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I ended up late with this post, with the topic being discussed on the late subreddit, but hey, let's bring it here and pretend it's original.
A lot of fiction uses the same character arc, which is called the positive character arc in the business or the hero's journey by Joseph Cambell:
the hero had a tragic event in the past
the hero has a flaw because of this event
the hero answers a call to adventure
the hero tries using the flawed approach and keeps failing
the hero reluctantly tries using the correct approach as a tool
the hero finally has some initial success, but the flaw bites him in the ass and he almost loses everything
the hero has a cathartic experience, rejects the flaw and adopts the right approach
the hero righteously wields the right approach and overcomes the opposition
This kind of arc is omnipresent: you see it in capeshit, it child-friendly comedies with Jim Carrey or Eddie Murphy, in Disney/Pixar and Dreamworks cartoons.
What I've noticed is that modern heroines do not follow the same arc. On the surface, it follows the same beats:
the heroine had a tragic event in the past
the heroine thinks she has a flaw because of this event
the heroine answers a call to adventure
the heroine lets herself be held back and keeps failing
the heroine tries letting herself go and starts succeeding
the heroine finally has some initial success, but the tragic event comes back and she almost loses everything
the heroine has a cathartic experience, rejects the tragic event and embraces her full power
the heroine righteously wields her full power and overcomes the opposition
When I look at this version of the heroine's journey, which I have tried to express in the most charitable terms, it does still look a lot like the hero's journey. Yes, the flaw being thinking you have a flaw is a weird one, but it's still a flaw. The heroine still overcomes it and the adversity, what's wrong with this arc?
I think it's the duality of the flaw that is missing. In the beginning of the hero's journey the tragic event is in the past. The hero is one with the flaw. He might not be living in the best possible world, like Shrek or Earl from Up!, but everything he has he has achieved with the flaw. The flaw is not pure weakness. You can reasonably construct a reverse story, a story of downfall or corruption:
the hero is pure
the hero answers a call of seduction
the hero tries using the righteous approach and keeps failing
the hero reluctantly tries using the flawed approach as a tool
the hero finally has some initial success, but his idealism bites him in the ass and he almost loses everything
the hero has a traumatic experience and embraces the flaw
the hero wields the flaw and obtains a victory that he learns all too late is hollow
You cannot do this with the heroine's journey, the reverse heroine's journey is just gaslighting that ends with a mental breakdown. The hero goes down and up in his journey (and up and down in his reverse journey), the heroine just goes up and up, there's no moral lesson beyond "don't let yourself be trod upon".
We just watched Queen's Gambit (which we hadn't seen before), and in it, Beth Harmon goes through a process which is indicated here to be the traditional hero's journey. She has a very obvious flaw (addiction to drugs and alcohol, also somewhat autistic way to treat other people), gets some success due to the drugs helping her visualize chess games but blows important games due to the drink, and in the end beats the Soviet world champion by consciously learning to stay away from drugs and alcohol and trusting the Power of Friendship.
Despite this, I've seen her being called a Mary Sue in some online comments, despite not fulfilling obvious characteristics (she has obvious flaws, she might be naturally talented but also works very hard to get where she's at, she doesn't sleep with handsome men but with weird chess nerds), which makes me think that this term really often gets just applied at women who are generally portrayed as talented and able main characters (I mean, if we get a chess series, of course it's going to be about a chess genius and not just some average-to-good chess player).
Every single female character in anything will be called a Mary Sue by someone on the internet, it's a sub-variant of Godwin's Law. There's a decently-sized contingent of internetizens that are just as retarded as the average twitter or reddit leftist calling everything white supremacist, just for the other side.
Also, Mary Sue has drifted a bit. I think that now a colloquial definition of Mary Sue might be "A character that the story treats with favoritism that runs counter to the audience's sense of narrative consistency." The most blatant, elemental mary sues are self-indulgent; they're meant to appeal to the writer, and to no one else. Reading a story about a Mary Sue is like someone inviting you over for sex, but it turns out to just be them wanking then asking "was it good for you too?"
It's slightly unfortunate that every Woman Protagonist Achieving Something That A Man Told Her She Couldnt Do is now called a Mary Sue or Feminist Propaganda or whatever; my sympathy is limited because the feminist propagandists have been pushing Mary Sues for years and saying anyone who doesn't like self-indulgently-written characters just hates women.
In the new Predator movie, I honestly can't tell whether the main character was intended to be a Strong Female Role Model Who Everyone Is Mean To For No Reason, Which Is Why They All Deserved To Die, or a mildly-abrasive tomboy Final Girl. It doesn't help that the scenes in the film intended to show how smart and observant she is instead imply the viewer is an idiot who needs everything spelled out to them. I think of her as Not-Funny Aubrey Plaza.
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That's one of the prime characteristics of a Mary Sue. The author's not willing to create an actual flaw for the character, so it's "I blame myself for this thing I'm not responsible for", "I don't realize how awesome I am", "other people don't realize how awesome I am", etc.
Yeah. Or the author includes characteristics that should be considered flaws, but it turns out that its not the character that has to change or improve, oh no, everyone else just had to recognize their greatness/accept them just the way they are. Everyone else had to change don't you know.
Its that failure to include change or growth since that would require acknowledging that a flaw existed that rubs me the wrong way about characters like Rey Skywalker or Captain Marvel, perhaps above and beyond the failure to make them struggle.
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This is probably much pithier than it should be, but perhaps "equal rights means equal wrongs." That is: I think an important key to writing a good female character (any character, of course, but right now it seems most salient here) is to let her make mistakes, and let them be her own fault. Agency has its downsides as well as its upsides (with power comes responsibility, culpability, blame.)
But this runs into a problem: basically any given flaw can be construed as a harmful stereotype by someone motivated to find such things. Characters belonging to demographics that have many defenders are much riskier to write for public consumption than are characters that belong to demographics that don't.
I've recently been blown away by Better Call Saul and specifically how compelling the character of Kim Wexler felt in that it so completely ridiculed 99% of recently written female lead characters.
And yeah it seems it just comes down to this, Kim actually has character development, her entire arc revolves around a real struggle with honesty and playing with the truth, which is thematically appropriate for a lawyer show, and she actually has a legitimate hard time with failures and losses, and falls and trials before she can redeem herself in whatever ways she still can.
In other words, she's actually human and not mere propaganda as Orwell would put it.
Notice that Kim is also a very competent lawyer and likeable person, and this is recognized and remarked upon by almost everyone that encounters her.
If that was all there was to her then she'd be Mary Sue-ish. But there's absolutely nothing wrong with depicting your characters as competent and well-liked! That's not the issue! First it helps that you show their competence rather than having everyone else gush about it, and second they have to struggle with actual problems and even make mistakes, even if said struggles and mistakes are invisible to all but the audience.
I loved that in BCS the only people that knew Kim's personal struggles and demons was herself and Jimmy (and us, the viewers), as far as everyone else was concerned Kim never did anything wrong and rarely made mistakes.
One thing I loved about Kim was a sort of "uncanny valley" about her that made her so close to being a Mary Sue and appear as one to so many characters within the show. It was to the extent that even I as an audience member who got to watch her darker parts felt confused as to why someone like her was with someone like Jimmy, and I had to constantly remind myself that she really wasn't the perfect hyper-competent well-put-together lawyer that her image made her out to be. Her flaws were huge and significant for the impact it had on so many lives, but also subtle due to her presentation, which I suppose was a common theme with most of the main characters in that show.
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The problem is that every female lauded by the culture war people hero is a Mary Sue.
Think of it - Ripley, Vasquez, Sarah Connor, Charlie's angels, Red Sonja, Geena Davis, Every synthia rothrock heroine are largely forgotten.
And that makes for meh cultural artifacts.
I think that lately we have been sold the feminist journey which boils down to - you are perfect, everything bad that happens to you is outside worlds fault.
Vasquez is a side character. Neither Ripley nor Sarah Connor are Mary Sues.
That is what I say - the action heroines if the past - that were liked and sometimes adored by the male audience were not May Sues. And they went the way of the dodo. The current crop - let's say after Capitan Marvel all are.
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The actress?
Couldn't be bothered to remember her roles, but she did had a knack for playing badasses.
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The man must realize a lesson of humility where he confronts his inner darkness/weakness/emptiness, the heroine must realize the truth of her inner light/power/fullness.
This coincides with the Western cultural understanding of men as inherently agentic and women as inherently unagentic. This also coincides with the pagan understanding of the act of sex as weakening men and strengthening women.
I have not watched any drag shows (besides Rocky Horror Picture Show, Disney’s The Little Mermaid, and that one episode of My Little Pony), but I am putting together pieces of a puzzle I haven’t seen: in a drag show storyline, the drag queen empowers the heroine to find, embrace, and perform her inner light/power/fullness.
One of the fascinating things about season 1 of My Little Pony Friendship is Magic is that the friendship between the two focus ponies of the episode is treated by the story structure as the hero, and both ponies involved must own the errors they made before the friendship is restored and the “hero” “wins”. In particular, the Rarity/Applejack sleepover episode and the Rarity/Fluttershy fashion model episode.
Is this a 'Western cultural understanding'? I imagine this is a pretty universal phenomenon, found in virtually all other cultures too. And even modern woke feminist media, which is ostensibly trying to deconstruct/criticise Western cultural traditions ends up reproducing the same thing (without realising it?), which is half the reason woke media sucks, because more often then not the female heroine has no agency despite the story pretending like she does.
I mean it's been more than a century and men are still trying to figure out whether it was a good idea to let women out of the kitchen. So the roots are definitely deep. Almost no culture in the world is considered sociologically matriarchal, so in majority cases the men are the decision makers so again that would bias the world view towards men as agents and women as inherently unagentic.
However there is another alternative system that does arise in certain cultural time periods. Generally during the warrior class in high levels of activity time periods. Such that often the men would go to war and the women would be the home care takers along with handling finances and the family business or their family part of the feudal estate. In these instances women are decision makers and are well versed in financial matters.
It is my belief that if industrialization had not taken place, then this would likely have been the final outcome of gender roles. A woman respected within her own sphere of influence as a well educated and skilled person but still within a societal expectation of her area of expertise being a woman's role.
So it would be akin to all men being soldiers, and all women being real estate agents as a firm rule or something along those lines separating certain skilled jobs as for women, and others for men, both being respected.
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The hero's journey typically starts with the "character vs self conflict", while the heroine's journey you describe is more like "character vs society."
The hero has to overcome some internal conflict before they can succeed in their other conflicts. But a heroine seems to not be overcoming her own internal conflict, but instead figuring out that her internal conflict is actually something imposed on them by society's stereotypes of women. Hell, the heroine's journey may be better parsed as "character vs (character vs self)."
There are movies where the heroine follows the hero's journey. Romantic films are big on them. The internal conflict is typically about which guy to pick, the trauma is some crap relationship from years ago. Lifetime/Hallmark movies do a lot of this, too. You'll see some big city lawyer (female) who has to go and close a deal on some property development in a beautiful small town. She goes and meets a handsome guy, usually they get off on the wrong foot. And he happens to run a failing business, which just happens to be the one she's there to buy. He bitches about how horrible the property developer is, but he has no choice but to sell. She hides that she's working for them. Internal struggle, people find out, everyone hates her, she realizes she loves the dude and hates her job, she quits her job and manages to save the failing business. Happy ending.
Anyways, what I hate in many Hollywood movies is that the female lead doesn't have the initial struggle at all. The story is basically reduced down to just the main conflict, but we go through the motions like there's a character vs character conflict. Instead this is basically just targeted at the audience, it's a "character vs (audience vs society)" conflict or something. Like we're supposed to expect her to fail, to struggle, but she doesn't. Our expectations, as they say, are subverted. And we're bigots if we think that the character should have struggled. Really what we're seeking is for the character to grow. If our heroine happened to meet the enemy at the beginning, it'd be a short film rather than a feature.
I've felt many recent female characters are basically written like one-dimensional villains, but they happen to always win.
This would be really interesting to unpack just because we could make the point that there are many female villains who are actually well-rounded characters because they have some tragic flaw (usually related to their reasons for being a villain) AND they act in an agentic fashion. Indeed they'd have to, or else the plot wouldn't happen! So they don't end up shortchanged in the character department like a female heroine might be.
And then discuss the point that Disney has recently started making films that examine their (female) villain characters and given them backstory... in a way that tends to explain or justify their flaws that led to villainy as not really their fault. In the process arguably making them less interesting.
Somehow I doubt we're going to get a Gaston movie that explains that his extreme narcissism and borderline obsession with Belle is the result of a traumatic childhood that drove him to be an extremely competitive perfectionist or something.
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Could this not be explained by the vastly different lived-experience of man and woman?
These stories exist within a culture, with moral lessons addressing current social ills.
The heroine thinks there is a flaw. And that thought was put into her head (and the heads of other women) by an oppressive patriarchal society.
The tragic event -- it is not one specific event that happened to the heroine, but rather a continuous and systemic oppressive event that happens to all women everywhere.
As such, the heroine's story addresses a societal issue, rather than an individual one
I think this is onto something but also missing a key step. The "lived-experience" that a flaw that that a woman thinks she has but is actually reflective of a continuous and systemic oppressive event is in itself a narrative that is taught to many women (and men) who then go on to write characters that reflect the narrative that's been taught to them about their lives.
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That's a thought I've had as well. Maybe the heroine's journey is the way it is because of the fact that women are different from men. Struggle for women is different from struggle for men.
When I go through a breakup or a death or a struggle, as a man, I deal with it. I sit in the pain, I learn about myself and the world. But I also am likely to engage in self-destructive behaviors. My experience is such that I am forced to grapple with the thing on it's own, on my own. Often with a great deal of examination of why I'm shitty, how I contributed to said bad thing.
When women I know go through a bad thing, they call upon their network, they have endless supporters (even if said supporters are superficial and transactional), but they have their support that insists they are great and the thing is actually horrible and not their fault. Women struggling involves them calling upon their vast social network of mostly female supporters. There isn't a concept of loneliness in one's shittiness for any women I know.
The heroine's journey simply resonates with women, and men think it's asinine. Women probably don't resonate with the hero's journey in the same way that men do either.
Whether one or the other is more or less "good" depends on the audience.
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Do Brontë, Woolf and Austen usually have female protagonists that follow the hero’s journey, or the heroine’s journey? I’m trying to think back to what I remember about Gossip Girls… it may be that there’s a gendered difference in what men and women want to consume. The new heroine’s journey might be building upon an earlier form, as a new variation of the damsel in distress motif. She’s saved not from a charming ideal man but from her own self-actuallyization and capitalist-individualist empowerment. I’m really not familiar enough with female protagonists in women’s literature, but lots of the Disney protagonists have the old motif.
Jane Eyre is an interesting case. It's Edward Rochester who undergoes the hero's journey in the novel, while the eponymous girl has a flat character arc in Thornfield Hall and beyond: she leaves Lowood School a fully-formed character.
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Your heroine version of heroine's journey definitely fits Captain Marvel movie. Now I had some discussions around Galadriel character in latest Rings of Power TV show. Some people defend it as hero's journey:
Galadriel had her brother die tragically
Galadriel is now raging and obsessed with revenge which is her flaw
Galadriel listens to the call for adventure to find Sauron and enact her revenge on him at all costs. And she has success finding various clues about him
Galadriel is too hardcore, pushing everybody away from her due to her single-minded focus on revenge, this is her flaw
Now there are some not so subtle hints that the character of Halbrand is the Sauron and he will use her rage to actually enact his plan. Which will cause Galadriel to almost lose everything. Then she gets rid of the flaw, gives up the whole "warrior Guyladriel" shit and becomes protector/enchantress Galadriel from the books. Now I'd actually love this arc, although I would definitely had it described differently. It would be good if in prologue Galadriel was not warrior-princess but more measured wise woman. Only death of her brother driving her to embrace the flaw.
Another potential version of this character arc using your heroine arc:
Galadriel is the bestest ever: the wisest, fairest, smartest and best warrior out there. She is pure
Galadriel will have her wings clipped in some future episode, maybe being tricked by Halbrand/Sauron and other male characters who will be successful at putting her down.
Galadriel will fail to attain as much success as before with this tactic.
Galadriel will be in the end forced to use actual force to save hobbits and other main characters. Only to be chastized for it so she returns to her pacific ways
Saurons takes advantage and kills loads of people - including weakling men that held her down
Galadriel is pissed, picks up her sword and decapitates sauron Arya Stark style in 5 seconds
All the men who offered any criticism will bend their knees to her and proclaim her as the true Elven Warlord for the end of times
The End
I am actually "looking forward" to seeing where the show moves with her story.
I would agree that "I am only fighting as a warrior because of my rage and I should be doing something else that I have more honest motives for" counts as a flawed heroine. But my confidence that a major American producer these days would have such a plot is close to zero.
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Your hypothesis has some parallels to commentary on modern villains by YouTube movie reviewer the Critical Drinker. He concludes that writers are often forced into this kind of arc by conventions that won’t let the heroine be portrayed at a disadvantage to a male antagonist.
Is it more common to have a classic hero’s journey when the heroine faces a villainess?
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There seems to be something deeply, almost perversely self-centered about the heroine's story. I used to have trouble differentiating the quintessential Mary Sue who just needs to believe in herself, from the popular Male Action Hero, who is already amazing at everything he tries to do, and whose flaws usually don't impact the story much at all. What I've realized is that the heroine's story is so much more focused on an internal reality, whereas the hero's story is very external and is focused on his impact on the world.
Generally a male action hero will use clever tricks to beat enemies, engaging in lots of shootouts, manipulations, reconnaissance, etc.. Q female action hero will do the same, but the focus will be on her, how cool she is while she's doing it, how hot she is even though she doesn't wear makeup, how unflappable she is in a dangerous situation.
These are generalizations of course, with plenty of exceptions. I think the key is to remember that even though the heroine's journey looks similar on the surface, really the whole external world is just being used to reveal things about the main character. Some level of inner character development and some level of external accomplishments are good, but heroes and heroines often occupy the extremes on either side when usually the middle is better.
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