The Art To Writing Women
An examination of what makes female characters well-written and the perennial myth of walking boobily down the stairs
I knew from the start that I would like Chainsaw Man. I've previously enjoyed Tatsuki Fujimoto's last work, Fire Punch, a lot: a bizarre, dizzying experience where nothing was quite as it seemed, a work that — now, years after I've first read it — barely seemed to hold itself together. Chainsaw Man, thankfully, is way more coherent and cohesive, a concise, short tale on family both found and born into, belonging, and who gets to wield power and how. There's a lot of heart in it throughout. It is, also, possibly the first time in the history of Weekly Shonen Jump that male desire is depicted in an organic manner — protagonist Denji is pretty vocal about it, but women don't get sexualized to hell and back. As a result, and most importantly to me, there's female characters I liked, loved, even desired. You got Himeno, a relaxed, sexually promiscuous character, and has the chemistry between her and Aki thriving as a result. You got Reze, whose arc is beautifully constructed from start and finish. There is Quanxi, a hot, very hot, very capable female character, who has a lesbian harem of demons (hello????). There is Kobeni, a more cowardly type of person who actually quits the devil hunter job midway through the manga only to be roped back into it. And lastly, Makima, a woman so evil, so cunning, so calm and constantly on top of things. Her controlling attitude has my entire timeline barking for her. (I promise this is plot relevant, but also my friends love women.)
This isn't your average manga published in Weekly Shonen Jump; good story and slim chapter count aside, there's more female characters than usual, which are sexy but not as sexualized as other female characters of other manga, and they contribute to the story in many different ways. If it ever came up in conversation, I would agree (or argue) that Chainsaw Man, as a whole, is well-written, no doubt about it. Here's the question that has been running through my head the past couple weeks, though: are the female characters well-written? And once this question pops up, others flock along, like: what marks a well-written character, what does it even mean to write female characters; why even bother to make a distinction between characters just based on gender? Why do I care anyway? Can't I just move on like a normal person, consume the next thing?
The essay will cover the first four questions, more or less. The last one, I can answer rather simply: no, I can't. Everything I've read after this — Lovesickness by Junji Ito; Vicious by V.E Schwab; Golden Kamuy by Satoru Noda — led me to this question, again and again. This is why, prior to writing this piece, I asked my friends and acquaintances three questions:
Do you seek out works with female characters? Why or why not?
What makes a female character well written?
Can you always tell when a female character is written by a man?
"writing female characters" yields me at least 3 results on how men should write female characters. The image results are funnier: it's full of examples and mockery of male authors writing female characters.
The advice to men doesn't break much of a new ground: write something emotionally resonant; write a female character without zeroing in on her apperance; give her a voice, an opinion; she has flaws and, gasp, she is her own person, as this Masterclass post puts it. There's an occasional emphasis on "strong" female characters, like in the title of this post. The highlight of this one? Turn your male character into a woman, also the very last point of this post. Because this is writing advice, though, it means there's always an idiotic statement smuggled in there by somebody that generalizes to the point of nowhere. Take this piece of advice, for instance: Most women are motivated by two things: safety and service, which makes you want to snap back, isn't everyone's? How is that a specific woman thing? Unless you think of a woman as the person behind the stove, it makes no sense to pin a specific gender to something as universal as the desire for safety and service. But this aside, most writing advice on how to write women boils down to, or explicitly mentions, one phrase: make her human.
It sounds easier on paper than in practice, though, making a character human, especially when the character isn't the POV. There's the crucial inner world you end up missing, for one; there's a reduced lack of screentime, which means there's less time to explore all the contradictions that make a character human. Then there's the factor of characters being perceived a certain way — say when a male character can't help but compare all the women he comes across as his mother— which means every woman is rendered to nuances serving the protagonist's characterization more so than being real people. And even if a women was the protagonist and the POV, there is no guarantee that the story allows her to act differently in situations when that is not the focus of the story. It's a gargantuan task, to make every single character human.
"And yet it's possible with men," you might protest. Is it, though? Let's keep the answer to this question suspended for a moment.
She breasted boobily down the stairs is a phrase, almost a magical shorthand, that even my male acquaintances online can recite. "Even" they could reliably tell you when a woman is written by a man from moments like these, the utter degradation of the woman to her bodily components, displayed for the male gaze like meat displayed in a butcher's shop. But there are characters that would certainly fly under the radar for some of the guys I asked*.* Take Beth Gamon, the protagonist of Queen's Gambit, written by a man, and later adapted for the screenplay by men. When answering my questions, specifically the third, it's Ria who brought her up to me: though I enjoyed [Queen's Gambit] you can really, really tell. Certainly, she's not breasting boobily down the stairs; she's not too focused to her appearance, she's got a drive on her own, she's got opinions that differ from others. But her sexual endeavors and lack of meaningful female friendships (outside her foster mother, who dies halfway through, and the penultimate episode where her Black childhood friend magically helps her) all congregate to a point where you get the sense it's not a woman writing her. Case in point: when Beth has her mental breakdown, she looks hot first, miserable second. **Even at her lowest, there is no aggression here. I thought we should write women like men though? Men get violent when they're mad, don't they?
Men made me hate, then appreciate female characters.
Prior to watching Clannad sometime 2014, I didn't care for female characters. Scratch that; for the most part in my anime watching life, I hated female characters. Mind you, I wasn't in any kind of "not like other girls" phase (hard to be, anyway, when you're literally not like other girls by virtue of being the only Turkish girl); I saw Winx Club, loved that, and that shaped my personality; I loved Barbie films; I would try to keep up with Bravo magazines and gossip too, though we never had money to buy any. It's just that I loved action. I loved shonen. I loved sports shonen as recently as 2018. And in shonen, female characters had a certain reputation. In sports shonen, girls being managers made sense from a logistic standpoint. But for all the others, they were either useless from the start or made useless later. They had the most impractical outfits. Men, especially the guy of the cast who chases after women, would comment on this female character's boobs, turning her chagrin to a point of humor. And — an offense that I would take to heart, again and again — they would like the blandest, most irritating protagonist. Lucy from Fairy Tail liked loud, brash, childish Natsu for reasons I am not sure of to this day; Tea/Anzu from Yu-Gi-Oh, who not only couldn't play the game in any capacity but also liked wimpy, boring Yugi for reasons I am not sure of to this day, again; Anna from Shaman King, relevant first then relegated later, also in love with a boy that didn't exactly seem lovable; Aki from Yu Gi Oh 5Ds who was sorta-kinda pretty next to Yuusei, who was a clinically asexual character the same way most shonen protagonists tend to be; Matsuoka Gou from Free! Iwatobi Swim Club, whose entire character was... fawning over muscles, turning female sexuality more to a joke than anything substantial; don't get me started on Mikasa Ackermann from Attack on Titan; Momoi Satsuki from Kuroko no Basket, who liked Aomine, whose singleminded ambition and obsession towards Kagami read more homoerotic than heterosexual, and Riko from the same show who had this love-hate thing going on with a minor character like Hyuuga; and lastly, Inoue Orihime from Bleach, who had the most whiny-looking eyes that pissed me off without even me reading a single chapter. They look different, but are as alike as identical twins: they don't get to grow — not as nicely, not as strong —, don't get to have the fun, the dynamics, the hardships, don't have more than one meaningful moment on screen compared to their male counterparts do. Violence happens to them. They get abducted, they get hypnotized, they get defeated. If it's not by the bad guys in the text, then the violence happens by the male fans that ogle and sexualize her front to back.
So the first time I saw Tomoyo in Clannad, whose first introduction is beating up the protagonist's best friend Sunohara like a fighting game combo, I was enarmored. Though it is a harem and an adaptation of a visual novel, Clannad wisely sticks to only one route — Nagisa — and lets the other girls be friends with Tomoya, the protagonist. I couldn't even tell you what her route even was, or how she and Tomoya became friends. I just remember her beating up Sunohara and it was a done deal. Her and Taiga in Toradora, another show I watched because the guys in my class told me to, made me obsessed with female characters in a way I never was before. And they all liked violence. They hit their love interests repeatedly. They weren't boy-obsessed, and their problems had real gravitas. I was obsessed with how readily Hitagi Senjougahara of Bakemonogatari employed violence, especially towards protagonist and eventual love interest Araragi; how her love was something to be earned for him. It felt honest. It felt real.
There is one more female character of Chainsaw Man that I left out earlier. Her name is Power and she is a blood fiend. Throughout Chainsaw Man, she's aggressive, loud, and violent, and protagonist Denji even remarks how unsexy he finds her even though they do all sorts of physically intimate things. It's only now at age 24 that I am taken with Aki so much. At age seventeen? Power would've been the character to make me realize that it's fine that I like girls.
Of course, this is not to say that a female character wielding violence means anything more than her taking an active role at certain points in the story (after all, you can't passively fight). But in my teenage years, just the act of them doing so meant that they wielded a certain sort of power: a power over their lives and the people they interacted with. In my juvenile head, violence—actual violence, violence between two normal people, not the sanitized superhero violence Hollywood likes—violence was an answer to an unspoken question. Even now, when I write and conceive female characters, they move as though something hurt them. Their response is to hurt the world back, in whatever way they can imagine. Violence, to them, means agency. When I asked what makes a female character well-written, this word popped up a lot: agency.
A case study that immediately proves the "violence = agency" equation wrong would be Natasha Romanov, aka Black Widow. She's a strong female character. She is capable of martial arts and doesn't need men to save her. But that is all there is to her. As my friend Mun put it: all i know about her is that she's good at close combat. literally nothing else going for her. the #HARDENED female character with a vaguely dangerous background. Black Widow is never violent for violence's sake, but for peace. In the Avengers, she has a mediating role, the one who looks out for everyone — it's not lost on me how she's also the only female character for quite some time, how her violence is almost maternal in nature, protecting the group rather than herself, or is ever used for anything more selfish. We get the sense that violence is something she was coerced to, educated towards when younger. We never learn what she really wants, never get to know any of her flaws. She is just The Woman, who kicks as much ass as men but never grows like them. At least Wanda Maximoff, the only other female character of the MCU who gets to do more than just the bare minimum, reacts to pain, feels angst, hurt, and opposes people for three fourths of a film. Gamora quips a little, but mostly she is an emotional link to the eggplant-skinned Thanos. In the end, though, the moral agonizing, the character growth, these all belong to the men. Women fight CGI monsters in Endgame, but there's no human factor to it, no mess that comes with violence, no reaction to the destruction at hand, neither adrenaline rush nor panic attack that these characters experience from literally killing other people. So what if Captain Marvel is the most powerful character of the entire cast? She, like all the other women, gets sanitized to nothing; we spend more time mourning the funeral of Tony Stark.
Power isn't a strong female character. Makima is hot, but wouldn't really fit the bill either. But are they good just because they're not horrendously bad, or don't neatly fit a stereotype? Are they characters that my friends would think of when I asked them of well-written female characters at all? Are they characters I'd think of if you asked me?
A well-written character reveals some truth about me, something I've always felt, but could never vocalize. They show something that I assumed other people don't go through the same way I did. When I can emphasize with them, even if we have nothing in common from our skin color to our occupation. And when I can't relate to them, then I want to respect them: I want to understand, be shown, where these characters come from emotionally. They don't even have to want anything grand, just move as though they've wanted something at some point in time, desire things and people. So when I think of a female character that is human, complicated, messy, and acts on her own terms, I think the first to come to my mind would be Nadia Vulvokov of Russian Doll. Sweet birthday baby! She is a computer scientist who is less than pleasant to the people around her, always with a veneer of irony. As is tradition of every timeloop narrative, she eventually finds herself forced to fix her mistakes, but it's way harder than she imagines. She isn't violent, just self-destructive. She's also ridiculously self-deprecating and nonchalant. You get the sense that she does everything that she does — be it drinking, smoking, or taking heavier drugs — is because she hides hurt. It's the hurt, the defense mechanisms, one flaw stacked on top of the other, that made her so real in my head.
Currently The Four Humors by Mina Seckin is open on my Kindle. It follows twenty-year-old Turkish-American Sibel as she returns to Istanbul over the summer, mostly to get a headstart on her major in medicine, but also to take care of her grandmother — currently suffering from Parkinson's — and, so the expectation, visit her recently passed father's grave. The book is written in such a manner that there is no dialogue tags; this makes things a bit confusing sometimes, but allows you to always remain in Sibel's head. It's not a pretty place. She barely likes it there herself. The grief eats at her from the inside, making her lethargic, ready to sabotage her relationships between her and her worrying relatives and her white boyfriend. She's often stingy and angry. It's her grandmother, who holds plenty secrets herself, and being with her that allows Sibel to breathe. It's her personal history that allows Sibel to accept her own. If she can be a different person, who was the same person this whole time, I can, too, she muses. Another major highlight is her relationship with her sister, Alara a fiery and stubborn character with her own skeletons in the closet. Sibel watches Alara at night and feels scared that maybe they are more similar than Sibel has considered before. After a museum visit, Alara says, You used to talk about feelings so easily, openly. Honestly, you were really powerful and You were the only one who ever yelled back at Baba. I think he loved you for that. It's this, the visceral scene where Sibel feels her grief as if I've found my body on the side of the road what pushes Sibel to see her father's grave that same afternoon. It's a dynamic I've always been surrounded with, but have rarely seen so well-written on the page: the women of your family that love you like it's made of leather. Sturdy and steady; a little hard, maybe too tight, but always available when you need it. I enjoy reading Alara most, but it's the dynamics that strengthens Sibel as a character, and in turn makes all the characters seem well-written and nuanced.
Jamie, a movie and music fan, and Miranda, who enjoys novels, films and TV series in equal measure, both mentioned women in relation to other women when I asked them what makes a female character well written. Miranda tells me she enjoys relationships between women, and that when written well can be so complex but also so simple and deeply rewarding. On the other hand, Jamie says: I usually associate the most sincere and complex relationships between female characters as being written by a woman, particularly those dealing with mother and daughter relationships, with the timid addendum: It's not always the case of course, but there's a benefit to personal experience as well as a direct understanding of societal influences which impact those relationships. The lived experience certainly helps bridge the gap between the author's real life and the protagonist's fictional life by imbuing it with real emotions. But that comfort — or, rather, the false belief that just writing women as a woman is enough to make the character well-written — can quickly lead to one-dimensional, bland female characters. If the woman as written by many men is flesh, then woman as written by the worst female author is a projection of her own sexual desire, somebody helpless and weak in the face of a man to save her, or (also a perennial favorite of a male writer that knows writing women Boobily is bad) she has ambition but not much regard for other women; a girlboss who must stand alone at the top. She is the logical endpoint of the Strong Female Character.
Let's take a look at V.E Schwab, or Victoria Schwab for her young adult novels. From her YA novels, I have read Katherine "Kate" Harker of the This Savage Song duology. For her adult works, we have Delilah "Lila" Bard of the A Darker Shade of Magic trilogy*,* the only female character of importance across those three books, Angie Knight as well as Sydney and Serena Clarke of Vicious, sisters that end up on opposite sides of a men's petty feud; Marcella and June of sequel Villains; and lastly, Adeline LaRue of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. Kate and Lila are rather sexless in their girlboss demeanor, ruled by ambition and the desire to be darker and harder, but they never seem to do anything evil. Instead, it registers somewhere closer to the sanitized nothing — though they desire, there is nothing that renders them human, no flaw, nothing that offsets them a little bit. June has no girlboss ambition, just seems to exist through sheer vibes and clever comments; she's pledged allegiance to no one but her own desires, which would almost make her interesting if it weren't for the fact that she gets relegated to the back a little too much. Marcella Riggins is another girlboss — perhaps a womanboss, considering how the first thing we learn of her is that she wants to free herself from the sexual and domestic submission she's subjected to her mob boss husband — who turns villanous, but never moves beyond an uninteresting sort of evil, boring villain. I suppose boobily wielding knives doesn't necessarily get better if it's a woman writing it. Adeline LaRue doesn't want to marry someone, so she strikes a deal with the first river god/devil/demon that she finds. Because nobody remembers her, and because she can leave no mark in the world, most of her character reduces to navelgazing about this fact. In the end, her love interest Henry — a character Schwab said she has put her all into and reads about that bad — decides to honor her by writing her story. I struggle to see how this is supposed to make Addie well-written. Serena Clarke is described as headstrong, but in most of Vicious she only helps out antagonist Eli Ever for reasons unknown — Sydney Clarke learns to free herself from her sister worship, through... hanging out with protagonist Victor Vale. Lastly, Angie Knight. We spend three paragraphs on how bright a mind she is, peppered with commentary about how Victor hates her relationship with Eli, how he wants her (but paradoxically, Victor spends more time thinking about Eli). Her actions involve eating pasta, saving Victor at a party, helping Victor with his insane ambition, and then being killed by Victor as a result of that. The moment Angie dies, Vicious becomes tolerable, if not entertaining. It's laughable if it weren't for the fact that this is a book of 2013, a year where fridging was definitely a Bad Thing to do.
Most tellingly, barring Serena and Sydney, as well as June and Sydney later, none of these female characters have meaningful relationships with other women. They are on their own in a men's world. The issue here is that in real life, women are around women constantly. And if they are not, it is a deliberate decision on the woman's part (with a strong dose of internalized misogyny). The insight that female relationships provide — the uplifting, sharing the deepest of secrets, even violence and any kind of harbored envy and jealousy — these completely miss in a Schwab work. It's sad that this crucial dimension that defines real-life women's lives is so blatantly omitted.
In turn, something funny happens to her male characters. Kell, of A Darker Shade of Magic, is a soft man with a lot of internal anguish. August, of This Savage Song, is also a soft boy with a lot of internal anguish, emotions he can't express. Henry, from The Invisible Life of Addie Larue, describes his internalized anguish in flowery metaphors involving rain. Victor Vale has no real personality in beyond wanting to kill Eli. Eli Ever has religious reasons to murdering ExtraOrdinary people, complete with a rather graphic self-harming scene where he converses with God; we never learn what he likes, what he does for a living besides stalking and killing people, how he is around friends, his connection to God beyond superpowers. Schwab's characters are very rarely actual people. They move like pieces on a chessboard; always pawns just mindlessly surging forward, never to take another piece.
Is anyone in Chainsaw Man well-written? I think a lot about Aki, whose past is shown through three panels maximum, but is more than enough to ground him and his motivations, his fear of losing people over and over, and his eventual endgame harking back to those three panels at the start. I think a lot about Denji, a teenage boy who learns to navigate through life, how charming and lovable he is. From the female characters, Reze has a great arc with a brilliant final moment that pushes her up to my personal favorite character of the manga alongside Aki; Himeno and Power come across quite human also, the former more so through flashbacks, the latter by virtue of a lot of screentime and her own agency. Quanxi and Makima... eh. They fulfill the function in their story, but well-written per the definition I laid out earlier I wouldn't say. They don't have to be, though, and that's fine.
I am still unsure if Lovesickness, a collection of short manga by horror mangaka Junji Ito, understands or deeply loathes women. The female characters come across as real, with wants and needs that are typical of teenage girls — blossoming sexual desire, the need to be heard, the desire to be seen by anyone — but the way these issues are portrayed, from body image to idol worship, there's a certain contempt I felt that I couldn't shake the entire time.
I’m thinking of this scene in Sex Education's second season where the girls of the class are asked what they got in common. They were, by and large, different — in personality, in skin color, in height, in attitude. Eventually, they found an answer: that they were afraid of violence by men. It is, but in a lot of ways also isn't, the answer to the question what makes a female character well-written: it’s that they’re human first, and their gender second. And in that manner, writing any character is not from the inside out, but rather from the outside in. So if your attempt at writing “the other gender” — whatever that may be — doesn’t go well, maybe it is time to reevaluate the approach to writing characters in general. Writing is funny in that way: the sum is never greater than its parts, and quality is determined by its weakest link.