How to make a female protagonist work...

How to make a female protagonist work? I was writing a fantasy/ adventure and was told by a friend to scrap it because female protags never work. They said the only female protag that works is the unexceptional victim, and wish fulfillment. My friend said my whole idea of female protagonists is just pure SJW stuff. Thoughts ?

Write the character like a male and call it female. Works for Chinese cartoons and sometimes even literature.

Make it a transwoman so it's at least half believable

The best depiction of a female character in fiction in my opinion would be Elizabeth Brisby from The Secret of NIMH.

>>The best depiction of a female character in fiction in my opinion would be Elizabeth Brisby from The Secret of NIMH.
the best female in all of writing history is a children book rat?

Dostoevsky wrote women the most realistically. They try their best to act civil, but ultimately they're all fucking nuts.

...

Follow a woman around at a distance or take alot of estrogen pills.

Make her a lovable cunt with a wicked and nihilistic sense of humor.

Most story's have no use of a protagonist that hysterically breaks down crying and goes against their own ideals in an unreasonable fit of rage when it gets though like Katerina Iwanowa though.

i like that but mine is an adventure about a girl who discovers shes a 'whisperer' meaning she can plant ideas in peoples head. so she uses it to get all kinds of shit done.

Sounds like a shitty story for teens, I doubt anyone will care if the character isn't well written

The only female characters you are allowed to write are totally flat and static, flawless Mary Sues. If you write a woman with any kind of character flaw or weakness, your manuscript will be rejected and you'll be blacklisted for life. It's better not to write female characters at all. Feminism did this.

Take your meds

Take your life.

What meds?

What life?

Female protagonists just shouldn’t follow the same archetypes as male protagonists. They can either be like Belle in Beauty and the Beast and tame a beast that wants to be civilized, or work as part of a mother/infant pair. Otherwise they have to dwell on their obsolescence which is the most common for women in literature, but doesn’t make for a strong protagonist.

This guy is right. Let me give you a window into how female mind works when facing female protagonists.
>Character is flawed
>"Ugh I hate her lol what a loser"
>Character has depth
>"Ugh, I'm bored."
>Character is lively, witty, charismatic
>"Ugh shes so smug I hate her."
>Character is totally flat, blank slate, mediocre
>"Oh, that's me, what happens to her next?"
>Wonderful things happen to them through no effort of their own.
>"Sigh, isn't that great."
>Wins with ease, without any conflict
>"You go girl!"
>Bad things happen to her
>"This movies so sexist!"

Ultimately the archetypal female is one in service to another. Junji Ito's horror comic demonstrates a realistic female character; it's almost as if the story should actually be about her boyfriend, and she's just experiencing things happen. So it's possible to make a "hero" female protagonists, you just need to make them act on the behalf of someone other than themselves.

thnx, so my whisperer, maybe she has to save the ailing mother? something like that?

This. Write strong female character the way you might a male character, and be unapologetic about it. The thing that usually ruins strong female character is the writer trying to explain why they're strong, especially in contrast to male characters.
They're a woman and they're strong, for whatever reason. Not because they're trying to be better than a male. Because they're strong.

That's not what I mean, I mean it literally has to be a higher power she's obeying. It doesn't even have to be a human power, it could be some spirit, or some powerful being from nature, etc. How does she get her whisperer power?

She's a MOUSE you FUCKing MORon, didn't you even SEE the FUCKing FILM?
I'm not even being ironic, so triggered right now.

The only time I made a strong female character work is in my fapfic about my alien dragon waifu. She's also a vicious mutated dragon-deathclaw thing that eats people so her strength is a brutish one, but her increasing humanity is what gives her depth and challenges in her new life post enslavement with my total not self insert.

You must balance strength and weakness. Strong is also relative. Your character does not have to throw trucks at people to be strong. Let her present strength as a face but give her moments where she still needs a shoulder to cry on.

Read some biographies of women who did things. Amelia Earhart, MMe Curie, Simone de Bouvoir, then read what other people said about them to get some idea of how complex and annoying exceptional people can be.
There has to be some female you've been around who you both know and don't like, try to build from a template and find the character can almost write themselves as long as you challenge them.

The form of a female is that she is mean't to marry a man and stay pure. During this time, longing grows. Hence, unless this should be some masturbatory text that doesn't use characters to have a message, this character would exhibit some of these traits. Like Alice in Wonderland, or The Scarlet Letter,

>be a whore
>die a tragic, slow, painful death and be buried in the wasteland and ahve people talk rumors about your resting places to this day
soudns about right fuck those whores

Look at James Cameron & Jodie Foster-movies, my dude

Have you considered writing her as a person OP?

OP should write her as a slime futanari desu

This. The more interesting characters will have flaws, struggles, conflict they need to persevere or overcome and they'll likely have emotional baggage like men too. People forget that a strong female protagonist doesn't literally mean a strong-hearted perfect Mary-Sue, but it should be a well constructed character.

As long as you make the character empathetic (and don't necessarily depict them in an insulting or patronising way), you should be good to go.

>girl protags should be shounen mains
you have bad taste senpai

Idk try to actually talk to women and build healthy platonic relationships with them and understand them as people and then you can actually write a realistic character.

thats what cucks do. Why bother dating a girl if you don't want to marry them.

this is the worst idea ever i don't know of any decent female protagonists in books, but there are some in TV, and the key is not to write them like fucking dudes with boobs. if you don't want her as a protagonist do like says and check dosto, you can read the Gambler with Polina in it in a few hours

some decent examples on TV are Olivia Dunham in Fringe, Ripley in Aliens (in Alien she was good too, but still just written as a guy with boobs because the plot didn't need her to be a girl, but in Aliens she has more female characteristics), Mulan in Disney, Veronica Mars in her series, Clarice Starling in silence of the lamb, Claire Underwood in House of Card when the series was still good, Leslie Knope in Parks and Rec memes and reddit shittiness aside was a good example of an hyper-active female leader, Ava Crowder in Justified (not a protagonist but still enough queues to take it from there)

I am saying not to date them, but to actually get to know them. You can't just start writing a character out of nowhere.
Just go out and meet people and then you'll etart to inspire this character on that person then along the way you add a little detail there a little detail over here and you got a character. You can't just pull out a person out of your ass.

Because not everyone is an anti-socialite.

Also most women have friends and if you're in a relationship with a woman you'll end up having female friends. Of course you'd realise that if you weren't petrified of women.

nice sword, what's her name?

Sounds awful

Sorry, user, I don't understand moon.

God made women out of nowehere user. And charectars aren't inspired by humans, because humans aren't inspiration for art, let alone culture.
>you just dont like women
I like to fuck women. I like to marry women. I don't like hearing about how some broad feels about things to learn how a "real" woman is. All of those women go on to become purple-haired whores since their husbands aren't enough apparently.
>relationships
cuck shit short of marriage

Honestly how many women do you know well that aren't family?

Try writing a female protagonist who faces no conflict ever. See if it gets greenlit or published, anons.

Even SJW-laden far-left media like Transparent and Broad City has awful shit happen to their characters as well as many flaws.

I know all women well.

lol Women are literally Omnipotent-Goddess-Men-Child-Victims according to leftists and if you depart from that model you are shunned. These people are insane.

>and the key is not to write them like fucking dudes with boobs.
What about a chick with dick?

>so she uses it to get all kinds of shit done.
like cleaning & stuff?

This is true.

that's a different genre, but you still should write her as a girl personality-wise regardless of what's between her legs

no to get guys to like her, she uses it romantically. also government inspectors come to take things away, so she can turn them away using thoughts. she lifts her palm up, stretches her fingers and blows and literally 'delivers' the thoughts in their head.

> lol Women are literally Omnipotent-Goddess-Men-Child-Victims according to leftists and if you depart from that model you are shunned. These people are insane.

I literally never said that. I implied that writing a female protagonist without conflict won't get you far.

>I literally never said that. I implied that writing a female protagonist without conflict won't get you far.
Well, if you are J.J Abrams, it will.

I don't really know JJ Abrams and his way of writing female characters but in most cases, a story needs conflict, despite the protagonist's gender.

>t. lonely man with a porn addiction

You could stop being a manchild and read Henry James.

this is just the normie mentality desu.

That's Zero, from Drakengard 3. One of the best games ever made, by the genius Yoko Taro.

The phrase "Strong Female Protagonist" is so fucking loaded. I don't even know how many shades of irony people are putting on it anymore.

Just make her weak but lucky

If you're writing fantasy/adventure you might as well be lazy and just write a guy and then replace the pronouns. Otherwise write what you know and understand. If neither apply to women, don't try.

your friend's never read madame bovary or east of eden. he has read YA. you associate yourself with shit like the faggot you are, OP.

Women are easy to write. We are like gay manlets. We constantly try to compensate for our weakness. We can't help but worry about how we are perceived. Done.

Just write a man but every so often they complain about their period and they carry a purse.

Your friend is retarded.

If you were talking specifically about things like a semi-accurate midevil fantasy, then they're slightly less retarded than I've declared them to be, but putting revisionist history aside, you can definitely make female protagonists that aren't just carried through the story by men. Even if you want to uphold the opinion that women are useless, that shouldn't actually stop you considering all of the child protagonists people write.

has the right idea. I'd add some Irigaray (The Sex Which Is Not One) to that if you're interested in trying to look at how men and women are legitimately different, but I should put emphasis on the word "trying" there. Ultimately the trick to writing an adult female protagonist is just being a woman. It's probably easier if you're writing a kid though. If you want to cheat, make it a robot and not a human-female so that you have an excuse for when you end up coloring outside the lines. Though once you start getting into superpowers and brute force, it might start becoming too obvious of a cop-out.

If I had to try and get at the point of it, from a male perspective, I would say that women kinda "jump" if that makes any sense. It's like the knight in chess. They can move quite a few steps ahead but have to dance around to just hit something right in front of them sometimes. I think that's why they've been historically perceived as hysterical, but it's also one of the reasons why they're useful. It's possible that men might look that way in women's eyes, but that doesn't matter here since you don't have a woman's eyes.

You could also just use a female issue to add purpose to the selection of your protag's sex. Samus Aran and the baby metroid vs mother brain for example; Samus has so few lines she was often mistaken for male, but at the same time the games would suffer if she were a man. Even fanservicey games like Haydee come to mind. The protag is a totally silent out-of-place titmonster in cumbersome highheels, but the game uses this to generate a dark-alleyway fear of some kind which would be completely absent if the protagonist were someone like Duke Nukem. I'd imagine you probably want a protaganist with lines though, so take that with a grain of salt.

Man I'm in the same boat, I'm trying to write her as a nomad girl who has to step into a man's shoes out of necessity, is it even worth trying to write a book as a total novice?

Read about a cultural phenomenon called "Bacha Posh".

Why are you writing about something that you can't figure out on your own? If it doesn't come to you as you write, or as you do your own research (and not what other people tell you to write about), then it's something you have no right to try and write about.

All characters need to be from the heart. You need to bring a piece of yourself out in them. Even if you are a male, you have an anima, or an "image" of what the feminine is like based on your interactions with women. Find it, place your tray in its stream, and fish out those small pieces of gold inevitably floating around in it.

Don't worry about their gender is a good start. If you want a female character, write one. If you want a good female character, it'll only ever be part of her character if circumstances require it to be. If your world, or a character in it, is making her gender relevant.

that's helpful and weirdly applicable considering her tribe's based on the Saracens, thanks.

He said protagonist

Biggest problem I have with female characters is when they're in a story in which I can't expect them to be interested or competent. While men are classically in stories about overcoming some aspect of themselves or the world, women's stories are about navigating complex social situations and coming to a deeper understanding of the people around them. Girls don't make good fighters, or often even competitors in any area.

Can't go any more in depth without knowing mroe about the story.

Well, as a girl, I can say that yeah, there is a problem with female characters as far as I have seen. Personally, I spent a huge part of my life actively avoiding female protagonists, and I still do, to some extent. Even now that I don't dismiss them out of hand, I still haven't found that many I actually care for.

I can only tell you what has personally endeared me to a female character, but honestly, written out, it's nothing special.

First- she has to have personality. Like, a legit personality. That's the most important thing. And her personality can't be "she's barren so she's bitter" or "she's in love with a guy so she's sweet." She has to have an actual, self sustained personality.

Actually, that's it. Alright, examples. I'm drunk, so cut me some slack, but I'm going to give a few examples of women and explain why they're great.
Okay:
1: Mako Maori (Pacific Rim)
When I first watched Pacific Rim, when I heard there was going to be a female pilot, I (and I assume a lot of other people) assumed she would be this tough, no nonsense frigid badass character. And then the umbrella tilted away and you have this soft-voiced, sweet character.
Why is this great? Because she defied expectation, and was allowed to be feminine in a very masculine world. We're talking giant robots and the end of the world here, but this revenge driven female protagonist was still allowed to be gentle. A woman being feminine or masculine doesn't make or break a character, but it all depends on how it's implemented.
Mako's femininity was never a crutch, neither was it her defining personality trait. She wasn't feminine so she could "better support her man" but because that was her personality. And it didn't subtract from her ability to be vengeful, or qualified, and neither did it subtract from her father wanting to protect her. Even Pentecost's initial refusal to let her fight wasn't a problem, because it wasn't laid on her shoulders to bare as a woman. Her father loved her, and wanted to protect her. That was his story. She wasn't a woman who "had to prove she could fight".
Actually, I have A LOT to say about Pacific Rim in general, but we're talking women here.

I'll break this up into sections, if people think I'm making sense.

go on

there's already some grill posters in this thread, but I'm going to say, coming from another grill poster who has read good books from the perspective of girls/women, that you're probably over complicating it.
i think the best advice is to either read biographies or books about famous women in history, like another poster said, or simply read more highly praised books that have female protagonists.
I think young girls are easier to write than women, because they have kind of the same personalities as boys, although maybe not the same opinions.
someone suggested writing a male character and then just changing it to a female character afterwards, but I think this only works if your character isn't interacting with romance, or family. (unless you want your female character to have a more masculine perspective on that)
everyone's got their fears, their hopes, and dreams. just figure out what your character's is. it's OK to have an unlikable female character if she goes through a character arc and maybe turns out better in the end.

Okay.
So next You've got Full Metal Alchemist(:Brotherhood)
FMA:B has probably one of the biggest spectrums of well rounded women to pick from. Just- all of them.
Winry: Young, mechanic, very loud spoken but also very protagonist orientated, but that also makes sense seeing as they're childhood friends.
Riza Hawkeye: Professional. Military. Stern. Relatively Quiet.
Izumi Curtis: Strong, very outspoken, very masculine in her strength, but also loves being feminine. Introduces herself as a housewife, loves her husband, etc.
Olivier Armstrong: Military. Cold. Calculating. Leader. Doesn't give a fuck. Will stab a man and bury him in concrete for even suggesting treason.
Then there's this huge selection of more minor characters, too.

I also want to say that all these women have very well established personalities and characters arcs beyond the surface level I'm explaining them at. These are just the basics.

Also, straight talk, I lost interest. I mean, OP's question boils down to "How do you write women like actual people", and I'm too drunk to put this much fucking effort into it.

Also, Olivier Armstrong, I swear to fucking god, I want her to step on my neck and call me a filth.

I think it's possible to write a good female protagonist, but only if you have no feminist motivation. If you're a self-identifying feminist then just give up, as your character will be nothing more than an ideological construct.

My male protagonist are like this desu

You can add some female-y things in later. The best female protagonist I know of is motoko kusanagi. The main reason she's lesbian (at least in the manga, novels and anime don't touch on it/make her hetero) was that the author didn't want to draw male asses.

In the end a strong protagonist is going to be similar, regardless of gender. It should be a relatively small part.

It depends on the type of work I guess? Katerina Iwanowa (or Gruschenka, or Anna Karenina or almost any other female from historical Russian novels) wouldn't work as strong protagonist but do work in the role they were designed for.

honestly, just write a real character. someone with flaws, someone who has a *real* motivation, someone with a personality that is realistic. Female characters shouldn't be perfect images of what you'd like to see, they should be real and relatable.
women are real, not just "men with boobs"

^
couldn't have said it better myself

>I want her to step on my neck and call me a filth

>1: Mako Maori (Pacific Rim)
What the fuck? Seriously? The only really grand thing about Mako was they they didn't make her kiss the guy in the end. But that said, feel free to beat my criticism away. Though I do want to say that you ought to bear in mind that things which are simple to you are big steps for other people and vice versa (I'm also of the opinion that changing the way individual characters make steps is the best way to draw a distinction between them, but I suppose that doesn't matter much if you aren't deep in each character's head.)

We'll I'm writing what I know. A young man who get's obsessed over any pretty and inteligent and/or talented woman he meets. I think that this idea of driven and collected male protagonist is quite outdated in the modern world. Everyone is extremely pre-occupied with minute neurotic details of their identity and trying to find genuine connection is a universal strugle. This of course is only me projecting but it's late and alcohol is very much wearing off.

So you're saying a character like Anna Karenina couldn't be made today?

The same way you write any character:Give her believable strenghts and flaws

The problem with the representation of female characters in media is that they are either mary sues or they are extremely unlikeable and condescending(Haha!Im a girl and im strong,because im a girl!grrrrrrrrrl power!)
Compare Lisbeth of the girl with the dragon tattoo with Ripley of Alien and you´ll see what i mean

>people giving advices about how to make a decent female protag from anime and manga
This place has become a sort of joke.

Find friends who go outside from time to time.

One is somewhat interesting and one is Ripley?
What about Lisbeth isn't believable?

Some anime/manga got way more progressive female characters than the shit you see in Western entertainment. Even fucking shonen like One Piece are decades ahead of everything you see in Hollywood blockbusters.

>They said the only female protag that works is the unexceptional victim, and wish fulfillment.
That's what people would expect of a human female, but if you are writing fantasy, nothing prevents you from writing an orc or a bear protagonist

That thing is called good taste, which forbids writing fantasy in the first place.

I present you with the best protagonist in the history of fantasy ever.

>write a character
>Call her female
Was it that hard?
Or make a qt trap like
Said

strong woman is an oxymoron

Just avoid grammatical gender when refering to your protagonist. Should be easy if you writie in English. Once your story becomes popular, casually reveal they are a she and gain even more popularity. After it gets a Holywood adaptation, reveal in the latest volume that she is also a reincarnation of Hitler and enjoy the eath-shattering sound of a million butts being blasted. Bonus points for forshadowing it inconspicuously since volume one.

Unless you only write fantasy ironically

Your friend is a delusional; disregard future opinions of said friend.

Spoiler Alert: You write women just like you write men; same approaches, same methods, same everything.
Behavioral patterns and societal trends are mostly taught. Sure, there are patterns that hold in a proverbial vacuum, but by n' large who you are has just as much to do with your experiences and upbringing as what you were born as (race, sex, etc), if not more.

The primary way in which things like race or gender influence a person's behavior is in the way that they're treated as they're developing mentally. To say that they have no impact on the person is somewhat inaccurate. The ways they're influenced, however, do not extend from intrinsic traits and features of said factors, but instead the was in which the individual is treated because of those factors; the way you're treated because of your race, or your sex, or whatever.

The problem isn't the character being female, but with the way many people perceive things like race and sex and how people are "supposed" to behave. Unfortunately a wide range of people, likely the majority in most cases, do believe (consciously or unconsciously) that, in this case, women are all going to want similar things, behave in similar ways, and have some similar goals. Because of this, those lowest-common-denominator-readers often get confused when their expectations are not met, and the only way to get around it is with sufficient character development and backstory as to convince them that that's how the character in question should be behaving; something that is often difficult to do without a slower first act, or an info dump.

As it's been said: The difference between fantasy and reality is that fantasy has to be believable (even when the disbelief is caused by ignorance).

>first act
Oh, how I abhor the three act myth.

Females are retarded or emotional, if you write a female character with this realistic traits then it´s going to be either boring or sexist, if you do the opposite and give her a more interesting or cool personality then you make her too perfect or unrealistic as a model for young women so it´s offensive

this
also:
The Legend of Mother Sarah