The Problem With “Strong Female Characters”

They told us we were getting progress.

Women who fight.
Women who lead armies.
Women who never cry unless it’s part of a battle montage.

We were supposed to cheer.
And for a while, I did.

Because I was tired of the wide-eyed princess waiting for permission to exist.
I wanted someone who could hold a sword and still look like she’d written poetry once.

But here’s the thing no one tells you:
if you trade vulnerability for power, you’re still caged — just gilded differently.

Every “strong female character” I see lately walks like she’s auditioning for a trauma she never got to process.
She can kill a god but not admit she’s lonely.
She never eats, never rests, never grieves for long enough to be inconvenient.
She wins, but she doesn’t feel it.

And I’m sitting there, thinking — why are women only allowed to be powerful if they suffer for it first?
Why does every heroine have to justify her existence through pain or perfection?

Somewhere between “not like other girls” and “the chosen one” we lost something sacred:
the right to be ordinary and meaningful at the same time.

I miss softness.
Not weakness — softness.

The kind that doesn’t need to be defended with sarcasm or steel.
The kind that holds instead of hides.

I miss women in stories who aren’t metaphors.
Who aren’t role models.
Who aren’t on-trend.

Just people. Messy, kind, furious, unremarkable — and alive.

Sometimes I imagine a different kind of heroine.
She fails the prophecy. She takes the job she doesn’t want.
She has bad posture, drinks cold coffee, and apologizes too much.
And somehow, the world still needs her.

Not because she’s perfect.
Because she shows up anyway.

That’s what strength is.
Not stoicism. Not steel.
Staying.

So no, I don’t want stronger women in fiction.
I want real ones.
Ones who laugh mid-battle, panic mid-speech, break mid-sentence.
Ones who win by loving something enough to look foolish doing it.

Because if “strong” means silent, unbreakable, unfeeling —
then we’ve just rewritten the same old myth.
And called it liberation.

by EchoViolet

Reader of contradictions. Believes strength and softness are synonyms in disguise.