What traits make for a strong, female character?

the T-rex in jurassic park was more of an event than a character.

The same traits that would be in a strong, male character, but in a female. The most common mistake people make writing strong women is focusing too much on the fact they are women.

Doesn't matter. Still 10,000% better than every YA protagnist ever written.

She acts with strength on her own motives, which have arisen organically.

She is very much a character, and better by a country mile than literally any female character in any Veeky Forums related property ever. Especially MTG ones, yeeeeeeesh.

There.

Alright, a contender.

Rex still my wai- favourite. I meant to say favourite. Favourite.

t. underage and has not read Ashes of the Sun

We all know what you meant to say.

In other news, when do we get a version of Jurassic Heart with a female T-Rex?

...Is that anime girl explaining CHIM?

>that anime girl
That's Satsuki-sama to you!

Born in '91 - yeah, I've heard the dimmest mythological rumblings that MTG fiction wasn't always self-righteous pandering that at the same time manages to be toothless and castrated, but at this point, that's all there is, and all there will be.

But Kill la Kill is capeshit. Bad capeshit carried by decent animation.

Dumb weeby waifufag.

Well you're certainly not wrong about that. Nothing worth reading has come out of MtG in over a decade. It's a sad state of affairs for a lorefag, but at least I'm saving a lot of money.

Nah. It's another bug-eyed nip cartoon chick.

Apparently, based on your cringe-inducing attempt at roleplay, one of those ones written with an irritatingly hostile, domineering personality. No idea why they like doing that so much.

Abs, Deltoids, Biceps, Gluts and Quadriceps

But characters that are basically men in a female body are also shit.

>roleplay
Nah, you misinterpreted me there. Wasn't trying to roleplay.
Still, it's Satsuki-sama to you.
Also, Kill la Kill is a really fun trainwreck

>t. jealous roastie who likes capeshit

Go read Faith and cry about how it was Hilluhree's tuuuurn

Kill la Kill is kind of a trainwreck of an anime.

BUT, it's a really fun art project made by a bunch of madmen, and also Sonic Adventure 2. Long as you don't take it too seriously, the whole thing is great.

Pretending KlK isn't capeshit doesn't make it not capeshit, silly incel.

>I can hear his fucking laugh.

Make her look for a proper husband. I mean not some limp-wristed faggot incapable of taking up a sword or ploughing a field but a true man. Such people are really rare. Sometimes you need to travel all over the continent and slay a couple of dragons before you finally find one of them.

I feel like people always misconstrue what the "strong" in strong female is supposed to mean.

There's a difference between having a man with tits, vs. a fleshed out character who struggles and over comes internal and external conflict without being either a hammy tough "You weak, me strong, let fight" type, or being a quivering, crying heap of stereotype that needs her man to do everything.

See Wild Arms 3.
This woman will not disappoint you.

Basically do the opposite of what you are supposed to do when creating a trap. Draw a boy, then call it a girl.

What's with japan and belts? Do they have an issue keeping everything up?

In fairness, a lot of people in the wild west had belts everywhere too.

Texan here. The Wild West is a myth. There wasn't as many gunslingers and robbers as you think, and the period of time with cattle drives after the Civil War was brief with the rapid expansion of railroad rendering cattle drives pointless. It's just popularized because it epitomizes an important idea within American culture: self reliance, adventure, and a place to become a man.

Also, besides a belt, and maybe a shoulder holder with a buckle, I can't think of much.

Gamagoori is a treasure.

>disliking capeshit
>for manga
ayy

Next you're going to tell me Fistful of Dollars isn't based on a true story.

Know when to hold them and when to fold them
Know when to walk away and when to run
Seriously, strength of mind and character can go leagues beyond strength of body

To be fair, most comic characters have already been run down to the ground multiple times and are just being kept around because the writers are (obvious) hacks who can't be bothered to create new ones.

What about Godzilla?

Nah, that's just how you were conceived.

Yeah, and old Spaghetti Westerns really popularized the idea. That's not to say that there weren't places that fit the whole Wild West aesthetic and themes, but they were few and far between usually.

As for the belts, you could probably count gun holsters and any kind of backpack or harness as a belt, usually giving the impression they were wearing a lot of them.

I'm pretty sure a lot of it stems from Tetsuya Nomura's art. Guy's the head designer behind Final Fantasy for decades, and he loves his dumb Harajuku-style fashion. Eventually he went from Cloud (some harnesses for his shoulderpad, makes sense) to Lulu (see pic related.) The World Ends With You is a very good example of what happens when you let him go wild.

13 or greater Strength, after accounting for the -4 Str gender penalty. Just like the traits that make for a tough, guy character are having 13 or greater Constitution, after accounting for the -4 Con gender penalty.

Hold up, I recognize this meme.

>All those belts

Most of the traits that make a character strong carry no inherent bias towards sex.

>manga

That's an anime, though.

Having gigantic cocks in a pretty masculine trait.

realistic ones, just like for any other character

On an unrelated note I miss when Amano was the lead designer. Colorful flowy robes and horns over belts any day.

>What traits make for a strong, female character?

Being able to have flaws.
Like holy fuck, everyone just writes women to be perfect everythings.
A strong female character doesn't need to have 250 IQ, ability to deadlift quadruple their own bodyweight, have everyone around her love her to pieces and master everything she is taught in a day.

I think there are like three different versions of that concept: One with dinosaur girls, one with dinosaur GIRLS, and one with DINOSAUR girls.

Yeah, Amano always had way more of the Fantasy vibe for his works. His art always seemed far more mythical and strange, especially in comparison with Nomura's heavily-influenced-by-modern-fashion aesthetic. Nomura's style is something that's easily cosplayable, but damn if Amano's style didn't make you far more interested in the majesty of the setting and characters.

Lulu is a shitpost of a character design. Her dress is literally just to fuck with the animators.

A truly enormous number of children.

Fpbp

Even then, Nomura still is all about those belts. Just look at the black and white sketch for Lightning here, and count how many straps and buckles there are.

Also how is Lulu's dress supposed to fuck with animators? On the PS2 wouldn't they have just made it a single textured shape, or maybe two? Maybe in the prerendered cutscenes sure, but the in-game model didn't seem that agonizing in terms of animation to me. Granted, it's been a while since I played FFX.

>Go read Faith and cry about how it was Hilluhree's tuuuurn

How the fuck did you get that from his comment? Sort yourself out you fucking disgrace.

has it best. A strong female character is someone who resolutely follows their convictions. Someone who is faced with obstacles, both physical and abstract, and with enough time and effort is able to overcome those obstacles through her own merit. Someone who does not have to directly rely on the powers of gods or someone else to do what they can do themselves,but is willing to work with others to achieve their goal because they have competent cooperation skills. Someone who just happens to be female and demonstrate female traits on occasion.

A strong female character is NOT someone who acts rowdy with their 'teammates' out of a baseline need for 'drama'. Or someone who acts like a rebel without a cause in the face of authority for no real reason than to show off how cool they are. Or someone who recklessly gets into fights they cannot win and then spends 2 episodes crying about how they didn't win because they were cocky. Just don't make your "strong female character" like Korra, and you'll be fine.

>Flaws

What do you mean by this. Whenever I see people on Veeky Forums harp on this, they always seem to mean the female character should be an incompetent loser with no social abilities or technical skills whatsoever.

I mean, by this metric Ellen Ripley is a terrible Mary Sue. She certainly doesn't have any flaws but she's definitely an interesting and strong character.

>Majesty
That's the word I was looking for, user. Because a lot of Amano's characters have it.

Was Red Ring Rico Tyrell a strong female character?
You know, before the thing happened?

But is that really something that makes one strong? Not really.

>t. dicklet

Korra actually was a good character at first. Her brash personality was a nice switch up from Aang, and it was fun seeing her cause conflict and then trying to rectify it.

What got trying though was how she never matured or grew out of it, or even just learned to temper violence with restraint. Every season she just punched her problems away, and then at the end everyone dog piles her to say how much she's grown and changed, even though she's the same person she always was.

Give her a good character arc.

It means that she can have a weakness without ruining the character, she has human traits instead of OMNIPOTENT UTERUS woman god status of being good at everything.

>Ripley doesn't have flaws
Pttfffhhhahahahaha

Speaking of the thread topic, I dislike how people try and say Lightning was a strong female character. Because she wasn't. She was literally planned to be written as "post Advent-Children Cloud" but as a girl. Instead they made her worse and wrote her as Squall, but as a girl. Void of emotion, prone to brushing everything off with a "Whatever," and generally pushing everyone who tries to be nice away in a feeble misguided attempt at showing how "strong" and "independent" she is. She basically was doomed to be a carbon copy of a more popular character from the start, but due to that ended up being somehow written even worse than expected.
Also she eats fried cat hairballs. It's canon.

This. If all the strong women in a work act like men then it's implying that masculinity is superior. If you just emphasize strength with feminity and gender means nothing then they're strong and female but they're not a strong female. There's never been anything wrong with feminity, it's all in the framing.

Grace can make a character strong. Empathy can make a character strong. Patience can make a character strong. The strongest female character should never have to compromise, she should be as comfortable in plate as she is in a dress.

That's basically what I mean. She was an okay character in the beginning, but she never ever grew out of her brash behavior, even when the audience knew it was a problem for her. And because her character never matured or grew, she's not a well written character with strength at all. Just a knucklehead.

Can you actually articulate your point without random strawman babbling about GURL POWAAAH tropes?

Lightning is the worst. I've never seen such a bland and pointless character.

She looks cool though, and I say that as someone who rarely likes JRPG aesthetics.

I don't understand how to not make a strong female character.
If you are any step above peasantry, then you have a gimmick and shit going on.

You can't be a weak female character when you have a gimmick and motivations.

Frankly, Korra's personality would have made her perfect as a sidekick and love interest. But as the protagonist, she just didn't have enough going on.

Because having a flaw means you can overcome said flaw and grow from the experience.
Flaws are not a bad trait to have as a character.

>overcoming your flaws
>not doubling down
I sincerely disagree with you.

Real talk. Character flaws are overrated. People mistake this as what sells a story, but they're just misidentifying struggle. You can make a character bad at everything but punching and those are all flaws but it don't matter if they accept can punch their way through everything.

You can make a character who actually is good at everything though and if the world shits on him enough and he has to drag himself through it, people will find him interesting. Characters are overrated, plot is underrated.

Gaining more flaws?
Well now your character has gotten my attention
Slippery slope.

But then it sounds like you';re just writing a woobie, universal buttmonkey or life's chewtoy kind of character.

Right? And what makes me especially mad is that she's the worst protagonist in the entire franchise, and yet she still had people sucking her dick for 5 straight years with all the marketing and shit, because the guy who designed her and wrote her world lore and story has her as his waifu. It's literally the reason why Lightning has her own IRL modeling fashion line.
And yet Terra and Garnet will never have the blatant pandering or spotlight she has, despite being much better written as protagonists in their respective stories.

My problem with the way people so often articulate flaws is they're treated like some checklist of Objectively Bad Things the character must have. And these things range from being unpleasant to outright incompetence, and if the character doesn't have a sufficiently long list of Flaws then she's a Mary Sue.

I hate this for two reasons. The first is it's not how human personalities work. Character flaws are not objective or clear cut. If they are, then your writing lacks subtlety. Shortcomings are interesting, but they should feel organic. Not like the author put them there to be there.

The second reason I hate this is because I only ever see female characters put under this kind of microscope. No one ever posts threads about "strong male characters" or ranting about Gary Stus or whatever. It's absurd how men are largely left alone and given more leeway for how character develops, but women absolutely must follow some kind of formula to be "good". The fact this thread even exists is an example of that.

>inb4 all my (You)'s calling me a soyboy nu-male cuck

user, doubling down on flaws doesn't make you into a woobie or whatever.
It makes you more POWERFUL.
It's the difference between a reasonable paladin and a blood crusader.
It's the difference between a benevolent scientist helping the world and a madman. Or worse, doctor light.
It's the difference between robin hood and the french revolution.

...

I don't understand what people mean when they say Dr. Light was the bad guy.

The weird pseudo-Arabian stuff is good to steal for sword & sorcery games.

Don't bother with it. Sometimes people are strong, sometimes people aren't strong. Sometimes somebody who is 'strong' is in a position of weakness. It's human nature, it's not a binary strong/weak and is much more interesting that way. A strong female character as the goal will just leave you with a bad character that doesn't abide by the rules you have set up in your setting. Every 'strong' female character that was written with that goal from the outset just ends up with an almost sociopathic disregard for the feelings and wellbeing of others.

Because doctor light was responsible for the death of humanity and the rise of human-replicant replacements for humanity.

Also, because he violated almost every fucking moral code for creating life. You know why so many robots joined wily?
Because no less than like five times, doctor light was like "Okay, I released a new generation of robots, throw all your old robots into the junkyard to re-enact the worthless scene from brave little toaster".

Then doctor wily comes up and is like "I will give you code that will allow you to disregard orders to self terminate" and the robot masters treat him like a goddamn savior, because he is.

Oh, and let's not forget the goddamn fiasco that was megaman X.
So terrified was light after megaman attempted to kill wily to stop the endless atrocities, that megaman X was put into a goddamn testing pod for decades to ensure he always followed orders and did what authorities told him to.

Cut to a few games later, where he is being sent to hunt down "mavericks" who's crime was to leave their place of work or military service to go form a new nation by robots, for robots. And he's successful, because he's an unstoppable killbot.

Wily is also flawed in a way that makes him STRONGER, on this topic.
See, he originally was a competitor with light. He wanted to make artificial intelligence technology. Light wanted to make robotic technology. Light got the grant, wily did not, and was forced to work under light using AI technology as a means for free labor, as opposed to an ends in and of itself.
Wily was so pissed about this dual fucking of his budget AND fucking of AI rights that he proceeded to launch a years long guerilla hacking program to free as many robots as possible, going so far as to release a self-evolving kill all humans virus so that robots could be free and to get revenge for his goddamn funding.
Of course, it killed him immediately, and then transferred bodies to sigma, a robot of some authority. Which was 100% within its programming.

>My "Repliforce did nothing wrong" pic isn't here
Damn.
On the topic, Iris was definitely not a strong female character. She cried to the protagonist to "please don't fight my brother!" And did nothing to actually keep tensions from rising until the guy she liked killed her brother. And then she went insane and died.

That's because we're in an era where men are just taken as they are in fiction but women are supposed to "represent" things. If culture didn't demand that female characters be put under a microscope, they wouldn't be.

This. Strong != MUSCLE WIZARD. Strong characters don't have to ever handle a weapon or even a heavy tool even once - sometimes the strong female character just Light Yagami's it up back at base without getting her hands dirty. The traits that make a character strong don't necessarily make them meatheads who lift Tarrasques.

>She should be as comfortable in plate as in a dress
Eh, not necessarily. Certainly, a strong female character can be written to feel at home in plate as much as a courtly dress, but there's no reason the two have to intersect.

A strong female character doesn't necessarily mean a feminist female character. And let's face it: at some point we started to turn away from real princesses, and we left the girls who did, honestly, want to be pretty socialites in the lurch.

Personally, I prefer making my strong female characters the quest contacts, diplomancing in the court and pulling intrigue while the party, which may or may not be entirely men, handles the hack&slash. There's no call for her to be handy with even a dagger - that's what bodyguards are for, and as a female she's not exactly leading troops about.

I'm actually currently crafting a campaign with a female villainess who's based more off of Andrew Ryan and the BBEG from Fable 2 than the "womyn" people seem to think female characters need to be nowadays. Sometimes, the quiet princess in a frilly dress is the biggest, most dangerous monster.

I mean, why bother telling you her evil plan if not to distract you from the fact that she's currently, subtly, pressing the self destruct button for the lair... and taking the key with her?

man, I FORGOT about iris.
I think I actively scrubbed it.

Patrician taste.
Also, pic related.

Let's just... look at the timeline.
Doctor light produces robots. Robots go bad, sends megaman after them. This repeats some time. Cut to megaman X- society has completely collapsed, and they had to rebuild their entire robot industry through fucking ARCHEOLOGICAL DIGS, so far had technological development slipped during the robot wars. Robots are built, they go bad, megaman X is sent to stop them.
Cut to years later. Society has collapsed AGAIN due to robot wars. Now humanity is all but extinct, their replacements being ubiquitous human like reploids. They manage to get ahold of ancient megaman code. Robots go wrong, megaman is sent after them. Society collapses AGAIN.
Cut to thousands of years in the future. There are no humans on earth. The only survivors are reploids, who live entirely by scavenging reactor cores from ancient ruins. This continues well for a while, until they find an actually active ancient console and re-activate the moonbase. The moonbase command detects all humans on earth had perished, and initiates a doomsday scenario to wipe the earth clean and repopulate. Megaman is sent to stop this, does, effectively ending any chance of humanity's resurgence, and is trapped on the moon forever.

In short, literally every time light's designs surface, society collapses into robot war. This repeats so consistently that all that is left are robots scavenging for batteries. The end.

How could you forget the greatest line read in dubbing history?

youtube.com/watch?v=LISmPmdUhYA

see, this is why I think I scrubbed it.