How do you give your female characters more agency

how do you give your female characters more agency,

So this noble lords daughter, 14, is betroth to marry the countries king, 45, the king is known as the most benevolent wonderful king in the history of the country, but she really doesn't want to do this, plus she would be moving across the country, so she runs away

on her journey to a port town to get a ship and sail away to another country, she meets our hero, who falls in love with her, he saves her from the men looking for her and they go on a journey together

I wont write out the whole plot but eventually she gets kidnapped (and hero finds out that shes going to be used in a ritual sacrifice) so he goes and saves her

More happens but that's her general plot, running away, meeting hero, getting kidnapped, getting saved

she just seems to kind of be pulled one way or another with the male characters fighting over her, i feel like i need something to give her more agency

any tips?

Give her a vague supernatural ability to see what's coming in the near future, kind of like Fiver's abilities in Watership Down. This way wherever she winds up will seem at least partially her doing=agency. It will also shadow your own meanderings with a hint of purpose.
Youll note for instance that this 'ability' will make it possible for her to love the aged king while knowing at the same time that he is not the one for her, etc.

by giving them more agency.

skimming your summary i determined your princess is little more than a mcguffin. she's not a character, she's a sailboat tossed by the waves of your bullshit patriarchy

:^)

make her male

Women have no real agency, give it up. Especially in a historical setting, all they could do is nag and hope that their husband didn't bust their teeth in. Or is the hero of the story some enlightened fedora tipper-insert from the modern era?

And why does she has to have agency? Muh feminism is cancer and most women want to read pirate rape fantasies anyway. Plus if you make the hero a bit of a misogynist you can ride on the resulting controversy. Add a rape scene or two, that should do it.

The prince is about to save her but oh no! the nidkappers were expecting him and knock him out. Luckily, moments before she loosed her bonds and saves him, so they both get out together.

The other user's suggestion sounds like it's kindof a cop out ("women can only be powerful via magic") but he's actually got the right idea. Try making it apples to oranges if you want her to have believable agency. Occasionally you get a good Joan of Arc who can just swing a big phallic sword around like a man (referring more to the sterotype than the historical character), but while this is sometimes a good thing, to make a woman look valueable simply by making her mannish is just another way to conform to the idea that men are the better thing to be.

Nobody who has ever asked about "muh characters" has ever gotten published.

Give her something or someone to protect. Make this the reason for her running away.

Dostoevsky probably moaned about his characters in a pub every time he drunk his fucked up home-made vodka.

>Muh karamazov, is good? Da?
>Whatever, add another sibling or something...

>14
You sure want to make it hard, eh? If she displays too much intelligence, it's going to be unrealistic but if she acts realistic, you'd at best get a bratty teenager. At least age her up to 17 or so.

More importantly, what was her goal before the shit happened? Why was it her goal? What's her goal now outside of staying alive? What skills does she have? She doesn't sound like a character.

>getting kidnapped, getting saved
You can make her play a more active role, let her get kidnapped after she attempted something to turn the tides against them. Let her save herself and the hero arrive afterwards.

If she were older, you could simply make her manipulative, and the things where she played a passive role, were just part of her plan, say she wanted the hero to fall for her and test him by faking a kidnapping or some shit. If you want to roll with the magic shit (which would at least work together with the sacrifice plot), rather make her ability something scary destructive/painful/damaging, so she's afraid to use it.

This sounds fucking awful. Scrap the whole thing and try to come up with a premise that isn't complete horseshit.

You can't do that without changing the plotline, so just write your little male centric fairy tale and be done.

big TITTS, big BWUTTY, skill of TWRKUNG

Make it so the hero loves her, but she doesn't love him back. At the same time, make her feel conflicted about not sharing the hero's feelings

>how do you give your female characters more agency,
Put them in situations where they can make meaningful decisions. Then have them make meaningful decisions. Basically, the opposite of what you're doing right now.

1. Stop writing fantasy schlock.
2. Write a cowardly gay man who must learn to assert himself. In editing, change this character to a woman.
3. Your specific character: she lacks her own story. Have her meet the hero, she throws him under the bus to save herself. Hero saves himself, they have parallel stories, and meet back up where hero saves her. Boom. There's even some tension between them now.

Why a womyn wouldn't want to marry the country kings that also has a good reputation?

Now this whole thing sounds like Re:Zero

>2017
>Writing female characters

how about you write a story about a princess who runs away from an arranged marriage and faces reality: rape, kidnapping, brutality, and the crushing of her ego.
that would actually be interesting desu.
in the end she becomes a sex slave or just gets killed or something.
a reminder that life isn't as nice as the narrarative we are ususally fed portrays it to be.

>be woman
>put your personal feelings above the peace and stability of the realm
>Millions will suffer because of it
This is an interesting moral conundrum OP, how does your character respond?

she saw one of those conspiracy videos on the TruthTube that exposed him as a satanic freemason jew who fucks kids.

Women won't like this. They'll say that it is what they want, but they won't like the book.

You write female characters as if they're human beings with a mind and will of their own.

Of course, ridiculous as a mere thought, but it's a fantasy anyway

I'm not OP but I'm fucking terrified to write women because I absolutely cannot put myself in their shoes. Everything I write is almost entirely male characters because the only experience I have writing women is as fapbait.

If I just write them as men they come off wrong, a woman who acts like a man is an oddity, and even still men don't treat a woman who acts like a man the same as they would treat a man the same way. I don't mean PRIVILEGE, I mean they'll have different expectations and reactions to shit just because she's female and because the same actions will be unusual coming from her.

How the fuck do I learn to write women

Literally just write a good character. Tell us why she ran away. What was she so afraid of? Why did she like the hero enough to journey with him after they met for like a few hours at most? Take those reasons and bring her to life.

Why did she choose this direction, this port? Choosing a path is agency. Maybe she's heard legends about the New World (or whatever land she wants to travel to). Maybe she found out her noble father wasn't really her father, and she was a trophy of conquest brought back as a baby and raised by the noble.

Give her a GOOD push away from her life, and a good PULL to where she wants to go. If she doesn't know how to survive in great wide world, she would have no reason to even consider running into the unknown.

Have the hero teach her how to survive in the wild west, you get character development and romance scenes in one. Now, she always carries a hidden dagger that she can use at your leisure. Bonus points if it's the one they were going to sacrifice her with.

Have her teach the hero a few things, as well. Surely, she has wily charms and an education she can put to good use. But for god's sake, never let her stand there and be useless.

You think of a man and you take away reason and accountability

How about a non-meme answer?

Like men, women have variable character personalities, and like any character, they have a want. Don't right an infallible Mary Sue, a passive waste like the ones you'll find in young adult vampire fiction, or whatever female characters in media you hate. You can write a good female character so long as you know what a bad one looks like.

If you're still having trouble, take an existing male character, and see how making them female would change the story so long as major events remain the same. If, for example, the Princess Bride became the Princess' Bride, the mutual respect of skill and character between the protagonist and the Spaniard might become flirty, but they're both on a mission and have no time for fraternizing with the enemy. Andre might act chivalrious in addition to his usual kindness, and the Sicilian might be sexist.

It may not be realistic to say that men and women are physically and mentally the same, but it works in literature. Writing a woman is really no different than writing a man.