...that instead of "strong" they should have used "realistic." No one can say Zoe (Firefly) isn't strong, or Lady MacBeth isn't strong, or...(insert countless other characters I've ran through)

Basically, she was just eye candy there to run the radio. But eventually, she did get her own plot lines and took on a more active role. If you get into the novels, she tends to be the person who can get a message through when no one else can... at one point I think she even uses semaphore. (Was that her, or was that Scotty? Hmm... I can't remember now, it's been ten years since I read those books...)

Really, really unsure why being any of the things marked on the flowchart is mutually exclusive with being an awesome character. Also unsure why male characters are apparently not held to the same standards.

Partly because of the feminist in me-- why are there charts like this for female characters and yes, I know there's male characters out there, too. But why is it that for female characters, there's... gah, I'm not sure how to word this.

I guess what bothers me is that male characters get to be Special, or Awesome, or the like, without being categorized like this (except on TV Tropes). For example, following the arrows that get you to "Psycho Feminist Lesbian Amazon" would be likely to get you any number of different "reasonable" male characters.

That, and I dislike formulas applied to writing, as though it were some kind of machine-- enter -these- coordinates, and you'll get X. Enter this instead, and you'll get Y. Writing is a fluid thing, and reducing something as huge as a character to a flow-chart just bothers me.

Though, I wasn't so much annoyed my the "idea" aspect as by the fact that a strong female character can't be a soldier, a police woman that deals with an armed and dangerous criminal in the first act or someone who has picked up murder as a profession. Those are all likely to kill someone by the third act.

From the looks of the chart, where it says, "strong female character", it should have said, "no one writes a character like this". At least, why aren't any mug shots attached to the SFC as there are to most other types of female character.

I don't think a character has to be a "strong female character" to be a useful female character. Your basic bit character or Generic doesn't have to be any more than a few words slapped together into a general category of character. If every female character were a fully realistic person, we couldn't fit them all into the story. The main characters, yeah, but not every single other character.

If your character is based on an idea and is a minor character, then you don't have to go beyond the idea. But if they're a major character then the only choice is to have them go beyond just the personification of some idea (for example--Cosette in "Les Miserables" is practically the personification of femininity). Otherwise, if they stick with just being the personification of an idea instead of a character that happens to be closely associated with an idea, they won't have a lot of depth to them.

I think maybe that was what the chart's author was trying to get at--the way a character has to have more than just one theme, how people aren't just defined by one major trait.

Well, I'm clueless and apparently don't know how to use the preview button.

Yes, there's a picture. A very big one at that.