FUCK YOU, SHE'S AWESOME

[opusculus]

Because I approve of memes this awesome. Stolen from karayan here and existence here, in response to this lovely little bit of idiocy and fail.

• Rena Ryugu from Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni
  
  I could actually probably do an entire section on the female characters of Higurashi, but I'm going with Rena because she's the least spoilery of my favorites. Rena is fucking awesome. She's sweet, shy, and adorable, and cares deeply about her friends and being a good person. She's by far the least aggressive of the major characters, rarely trying as hard as possible to win. She adores cute things, and nightmarish things that she thinks are cute, and would love to take them all home to be with her.
  
  She's also probably the most insightful of the main cast. She's the type of person who is very good at assembling the whole picture from a handful of clues, and does so both for practical things, like figuring out who the murderer is and more philosophical things. The fact that she's the most superstitious person should be a powerful clue that there's a lot of truth behind the superstitions, and the fact that she makes them into a valid and true philosophy as well as a "god will strike you down if you don't" is awesome.
  
  Plus she's willing to chop people up with a machete if they hurt her family.
  
  Edit: Oh wait never mind, she's an approved strong female character. Not because of any of the above mentioned things, but because she's the protagonist of one of Higurashi's episodes. Clearly this inherently raises her awesome levels by five billion to meet the approved standards.



• Lucca from Chrono Trigger
  
  Because this made me splutter forever when I saw her on the list. LUCCA IS NOT FUCKING SHY, DAMNIT. Lucca is an awesome inventor with damn powerful magic who travels through time to save the world. She is entirely aware of her own awesomeness, and enjoys showing off her new inventions. She's driven by a powerful need to make things better, which can manifest in anything from repairing a broken robot from a thousand years in the future because she can't stand to leave it unfixed to saving the world. And she's almost impossible to daunt, considering she's perfectly willing to break into the castle to save her best friend who was unjustly imprisoned.



• Angel from Digital Devil Saga
  
  Angel is one of the most fucking badass villains of all time. She's a brilliant scientist who turned bad when her true love was murdered by terrorists, who decided to get her revenge on the world by turning people into cannibal demons before destroying the world. She ruthlessly uses everything she can to get there - creating a child entirely of her own body and using her as a test subject in her obsessive quest to get god's power, turning an entire world into cannibal demons and ordering them devour their enemies to test out the demon virus, turning herself into a cannibal demon, creating an uprising and killing the leader of the only prospering enclave of humanity left - she does it all. And the scene where she dies is just an incredibly powerful scene, because she never once loses any of what makes her such an awesome and compelling character while also making what drives her so obvious.



• Princess Kareen from Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold
  
  Because being a damsel in distress before being killed doesn't always make you a lousy character. Kareen was, before anything else, a survivor. She'd survived bearing a child to an insane crown prince with a thing for torturing pregnant women, and after his death had started to make plans for her surviving the emperor's death and her son's very long regency by attaching herself to the first person she found who might have had the power to protect her and who Imperial Security's reports said had normal enough tastes in sex. She was quiet and reserved, and very good at understanding people and knowing when to let them go, and inspired fierce loyalty in those who knew her best. When civil war broke out and she thought her son was dead, she was determined to survive this, too, even if it meant sleeping with her son's murderer who thought he loved her and marrying him to give him a legitimate claim on her son's throne.
  
  It was only knowing that her son was still alive, and that as long as her lover was alive her son would be in danger that caused her to lose her finely honed survival instincts in favor of killing the bastard. Kareen's interesting to me in large part because she's so quiet and reserved that it's hard to see her, especially with everyone else projecting their desires onto her, but you can still see a really interesting person underneath all that.

Comments

[inarticulate]

Lucca was the first one I noticed, and… exactly. EXACTLY. ♥ Lucca.

[opusculus]

Yeah, there were other ones that were really bad, but Lucca caught my attention because. What. You do not diss the awesome of my childhood like that. Lucca = pure distilled win and awesome

[nu_ophiuchi]

(This is eldena from livejournal, I came here from there and I never use this DW account but I shockingly have one and have no reason to log out so hey.)

I'm blown away by how the chart would be fine as an examination of how stereotypes interact if not for that amazingly ridiculous Strong Female Character branch. Did the fact that the "clichéd" section is a gazillion times more complex not strike anyone as a problem? If anything, it does a good job making stereotypes sound a lot more interesting than strong female characters.

Though I find I'm having trouble playing the game since the first two questions alone are very subjective and the next two also tend to be widely debatable; I suspect I give characters more passes than some people.

[nu_ophiuchi]

Actually, on second thought, the bigger problem with the Strong Female Character branch is that its qualifications really aren't hard or complicated, and there are characters who landed elsewhere in the chart that, subjective or no, at the very least could use some real justification as to why they failed those five steps. They're doing two separate things here: the rest of the chart is "this is why all these characters are stereotypes", but that top row is pretty much a showpiece to look like it's making a point without having to elaborate on it.

[opusculus]

Yeah, it's one of those things that honestly really should have been chopped up into two charts at very least. I'd still not be real happy with some of their choices, but the wide range of awesome female characters they have in their failed female stereotypical characters chart is just a whole world of no. I certainly can't think of any reason for some of those characters to flunk being a strong female character unless "can carry her own story" means "must be a protagonist", which kind of puts an ickier spin on the whole thing. Only one woman at a time can be a Strong Female Character is not a good message.

And the top line is so vague as to be completely useless. I can't honestly say I know what "carry her own story" could mean if it's not that they're a protagonist. I can't actually think of any characters who couldn't carry their own story if the story were written about them by a decent author, no matter how flat and poorly developed, because writing a story about them would require fleshing them out unless they were already the protagonist of the story. And "not representing an idea" is just...I can't think of many characters who are inherently limited to being just an idea, and those who are are generally in canons where everyone's basically an idea, so I'm not sure what point that actually makes besides "female characters are held to a higher standard than male characters." The whole top line basically comes off as a mess of "I'm going to say things that sound good without ever bothering to elaborate on it."

[nu_ophiuchi]

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.

[opusculus]

Yeah, you're right. The chart does have some interesting things to say about what transforms female characters into a different stereotypes, and I could see that being interesting in a different context, but turning that into a value judgment on them for fitting tropes is bad. Honestly, I think some of my favorite characters are the ones who fit squarely into tropes and proceed to completely subvert the expectations of them because people aren't that simple and their writers know that.