Reading, Writing, and Being a 'Strong Female Character'
Fair warning: I have been reading metafandom a bit too much lately. But the Female Character Flowchart has been making such extensive rounds that I've started to see it elsewhere as well. It's popping up on facebook, twitter... and I'm fascinated by how, outside of LJ, all of the reactions I've seen have been "Yeah... the state of female characters is pretty sad," whereas most of us in this corner of fandom are up in arms about how some of our favorite female characters got thrown onto the chart or, from a wider standpoint, how the chart implies that any female character that serves a supporting role is not a "Strong Female Character". Some of you might remember my last diatribe on "Strong Female Characters" (which is locked due to real-life things touched upon in that entry, sorry), which mostly boiled down to my conclusion that 80% of the time I don't hold up to most "strong" character standards, so what are we even looking for if real, actual people don't pass muster? (And this happens on the list, too. I mean, Yoko Ono is on it and, as much as she's reduced to a trope in pop culture, she is still a real person.)
And this is where I would wave my hands around and shout "Stop conflating 'strong' with 'well-written' in terms of characters." Nevermind how 'strong' tends to be a masculine ideal and putting the first on the list of traits for a female is counter-intuitive at best... well-written is what matters. (And I can't even get into the whole problem this raises with flawed vs. too flawed. And goodness, once we've determined, in that straight little line that supposedly leads to narrative perfection, whether someone is flawed enough or not they get dumped into the same reductionist morass as everyone else that can't carry their own story or exists as a soapbox for someone's ideas.) So let's say that our gold-star "Congratulations!" category is for Well-Written Female Characters. But I'll be honest here, I suspect that Lara Croft makes it across that fine line at the top, and in a chart where that happens but Faye Valentine and Zoe Wasburne are relegated to substandard status is more than a bit flawed (not that both of those characters don't suffer from writer-inflicted oversight problems). And that's my main argument against the chart. It's more concerned with a war against tropes than it is with what actually makes a good character, regardless of gender, and it doesn't seem to distinguish at all between the different roles protagonists play versus supporting characters.
But I'm determined not to go off on another rant on this stuff. Instead, I want to have a bit of fun with this chart. I've been skimming through it for the better part of a half-hour now, trying to figure out where I fit on it. I mean, I'm constantly going on about how my life has a secret author, after all, so it's only appropriate for me to figure out where I stand.
I'm going to come straight out with my hypothesis (because otherwise I will never manage to organize this entry at all). Because if you take your own life as a story, where you fall on the chart depends entirely on how you cut it. Every story is just a piece of a whole world (that's why fanfic has a place to flourish), and all of the characters in it technically have their own individual story going on. And I think this is something it's fair to assume for every character, whether the writer actually manages to portray that or not. I mean, let's face it, one-dimensional and stereotypical characters do serve a purpose (though I'm certainly not going to argue that they're always going to be put to good use). And, honestly, look at the people in your life that you only sort of know. The check-out guy in the grocery store with the weird haircut, the bank teller you always see, the boss you have that shares random out-of-context personal details. Are these three-dimensional characters? No, not from your point-of-view. But are they not real people? (Without straying into philosophy here, guys.) I like to think that there are three dimensions to any character, even if we don't get to see them, and that's the way I view most fictional characters. If it's not there, I tend to make up the rest, and that's probably why I forgive so much I shouldn't when it comes to writers messing things up.
So. Back on track here, a character's role and dimension depends on how you slice the story. I'm currently fascinated by the role I fulfill if you just lift my office out into its own narrative. In this scenario let's assume we're working with an ensemble cast and I'm not the main character, so that automatically bumps us down to the villain question. With a few exceptions mostly having to do with my hatred of our process servers, I don't really fit the villain category, and I'm not a love interest. Since we're looking at my office, it is a team-oriented story, and that gives me approximately eight choices for who I am. If we're telling the story from any other department's point of view, I'm almost invariably the shy-nerdy voice of reason. If we're looking from an attorney's point of view, I am anywhere from Rogue to Punching Bag, depending on the day and whether I've tried to contact a certain stupid large national bank that is not our main client lately (since there doesn't seem to be a 'She does whatever we throw at her/Jack of all trades' category, I suppose I'll say I'm mostly a Rogue in regards to the attorneys). And if we take it from my department's standpoint, I get to hop over to the circle of 'Leader' characters. Ignoring my propensity to categorize my job as a horror story, I'm not violent and I'm certainly not 'nearly-perfect,' so that leaves me in the 'Married to her job' category. Which isn't terribly inaccurate, I suppose, but apparently still makes me a not-strong female character. But let's go back to 'nearly-perfect' because I love this one. It gets leveraged against female characters all the time, because something deep in our insecurity makes us point to other girls and go "Too perfect!" I have, in fact, had this finger pointed at me at work several, if not many, times. Because I'm a goody two-shoes, because I put in extra hours without complaining, because et cetera. And so here, because some of the other women in my office resent the fact that, by not complaining about extra work, I am actually obligating them to do more work without complaining as well or risk irking the bosses, I slip into the annoying overachiever category (or, assuming an audience that isn't my co-workers, I am an 'Ideal Woman', presumably because my male bosses like me. But if I was a bit older I would be a wise crone, and maybe miraculously I wouldn't be resented anymore? Or, if the genders in my office were switched and the female attorneys liked me more than my male co-workers, I would be a Mary Sue?)
At this point I feel like my point would be made better by walking an actual, fictional, female character through this chart, so the nonsense you encounter by trying to implement this really comes to light. Because what it's coming to, outside of the meta issues at stake here, is that the role of all of these female characters boils down to point-of-view. (So, what does it say about our point of view here that I (we?) disapprove so intensely of this chart? What does it say about the chart-creator's point of view?)
I was going to take Temperance Brennan through the chart, but I realized pretty quickly that, since she is a titular character of a show she pretty much gets a free pass through the top line. Congrats, Bones, you can hang with Lara Croft. So I suppose it follows that this chart is effective as an argument against the lack of female protagonists. But that makes the whole bottom of the list terribly unnecessary, and as much as I'd like to look at the chart in this light, even my powerful inclination to retcon things doesn't extend that far.
And actually, I think that might be where all of our problems arise. The first question is whether the character can carry her own story, but that question then seems to be treated as whether the character does carry her own story. Just because some of these women are not written as main characters doesn't mean that they couldn't carry their own story, it just means that a different point-of-view was chosen for telling the story they were involved in. (I'm confident that the original authors of several of these characters, at least, would do a fine job of making them into main characters in their own stories.) And it's an even bigger problem that, since all of the first three turn-offs lead to the same place, it's basically implied that all the women in the branches off of the main line can't carry their own story, and are either too perfect or too soapboxy. I think it's this implication that has people up in arms, and I'm left thinking maybe without the examples, this would be a much better chart. (So I erased everyone. Which I guess makes me a villain.) Without the pictures we could stop focusing on figuring out how certain of our favorite characters were deemed unable to carry their own story, or without flaws, or too representative of an idea, and focus instead on how, if you're a female leader of a team, it's still possible for your main purpose in the story to be "the Gossip". (What?) Which is the sort of error that's the real failing of this chart. The examples lead to the dead-end logic that characters don't fit more than one trope, but more importantly the lines themselves lead to overly reductive and dismissive conclusions about female characters in general.
Which feels like a conclusion in a crappy college gender studies essay, but whatever. It's Sunday night and I have nothing better to be doing.
I guess, what I'm generally getting at when I pick up these arguments is that it's absurd to have some predetermined "Ideal Female Character" archetype, because there is no way it can be fulfilled realistically. And yes, I think that is what this chart is implying, because it relegates every trope to substandard status. So, in order to be a strong female character, you need to carry your own story, be just flawed enough, and not representative of anything readily recognizable (which I can only assume is how a lot of those characters got onto the bottom of the list). I remember having this argument countless times in college, with people who would tear other people's writing apart for "clichés" that were really just tropes. People have a habit of thinking that, just because they recognize something as an idea they've seen used before, that it must be a cliché and taken out back and burned. I feel like I tend too much toward ultra-realism in my demands for fiction, but at the same time, an unattainable standard for a certain group of characters, especially an entire gender's worth of characters, is arguing too hard for ultra-fiction.
And this is where I would wave my hands around and shout "Stop conflating 'strong' with 'well-written' in terms of characters." Nevermind how 'strong' tends to be a masculine ideal and putting the first on the list of traits for a female is counter-intuitive at best... well-written is what matters. (And I can't even get into the whole problem this raises with flawed vs. too flawed. And goodness, once we've determined, in that straight little line that supposedly leads to narrative perfection, whether someone is flawed enough or not they get dumped into the same reductionist morass as everyone else that can't carry their own story or exists as a soapbox for someone's ideas.) So let's say that our gold-star "Congratulations!" category is for Well-Written Female Characters. But I'll be honest here, I suspect that Lara Croft makes it across that fine line at the top, and in a chart where that happens but Faye Valentine and Zoe Wasburne are relegated to substandard status is more than a bit flawed (not that both of those characters don't suffer from writer-inflicted oversight problems). And that's my main argument against the chart. It's more concerned with a war against tropes than it is with what actually makes a good character, regardless of gender, and it doesn't seem to distinguish at all between the different roles protagonists play versus supporting characters.
But I'm determined not to go off on another rant on this stuff. Instead, I want to have a bit of fun with this chart. I've been skimming through it for the better part of a half-hour now, trying to figure out where I fit on it. I mean, I'm constantly going on about how my life has a secret author, after all, so it's only appropriate for me to figure out where I stand.
I'm going to come straight out with my hypothesis (because otherwise I will never manage to organize this entry at all). Because if you take your own life as a story, where you fall on the chart depends entirely on how you cut it. Every story is just a piece of a whole world (that's why fanfic has a place to flourish), and all of the characters in it technically have their own individual story going on. And I think this is something it's fair to assume for every character, whether the writer actually manages to portray that or not. I mean, let's face it, one-dimensional and stereotypical characters do serve a purpose (though I'm certainly not going to argue that they're always going to be put to good use). And, honestly, look at the people in your life that you only sort of know. The check-out guy in the grocery store with the weird haircut, the bank teller you always see, the boss you have that shares random out-of-context personal details. Are these three-dimensional characters? No, not from your point-of-view. But are they not real people? (Without straying into philosophy here, guys.) I like to think that there are three dimensions to any character, even if we don't get to see them, and that's the way I view most fictional characters. If it's not there, I tend to make up the rest, and that's probably why I forgive so much I shouldn't when it comes to writers messing things up.
So. Back on track here, a character's role and dimension depends on how you slice the story. I'm currently fascinated by the role I fulfill if you just lift my office out into its own narrative. In this scenario let's assume we're working with an ensemble cast and I'm not the main character, so that automatically bumps us down to the villain question. With a few exceptions mostly having to do with my hatred of our process servers, I don't really fit the villain category, and I'm not a love interest. Since we're looking at my office, it is a team-oriented story, and that gives me approximately eight choices for who I am. If we're telling the story from any other department's point of view, I'm almost invariably the shy-nerdy voice of reason. If we're looking from an attorney's point of view, I am anywhere from Rogue to Punching Bag, depending on the day and whether I've tried to contact a certain stupid large national bank that is not our main client lately (since there doesn't seem to be a 'She does whatever we throw at her/Jack of all trades' category, I suppose I'll say I'm mostly a Rogue in regards to the attorneys). And if we take it from my department's standpoint, I get to hop over to the circle of 'Leader' characters. Ignoring my propensity to categorize my job as a horror story, I'm not violent and I'm certainly not 'nearly-perfect,' so that leaves me in the 'Married to her job' category. Which isn't terribly inaccurate, I suppose, but apparently still makes me a not-strong female character. But let's go back to 'nearly-perfect' because I love this one. It gets leveraged against female characters all the time, because something deep in our insecurity makes us point to other girls and go "Too perfect!" I have, in fact, had this finger pointed at me at work several, if not many, times. Because I'm a goody two-shoes, because I put in extra hours without complaining, because et cetera. And so here, because some of the other women in my office resent the fact that, by not complaining about extra work, I am actually obligating them to do more work without complaining as well or risk irking the bosses, I slip into the annoying overachiever category (or, assuming an audience that isn't my co-workers, I am an 'Ideal Woman', presumably because my male bosses like me. But if I was a bit older I would be a wise crone, and maybe miraculously I wouldn't be resented anymore? Or, if the genders in my office were switched and the female attorneys liked me more than my male co-workers, I would be a Mary Sue?)
At this point I feel like my point would be made better by walking an actual, fictional, female character through this chart, so the nonsense you encounter by trying to implement this really comes to light. Because what it's coming to, outside of the meta issues at stake here, is that the role of all of these female characters boils down to point-of-view. (So, what does it say about our point of view here that I (we?) disapprove so intensely of this chart? What does it say about the chart-creator's point of view?)
I was going to take Temperance Brennan through the chart, but I realized pretty quickly that, since she is a titular character of a show she pretty much gets a free pass through the top line. Congrats, Bones, you can hang with Lara Croft. So I suppose it follows that this chart is effective as an argument against the lack of female protagonists. But that makes the whole bottom of the list terribly unnecessary, and as much as I'd like to look at the chart in this light, even my powerful inclination to retcon things doesn't extend that far.
And actually, I think that might be where all of our problems arise. The first question is whether the character can carry her own story, but that question then seems to be treated as whether the character does carry her own story. Just because some of these women are not written as main characters doesn't mean that they couldn't carry their own story, it just means that a different point-of-view was chosen for telling the story they were involved in. (I'm confident that the original authors of several of these characters, at least, would do a fine job of making them into main characters in their own stories.) And it's an even bigger problem that, since all of the first three turn-offs lead to the same place, it's basically implied that all the women in the branches off of the main line can't carry their own story, and are either too perfect or too soapboxy. I think it's this implication that has people up in arms, and I'm left thinking maybe without the examples, this would be a much better chart. (So I erased everyone. Which I guess makes me a villain.) Without the pictures we could stop focusing on figuring out how certain of our favorite characters were deemed unable to carry their own story, or without flaws, or too representative of an idea, and focus instead on how, if you're a female leader of a team, it's still possible for your main purpose in the story to be "the Gossip". (What?) Which is the sort of error that's the real failing of this chart. The examples lead to the dead-end logic that characters don't fit more than one trope, but more importantly the lines themselves lead to overly reductive and dismissive conclusions about female characters in general.
Which feels like a conclusion in a crappy college gender studies essay, but whatever. It's Sunday night and I have nothing better to be doing.
I guess, what I'm generally getting at when I pick up these arguments is that it's absurd to have some predetermined "Ideal Female Character" archetype, because there is no way it can be fulfilled realistically. And yes, I think that is what this chart is implying, because it relegates every trope to substandard status. So, in order to be a strong female character, you need to carry your own story, be just flawed enough, and not representative of anything readily recognizable (which I can only assume is how a lot of those characters got onto the bottom of the list). I remember having this argument countless times in college, with people who would tear other people's writing apart for "clichés" that were really just tropes. People have a habit of thinking that, just because they recognize something as an idea they've seen used before, that it must be a cliché and taken out back and burned. I feel like I tend too much toward ultra-realism in my demands for fiction, but at the same time, an unattainable standard for a certain group of characters, especially an entire gender's worth of characters, is arguing too hard for ultra-fiction.