If Ree’s bar for good female characters is the girl from AC then it’s pretty low.
A good female character is not simply an overly sarcastic tough girl who reads like any modern lead in the post Marvel movies era.
Like she’s fun while playing the game, but there’s nothing special about making a tough and witty character.
I don’t think good female characters are simply male written characters but drawn female.
Daria to me is a good female character from my youth. She is sarcastic and smart but extremely flawed because she uses those things as a barrier from and to judge others. And she tries to hold her self to a higher authority even though she could never hope to measure up to it. Because in the end she’s human even if she refuses to see that.
That’s a good character.
I really hate the modern conflation of "good character" with "positive character or "empowering character".
so often nowadays you read shit like: "X is a great female character because she's strong, indipendent, smart, etc etc" when that has shit to do with whether one is or ins't a "good character".
A good character is a character that has depth, and serves the story its in appropriately, whether that means they're brave or cowards, strong or weak, smart or dumb, has nothing to do with it.
Sure when we talk about characters aimed at children, there can be an argument made for good role models, and therefore simplified, positive icons, but it's depressing to see grown people applying the same criteria.
In superhero comics/movies and videogames, as well as cartoons, this mentality is a plague.
Being fair, I suppose the logic behind it is that if this games and comics are power fantasies, everyone should be able to enjoy that form the escapism. Of course, self wanking with your OC character is a recipe for bad story in most cases, so I imagine thats why some people in Reee are ofended by the term Mary Sue.
Im all for diversity, but the one that Ree usually promotes is the most shallow form of corporate pandering.
Yeah, i'm ok with power fantasies, male or female, and i certainly understand wanting to see more female power fantasies, too.
Don't call them "great characters" though; They're serviceable characters, and that's what they need to be, but it doesn't make them great.
And it's especially a problem when those couple of key identifiers (strong, smart, sarcastic) become the start and finish, of a character's worth and value, and the opposite (weak, dumb, etc) are indication that they're just a bad character.
I think the obsession with identifying (and "subverting") tropes, that became super popular in the last decade or so, has something to do with it; you tend to lose a picture of the whole, when looking at a story, and just see a collection of switches to trigger on and off.
