Sara Connor still a viable character model?

[dawaterrat]

While this is technically about my NaNo, I'm not filtering it, on the off chance someone comes by with insight. I'd post this over on the NaNo boards, but they're supposed to shut down for site-wipe today, so that would be kinda pointless (though I may repost it after re-launch), and it's not really a "help" thing, though it might be worth posting

Comments

[borgknight]

Plenty of MMCs need rescuing the first few adventures. Everyone needs to learn, right? Read Spellsinger again and look how often Mudge has to pull Jon-Tom's chestnuts out of the fire.

[artikat]

The issue isn't often so much that the female character isn't competent to save herself (many people can't do that), but that it seems that many male characters automatically have the "save the damsel in distress" skill. So we might want to know why do the males have skill sets the female characters lack, and why is this interesting? It's not that the answers to these questions are always problematic -- they aren't, but you may wish to consider the answers when you are writing.

An example of a more modern version is the Stephanie Plum series. A fun read, but even after years of doing her job, the main character is often dependent on the male characters to save her. My take is that Evanovich wants the readers to continue to identify with her main character while continuing to use the tropes of a typical romance novel complete with the larger-than-life Hero and the even-larger-than-that Anti Hero.