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Fi's Five Favorite Female Action Heroes #1: Major Kira Nerys (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)

3/29/2015

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(Click the links to read Favorite Female Action Hero #2, #3, #4, and #5)

First of all, this is a countdown that demands a few honorable mentions.
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As you can see, this month was a tough one, but we've reached my final favorite female action hero of all time, Major Kira Nerys.
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Deep Space Nine is the most neglected Trek series, neither held as classic like the original series or Next Generation nor reviled like Voyager or Enterprise, which is sad, because its character and plot development are the deepest, most nuanced, varied, intense, and successfully experimental of any incarnation of the show.

If you haven't seen it, here are the basics:

After the planet Bajor at last repels a generations-long occupation by the Cardassian Empire, The Federation of Planets sets up an outpost in orbit around Bajor called Deep Space Nine, at the request of the Bajoran Provisional Government, to help with reconstruction and monitor Bajor's progress toward qualifying for Federation membership.

Kira Nerys, a Major in the Bajoran Militia, is assigned to Deep Space Nine as Federation Commander Benjamin Sisko's First Officer, in the hope of encouraging Bajoran/Federation cooperation.

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With me so far?

Kira's been fighting for Bajoran independence since childhood, and she's not thrilled about depending now on a more powerful ally. She and Sisko immediately get off on the wrong foot, and to make things more complicated, a stable wormhole connecting the Alpha and Gamma quadrants of the galaxy is discovered next to Bajor shortly after the establishment of DS9, making what was supposed to be a backwater outpost into a hub of scientific exploration and, like it or not, a critical strategic position.

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Trek, for all its great qualities, has a well-earned reputation for thinly drawn characters. Benevolent, enlightened, anti-conflict humans, aliens defined by a single broad cultural trait. DS9 does the best job of breaking this trend, especially with Kira.

She's a guerrilla freedom fighter suddenly turned legitimate by her people's victory over their war-crime-happy one-time conquerors, and that equation isn't glossed over.

She's a passionate, uncompromising defender of the downtrodden, but she's got plenty of moral grayness, some war crimes of her own under her belt, and the concept of fun tends to elude her after all the unimaginable awfulness she's been through.

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That doesn't mean she won't try for her friends.
She's also intensely religious, their spirituality having been one of the Bajoran people's only consolations during the occupation. It's enough to cause a rift between her and a Federation school teacher on DS9 who begins teaching science to the station's children, Bajorans included, and to make her advocate a return to a caste system that would have disqualified Bajor from Federation protection, when one of Bajor's historical religious leaders is resurrected from the dead.

Hey, it's still Star Trek.

Over the course of the series, Kira has to become more open-minded, form friendships across cultures, make an uncomfortable transition from violent rebel to administrator and diplomat in order to keep advocating for her people, and allow herself to recognize corruption where it arises among the Bajoran clergy, all without losing sight of her personal faith.

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It would be easy for Kira to fall into the subordinate girl part, as the series's Captain's mismatched first officer who has to learn to respect, follow, and eventually love him, but the ensemble structure of the series stops her from falling into the same traps a character like her would in a movie. The growing mutual respect and friendship between Kira and Sisko is one of the important plot threads, but that's all it is, a friendship, and one thread out of many. 

They each get their own in-depth plotlines, romantic and otherwise. They each get to play protagonist in a nearly equal number of episodes, and while his tie in more closely to the (not particularly interesting) overarching mythology of the series, she becomes more of a leader at the station than he is with all his mythology related distractions, and her plotlines are more frequently action-packed and emotionally powerful.

She’s the one who ends up forming a close friendship with an elderly Cardassian man after being kidnapped and forced to impersonate his daughter.

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She's the one who once had to pay a profiteer she despises to help her conceal a murder from the investigator who would later become her best friend.

She's the one who ends up sharing guardianship of a naive political refugee with the same Cardassian overlord who abducted Kira's mother as his consort when Kira was three.

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...Cue wacky sitcom music?
It would be equally easy, with her formidable battle history established in the first episode, for her to end up as that one character everyone gets to beat up to prove how tough they are.
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*Cough*
But no, her unrivaled skill set in the field of fighting dirty and fighting to win is shown as often as it's told. She's nearly undefeated in onscreen physical combat (which there's plenty of on DS9), and by the final season, with the galaxy in all-out war, she's called upon as an expert to train Cardassian military leaders in the same guerrilla tactics she used to defeat them, to make them more useful unwilling allies against the greater threat from the Gamma quadrant.
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It's up for grabs who's more annoyed and embarrassed by this.
She's the best at what she does, and she doesn't need to be shown up in action, because action isn’t her problem. Her vulnerability comes from her struggles to deal with her anger and adapt to living as a whole person in the tenuously liberated Bajor she's worked her whole life toward creating, and it’s a long, difficult, fascinating journey.
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Like my picks for greatest female action heroes? If so, this is the point where I’m obligated to note that I create female action heroes as well as analyze them. If you’ve enjoyed this list, I’d like to introduce you to another resistance fighter defending her species, named Mina Todd:
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Or, if you’re in a lighter mood, a certain zombie slayer named Cassie Fremont.
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Keep demanding cool and complicated female heroes, everyone!

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!
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Giveaway + Guest Post by Jenniffer Wardell, Author of Beast Charming

3/28/2015

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Today I get to welcome back Jenniffer Wardell, in celebration her brand new release, Beast Charming! There's a giveaway at the end of this post, or you can get your copy now...
Right here!
Jenniffer's already confessed her most embarrassing fictional crush on this blog, and you can read my review of her laugh-out-loud sweet fractured fairytale debut, Fairy Godmothers, Inc right here. I've got a Beast Charming review brewing as well, but in the meantime, I'm asking Jenniffer,

"What can fans of Fairy Godmothers, Inc. expect from Beast Charming? Any new favorite fantasy or fairytale tropes you're riffing on this time around?"

Finding a Sidekick's Heart (In a Protagonist's Body)

I had grudges against certain fairy tales.

It might not have been so bad if I hadn't loved them so much, but there would always be one or two things that would just drive me absolutely nuts about all my favorites. The supporting characters never got to say much – and back story was completely out of the question – and the lines between good and bad, right and wrong, pretty and ugly were always so clearly drawn. You were either one or the other, and there was no in-between.

Even as a kid I knew how stupid it was, much as anyone did who saw the teacher's pet dump one of their classmates off the monkey bars when no one was looking. Most people don't fit neatly into categories, and if they do it's usually because you're not looking hard enough.

So I was the kid who never really trusted Prince Charming, and thought that the dragon would have been a lot nicer if they hadn't broken into his house and tried to steal his stuff. If I ever wrote a fairy tale, I swore, I'd get the real story out of everybody.

In "Fairy Godmothers, Inc.," my biggest focus was on giving people who were generally supporting characters a chance to shine. I didn't get to really play with any character expectations for Kate, because the traditional story never really expected the fairy godmother to be anything at all. The same was true for Jon, the classic "second son" prince who was generally expected to fade into the background.

 In the classic fairy tales, they would have both been consigned to plot devices. Simply giving them a voice, as well as the chance to propel the story forward, changed the story past all recognition (and hopefully made people laugh). Rellie, who would normally have been the star of the show, was happy to play backup – if nothing else, it took some of the pressure off.

But it got me thinking. I was usually dismissive of a story's "main" characters – they always supposedly fit so neatly into that black-and-white world I didn't believe in – but Rellie had turned out to be pretty cool. What if the main characters didn't believe in the labels any more than I did? What if they were secretly just as quirky as the supporting cast always got to be, and hated the fact that they were never allowed to show it?

What if they didn't even realize they were the protagonists, and just thought of themselves as background characters in someone else's story.

So I met Beauty. This isn't the good, sweet girl you know from the fairy tales – she's got a temper, is seriously awkward in social situations, and has failed at being the romantic lead so many times that she wants nothing more than to fade into the next available crowd shot. She's not looking for a happily-ever-after, and isn't in any shape to save anyone with the purity of her heart. All she wants is a place to hide from her father's unreasonable expectations, a steady paycheck, and maybe a friend who understands what it's like to not fit in.

Which, you know, a big, furry guy with claws might be able to do.


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About Beast Charming

Beauty Tremain had spent her life being thrown into the path of ogres and noblemen by her title-hungry father, Noble Tremain (whose name is really Frank.) Escaping the bonds of her sadistic matchmaker father to work for a dragon-owned temp agency, Beauty hesitantly takes a mysterious job working for a butler in an enormous mansion. When the mansion’s owner, James Hightower, proves to be a seven-foot-tall brooding beast with the bad habit of hurling statuary from the rooftop, it’s up to Beauty to roll up her sleeves and argue her way to a paycheck.

When Beauty and James start having feelings for each other, however, they determine their relationship is the least of their concerns. Beauty’s father re-enters the scene armed with lawsuits and threats. To add to the chaos, James’s mischievous ex-fiancee shows up to reclaim him. Beauty and the beast need to somehow control their tempers long enough to return the favors with schemes of their own.

Click here to order your copy!
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About Jenniffer Wardell

Jenniffer Wardell has won several awards from the Utah Press Association and the Utah Headliners Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. Her first novel, Fairy Godmothers, Inc., debuted in April 2013, marking the beginning of her brand of wit, fantasy, and romance. She currently lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.

You can find her on her blog, on Facebook, and on Twitter.

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Fi's Five Favorite Female Action Heroes #2: Mulan

3/22/2015

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(Click the links to read Favorite Female Action Hero #3, #4, and #5)

Hey, how did a Disney princess end up on a Women's History Month countdown of female action-badasses?

It may sound strange, but Mulan is the best fit for the hero part of the equation out of every character who came close to consideration for this list.

Mulan isn't simply a heroine by virtue of being the main female character in her story. She's a classic, textbook, clever underdog epic hero of the kind you'll read about in story structure manuals with an invariable masculine pronoun. Only she's a woman. And she faces challenges that relate to being a woman, and she wins more style points than many a male hero struggling with the notorious blandness that often latches itself to classic hero types...

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…All without losing any of the classical elements that work.

If you haven't seen the movie, here's how it goes:

Mulan is failing spectacularly in her attempts to impress her village matchmaker to make her family proud. She's smart and beautiful, but she has a bad habit of cutting corners (as so many smart folk do).

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And she has difficulty with things like poise and speaking when spoken to (as so many smart folk do). She still has working feet and her family loves her, but otherwise life treats her about as well as you'd expect, being an intelligent woman in imperial China. And war is looming.

Mulan's elderly father gets drafted, and she's sure he won't survive another battle, so she disguises herself as a man, steals his conscription notice and armor, and runs away to join the army in his place, knowing she'll be executed if she's discovered.

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So far, no wishing, no prince charming, no following along with another character's mysterious master plan. She sets the story in motion by acting, to save her father but also, as she later admits, to find out who she is and whether she can be worth anything in a life she chooses for herself, after she's found herself worthless in the one that was assigned to her. 

Obviously, there's a lot of particular relevance here for women, the fight to develop an identity in a world that's that's always trying to relegate you to a narrow peripheral role, and it's a theme that's often done badly. 

Well-meaning storytellers out to show how equal a heroine is to men often show nothing but how perfectly competent said heroine is and how unfair the world around her is, and only succeed in proving her unequal to her male counterparts in the field of being a hero the reader or viewer can enjoy rooting for. Mulan is the woman-out-to-prove-herself done right, because like every likeable male hero on a self-discovery, coming-of-age quest, she has to do more than show other people how wrong they are about how great she already is.

She has to struggle, learn, and grow.

That genius's laziness?

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It comes back to bite her. More than once.
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She has to work her ass off to learn how to fight.
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Via musical montage, of course, but the principal is the same.
At the same time, she keeps and develops the best parts of herself, courage and nobility, of course, like any classic-style hero, but particularly that knack she has for out-of-the-box problem solving, which she uses to win her peers' respect,
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And then win a critical battle and save her captain's life.
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Right, yes, there is a love interest in this movie, who shows up after Mulan's set the plot in motion.
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Shang is the captain of her unit, an intimidating badass in his own right, but with a soft side she catches glimpses of after she earns his respect and saves his life. When her secret comes out (as a hero's secrets always do), he allows her to escape execution and run away home in acknowledgement of his debt to her, to her but disowns her as a friend for lying to him, until she makes the choice to keep on being a hero, with or without anyone’s appreciation or her father's draft hanging over her. She goes to Shang and their friends with her plan to stop the bad guys and save China, and after she proves herself again, he relents and acknowledges her now-superior skills and the brilliance of her plan and agrees to follow her lead, causing her to have to rescue him again, before she goes on to save the day on her own. When the action's over, he shows up indicate that she’s won him along with the day.

You may recognize Shang's role from 90% of all female movie characters usually depressingly classified as "strong and empowering."

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He's even the only member of the team who refuses to dress appropriately for the mission at hand, for fear of spoiling his all-important sex appeal.
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And his entire backstory revolves around daddy issues.
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Not that I'm complaining about this role in the case of Mulan. As much as I particularly love works that treat male and female characters equally all within one story, we've got a lot of playing field to level before characters like Shang get to be complained about.

While most of the women on this list are favorites I've acquired as an adult and have very adult universes to match, Mulan is the one hero I'll say, completely seriously, that every little girl should know. There are more male-led adventures like hers than any boy could experience in a lifetime, but for girls, she's an oasis in a massive void.

Now let's watch her take down the villain as directly, deliberately, and violently as any Disney heroine (or Disney protagonist, for that matter) has ever been allowed to, instead of watching him self-destruct in an unsatisfying accident.


A little wackiness helps her get away with this.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!
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Fi's Five Favorite Female Action Heroes #3: Michonne (The Walking Dead)

3/15/2015

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(Click the links for Favorite Female Action Hero #4 and #5)

Oh most definitely there shall be some zombie slaying on our Women's History Month countdown!

If you don't know The Walking Dead comics or TV show (as small as those odds are if you're on my blog), it's a pretty basic open-ended story of the struggles of the survivors of the zombie apocalypse, and Michonne is the one with the sword.

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Is that a silhouette or what?
As previously noted this month, there's an abundance of female characters who are given swords and aren't thereby made notable characters. Michonne even suffers from some of the problems that so often plague them. How she got so good with the sword isn't really explained on the show, and the comics use the laughable explanation that she was a fencing champion in college.
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These styles of swordplay are about as compatible as an 9-track tape on a turntable.
So in spite of her coolness being thrown together without quite enough thought, as is so often the case with female characters designed for the purpose of coolness, what is it about Michonne that works so well?

Well, in the comics, it mainly comes down to the surprising lack of patronization surrounding her. This isn't generally one of The Walking Dead comics' strong suits. This is a series that brushes off the formation of an all-male council of leaders among the characters with about four lines of dialogue about how unsuitable all the female characters available at the time would be. 


The accuracy of those few lines should be enough to illustrate the bigger problem.

Michonne, however, despite being something of an exception in the Walking Dead comic-verse for being a competent woman, is never treated as an exception. She's about as good and as bad, as tough and as vulnerable, as any of the male stars. She's counted as part of the muscle of the group, never with any particular fanfare or "for a girl" asterisk implied. Of course, this has a lot to do with the simple practicality of a sword in a scenario where stealth is constantly a concern.

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Also, she came up with this revolutionary stealth technique that none of the other characters usually remember exists.
After a very long, slow build of existing as one of the team not stuck in the usual "the girl" spot, she and our hero, Rick, form that nearly unheard of thing for two characters in their position: a solid platonic friendship, including a partnership as Alexandria's police force, as introduced to the show last week at the time of this posting.

The comic points in her favor may not sound like a lot, but they're enough to make her an icon in a non-ironic, non-condescending way, and as comics go, that's not nothing.

TV-verse Michonne, on the other hand, is something so much more.

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Yes, that's a smile.
The TV version of The Walking Dead has plenty of its own writing issues, including with its female characters.
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(Mainly in the early seasons)
But one of its best overall deviations from the source material is the way it preserves enough of the humanity of the characters for the horrors they face to keep mattering.

That doesn't mean the show shies away from the more horrific content.

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Oh no, not at all.
But unlike the comics, which dwell on the misanthropic "we are The Walking Dead" theme to the point of numbness, the TV show knows when to let up enough to remind us to love the characters. That, combined with the charisma of Danai Gurira, makes all the difference for Michonne.

The TV show removes Michonne's less appealing qualities (she's racist and sexually manipulative in the comics) and also cuts out her more predictable rape-revenge plotline with The Governor, making their highly personal enmity revolve around a he-said-she-said tug of war for the trust of the other characters instead.

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Also that little incident with a zombified little girl.
With those elements gone, her notoriously shrouded backstory comes down to an ordinary lawyer and family woman, stripped by the apocalypse of everything that made her any of the above, trying to figure out who she is now, and the mirroring of her plotline with Rick's is more pronounced. 

As he gets crazier and more broken by the zombie-filled world, she gets saner and puts herself back together from what she lost all at once. As he gets more distrustful of humanity, she gets more open and hopeful for the future of civilization, and their friendship ends up becoming the two halves of the group's conscience.

For being every bit the badass she was in the comics, an unquestioned physical protector of the survivors, she's become strangely close to what might be called the heart of the show.

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While there’s every possibility that Rick and Michonne may turn out to be an excellent TV romance someday in the future, there’s also every possibility they may not. It’s not assumed, because filling in the role of the romantic foil in his story is not her simple, obvious purpose for existence. She’s not just one of the better examples of The Girl in action stories. She defies the formula.

And it must be noted, she does this not only by being a multifaceted character, a force to be reckoned with in a fight, and an icon of action-hero cool, but by being all this on a show where other women are too.
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This spot on the list was a tossup between Michonne and the Carol who bears no resemblance to her comics counterpart, the one who went from abused housewife to lovable sociopath who can take down a season-long town-sized villain with a single rocket launcher and force us to ponder the question of how many children she could kill and still be a hero.
There are plenty of clips of Michonne and her sword kicking Walker ass that I could leave you on, but to capture the cool-factor that hovers around her, let's go with the instant of her transition from page to screen.
Yeah, that’s her.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

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Fi's Five Favorite Female Action Heroes #4: Hit-Girl (Kick-Ass)

3/8/2015

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(Click here to read favorite female action hero #5)

Continuing our Women's History Month countdown, this week's deep and stylish female badass is the one and only literal superhero who simply couldn't be ousted from this list. Yes, she's technically owned by Marvel, but she’s not part of either the DC or Marvel main universes, so I’m getting away with this one. That’s my rationalization, and I’m sticking to it.

(Disclaimer: This is one of those rare and embarrassing moments when I'm forced to admit near-total ignorance of a story's printed origins. I haven't read the Kick-Ass comics, and this post is based entirely on the awesomeness of movie-verse Hit-Girl as played by the ever amazing Chloe Moretz)

If you don't know Hit-Girl, here are the basics:

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Sorry, as a fellow homeschool-ee, couldn’t resist slipping that in once I found it. Now we’ll get to the basics.

Superheroes are fictional, as they are in our universe. Or they were. Super powers remain fictional, but a handful of ordinary humans are taking up the tradition of stylized, masked vigilantism for their own various reasons. The first one we meet is our hero, Kick-Ass (A.K.A Dave Lizewski).

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But Hit-Girl and her father, Big Daddy (A.K.A Mindy and Damon Macready respectively),
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have already been in the game for years, out of the public eye, waging war against the criminal syndicate that killed Hit Girl's mother. They're not using the costumes to spread a legend. They're Big Daddy's way of making Hit-Girl happy and comfortable sharing his revenge-seeking lifestyle.

They're not the no-killing-code kind of costumed vigilantes.
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By the time we meet Hit-Girl, she's utterly lethal in both attitude and skill and in love with the masked lifestyle, the only one she knows.

And she's eleven years old.

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It's a combination that's earned the character a lot of criticism. She's often been called inappropriately sexualized and exploitative.

I heartily disagree.

In fact, I find movie-verse Hit-Girl quite possibly the least exploitative female super in fiction.

Her costume precisely captures her persona.

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It's girly and juvenile (including a particularly controversial schoolgirl skirt), but also practical and not remotely revealing. There's nothing about it that's inherently sexual (for the love of god, real schoolgirls still wear those skirts), yet it makes people uncomfortable because of the assumption that a female superhero/female with power/female with symbols of innocence must somehow be a sex object. The fact that she starts out as an actual child forces the viewer to double-think the role that would be forced on an older female character in the same position.

Hit-Girl is not eye candy, and she's not a damsel in disguise. She's a hero with every bit as much depth and complexity and about as active a role as Kick-Ass, our actual protagonist.

She's a born and bred badass with more experience in masked street violence than almost any adult in the game, yet with a complete lack of experience with normal life, even more so than other people her age. When she steps into a room, no matter how many fully grown heavily armed men are in it, her sheer comic-book-fantasy-grade ability can command instant fear and respect, but there's a childlike put-on quality to the flirty femme fatale banter she attempts.

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She doesn't talk like someone else's fantasy. She sounds like exactly what she is; a kid dealing with a crush (on Kick-Ass) and playing and experimenting with growing up by imitating what she thinks sexually active adults are like, except those ideas of adulthood she's mimicking are drawn mainly from comic books, and she has a rather... advanced vocabulary for her age.

Hey, she deals with mobsters every day. Give her a break.

Hit-Girl is exactly what she should be, what she would be under the circumstances. She's a frighteningly cold and efficient killing machine, and a lonely, awkward, vulnerable human being.

I'm not the biggest fan of the second Kickass movie, partly due to its uneven pacing and tone, and mainly because of its unbelievably clumsy and lazy handling of the other female characters, Night Bitch,

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Just put her in the fridge already and stop laughing.
The high school cat pack,
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Dear screenwriters, have you ever actually met a teenage girl? Because I think you just watched the Mean Girls movies a few times. With the sound off. You watched Mean Girls with the sound off, didn’t you?
And especially Katie.
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How are we going to get Kickass back in costume after he swore it off last movie for his utterly sweet-hearted girlfriend? By character assassination WITH A NUCLEAR DEVICE.
But one definite highlight is getting to see a now teenage Hit-Girl (who seems to have some magical insulation against these mishandlings possibly fueled by Chloe Moretz's natural awesomeness) forced into a normal setting as Mindy Macready, trying to adapt her superhero confidence to carry over into everyday life with wildly hit-or-miss results.
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Okay, not quite this hit-or-miss, but I couldn’t find a screencap of the equivalent scene from Kick-Ass 2.
Hit-Girl's personal struggles explore all the serious downsides there would inevitably be to being a rigorously trained, highly skilled, pubescent masked vigilante. Yet it doesn't take away from the cool, want-to-be-her fantasy of what she is, which is, after all, what we love our action heroes for.

For example…

(Watch this one with the sound on. The music choices are as over-the-top beautiful as the action itself.)

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!
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Fi's Five Favorite Female Action Heroes #5: Brienne of Tarth (A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones)

3/1/2015

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So I've been planning this topic for, what, two years now? Finally, in 2015, in honor of Women's History Month, I'll be devoting my March countdown to the coolest action-style heroes ever to carry ovaries.

Note: For reasons that will become evident next month, I had to make DC and Marvel characters ineligible for this one. Sorry.

Kicking things off, we've got Brienne of Tarth, from A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones.

If anyone out there doesn't know the Ice and Fire books or Game of Thrones TV series, Brienne is an anomaly in her dark and patriarchal medieval fantasy universe. She pursues the life of a knight instead of a lady in all but name, and she's damn good at what she does.
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There are a number of sword-wielding, ass-kicking women in fiction, however. Brienne isn’t even the protagonist of her story (not that a single Ice and Fire protagonist can be narrowed down). What makes her so special?

For starters, look at her.
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Unlike so many of those sword-wielding women who look like they shouldn't be able to lift said swords, Brienne is quite obviously, evidently, physically capable of said sword-wielding ass-kicking.

This isn't to say that all action heroes should be human tanks, of course. As a woman of unassuming stature myself, I've always had a particular fondness for the small, quick, clever hero types, male and female alike. But next to the many heroines imbued with improbable brute strength for their petite forms, there's something very refreshing about a female hero who looks exactly like someone with her plate armor wearing prowess would look.

Come to that, there's something terribly refreshing about an unpetite female hero in any case.

As with any good hero, though, the best of Brienne is not what she looks like or what she wears, or what she can do. It’s who she is.

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Brienne is born into a no win situation. Being born female in Westeros is bad enough, but being female, high-ish born, and unable to fit at all into the mold of a lady, she fits in with no one, men or women. Her father tries to marry her off, but no one wants her unless she'll act the way a woman is expected to, terms she refuses to accept. She joins the all-male forces of Renly Baratheon, one of the claimants to the throne, and his men make fun of her looks and place bets on who'll take her virginity.

Where practically any other female character with this kind of origin story would become a one-note force of anger and female machismo out to show up every man she meets and look down her oft-broken nose at every traditional woman trying to make do with the life she's been assigned, that's not at all what Brienne is.

She rightly resents her treatment by most of the world, and she's privately hurt by their judgment, but she continues to be what she is and believe in her knightly code of justice and honor, no matter how little it means to anyone else in her world. She refuses to let her life revolve around pursuing marriage at all costs or sacrifice who she is to attain it, but that doesn't mean she rejects meaningful relationships where they arise, like so many characters out to prove they 'don't need a man'.

She’s not afraid to offer her trust and friendship to people who seem deserving, as few and far between as they are in Westeros. She falls in love with Renly due to the simple, reasonable fact that he treats her with decency and respect. She also has no problem swearing loyalty to Catelyn Stark,

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a smart and tough lady who lives a far more traditional role, for the same reason, and because she recognizes Catelyn's own brand of nobility, different as it is from her own.

And of course, her unlikely friendship-of-convenience-turned-real with Jaime Lannister is a series highlight in its strange, slow progression, in spite of Jaime’s less forward ideas on women and his lack of much of the nobility Brienne seeks out in people.

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Brienne is both strong and open enough that their relationship manages to change and improve them both.

Okay, now that you know why we should all love Brienne, let's get back to the action and watch her take on The Hound in one of my favorite TVverse-added scenes ever. If you don’t know enough backstory to enjoy the banter, the fun starts at the 4:10 mark.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!
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