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Anime and other interactive media has quite a bit of this going on already; perhaps you just need to watch more of it. Popular examples include Gunsmith Cats (both the MCs do this), Gunslinger Girl, Ghost in the Shell, Upotte, Re:Zero, Made in Abyss (more 'girl acts like a boy', but she definitely gets beat to shit), Ranma 1/2 (and all the gender-bending anime that would follow in its footsteps; bonus points for female author), Genshin Impact, Fire Emblem, Final Fantasy, the Persona series, Fate/Stay Night (and the Nasuverse in general), You're Under Arrest!, Hunter x Hunter, Trigun, Nier: Automata, Bayonetta, Half-Life 2, and every other shooter video game or RPG that allows you to pick a female player character (the usual answer is "actually, I'd prefer to stare at a girl's ass in third person", but come on). Western examples include Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Alien, The Matrix, Kill Bill, Terminator/2, and the X-Files. For rarer 2010s examples, all the movies in the Kingsmen series have female antagonists; Edge of Tomorrow had an action girl right out of the '80s but that's an adaptation of an earlier manga so maybe it doesn't count. Also the most popular Vtuber in the world is a woman who acts like a man. This isn't an exhaustive list.
Of course, I'd actually say that in a good number of these cases the women aren't actually acting like men, but then that generates the "what's 'acting like a woman' mean?" question (in the same way as "what's 'acting white'?"). Gynosupremacists (and black supremacists) are by definition going to answer that question as selfishly as possible- and in so doing miss the truth that nobody has a monopoly on acting constructively (in fiction or in real life), most constructive (and destructive) actions don't have a gender, and all successful writers understand this. Now, it might be the case that the more flashy constructive/destructive actions do tend to go to characters on the right end of the population distribution- which is why they tend to be white and male- but the choice to just not do that is always there (the problem comes from progressives wanting it for free, hence the desire to colonize previous works rather than creating something out of whole cloth- this is the root of corruption).
The best example of "wants it for free" I think I've ever seen is the opening to Terminator 6; where it's literally "fuck you, we're killing off the whole reason for the plot in the first place; this series is now about (if memory serves correctly) some random interracial lesbian couple".
Beauty cannot come from corruption. The reason all the competent female characters come from the '80s and '90s is because feminism and gynosupremacism weren't quite yet the same thing for the average writer (or investor); that's no longer true, so all they can possibly write are Mary Sues. Places that don't have a culture of open gender warfare are less likely to suffer from this, though Japanese media also tends to have weird out-of-character things like "lost a fight, time to go back to the kitchen" (Sloot's DBZ example) so you have to contend with that instead.
Anime isn't interactive media, unless you're referring to anime-style video games.
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Hold on, which one? This needs some qualifications, because I can immediately think of several who are #1 for certain metrics/categories, and I wouldn't call Ironmouse or Gura very man-like in mannerisms.
EDIT: And yes, the difference between strong female protags then and now is that, before, there was genuine challenge for the likes of Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor. They didn't suffer from the boring inevitable invincibility we accuse shonen protags of having, they had to face genuine life-or-death struggle.
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But in the show that kicked this discussion off (True Detective) this isn't true. Navarro is a schizophrenic with anger issues whose mistakes allow her sister to commit suicide and then provokes fights in order to have herself punished and beaten for her failure and is unable to have mature emotional relationships. Danvers is a bitter, emotionally repressed, failure of a wife and mother, tormented by the death of her husband and son, who treats everyone terribly and drinks and has meaningless sex a lot.
They make obvious mistakes, mess up a lot (missing huge clues that are right in front of them) and are pretty clearly flawed in a lot of ways. They are both unlikable characters. And this appears to have been intentional as Jodie Foster describes her character as a horrible Alaskan Karen. Most of the criticism above is not that they were Mary Sues but that they were portraying mostly masculine character traits. Most of the traits we see for them would be entirely normal to see on a hard boiled male noir detective.
The arc they both go through interestingly is to be more open to feminine traits (being more emotionally present and open (and physically present for her kid in Danver's case), and to let go of the rigid hierarchal structure of the law, to see the predominantly female scut work in the town as worthy of respect. It's certainly a feminist message in that respect, but you could have swapped in two male detectives as the leads who would learn the same message without having to change anything pretty much.
For a spoiler we meet a weak female character early on who is missing fingers, they find a palm print on the murder victims clothes which matches those missing fingers, yet dismiss the suspect due to her status. It turns out she was indeed part of the group that murdered the victims. The group of female cleaners has access to the various pieces of information they needed to solve the crime they were avenging because they were able to wander around the police station, lab facility and everywhere else in town as no-one gave them a second thought including our two female lead cops.
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I think there's a fair bit of context that's needed to make a decent female action character. It's easier to suspend disbelief when it's already been suspended for fantasy settings.
A female superpowered character is just as realistic as a male Hulk. In animated media, the downside of unrealistic representation (drawings) is balanced by the ease of implementing fantasy settings. An anime will never look as realistic as a live-action show, so writers may as well make full use of fantasy settings.
On the other hand, live-action shows can very easily make us believe in the reality of their settings. Real actors make us believe that we have real people on the screen, and their work (can) add a depth of visceral emotion that cannot be replicated by animated drawings.
Here the issue is also with the actors and actresses. While it is very easy to animate a badass superheroine/magical girl/ruthless adventurer etc, getting Brie Larson to look menacing/intimidating is not an easy feat. Even if the character is supposed to be fantastically superpowered, the behavior of the actress (and supporting cast) does not meet expectations. Weak punches that don't connect getting turned into devastating conflagrations by CGI does not satisfy the way a painstakingly choreographed movie like John Wick would.
Male actors themselves go through a whole transformation to embody an 'action hero'. Sadly, most of the cape movies actors are on steroids. Keanu Reeves who does not look like a great badass in real life apparently spent a long time practicing with real guns to be 'John Wick'.
What would be needed for satisfying live-action female badass movies would be a crop of actresses who would dedicate themselves to the genre like exists on the male side, and actually work on the craft, instead of feminist fantasies that neither women or men are interested in watching.
So for good live-action female action character:
for realistic settings:
I think the biggest issue with having women on the set of an action movie is that it breaks the magic, in a way. Mostly because female actresses in general seem to be bad at demonstrating violence, and nobody making these movies seems to have any issue with that.
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I'd argue that the enjoyment of watching Gunslinger Girl wasn't all that much related to how cool the girls looked doing manly things like chasing down and shooting terrorists in city streets. I always thought the action scenes had more of a somber and tragic tone than thrilling (though they often were thrilling). Then again, perhaps being funneled into a thankless, depressing, and dangerous line of work by a society that abandoned you before turning you into a monster might be the most manly thing there is, so I guess this counts.
I couldn't watch Gunslinger Girl. The whole setup with older men mentoring young girls to do weird things, even if in this context it was assassination, seemed too close to grooming for me.
As someone who watched a few episodes of the anime and didn't stick with it, I imagine it pretty much was just grooming without any sexual component to it--was probably the point, even.
It did start as a comiket doujinshi, so the grooming angle was explicit in every sense of the word. Complete with management having the "what did we learn, Palmer" discussion after a lovesick cyborg murder-suicides her handler: "sprinkle some terrorist blood around the scene, destroy the ballistics report, and for god's sake don't do whatever we did again"
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Which one is that again?
Gura, the shark girl. Male-coded interests, male-coded avatar, male-coded lack of disgust/manners/candor, male-coded memes (some of them are harder to catch, but c'mon, titling your video referencing "pee is stored in the balls"?)
It's not necessarily a 1:1 example because, well, tomboy... but there's something qualitatively different between her and the other girl streamers in that the whole "men and women are different" thing is minimized [even if it is an act, or specifically engineered to do that, you can't tell]. It's the "girl you used to be friends with a long time ago at the age before men and women naturally drift into their own spheres of influence" thing- and while all of the streamers do this to some extent, she just happens to do it better.
Yeah, I dunno, I feel like Mori is the more man/tomboy/ladette-ish of HoloMyth, Gura just comes off as "wacky girl" to me.
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Boy-coded, maybe.
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