#female characters

[promptcalender]

Types of female characters we need more of

older women allowed to have a story outside of the fairy godmother trope or being a mere caretaking accessory to another character

girlfail characters

women who stand on business and dump the pathetic loser bf

non-traditionally feminine women who bond with traditionally feminine women instead of putting them down (and the other way around)

women who take charge of their destiny

women whose happy end doesnt involve romance and whose romantic life is not centered much

strong but warm and empathetic women

queer women with a story beyond exploring their queerness

soft black women

female mentors who dont fall into the caretaker role but also aren’t unnecessarily cruel

grumpy, taciturn women

fun, flirty, seductive women whose personality is not treated as a promiscuous flaw to be fixed

weird and off putting women

tall, feminine women who are not othered or treated as less feminine for their height

short, serious women who are not infantilised and taken seriously

women in stem

female antagonists whose antagonistic behavior is not sexualised or motivated by being wronged first. just an evil, brutal person

women of color who are neither the ‘subservient damsel in distress who needs to be freed by the white man’ nor the ‘oriental, tempting beauty who seduces the white man with a dagger, a smirk, and a cocky one liner’

[Prompt Calender: March 8th, International Women's Day]

[marshmellowed]

every time.

[noperopesaredope]

I wish we had more female characters like Eleanor Shellstrop. One of the most unlikable people you've ever met. Read a Buzzfeed article on most rude things you can do on a daily basis and decided to use that as a list of goals. Makes everyone's day worse just by being there. Dropped a margarita mix on the ground and tried to pick it up, only to get hit by a row of shopping carts which pushed her into the road where she was hit by a boner pill delivery truck, killing her instantly. Cannot keep a romantic partner despite being bisexual. Had a terrible childhood but will die before she gets therapy. Best employee at a scam company. Just the worst but also can't help but root for her to improve.

Absolute loser. Girl-failure. Bad at almost everything. Literally perfect female character.

[girl-blorbo-polls]

Would your girl blorbo have a Tumblr?

Yes, active

Yes, not active

No, very online in different ways

No, not online at all

Other

Voting ended onDec 27, 2025

[ebenelephant]

ooh mel having to come to terms with the fact that, well-intentioned or not, she's infantilising becca is actually such an interesting and necessary plot point to go with given how we've seen mel tie her identity so much into being a sister/caretaker. we saw becca assert her independence in some smaller ways during the last episode, but this was excellent.

[bodiesdecaying]

misato katsuragi is not just "that pedophile character."

yes, she grooms shinji. yes, it's messed up. eva wants you to feel disturbed by that. but flattening her entire character into "pedophile" misses what's actually going on with her writing.

misato is written as hypersexual, but not in a way that's empowering. it's survival. it's her crutch. she uses sex and flirtation as coping mechanisms, the only way she knows how to build intimacy after a life defined by abandonment, second impact trauma, and the death of her father. her relationships (with kaji, with shinji, even her casual joking) show how she's stuck in this loop where she equates intimacy with sex, because genuine vulnerability feels impossible.

her "hypersexuality" isn't meant to be titillating, it's meant to be tragic. it's messy, it's inappropriate, it's self-destructive. eva keeps showing us how she drinks too much, pushes boundaries too far, hides behind seduction instead of honesty. and when she offers herself to shinji, it's not some secret truth of "oh she’s a pedophile," it's a breakdown of everything she's been holding in. her fear of dying, her terror of being alone, her inability to connect in any way that isn't sexual.

that's why her character is important. she embodies adulthood in eva's world. not wise or put-together, but broken people dragging their baggage into every relationship. misato hurts shinji, but not because she's only predatory, it's because she's caught in the same cycles of trauma he is.

so yeah, call her out for her behavior, but don't erase the bigger picture. misato isn't "bad representation." she's realistic representation of how trauma, hypersexuality, and desperation can warp someone's entire way of existing.

[elumish]

I just saw a post where one of the comments was a woman saying that they don't care about the POV or internal life of female characters in general, and I didn't want to reblog that post because I didn't want to go after that specific person, but I did want to say:

If that is how you feel (regardless of what gender you are), if every time you read a female character (but only a female character) you think, ugh I don't care about them, they're so boring, female characters never have internal lives worth reading about, you need work on that.

I'm serious. Figure out what your hangup is, reevaluate how you're approaching stories, maybe get some therapy or talk to someone about it if you need to, and figure out how to get past your dismissal of female POVs as being worth reaing.

Because whatever problem you have with the internal lives or POVs of female characters, it's an issue you also have with women. It's not like female characters are somehow universally written as so fundamentally different from real women that everything you find so dull or shallow or annoying or uninteresting in those female characters is fictionalized--and, it's not like female characters are somehow universally written as so fundamentally different from male characters that everything you find so shallow or dull or annoying or uninteresting in those female characters isn't also present in those male characters in some very similar way.

And if your excuse is that men can't write women--read more things written by women. (Some men can write women well, but you should read things written by women anyway.)

Tl;dr: If you find yourself looking at every female character you read, or every Black character, or every disabled character, etc. and thinking that somehow none of them quite live up to the male/white/abled characters that you are used to reading, that's something you need to work on.