damsel in transition

[kaigou]

[ ETA: to clarify a term I frequently use (but may be unfamiliar to some), "animanga" is a portmanteau of "anime" and "manga", meant as a shorthand for "the Japanese illustrated-story publishing/production industries, including manga (graphic novels), illustrated 'light' novels, four-panel comics, animated television shows, animated miniseries/OVA (Original Animation Videos), and animated theatrical releases". Because there's often a great deal of cross-pollination between the two types (printed vs. moving), I tend to use "animanga" to refer to the entire ball of wax in one easy word. ]

We all know (and likely loathe, at least given the posts I see go past from most of you) the damsel in distress: she does something stupid, gets captured/hurt, has to be saved by the hero, and usually ends up clinging to him. I've been browsing some of the manga that readers have classified (on reader-tagging database sites) as "strong female lead" or "strong female character", and I think we need an intermediary.

Something like, "female character damselfied by the author", or "damsel with fighter tendencies," for a less anti-author spin on it.

The so-called "strong female characters" usually go like this: she's relatively outspoken, strong-willed, and ostensibly very good at whatever she does (even if in some stories we never see her do anything, we're at least told she's good). She's independent, and a common expression or thought among the transistional damsel is that she wants to 'stand on her own two feet'. She'll often explicitly state that she intends to fight [the big bad], alongside the hero, as his team-mate or equal. She doesn't see the hero as her rescuer, but as her mentor or her role model (and sometimes as the person she aspires to equal).

Cases in point: Tokine in Kekkaishi, Sakura, Hinato, hell just about any of the female characters in Naruto, Rukia in Bleach, Lenalee in D.Gray-Man, Marie/Soma in Gundam 00, Hilde in Gundam Wing, Kallen in Code Geass. Yet to be determined if Yura (from Nurarihyon no Mago) will fall into this category, as the fight's not done, so there's still chance for her to fall in line.

These are all combatants, btw; I don't think this transitional category applies to civilians, like Winry (of Fullmetal Alchemist) -- as a non-fighter, her most likely means of expression (in a sense, "her way of fighting") is not going to be head-on battle-mode, so it doesn't seem right to measure her by the same standards.

For each of the cases in point (and plenty others but I'm midway through drawer-building and waiting for glue to dry, so keeping this short) -- the introductory pattern, as combatant, is usually as above. Somewhere mid-battle, however, the damselfied combatant is tripped up. One of three things will happen. Either she doesn't have enough spiritual oomph, eg Tokine, Lenalee, and just about every female character in Bleach. Or she doesn't have the will-power/dedication (or alternately, can't overcome her doubt in herself), eg Kallen, Marie/Soma, and Yura (in her earliest fight-scenes). Or the author simply sets her up against fighters who just happen to out-rank her -- Hilde, and nearly every female in Naruto.

Which ultimately amounts to: she still needs to be rescued, but with a twist: she gets mad at herself for ending up in a place that requires the hero rescue her. You can see the differentiation most clearly in Nurarihyon no Mago, actually: Kana is a true damsel in distress, captured, helpless, and waiting anxiously for someone to come save her, and it doesn't even occur to her that she might've, or could've, done anything on her own behalf. Yura, in contrast, is annoyed at needing to be rescued, and determined to do her best to prevent it from happening again.

So what we get is the apparent warrior-woman, trapped in the position of damsel-in-distress (injured, incapacitated, or just plain outranked and unable to contribute to the overall fight), but also consumed by frustration at her position. She invariably rails helplessly against her, well, helplessness, and we're supposed to see this as a fighting spirit, and ignore that basically she was set up to fail. Again and again these transitional damsels throw themselves against someone far stronger, but digging into that observation means realizing that even these so-called warrior-damsels are always set up as weaker in some way, from the get-go. The story's premise either presumes the female character to be weaker (ie Tokine) or undermines the female character enough to destroy her original potential (Sakura, Lenalee).

We're supposed to see the warrior-damsel's determination to fight "against the odds" as bravery... but I can't help but note that in nearly every bloomin' instance, the fight doesn't cause the warrior-damsel to power-up like it does for her fellow (male) character. It just beats her down, and puts her back into the box of needing to be rescued. The only real difference is that we got teased with the possibility that this time, it wouldn't be so, and we got a lot of words from the heroine about how she wants to fight and/or be acknowledged by the hero and/or be equal to the hero in strength -- but the bottom line is that the message in the actual text is that this will never happen. But that's okay! As long as she wishes it might, that makes her strong female, because at least she's not helplessly accepting her damsel position.

Or maybe it just makes her kinda stupid, for entering battles with fighters who out-rank and out-flank her. Or maybe what makes her stupid is signing up for a story with an author who give plenty of lip service among the fan service, but has no intention of actually following through.

ETA: there's another way some authors will handle the "what do I do with the extra chick in the party" question, which is to justify the sabotage as meaningful sacrifice. (The women in Naruto, and Lenalee, get set up for this repeatedly.) The method is this: by some means, the warrior-damsel does take on (and frequently then proceeds to kick serious ass of) a pretty scary big bad -- but in the course of doing so, is either: pushed past her limits and burnt out (Sakura, Tokine), if she's not injured to the point of comatose (thus rendering her not just injured but pretty much a NPC for the rest of the fight, cf Lenalee).

The storyteller's rationalization, as I see it, is thus: every fight must have both a physical climax and an emotional one. The physical, of course, is obvious; the emotional may differ each time. The latter will show up as "what are you fighting for?" or "is this really important enough reason to fight?" or even "do you really have it in you to kill someone?"

A favorite trope of Japanese animanga is the "I fight to protect those precious to me" (well, actually, this is probably a pretty common fight-justification in stories the world over, now that I think about it). If your character is going into a fight and you want emotional conflict along with physical, the lowest-hanging fruit is definitely the "why would you fight this hard?" The character, naturally, will doubt himself suddenly, but hey, look, there! His female teammate fought and gave it her all -- whether now she's injured and rooting for him, or injured and needing his protection (since the author has now rendered her not just badly hurt but also suddenly stupid in terms of any remaining self-defense skills), or just plain out cold. In short, her sacrifice inspires him while at the same time providing an object lesson in "the reason why he fights so hard" -- to protect girls his friends from going through such pain.

Which I think can have its place in stories, and is certainly a valid point in any action-based bildungsroman, but it gets tiresome when you realize that the sacrifice-and-example is pretty much always played by the action-girl, and frequently it's the only role the action-girl can even play. For all the homoerotic subtext some fans want to see, it's actually not very common to see a male character throw himself head-first against overwhelming odds for the sake of an injured or comatose male team-mate or friend. (The various Gundam series and Naruto are major exceptions, though, which might be why they also subtextually hit a lot of buttons, too, because they capitalize on tropes that are more often male-female in other stories.)

As a footnote to all of the above, one thing I've noticed increasing is the number of mangaka who seem to try and balance "lesser physical power" with "greater ruthlessness". Tokine in Kekkaishi is an absolutely stellar example of this, with absolutely no mercy while her male counterpart is really a softie. Sakura shows major signs of ruthlessness, too, but she's not without some modicum of compassion.

The animanga I recall from the 90s and early aughts, the girl's more likely to be a blowhard about having no sympathy for the enemy, but at the last minute! she can't bring herself to fire! and the hero thus must step in. The updated version is that the girl has no qualms about going for the jugular... if only the author hadn't set up the premise or circumstances to make sure she wouldn't actually have enough muscle/power behind her punch. It's like, well, now she's given the opportunity and guts to shoot -- except the author took all her ammunition away.

All these are just more reasons on the list of why I love Balsa and Gen. Oliva Armstrong so much.

Comments

[chibidrunksanzo]

I aspire to be Major General Armstrong. At the very least, I plan on cosplaying her.

[kaigou]

At the very least, I plan on cosplaying her.

Get in line!

[branchandroot]

*two thumbs up* Of course, one of the things that ticks me off the most is that so many readers/fen don't seem to see that the author is doing this on purpose. Rukia is my "favorite" example. Huge fan conflicts over whether she's a wimp or not, and no one seems to stop and say "wait, hasn't anyone noticed just how much work KT has been doing to make absolutely sure she can't fight effectively despite the narrative lip service to her strength?". I mean, seriously. We are so far past 'three times is conspiracy' by now.

[kaigou]

I think the only person I've seen comment at length about Bleach's anti-woman stance is probably snarp -- everyone else seems to think Rukia et al are great Strong Female Leads, and I'm not sure I'd even call them transitional damsels. That's giving the mangaka way too much credit, seeing how he repeatedly sabotages every single female character. Over and freaking over. But then, I haven't been that impressed by Kubo's writing skills, anyway -- anyone who can only make the good guy look good by making everyone else look bad is not exactly really writing a good guy who's any good.

[genre-savvy.livejournal.com]

I believe the TV Tropes Wiki would call this the Faux Action Girl. I'd call it one of the most obnoxious character types around.

[kaigou]

The problem with calling it "faux" is that it makes it sound like the girl isn't action-ey -- and she is, at least far more than her original version of damsel-in-distress. On top of that, "faux" implies that there's a "real" action girl out there, and frankly... I can count on one hand the number of true "action girls" in anime/manga. (And this is ignoring that, uhm, four-fifths of them are characters in Fullmetal Alchemist, which is probably saying something right there.) For that matter, I can count one hand for the number in American pop culture, for that matter. A fair number of the one-hand for US entertainment would be heroines who aren't even on the air anymore, which doesn't help.

Thus, given that there aren't really a huge number (hah, it's like a freaking pittance) of "true" action girls -- who can hold their own against the hero, if they're not the hero themselves -- I do think it's kinder to consider these characters transitional. In some of the author-notes or interviews I've read, I get the impression that the author intended to have a strong female character -- to do something 'different' from the usual boys-action story, to attract a female audience and/or expand audience appeal, or just to mix it up a little -- and they seem to do okay until they get to the point where the fight really gets intense.

Sometimes it seems as though the author just isn't entirely sure 'what to do' with the female character. You can almost see it laid out in the text: the author's internal preference is that girls-don't-fight (or that's what the author's own lifetime of stories are telling the author), and the character's needs are doing a sub-textual battle with the author's own biases. I get that feeling from Naruto, sometimes, that Kishimoto dances towards -- and then away from -- the notion of women fighting just as powerfully as men. Like he wants to try it, but doesn't really have a template of how it'd work. (Which, yeah, as a writer, I have issues with that "not having a template" concept, but giving the man the benefit of the doubt, considering the rest of the pop culture wherein Naruto is published.)

Other times, I get the sense the author isn't sure how to balance the author's own preference/wish/story that focuses on the male character with the heroine's supporting role. That is, if "the girl" gets too much to do, what's left for the hero? If there were anything that ran closest to being "faux" action girl, it'd be that, where the author is intentionally knocking the girl down because otherwise, she just might come out better than the hero. Bleach has got to be one of the top-most perpetrators of that bullshit, to speak frankly, and it's why I stopped reading that manga. That author clearly sets up the girls to fail, repeatedly, because it's the only way he can think to make sure the boys always look better in comparison. Again as a writer, it makes me feel like his male characters must actually really suck, if all it'd take is a little more attention to a supporting character to undermine the leads.

[dagas_isa]

I hate this trope with a fiery vengeance, but it's a hate directed solely at the authors for putting them in these situations time, after time, after time (we could add in a few 'after times' to simulate a montage here) instead of the characters, who, if we believe the lip service are all perfectly capable of kicking ass. They just always 'coincidentally' end up in the wrong situations.

[kaigou]

They just always 'coincidentally' end up in the wrong situations.

Ayup, and what gets me is that as a storyteller I can see that often there's an in-story rationalization for it. I went back and edited to add some of the thoughts I'd forgotten to put in, and that's one of them -- that the transition-damsel is too often used as a sacrificial pawn whose injury is meant to inspire/fire-up the hero. (It's like woman in the fridge, except this is more like girl in a coma.) On one level, I can see how if the main development is meant to be protagonist A, that injury/harm to supporting character B would get protagonist A into a frenzy and/or teach the protagonist a lesson (about him/herself, or about the cost of fighting, or about what's worth fighting for, pick your flavor)... Maybe the first five or six times, I could let that storyline go because I was going along with the rationalization -- but now, I've seen it just so many freaking timesthat it's like watching any Gundam series: I don't even bother paying much attention to the details, I'm just waiting for the obligatory "oh noes it's a gundam!" shoe to drop, so I know the story's really gotten started.

Except with transition-damsels, I'm waiting for her to put in a decent showing before getting pummeled totally, after which she'll spend the rest of the time exhorting the hero to do more. And after that, of course, if the author has rendered her particularly helpless during the fight, we'll get the post-fight lip service of seeing her deck the hero for taking too many risks. I think that's supposed to make up for her general suckage for most of the fight, but it always makes me want to say: okay, if the hero could beat the bad guy and she can beat the hero, why didn't she just freaking do that to the bad guy in the first place, and then I wouldn't have had to sit through three entire episodes of next to no dialogue and way too many constipated-screaming from the hero and bad guy in four-part harmony?

Although, I should say (in some authors' defense) that the higher level of transition-damsels don't just sit around and cry (or scream) after the author forces them to step down. The good ones do contribute in some small way (ie, pre-timeskip Sakura continues to strategize, while post-timeskip she'll set about healing herself or others, and Tokine will pitch in and set up her finesse so it's available for the hero's use, which isn't perfect but is still better than an entire episode of crying between yelling the hero's name), and I also try to give credit to authors who seem to be learning "what a girl can do" as they write -- again, Sakura and Tokine are good examples of that, with the author developing them (slower than the boys, but still) instead of constantly shoving them back into a helpless-damsel box for later rescue. They're still not getting the full development or powering-up of the boys, but at least they're not knocked out cold (or left out completely).

[ivoryandhorn]

This is one of those things that seems so obvious in retrospect, but if you had asked me prior to reading this post to articulate any part of this I would have drawn a total blank. "Damsel in transition" is totally going into my mental toolbox.

[kaigou]

Actually, you can blame a lot of this on D.Gray-man -- I've been doing a lot in the workshop, and it's hot and stuffy out there, so when I come inside to cool off, I'm not up for sitting at the computer. Mostly I'm just sitting in front of the fan and trying to cool down, and want something mindless to look at for ten or so minutes at a time... and a whole lot of episodes that don't really require, y'know, thought are good for that. (If it were a series I liked more, I'd end up not getting back to the workshop b/c I'd be watching more attentively after getting caught up in a favorite story.)

And, gee, after the sixth episode of basically Lenalee turning on the waterworks yet again -- in between crying Allen's name like a damn broken record -- eventually it sinks in that, well, this is a really damn annoying thing to do to a character who started out as somewhat interesting. She was never at the level of a Winly or a Kallen or even a Sakura, really -- maybe more on a par with Tokine -- but there were glimmers of potential, and then one big sacrifice and from there on out it's helpless, helpless, helpless.

Dude, there's a point in the anime where they're all trapped on the ark, and Rhode shoots candle-knives at a human who'd ended up accompanying the exorcists. (I can't even recall now where the anime and manga diverge, but whatever.) So knives are in this guy's back, and Lenalee doesn't even try to remove the knives. She just kneels over the guy while screaming his name. Repeatedly. And crying. Oi, you twit, I wanted to yell, do you not even remember the first-aid you demonstrated only, what, thirty episodes ago? Total regression into nothing more than helpless damsel mode, complete and total. Absolutely frustrating and infuriating, really. If I weren't already lukewarm about the series, that maneuver on the mangaka's part probably would've ruined it totally for me, anyway.

But on the upside, it did get me thinking...

[starlady]

Kallen is pretty ruthless too, come to think of it.

Anyway, yup, total agreement.

[kaigou]

Oi, I totally forgot about her in that respect -- you're right, though I seem to recall that near the start of S2, she crumbles. (I stopped watching only a few episodes into S2, but I could've sworn she goes through an "oh, no, I can't!" break-point of some sort. Don't recall the details, only that it left a bad taste in my mouth for her character, after a relatively decent showing in S1 for her.)

[taithe]

Heh I remember telling someone how FMA ruined me for other shounen because Arakawa does an excellent job of establishing multiple strong female characters.

The trend you describe is aggravating especially since as a young girl it was disheartening to see the action-girl get beat down for the sake of action-boy. Sailor Moon used to be one of my favorite shows because it actually flipped the gender roles. Action-boy often got beaten down and needed saving from the action-heroine. At the same time I wished action-boy didn't necessarily have to be sacrificed. Or that gender didn't have to play into it. *sigh*

[kaigou]

I remember telling someone how FMA ruined me for other shounen because Arakawa does an excellent job of establishing multiple strong female characters.

Hah, for me, it made me even more cynical, I think. I mean, look at Bleach: over and over, the mangaka seems to pull this stunt of having to downgrade his female characters, as though if they're remotely awesome, this will undermine the awesomeness of the (male) protagonist/s, instead of just buckling down and figuring out how to write better protagonists. Arakawa really put the lie to that kind of nonsense, because she wrote Izumi, Gen Armstrong, Hawkeye, Winly, and all the rest of them as pretty damn impressive women -- and it never once made Edward or Alphonse look mediocre in result. In fact, I'd say it made them look even stronger as characters, to see them keeping up with female characters who weren't about to back down.

Plus, Arakawa never once played that crap-line that I find so patronizing (or maybe I'm really sensitive right now after seeing it one too many times in D.Gray-man, recently) -- "if she can try so hard, we can't stop here!" or "she really did her best, so I have to, too!" while the "she" in question is flat-out cold after one punch from the bad guy. It really does feel condescending; it feels to me a little too much like, oh, I don't know, an Olympic cyclist declaring that because some kid managed to make it all of ten feet without training wheels (before falling over and cracking her head open on the sidewalk) that he should work hard, too! It makes me want to punch someone, but I'm not sure quite who: the girl laying there out cold, the boy making the left-handed compliment, or the author for making me hear/read such crap for the nth time.

[giethe.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. Does this mean you're equating "Strong female" = 'battle prowess' here? So far, what I get from your entry is you want to see females win in battles to justify their 'strong female lead' position.

[kaigou]

Nope, not entirely -- but it helps to remember that my favorite genres tend to be SFF and political/warfare (preferably with mecha, damn it) so that is where I tend to focus my attention... and more to the point, it's where the transition-damsel is probably most easy to identify. When you get into stories that aren't quite so physical or action-ey, then you get into murkier issues, where some helpless damsels are allowed slight moments of near-transition status, and more generally transition-level damsels may still have moments of TSTL helplessness. That makes identifying and categorizing the non-combatant examples a bit more complex, and I didn't really have energy/time today to go into the transition-damsel issue quite that deep.

But I still wouldn't mind seeing more female characters win in battle -- or more precisely, get a 'win' that amounts to more than just barely finishing the prelims and promptly falling to the wayside when the finals begin.

Err, meant to add: some of the best transition-damsels (leading into true "strong character comma female") are actually in manhwa that have genderbender themes. Boy of the Female Wolf and Love in the Mask are my current favorites; Sarahsa is more crossdressing than true genderbender, but it's also showing a strong lead who happens to also be female. Threads of Time gave it a good shot but ultimately was a shonen series with the girl in the background, but at least it was a strong supporting girl, and not a damsel. Come to think of it, most of the truly strong characters -- who happen to be female -- that I've been reading recently have all been in manhwa, not manga.

[brainwane]

I have no particular response here but wanted to let you know that I was glad to read this.

[kaigou]

Hey, I'm just here for the thinkyness.

[alias_sqbr]

Hi, I got here via animanga_news, hope that's ok.

Anyway: I totally agree. I was just thinking similar thoughts last night watching "Covert Affairs", which is a live action US show with a "kick ass" female protagonist, but in all the fight scenes where she had a male ally he got to do more of the fighting and pretty much all of the killing.

Another related trope, I think, is the woman who is genuinely very powerful, but can't control her power, so that she sometimes utterly destroys the bad guys but more often than not her powers cause her mostly distress or turn her evil. The overall moral still being that it is only men who can use and control physical/violent power in a positive effective and satisfying way. The idea of a woman doing so just feels wrong, so something always happens to stop it: she is defeated, she can't deal with the power, she turns evil etc.

I've been reading/watching mostly shojo and josei recently, which has a slightly different set of issues and less of an emphasis on fighting. But I have been enjoying the way that Yankumi from Gokusen is a better fighter than everyone ever, including her love interests :)

[kaigou]

...the woman who is genuinely very powerful, but can't control her power, so that she sometimes utterly destroys the bad guys but more often than not her powers cause her mostly distress or turn her evil.

snarp did an incredible post on that -- check the sticky on snarp's DW to see a link to the post. It really covers the whole gamut in terms of unpacking that cliche and everything wrong with it. And you're right, it's a truly aggravating and annoying trope, but it's a bit blunter (in that when you see the female character start to lose it, you know where you're heading).

What gets me about the transitional damsel is that I'm never quite certain whether the author is paying lip service to strong female (and then sabotaging her b/c the author hirself isn't comfortable with the idea that a girl can be as strong as -- or stronger -- than a boy). But then again, maybe the author is fighting to get out from under editors, publishers, even fans who don't want a too-strong female, and the author's doing a transitional damsel as a compromise (or a way to push the envelope without ripping it completely). Or possibly it's that the author wants to write a strong female character, isn't sure how, and is figuring it out -- and sometimes falls back into older/misogynist patterns for lack of a template.

This, incidentally, is what I think is going on with Kekkaishi, based on the author's own omake talking about his intentions/ideas for the characters and story -- that he wants to do something other than helpless damsel, but having decided that, doesn't seem entirely sure, well, what else he could do. Which I privately think isn't too bright nor creative on the author's part, but hey, everyone has to learn at their own speed, I suppose. At least, that's what I say when I'm in a good mood and willing to give the benefit of the doubt. The rest of the time, I just gnash my teeth and go re-watch Seirei no Moribito.

[cypher]

Thank you for making this post! It's a really good distinction to make, and a lot of interesting insights in the post and its comments.

[kaigou]

The comments are always the best part of any post I make. I wouldn't fool anyone as being half so brilliant if I didn't have an awesome peanut gallery.

[llyse]

This, this is totally articulating a lot of the reason why I can't stand many, many shows. Going to read the links I snagged from post and comments, thanks very much!



(Extra: Have you by any chance watched the Fafner anime? I'd be interested in hearing any thoughts with the treatment of gender on that one, because while I personally think it's done fairly well, it's been some time since I last watched it and I am kind of biased towards liking it.)

[kaigou]

You mean Sōkyū no Fafner? I tried to watch it on the recommendation of friends, but I think it was just too much redux at the time -- I was already maxed out (yes, amazing, but apparently possible) on mecha, and Fafner was riffing on Gundam enough to make me twitch... and to think, that was while missing the Eva and RahXephon references/riffs. So, first episode, some of the second, and I moved along. If I ever find a reliable source for it (that doesn't require I pay before I try, that is -- why don't libraries have these sorts of things!?), and had a bit of free time, I might try it again, but right now I'm kinda swamped with all the series already on my plate.

[ravenbell]

A couple of thoughts from an old school otaku.

The exact same trope exists, gender reversed, in most shojo series like "Cardcaptor Sakura," "Sailor Moon," and "Princess Tutu." The trouble is that shojo have all but disappeared in recent years, subsumed by the moe/cute girl and josei/young woman genres. Most of the fantasy and action shows popular in the West just aren't aimed at girls of this age group. The only recent shonen I can think of that has a true female lead is "Soul Hunter," which has Maka, who still has to share the role with a lot of others.

If you look back at the 80s and early 90s, the action girls were everywhere - "Bubblegum Crisis," "Dirty Pair," "Patlabor," "Armitage," "Iria," and "Slayers" - but they were mostly seinen and comedy heroines. I think their disappearance in favor of moe girls has a lot to do with the changing demographics of anime - the industry is now pandering to the hardcore otaku base a lot harder than they used to, and shojo never sold very well in the West.

When you get away from the typical cookie-cutter Shonen Jump-style titles, you do get some stronger supporting girls like Yoko from "Gurren Lagaan" and Re-L from "Ergo Proxy," but you really have to look for them.

[kaigou]

I was looking up some of the recent shoujo titles I'd found mentioned in recommendations, and came across a forum conversation about how fansub groups just don't tend (for whatever reason, it wasn't gone into) to take on shoujo titles, and when you combine that with the disinterest from distributors like Cartoon Network, the result is that a lot of the good shoujo -- that does show strong, if non-combatant, heroines -- just doesn't get exposure in the West. I have no idea how I'd go about assessing who's doing fansubs -- who makes the choices to fansub this show, versus that show -- and the demographics of the fansubbers, so I'm sort of at loose ends as to why, at least among the amateur fanbase, there isn't more translation going on. I mean, I have suspicions, but that's about it.

I find it intriguing you mention the 80s and 90s as highpoints for strong female-led shows in anime, seeing how the same was going on here in the West -- it was in the 90s that we got the Alien trilogy, T2, Thelma & Louise, Buffy, and similar strong action female-action hero-type movies... but somewhere in the last part of the 90s, that ground to a halt. The reasons for such a shift -- from more feminist-influenced stories, to more conservatively gendered stories -- may be different between West and East, but it's still interesting that they're paralleling each other so closely, time-wise. I'm not sure either can really be attributed to the demographics, because it's a given that Hollywood and its counterparts don't have a freaking clue about the true nature of its demographics (or at least, has a clue but then disregards it in favor of the assumption that, basically, male audiences are the only ones that "matter") -- so I wouldn't be surprised if the Japanese business equivalent operates on the same assumptions.

I think in part, it's the idea that if you want a big audience, you write to the default, and since the default is white male (even, looking at the biggest shonen series, white male with blond hair and blue eyes) -- then the business decision-makers presume that this common denominator of white hetero male will therefore appeal to everyone. Sort of like the way using "him" in English is supposed to denote "everyone", or using "man" to mean "humanity". Perhaps with the downturn in the world economies, and the slow tightening of the belts when it comes to entertainment budgets, such businesses (hollywood, japananimanga) get more conservative because they can afford fewer risks/losses, and the result is that stories get "safer", with leads that are supposedly "proven" to appeal to as many people as possible.

Actually, it's a subset of anime, but there's a similar -- if highly disturbing -- trend visible when you look at a series that's been reworked as a theater-released movie: Eureka Seven, Rahxephon, Escaflowne. (Eureka Seven, however, is absolutely the most egregious of such basatardization, so unless you're feeling really masochistic, skip the movie redux.) When the series is "retold" as an OVA, it seems as though the creators say, "what is absolutely necessary for the sake of the plot, that we must retain, and what can be discarded because we don't have the time?" Without exception, what is considered of less priority -- or, at least, I deduce that from the fact that it's consistently discarded -- are the strong female leads. They're all relegated to damsels, simplified into evil bitches, or just shoved into the background (if they're not just plain written out of the story altogether). The first time, I was surprised; by the third example, I'm thinking no longer a coincidence, y'know? Clearly, there's rationalization going on that female characters are not a priority, and in the compressed time of an OVA/movie, this lower priority really shines through.

I have not watched the OVA for Gurren Lagaan, for what are now probably pretty obvious reasons. I don't even want to think about what would be done to Re-L, if Geneon decided they wanted the entire philosophical mindscrew distilled into 90 minutes. Hell, she'd probably end up hopelessly in love with Ergo Proxy from the beginning, and every action would be prefaced by, "what would Vincent think?"

*sigh*

[alas]

ARGH

Okay, I will attempt a more coherent reaction than that, but yes I hate this character trope like burning. Interesting discussion points coming out of this though.

Sometimes it seems as though the author just isn't entirely sure 'what to do' with the female character....Other times, I get the sense the author isn't sure how to balance the author's own preference/wish/story that focuses on the male character with the heroine's supporting role. That is, if "the girl" gets too much to do, what's left for the hero?

This irritates me more than anything else, because it's clear, particularly with series like Bleach and Naruto, that the creators have trouble with writing female characters, not supporting ones. Male supporting characters get to be awesome and take names - for example, if any of the male supporting characters in Naruto happened to be female, that would be...so awesome my head might just explode. Shikamaru! Neji! Gaara! They all manage major character arcs and growth in very individual ways, without robbing Naruto of main character status. (Indeed, the strength of their arcs, and the influence Naruto has on them - without weakening them - only adds to his status.) In comparison...from what I last remember of Naruto, pretty much all the supporting female characters just becomes medics without any real explanation as to why they would gravitate towards that (even Sakura.). WTF Kishimoto, I could buy being a medic becoming popular with Tsunade as Hokage, but the fact that it's all girls, and none of the boys taking up medic training shows how empty that premise is. *gasp!* We can't have mentors across gender lines, oh noes. (I mean, look what a crappy job Kakashi does with Sakura - not that he's much better with Naruto, but there's a little more effort there.) I must go to FMA and Izumi for that.

everyone else seems to think Rukia et al are great Strong Female Leads, and I'm not sure I'd even call them transitional damsels.

I think that just shows how badly written a lot of female characters are, because, unfortunately there are some series that by comparison make the Bleach female characters actually look like Strong Female Leads.


Or maybe it just makes her kinda stupid, for entering battles with fighters who out-rank and out-flank her.

There is clearly room for an epic series that will actually use this in some sensible and interesting manner, where a bona fide damsel in distress or faux action girl actually realizes this, and ...IDK, becomes a Machiavellian chess master a la Lelouch in Code Geass or something. I think I really enjoyed that about Code Geass, considering that it was so action packed - that Lelouch was consistently shown as quite physically weak; and even though he could work around it, it was something he did have to work around.

[kaigou]

I hate this character trope like burning.

I would have to say, I hate the traditional damsel like burning, and the transitional damsel like... well, if the former is a third-degree burn, the latter is a second-degree burn. Possibly easier to survive, and less chance of scarring, but not exactly all that much fun despite the lesser-status.

I mean, look what a crappy job Kakashi does with Sakura - not that he's much better with Naruto, but there's a little more effort there.

This is actually in reference to your comment about the writers having trouble writing female characters, but the Naruto example is a good illustration. Kishimoto seemed to be trying to rationalize the lack of attention on Sakura's training (pre-timeskip), and he did it by having Kakashi spend time with Sakura... basically explaining why he didn't feel there was a major need to focus so much attention on Sakura. With my cynical hat on, it amounts to, "It's not that I'm ignoring you, it's that those other (boy) characters are so bad that they need a lot more work." In Kishimoto's defense (and perhaps this wouldn't twig for a non-jock reader), I did like that he's one of the only shonen-writers who does not treat "lesser physical status" as "less able to do things", but had a character expressing that flawless technique can be, on its own, actually far more powerful than brute force, because it's more efficient and controlled. Yeah, okay, it might be lip service but it's still a lip service no other shonen series -- that I've ever read -- has paid. In that respect, I'm willing to see Kishimoto as trying, if not always succeeding, to at least not toss the female characters into the dustbin.

I think I really enjoyed that about Code Geass, considering that it was so action packed - that Lelouch was consistently shown as quite physically weak; and even though he could work around it, it was something he did have to work around.

My theory about Code Geass was that the original creator was a founding member of his high school chess club (or the Japanese equivalent), and was constantly bullied/harrassed by the jocks. Code Geass was his privately-grown, but wildly successful, revenge on those jocks: an entire series predicated on the notion that someone with brains will always, in the end, outsmart, outflank, and outrank, those who think brute force is all it will take. It's like the ultimate geek-egghead revenge show.

Although that trope has been put in the hands of female characters -- Tsunade and Tokine being two shown (not just described) as ruthless, as is Kallen (per Starlady's reminder, above) -- they don't get the same accolades. In their cases, they're meant to be contrast to the boy-hero, who (in a strange latter-day genderflip) is the one often arguing for mercy or compassion. Or maybe it's just that the boy-hero wouldn't argue for the same if it were a male friend showing such ruthlessness -- sometimes, maybe, but in some cases, no... since it seems to me Naruto would argue for compassion against Sasuke just as fast as he would with Sakura. But in general, I do sometimes feel a slight tug from the author, a subtle message (that perhaps the author is not even aware of, such being so ingrained in our gender-based perceptions and biases) that the shonen-hero isn't arguing for compassion because he truly values that trait on its own, but because for a girl to lack nurturing/compassionate modes is somehow wrong, in and of itself: so her ruthlessness is demonstration not as example, but as warning.

A lot of writing, I know, operates on an unconscious level: it's only afterwards that you could look and say, "y'know, I think you're saying something that maybe you don't realize you were saying" -- something true of all -isms and -phobias that are culturally embedded: racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and so on. Knowing that, I do try and give some credit to authors who are fighting an upstream battle against the base assumptions of their audience/s, and push a little at the envelope... but that doesn't mean I shouldn't call them out for where they fail, only that I do feel it important to recognize their success, however minor it may be compared to overall fail -- it's still better than the complete and utter fail of those authors' colleagues.

Still, it bugs me that a lot of these transitional damsels are considered "strong female leads" when it'd be far more accurate to say "female leads that are somewhat better than mere damsels, even if not truly strong by a shonen or boy-hero standard".

[ex_verdure627]

Great little essay/article! I got linked here from metafandom on LJ, and I'm glad to have read this. Especially because animanga articles don't often get highlighted on metafandom, haha.

Anyways, I'll have to agree that "transitional damsels" is going in my mental toolbox, since it's a very good term for an archetype I had noticed, but not really had a good way to describe why they bothered me. And man, I'm glad that D. Gray-Man is one of your big examples, since the change in Lenalee's character after her haircut (as I refer to it, haha) annoyed me enough to drop the manga and not buy the volumes after that point.

Though, I'm glad that the trope is changing. "Strong female characters" that fall into this category are very common now, and truly strong female characters are also getting more common. I don't keep up with anime and manga now as much as I used to, since I tend to gravitate towards "older" series in both age and demographic, but I will say that a good anime to watch that really plays with this idea is Revolutionary Girl Utena. I'd go as far to say that one of the central messages of the series is about the damsel vs. heroine and what qualifies each.

[kaigou]

Oi, "little" is a once-in-a-lifetime achievement for me! Normally I end up with 6K for an essay and figure I'm being pretty succinct. (Well, succinct for me, at least.)

"Strong female characters" that fall into this category are very common now, and truly strong female characters are also getting more common.

I think some replies are taking the concept of transitional damsel as a critique -- which, okay, it is in terms of "these are not truly strong female characters" -- but it's also a landmark, I think, that we have these halfway-strong characters. I do see it as a positive movement among authors to at least try, and the existence of the transitional damsel indicates they're at least willing to consider that it's not always true that "fights are for boys (and girls should stay home)"... even if many of those authors continue to fall down on the job when it comes to following through on the genre-breaking. They are at least getting started on cracking the genre, even if it remains rare for an author to truly smash the genre, and I'm willing to give credit where it's due for at least the attempt.

[rusty_halo]

Great post. I don't know the anime examples, but this is totally the reason that the writing of Jo on Supernatural frustrated me so much.

[kaigou]

Ehehehe, well, see, actually, I might have more western/non-anime examples if I, uh, had a television. But I haven't for about five years now, and every now and then I think, "hmm, maybe if we had cable, I'd have something to watch when I'm down with a cold!" -- except that I only catch colds like once every three years, so that motivation doesn't work for much.

However, it's not like I don't see the trope going on in the West, too -- I seem to recall finales from some of the Harry Potter movies showing Hermione cowering and waiting for rescue (or looking determined but still waiting for rescue) even though the rest of the time she'd been pretty strong in her own right. From what I see of TV-show critiques on my flist/dwircle, it's a pretty common bait-and-switch kind of trope throughout Western and Eastern entertainment.

Also, I love your icon.

[susanna]

I just wonder whether this pattern is really a new development, the "damsel in transition" as a replacement for the damsel in distress. I still remember the Prydain Chronicles that I read as a child, where Eilonway starts out stronger and more clever than Taran, and in the end she's left home (going on adventures is not suitable for a princess), decides to follow the warriors, and ends up having to be rescued. The same goes for Li Si in "Jim Button" by Michael Ende: She wants to go on adventures too, but ends up having to be rescued. (I don't think you know that one, but it's a very popular children's book in Germany, and very good, but the blatant sexism is annoying.) I also remember that even as a child I found this annoying.

With Sakura from Naruto I recognize a pattern that I also know from Jim Button: The girl is more intelligent, or at least better educated than the boys, but it turns out that all she has learnt is useless when it comes to real adventures. Boys like the message, as they are normally worse at the kind of education and learning you need to succeed at school, but in the end, the message is detrimental to boys. So, boys may succeed better in manga, girls in RL...

Ah, and we have Karin in Naruto. She does the thinking while Sasuke does the fighting. And Konan is the only character who invested some time into planning before she set out to fight Madara...

You bring up an interesting point when you mention that Kishimoto manages to give the male supporting characters (Lee, Gaara, Shikamaru... ) interesting arcs that don't take away anything from the hero, but he is not able to do this with Sakura. I think that with Sakura there are two problems: She should be more important than Gaara and Lee and Shikamaru - she should be on par with Sasuke, when it comes to importance, or even Naruto himself - and then she would be a real threat to Naruto, just as Sasuke is (a lot of people complain that he has become stronger than Naruto and takes too much "panel time" from him.) But the real problem is probably that Kishimoto is not able to imagine any interesting emotional conflict for a girl that is not linked to a boy. It's only older women who have lost all their loved ones who are ready to sacrifice themselves for their village or the world, as Tsunade or Chiyo do, or now Konan. In Naruto only women who are too old to count as love interests have a chance to be strong fighters.

[kaigou]

I just wonder whether this pattern is really a new development, the "damsel in transition" as a replacement for the damsel in distress.

No, I think it's been around for awhile, as I can recall children's books and YA-genre books with transitional damsels (or some proto-transitional damsels). I think it's more a category that's a logical extension of the way authors play with genre conventions, like trying to flex stereotypes: suddenly the blonde bimbo is just as gorgeous and apparently vapid, but she's vapid with advanced degrees in astrophysics! Ahaha, you can practically hear the author crowing, bet you didn't see that one coming! (The problem is that eventually, this genre-distortion eventually becomes a genre-convention in its own right, done often enough, or done with a strict flip without any real quirks.) So the transitional damsel has been around for awhile.

Maybe it's that people are reading "transitional" as meaning we're moving from damsel --> in-between --> strong female, like some sort of evolution. That wasn't my intended reading; I meant less in terms of literary evolution (as though, eventually, we will have nothing but strong females and no damsels in any stories) and more in the sense that we can't really classify female characters as "only" a damsel or "only" a strong female character. There's this in-between type, that may be on-purpose (for the story's sake) but may also indicate a failing on the part of the author to carry through the genre-cracking to its logical end.

But the real problem is probably that Kishimoto is not able to imagine any interesting emotional conflict for a girl that is not linked to a boy.

I think it's working in the opposite direction: that Kishimoto can't see any reason for a boy to find anything interesting about a girl... unless the girl's interest is focused on the boy. In other words, if a girl likes something more than the boy in question, like, say, soccer or working on cars, then she's not actually all that interesting. Her interest excludes the boy, and the boy -- for Kishimoto, like so many other mangaka -- is the center of the freaking universe. Anything that isn't focused on him, be it a villain or a rival or a teacher or a parent, is pretty much of lesser to null importance.

The characters who are past love-interest point aren't just no longer love interests, too, they're mother figures. And having a strong female mother figure be a fighter is a completely different issue altogether, because if there's one story-niche where women are nearly universally not just acceptable as ruthless but damn near expected to be fierce and ruthless, it's as mothers defending their young. Stories go way back (hell, all the way to Grendel's mother, if you like) in which the mother-figure rises up from the darkness and shows herself three times as bloodthirsty and fearsome as any male on the stage. Normally, this would strike terror into the hearts of the average male viewer (and still does, it appears)... but it's okay! Because this instance, it's a mother defending her children, and that gives her a free pass to get truly brutal.

(Ah, and one thing about Karin -- I heard plenty about how she's the thinker, but when I finally caught up on the manga, it read to me like she sure does a lot of thinking... and Sasuke ignores all of it. His disinterest in her monologue constitutes, to me, the text itself condoning the dismissal of the 'thinker' input/strategy. It's saying: sure, we keep her around because she's smart, but that doesn't mean we actually have to listen to her. She's just a running monologue to explain what's going on to the cabbages in the audience.)

Here by metafandom

[fennel]

I really adore your posting. You seem to have pretty much the same stance on the topic as I do, and "damsel with fighter tendencies" is a really nifty term for it.

What drives me up a wall is, indeed, the usual derailing such criticism gets (as your posting shows, someone commented to your posting with the usual attempt at derailing). Apparently, many people in fandom see it as really mean to ask for female characters who are equally capable to male characters in series like that.

Bleach seems to be the worst offender in that regard. I can't count the number of times where a woman is set up as somewhat strong, just to get completely knocked down, needing guys to step in. And if you bring it up? People cite the one time Orihime didn't need help to somehow prove Bleach is okay and that you totally are mean because you're saying female characters need all to have combat ability!!11 (except, of course, there's not exactly a surplus of characters like that threatening to blot out those without...)


The sad thing is that there are some canons with really capable female characters, even leads. ...But you're not allowed to bring them up. They will be dismissed as "moe", since "cast with lots of females that do awesome stuff" = "moe crap" the moment one design could be called cute.

One of my fandoms is like that.
The main girl (and no, there's no guy who could save her. The only noticeable guy is a shopkeeper) would give most shonen heroes a run for their money. She's also a sloth, really likes getting money, and her main tactic to solve incidents is shooting down everyone who gets into her way until someone manages to direct her to the true cause of the problem - which she mostly does so she can get back home faster and sleep.
The canon? Touhou.
Despite a female main character like that, despite a chessmistress character, despite the second main heroine being a take on the "massive power bursts at once" shonen kind of hero...everyone dismisses Touhou as "Moe crap". Yeah, some designs are pretty cute, but if you go by what the characters actually do... they're pretty badass indeed, and are very varied as far as personalities go. And capable? Yes, they are, more so than most male shonen leads, even putting fighting ability aside.

Or take another anime that routinely gets blasted as moe, because it dares to have female main characters. They just happen to be a group of soldiers. Who end up stopping a war. But that doesn't matter: The main girl is cute and has a ditzy moment sometimes, and therefore it's a moeblob show that doesn't deserve consideration. Also scary non-white people around, one of which has deep subtext with another person of her gender, can't have that.

Precure? Dismissed, cutesy magical girl stuff, can't be useful. Let's ignore the heroines punching the heck out of enemies, and there even being a female-female fight with similar iconography than, say, the Naruto vs Sasuke fight in Naruto.
Canaan? Dismissed, a female villain has a fanservice scene, must be fanservice crap. The main heroine and other capable female characters don't matter. Not to mention scary non-white and middle eastern people.
El Cazador? Dismissed. One of the heroines looks moe, and a dark skinned south-american female character with an afro? The sky would fall if anyone would watch it.
Moribito? People just ignore that this series exists.

Fandom really doesn't seem to want shows with lots of female characters doing things.

Bitter? Me? Never.

Also here by metafandom

[miss_prince]

Touhou sounds and looks awesome. I haven't watched a lot of anime in recent years, but I'll put it on my to-watch list!

Late to the party, prompted by metafandom too

[raletha]

I finally got around to reading this! It's very interesting, and describes very well a lot of the reasons why I often don't relate well to some female character types. Now, I'm not familiar with the other anime you mention besides the Gundam series, and I've not seen all of Gundam 00, so I won't comment on that, but I did have one point of, not exactly disagreement, but divergence? Distinction?

I'm not sure I'd necessarily include Hilde in this trope, at least not within the full context of Gundam Wing. In isolation, she does fit it very well, but I'd rather not strip her of her narrative environment. I would view her as more of a human being in transition rather than particularly a female one. She represents, to me anyway, more the confusion and idealism of any given young Colonial civilian who joined up with OZ out of their desire for peace, rather than anything particularly female or feminine. This is largely due to (at least) two factors, one of which you mention: male characters are often in positions of vulnerability and must be rescued by their friends, male or female. Secondly, the other female characters in Gundam Wing give us a more complex metric with which to evaluate each individual female character in Gundam Wing. In sharp contrast to the transitional damsel, we have Sally, who one could argue subverts this trope in episode 12, fighting Bund & Co. while Wufei has his crisis of heart; and Noin, who is a very powerful character in her own right.

Noin in particular, I think. She pilots an inferior suit side-by-side with the Gundams and is never a liability: she more than pulls her own weight. We are told -- and can believe because of this -- that she is a better pilot than even Zechs. I know some fans find her loyalty to Zechs something that weakens her as a woman, but I think that's misguided. We know Zechs inspires exactly this kind of loyalty, regardless of sex. See Walker and Otto in particular. In some ways, Noin is the stronger for their examples. She won't die for Zechs or follow him blindly. Noin is no Griselda, ironic or otherwise; she is never so passive. Nor is Zechs Walter.

I also don't think we should take Wufei's evaluation of her as truth. I mean, Zechs is also appalled at the youth of the pilots, and neither he (see his outrage in Siberia, "You can't fight, can you?") nor Treize would kill an apparently unarmed, defeated, or surrendering opponent. Noin's response to Wufei's youth likely has more to do with her position as a military instructor of young men, for whom this instinct is entirely natural regardless of sex, and as a person with a particular kind of honor (or, more completely, tadashii [is that the right Japanese word? I hope so.]) in warfare (One of the big GW themes).

Dorothy, Catherine, and Relena are trickier to consider in these terms, but one of the things I like most about Gundam Wing is that its female characters are developed as human beings, not simply female arche- or stereo- types. I don't think Hilde fails, or is set up to fail, because she's a girl. I think it's because she's young, hopeful, and determined as a person, but her reach exceeds her grasp because of her naiveté and inexperience as a person. Of course, this could all simply be a garbled result of my own genderqueer afeminist goggles. YMMV.

(frozen) Re: Late to the party, prompted by metafandom too

[ingvild]

Catherine is probably the most obvious "supporting female" in the show. Dorothy, if anything, was created as a foil to Relena and was there to make the political aspects more complex. (But Dorothy is notoriously hard to get a grasp on.)

Relena had a strong enough presence that she began to change people's thoughts - WITHOUT the benefit of a Gundam. Relena was a non-combatant, so it doesn't matter that she had to be rescued. Her role was to unify people and open up for the possibility of peaceful solutions. Personally, I think that without her work on Earth and Une's in Space, the mutual surrender at the end of the show would never have been possible - and without that, the war wouldn't have ended.

[(Anonymous)]

Just a little side-note: they did that to Susan in Prince Caspian - gave her a scene where she gets just enough time to show off her awesome fighting skillz, and then she conveniently forgets them so that Caspian can save her from the villains at the last minute. I may have facepalmed in the theatre.

[kaigou]

Dude. I facepalmed all the way through the first movie, and that's why I didn't waste my money on the second -- a good line a girl had, they put in the mouths of one of the boys (sometimes almost word-for-word!) and any idiotic or naive line a boy had, they gave to a one of the sisters to say. And it's not like CS Lewis was all that progressive in the first place, either! There were hardly any lines worth having, girl-wise, in the first place, and what little he bestowed, Hollywood removed. Ridiculous. And infuriating.

here via metafandom on LJ

[(Anonymous)]

I totally agree with this analysis. It bugs me that the role of action girls in most media (in anime and in Western media) is to always be second-best. Sure, she fights, but she never wins. She never gets her moment to shine. She, like many female characters throughout the history of stories, is inspiration. She can never be an equal to the male characters. And that bothers me. Sakura could have been so much more. Same with the other female characters of Naruto.

Now, in Fullmetal Alchemist, even though Hawkeye is the subordinate to Mustang and gets rescued by him several times, I think FMA handles the female/male dynamics better than a lot of other manga. I don't sense the same kind of sexism in it. Even though Hawkeye is not as powerful as Mustang, I get the sense that the text treats her as an equal.

I don't need my female characters to be super-powerful and stronger than all the guys. Unrealistic characters are just as bad as powerless ones. I love the action heroines of Tamora Pierce's stories, but I mostly just want to see more complex, flawed, interesting female characters who aren't just meant as eye candy or romantic interests.

[kaigou]

One of the reasons I think anyone interested in "how to handle female characters well even in a shonen series" should watch FMA is because of the dynamics between Mustang and Hawkeye. There's absolutely no doubt, textually, that Hawkeye is very, very, very good at what she does. (And for the record, there are a number of instances where we actually get to see her being exactly that good -- Arakawa does not pull the punch by having Hawkeye decide that it's not okay for her to kill people; if Hawkeye ever expresses doubt over whether she should, this does not affect her ability to go right ahead and do what must be done, regardless of her feelings for human life.)

What makes it a little more complex (and interesting, to me) is that Mustang is treated as being also incredibly good at what he does -- in fact, the text states unequivocally that among the alchemists we see on-screen, he's the most powerful. Not Edward, and not Alphonse, but Mustang -- and that right there is unusual, because normally shonen-genre stories will, at some point or another, put the shonen-hero (Edward, predominantly) at the forefront, unequaled. To the very end, Mustang remains far more powerful than Edward.

In that regard, it makes the final showdown -- where Hawkeye and Mustang must work together, with her incredible sniper-trained eyesight and Mustang's sheer power -- particularly intriguing. They're not cast as subordinate assisting her superior, but as equals. I'd even say that it's more like Mustang becomes Hawkeye's weapon, in a sense; she puts down her gun and aims with him, instead. Her lack of alchemy may make her less powerful on a scale of sheer destructive power (although if we're looking for brute force, that would be Edward; Mustang is shown to have considerable finesse), but it doesn't make her less.

It's a subtle difference, but a crucial one, I think: that texts in which the female character is 'supposed' to be an equal, of equal (if different) strength-of-skill, the text itself treats her as something we can dismiss or discount. Arakawa sets up Hawkeye as 'less' on the scale of alchemy (or, more precisely, 'not even on the scale at all') while giving her fearsome skills elsewhere, but Arakawa never makes the move to then declare that because Hawkeye doesn't rate on this single scale that she doesn't rate at all.

I think it's not just that Mustang sees Hawkeye as an equal... the author does, too.

Perhaps this is also part of the issue with the transitional damsel, in other stories where we have potential for great female character and no follow-through, even when those characters are supposedly really awesome. It's possible the author created the character with "really awesome skills" in mind, skills that would complement or supplement the main character -- but the author then didn't treat those skills as equal in value... and the result is that the text subtly dismisses those different-but-awesome skills. So we end up with this quiet but consistent slant in the story, that sure, she's good at that but because she's not quite so good as this, she's not really any good at all.

It doesn't help that the genre conventions of action-stories are that the hero (or heroine) must be superlative, and even if there's doubt/crisis in the middle, the hero/ine must still eventually win the day, carry the show, be the center of our attention. Creating a character like Mustang -- who is, in many ways, superlative to Edward on Edward's own scale -- is a real risk, genre-wise: you could end up with Mustang successfully stealing the show, taking attention away from the centerpiece. (This is is one reason I admired Naruto's first half so much, as well: the teachers could, and did, frequently "show up" the students, including Our Hero, and I found that refreshing compared to the number of stories in which the shonen-style hero rapidly advances past his mentor/teacher.)

Given that genre convention of the hero remaining at the forefront, with all other characters measured against the hero's standard, I can see why authors may lean towards 'downgrading' other characters, to make the hero look better. It's cheap, it's a cop-out, and I hate it, but I do get why authors do it, because it's easier than the work of figuring out how (as Arakawa did with Edward and Alphonse) to make your main characters the centerpiece despite having superlative characters in the background.

I've actually seen this argument in some fandoms: "but the hero keeps losing to so-and-so" or "but when you look at the entire show, you see the hero never actually wins against these other characters" -- and the conclusion is inevitably, "so why on earth do we think he's so great?" I can't recall anyone ever using that argument about Mustang and Edward, considering that Mustang does repeatedly show up and/or beat down Edward, in a variety of ways. (And in fact, Edward even comes to rely on Mustang and his skills arriving to save the day, by the end of the story.) I think that's because Arakawa figured out that brute force isn't why we like Edward, so the number of so-called battles he wins or loses isn't the reason the fans liked him -- thus, he could lose against Mustang and others, and not lose his position as the centerpiece of the story.

But for the author going the cop-out route of slavish attention to genre conventions (that the hero must, at least eventually, be the 'best' at something), using the hero as the standard for measuring 'best' means that anyone who can't fight on the hero's terms, with the hero's skills, by the hero's standards, may be 'best' at what they do but story-wise, they're unimportant, or at least not as important. They never get their moment to shine, because the light they put out isn't valuable because it's not of the same class or type as the hero-type light.

[sakanagi]

It is, sadly, true that there are all too many characters hit by the "female character damselfied by the author" button. I've heard some really bad things about Bleach and Naruto in that regard, and I don't doubt that it isn't a rare thing. :(

A lot of the cases I've heard about where the author has seemingly sabotaged only the efforts of female characters in fights have been ones where the character is supposed to be on par with the guys, but somehow they never, ever get the chance. And then, like you say, they can be the encouraging factor for the guys to go ahead and do their best. It really is a terrible thing for authors to do. Now, that sort of thing doesn't make me dislike the characters, because it's not their fault the author is failing like that and, but it is disappointing to see it happen over and over.

Anyway, I'd like to take a moment to talk about how you've discussed Lenalee from D.Gray-man falling into this unfortunate category of being constantly sabotaged by the author. I actually don't think she does fit it as well as you're presenting, because although she certainly was tripped up into a helpless noncombatant state once, that's hardly the limit to her role in the story. Except for the one time when she couldn't fight due to overextending herself defeating Eshii, she's consistently presented as being a strong Exorcist (...except in the awful anime filler episodes where she tends to be a repeated victim of getting ill and helpless...) and more importantly, this is backed up with action.

There are even subversions. Later in the Level 4 arc, when her people including the main three male characters (two without any ability to fight back effectively against the enemy due to overextending themselves in their last fight) are losing and getting beaten up or killed in a hopeless fight, Lenalee's actually able to gather her resolve and character development, gain her powers back plus a hefty power up, and go in in a blaze of glory to save them.

The main problem as I see it is both that her previous loss of power lasted a long time in terms of chapters (although to be fair, the main male character's power loss also took a long time to be resolved), but also that the unfortunate prevelence of the "enforced female helplessnes!" plot in media caused a lot of people to completely write her off as being permanently in that category, when in fact it was just temporary, the same way it has been when the male characters have lost their powers in that series. Personally, I did not read that situation of being at all one which could possibly undermine Lenalee's original potential to the point of it being destroyed.

[kaigou]

There's a discussion in one of the sub-threads about anime adaptations (and movie adaptations, for that matter, not just in Japan but in US productions as well -- and come to think of it, though I've not seen the show, it appears the television adaptation of True Blood follows this pattern as well) about how you often see the adaptation become more sexist, but rarely less sexist.

My impression of Lenalee (or is it Renalee? I haven't a clue, really) from the manga was that she was decently powerful, does level up as a result of a major battle, goes through her own development, and comes out kicking. From the anime, however... well, it started to go downhill with the usual filler-crap, and a pattern that might just deserve its own post for being such a continuous pattern: "gee, we need a few episodes of a mini-arc to fill up space while we wait to find out where the manga/original is going, so... I know! Let's have a spontaneous appearance of a new villain who doesn't appear in the original, who creates havoc but eventually does nothing that affects the main storyline -- hmm, and the villain needs to stall things, so let's have him/her capture one of the good guys, and that means we'll have at least three episodes -- more if we drag it out -- with the good guys fighting random beasties to rescue their compatriot. We've got a girl on the team, right? Okay, she can be the hostage." Honestly, that's why I stopped watching Naruto fillers, and I wasn't surprised in the least to see the same routine played out in D.Grayman fillers, either. It's beyond a formula; it's more like the anime version of freaking Mad Libs.

But from then on, once she gets a major haircut, she cries at least once an episode. In the few episodes where we don't see her crying, we see flashbacks of her crying, and I'm not sure that's much better. That's twenty-five something episodes of freaking crying. Oh, she certainly steps up to the transitional damsel plate by giving it her best anyway, but (as I mentioned in another response, above... uhm, somewhere in one of the comment-replies) there are also points where she gets marvelously stupid and helpless. I mean, teeth-gnashing, this-shit-wasn't-in-the-manga, that's-it-I'm-deleting-all-of-this infuriatingly obnoxiously unrelentingly helpless.

I got the sense from the D.Grayman anime, at times, same as I did with Naruto (though Kekkaishi has to have taken one of the more irritating methods for the weekly re-introduction) -- like the writers felt the need to emphasize this important point... except that in doing so, they emphasize it to a degree that watching/reading straight through, it becomes a ten-tonne anvil slamming on your forehead. Over, and over, and over.

Maybe it made a big impact on me because I was mainlining the episodes -- I think I watched the first fifty in about two days, and the last twenty-five (after a few days' break) in just over a day or so. One right after the other, without much break at all, and it really piles up. Perhaps if I'd watched them with a week's break between as the show'd originally aired, it wouldn't have become such a repetitive sensation, y'know?

A tangent, but that reminds me of the dangers present in serial writing (where you write/post a chapter on a regular basis, for immediate reading by audience) -- the lack of sitting down and reading straight through means you don't realize where you're repeating yourself, because you're refreshing your own brain along with the audience's. (Compared to a book format, where readers are expected to read from start to finish, or at least in major chunks, instead of taking a break of several days between chapters.)

[(Anonymous)]

I can't say this was a happy thing to read because it hits so hard that alot, if not all, of my mainstream women in manga or TV I love fall into this category.

But it's freeing to know that the nagging feeling I've always had about why can't any of the people I love, say Kikyou, truly win; There's a reason!

I won't stop loving these characters. 1) They are too dear to me. 2)I feel like I as a person could fit into the category of a woman claiming to be/told to be tough and failing by external pressures. 3) I'm far too mainstream in what I get for TV and movies and anime. (Though YAY to the recommendations littered throughout the threads.)

I will think more about rewriting my internal canon muse, and it's biases, to make these characters win, like I want them too. In my fanfic universe, in my head, in MY life, these ladies can be as great as advertised.

Thank you for writing this post. I've even saved it for future reference.

pigtailedgirl from LiveJournal

[kaigou]

I absolutely don't think that such a critique is any reason to stop loving a character, or even an entire story. I think one could only argue that it's reason to stop if one assumes that the author sabotaged the character on purpose, in which case I, personally, would start to pull back from the story. I'd be feeling like the author is taking jabs at me, the reader/viewer, for liking this character. As though the sabotage is meant to also carry a message that as the character is dismissed, so am I dismissed for thinking this character should get or deserves more than she's given.

However, I think that attributes a level of malevolence to authors that probably isn't there. Like I've said elsewhere, I think you can't really peg what's in a writer's head, and it's possible that even the most egregious are entirely unaware of the impact/implications of the way they treat certain characters. Sexism can be just as blind and ingrained as any other -ism, after all. I do think that if you have thirty-something volumes and the author has repeatedly trod the same shove-the-female path over and over, that you might have enough, textually, to say there's a significant pattern... but even then, any analysis is going to step into subjective (and therefore arguable) territory if we try to claim the author intends to sabotage. It could be the author really only intends to focus on the main character, ergo, the supporting/female characters "simply aren't important enough" to warrant any additional attention.

But part of the point (for me, at least) in writing posts like these are in hopes that such might create conversation that might eventually come to the attention of writers/readers, to let them know that they're being called out -- even if they never had any but the best of intentions. Because I think it's entirely possible that for many writers, and creators, that they just "never stopped to consider" the implications of what they're doing -- and that they should, I think, get credit for at least attempting to include stronger female characters. It's just that their reliance on other genre conventions (needing a sacrifice, needing an example, etc) is undermining their sincere wish to have solid female characters alongside the male characters.

Here via metafandom

[soukup]

OH MY GOD THIS POST IS SO AWESOME. It should be said that I don't read manga or even especially know what animanga is (it sounds like a movie or TV show based on a manga?), but absolutely everything you've mentioned here lines up so perfectly with every book I've ever read and every movie I've ever seen which I'd been told contained a "strong" female lead.

Why aren't women ever the biggest or the strongest? Why aren't we ever physically tough? Why can't we ever be pictured as the bravest and the most powerful ones in the room -- the ones who save the day in the end, whose strength is handled as an awesome thing? It feels like the only time I ever see anything resembling that is with female villains. And I am so, SO tired of women who've become evil because they have too much power, and of "gutsy" and "feisty" female ingenues (you've described this above in detail and you are RIGHT ON), and of women who get taken out at the start of the fight because there's this weird taboo around showing a female character actually throw a punch. (Maybe it has to do with the "you can't hit girls" thing? IDK.) In other words, why is Women Are Weak so set in stone? Perhaps more importantly, why do people find weak women so appealing or interesting or whatever that we've created this long list of tropes for writing them with variation so it doesn't get stale? Because that is what you have listed here: different ways that authors have come up with of writing weak women so that they can do it over and over and over again without it looking like the exact same story. Why do we fetishize this?

(Hmm. Sorry for having a little gutspill moment there. Evidently I've been thinking about all of this a lot more than I realized, and for quite a while now!)

I don't have any of the answers about why these patterns are in place. But the above are real questions, not rhetoric, and if you have any thoughts about/reactions to them, I'd love to read that, too. Either way, thank you so, so much for writing this meta -- it's made my day to know that someone else shares my frustrations.

[kaigou]

(note: I added a bit at the top of the post explaining the term 'animanga' -- sorry, the metafandom linkage caught me off-guard, so my slackness is revealed with lack of definitions for those not in my areas of fandom. whoops.)

different ways that authors have come up with of writing weak women so that they can do it over and over and over again without it looking like the exact same story

I think it's not entirely fetishization, which requires that we assume the authors desire and/or prefer that representation -- and I'm not completely comfortable being so presumptuous as to claim I know what's in an author's head. (It takes a lot of text, lots and lots of text, to be able to have a consistent long-running pattern of, say, female character sabotage, and even then you can really only say that one way or another, the author is doing X, but that doesn't mean the author intends to do it, or that the author is even aware of the sabotage... but then again, maybe s/he is.)

I think it's more a constriction of genre conventions. I mean, for instance, let's say you've got a story that takes place in the American West, sometime around the late 1880s. The average reader would immediately plonk that down as "Western" and expect at least some kind of nod to genre conventions (or, possibly, a complete subversion of genre conventions, but even subversion is still the presence of those conventions, just flipped). You'll need to have your horses, your cowboys, someone playing poker, a sheriff, trains, possibly a posse or a bank robber, and at least show a saloon in the background, preferably with floozies in red dresses hanging out of the upstairs window and cat-calling the cowboys come into town.

If you drop too many conventions from your story -- but leave the setting/premise such that it would summarize at a glance as "western" to the average reader, eventually you'll end up with one of two things. Either you'll have a lot of people describing your story as "kind of like a Western, but not really" -- which will turn off those who do want a Western, while also turning off those who don't want anything even "kind of like" a Western... or you'll just have a whole lot of pissed-off readers who went into it expecting a Western, and got barely even a passing glance at genre conventions. They'll feel cheated.

In shonen/boys stories (really, you could say "action/adventure + coming-of-age" and that fits about right), there are certain conventions, as well, and one of those is that at some point, the young man in question must doubt not just whether he can fight, but if his inability to fight is related to not having a pure-hearted reason for doing so. (Sincerity and earnestness as reasons for fighting are a huge cultural button in Japanese literature and pop culture: basically, the message is that if you believe strongly enough, that matters more than whether your belief is idiotic and pointless or noble and valuable. It's far worse to believe two-facedly or half-heartedly in a noble cause than it is to believe fully and sincerely and purely in an evil cause.)

Anyway, at this point, genre convention says the young hero must get some reminder of "why he fights". If we're dealing with a true damsel, then she's probably right there (or off-screen, watching, and yelling his name repeatedly in between crying, possibly with added convention of crying on his behalf because he's such a gentle soul who wouldn't otherwise fight like this, blah blah blah). If we're dealing with a transitional damsel, then his moment of self-doubt is when she gets suddenly stupid or her shields suddenly fail or she trips over a rock or whatever it takes to get her to cry out in sudden terror that oh noes, she's about to get shot! Or just got cut, or fell down, or whatever thing the author introduces to make the formerly strong-willed nerves-of-steel girl cry out in pain/horror/whatever. And this sound snaps the hero back to himself, as he recognizes that "protecting those who are weak" is his goal! Or protecting "those who are precious to him" is his goal! ... and there's our transitional damsel, working overtime as the exemplar of "those who are weak and/or precious".

Of course, in stories where girls aren't on the battlefield, then the sacrificial role is played by either the kindly older-brother character or the goofy sidekick. (Because sidekicks always get it, y'know, another genre convention along with the assumption that sidekicks never get the girl, or boy, either -- and if they do, then it's pretty much guaranteed they'll be dead before the end of the movie.)

The result is that I think sometimes authors aren't strong enough or experienced enough or just plain versatile enough to realize that they can flex, maybe even break, some genre conventions and it won't alienate their audience... that a really good story is one that completely subverts -- even breaks -- major genre conventions, and that frequently this kind of story creates a new genre in its own right (even if this is a genre that will be dominated by the original for some time to come, but still, it's a new genre). I'd say Lord of the Rings qualifies as a genre-breaker and genre-creator, which might be harder to parse from the context of the original story but certainly has all the signs based on how many imitations we've had since the original. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is another, and has certainly inspired reams of urban fantasy smart-talking weapons-carrying otherwise-normal slayer-style heroines.

But if an author doesn't have the experience to know where genre can flex (or just be ignored outright), or doesn't have the guts to try, or possibly worst of all doesn't even realize the implications and issues buried in the genre conventions... then you get a load of conventions without any real thought as to what it means to have them, the implications for the story/characters, or the overall big-picture effect of those repeated conventions in the story. The author is slacking in those areas, figuring s/he will play by formula...

So it's not necessarily, I think, that an author would say, "why, yes, I love weak females who are helpless to do anything but cry the hero's name!" In fact, looking at a number of author commentary/interviews, it's clear that many offenders honestly believe they're writing something strong and fabulous for women (and this goes double for those writing transitional damsels). They can't see past the relative newness of the transitional damsel to realize she's really only flexed the genre convention mould, and certainly hasn't broken it. Or, more precisely, the author him/herself doesn't realize that there's a value (and not nearly as much risk as they might fear) in breaking that particular convention. They just take it for granted that this is the formula... and the result is that we get story after story of the same old crap, because the authors can't be bothered to see the female character as worth the time it takes to find some other way to play her part.

[a_blackpanther]

(Here via metafandom)

I think this is an interesting discussion you've opened here, but i think it's unfair to exclude "civilian" characters. Even if they don't get to fight in the literal battle at the end they have their own resources and they have their own ways of fighting the good fight, but way before they get to put their skills to use they get similarly put out of the game. Or when they're put in some kind of dangerous position they turn into damsels in distress even though they previously haven't exhibited any such tendencies. It's just as annoying as when the action girl turns into the damsel in distress.

And, unfortunately, fanfic authors tend to be really fond of this trope too. Two examples who come to mind directly (as i don't really read manga) are Aeryn Sun (of Farscape) and Elizabeth Weir (of SGA), who turn into whimpering damsels in distress at the first sign of trouble in every other fanfic.

[waterfall8484]

You're right about including civilian characters. In the context of these works it wouldn't matter so much if a civilian ultimately failed to reach the same level as other characters, as long as they were shown fighting with all the resources and talents to their disposal. That being said it wouldn't even be necessary for them to fail, as there are other ways of being useful than though raw power etc.

GIP. :~D I think Avatar: The Last Airbender is one of the few (Western) shows that have come close to having consistently real strong female characters recently. Fringe might also be included here, perhaps?

Also, Aeryn Sun rocks!