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An overabundance of Soppy Male Leads, I mean. I can't think of any offhand, but I can't imagine it would sit better with me than the Overly-Macho Male Lead. I think the Stallone and Schwarzenegger character types are gross, frankly. Again, it's all about balance. I'd like my boyfriend to feel strongly enough about me to clock someone who was bothering me (if I didn't do it first myself), but I wouldn't like him to feel like he had to be a bruiser to be a good man. Similarly, I'd want him to be able to recognize and express his emotions, but not let them rule every moment of his life.

The best character I know who might be described as macho is Ka D'Argo from Farscape. He's big, he's tough, he's gruff, he'll sock you as soon as look at you if you cross him... and we learn that his secret ambition is to start a family and settle down on a farm. Wonderful character.

~Neshomeh

I mean (especially in the video games) she's endowed. And I mean seriously. To the point where it would get in the way. Character, yes, a warrior woman, but the model-like figure gets a bit close to Sue-dom for me.


(Please angry fans don't kill me.)

She packs the biggest hand cannon in the Firefly-verse and is badass to the nth degree. I agree with Leto's assessment that River isn't necessarily because of her mentally-damaged state, though.

How about, just putting a few randoms out there - Princess Fiona from the Shrek series (I mean, she kicks the arses of all of Robin Hood's merry men in the original, for one)? Hana Gitelman from Heroes (ex-Mossad with the ability to manipulate electric information etc.)? Ziva David from NCIS (just awesome)? Sydney Bristow from Alias? Fiona from Burn Notice? Lara Croft, Tomb Raider?

We do become angry over this sort of thing, but after a while the energy goes out of the fight, just as you say. I would never end up doing anything for a reporting community, anyway - I just don't have the time.

Maybe ignoring him will do some good.

Better to imagine the sobs, instead. *wicked grin*

You're absolutely right about films and such; I hate them, and tend to ignore them, and while I was thinking of non-story social treatment, I should not have used the word "symbol". The thread below this sort of outlines the point I was trying to get at, but I did so badly in this first post, so I apologise. I should've gone back and rephrased myself.

Among other things, I DESPISE the fact that movies never seem to have women that aren't thin and sexy - or men that aren't handsome. Sexuality may sell, but it makes the rest of us feel horrible, and I would love to turn the fashion industry on its ear... but I'll not get into this discussion, because I will literally never shut up. In short, you're right again, Araeph, and I humbly bow at your feet. I didn't mean to imply otherwise.


By "victory" I assume you mean the success of the women's movement. If I'm mistaken, please feel free to correct me. If I'm not, how exactly does one throw one's hard-won civil rights into everyone's faces? "Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah, I get to vote now!"? Besides, equality is really a victory for everyone, not just women.

It should be, and yes I did mean the women's movement, but what I was getting at is that a lot of women seem to misunderstand what gender equality actually means; now both genders have the right to work any job they want, but that doesn't mean every woman can have a great career AND raise a family. Equality on that front gave women a CHOICE of what they wanted from their lives, not the ability to have everything, and from what I see around me, many seem to be blind to that. Then they go complaining about unfairness of little details because they're stressed by trying to have a good job and a family at the same time. I'm not saying it's impossible, of course, just taken to be what every woman is entitled to have .

Sorry, I've gone off on a tanget. By "throwing in faces" I meant that men are often getting the short end of the deal in situations such as custody cases because a lot of women throw around the "I'm a woman and if you don't support me you're gender biased!" card. They forget that by making that very claim, they're being gender biased themselves. I didn't mean to imply that all women do such things, but it does happen.


I've never read Mara's adventures but have actually heard them cited elsewhere as a good example of a non-Sue, non-militaristic female.

Mara's interesting. I rather like her, though I only read the five boosk by Timothy Zahn, and refuse to touch any of the other Star Wars EU books. She is militarisitic, though, in some ways; she was a trained assassin for the Emperor, and her targets were mostly political. A lot of her behaviour has (or HAD, as she did grow) straightforward, highly efficient mannerisms that people can associate with military training. That said, she never felt like a Sue to me, and I appreciate her character.


as 21st century writers, Suethors subconsciously feel the need to reduce the huge gender imbalance that plagues virtually every genre and medium. In other words, they want true strong female characters, but aren't knowledgeable enough either to write one or to appreciate one when one comes along.

EXACTLY. Exactly, exactly, exactly. Which makes it all the more of a shame when they create bad stereotypes.

- Sedri

Thank you so much! And on that note, I wish to claim a piece of badfic. Who do I inform so that it can be changed from one list to another?

InuYasha - All My Love

In my real life, I have no great desire to change the world or have a high-powered job or great athletic skills; all I want is to make enough money to have a house and kids (and cats) and to enjoy my life from day-to-day. When I say this to some - many - people, I get very strange looks.

It's not that I don't want to do well - I'm planning to do post-grand and masters here in uni, and that's no small accomplishment - but that the "classic" woman that so many people call oppressed is what I really do want to be; I can still be outspoken, but no one seems to realise that. It's as though being a mother isn't difficult enough to be respected anymore. *sigh*

image of Must Be Strong, and now we've got an overabundance of Soppy or Sentimental Male Leads, and every time a man leans towards the old sterotype, he runs the risk of being criticised (mostly by women) as a nasty bastard. *sigh* It's a shame.

I think there are more than enough "symbols of power and independance" for women around.

Really? I'd argue that there aren't nearly enough, and so the few symbols we have do double duty, which just weighs them down under all our expectations. Go to Rotten Tomatoes and look at the movies that have been released for this week. How many have female leads whose character outshines their appearance? (You can even compare that to the numbers of male equivalents.) Furthermore, how many collective symbols of female power and independence have you seen? Just by looking at the characters listed in this thread, I can tell that lots of these women are "the girl" of the team/regiment or, if not the lone warrior, are one of the few female warriors in that universe. That's not a very good indicator that warrior women are plentiful.

There is a sense in fandom that there are lots and lots of strong women in media, because people can now name five or six off the tops of their heads who really stand out. Unfortunately, the reason that a lot of these strong women are so visible is because they are so isolated in the sea of male characters that the human race has produced.

I'd like you to do something for me. Go and write down your top 15 movies. Now, write down the following:

What percentage of the movies have strong and independent men in them? And women? (Please note that this can mean internal strength too, as well as other strength independent from firepower.)

What percentage of movies have only one strong and independent man? And women? Count how many characters of both sexes you would describe as strong.

What percentage have a token man who is the heroine's love interest? And token women?

What is the male-to-female ratio in each movie?

What percentage of the movies have men who are looked at not in terms of character, but in terms of appearance? And women? Count them all. (I'm not asking if these people are sexualized too, I'm asking if they're sexualized first and foremost.)

Now...and this is really sad...

Do the same, not for your top 15 movies, but for 15 movies you think have enough female chutzpah and strength to be called "girl power" movies. (Note that I'm not calling them chick flicks; that's a different genre entirely.)

I guarantee you that even in most movies with a strong female lead, there is at least one capable male, and that in the majority of girl power movies, the strong and independent men STILL outnumber the strong and independent women! And, hey, if you want to discount every movie made before the Women's Rights Movement, go right ahead. The results won't shift that much.

Are there still more than enough symbols of female power and independence?

That's just one medium, by the way. There are thousands of years of literature behind us where women like Keladry and B'Elanna cropped up once in a blue moon, where even internal strength in women was portrayed as rare. Strong and independent women in fiction exist, oh yes they do, and always have. But they are so heavily outweighed by the sheer numbers of strong and independent men (the ratio's probably about 500 to 1, taking into account all literature, fictional movies, TV, comics, legendary oral history, and heck, even folk songs) that they often get lost or are forced to become more in the public consciousness than they were ever meant to be by the author.

This is why years and years will pass before there are "more than enough" symbols of power and independence for women. This will only happen when those symbols outnumber by a significant margin all symbols of power and independence for men.

*toasts* Here's to you, 2800 A.D.!

Not to say that women don't deserve such thing, but quite frankly, we already have it, and I think a lot of women nowadays are throwing their victory into everyone else's faces. It seems like the pendulum has swung too far.

By "victory" I assume you mean the success of the women's movement. If I'm mistaken, please feel free to correct me. If I'm not, how exactly does one throw one's hard-won civil rights into everyone's faces? "Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah, I get to vote now!"? Besides, equality is really a victory for everyone, not just women.

That said, I do like strong female characters. The one whom most fits your description is B'Elanna Torres from Star Trek: Voyager, but the one I most admire in terms of being a strong woman is Mara from Raymond E Feist and Janny Wurts' Empire series - she makes her victories by being clever politically, and has no skill at all with weapons. I like that.

I'm familiar with (and have a soft spot in my heart for) B'Elanna, and I've never read Mara's adventures but have actually heard them cited elsewhere as a good example of a non-Sue, non-militaristic female. It might have been Winterfox.

I like warrior women - I'd call myself one - but I tend to avoid them because from what I see in society today, I think it's overkill. We know women can be strong; what's unexplored is how strength, how the ability to fight and win, doesn't require weapons or battle cries. There are many I would call warriors that don't fight.

Of course there are, and I could say the same. Arms-bearing women are just the easiest to contrast with Warrior Sues, the latter being the most visible female character cliché in most badfic. (I count wand-dueling as warring, by the way.) I'd argue that the existence of Warrior Sue is due to the fact that, even if there are many strong female characters, the proportion of these in comparison to men is so skewed that a lot of Suethors aren't exposed to enough of them and taught to value them. At the same time, as 21st century writers, Suethors subconsciously feel the need to reduce the huge gender imbalance that plagues virtually every genre and medium. In other words, they want true strong female characters, but aren't knowledgeable enough either to write one or to appreciate one when one comes along. Add this to raging hormones and the influence of Canon Sues that they idolize, and the result is a bizarre chimera--misandrist and sex object--that we agents encounter and slay on a regular basis.

~Araeph

Peach is great, though she's more of an It. Biddy too, though she doesn't have a very big part in the series.

It's very irritating when people insist that Dairine is a Sue, on the grounds that she's really smart and an incredibly powerful wizard. She's not exactly flawless--and she's spent the past few books dealing with not being WonderKid but not knowing how to do much little, detailed stuff.

Or, in other words, Diane Duane is awesome.

...while I'm a big Keladry and a milder Alanna fan, I always thought Daine was a big ole Sue. In fact, I should try her out on an Original Fiction Sue Test.

But the one who rocks harder than them all is Buri. I hope she has her own spin-off in the future.

Good thought! Don't forget Dairine and their mom, though. And Kit's sister Carmela. And the Hesper, who fought an entirely different sort of battle. And, well, it's another good continuum for strong women, isn't it?

~Neshomeh

One can never have too many newbie gifts. XDD Thank you very much~~ Oooh, that's nifty. :3
Thank you, and I wish you luck as well! :O

As all four (GASP! Yes, four. I'm not sure what gave me the idiotic idea to write two agent pairs... *head, meet wall.*) of my Agents are female. That is, unless such as July mess with Gender Rays.

C

Hi! Um... you've most likely gotten showered with links and all already, so: 1) good luck and have fun, and 2) Have a Convenient Towel to add belatedly to your newbie-gifts! It'll change color to whatever you want at first, but it settles after one color change. It'll still pop up when you need it though.

Welcome, Sobakasu! I wish you more luck than me in trying to get Permission!

Okay, technically it wasn't until I was on the train and thus without access to a computer, but I was right about remembering at an inconvenient moment.

Juanita (Nita) Callahan (Young Wizards; Diane Duane) Technically the wizards of this series are "in the service of life", and thus not supposed to kill, but in several of the books Nita ends up having to fight - most notably, the fourth (A Wizard Abroad, in which she and a horde of Irish wizards have to fight a bunch of nasties from Irish mythology) and the eighth (Wizards at War; as you may be able to guess from the title, there's fighting in it. This one makes a great deal of use of the magic particle accelerator introduced in book 5.)

Ace Ventura? Seriously? O.o

~Neshomeh

I've seen people complain that she's Sueish because of all the unfeasibly cool stuff she does. Disregarding, of course, that everyone does unfeasibly cool stuff in the PoTC films (if they didn't, the movies would be very boring).

It's kind of a fact of fandom that there are fewer male writers, thus fewer male OCs, and thus fewer Gary-Stus. But yeah, female OCs are more suspect, chiefly because there are more of them and the majority are poorly-written.

On the flip side, there are (or were--I guess I don't really know) fewer female leads in published fiction, and we have higher expectations for them because of all the stuff that's going on in this thread.

There's also the fact that the term "Mary-Sue" is associated with female characters, and is a relatively well-known term. We're sort of geared to suspect female characters by the very language we invented for them.

It is kind of a nasty catch-22, isn't it?

Do you have an example of the kind of thing you're talking about, like a particular fandom? I'm curious about this now.

~Neshomeh

Penname: Torian
Bio: So like I'm a slashe r and Ilike random ch aaracters that nobody bothe ers with mych so if th eres an bit chara you li ek and wa tn to seehookup wit h soemone just sned me a reviw on o ne of my s tories and reqest it.

As in, a lot of people will insist that a female character is a Sue because she has all the l33t skills - but fail to regard that everyone else in the fandom source material has them as well.

Well, I know that TOS sent at least one Canon Replacement 'Sue to OFUM for extermination. I imagine that if OFU characters are acceptable forms of punishment, there's some wiggle room for using other goodfic canons. The rescue and use of plotholed canons is really the only other close thing we've had before. Except for Team Phoenix...(http://www.misssandman.com/PPC/Pranksters.html) Hmm. Couldn't say.