Do you think a lot of female characters these days are written poorly? If you do...

Do you think a lot of female characters these days are written poorly? If you do, in what way would you say they're written poorly?

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I think a lot of characters in general these days are poorly written

They are often

1) underdeveloped, receiving only shreds of a real character arc

2) immune to real consequences for their destructive decisions

3) hypocritical

or 4), in the case of a character like Korra, frustratingly mediocre and devoid of charm.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

This.

Don't you mean they're written realistically?

Yes.

I get tired of characters being written as Mary Sues in a effort to create a "strong female character."

* She picks up a sword and is instantly better than other characters who have years of training and experience.
* Everyone instantly likes and trusts her, even if she just met them.
* Everybody sticks up for her when she gets in trouble, even if they have no real reason to.
* She gets away with things that other characters would be penalized for.
* She receives endless praise and attention, whether it's warranted or not.

It's much more interesting to see someone who shows real growth and who has a real character arc.

...

>I get tired of characters being written as Mary Sues in a effort to create a "strong female character."
Case in point
When did "being a cunt" translate to "being strong"?

A character that's well-written is not necessarily well-liked.
When a character that the audience is supposed to hate is poorly written, the audience usually just doesn't care about them.

And writing something "realistically" and "well" are very different things.

being assertive -> being strong
and
being assertive -> being a cunt

"Hey Ollie, fuck you for not telling me something I have no right to know about" is not being assertive - it's just being a cunt.
If the shoe had been on the other foot and Felishitty had been the one not telling Ollie about her illegitimate child to protect his life tumblr would still applaud her. She is the single greatest reason not to watch Arrow. I stopped watching about mid-season 4 and never looked back.

The ongoing quest for "strong female role models" has lead to an unending stream of female characters who aren't treated like people, but as paragons of righteous virtue who can do no wrong.
Despite this, they are still consciously written as "flawed" in some way; these flaws are rarely addressed by the story, let alone noted by other characters, and more often than not are treated as something that the heroine should embrace.
But ultimately these flaws, left unchecked, prevent the character from even being an ideal, like a Golden Age hero who represents something greater than themselves, so we can look past their inhumanity to admire the lesson or story being told through them.

These characters remain flawed, but not in a human way; it is only their ugly disguise. And it disgusts us to see those around them be blind to their ugliness, for only the audience to see that the empress has no clothes.

A well-written female character has many of the same traits of a well-written male character in the same role.
They must be both flawed and humanized, and both of these dimensions of character depth are explored in ways tied to their purpose, both in the story and the narrative.

Finally, someone who realizes how much of a shitty mary-sue Connie is, SUfags would defend her to death because they get offended whenever someone criticizes their pajeet loli.

You're crazy, everyone hates her.

t. SUfag

anyone have any "good" female charcters then?

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Several of the female characters on ATLA were well-written.

LOK is another story though...

She was really irritating when she first appeared, but they toned that down a lot over the course of the series.

nobody in SU has real growth though.

really? the last time I tried to debate anyone on Connie not being a character, they would defend her lack of flaws and the ability to be the best at anything as "character development" when it clearly is not.

I always have to point out her off-screen "mastery" of swordsmanship when it took Pearl centuries to perfect it, how she's soooo much better at caring for Steven when he turned into a baby despite Greg being the actual parent here, and how Peridot and Lapis acted like total autists in the New Crystal Gems just so she preaches instead of Steven.

They'll still defend her anyway and post dozens of Steven x Connie fanart to hide the fact they have no counter-argument.

These fuckups.

You know, I always liked the phrase, "If everywhere you go smells like dogshit, look under your shoe." Think about it Sup Forums.

Star and Katara are very good female characters, I am honestly surprised no one tried to copy them and instead went with the "kickass tough girl who don't take no order" or the "quirky girly female who is too cute to do anything wrong" tropes.

>frustratingly mediocre and devoid of charm.
That's literally every female character ever made.

Katara is a good example of a character who is well-written but who isn't always likable and who isn't portrayed as infallible.

...

I'm writing the shitty female characters?

>I am honestly surprised no one tried to copy them
Probably because they're actually garbage.

This argument is pointless here because no matter what character you pic it'll be screamed at with MARY SUE.

At this point it's crying wolf for the "it's about ethics in storytelling" types and it has no actual merit. If everybody is a Mary Sue then nobody is.

...

Please tell me this is an edit.
Please tell me that Bendis didn't actually find such a shitty way to try and shoehorn in this shitty "Ur never gonne be a scientist ur a black girl lol" shit in a post-Obama world. Please.

bubby from flapjack
sylvia from wander

Helga was a pretty great character.

Everyone knows that "Mary Sue" just means "character the author likes more than me", user.

Holly shit. That's bad, that's really bad

I bet you're a bimbo fetishist,

how does that apply to the topic at hand?

Ugh

I remember that one user who suggested that she would be much better as a girl living in an African village who watched the adventures and fights of Marvel superheroes on an old TV with her cousins and friends, and out of all the heroes, she looked up to Tony Stark the most.

Her village was under constant threat from a militia that occasionally killed or kidnapped members of her village to be one of their men, but no one in the village was brave enough to stand up or fight back. Until one day, the leader of the militia took two of her cousins as he was preparing to fight another militia over resources, and that's when she decided to build her own Iron Man armor out of junk and metal found around the village while studying from old engineering books she salvaged from different sources.

She'd fight the militia and barely win after surviving the leader who tried to destroy her with an RPG, and due to this success, her story was made internationally and Tony Stark heard of her endeavors, thus inspiring him to visit the girl and ask her if she could come with him to New York and be his apprentice.

we need more female characters like Kino.

Don't fall for the Tumblr interlopers

...

Im not even a capefan but holy shit
Yeah
Im happy i dont reed marvelshit

>Peridot and Lapis acted like total autists in the New Crystal Gems
To be fair they acted like total autists in Beta too, and Peridot was always an autistic shit
But I see almost pure hate for Connie around here too, guess you've been unlucky

And 5) Actual good written female characters trapped in a bad show

Mabel is an extremely well-written character. Hyper-realistic, even.

Writers confusing "strong" for "immune to all criticism" and independant for "acting like a total asshole"

Tbh honest it all boils down to the fact that people like and resonante with underdogs, or at least grounded people.

Mary sues, and most females, are not that. They're super special, liked, and better than everyone without it being earned; thats more Gaston than Belle

They treat them almost alien like in writing. They are supposed to be normal people, not perfect robotic goody goodies. Even Mabel is a result of this. Good female characters come from being written like the guy ones. If the female joins in on a male adventure and they get good dialogue and have an arc they are immediately a better character than these "girl do no wrong, LOL, girl power, feminist power!" characters. Just write them as if they were a normal character or person, that's it. It's not that hard. If you can make a good guy character you can make a good girl character.

Except guys and girls are very different in real life.

Guess what cartoons aren't? Real life

Do you know what suspension of disbelief is?

They're really not.

They really are.

The ease with which girls can get guys compared to the reverse is the primary factor causing that, since it creates a huge gender dynamic imbalance. But there are also others.

There is no such thing as good female characters, you dimwits

You're talking shit mate, they're not different species. The amount of diversity and overlap between the genders in terms of personality/behaviour is fucking huge.

Doi!

Given that not a day seems to go by without someone posting a question asking whether men and women are different species somewhere on the Internet, it looks like many people don't perceive it that way.

And I'm sorry to break it to you, but the overlap is much smaller than you think, and diversity in that sense doesn't really exist among women, definitely compared to men at least.

That....Would be fucking amazing to see

Not the guy, but you're not seeing the whole picture. We're not different species, but it's surprising how different the genders are. There's a documentary about a woman who tried to live as a man for a period of time, and she ended up being treated for depression. Women and men exist almost in completely different worlds.

horses

You say "alien" as if that's inherently bad. Realistic characters are boring and dull.

Well that's true. The lot of the them.

I can only speak from my personal experience I guess, but I've met many women who are very similar to me personality wise, and many men who couldn't be more different. That would suggest to me there is plenty of overlap.

I agree that there are differences, but I don't think they are as great as some people make them out to be.

youtube.com/watch?v=Ip7kP_dd6LU&ab_channel=ChandraSekharF

I found the documentary. Check it out, see if you change your mind.

I've already seen it.

This.
youtube.com/watch?v=pBz0BTb83H8

I wonder what the result would have been if this experiment were conducted in Europe, say.

America is basically a land of sexual starvation for men, and undoubtedly that fact is influencing attitudes towards each gender.

Also they got no flaw.

Because being a cunt free from consequences or effort IS women's idea of being strong. Felicity is very popular among the female audience.

Me too. I live in New Zealand, and I think that might be part of the reason why I perceive things differently.

AFAIK New Zealand is one of the very few countries worse in that sense than the US. (Canada is another one.)

I'm talking just culturally, we're very different to the US.

Oh absolutely, but "different" does not necessarily imply "better", especially when only talking about one particular aspect of it.

I just don't understand why Westerners can't write good characters in general. Why must it be a good "female" character?

Why aren't there well written Mexican characters? Or elderly characters?

I was curious, so I found this article, and we're not quite as low as the US:
therichest.com/rich-list/poorest-list/the-10-least-sexually-active-countries/

I wasn't talking about that aspect in particular, I was meaning more generally.

>poll only 26 countries
>report 10 of them as ranked the lowest
This is why trust in polls is so low now.

>implying Easterners are better

>She gets away with things that other characters would be penalized for.
This is why I ended up hating this bitch

>As hopeless as any other recruit at the start; earned her place in the army through determination
>Doesn't have a "silly boys" attitude; actually befriends the other male recruits, has mutual respect for her commander, and joins the army partially out of love and respect for her father
Can we at least agree Mulan is a decent female character?

No. She is the great female character

Women don't really understand what leadership is, it's just not really their nature

They see a frustrated boss lash out periodically and say "guess that's it"

You know how the Chinese got so butthurt about Kung Fu Panda? How they asked themselves "why didn't we make something as good as this?"? Well they already knew the answer, he'd be too perfect. The Chinese wouldn't be able to make Po without him being a boring, flawless, soulless paragon of Confucian virtue. To make the hero a bumbling oaf but with redeeming qualities would be anti-Chinese in their eyes. Kung Fu Panda created by the Chinese would have been like IP Man.

Western writers experience something similar with women. Their inherent biases, positive discrimination, and socio-political hangups keep them from doing their jobs and making a human being.

Like how everyone acknowledges Michael Clarke Duncan was a godly villain (Kingpin) but back during the original creation of the character at the height of the civil rights movement Kingpin was changed from a black man to a white one for fear of being racist by the liberal writers.

that's why the only flawed women in media can be only animals.

Not a Sup Forums character but Rey pisses me off the most

And fucking normies will flock to her defense calling Luke a mary sue

*the only flawed women in media are animals

Actually, almost any Hartman's women is flawed.
>Vicky
>Wanda
>Kitty
>Amanda

Danny Phantom was the only one without a woman suffering any slapstick

>get slapstick = being a "flawed" character

Mulan >>>>>>>>>>>>>>> shit >>>>> Korra

>New Crystal Gems
I don't know what you have been doing that time, but that was a shit episode in general where everybody was shittily written. You have nothing to gain to use that ep to prove your point

She's still boring as shit.

who hurt you?

Female characters' inability to be interesting.
When dull characters like Ripley, Sarah Connor or Clarice Starling are put on some sort of pedestal, maybe it's a sign that women are simply not interesting.

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with your shit taste

I feel like nowadays writers are so terrified of the audience (or the vocal non-audience in a lot of cases) that they just don't want to risk writing an actually "human" female character.

I mean I don't see how that was a factor with stories like Gravity Falls and Korra, it seemed to just be a product of the writers' own incompetence and narcissism, respectively.

This.

If being a girl is a character trait then you already failed (unless you're trying to write an insipid character)