There’s a specific kind of dude that loves to complain about fictional girls/women being given too much power/capability, and expresses it through the lens of that being “poorly written” or “not well-crafted,” and it’s definitely an irritating phenomenon.
A character genuinely being of low narrative quality is a fair criticism, and good-faith critics of that kind of thing are not who I’m talking about in this article. It’s the other guys. You know the ones.
The amount of Justification a person expects from a thing in order to Let It Exist is a kind of Weight and Burden I don’t see talked about too much, and that’s understandable because it’s an inherently controversial subject, isn’t it? Anyone who discusses this kind of thing faces the possibility of backlash from all parties involved, both the people they’re up against and the people whose side they’re actually on. It’s hard to get it right, but that’s no reason not to try. Fear, as they say, is the mind-killer. The line is razor-thin and you can easily fall off, but in some cases it’s really clear what our mindset should be.
Lots of works, lots of characters are allowed to Exist as they are Because They’re Fucking Cool. That’s great. Some characters and some works are scrutinized more heavily than others and “Because It’s Fucking Cool” somehow suddenly doesn’t apply to them anymore for some reason. Hmmmm.
The double-standard is definitely a thing and you see it arise with things like Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel, Birds of Prey but as with the Arya example in Game of Thrones, even girls set in stories where they share top billing for “main” narrative throughlines aren’t immune. Any female character who does something a little too awesome is a ripe target for this kind of completely meaningless friction from certain people. The nail that sticks out gets hammered.
Girls are allowed to have sick characters who have the power-levels they have, do the things they do, and act the way they act simply Because It’s Fucking Cool, just like we do. They deserve to have, identify with, resonate with, and inhabit, characters that are Fucking Cool.
Everything I do fundamentally stems from this mindset of, what’s just totally wicked, what gets a “hell yeah” out of me? I have fought for years to come to acceptance that, frankly, I’m probably going to be writing the same kind of Rogue-Boy and Mystic/Angel-Girl story ad infinitum, and I was able to come to that acceptance because I realized it makes me happy, and that is enough. To try to take that away from someone is, I think, The Dickest Of Moves. To take it away from an entire gender makes me give you a very unpleasant look.
I am more than willing, beyond willing to fudge the lines in a story a little, to make something seem stupider, less fleshed-out, a little less “logical,” in favor of leaning hard into: “I did it Because It’s Fucking Cool.”
Everything I do erupts from that drive, the emotional satisfaction that brings about. It’s as true of my in-progress novel Ara’s Journey as it is of everything else I create. Barring the sheer soul-chilling terror of even daring to finish a book at all, I wonder how many people will ask for increased justification for why Ara can do the sick things she can do, and ask for less of that justification regarding Lionel, even though both of these characters’ impact-moments, abilities and approaches to their challenges arise from the exact same place;
I did it Because It’s Fucking Cool.
Because it’s flashy and vivid and wicked as hell.
Because it’s comic book-y, anime, and juicy.
I’m willing to bet the interrogation will skew in one direction quite noticeably.
And it shouldn’t.
Girls deserve to have characters and situations that don’t need to go through a faux-bureaucratic process of being Permitted Existence by jumping through a hundred hoops. Girls deserve to experience stories that we let Be without a barrage of badly-disguised, “It feels weird for her to be Fucking Cool because she’s a girl and I’m not Used to that; so start Justifying why she’s so awesome above and beyond what we have to do for our own on-page representatives, our own on-screen ‘champions’ or we’ll suddenly say that badass girl you love to watch, read about or play as, is Badly Written.”
Girls deserve to Feel Fucking Cool. Let’s let ’em.
