Subject: The Unlikable Heroine.
Author:
Posted on: 2014-03-26 07:17:00 UTC
I came across this post on my dash and man...something in this is so true its painful. You guys gotta check this out.
http://toudou.tumblr.com/post/77800428586/the-importance-of-the-unlikable-heroine
...I think Tamora Pierce does the best at creating 'unlikable' heroines. Almost inevitably her female characters actually feel like real people, even when set against the fantastic worlds they exist in. I first ran across her when I was ten and I picked up a copy of Alanna: the First Adventure at the library. Her writing has stayed with me to this day, and I'm eager to read Battle Magic, the newest of her Circle books (once my sister-in-law gets done with it, that is). Her female characters range from bad-ass lady knights to noblewomen with the ability to manipulate thread magic. It's awesome, and I love every minute of it.
These are good points. I'll have to keep them in mind.
This writer makes some good points. Oftentimes female characters are portrayed unrealistically to make us like them, and I don't believe that should ever be done, because it does give young girls an idea of being a woman that is completely inaccurate and unattainable. Like the "Barbie mentality," though that's more in the physical appearance.
However, I do disagree on a few points, first and foremost her list of characters that she classifies and "likable" and "unlikable."
Take Elizabeth Bennet. When I first read Pride and Prejudice I immediately felt a connection with her, not as a character but as a person. The defining flaw that made her a real person, I think, was her willingness to say exactly what she thought. Yeah, she dressed right, she spoke with a certain level of decorum. But go back and read the chapter where Darcy proposes to her for the first time and you can see exactly what she'll say when she's angry. Also bear in mind that this is regency England; a lot of things that people said to each other then were far more scathing than they sound to our 21st Century minds. Passive aggressiveness was, I think, more subtle back then. Elizabeth was by no means the perfect little Miss Perfect this writer defines her "likable" characters as. Some would argue that by realizing that she actually likes Darcy and ultimately agreeing to marry him she lost this ability to say what she likes. But I don't believe so. For one thing, she said what she liked to Darcy's aunt Lady Catherine with no thought for the possible consequences. And if you observe the passive aggressiveness in her interactions with Wickham after he married Lydia (which Wickham was undoubtedly aware of, he wasn't stupid), she was still loaded and dangerous. For another, if memory serves Darcy said he fell for her "for the liveliness of your mind." He could clearly still see it in her to the end. I really don't think Elizabeth is a good example of the "likable" characters.
My other big issue is Susan Pevensie. She's defined as "unlikable." I never noticed a particular temper burst from her, or her thinking back that anything she did was wrong. Of course, she looks a bit shabby compared to Lucy, and she renounced Narnia in the end, but these are just the things that make her a real person instead of a cardboard cutout or (fates forbid) a Mary Sue. I always related to her a lot, but liked her at the same time. She stood up as a role model for me in the three books she featured prominently in. And, as Sevenswans pointed out, she's trying to be a replacement mother for her younger siblings. That's a lot of pressure, and when you think about it, she held up admirably. Take into consideration also that if you only read The Horse and His Boy she's the epitome of the "likable" characters that were mentioned earlier.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that the author of this essay seems to be generalizing: Either a character is "likable" or "unlikeable" (which is a bit of an oxymoron anyway since the author clearly likes the "unlikable" characters, as characters, anyway). Everyone, including well-written characters, have both likable and unlikable traits, and whether or not a person ultimately likes them is a matter of personal preference, a bit like choosing cake flavors. An entire person can't be "likable" or "unlikable." In real life, I know a couple of girls who I've decided I ultimately don't really like. But they're nice, outgoing people who are always ready to talk about anything I want to. Why don't I like them? They fangirl obsessively and inappropriately (according to my subjective views of "appropriate"), are somewhat judgmental, and won't watch or read anything that was made before '97, thinking I'm silly for doing so. I don't hang out with them if I can help it because these traits grate on my nerves. They still have likable traits. They can't be unceremoniously shoved into the "unlikable" bin.
Stepping back a bit further into real life, I would like to briefly touch on the whole premise here. The author doesn't want characters in books and movies to paint an unrealistic picture of life for girls, and as I said before, I agree with that. But she seems to have this idea that more restraint and general happiness is expected from women than men. As a preemptive disclaimer, I don't think women should be expected to apologize for things that aren't their fault or any of that. But women are expected to be more calm, caring, and forgiving, which are all good traits. I do have one question: Why is she fighting to allow females to lower themselves from this level of grace and forgiveness to that maintained (or accepted) by the male portion of the world? Wouldn't society in general be improved if we instead expected men to rise to the same standard women are held to? Wouldn't we all be happier? And yes, perhaps the standard should be lowered. It is unrealistic; we're only human after all. But to borrow a quote from one Gene Roddenberry: "Humans are at their best when they are stretching for new horizons, new frontiers."
(That doesn't excuse writing characters who are unrealistically "likable." She was definitely right there.)
Well, there's my blurb with an opinion I haven't ever seen anyone else express. I hope you don't fault me for it. There is quite a lot of valuable truth in this essay you linked, but I felt I had to point out a couple of mistakes. I also may be misinterpreting the original intent of the essay, so I apologize if I am. So... yeah... have a nice day everyone!
Yeah, dialogue in P&P looses a lot of relevance if you're not terribly used to classic British humor, or if you have trouble with the vocabulary or imagining the tone in which things were said.
Susan, upon a second reading, was probably placed into the "Unlikable" category due to the fact that she took on a leadership role in the early books (and there was a boy available to take on a leadership role instead, though Peter was far less emotionally ready for it than she was,) and because she was later derided for her "lipstick and nylons." I don't think it was intentional, but Lewis may have been demonstrating a contempt for "fashionable" young women of the fifties, or for a young woman choosing to focus for a bit on her appearance or the approval of peers. (Or it could just be Lucy being angry that Susan had seemingly abandoned them all and Narnia... according to the timeline, when all the Pevensies but Susan died, Lucy was seventeen, Edmund was 19, Susan was 21, and Peter was 22.)
I think the author here's problem in writing the essay is one of vocabulary: I took it to mean that she's agitating for more female characters in roles that aren't traditionally feminine, and highlighting that "feminine" roles are traditionally self-effacing, and that women are expected to more or less completely deny their ego in order to be considered adults. (Men rarely are.)
Nonetheless, a very good point is made, that male characters are rarely held to be unreasonable if they act on anger, jealousy, fear, or just plain crabbiness, and female characters are often derided if they act on these emotions, are flawed in any way or if their behavior is assertive... while they're at the same time derided if they cry, display any sort of fear, or react in a human manner. Society expects women and female characters to be a perfect blank slate that reflects whatever men want to read into them, and then goes on to mock many female characters (if written by a female writer,) for being "mary sues," (often with very little justification: while there are plenty of awful popular novels out there, there's also plenty of average to good writing to find,) regardless of whether or not she fits that paradigm of demure incorruptible pure pureness, and to praise male writers if they even think to include a female protagonist, no matter how unrealistic she is.*
* Examples of that are far too many to list, but are the main reason why I couldn't get very far in the Honor Harrington series or A Song of Ice and Fire (besides rape as a plot device): female authors who write characters like Honor get lambasted for daring to write a female starship captain, while Weber gets nothing but praise for writing his blue-eyed military-jacket dream girl in every series, and Martin spent the entire chapter I read having the female character he was writing think about her boobs. In my humble opinion, the majority of Martin's fame is due to the TV series and not due to the quality of his writing: he can't write a female character naturally because he's constantly reminding the reader that they have boobs.
I really like the Song of Ice and Fire series, so I want to try and defend it somewhat. Unfortunately, it's been a couple years or so since I read the first book, I don't currently have a copy with me, and my memory is utter crap, so please forgive me if I'm off base.
I think the chapter you're talking about must have been from Daenerys' point of view, and if so, that would've been the scene where she was being dressed up in a slinky dress by her creepy older brother so she could be presented to a barbarian warlord as his bride for the purpose of forging a political alliance between said creepy brother and said barbarian warlord (who actually turns out to be a fairly decent guy, for the record). Daenerys is a very young woman in this scene. She's new to the world of having boobs, and also new to the world of having them shown off to some guy for the benefit of some other guy. She has every reason to be thinking about her boobs and what they mean for her future.
Daenerys goes on to take charge of her life and completely kick everyone's ass from here to next week. I love her. She's one of my favorite characters in the series.
That said, there IS plenty to discuss when it comes to how G.R.R.M. writes his women in general. It's not that there aren't plenty of tough, ass-kicking ladies with their own voices and agendas; it's more that nothing good ever happens to them (or really anyone else, because G.R.R.M. enjoys the taste of our pathetic tears). It's a particularly grim one of those medieval-ish societies where lots of the women have been/are being passed around for political or just plain carnal reasons, and G.R.R.M. does not shy from writing about unpleasant things that maybe some readers would shy from reading about. However, it's what the women manage to achieve in spite of living in such a crappy, depressing world that makes them great, IMO. Consider looking past the boobs and giving the series another shot. {= )
~Neshomeh
I had one of the middle books - no idea who the character was.
... They never mentioned a brother, in the part I read (yes, I opened to a bunch of random chapters just to see if I liked the book, the other scenes I saw were one about mustard and a traveling scene) but I suppose it could have been Daenerys.
I know pretty much from that chapter though that G.R.R.M stands a good shot of personally annoying me if he continues to write so many extremely body-conscious heroines. However, I don't know a lot about the series other than what's been spoiled at me, and I'm probably not going to actively look to read or to know more of it due to trigger issues, now that I know more about a couple of the characters, so there's that too. *Shrugs.* I can't judge the series as a whole, but the parts I read (which did not sound like the character was as young as I'm pretty sure Daenerys was supposed to be,) severely annoyed me by the time I reached lines about how the character thought about how her breasts swung as she walked.
Personally, as a lady with ladybits, that degree of forcedly sensual body consciousness sounds pretty fake - a young teen would be more awkward, a mature woman would be more used to her body.
... I did try very hard to read Honor Harrington, though, and got through two books on the strength of the plot. I might come back to that some day, or more likely to the Safehold series, though Nimue is basically a mini Honor with a different mission.
but Honor Harrington is made of utter win
Basilisk Station was, all in all, pretty interesting.
I didn't realize you weren't talking about the first book. In that case, I may have been making stuff up. ^_^; I mean, the scene I mentioned happened, but I don't know if she was actually thinking about her body in it (though it wouldn't surprise me, given the circumstances). I also don't know which chapter you actually read, or who the POV character might have been.
I guess I'll just add that, as a fellow lady with lady parts, female characters dwelling on them doesn't bother me. I'm comfortable with my parts, and do think about them as circumstances warrant, so it doesn't strike me as unbelievable for female characters to do so. Plus, if the character is a sensual character (was it Circe? was she naked at the time?), it could well be in character for her to think about her body in terms of sensuality. If it turns you off, it turns you off—and it definitely can get a bit much for anyone at times—but I don't think it's quite fair to judge the author's ability to write women based on that one point.
I have no idea who Honor Harrington is, I'm afraid. Never read 'em.
~Neshomeh
If it's what I think it is, it's from the second book. Daenerys have been asking the merchants of Qarth for help to take her throne back and the refused her. While petitioning them she was wearing a traditional Qarth dress which left one breast exposed. Later on she's back in her own clothes and feeling much more comfortable.
I remember reading a review/opinion piece basically deriding GRRM for thinking that women were thinking about their boobs all the time, and mentioning that very chapter as proof. I picked up the series anyway and when I finally got to that part, I thought the reviewer had totally taken it out of context.
Yeah, I have no clue who the character was (she was going to some sort of political meeting, and I kept thinking that she'd better start concentrating on bargaining for monetary support instead of thinking about whether or not her boobs were staying in place.)
Meh, I've got no use whatsoever for my female anatomy, so I tend not to think about it until it gets in the way. :D (I think, looking back, that part of my irritation could have been with the people who told me to read the book - I read over some scenes after a bunch of guys on the trip said "oh, G.R.R.M is the only fantasy author who's even capable of writing female characters!" ... To which my reply was "boys, I'll be the judge of that," while they continued to demonstrate their extreme ignorance of fantasy as a genere, or that there were any female authors who wrote fantasy that wasn't firmly shelved in the kids' section.)
... I didn't like the moments of extreme body consciousness in Sabriel, now that I think of it, but they didn't last as long and happened pretty infrequently, so I got around it.
Honor Harrington is... about a war fought by a space navy, and Honor is a starship captain and a tactical ace. However, Weber falls into ruts pretty easily with her, repeating characterization and description pretty much word for word, which gets a little tedious. I wouldn't recommend reading the Honor Harrington novels all at once if it becomes tedious, and you'll probably need the wiki even if you read them all in a row. There are a lot of them. I liked the first two okay, but there's a limit to how many space battles I can read without them all blending together a bit. :D
I think one of the reasons the author kind of put her in the likable category is because she's measuring the fans responses to the book and her character. In the series itself she may be considered "unlikable" but most of us readers fall instantly in love with her is because of her sense of independence, her intelligence and her wit--moreover how she manages to defy the expectations of her society while constantly having to live in said society.
A lot of women identify with her which is why she's considered to be one of the most iconic heroines in literature. What OP might be saying is that we like characters we identify with and from that sense of identity we create a list of criteria. Unlikable female characters step outside of that criteria and into unfamiliar territory. Sometimes they react in off ways that put us at odds with those expectations. I actually know a character like this myself and at one point, I made the mistake of calling her a Mary Sue because of it.
She had a tendency to react in extremes--very emotionally unstable. She was really strong; strong enough to cross that line of "Badass but not too badass because that's threatening". She wasn't a badly written character by a longshot but because she stepped outside of that paradigm I unwittingly created, I just didn't want to like her.
What I kinda took from the essay is that being a "likable" female character is about conforming to those expectations readers have. Lizzie is likable because she's balanced and she straddles the lines the author mentioned:
"Nice, but not too nice.Badass, but not too badass, because that’s threatening.Strong, but ultimately pliable."
That's not a bad thing by any means but some people in this world are just so...out there. Characters too. They don't just cross the line--they take leaps and bounds straight on over it. Like, they're there own plane of existence and quite possibly--very alien, very off-putting for the rest of us. Like Sherlock. Except the fandom of BBC Sherlock is absolutely enthralled with his character, though it begs the question; would that still be true if Sherlock was a woman instead of a man? What are the chances that if Sherlock was in fact a woman, she would fall under that list of "unlikable" female characters?
I like to write about female characters that think and react in extremes--I'm not as good at it as I'd like to be but its just a lot of fun to write them. I think what OP is trying to say is that these kinds of characters are just as important as the "likable" characters and that their stories need to be told as well.
I was going more with the author's original commentary on what constituted a "likable" female character - one that fit in with the standards of what she as a woman had constantly told was acceptable behavior in a woman who wanted to be liked by other people.
However, you're right: the fandom adores Lizzie Bennet. (One t, two n's... do we even have a mini for that? Perhaps a mini english bulldog could be invented for the works of Jane Austen and the Brontës, where we don't really have any fantastic creatures to choose from.) However... the fandom also adores some of the characters she's put in the "unlikable" category with almost as little reservation. I doubt Lizzie was subjected to unanimous approval by readers when Pride and Prejudice was published. Lizzie Bennet does not challenge today's ideas of a woman's role in society, but she was a challenge to women's roles when she was written.
I think we need enough rounded female characters that we feel comfortable not liking some of them, instead of feeling obligated to support them because they're, you know, ladies who aren't damsels in distress or completely incidental to the plot. These kind of heroines, that you're free to like or dislike, are fairly common in children's novels and novels written for female YA audiences (for example, I greatly disliked Pippa in A Great and Terrible Beauty,) but aren't as common in "mainstream," fiction.
It just could have been worded better in the essay, I guess. By her definition of "likable" I thought Jane Bennet would have been a better example. But if I'm not understanding her correctly, then this all makes sense. Thanks for pointing it out.
Personally, I've never really noticed that with men, though I've never been looking. Also, my reading pool is somewhat limited; until recently I've only ever read books whose authors are currently dead.
My brother once told me, "It's hard for us [men] to see a woman as anything other than an object for sex." (He is rather fond of the Honor Harrington series.) I can see how this would stand in the way of a male author to write a believable female character. But I think it works the other way too. I have a great deal of difficulty writing believable male characters because I have trouble seeing past how they physically look. (Though I've never really dedicated any time to them thinking about their personal bits. I don't spend any time to speak of doing that, so I assume they don't either.)
And then, of course, there's the other end of the whole spectrum. In my original fiction, there are two female characters who fall into the "traditional gender role" of staying at home waiting for the men to return and prepping bandages. I'm absolutely terrified that I'll get put down for writing female characters into a traditional gender role (I've already heard it from a couple people).
The point of that is that many people are as adverse to people daring to put females in a traditional gender role as a non-traditional one. No matter what you end up doing, there are gonna be some people who are gonna hate it. (How do you think the LotR movies' popularity would have been affected if Arwen had stayed in Rivendell and made Aragorn a flag like she did in the book instead of riding out to save Frodo?)
As for the idea that feminine roles are self-effacing, I don't agree with that at all. People may not notice, but that doesn't reduce the importance of the roles. Take my example of bandage prepping. All the men go out to a battle and the women go too to put more female characters in non-traditional gender roles. Battles being what they are, there are lots of injuries. After the battle, everyone goes home, and there is no medical care ready to go for all the critically injured people who are bleeding to death because no one stayed to do this important task. (Heaven forbid the men should stay, but that's beside the point. Someone needs to do it.)
A note on something I said above; I'm not saying no men can write believable females: C.S. Lewis, after all, was a man, and I immediately related to all his females. I think they were believable characters with realistic problems.
Are there any examples of male people calling a female writer's female character a Mary Sue? 'Cause in my (admittedly limited) experience, this is done just as often by women (often to provide some justification to separate her from her love interest). Rose Tyler from Doctor Who has often been called a Mary Sue. The only times I've ever seen it is when fangirls are trying to get their OC close to the Doctor, which they accomplish by bashing Rose.
I'd like to correct something I said in my earlier post. I said that Elizabeth Bennet doesn't fall into the "perfect little Miss Perfect" category, and claimed the writer defined her "likable" characters like that. Upon further reflection, I have determined that this is inaccurate. She defined her "likable" characters as "unobjectionable." Raise your hand if you found anything Elizabeth Bennet did objectionable? *Entire cast of Pride and Prejudice raises hands along with me.* My point stands; she's not "likable."
I still hold out that the solution to all this is not to lower the standard for women, but raise it for men. Certainly we should change our attitudes somewhat, given what you said about "female characters are often derided if they act on these emotions, are flawed in any way or if their behavior is assertive... while they're at the same time derided if they cry, display any sort of fear, or react in a human manner." Of course we all have to understand that women are people, and hopefully female character should emulate that. I would even go so far as to say that the standard should be changed (not lowered, changed). But instead of just as a society accept women acting on emotions like anger and jealousy, wouldn't it be better to expect men not to, since very few results of these emotions are good? I mean, imagine a world where no one acted out of jealousy. I don't think we could ever achieve it, but we could try. And maybe lowering the standards for women wasn't the author's intent at all and I'm just reading that into it. I apologize if I am.
And if it's a matter of men's female characters being valued over women's, well, the only thing we can really do about that is teach as many people as we can to view characters as objectively as they can. Anyone with the first lick of sense will realize that if a female character spends an entire chapter thinking about her boobs, she has a long way to go as a character.
Anyway, this is all very superfluous. I meant I saw your point about the vocabulary thing. The writer of the essay seems to have a solid enough grasp of what she's talking about (as solid as mine, anyway), but she could have chosen better words to say it than "likable" and "unlikable." Someone pointed out that "likable" characters tend to be boring. Thus, by default we all like the "unlikable" characters better. Perhaps "societally pleasing" and "non-traditional" should have been used, or something to that effect. And of course, I'm not dictating what anyone should believe on the topic. She's welcome to views that are different than mine.
... What I'm getting out of this article is that fandoms often dislike heroines who fall somewhere between Black Widow (displays few emotions, kills lots of stuff,) and someone like, say, Jane Bennett, who is squeakily, shinily nice to everyone and has pretty much no self-direction whatsoever. Male characters are in general cut more slack, even if their behavior isn't realisitic for their situation.
Interesting, though, that the author defines "likable" as such a lukewarm accomplishment - note that conforming to feminine stereotypes won't actively achieve anything for you, under this definition, just supposedly protect you from other people's disappointment and rejection.
Speaking of individual characters:
Elizabeth Bennett: okay, I'll give that she conforms to the standards of her society, but she's the heroine because, unlike her older sister Jane, she does actually deploy her snark against people and defy some expectations. Jo March, likewise, was written during her time intentionally to cast off feminine stereotypes.
Meg Murray's not a great example in the works of L'Engle for the type of heroine the author describes, except maybe in later books which focus on her daughter Polly, when Meg has dedicated her life to raising her many children. Vicky Austen or Meg's mother, Katharine Murray, are better examples: Katharine is a sort of domestic goddess, who is depicted as 100% selfless, and able to easily make groundbreaking forward strides in biology while cooking for her husband and children over a bunsen burner in her lab. Vicky is a poet who clashes with her far more ambitious younger sister and who is relied upon to be the stable caretaker and secondary mother for the younger siblings, and the emotional anchor for her elder brother, who spends most of her adolescence making his life, or her parents' lives, easier. Her reward is not to achieve literary eminence, but to be married off to her first high school sweetheart, despite the number of times she gets mixed up in the weirdness of time and causality in the L'Engle universe. Unlike Meg or Polly, she does not take an active role in shaping her destiny or that of her family: her choices are all about domesticity, supporting her friends and siblings, and which of her love interests will make a more suitable husband.
Matilda also isn't a great example of "likeability" in the context of this essay: the proper one would be Miss Honey, who lives a life of demure poverty because she can't stand up to her aunt. Matilda, on the other hand, has resorted to petty revenges to get back at her neglectful parents - any demureness on her part is mostly a facade.
I'd still say that the four above are, on a sliding scale, more traditionally feminine or at least compliant than the other heroines mentioned, and that they do exist on or near the unrealistic line drawn in the sand for society's expectations of women. I also think it's interesting that most of the heroines who are allowed to be difficult are comparatively young:
Amy March, the youngest of the Marches, spent most of Little Women having her behavior corrected until she became demure and ladylike enough to win the approval of their rich elderly relation (and eventually Laurie, though I won't get into that.)
Mary from The Secret Garden was "civilized," through becoming a devoted supporter of her male friend and learning to conform.
Lyra did not become a conformist as such, despite having a love interest and the implication that young love determines the shape of your soul, which is one of the main reasons I like her so much. She matured without becoming demure or ladylike: she learned to pick her battles so that she could fight them all the harder.
Susan surprises me that she's in this category, but then I remembered that Susan is set up to fail throughout the Chronicles of Narnia. Despite the fact that she superficially conforms to society's expectations of a young woman and that she plays the mother role throughout the Narnia books, she's always going to come second to Lucy's incorruptible pure pureness, and it's mostly because she is stepping up to fill the role of their absent parents in earlier books and attempting to carve out an identity of her own in the real world in later books. Jill Poole might be a little more straightforward of an example: she deals with plenty of her own selfish decisions, but she and Eustace are equals in their books, and she's shown as trying very hard to stand up for herself in the midst of a rather awful school in the beginning of The Silver Chair.
Hermione also changes and gets transformed into a more socially conforming girl in later books (book four's beautiful all along moment comes to mind,) but she actually gains moral complexity along the way too. Like the Murray women, she's a complicated example because she represents the female intellectual.
Hang on. I'm going to go write an essay on this now.
That being said, your opinion on Aravis from The Horse And His Boy and where she falls on the spectrum?
On the author's original spectrum, she does avoid conformity (she runs away because she'd rather not get married,) and she's allowed to have a temper and even to make enormous mistakes in the story. On the other hand, the girls in Narnia are all judged solely by whether or not they become devoted believers in Aslan, and she gets converted hard.
Obviously, Aravis is no where near Lucy's incorruptible pure pureness, but she doesn't get the same engineered failure that Susan does just for going out and trying new things, and I'd say she falls closer to the author's original definition of "unlikeable," since she's got a temper and an opinion and isn't afraid of voicing either.
Actually, there's a whole class of heroines - Aravis, Eilonwy, most of Lloyd Alexander's other heroines, Lyra Belaqua, Meggie Folchart from Inkheart - who represent a paradigm that we don't see as often with adult heroines. They get to have flaws and short tempers and make mistakes and win arguments and fights against their male friends, and save their brothers and fathers and friends, because they're young, and they don't yet represent any idea of the ideal woman. Their tempers are often seen as something that they will need to grow out of, or moderate to some degree, but since they're at their oldest in their early teens, they don't automatically get disapproved of by the author or readers for not being demure and self-effacing.
May it be telling that all the heroines I recognize (Mary, Lyra, Susan, Hermione, Katniss and Scarlett) are listed under "unlikable", and I like most of them? Except Scarlett; I hate Scarlett, but at least she isn’t boring. If I ever knew a "likable" heroine, she was apparently forgettable.
HG
I think the only real flaw with the article is that the author makes a false equivalency between "complex characterization" and "she's unlikable". Granted, she does use her own definition of "unlikable" for her purposes, but it's still strange to hear her talk about characters as 'unlikable' just because they happen to have a quality that doesn't make them a goody-two-shoes. To my mind, there's a big difference between "this character is complex and may not always act properly because that's how people are" and "this character is nasty, mean, short-tempered, and all of these things are to such a degree that you want to strangle her half the time".
Thankfully, I get the feeling that she's also partly aware of this distinction, 'cause in the "unlikable" heroines list she does list people in the former category rather than the latter. So I get what she's going for: this is basically a call for more complex female heroines who aren't always demure and apologetic, and especially of heroines who aren't afraid to define their own lives independent of the expectations of others. And really, what's so wrong with that? I'm sure we could use a few more ladies like that, y'know what I mean?
That may well be true... but it's the central thesis of her (?assuming from the 'claire legrand' name) argument. Quote:
'for my purposes here, I’ll define a “likable heroine” as one who is unobjectionable.'
Or in other words:
'I will define 'likeable' as 'boring', then list some characters who are not boring and claim that they are unlikeable and that you should like them'. The problem here is that she never made the connection that people don't like them. I'm not saying that her argument is necessarily wrong, nor that it's right - she's discussed two issues and failed to link them.
For my part, I preferred Graceling over Fire.
Oh, also:
'And, I would add, these parameters seldom exist for heroes, who enjoy the limitless freedoms of full personhood, flaws and all, for which they are seldom deemed “unlikable” but rather lauded.'
I also preferred Hermione Granger over both the 'likeable' (ie, uncomplex) child Anakin Skywalker and the 'unlikeable' (ie, complex) adult Anakin Skywalker (as portrayed in the films). So yeah, that's me.
hS
...though it's worth pointing out that, for me, that alone wasn't enough to detract from the main point. It was mainly a wording thing I think, but the point of the article was clear to me anyway, so...
Yeah.
Personally, my problems with child Annakin were partially the lack of complexity (he's supposed to be what, about nine during the Phantom Menace,) and partially that he was more a plot device than a character.
My problems with grown Anakin were that he was a smug, manipulative and narcissistic young man who then graduated into wide-scale murder, entered into a relationship that I have to characterize as manipulative, obsessive and creepy, and his portrayal in the prequel trilogy completely undermined his supposed redemption as Darth Vader in the original trilogy.
But getting back to the original point of this topic, I've just thought of something: Padme is portrayed in the prequels (at least once she becomes a love interest) as surprisingly passive. She's allowed to physically defend her own life and Annakin's, to be a queen, and to help take back her own planet, but her practically non-existent opinions are always taking back seat to our three strong male Jedi. She isn't allowed to take initiative unless one of them approves it.
It's Anakin's wishes and Anakin's problems as a Jedi that define their marriage. (Much is made of how he is in so much pain keeping their relationship a secret, but when she says that she can't live that way her feelings get brushed aside because, well, he's a Jedi. No attention is paid to how her life is going to change now that they have a kid - sure, she's rich and taking care of the infant won't be a problem, but Anakin's struggle over all this is the only thing touched on by the plot.) Padme's decrease in competence and the ability to voice her own decisions is also directly tied to the point where she becomes a love interest - as a fourteen year old queen, she and her body double physically infiltrated a castle, shot things down, and faced down battle droids. As a twenty-something senator, she's relegated to a damsel for Anakin to rescue, and she no longer gets to question Obi-Wan's plans like she questioned Qui-Gon's in the first movie of the trilogy.
Weirdly, considering the time gap between the original and prequel trilogies, Leia is allowed to be a much more complete character than her mother - she voices opinions all the time, forms plans independently of her brother or her love interest, leads battles, discusses strategy, doesn't apologize for calling Han out, and her relationships with Luke and Han are completely independent of how Han and Luke get along. Not to mention, she shoots things, befriends the Ewoks on her own, and kills Jabba the Hutt with a chain. She fit's the author's definition of an "unlikable" woman, since she's assertive to the point of being verbally abrasive, and her great plan to rescue Han ends with her captured by Jabba the Hutt. (Which nobody ever blames her for, I should point out - Padme is blamed in Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones for failed plans, with at least one person saying that she should have stayed in the ship.)
... All right, that was a tangent.
Though I think the reason for the false-equivalency may have been OP parroting some of the collective climate in fandom towards certain "unlikable" female characters. Sansa from Game of Thrones comes to mind. She gets so much hate for being "weak" "stupid" "whiny" and "childish". It bothers me because people forget that she's only 14. She is a child trying to navigate in an unforgiving world full of adults who seek to use her for their own gain.
I personally think Sansa is a great character in a wonderfully human way and I've never really understood the weird trend on sites like tumblr where characters like her that are "too emotional" are detestable female characters.
They don't know as much about feminist theory as they think they do, and that being a strong female character means making every female character an action movie star with boobs.
That or (on Tumblr in particular) the "too emotional" Sansa is a liiiiiiittle too close to home with regards to their fangirling over Gay Ship Of The Week.
Its funny that a lot of people defended the movie and its characters as "empowering" when in fact, the movie itself tries (and on some level fails) to make fun of those very same people.
You know how the movie was marketed to a generally male geek demographic by showcasing hot girls dressed up in different costumes to represent various fetishes of "kick ass" female characters in geek culture complete with explosions and videogame-like fantasy settings?
Well I find it interesting how these scenes were woven in to the actual movie. We all know how the movie tried to show us how Babydoll's regression into that fantasy was supposedly a metaphor for her "fighting back" against this male oppression but the interesting part is when the fantasy ends and Babydoll is back into her second "brothel" fantasy all of the guys in the movie are reduced to stunned drooling idiots like some of the guys in the movie's audience. That really wouldn't mean anything if the dudes in the movie doing the staring weren't portrayed as the bad guys Babydoll is trying to escape from.
Its interesting because the first fantasy is that of the brothel sequence where in order to earn her freedom Babydoll has to dress up in different costumes and perform different dances to pander to the corrupt, sleezy male baddies and have her gang of girls rob them while they're in a drooling stupor over her moves. In the second fantasy she's doing the exact same thing although this time--she's pandering to the male-geek demographic audience the movie was marketed to. She's playing everyone in the audience by using that mindset of "b-b-but even if these girls are super super hot and in fetishizing outfits its still okay because they're super strong so that makes them empowering right? Right?" against them.
And she doesn't succeed (much like how the movie didn't in adequately conveying said message). She's lobotomized and reduced to a vegetable and the other girls who followed her are dead too. The only one who lives is Sweet Pea. The "big sister" of the group and the only one who bothered to criticize Babydoll and wasn't impressed by her dancing because she saw it shallow, impersonal and an empty attempt to stimulate the male audience.
This is kinda what I saw after watching this movie with some of my male friends for the second time while trying to piece together the purpose of weaving three, seemingly disconnected fantasy sequences into one movie (because I literally had nothing better to do at the time). I still didn't think the movie was that good and that I would want to watch it again.
The title though was beautifully relevant.
The movie takes itself way too seriously at some points so even though I feel like I got the message--I still found it a tad bit disingenuous. I mean it really should have gone for something decidedly more tongue-in-cheek satire if it wanted to make its criticisms of its audience better known.