Meagan Spooner’s Beauty and the Beast retelling, Hunted, provides an example of a strong female character who fails to be relatable. Weakness is often more compelling than strength, so if we don’t shy away from a character’s frailties, readers will find her even more endearing. Understanding how women participated in combat throughout history will further enhance authenticity. This might be a bitter pill to swallow, but we can’t pretend that physical limitations don’t exist, regardless of the genre we’re writing. Identify the Strengths and Weaknesses of the Protagonist’s Gender How do we make sure we aren’t reducing female characters to male clones with pretty faces? If we pay attention to three areas where male similitudes tend to invade, we can correct them.ġ. Now that we’ve pinpointed the issue, we’re left with a question. Shape Protagonists According to the Truth If we acknowledge instead of deny how God designed each gender, our stories will help readers view men and women with both empathy and admiration. In fiction and in real life, women have been using their unique abilities to outsmart enemies, survive catastrophe, and solve problems for centuries. We can preserve a heroine’s femininity without turning her into a damsel in distress whenever she faces a threat. Second, her psychological struggles and growth are a catalyst within the plot. First, Sanderson gives her access to magic that compensates her height and weight. The story absorbs these disadvantages and plays with them, allowing Vin to change and conquer in a believable way. Vin, the female protagonist, is petite, thin, and an abuse survivor. Jael exhibits great strength, not in muscle, but in mind and spirit.īrandon Sanderson does a superb job of portraying a strong woman in his Mistborn series. She welcomes him into her tent, lulls him to sleep with excellent hospitality (warm milk and a blanket), and then drives a tent peg through his skull into the ground. Jael encounters the enemy commander Sicera as he flees a military defeat. The book of Judges showcases a woman’s cunning capture of an opponent. True strength goes beyond a person’s physique-into the mind, character, will, and spirit. A strong female protagonist is interesting and compelling primarily because she isn’t male. We can’t copy and paste a woman onto a man. The Truth: A Strong Woman Is Inspiring Because She Is a Woman We squeeze her into a masculine hero archetype and expect her to perform accordingly (with perfect hair, teeth, and nails). Yet we’ve been convinced that a female protagonist must be as virile-or more so-than her male counterparts. Brawn, baritones, and beards aren’t required to write a resilient protagonist who can save the world. Women have less muscle mass than men, higher-pitched voices, and don’t grow beards because their bodies produce less testosterone. As with most Hollywood thrillers, the protagonist defies reality, taking on multiple opponents in fights that ignore the limitations of the female body. In the 2017 spy flick Atomic Blonde, undercover agent Lorraine Broughton is sent to recover sensitive information. The trope is so widely accepted that it almost goes unnoticed. The female protagonist can overpower anyone-man, woman, or monster-because she’s ultra tough. This falsehood bases a hero’s competence on mere physical prowess. The Lie: A Woman Can Do Anything a Man Can Do (and Do It Better) In our efforts as Christian writers to accurately depict reality, we must be aware of the fallacy weighing down female protagonists. But lies are a distortion of the truth and thus designed to resemble it. In the book 7 Women, Christian biographer Eric Metaxas says, “to pit women against men is a form of denigration of women, as though their measure must be determined by masculine standards.” The value of women is in their differences from men (and vise versa). Neglecting one or the other in a story guts the truth’s potency.īut misrepresenting a woman’s strength is even worse. Male and female perspectives each possess great worth, and both genders are vital aspects of the human experience. This bothers me, and it should bother you too, because we’re being fed a lie. They act like men (albeit hot men with curvy bodies and perfect hair, teeth, and nails). Strong women, as they’re portrayed in a lot of fiction and films, have a problem.
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