(This is assuming you played FFXIII, so if you didn't, then you can ignore this) This is a weird ask, but after seeing the "broody male vs broody female" character comparison, I remember that there was one broody female character that people loved: Lightning from FFXIII. Why do you think she was loved?
Oh god, you have triggered my trap card. I am FFXIII's number one feral defender.
My super extra spicy FF opinion is that the XIII trilogy is amazing. To truly trigger the FF nerds in the audience, FFXIII-2 is in fact my favorite final fantasy game in the entire history of the franchise. (I have played all FF games to date except XVI and the MMOs, because I cannot do MMOs due to mental ferret reasons.)
Lightning works as a character because she was written like a man.
Lightning works because she is the emotional driver of the entire trilogy and she's flawed. She's deeply unlikable at the beginning of XIII, prone to violence and overreactions, and she's the central screw keeping the tension in the Snow-Hope-Lighitning knot of emotions, feelings and relationships.
It is very clear her anger towards Snow is misplaced: Lightning is angry at herself, because she was the one who didn't listen, she's the one who alienated Serah, she's the one who was proud and stubborn and refused to bend even a little, despite the fact Serah and Snow were visibly and obviously working very hard to meet her on her terms. It's not her fault that Serah was turned into a l'cie (in fact, the whole overarching argument of the trilogy is that the fal'cie and l'cie system is flawed and broken and needs to be torn out from the roots to allow for a just, better world), but it is her fault that she found herself powerless to do anything about it, because she made the choice to prioritize her own pride over her sister's attempts to communicate.
And this crucial, because as Lightning comes to terms with the fact Snow did not do anything wrong - at least as far as Serah goes, you could argue about the effectiveness of NORA vs PSICOM trying to save the people being purged, etc, but I still think, in universe, we're primed to see Snow's actions as morally correct, because his whole deal is to be a callout for complicit inaction in the face of facism and genocide, which is totally not relevant in this year of our lord 2024 or anything, anyway! - it creates a lot of tension in her relationship with Hope.
See, Hope is fascinating, in XIII, because surface level, his bone with Snow makes sense. Snow got his mom killed! Hope wants revenge over that! He's an unstable, emotional teenager dealing with too much all at once! He latches onto Lightning because Lightning seems to be the only one who sees Snow for what Hope thinks he is: a loud, obnoxious try-hard that will get people killed in pursuit of his miopic idea of "good."
But Hope is wrong.
Demonstrably!
It wasn't Snow that killed his mother, it was the PSICOM and on a larger scale, the government that ordered innocents to be Purged. Snow acknowledged and enabled his mother's agency, but she made the choice to stand up and fight. She picked up the gun. Snow didn't throw a gun at her and told her to go kill people for the glorious revolution. Snow and NORA showed up to try and save people being unjustly and, one could almost say, unlawfully, executed for the grand crime of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Snow and NORA are there to do the fighting, and they enable people who decide to fight back themselves to do so. That was a choice Hope's mom made. She even cracks a joke about it. Hope is doing the teenage thing where he projects all of his rage onto Snow, because Snow is right there. Snow has a face and a name and was conveniently right there when Hope's mom died. Worse, Snow suffered similar injuries to her, but he survived, while Hope's mom didn't, and Hope is stewing on the perceived unfairness of that, as if survival was a tangible, physical thing that Snow had snatched away from Hope's mom to save himself.
So having Lightning acknowledge that it Snow wasn't in the wrong about Serah and come down from the murder-driven high leaves her purposeless and saddled with a volatile teenager that just wants to make the world make sense. Hope wants to kill Snow and pretend that will in fact return everything to normal. But it won't. It can't. It's an observable fact. Killing Snow won't fix anything and will in fact make everything just that little extra worse, just for kicks.
Here's where Lightning shines. Lightning is written like a man. Lightning does not take on a motherly role and sacrifice her own narrative to coddle Hope and teach him the power of forgiveness. Lightning doesn't defrost into a moe blob of soft, kind fluff and she doesn't get in contact with her femininity in the traditional, arguably stereotypical ways.
Lightning goes: New plan, which is Same plan, New target. Lightning is still going to fix the problem through tremendous amounts of military violence, because she is a soldier and that's how she fixes things. What she has gained, as her character arc progresses, is not thawing into non-violence, but rather, clarity of purpose. The game says, in every possible way: Lightning is good at violence and violence is what she's good at, and this is a good thing. The thing she had to overcome was being obsessed with the wrong target, blinded by her own unregulated emotions that did not allow her to see her real enemy and the true path to what she wants.
And this is further reinforced as she grows throughout the trilogy: in XIII, Lightning fights to save her sister, in XIII-2, Lightning fights to save reality, and Lightning Returns, she fights to preserve what she's come to understand as the essence of humanity: those bonds that would drive you to pick up a fight with god himself, and the myriad of complex, contradicting emotions that make life worth living.
Lightning works because she's right. Because no one ever looks at her and goes "oh boo hoo, little girl trying hard!" and there's no very special episode where we learn she's secretly very girly or that the true power is her soft femininity. Lightning is a broody bastard and she fixes all her problems with her sword, which, and this is true, is also a fucking gun.
When Etro hires her as a bodyguard, I promise you, it wasn't because she was uwu waifu material, it was because she looked at Caius casting Meteor at her and went: bitch, I've got a SWORD, that is also a GUN, and then parried that shit out of orbit.
Lightning just works, man.
And you know what's great? She's still no the coolest of the Farron sisters.
*gestures excitedly at Serah*
