opusculus

The thing is that, in actuality, fitting a few stereotypes on paper doesn't prevent one from also being a strong female character. And if it did there'd be like two strong female characters in the world because, if you boil everything down to its essentials, stereotypes are next to impossible to avoid. There is nothing new under the sun, especially not that turn of phrase, and any concept that's been used enough times to have a presence in the pop-culture collective unconscious becomes a stereotype. A well-written character, one that doesn't ping as stereotypical, is one that develops beyond the stereotypes it could fit enough to overwhelm them and transcend them. The issues our media often has with female characters arise from writers who rely on stereotyping because they either can't be bothered to figure out how to add to it or think their audience won't accept anything else.

Which is why I thought much of the chart would be interesting not as a way to categorize female characters, but as an exploration of the way certain stereotypes relate to each other. That would be a good discussion. Adding a simplistic value judgement metric to it is terribly misguided. I was definitely thinking too that it'd work better in two parts, although the Strong Female Character line doesn't make much of a flowchart anyway.

...Or, as they say on tvtropes which I'm not linking to don't worry, Tropes Are Not Bad.