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JBK405 Since: Apr, 2009
Nov 5th 2010 at 10:40:18 AM •••

Badass or Faux Action Girl? Renee Montoya is listed under both tropes, using the same action as an example, but they are mutually exclusive tropes. I have not read the Knightfall story so I can not weigh in on which is correct, but one of them should be removed by somebody who is more familiar with the story.

A badass is somebody who is...well, somebody who is badass. A Faux Action Girl, on the other hand, is a woman who is set up as badass, but is later shown to not be badass at all. Now, here's the tricky part: Just not being a badass does not make you a Faux Action Girl. In oder to be a Faux Action Girl, the story needs to imply or outright state that this person has fighting skills, you have to expect them to be badass, only for a later scene to show that they do not quite measure up. The description of Renee in the article says that she breaks into a school being held hostage by Zsasz and is then herself capture, which contains part of what is required for the Faux Action Girl trope, but only if earlier scenes had shown everybody saying "Man, Zsasz is toast 'cause she is going to kick his ass" or she had previously ben shown beating up a whole bunch of thugs or something like that. If there was nothing present in the story to make you think she should outmatch Zsasz by herself then she was ever a Faux Action Girl at all, just a normal Damsel in Distress.

So, which is it?

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RubberLotus Since: Jan, 2001
Nov 19th 2010 at 7:51:57 PM •••

It's definitely not Faux Action Girl. Zsasz regularly gives BATMAN problems in hand-to-hand, far more than Joker, Penguin, or Two-Face. And it's not because of gadgets, either. He's just that goddamned tough.

JBK405 Since: Apr, 2009
Nov 19th 2010 at 8:35:03 PM •••

Yeah, I'm familiar with Zsasz, but that still leaves the trope question unanswered. Like I said, just being defeated doesn't make her a Faux Action Girl, everybody gets defeated sometime, it's about the set up. Before she was defeated here was everybody going "Yeah, Renee's the best one we have, there's nothing she can't do," to give the impression that she was badass enough to take Zsasz down, or was the set up more along the lines of "Good luck Renee, you're gonna need it against that whacky SOB" to give the impression that Zsasz is the super-tough one here.

If it's the first one then it is Faux Action Girl, setting up a woman as an Action Girl only for her to become a Distressed Damsel for the hero, but if it's the second then it's not Faux, since she never failed to live up to the original expectations. See what I mean?

Edited by JBK405
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