to be so badass, or that it's unexpected for her to be able to beat men, or,
• Emphasizing the idea that her strength makes her a feminist icon, a symbol of female power, an inspiration to other women and girls, or something similar, or,
• Playing up the idea that their strength is sexy. (This last one might be a separate trope; it seems materially different than the other two, though they often overlap. And there's notionally male characters who can do this too, although Male Gaze means they're often reserved for Bara Genre or the like, and I think that there's a reasonable argument that even today differing perceptions and expectations for genders make it a fundimentially different trope when the gender is different.)

Basically, just being a girl who is an action hero isn't enough, the story has to emphasize the intersection of these two traits and do something specific with it, in the same way that a Scary Black Man isn't just a black man who is scary.

The hard part, of course, is trying to get people to stick to places where these traits are brought up in the work itself as opposed to "I, as a viewer, am surprised and think it is cool that this female character is a badass" or "I, as a viewer, find her attractive because she is strong."

But I do think that it's tropeable even with that restriction, ie. there are plenty of works that have the villains go "defeated? by a mere slip of a girl? This CANNOT BE!", or have the surly male instructor who is reluctant to acknowledge the Action Girl because she's female, or other clear-cut tropes related to this one.

I suppose we could also split all three of the points above into different tropes, eg:

• Action Girls Are Unexpected or something. A trope for female characters who evoke an in-universe reaction of "how strong can she be, she is a mere girl and ow oof oh no, she has defeated me."

• Girls Need Role Models was cut, which suggests that coming up with a workable trope for the second one could be hard (but I think part of the problem with that one was that it was more commentary, whereas something like Badass Female Role Model or somesuch is a more identifiable character type.) Even then it's easy to see this being misused because people can go "well, I see this as intended to be a role model."

Edited by Aquillion on Nov 14th 2023 at 12:11:00 PM

That gets me thinking, is a guy being outraged/humiliated that they were "beaten by a girl" already a trope?

Yes. It's I Was Beaten by a Girl. There's also You Go, Girl! for the stock plot of girls taking part in an athletic competition against boys and holding her own.

:

That bolded part makes me think of Forgotten Trope:

Edited by Malady on Nov 14th 2023 at 11:26:13 AM

I think intentionally or not the trope might have taken inspiration from the "man of action" concept, a person who is dedicated to adventure and hands-on activities as opposed to passive pursuits or conceptual theories. An Indiana Jones type or "Most Interesting Man in the World." The Action Girl would be the Distaff Counterpart of that, which has slightly different connotations because of Men Are the Expendable Gender. This is perfectly in line with the Lara Croft picture already.

Again late for the party, but I'd like to point out we ALREADY discussed why the concept of making it into an index is just multiplying problems... which didn't prevent the exact same people to show up and yet again say "hey, let's make it an index" and the same people reply with "yeah, that's great!", yet again without any arguments for their case.

We need a better system to announce replies in forum threads, I routinely forgot to check on those.

Edited by Tropiarz on Nov 20th 2023 at 2:14:16 PM

Well, apologies for sounding snippy, but I went back to the previous thread cited in the OP, and so far I just see you objecting on the grounds that in your opinion there "needs" to be a Super-Trope.

Edited by StarSword on Nov 20th 2023 at 3:00:51 PM

Since we're still throwing out ideas, what if we limit this trope to cases where the Action Girl is the token female of the group? Sort of like a subversion of The Chick.

Er, you can't subvert a trope that got disambig'd for being misused. The Chick was never about being super girly and weak anyway — it was just a gender-specific, FMB specific version of The Heart.

I am not sure making it have to be the token girl is a good idea. Though I am really not sure how to fix it personally either.

Why not just try an iterative approach?

1) Compile a list of 5 (five) reasonably consensus characters who should absolutely be on the list

2) Compile a list of 5 characters who are currently on the page and are generally agreed not to belong

3) Figure out things that distinguish 1) from 2)

It seems like there are a minimum set of 2 features required to sketch out the concept

A) The character must be female(-ish, acknowledging the range of entities described on this site), and

B) The character must be >consistently< notable within the work for >physicality< under dangerous conditions. A single punch doesn't do it, and being wizard-y doesn't do it, but both a barbarian queen and an acrobatic spy definitely would.

Obviously folks may disagree with either of those, but they seem like the minimal set. I see Hermione is on one of the trope subpages, along with several other HP characters, maybe B) needs to be modified to something beyond physicality, but it's a constraint that seemed to be significant in the page definition.

Edited by dspitzle on Nov 20th 2023 at 1:48:08 AM

@Shark Toast you mean Affirmative Action Girl? We already have that one. It's pretty narrow, too.

On the one hand, I feel we are missing a trope for women whose fighting is played up for sexiness (closest I can think of is Panty Fighter, a genre revolving around extreme forms of them).

On the other hand, it would be difficult to pin down examples because it's hard to think of an action girl who isn't made to be sexier than a real hand-to-hand fighter would be. And editors would try to remove their favourites because they would see it as denying them to be legitimate action heroes, that they were only pandering to the audience.

But I'm on the side of turning this into an index/supertrope. Some history on the Analysis page would be welcome.

Some tropes cover aspects of that. Like Kick Chick, where part of the purpose is that women kick to show off their legs. Or Most Common Superpower where superpowered women also have large breasts.