Currently, there has been a trend in female protagonists taking over multiple different franchises (e.g. Star Wars, Avatar, Doctor Who, Game of Thrones, etc.), do you think there is hope that this trend will steadily continue or have an impending decline?
A lot of times we are seeing quantity over quality. Leia may have been the only women in the original Star Wars, but she was much stronger than Rey because she had flaws. The main problem with The Force Awakens is that while I enjoyed Rey's character and love Daisy Ridley, Rey never really struggled. Disney was so afraid of their female characters being labelled weak that they made her good at everything. If there is going to be a decline it will be because people are too afraid to have female characters that suffer and have flaws (like Sansa in Game of Thrones) due to backlash on said characters. We should treat female characters no different than the males: sometimes strong; sometimes stupid; sometimes downright maniacal. There's an array of characters out there, and strength doesn't necessarily come from being the best. – AGMacdonald7 years ago
There's potential with this question to address an often-missed issue with the upsurge in female representation, which is that women aren't "taking over" - the gender ratio is just leveling out. If the number of female characters were to decline, media wouldn't be going back to normal - it would just be going back to a male majority. This is bearing in mind that we aren't even at equal numbers yet - to take Marvel as an example, every single movie title except for one is male, and the separate teams have a male-female ratio of around 6-2. Two other important points would be to acknowledge the bizarrely venomous backlash to female characters (Rey, Ghostbusters etc), as well as the significant expectations placed upon female characters - if they aren't perfect, they're lambasted as slutty/bitchy/manipulative/whiny/etc, and if they are perfect, they're Mary-Sues. – Cat7 years ago