The Strong Female Character Archetype

For my first blog post that isn't a review of something, I thought I'd talk about a topic that has been on my mind quite a lot lately, concerning a trend in current-day TV shows and movies. In recent years, there's been growing demand for a certain depiction of women in film. Most refer to this depiction as the strong female character.

Now, this trend certainly isn't a surprise considering the years of film where women were for the most part helpless damsels. It figures that women and even men would get sick of women mostly taking on this role in fiction, and I'm mostly content with this new portrayal being prevalent. However, I do have some issues with it that I'd like to talk about.

A New Archetype
To me, it seems like the "strong female character" has sort of become a new archetype. Instead of making women these passive, emotional damsels, they're instead active, emotionless ass-kickers. In other words, women's roles have simply been reversed and are merely strong in the sense that they can physically kick ass and that they aren't emotional. However, good and memorable characters don't merely come out of capable fighters, but instead usually come out of being relatable, interesting and/or fun. This form of the strong female character is an equally uninteresting depiction of women that takes just as much effort to write as does a damsel. Heck, even Michael Bay, who is notorious for his shameless objectification of women in his films, has Megan Fox's character in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014) save the heroes, reversing the damsel/hero roles. Does that inherently make her character a "strong female character?" I don't think so.

Physical Strength vs. Character Strength
The very notion of women needing to be "strong" female characters is pretty silly as it implies they need to be physically strong. Not all well-written female characters are physically strong. A good example of this is Liv Moore from iZombie. Sure, if you count her going full-on zombie mode, then yeah, she is, but most of the time, Liv's strength as a character comes from being relatable. She gets pissed off and angry sometimes. She cries when life comes to a halt, and she can be hilarious when she wants to be; above all, she is written like a human being, not as an archetype used to replace another crappy archetype.

Influence of Gender
Finally, when it comes to writing good female characters the focus shouldn't be, "How do we write a strong female character?", it should be "How do we write a good character?" Whether a character is male or female, the focus should be on trying to make them relatable if they're to be the protagonist and sympathetic if they're to be the antagonist. Obviously, this doesn't always apply, but often times it does. The thing about good female characters, such as Liv, I find, is that them being female isn't their primary attribute. They're not good because they're female or despite that they're female. That's not to say that gender can't ever come into play, but it shouldn't be the primary trait defining who a character is because in real life, that's not what people are like. We have many sides to ourselves, and a good character brings those different sides to the table, which is a big reason we find them likable and/or relatable.

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So overall, strong female characters aren't a bad thing, but we need to remember why we actually tend to find characters memorable. It's not because they are "strong." It's because they're funny, relatable, intriguing  or just plain entertaining for some reason. Therefore, if we want to have better female characters in fiction, we need to allow ourselves to go beyond the "strong female character" archetype. That's of course not to say that there aren't female characters that already go beyond this archetype, as I did use Liv Moore as an example earlier. I am, however, saying that we need to be mindful not to get caught up in the pseudo-feminist depictions of women that merely replace stereotypes with other ones, instead of getting rid of them altogether.