The Problem With “Strong Female Characters”

For years, pop culture has celebrated the rise of the “strong female character”—the action-hero archetype who is independent, witty, tough, and often emotionally closed off. While these characters were a necessary reaction to decades of one-dimensional damsels in distress, they’ve created a new limitation: women who don’t fit this narrow mold often get overlooked, undervalued, or erased.

Strength doesn’t always look like wielding a sword, firing a gun, or delivering sarcastic one-liners. Sometimes strength looks like Maya—who quietly holds her family together while carrying burdens no one else sees. Sometimes it looks like Hannah—whose vulnerability allows others to drop their guard, fostering community and empathy in ways brute force never could.

The Myth of “Strong”

When Hollywood (or publishing) defines strength as physical resilience or stoic independence, it reinforces a masculine-coded version of power. The women who excel in these roles are still, essentially, playing by rules that were never written with them in mind. That’s why so many “strong female characters” end up feeling like men in disguise rather than women with unique inner lives.

This framing also dismisses the kinds of strength that are harder to dramatize but no less important: emotional labor, caregiving, patience, creativity, empathy, and the courage to remain open in a world that often rewards hardness.

Maya: Quiet Strength

Maya doesn’t need to shout to be heard. She manages crises with calm steadiness, makes hard choices without fanfare, and keeps her family grounded when everything feels like it’s falling apart. Her strength is in endurance, in the ability to stay present when others fall apart, and in the grace she extends even when she’s exhausted. These are the strengths that often go unseen—but they hold entire worlds together.

Hannah: The Power of Vulnerability

Hannah’s superpower is her willingness to feel, to let others see her tears, her joy, her hope. Vulnerability is often dismissed as weakness, yet it’s one of the bravest acts a person can offer. It requires trust, openness, and the courage to risk hurt in order to foster connection. Hannah reminds us that leadership isn’t always about dominance—it can be about modeling authenticity and making space for others to be real too.

What We Need Instead

What we need are whole female characters—messy, layered, contradictory. Women who can be tough in one moment and tender in the next. Women whose arcs don’t require them to renounce softness or hide their emotional lives in order to be “taken seriously.”

We need stories that honor the Maya in our lives—the quiet pillars who do the invisible work of love and survival. We need stories that celebrate the Hannahs—those who prove that vulnerability is not fragility but radical courage. And we need creators brave enough to write women who aren’t archetypes but humans.

Because the problem with “strong female characters” is that they’ve given us only one version of strength. What we need instead are female characters who show us that strength comes in many forms—and that softness, openness, and emotional resilience are not weaknesses to outgrow, but powers worth recognizing.