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GastonRabbit
MOD
(General of TV Troops)
2023-06-19 08:09:06
This is a question for Trope Talk, which has a thread for discussing potential duplicates.
You can't just say "perchance".

I've been looking at Damsel out of Distress page and noticed examples that don't really seem to be that: Elsa, Honey Lemon and Gogo Tomago are superheroines who get captured during a fight, but free themselves using their powers - none of them is ever really helpless, sees herself as a girl to be rescued, or even acts helpless (they're all slim, pretty girls, if Gogo is a tomboy, but superheroines all the time), so Badass in Distress, sure, but damsel? Only if we equate damsel with a girl. Especially that Elsa has no-one to rescue her, and while the other two are part of a team, the guys are busy fighting. Black Widow pretends to be a helpless damsel for intelligence purposes, so she's actually a Decoy Damsel (badass, too, but definitely fits Decoy Damsel). And Rey? Rey's training to be a Jedi, danger is part of the job. And there's this: "Nearly all of the female characters in Homestuck are at least as dangerous as the males; occasionally they need to be rescued, but no more often than the boys do."
So, my question is this: what's the difference between a Badass in Distress who happens to be female and gets herself out of the scrape as a matter of course - and a Damsel out of Distress? Because I thought it's more like the difference between Action Hero (a professional or experienced amateur of adventuring) and Heroic Bystander (who gets adventuring thrown at him and raises to the challenge). But it seems like it isn't?