now that I am thinking of it the “strong female character” discourse perpetual motion machine has honestly done terrible damage to how people write female characters, especially in YA books, because it encouraged people to write individual characters in terms of things that were generally wanted or needed among female characters.
so reader A wants women who are independent, so I’ll make my protagonist independent. reader B wants women who are strong, so she’s also strong. Reader C wants women who are feminine, so she’s feminine, but reader D wants women who are not traditionally feminine, so she isn’t too feminine, and reader E wants women who don’t need a man, so we’re going to avoid focusing on romance, but reader F wants women who are sexually independent, so we’re still going to have her be sexually active and explicitly not give a shit about her virginity, and it keeps going and keeps going.
and what you end up with is a bunch of characters that exhibit a limited range of qualities because few people want to write women that strongly contradict *any* of the things people want from female characters, because we’ve been reading it like every single female character has to individually model what a Good Female Character should be like, and the majority of YA protagonists are vaguely the same level of feminine, independent, vulnerable, skilled, clever, and sexual, and it’s actually suffocating
jacobvanloon
origamiaround
tangentwithtanner
