Originally Posted by
Fe 26
Its hard for me to say what makes a good female character because I'm male. On one hand you can just write a character like you would a man, then make them female. That way you don't fall into tropes and the character seems more genuine.
But then you run the risk of making the character sterile and devoid of the impact female biology has on women. But that's hard for even women to write because all women are different, so they usually play it safe and avoid it.
Like can anyone really remember anything where women were really written like women? And all of them in the cast? Like their hormones cycle and that impacts small things in their personality? Or that women typically respond with fear in situations that would anger men (thats not an IPism, that came from a study. Women experience fear like 80% more than men)? Or the special traumas they experience as children and how that impacts how they think differently?
Sure some stuff tackles that, but then it becomes the primary focus of the fiction. The whole story becomes the pain of childbirth and how the MC hates her mother.
What about something where a secretary gets anxiety because her boss reminds her of her mother who hit her, and we're never allowed to know that? Because thats real life. Thats how women really work. Or the secretary that goes and cries in the bathroom everyday because she's miscarried 10 times. Again, the viewer never gets to know that. They just get to see the edges of how it impacts her job. Thats real life. Thats how real women work. There is a hidden world, and it either becomes the primary focus of a story or is completely removed and the women are mostly written like men.
I suppose that if you did try to write characters like that, the viewer might hate it, because those characters would seem crazy or poorly written. You wouldn't understand their motives. But eh, thats life.
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