What makes a strong female character strong?

Game Development Writing and Content
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This is true. I think the main issue with Disney princesses is that so much importance is placed upon their looks, and their beauty is usually connected either directly or indirectly to their virtue. That’s an extremely glaring flaw in the way the story is framed of course but the characters themselves are actually great role models. They’re honest, compassionate, intelligent, usually courageous.

The best example of a Disney princess I can think of whose looks are mostly irrelevant is Mulan. Correct me if I’m wrong because it’s been a while since I’ve seen it, but I’m fairly certain that nobody tells her she’s beautiful in any way that’s supposed to have any legitimate meaning on the story. The dude falls in love with her because she’s resourceful, brave, and brilliant. The story would be exactly the same if she were conventionally unattractive, and unless you’re dealing with beauty as an actual theme in the story, looks should be pretty much irrelevant. I don’t see the point in describing a character as physically beautiful unless that ties into a theme somehow or affects their characterization. Physical beauty should be entirely irrelevant in discussions about female strength, but as of right now it just can’t be, because for so long the number one expectation placed upon women has been to be beautiful.

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You are right. Mulan is considered beautiful, but that is irrelevant to the story. It is similar with Tiana, Merida and Vaiana.

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What makes a strong female character strong? I’ve found that the important thing is that the female character drives the story.

Specifically by pursuing their goals, desires, interests, and intentions. If those aren’t pushing the story forward, then even the most powerful of female characters really isn’t strong in a narrative sense. Give me a gutter orphan with a rusty knife who wants and strives to achieve something over an indifferent someone in power armor with a razor-fist any day.

Speaking of specifics, let’s take Snow White. Is she a strong female character? Nope. Her goals and intentions aren’t really in play because they don’t drive the story. Her beauty does, and even then only because she eclipses the Queen. Snow White goes through many adventures and trials, and her predicament drives the story even when she is asleep, but her character doesn’t.

Mulan’s goals, on the other hand, do drive the story. She wants to protect her father and everything she does is to that end. Her desires also come into play, and likewise push her arc with Li Shang.
Mulan being beautiful (As Bluebirb noted), has cultural expectations that come with that, and this is actually an impediment to her interests; a good thing from a narrative point of view.

And Fury Road? An excellent movie for this discussion.

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Exacly! I’ve met so many women who treated their male SO that way, I never understood the stereotype of “toxic masculinity”…It’s toxic humanity, it occurs in and against both genders.

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Hi Allen,

While I agree that this can be a driver in defining a strong female character, I believe it is more than this. I would go as far to say that your own writing in Tin Star shows that you can have a strong female character that does not neccessarily drive the story.

Carrie, Yiska and even Maria are all “strong” female characters in Tin Star and they were all characters that make your game still one of my all-time favorites.

I know, I am such a fan-girl of yours. lol. :two_hearts:

Edit:

it is a stereotype - there is no rationality except the debunked rational that “all stereotypes are based on something in reality” – there is no understanding it outside of it being a stereotype.

Edit 2:

Sarah’s point – is that toxic behavior is the issue, not the gender attached to that behavior.

As a result, toxic masculinity needs context to be something outside of the stereotype – she was not saying toxic masculinity doesn’t exist. Nor was she dismissing the issues that are a result.

Now, enough of toxic masculinity talk in this thread.

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There are toxic people everywhere. But toxic masculinity has become a cultural problem in Latino countries. For instance, In Spain, Hundreds of groups of men trying to rape a woman or even a group of them hitting several girls
has become a public problem. Men hitting random women in public just because of being women. And saying we women are whores so they have as males all rights to abuse us publicly. We have extreme right politics defending condemned rapists.

So toxic masculinity as an ideology is real.

I have heard many people saying Oh, is not a gender issue to trying hide under the carpet the problem we had with Toxic masculinity and violence against women and queer. So is not a stereotype as it is real at least in many countries as mine.

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Well, if you’re still interested in writing this story, I would recommend you not stay too long on the stuff that’s happened to her and caused her to have that opinion, otherwise she’ll come across as mopey.

You can still cover it, since it’d give her depth, but then make sure to write her taking action to resolve her problem/s. What so often happens is that a character will have a problem, feel sad about it, and the the writers will often say that that’s character growth. But it isn’t.

Having a problem, feeling sad or whining about it, doesn’t make a strong character (or person for that matter). It makes someone unattractive because people recognize them as someone who always complains but never fixes the problem even if the solution is such as simple one.

If you don’t want your character - who just so happens to be a beautiful woman - to be objectified by her appearance alone, then don’t spend too much of your words on it. In other words, don’t spend a 5+ sentence paragraph describing what she looks like. Mention what’s important to the story or what your audience needs to know, but then leave it at that.

If your character (regardless of gender or sex) has long hair and in a horror novel, I’ll expect the long hair to be a disadvantage at a later time. Maybe it gets caught in a trap which ends in the character’s grizzly death.

What you can do is have the rest of the cast objectify her - in a negative light aka “queen bee” -, but never let your audience fall into the same trap since we’ll be following her PoV.

I’m sure this portion of your question has already been tackled, but don’t write a character with express purpose to show how strong they are. If you do that, then you’ve - ironically - devalued them as characters and made them to be symbols for the purpose of virtue signaling which your audience will no doubt catch onto and subsequently dismiss for the rest of the book.

Writing a character to “be strong!” is the other end of the spectrum to write those damsels in distress that served as nothing more than a prize for the male hero. In both scenarios, you’re reducing a character to be nothing more than a symbol of your intentions in the laziest way possible.

So my advice? Write good characters. Write complex characters that are tougher to define compared to the one adjective (“strong character”) ones. Look at anybody in your life who you know very well and dissect them into the good, the bad, and the ugly and then do that for your characters in the novel.

Your mother might be “strong” for one reason or another, but she’s also a bunch of other things too.

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I guess it all comes down to perspective.
I think she was, after surviving murder attempt she never lost her kindness or trust. That, to me, Is a strong trait in anyone.

strong women can be masculine or feminine. I like the ones who are strong on their own accord, who don’t try to be all macho-man but can still play with the big boys and hold her own while keeping her femininity (stereotypical femininity like hair, makeup, still loves cute dresses can can rock body armor at the same time)

It’s been a while since I’ve watched Alien but I’m pretty sure Ripley was like the embodiment of a strong character, now i want to watch it again

I wanna add: (to me)
A character not having any flaws is over powered and boring, not strong

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Can I say this as a female? I don’t- REALLY don’t- like "Mary Sue"s… Nope, no one is a unique little snowflake that just everyone wants or someone that can be a witchvampirerobotnunzombieneurosurgeonstripper. Doesn’t happen.

A strong female character is flawed. There are no perfect people and strength doesn’t count for much unless you’ve been tested, broken and made your way up to your feet again… maybe not even fully able to stand straight, but damn suborn not to be held down… Tis it. :smiley_cat:

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Listen. Mary-Sues are important for the development of young women in primarily male media as a form of discovering their own sexuality and power as they navigate a tumultuous time in their lives towards adulthood.

It’s also a very important tool for adult people of many genders discovering new agency over their bodies and their identities and shouldn’t be shamed for arbitrary standards of bad writing.

Anakin Skywalker is Space Jesus Virgin Birth and built the fastest pod racer and a functional droid when he was nine years old but we don’t hear people calling him a Mary Sue. It’s just an excuse to shit on young women creating their own harmless fiction for themselves and other young women. It’s not beholden to the same standards as published media.

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Absolutely. You can see this very difference in super hero design: males are huge, muscular and powerful while women are slender and barely-dressed.

Both are unrealistic expectations for people, but men’s muscular and powerful shapes are a threat and a power fantasy for men… while women being barely dressed, in high heels, and almost always drawn as beautiful, unmarred, unemotional and with makeup on even in battle are… also a subject of male gaze. When Tony Stark, Iron Man, makes a rape joke in a Hollywood film referring to primae noctis, you understand then that most of these films exist with the idea of consumable women.

Straight cis men are allowed to indulge in their fantasies where they’ll gain powers and respect after a heroic trial and get the girl or at least a girl without them being called Mary Sues.

It’s men who get the radioactive powers of Spiderman or the Hulk, who find the last dragon’s egg in Eragon and becomes its rider in How to Train Your Dragon, who are presented as the sympathetic protagonist in Passengers, who are the secret princes, the hidden mages, the robot-killers, the monster-slayers, the heirs and inheritors by subconscious default. The Lion King tries as it might to write around the fact that the lionesses partake in the final battle and win, and yet spent years waiting for the male protagonist to return to do so…

Women are the Love Interest, Seductress, the Ingenue, the Daughter, the Sister, the Mother, the Bitch, or the Crone: not as all-consuming as it once was in media, but still present. Whether you’re playing Final Fantasy or the Witcher, whether you’re watching Legend of the Seeker or Kung Fu Panda. The Hunger Games books specifically criticised the sexualising, politicalisation and dehumanising of children, especially PoC in the media and how it robs children, especially girls, of a childhood. In response the films up the focus on the love triangle, make the heroine white and have her played by a 21-year-old woman rather than a 14-year-old girl.

There are very few power fantasies for women with female protagonists presented as for all genders like the male ones are. The only one I can think of in recent years are the Legend of Korra and any Star Wars including Rey (guess how much these two are hated for “bad writing” and “Mary Sues”?). Pixar’s Brave, maybe? I used to love Xena growing up, but it’s extremely niche.

Yes, there are female variants like Spider-Gwen, but who spends on them? Who cares too much for them? And shounen anime practically runs on this trope. It’s partly why magical girl stories like Sailor Moon exist as a form of backlash.

If you, as a woman, want to explore emotion and power and what you, as a woman, want, do that. Do that. Who cares if it is a “Mary Sue”? It’s just a term to make poor teen girls and insecure women feel even worse about their personal indulgences and I will not stand for it.

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@Laguz I think that there may have been some confusion about the use of the term Mary Sue. I think that empowered, strong female characters are wonderful, and don’t consider them Mary Sues (someone told me the male version of a Mary Sue, but I forget). My point is that you don’t have to go all the way to the other side to show that a female character IS that.

What is a good non-gendered example… Ah! The story about 300. So you have 300 Spartans hold off the Persian force at Thermopylae, right? The army of Persians was in the thousands. If you go and say, those 300 hundred men held off a million Persians, does that make their accomplishment better somehow? Even if it were a couple of thousand it’s still impressive, not just because they held their own, but because they were willing to die for something greater. You don’t have to exaggerate how impressive something is for it to be impressive.

I like a strong character- male, female or mineral. I play the games from different perspectives, and I find that my favorite characters MC and NPCs have chips in their armors because that makes them more endearing and relatable. Is that what everyone likes? Nope. That’s why I ended my post with “jmho”.

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That’s a Gary Stu, I believe. It’s a rarer sight than a Mary Sue though as reader inserts tend to be about 85% female, with most of the 15% male reader inserts being M/M. There’s very few reader inserts with straight male characters.

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Anakin was certainly a Marty Stu, and the film in which he played a 9 year old Jesus is the least liked, most criticized film in Star Wars history, most especially the “midichlorians” that were introduced to make him so super special. I strongly suspect that both Jesus Anakin and Jar Jar were botched attempts by Lucas to make the film more appealing to small children that only served to annoy large numbers of teens and adults.

I do agree that the term “Mary Sue” isn’t always fairly or accurately employed when aimed at female characters, ie. most power fantasies, male or female, aren’t really Mary Sue’s. And girls are just as entitled to their power fantasies as boys. Nevertheless the term does have value when used in the context it was originally coined, as a caution against a common set of pitfalls beginner authors tend to fall into that together can render their protagonist unrelatable to most readers.

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Except its “context” was satire of fanfiction in “a Trekkie’s Tale”. Making fun of young girls’ wish-fulfilment which, while badly written, is harmless. It wasn’t making fun of published works and bad writing, no, it was making fun of harmless fun little writings created for free often by young girls who hadn’t the writing skill of a grown adults and were thus mocked for it.

If you’re, like Mary Sue herself, fifteen years old, I’m not going to hold you to the standards of “good writing” or even “acceptable writing” I would an adult. And it is these people - young teens and young adults - that most produce self-insert or OC fanfiction.

Why are people finding excuses to hate on young women, again, women that write for free, women who are not “beginner authors” as you say but hobbyist writers for fun? Mary Sue’s original context was a grown ass woman hating on bad writing and gratuitously unrealistic and overpowered self-insert and OCs in free fiction created by teen girls for teen girls.

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There is certainly more to this. Reading through all these posts has certainly been enlightening on how others see things.

As for Tin Star, the praise is appreciated. When writing any NPC, an attempt was made to consider their story, their goals and desires, and how the MC might interact in a particular way with them because of those. Certain NPCs, such as Miss Caraway, might also be changed by them.

Why was Miss Caraway hanging around Preston Springs? There had to be more to life than being ogled by prospectors, shooting them up if they got frisky, and making a living by gambling. Well, she was there because her father asked her to be there, to keep tabs on Preston and his doings. This came to a head with the Golden Stagecoach chapter.

So, she’s trying to help her father out. He can’t live as an outlaw forever. But what did she want for herself beyond such demonstrations of filial piety? Not unlike Mulan, now that I think about it.

She also suffered the loss of a close friend, her first real one, in Preston Springs. There is some emotional resonance there for her, a loss she hasn’t been able to shed.

But if the PC takes her to some of the shows down in Elko, that sparks the idea that she wants more than a rough life out west, that besides her father and her friend’s unjustly filled grave, there just isn’t enough for her. And if the PC romances her, she figures out that she does in fact want someone to love, provided they love her in return. And she’ll pursue that to the bitter end once it is set in motion.

She wants a lot of things, and her striving to achieve those is her own story, her own arc, though it is linked with the PC in many ways. For example, if the PC is of an honorable bent, and relocates to New York City, in some endings she’s a mysterious figure who dispenses justice in the bowels of the city and then vanishes… albeit into a nearby bar or else she goes back to the mansion where the PC will probably be waiting up for her.

Hmm. This has wandered a bit. But we can probably leave it with, yes, you are correct; Strong female characters don’t have to drive the main story to be strong.

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My first experience with a Mary Sue wasn’t with a 15 year old author writing for free but a 40-something year old best-selling author who wrecked her own award-winning series (and income!). Her fandom was over 95% female and they turned on her, with the extremely passionate anti-fans eventually outnumbering the fans. Possibly the most damning trait of the series was that while every single male character loved and adored the protagonist, there was no room in the series for positively depicted female characters aside from the protagonist herself as all female characters would eventually betray the protagonist out of jealousy.

So if the author is a 15 year old girl writing for free, sure, cut her a lot of slack, but adult authors who’ve made millions and have stubbornly driven the majority of their own overwhelmingly female fan base into an extremely passionate hatred are a different story.