Are female protagonists over done or just difficult to write?

I think male protagonists are over done.

 

Speaking of movies, I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Alien (and IMO to a lesser extent, Aliens). My understanding is that Ripley is widely regarded as a groundbreaking female protagonist, and I believe the script was written without actually assigning sexes to the characters, so the roles were open to anyone.

@Justin Rocket : I get the 'reality is unrealistic' angle you're stating, but still respectfully disagree. You may be right about audience perception, but I can only envision that being true if you assume that your audience is sexist - I'd rather be optimistic (although it probably varies by audience/between genres/etc). I think Brienne only reads as a woman because Martin deliberately wrote her into a sexist context where she's discriminated against for it.

 

You haven't met many people, then. What I said about running the spectrum is empirically true. I've met women who align more with the traditionally masculine and vice versa. It sounds like you want female characters to represent some statistical average in your works, or worse yet your misconceptions about what a typical female must be like. That's a bad way to approach writing, in my view. You start with character, male or female, and that character can have any set of personality traits you assign and be a realistic character. Then, when it comes to your character's actions in the story, you base it on what your individual character would do, not what you think a woman would probably do. If I wanted to read literature based on (mis)conceptions about what a female character has to be like because she's a woman, there is a bunch of bad pulp from the 50s that can be had for cheap.

 

I think the point is that the main character has to read as a woman, not a man with boobs attached to his chest. Let her be a woman. Yes, not all women fit into a mold, just like all men fit into a mold, but...OK, ever read Jay Lake's The Green Trilogy? I read her and I actually feel like I'm reading about a woman. Trying to imagine Green (the main character) as a man is almost impossible. She reads like a woman, even while she's kicking all the asses from Copper Downs to Kalimpura. The hypothetical Male!Green would be totally different than the Green that exists in this trilogy. The whole story would've likely gone down a different road if we switched out the sex parts.

That said, I do agree about the individual personalities. Not all men want to kick ass and chew tobacco. Not all women want to do make up and other stereotypically feminine stuff. Take me for instance. I'm a guy, yet I'm a shy, scrawny, overly-sensitive person. By the logic of gender stereotypes, I am a woman trapped in the body of a man. It's the personality, not the sex part that counts.

I dunno. Me? I just write them as people. Whether they have boobs or a dick is irrelevant. Saying that someone has to do these things because of gender is like saying a black guy has to like basketball because of his skin color.

 

@Link the Writer if you agree about individual personalities, then what personality does a woman have to have for you to feel like you're reading a woman? Sounds like the character just has to match your own personal preconceptions about females. Another person with different biases might feel differently.

I still say you stick to character. It is unfortunate that with the entire range of human experience, personality, &c. on a blank canvas in front of them, writers are still falling into the trap of writing female characters as some average of whatever they think females are. Men can be strong, weak, brave, cowardly, masculine, effeminate, good, evil, &c. to encompass any range of human traits, but females? No, they have to match biases or they don't feel like women. Bollocks.

 

I don't think female protagonist are overdone. They are quite trendy right now, I guess, but there are so many stories to tell I don't think you can overdo female or male protagonists, like, ever.

Difficult to write? Nah, I think if the writer is observant of human behavior, and has hopefully stuck their head outside a few times to get a decent idea of basic human interaction, they'll be fine, whether they write men or women. We come in so many shapes and sizes, there are so many stories, some defy stereotypes more starkly than others, that it's difficult to go so horribly wrong every woman everywhere would go "pfft, that's a man with boobs." (I dislike the whole man with boobs -term, btw. According to the parameters set by feminist critics, if I wrote myself into a story, I'd most likely be dubbed as one, too).

And yeah, it might be trendy to mistreat male characters nowadays. I'm not sure. I saw a critique of Hannibal the other day about the show's misandrist plotting, and while I haven't watched it, I found the points the critic made quite interesting. Have we really come to that? That writers have to resort to convoluted plot twists to keep women out of harm's way in order to keep the ratings up while it's ok to throw male characters under the bus? It's such a weird thought that gender should matter so much.

I can't remember if Cole was mistreated. I never liked the actor/character, so most of the time I just hoped he'd go away.

 

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I'm curious. What do you think is "traditionally male"? or vice versa? I'm not talking about which gender is more likely to be a boxer or a hair designer. Those are cultural differences.

I'm referring to anatomical differences. Besides the hormonal differences, females have a thicker corpus callosum. They process language on both sides of the brain. That part of the brain responsible for math and geometry matures faster in boys. The female brain has about 9.5 times more white matter than the male brain. The male brain has about 6.5 times more gray matter than the female brain. These anatomical differences affect how we live our lives day by day and affect voice.

 

True, and you no doubt saw that in my own thread as well. :[ I just try to remember that this character is a person with a personality, likes and dislikes; wants and needs, etc. This character may have breasts, or may have a dick. Doesn't matter. What's imperative for writers, I think is that they stick to their own vision of the story regardless of what's trendy or not. My main characters are ladies because that's how I saw them as in my head. Were they guys, that's what they would have been as well.

Really, if writers have to put chains on their stories to satisfy certain parameters, then we've truly reached a dark age.

 

Well, it's okay to be concerned and mindful, I think. I can understand that it's sometimes challenging to identify, say, the invisible benefits of being a woman which partially contribute to the female experience if one doesn't have female friends, for example. I had the opposite experience, actually. I never in a million years thought the dating game was so cruel to men until I grew older and wiser. Me and my fellow women were breezing through that part of the human experience, picking the cherries on top and taking that for granted, while men were scrambling over each other to become that cherry. Granted, I was always nice; I've later heard I've been something of an exception in that regard. I never laughed at a guy's face or embarrassed him in front of his or my friends like so, so many other young women do. But this is just an example from my life where I noticed there can be things I need to take into account when I'm writing a guy of about the same age and with a similar social status; he most likely has never enjoyed the privilege of attention, he's probably been the beggar, not the chooser, and that could affect his self-esteem. But such differences go beyond gender too. If I were to write an overweight woman, or a woman of color, I'd also need to learn about her experience, not just as a woman, but as human too. If you know your female character's background, how she became who she is and how she will become who she'll be at the end of the book, I think she'll be a good, well-rounded character.

 

What makes writing an art form is what we do within the parameters we're given. Hell, language is full of restrictions. Those restrictions are why we don't see novels written in zaph dingbat.

 

Exactly. It's all about learning about what life is like for the other person.

An example of this, I found in Jay Lake's book Endurance. Yes, it's fantasy, but the MC (Green) is a woman of color (as is her people) and there was a scene where she expressed that color to two men stating that she was, paraphrasing, "nothing like those whitebellies of Copper Downs." As a white guy, I felt a bit insulted by this until I remembered that given what happened to her as a child (being kidnapped and enslaved by them) I realized that yeah, of course she's not gonna like the white folks of Copper Downs. I wouldn't either if I were in her position. I would be flat-out racist and harbor a vindictive grudge against them. Just like she's doing in the books.

It might be a bad example as the book is fantasy, but it made me feel a lot closer to Green because for the first time, I actually understood her and what she went through. I could see why she'd feel this way toward white people. That's the mark of a great writer: they take you out of your comfort zone and make you think on life from another perspective. They make you think of something you never would've considered in a million years.

 

I find reader expectations harder on female characters than men. If she makes a wrong move she's an idiot, if she's rescued it's no longer romantic - it's a cope out, if she's too strong it's unbelievable or she's a bitch, if she's not strong enough then she's a weakling. There's no middle ground with a female. It's as if she's not just a person but someone who is to expected to pave the way for a new archetype - the superwoman.
I usually look to my favorite stories and movie performances when I want to get some inspiration for a good female character and collect the traits that I particularly like.

 

But by the same token, male characters are also judged.

"If he makes a wrong move it was some inevitable circumstances he'll eventually recover from, if he's rescued it's a contrived trope, if he's too strong it's either perfectly believable or he's a bully, if he's not strong enough then he's an unattractive weakling."

 

So either way you slice it, people are going to have bizarre expectations for both the male and the female protagonists that are not related to the their personalities.

 

To a point but I've always felt that there is more wiggle room for a male character with the possible exception of sci-fi as I find those readers/viewers nit-pick everything - Male/female/alien nothing escapes their dissection.

As a viewer reader I'll accept a man's brute force rampage with pat background info but as soon as it's a woman I'm like whoa time out - this isn't the era of Valkyries, no woman just turns into a John Wick without a damn good explanation or event.
This doesn't make the idea impossible but I think it just goes to show that the gender's can't be treated ( in my mind anyway ) interchangeably.

 

I agree. I didn't hesitate to have my male MC cry at one point, because I know he's otherwise "manly" enough to get away with it. I had serious wobbly moments letting my female MC cry though, because I was afraid it would make her look too weak.

In the end I thought fuck it, she's going to cry, that's who she is. She cries at sad movies as well, and I'm not going to be ashamed for her.

 

I think males and females are both overdone. At this point we should only be writing about nonbinary, gender fluid, multicultural, nonconformative... I'm kidding. Write what you like, write what you know.

 

What is your method of inquiry for that?

 

I tried that, but do you have any idea how hard it is to have a protagonist which is a fucking chair*?? All it wanted to do was just stand there!

*not the Catherine the Great version, get your mind out of the gutter! shame! I'm talking about a plain folding metal one.

 

Anatomical differences exist, but you're not demonstrating how they make men and women's behavior different at all, much less how those differences are relevant on anything more than a statistical level.

 

I dunno, both are equally capable of having a huge, glorified roaring rampage of unbridled vengeance sometimes with little to no explanation other than, “You hurt me/someone I cared about. Payback time.” They'll do it their own ways, of course, but I always felt that depending on the personality, the person may or may not go the John Wick way regardless of gender.

There's this fantasy book series I'm reading now by Jay Lake and his female protagonist, Green, is probably just the sort that would exact bloody revenge on anyone who hurt her/her loved ones. She'd be teaching John Wick a thing or two about revenge.

 

The Bechdel Test proves there's more wiggle room for male characters, in film at least.

This is a good place to remind folks about one of my favorite essays:
'We Have Always Fought': Challenging the 'Women, Cattle and Slaves' Narrative

 

I think women are socialized in most cultures to respond less aggressively and with less overt violence, even when justified. Therefore, to be "believable" or "realistic" female characters are usually required to take a lot more crap than male characters before they go John Wick. However, I think this is a result of sociological conditioning, rather than intrinsic qualities.