WHY ARE FEMALE CHARACTERS WRITTEN TERRIBLY??

hi guys welcome back to my channel my name is Maddy if you're new here I hope your day is going well today we're gonna talk about something that pisses me the off and that is poorly written female characters and the epidemic that we have especially in fantasy at the moment with poorly written female characters and the question I would like to pose with this video is it possible for male authors and female authors to write good female characters so if you follow me on Goodreads the link is down below you may have seen my review for this book this is a ship of smoke and steal by Django Wexler I was highly anticipating this why a novel following and a thief assassin lady who basically has to go to a pirate ship to try and Shanghai it was kind of unclear exactly what her goal was for most of the book this book has a strong female character very much in the sense that she likes to fight and she likes to and there is nothing else about her character that has any deaths she is just a strong female character that likes to do those two things and that's it if you've been here a while you will remember that I had a similar issue with one of my most hated books of all time artemis by Andy weir the voice of jazz from Artemis is in distinguishable from I'm pretty sure the Martians character and it's very frustrating to me that a male author does not put in work to actually make the female character sound like a female voices do matter and the narration of a story should match the character that you're following in my personal opinion but that's where this video idea came from I'm not going to go into depth about this book because this video is not a review for this book I will probably be talking more about this extended detail in my wrap-up for this month because the hated that thing and I'm not going to be taking out the time for this video to talk about it and I'm assuming that this video will actually be part of a series because this is just going to be the groundwork that I want to do on this situation that we've going on here so there are three different types of characters that I want to talk about in this video that piss me the off the first one is one that we're not going to be discussing all that much it is the weak docile princess trope it's basically the princess like character who doesn't do really anything other than supports the main hero's story ie Buttercup from The Princess Bride I used to hate her character so much as a child because she didn't do anything she was very boring she screams a lot and she gets rescued that was the extent of her character at the same time there's nothing really wrong with a character like that but it isn't very interesting and it's not really a fully fledged character because that character has no hopes and dreams or goals or anything other than to at some point marry the hero of the story so the two tropes that I tend to see a most common in fantasy as well as contemporary are the strong female character and the good girl character now why do I think both of these characters that we see prevalent in so many different types of books and genres and age ranges are poorly written I'll go ahead and get into that now number one the strong female character there has been a lot of backlash against the strong female character in the recent years it's not really a well-developed character it's really just a boring like version of a male character in a girl format a lot of times with a strong female character we don't see anything else other than her physicality that's all it seems to change and with that physicality we also add sexuality because for some reason if a woman has taken on the strength of a man she also must take on their sexuality as well and I really don't agree with that I really find problems with that a woman's sexuality must be tied to her strength and that's very frustrating to me I also find that with strong female characters they also really bottle up their emotions very much like toxic masculinity does for men and it's very frustrating to see a woman talk and act in a way that I don't feel really resonates with the way character should be in that given situation and I do tend to see this quite a bit in strong female characters written by men to me the strong female character masks misogyny with empowerment and it's very frustrating moving on to the good girl trope the good girl trope is one that I see most commonly perpetrated by women and it pisses me off so badly most recent good girl trope that was absolutely disgusting was from after it by Anna Todd the main character in this book is very pure very much bookish and does not like other women and thinks that they are all threats to the man that she wants to be with the good girl trope is something that is very easy for women to connect with and it's very easy to think that oh this girl who is shy or sweet and doesn't really have a lot of friends is someone that I could identify with because women do tend to put their vulnerabilities into the character whereas men tend to put their valued qualities into their characters and it's very frustrating to me because women's stories shouldn't just be about our vulnerabilities it should also be about our strengths and even though we're not as physically strong as men doesn't mean that we don't have other strengths women put a lot of their vulnerabilities into the characters because the world has told us that we are vulnerable and so that is the stories that we are expected to tell another thing about the good girl characters is that they usually are unbothered by like girly stuff they don't like makeup they don't like going out they don't like dancing or whatever they're very much not bothered by being a girl and they don't want to be girly and that is something that you can find in both of these two characters the hatred of other women and it's so annoying but the one thing about these characters is that they always have the same goal and that is to get the man defeat whatever like thing is between the man and them and then get married and have babies so what for the good girl the basically the obstacle between her and the man are the other women typically speaking to get to the man so they must be vanquished evil must be vanquished so that she can get to the man and either heal his soul because that's the emotional baggage part of the job apparently and then she can be with him for the strong female character it's literally an evil must be defeated and then she gets to marry the man an easy way to depict this is with two different characters one of them being the before-mentioned Tessa from after but the strong female character that I'm going to use to depict this is Katniss Everdeen so it's easily shown in after with Tessa that shirt goal is to get with Arden and somehow beat the abusive --is-- tendencies out of him and then vanquish these that are his like you know side hoes but it's not as easy to understand Katniss Everdeen and with Katniss Everdeen I'll put a little picture here because this is going to be a little bit spoilery for the end of the Hunger Games series but proceeding from now on if you don't want to be spoiled like click to the skip this part but with Katniss Everdeen her entire goal for most of that book series it's to defeat the evil political regime but at the end of the series her happily ever after is being married to Peeta and having babies whereas that has never once on the page been what she says she's wanted ever and that's what's frustrating to me for a female character who is supposedly strong her her goals shouldn't always be the same as what we expect are a female character should be note that both of these books were written by female authors and that this ending does not necessarily have to be for a female character the ending of the Harry Potter series if you haven't read them like I don't know what at the end of the Harry Potter series everyone is married and has babies but honestly they all went through war that doesn't necessarily make sense for their characters so why do we see this pervasive happily ever after especially from female authors and for female characters it doesn't make any sense no marriage and children are both wonderful and absolutely part of other people's happily ever afters but they aren't the end-all be-all happily for after life goes on after you have children and I would love to see stories along those lines I would love to see stories about a mom with a two-year-old slung on her back kicking demon ass and I would love to see contemporary stories with a dad teaching his daughter how to do math I would love to see more stories that go beyond Parenthood because Parenthood is not the end of everyone's stories and so let's go ahead and talk about the most important character in this video Sansa Stark [Music] so Sansa is one of the most naive gullible and let's just say girlie that I could pick um she does not hate femininity she loves it in fact her hopes and dreams have always been marriage children and powered because the wanted to be queen so like we know what she knows what she wants she also manages to play the game of Thrones better than most of her family members so why do I think Sansa Stark is one of the best female characters of all time let me tell you Sansa's hopes and dreams has always been and marry the handsome prince have his babies and rule as Queen does that sound familiar because it's literally the plot of every Disney movie ever the dream that Sansa has is relatable because it's the dream of several millions of women throughout the world today now I know that I just said that the cliche narrative arc of a strong female character ending her story with getting married and having babies was cliched and boring but that's because the strong female character or the good girl character never wants States that their hopes and dreams are to get to that type of happily ever after whereas Sansa sticks to her baby guns for the entirety of the abuse that she suffers at the hands of the Lannisters and still manages to survive despite the fact that I know if I was around Cersei I would have mouthed off and got my head chopped off that's for sure there's a clear understanding of who Sansa is by telling you this is what she wants even though she wants to marry this person that's like a giant dick hole whereas the other two characters are only really defined by their physicality or by their relationship with men so those two characters automatically are not dimensional characters Sansa may not be your favorite character in the world but Janet from work who keeps asking you when you're gonna have kids isn't your favorite person either just because she wants to be a wife and mother doesn't make her inherently weak and the other thing about Sansa is that despite the fact that she wants that happily ever after she's vanquished so many evils in the time that her story has started and she still hasn't reached that happily ever after but that is still her goal that has always been her goal and will always be her goal because even though she's grown as a character and has become less and less naive she still knows what she wants and I think that is an amazing ability to actually set groundwork as a female character because once again as Georgia Martin said when he was asked how he writes wealth done female characters he considers women to be people and people have hopes and dreams not just a happily ever after that's constructed from a Disney movie the aspects of the good girl character and the strong female character aren't wholly bad but they're just not a whole character they don't add up to a full-fledged person and so they are in fact written terribly I'm not saying characters can't have a happily ever after that includes marriage and children I'm just saying I would like to see that be their hopes and dreams before we get to the end of the book otherwise I would like to see characters like Katniss riding off into the sunset ah I like Frodo from Lord of the Rings because not every character wants to settle down like Samwise Gamgee like not everyone wants a family or a marriage and it's very frustrating to me that we limit our characters who are female specifically to this very contrived very cookie cutter version of happily ever after and it pisses me the off so basically to sum up when I read my female characters if they're only defined by their physicality or by their relationship with men I automatically do not like them because they are in fact not fully fledged characters thank you for coming to my TED talk and so I will probably be doing other videos on topics like this if you have like particular topics you would like me to talk about please leave them down below I'm thinking I will probably do a sexual violence in fantasy against women because I just have a lot to talk about on that as well and I left out a lot about what the ship of smoke and steel did absolutely terribly especially regarding bisexual women and just violence against gay women in general but keep an eye out for that but definitely leave me down below if you want me to discuss other topics I'm gonna go now guys like subscribe all that good stuff bye [Music]

Channel: The Book Pusher

Views: 67,660

Rating: 4.8358555 out of 5

Keywords: books, booktube, booktuber, bookish, book reviewer, bookseller, pet peeves, unpopular opinions, trope talk, strong female character, good girl character, slytherin, hufflepuff, buttercup, katniss, after, anna todd, reader

Id: E-ZM1ZqPnzM

Length: 14min 1sec (841 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 19 2019