It’s not the happiest of endings (or even stories), but Snow Flower and the Secret Fan comes to mind as a recent movie that focuses entirely on women and the love and devotion between sisters. It’s implied that Snow Flower lived a happy life, despite her circumstances, while Lily’s life was not particularly unhappy, considering her position.

Wait Until Dark (starring Audrey Hepburn), The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, and other older films (especially ones starring one of the Hepburns) are also worth watching because the women, while effeminate and often conforming to the strict gender roles of the time, were true characters of their own. They had desires and wills that, while sometimes portrayed as ridiculous and/or a hindrance (especially in comedies), did not evaporate at the first sight of a man. Even when the women aren’t in the main spotlight (such as in Old Yeller), they remain strong characters that are always working behind the scenes — not because they’re being sneaky or duplicitous about it, but just because the story happens to not focus on them, and they’re not about to stop their lives until the next time they appear on-screen.

A good thing to bring up. Now, I really have nothing to add on this other than to go on about how much I dislike people’s lack of creativity these days, but oh well. I need to talk about this somewhere so here goes.

Have multiple facets

You know, what I’ve always had a problem with was a really bad character being given the illusion of having more depth to her personality then there really is. The female lead (gosh I know there’s better examples as I’ve projected much irritation at the tv on many an occasion, but I can’t remember very well now and this will do for now just to get my point across) in I Am Number Four is really not that interesting. Oooh, she’s into photography. That automatically makes her the most intriguing girl at the school. Apparently if you give a female character just one hobby that allows her to be remotely creative, that immediately puts her in the “intelligent, attractive, yet severely misunderstood” category. Gasp She sees the world in her own way and everything. She’s so amazing!

Another thing I’ve seen enough of: the big bad secret that isn’t so bad. So maybe there’s someone whose dad’s the principal at the school she goes to. So she’s all trapped inside or whatever because she cannot be herself at school, and of course, neither can she do so at home. That’s terrible? I mean what did you want to do so badly that you can’t do with your parent here? Set the school on fire? Yeah, your situation’s not that bad.
Or a sibling has a terminal illness. Okay, that really is a very bad thing, but usually only serves to make the female lead look more tragic. So now this puts the her intense suffering in perspective and the fact that it makes her upset, which any human being would feel if their own flesh and blood were in agony, is supposed to make the viewer marvel at how sensitive and caring she is. You know what’s sensitive and caring? Shaving off your hair so that your sick sister doesn’t feel less pretty. Remember when Cameron Diaz did that for her daughter in My Sister’s Keeper? I loved her character so much right then. What isn’t sensitive and caring is putting on a sad face when next to their bed, or getting a little teared up when talking about them to other people. It never fails to annoy me how much the male lead is extremely moved by this and now he absolutely must be closer to her or something. I really have no idea what that’s all about. My point is, these shallow characters that we are supposed to believe as being more fascinating than they really are don’t even have to make that many sacrifices to come across as selfless. Anything good thing they do, and I mean anything, is elevated much higher than it should be.

Are not superhuman, whether because they can juggle lorries or because they have a specialized skill, like cooking or shooting bad guys.

If I see one more girl in an action movie that can hotwire a car/pick a lock/insert any other crap like that here, in an attempt to make her alluring, I’m going to scream.

Now, there’s actually a few characters that I do like from both books and movies, but after reading your list above, I remember that a lot of writers, fall into the trap of caring too much about the character. So even though I have my favourites, since I can still see some qualities within them that I could have done without, I won’t name them. Maybe I’ll think of one later, but I doubt it. They all have something I was displeased about. And True Grit sounds great. I’ll have to look into that.

or explain their absence in the cinema and other media.

Stupidity. And there are so many people to blame for this. First, we have way too many attractive youngsters studying acting who obviously get picked for their looks and not talent. I mean, I’m looking at the screen and thinking: Really? Out of thousands of girls who auditioned, she was by far the best? And what was wrong with the one who could actually act? She didn’t look like a model? There’s nothing wrong with average, people. There really isn’t. Now, when it comes to these untalented young men or women in the movie, yes, there’s only so much you can do with what you’ve been given, but it’s only when someone is competent that it’s obvious their role isn’t doing them enough justice. With a really good actor that just happened to make a bad choice, I pity them throughout the movie. I can just see them holding back because they really can’t do much else with the pathetic role they were given. Now, when incompetence, clashes with bad writing, that’s when you see just how incredible it is that so many idiots can just happen to gather in one place at the same time. I mean, bad actors and bad writers? Magically brought together by destiny? It’s so amazing oh my goodness. I really cannot wrap my head around that. I don’t know why nature allows such things.

So bad actors, bad writers. Also, the audience is to blame. You guys, you’ve gotta make a big deal about this. People complain about the most mundane things, and can go on forever about something that really doesn’t matter at all, but refuse to demand higher standards. They also refuse to challenge themselves to give up their need for two and a half hour illusions in order to observe someone that’s actually very real, admirable, respectable and all those other nice things. By illusions, I mean that people have become way too accustomed to inserting themselves into movies these days. It’s actually disturbing. The minute it starts, they settle in to enjoy being the pretty, intelligent, misunderstood person and once it’s over, the illusions’s ended, but they want more so directors make more. They now feel comfortable churning out this rubbish and right now, it benefits the majority: those who want the illusions, incompetent writers who can write twice as fast because they have half the talent of real writers, therefore they can write more stuff, then more movies can be made and more money is generated. That’s why this keeps happening.

If I see one more girl in an action movie that can hotwire a car/pick a lock/insert any other crap like that here, in an attempt to make her alluring, I’m going to scream.

Well, I agree with the using it to make her alluring being scream-inducing, but I just feel compelled to point out that it’s really not that difficult to pick locks or hotwire cars. Between babysitting demon children who think it’s fun to lock themselves inside various rooms with the key and then throw tantrums when they can’t get out and a basic understanding of how a car’s engine/wiring works, I’ve gotten quite good at picking locks, and I can hotwire most cars, if need be. It’s pretty practical knowledge to have, really.

Anyways, something I forgot to mention in my earlier post: even in most comedies, the women possess dignity, and it’s not the overblown royal sort of dignity (which is more arrogance than anything); it’s the quiet, composed, and determined sort that responsible, self-aware, and well-adjusted people possess. You don’t see that type of dignity often today.

What about Lindsay Weir from Freaks and Geeks?

As one of the leads, I really think we got to see quite a few facets of her character including up and downs as well as progress forward. (Probably the most bittersweet things with a premature ending to a tv series is there is no chance for the creators to undo character development to string out the series past it’s due date.)

I definitely think she exists independent of males/ their relationship and yet she is capable of being in relationship. This I think is important. I understand the cardboard cut out love-interest that people want to avoid, but I’m cautious of then pushing into the territory of the girl can never be in a relationship lest she appear dependent. A fully developed character should have the freedom to be both in relationship and not, but we simply don’t want to define them by the relationship. If anything, Nick was the needy individual, dependent on another.

The entire series had a sort of realness to it and it seems Lindsey has that same sort of realism going through a variety of struggles but isn’t the ‘perfect girl except she’s a klutz’ or the over-the-top bubbly personality.

No-one is super-human in the tv series. She is a whiz at math, but being academic isn’t superhuman.

Ending- didn’t really have an ending, but it’s trajectory was hopeful. She’s a lot more firm in her place with the burn-outs (she no longer fits with the mathletes) and yet she hasn’t resigned herself as a burn-out. In fact, the influence she has on the burn-out crowd and they on her is very interesting. (Several of them starting to get the dose of reality of ‘aw, crap I’m going to graduate soon’. Daniel playing DnD was so funny.)

I don’t know, I’m a guy so maybe I’m overlooking things. But on the whole I really enjoyed Lindsey as a character.

Because it’s on my mind at the moment (just finished a binge in the Bioware forums a half hour ago, actually!), I’d like to mention Mass Effect. It’s a video game series, not a book or a movie, but one of the many things it’s significant for is its characters. In my opinion, they almost all fall into the category of “real girl”, although the first game gets it better than the second. And the main character, Commander Shepard, can be both male and female, with no difference in dialogue, action, or combat ability, except for appearance (combat armor with full coverage or unrevealing casual clothing, and no unreasonable body proportions) and voice acting. (And who you can romance, but even then, FemShep is not particularly different in relationships from ManShep.) It’s refreshing, quite frankly. You think books and movies are bad? Try being a video game fan with any amount of respect for women. It’s not all that easy. (Luckily, most good games get it right, so you just have to be sure to only play really good games. ;))

Anyway, I’m not going to mention FemShep because, quite frankly, the main character doesn’t have a set gender. (The box and most promotional materials do have ManShep on them, but official Bioware policy is that this is only for convenience sake and that there simply isn’t a canonical Commander Shepard.) But I would like to talk about a few other characters. First game only; like I said, the second game did a bit worse, and while I still don’t think they did too bad, I’d have to throw in a lot of caveats. So we’re going to stick to the totally awesome first game women.

In the game, you end up collecting a squad of six different characters, two human and four alien. Three are male, and the other three—Tali, Liara, and Ashley—are female. There are no differences in their combat abilities based on their gender, and as with a female Commander Shepard, their clothing is never particularly revealing and their armor is entirely sensible.

Ashley Williams is the first person you pick up on your team. She’s human, and she’s quite literally the second-strongest fighter on your team—the only one who outdoes her is the 1000+ year-old bounty hunter of one of the most aggressive species in the galaxy. She, alone on your squad, can use any weapon (by which I mean you can put points in any weapon for her—Mass Effect is an RPG, after all!) and very little fazes her. She’s got quite a few facets, though. The most prominent is her intense distrust of aliens (which she is quick to stress isn’t xenophobia, just a lack of trust). But that’s not everything. She’s also deeply religious, likes poetry, and has a wonderful relationship with her three sisters. And even if she ends up in a romance with a male Commander Shepard, she never relies on him—in fact, when you meet her, she’s the sole survivor of an entire unit of both male and female soldiers. She doesn’t rely on anybody for anything. So I’d say she passes very well.

Tali’zorah nar Rayya is the second female character you pick up. She’s a young alien on her Pilgrimage, a rite of passage into adulthood for her species in which they travel the galaxy, find something of value, and return to their people, hopefully having A) learned something about the world around them and B) found something useful for her people. Already, you can see she’s not the reliant type. She’s only in her early twenties, yet she’s roaming around the galaxy and getting into fights without anyone to help her. Again, you pick her up in the middle of combat, and then you find she has information that she retrieved from yet another fight she was in earlier. She’s also an extremely competent engineer (to the point that your human crew and your (male) chief engineer on your (partially) human-built ship start to rely on her!). In my opinion, she’s quite realistic, managing to balance “wide-eyed just-out-of-teens just learning about the galaxy” and “actually quite a fair fighter” quite well. She does have flaws, though: she’s somewhat socially awkward and doesn’t know all that much about the galaxy before meeting up with Shepard. And as for her looks, well, it just so happens that her species lives entirely in enviromental suits. You never see her face once, and her entire body is thoroughly covered.

Finally, Liara T’soni. Another alien. And, I should point out, not precisely female. Her species (the asari) is monogendered (which, yes, for the pedants, means she’s female), but they look and sound an awful lot like female humans. I’ll be honest: the asari are the Green-Skinned Space Babes of the Mass Effect universe, only blue. Half of them seem to be strippers, they’re supposedly extremely promiscuous because they can technically mate with just about anything (it’s a mental thing, apparently), and they look like extremely good-looking human women. Only blue. So Liara immediately presents a bit of a problem, with the simple fact that her entire species presents a bit of a problem.

Yet Liara is a weird example of a character who is very clearly fanservice… without actually being a bad character. I mentioned half of the asari are strippers. Well, the other half are either incredibly brilliant schemers or mercenaries, which kind of evens things out a bit. Liara is of the latter category (sort of), being an extremely brilliant archaeologist. She’s an expert in ancient species, is very smart, and… also happens to be fairly innocent. She’s 106, which is scarcely out of her teens by asari standards, so this is understandable. At the same time, she learns quickly and is more innocent in the “socially awkward because she spends her whole life in dig sites” way as opposed to the “oh dear, teeheehee, I’m the damsel in distress” way. (You do actually meet her when you have to rescue her, but she very quickly proves herself to be a competent fighter (one of the strongest, in fact, because she’s your resident expert in biotics, Mass Effect’s version of sci-fi magic) and spends the rest of the game being pretty awesome.) And she’s also the daughter of one of the antagonists, with this part being done in a realistic and interesting way. So she’s a good example of a character who is kinda fanservicey (although like every other main female character, she always dresses conservatively and reasonably) and innocent while still being multi-faceted and interesting.

She also gets about ten times more awesome in Mass Effect 2, but that’s a bit of a lengthy story. Suffice to say, if you doubted her validity as a strong, self-reliant character before, you won’t any more after you play Mass Effect 2.

tl;dr: Mass Effect has really good female characters, regardless of whether you’re playing as a female or male Commander Shepard.

I’ve always admired Studio Ghibli movies for their (imo) strong female characters. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Kiki’s Delivery Service come immediately to mind.

If TV shows are fair game, I’d submit Kima Greggs of The Wire, but she’s a lesbian so maybe she doesn’t count.

Why not?

Why not?

It seemed like it might be a cheat or something, given some of the challenge’s criteria.

Oh.
Well, I suppose that in most novels a characters sexuality [particularly if their GLBT] can be a big part of their character. It just shouldn’t set them apart from everybody else, that’s all.

Oh, I love Alyx. She’s so real emotionally. A great example is how she reacts to stalkers. They’re dissenting humans, twisted and “augmented” by the alien overlords into abominations and made slaves. She’s this big mix of conflicted emotions. Anger at the overlords for doing it. Sympathy and sadness for their plight, hoping that they aren’t conscious/intelligent enough to remember what happened to them. Regret that there’s nothing she can do for them. And a very understandable moment of freaking out when she wakes up to have one screaming and gibbering in her face. The point is, that’s how a real person would be. In a lot of ways, she’s a whole lot more realistic than even the main character!

Does Sophie, from Howl’s Moving Castle count? She’s an old woman for most of the story, but she seemed pretty realistic to me.
Here’s another list:
Tiffany Aching from Terry Pratchett’s books. Honestly, that was one of the things I thought when I first read about her.

Harry Crewe from McKinley’s The Blue Sword (The prequel to The Hero and the Crown. I agree about Aerin, too.) Harry is really cool.

Princess Adelina (Addie)—Gail Carson Levine’s The Two Princesses of Bamarre. Addie is an interesting case. She’s almost crippled by fear and shyness, yet she ends up overcoming them as well as accomplishing great things.

Harriet the Spy. Especially the parts where she gets mad. It just seemed like a real person.

Hermione, from Harry Potter. She is important for other reasons than who she falls in love with. That is why I am glad that she didn’t end up with Harry.

Possibly Sabriel, from the book of the same name, and Katniss from The Hunger Games. Though I realize not everyone may agree with me on that one.

I agree about Ella from Ella Enchanted, though. I’ve always considered her an example of a strong woman, who’s strong without being great at combat. She tends to use her intelligence in other areas instead, like the scene where she charms the ogres to sleep.

Katniss from The Hunger Games.

I always thought she was more pointlessly mannish than inspiring female role model. I would agree with you on Addie and Ella, though.

While we’re on the subject of fairy tales, I’d like to add Belle from Beauty and the Beast and Rapunzel from Tangled. Belle’s first interest is in her education, and she makes the Beast prove his love to her before she returns it. Yet she still has enough purity of insight to see him as he is: a broken man struggling against his basest nature and the mistakes he’s made in the past. Rapunzel is a bit immature, having been sheltered her whole life, but she is also willing to learn everything she needs to know to survive in this world. And she never becomes cynical. By the end, she has conquered her fears and guilt over leaving home, and has made good choices that benefit her and those around her.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, I still like Gordon, I was just pointing out that because he is a silent protagonist, we never see his emotions—it’s our own emotions that we attribute to him. So in the game, Alyx expresses more emotion simply because Gordon doesn’t express any emotions.

What about Katara, Toph, Mai and Ty Lee from Avatar: The Last Airbender? Everyone there is a superpowered fighter, so technically in that world they wouldn’t be considered “super”

What about Ellie from Tomorrow When the War Began?

I love Shannon Hale’s books :)

Have you read Enna Burning, lfm? It’s even better than The Goose Girl, though as far as I’m aware it’s not based on any fairytale.

Short answer, because I haven’t read them: I don’t have an opinion of them :)

I disliked how Celia was cast as the villain, because her motives of upward mobility and frustration at being treated like Ani’s plaything all her life are perfectly justified,

Well, it does follow the fairy tale pretty closely.

However, I don’t think you’re giving Ani enough credit. Her heroic status isn’t dependent on her desire to maintain status quo. Sure, that’s what it starts off as being, but as she is faced with obstacles towards this, her desire for status quo grows into wanting to reclaim her heritage for herself, become good at something she wants to have and be good at, and becoming more self-assertive, confident, and capable whilst undergoing hardships she had never expected to face. She has ambition, too.

from being locked in unusual places by kids you were babysitting

I wasn’t the one getting locked into unusual places. That was the kids locking themselves in there, and I was the one who had to rescue them. And they’d usually lock themselves in there right as their parents came home. And for some reason their parents still trusted me to babysit their children again.

But my point was that those skills aren’t that difficult to justify having to begin with, especially for girls. Most girls I know have babysat, and I wouldn’t be surprised if most of them have experienced mischievous children locking themselves inside rooms, as well as having to figure out how to get the kid out before disaster strikes.

I want to bump this thread to draw attention to Kitty’s excellent article on this issue posted yesterday on the main site:

CLICK HERE