Discussion Main / NeverASelfMadeWoman

I see a lot of general examples and aversions (sometimes labelled subversions); bring it up in the topic on NRLEP listing.

Because it has nothing to do with this trope. This is about women, what men do has nothing to do with this.

hm, that's true. The original reason for that banner was to clarify that the fact that it's such a subconcious trope caused examples ot be removed or justified whenever the character in question was an Action Girl. It could probably be explained better.

Doesn't this have to be relegated to settings where self-made men are actually common? In aristocratic societies very few people are self-made in any case.

Yes, she's a love interest, but that's not why she has her rank in the military. She was an Agent with the Special Scientific Reserve before Steve enlisted, and in the Avengers (in a deleted scene, anyway) we see that she stayed with the SSR until retirement. The fact that the movie does not actually revolve around her does not diminish the fact that she clearly has work and business independent of anything Steve is doing.

From the trope description: In a cast with many characters or a Five-Man Band, there is a tendency to give any female character of importance a male character to thank for her position. Agent Carter got as far as she did on her own.

I really think people treat this trope as more meta than it's intended to be. Never a Self-Made Woman is not The Smurfette Principle. The vast majority of the description concerns in-universe guidelines. Being the only woman on the team has no relevance to Peggy's in-universe background—she doesn't chase after her goals because of a father's example, she doesn't find herself on a team for the sole reason that she was with her boyfriend when the plot hit, and there is not the slightest suggestion that she should or will step down from her position because she's fallen in love and thus clearly has a future of marriage and family and babies to concentrate on instead.

We see her trucking around doing work for the SSR, training soldiers, being the only person with the immediate presence of mind to follow the gunner who shot Erskine. They're not things with a huge impact on the plot, but they are there, and more to the point, they're things that are unrelated to Steve.

Furthermore, the most significant things Peggy does for Steve are not framed in terms of their budding romance. When she encourages him to pursue something greater, she doesn't say it's because she believes in him; she namechecks Erskine. When she tries to comfort him about Bucky's death, there's nothing romantic or feminine in her approach—she doesn't hug him or touch him in any way that puts her affection at the front of the scene. She's there as a friend, because her friend is grieving and she's concerned for him. When she's invading the base with everyone at the end, it's not because she's standing by her man, it's because she's doing her job as a member of the team.

Yes, she's Steve's love interest. But her relationship with him is not what got her into her position in life and it doesn't force her out of it, and those two things are, to me, at the heart of Never a Self-Made Woman.

Actually, having written the original description as well as the YKTTW, I can say for certain that the patchworky description here was an attempt to get at the general principle of women not being interesting or important enough on their own, and many of the examples reflect that. It is badly written, I'll give you that, so maybe there should be a supertrope and let this one be less liberal in its interpretation, but for now the position in question stretches beyond a strict title to importance to the plot (position in the cast, so to speak).

If it's a trope about the women in a cast being less important than the dudes, whether in-universe or in the narrative, then it basically can't be a trope unless you're willing to put almost every non-central-protagonist female in every work of fiction ever on here. It's far, far too general, and utterly unfair to female characters as a whole.

Best example I can think of is Hermione Granger. If you take it only as counting things that actually affect the plot, Hermione doesn't fit this trope, because she actively participates in things whether Harry and Ron do or not, she doesn't owe her success to anyone male (and, to a large degree, had to do it without her own parents because they're Muggles) and goes on to earn a career without anyone's hand-outs.

But if you take it in meta the same way you've taken the example with Peggy, then she belongs here: she gets the Time Turner on her own, but only so the plot can put it into Harry's hands. She studies and practices the most and is the most competent witch in her age group, but Harry is the Chosen One and therefore more powerful, and relies on her friendship with Harry to get her involved with the plot of every book because she'd otherwise be too busy doing unimportant stuff (like House Elf activism).

Haley Starshine is another example: see, Haley is a competent member of the Order of the Stick and, for a long while, was the central protagonist of the post-Azure City story arc. She is absolutely every bit as important as the rest of the cast. But, we have to remember that the focus of her character is and has always been around male characters, first her father, then her love interest. Even when she was the main character, her primary goal was getting Roy raised from the dead (which I wouldn't normally count, except that makes it the third point of proof in a continuing trend with Rich Burlew's female characters). She would literally not be in the story at all if she didn't have a famous thief father who destroyed her ability to love and trust, so that she could spend the second half of her character development letting Elan teach her how to love and trust again. And because that part of her development actually grows and changes and her skill as a rogue is constant, it becomes more important to her character than her role in the story.

I agree that this is a trope, but only in-universe examples. Otherwise, there'd be no way for any female character to NOT be on this list.

EDIT:

Specifically relevant to the Peggy example, the bit about the female character being a 'bonus' to someone else would already disqualify her for the trope. The whole point of Steve and Peggy's relationship is that it was cut tragically short. They clearly had feelings for each other, but never got to have the romance they would have wanted because the war had to come first, and both of them were more devoted to winning the war and saving the world than they were to each other.

Yep, a lot of female characters fall into the trope - you'll also notice that almost none of the male ones do and that's the point. Male characters live and die on their own or surrounded by friends rather than family, but female characters are almost always girlfriends, love interests, mothers or sisters, never interesting enough on their own. It's not even about secondary characters versus protagonists, most secondary male characters don't have to have their presence explained by family ties and you'll notice that male secondary characters can be that father or mentor pr brother or love interest that always seems to be brought up when the female character is mentioned. And yes, it is unfair, but it is the writing convention that is the problem, not the fact that it's pointed out. Writing women like this isn't done due to a force of nature, it is a writing shorthand, same as any other trope on this site. You you want to let it go for being too common (and it is not everywhere. Hermione is a decent aversion in being part of the team first and foremost, but there are also works like Sabrina The Teenage Witch, Dykes To Watch Out For, Jane's world, Sailor Moon and many more), the same can be said for nearly every other Omnipresent Trope on the site.

As for the Peggy example, I'd have been more convinced if the movie was actually a love story. As is, it is an action movie with a standard romance subplot, and Peggy is actually the only female character with more than one scene. I haven't read the comics, so she's probably better developed there, but this is about the movie. Nothing personal, not a stamp of badness pr anything like that, it just fits the trope.

I didn't say the trope was unfair, I'm saying that your extremely broad, sweeping, meta-and-otherwise definition is unfair. You're basically boiling it down to "If she's not the protagonist and has a relationship of any kind with a man, in-universe or otherwise, then she's Never a Self-Made Woman" which is not at all true. This trope does have its validity (I've added a number of entries to this page myself!) but not when you're using it to discredit every female supporting character just on the grounds that she isn't the center of the narrative universe.

Yes, many female characters are attached to male figures in their lives. Peggy is not one of them. Yes, there is a romantic subplot, but she is not a throw-away love interest, and she does not exist solely to develop Steve's character, and more importantly, the movie makes it very clear that she had a life before Steve, and she had a life after he was gone. She joined the SSR without him, went on assignment without him, she had an entire career that had absolutely nothing to do with her relationship to him. Every scene they have together develops her character at least as much as it develops his, and her accomplishments and Bad Ass moments do not involve him at all (except when he's the one fucking up). Painting her with the LINETS brush just because the movie is not actually about her is horribly unfair to the role she actually plays in the plot— especially when that plot takes place in the 40's and having Peggy be as active and skilled as she is speaks volumes for how she isn't just a prize for Captain America. (A prize which, should be noted, he would not have gotten even if she was one.)

EDIT:

Mainly because I really do not want to get in an argument over this, let's take a shortcut, here:

Who does Peggy Carter have to thank for her position?

The answer is herself, and so she does not deserve to be on this list.

I think you're taking this a tad too personally. For one, you're either misunderstanding or being unfair in your interpretation of the trope. This isn't about secondary or primary characters. To use one of your examples, Hermione is part of a team, she's not there as a girlfriend to anyone; by the time she does hook up with someone, he's either less important than her on equal footing. She's part of the trio with a partner, not a girlfriend of someone who happens to be part of the trio. Mc Gonagall is a clear aversion too, and you'll have to strech your imagination quite far to say that the books revolve around her. By contrast, Tonks and Fleur are introduced as auror and a tournament champion respectively, but are by the last two books only mentioned as Bill's and Lupin's wives and mothers of their children. Now that is something you won't get at if meta levels are forbidden.

I still do not agree with your assessment of Peggy and probably never will. That doesn't make me an extremist or a crusader or mean that I'm hurting her -she's an idea the author had, not a person - just that I don't see her in the same way as you do. We'll keep her off the page, please just keep in mind that I am just as entitled to see her as a LINETS (and I do as a feminist and as a relative of real women who had a career in the 40's) as you are to see her as a role model in other aspects.

I disagree that Tonks and Fleur are off-limits unless meta is involved—Tonks in particular clearly drops hugely in importance as soon as her romance comes into play. I think both of them line up well with the latter half of the trope description, the one about a female character dropping gradually out of the plot as she becomes more and more defined by her relationship to her man. That is still firmly a function of the narrative and its treatment of the characters, but does not delve into authorial intent, which is I think the line you're blurring here.

There are levels of analysis: what a character does and says (the character view), the way she's treated by and in the plot in general (the narrative view), and the consideration of the creator's aims in how and why the plot and characters were written the way they were (the authorial intent view, and by far the most meta of the three). Likewise, there are tropes for character actions, character types, plot events, themes, moods, settings, audience reactions, and on and on. My experience is that TV Tropes tries to keep tropes that apply to the narrative itself separate from tropes that apply to the creation or experience of that narrative, I can only imagine specifically to avoid arguments like these.

Saying that a character fits this trope solely because a work needed a love interest and she's it, disregarding that she fits literally NO PART of the description that covers narrative cues, seems to me to be painting with far too broad a brush for something that is not a Super-Trope. If a woman has to pass each and every one of the three levels of consideration I laid out above to not count as this trope (doesn't define herself by her relationship to a man, is not defined by the story by her relationship with a man, is not put into the story by the author for the benefit of a man) then we are in the territory of an extremely broad trope indeed, and this page needs a) a new title b) a rewrite and c) a clean-up.

And as a last point, I don't think it's fair to say that Hermione doesn't count in essence because she gets more subplots and her relationship takes longer to develop. The Harry Potter series is seven books long. Captain America is one movie. You say Peggy's only there to be Steve's girlfriend? I say Hermione is only there because Harry needs someone who isn't too terrified of looking scholastic to get plot points out of books from time to time—oh, and so Harry has someone to talk to when he and Ron aren't speaking to each other. Tada, we've both declared ourselves arbiters of authorial intent and defined capable, independent women by how they interact with men—and with equal lack of respect for how the story itself portrays them! I hope we're all feeling nicely feminist about it. Which is to say, this trope as meta becomes YMMV at the drop of a hat. If you don't want edit wars on the trope page you made, clarify the trope. I like this trope as an in-universe trope, I really do. I appreciate your insight in noticing it, and I'm glad it's here. I just don't think it should be used to justify unfounded, unsourced statements about why an author chose to put a character in a work without acknowledging how the author went about doing so.

Okay, first of all, you're misunderstanding the trope again. Being there to move the main plot along is fine, because that is what all side charatcers do, regardless of gender. Try replacing the characters with a male one and see what I mean.

Let's make th basics clear: I don't care about authorial intent and I'm frankly starting to wonder what I'm doing on a site where half the edit wars and half the discussions on the repair YKTTW end up being attempts at protecting people's favorite shows from tropes that may shed any light on it that isn't positive. Having lots of works on the page is not a campaign for raining on a fan favorite's parade or attack the author or whatever it is you think I'm doing, it just means that it is common. Also, do I have to not again that neither work nor character have feelings and that the author won't even know about the page? Noone is being unfair to them, the only ones who react are the fans. And believe you me, the fans will start edit wars and quibble over interpretation no matter how watertight it is, so that is really not a good argument (and even less so because this page doesn't actually get them that often)

But yes, authorial intent. It's irrelevant. What is relevant is the pattern of stories where the only femalre character of import is the love interest - that says something. It says even more when you get works with more than one woman and all of them are love interests or sisters or mothers. That's probably not something the writer even thinks about, and if they do, there will probably be a million explanations for it, as with Damsel in Distress or any other trope, but the pattern remains and it doesn't actually happen with male characters unless it's sailormoon or My little pony or something. That is actually a pretty clear guideline for looking for the trope within the narrative, and I know that it doesn't do Peggy any favors, but adapting the page just to fit her seems a little ridiculous.

I agree with a possible rewrite though, both to clean up the descriptipn and to make clear how this usually works. Maybe a sliding scale from In-Universe to meta might be useful. Could be a suggestion for the repair shop, which is really where this discussion fits anyway.

Okay, well, two things:

One, Vinehammer and I are two different people. Just so you know; it doesn't seem obvious from the way you're responding that you realize that.

Two, the language used when the trope describes "a bonus to someone else" should either a) exclude any character that has a greater function in the plot than as an obvious trophy for the hero, or b) include any character who is not the primary protagonist or the antagonist, regardless of gender. That phrase is so vague as to be meaningless.

And going back to the Captain America example, I think I've narrowed down the reason why she (and any other female lead of her type) doesn't belong on this list: she's a love interest, yes, but her function in the plot is The Obi-Wan. She's one of his drill sergeants, she's the one who tells him he has more options than just being a chorus girl or a lab rat, she's the one who tells him how to reconcile Bucky's death as a soldier: everything she does for him in the plot, she does as an older soldier with more experience.

Unfortunately, the Trope Repair Shop is full at the moment.

Ah, thank you for pointing that out, I do get a bit sloppy when it comes to remembering names.

I've been thinking of tweaking the description to be more clear, including the exemples I mentioned where all (or in extreme cases the single) female characters happen to have familial or sexual ties with male ones. That is a decent guideline for meta, I think, since it strips most implications of wether or not a character is a good or deep character - the real question is why the writer can't have a female character in the story without her being a love interest, mother or heir to someone else. It isn't about side or central characters, since a cast woth multiple female characters following the pattern would be a rather obvious example (unless it's a family drama of course) and a cast with a single female character who is cast in this role sticks out like a sore thumb (one might ask wether she'd have that bond if she was male or why the love interest was the only female worthy to include)

Seen in that light, Peggy could fit in regardless of her role as mentor, but then you could make a case for a military enviroment.

Shame, a structured scale looks better by the minute. It is rather counter productive when people think that fitting the trope automatically makes a character shallow.

The way it's written now, the implication is that the character is shallow for having those ties. The 'bonus' line is the one that really grinds my gears on that front, but the trope description has a general presentation of love interests as having no merit as characters on their own, or having no reason to be in the story except as love stories. While that isn't true, it does mean that characters like Peggy, whose role as a romantic lead is entirely secondary to her role as mentor and friend on equal footing with Steve (although she doesn't get as much screentime), get lumped in with characters like say, Kara, from Dragonheart, who could be removed from the plot entirely and not change anything at all.

It also doesn't help avoid the suggestion that people posting characters here think those characters are shallow when they use language like, "Of course she only functions as a love interest," instead of some simple statement of, "The only woman in the story is the one involved in a romance with the main character," which would get across the same point without also dismissing out of hand everything the character does that isn't related to the romance plot. I don't disagree that there ought to be more female characters in media who aren't related to the men in some familial or intimate way; I mainly feel like the blur between meta and narrative function makes the name of the trope misleading. Self-made resonates very strongly to me for the backstory elements; the phrasing is so implicitly about the character's motivations and origin that making it about the meta under that name just seems counter-intuitive to me. Would something like Never Her Own Woman would be better? It doesn't have the past-tense shade that self-made does.

Actually, while we're talking about the trope description, the part about a career woman meeting a romantic interest and dropping out of the plot to concentrate on family or her relationship also feels kind of shoehorned in to me. It fits just fine if all you're doing is objectively looking at a female character's relationships with men, former OR current, but again the self-made term becomes misleading when divorced from the description of what got a woman to where she is—a woman can be entirely self-made and then fall prey to societal expectations about what she should do once she's met someone. As written, the second variation of the trope seems like it would fit more accurately under the Family Versus Career umbrella. It's got a place here, absolutely, I just don't like it under the name it currently has.

Trust me, the name used to be much worse and got changed a while back- I'm not convinced there will be support for a slight change for such a small trope with that in mind.

But I also think we can't be too nice to the character either - they don't have feelings, remember- and end up looking like there are no implications to this trope. Most romantic subplot are tacked on, meaning that most love interest don't have a value of their own, which is especially obvious when it comes to smurfettes. And do remember that primary roles are subjective- in my opinion, they could just as easily have cut Peggy and given her lines to someone else à la Hot Fuzz, since there wasn't that many of them to begin with. Maybe it is a valid argument for calling her shallow, maybe not, but it does tell us something about the energy put into the character.

Well. If there are three of us arguing the point, and two of us think the trope is broken, then that means there's support for it, yeah?

"They would just as easily have cut Peggy and given her lines to someone else" means the role was necessary, it just didn't have to be a romantic interest. Peggy and Steve did not have to have any kind of romantic inclination, no, but the fact that they did does not diminish the validity of Peggy's role in the story. Would it be less sexist to have the romance removed and Peggy's character played by a man?

I confess myself mystified as to why we keep coming back to the primary/secondary/tertiary talking point. Regardless of how significant a female character is, the trope will be apparent in-universe if it's in play. If the meta level is entirely about how female characters never appear in a story without a love interest or family member also being involved in the plot, why does it matter how main they are or aren't? As far as I can tell, you're advocating making this call based on whether or not a female character has a value on her own, and that is ALWAYS going to be subjective, as you yourself just pointed out.

To circle back to the beginning, that problem goes back to the name of the trope. If it were just an observation about women not being allowed into a work without a male companion, we could just spout off lists of women all day and everyone could agree with the empirical observations being made. But the title takes us straight into a discussion of how and why, and that leads to debates about whether a woman's relationship is more definitive than any other function she has in the plot.

"Peggy Carter is a love interest and the only woman in the movie." Yep, that sure is true.

"Peggy Carter is the only woman in the movie and her function as a romantic figure is more important than any other role she serves." That's where we suddenly have a problem, and an argument, and an edit war.

With the current title and current scope, that's a problem the trope is never going to shake.

Since she was the only woman in the story, I think we can be pretty sure that she would have been a man if there was no romantic element, meaning that as a woman her primary purpose was being a Love Interest.

And yes, there may very well be major problems with this trope, but it's kind of hard to tell when arguing between three people and it keeps revolving around wether one single example would fit or not. I do support a repair shop thread, but there is really no point in discussing it here without more input (especially without interest in Peggy's case), and it doesn't give any mandate for the changes you would like.

You're seriously missing the point, here.

As it stands now, this trope immediately condemns all female romantic leads just for being romantic leads, and completely disregards any and all other development they may have. That's not "pointing out an unsettling trend with female characters", that's "Complaining About Character Archetypes You Don't Like".

Peggy is just a stand-out example because she's a mentor figure for most of the film regardless of the romance she doesn't actually get to partake in. She fits only the most vague, least valid and most meta criteria of the trope, and only if the core of her characterization is completely disregarded. There may not be many characters like her out there, but if and when they do exist, they need to be upheld as an example of a love interest done right and not dismissed out of hand just because they exist.

Further, "mandate"? Really? On a site that anyone can edit?

Yeah, sorry for not changing the name and reworking the trope definition based on two people defending a character they like.

If you want her off the page, she's off the page. If you want to write her in with a measure or praise, you do that. Like you said, the wiki is free to edit.

I think so. It might not be a complete inversion/subversion in regards to her mother, if she in turn got her position thanks to man, but in terms of your main character it probably would.

And with the change in the Trope Name, I'm thinking this becomes a viable example.

EDIT: Except that with the description being the same... guess not.