Catria, a 20-year-old pegasus knight. Only a fun-hating curmudgeon would think that this is bad. (Fire Emblem Heroes © Nintendo)
Online, I saw a comment stating that active female protagonists, especially those who do combat, are inherently non-conservative. The thinking goes that any right-leaning action fiction must have a masculine male protagonist; if there are any females involved at all, they must take up non-combat roles. In this view, an active, fighting female character is hypocrisy at best and politically correct kowtowing at worst.
It’s an understandable sentiment. It’s also wrong.
It is true that traditionally, males had the duty to fight wars and protect women from danger. It is also true that fiction seeking to be woke and progressive commonly features rough and tough females who punch and shoot as well as any man — and here in the 2010s and going into 2020, this idea has received even greater focus than before.
Thus, these characters come off as a mark of progressiveness; any non-progressive who does this looks like they’re just bowing down to the dictates of PC out of fear of being called misogynistic.
However, I believe that those of us on the right should feel no shame in using such characters.
One, as Kristine Kathryn Rusch points out in her essay Rescuing Women, active female protagonists were common in written sci-fi long before the politically correct era. Do not be fooled by the films released in the pre-WWII period; there was a lot more going on than damsels in distress.
Two, even audiences who detest PC enjoy fighting females. Note that in all the hullabaloo about strong female characters, virtually no one has seriously come out against them as a concept. Not even geeks of a right-wing bent have seriously attacked the idea of such characters. What they do attack is not the characters themselves, but the male-bashing associated with boosting up such characters. The far-left also likes to brand any criticism of the characters as “misogyny” and “trolling.”
Three, attitude matters. Even if you think women shouldn’t involve themselves in violence too much, your work won’t be didactic, merely a way to explore ideas and philosophies in an emotionally potent way. As long as you’re not writing out of fear, you need not worry. Besides, merely having an active female character isn’t woke enough anymore — now she must be unattractive, angry, and snarky too.
Don’t cast aside a trope you enjoy just because SJWs like to use it. Instead, do it better than they ever can.
You ever see the game No One Lives Forever? The protagonist is a female British intelligence agent at the beginning of the Cold War.
While in other stealthy games, she would be dragging and hiding the bodies, her superiors believe that she would struggle with that. Thus, they give her a chemical that actually dissolves the bodies. It’s a neat little feature that shows how active female characters can work if you understand their disadvantages against men.
Pretty neat solution.
Tolkein’s Eowyn is a great counterexample both to the idea that traditional/conservative authors ought to avoid such characters and to the idea that they always have.
That is an excellent point, Bruce Unmighty.