We still can’t handle complex female characters

Being annoying is a woman’s worst sin

It is hard to be a female character in a piece of media. We all know that. This is not a revelatory statement, however, it does feel like a strangely stagnant one. I don’t consider myself naive when it comes to the advances of feminism and the unstitching of unconscious bias; I know the job to stop people disliking women…it isn’t over. But does it feel like it’s progressing?

We all watch the internet clamour for more complex female characters and then tear them apart when they see them.

There’s a whole meme format for it. (It was

Mel Zog

’s post below that inspired this piece, actually. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.)

Whenever I see this online, I always think of Rory Gilmore. I rewatched Gilmore Girls this year and I spent a good portion of my time watching it slack jawed at the reality of the scenes and storylines that have garnered Rory the most hate. The full context would play out and it just felt like it had been misquoted online for justification of why Rory was the worst. And it just seemed to me like a complete lack of media literacy.

Maybe I’m missing the joke. But I think we can’t dismiss the cultural impact of the jokes we make. You can say something on the internet for laughs but you are building a narrative in the social canon. To rip apart a fictional woman does impact the wider world.

Is Rory perfect? No! But I mean, is she really that bad?!

It’s a similar thing with Cassie from Euphoria. You would believe that she was running around murdering for the way audiences reacted to her sleeping with Nate in season 2. Perhaps the audience would have liked her more if she’d done that. On a popularity scale, I bet Amy Dunne would rank higher.

There is a specific type of woman that makes us uncomfortable in media. And there is something in characters like Rory Gilmore, Cassie Howard and Serena van der Woodsen that rubs people the wrong way. Why is it that their counterparts — Paris, Maddie and Blair are more popular? Is it that they ‘own’ their faults? The latter characters are ambitious and unapologetic in who they step on to get what they want. They are easier to be called iconic.

Now this isn’t all female characters of course. Certain parts of the internet are currently trying to scrub Challengers Tashi Duncan from her own story. In the most boring interpretation of the film, some people want Challengers to be a simple Art/Patrick love story — when it is clear that all three of them revolve around each other. They are the most literal love triangle that we’ve seen.

So what is it about characters like Rory, Serena and Cassie that bothers people? Words such as ‘entitled’ tend to be thrown about, but that feels like it is covering something else. I think there’s something in the fact that people feel like the narrative is telling them that these characters are good people. And yet we see them do ‘bad’ things. So is it that we can handle unapologetic women as long as we aren’t supposed to see them as good and pure? We hold these women to higher standards and so when they do wrong, we simply can’t forgive them.

Are we subconsciously still categorising women as a Madonna or a whore?

We say “We support women’s rights, but we also support their wrongs”… that is, until they defy our exception of what a good girl/woman is.

We ask for complex female characters, but when they are complex in a way that we don’t want, we reject them. How can we allow for the whole spectrum of womanhood if we veto the bits that bother us? If we simply dismiss them as annoying?

Or worse, we decide these women are the real villains. Is it a recent thing to decide that every story has a literal black and white villain? An explicit villain? Is it the Marvel-ification of cinema and storytelling?

I am not saying that we all have to like every character. The truth is, Serena drove me a bit up the wall a few times in Gossip Girl. I always did prefer Blair. But it is the mass decision that Serena is ‘worse’ that is the bit I have to challenge. Mainly because these decrees seem to be coming with from today’s audience. These female characters were complex when they were created, and now in the age of the clickbait headlines and thumb-stopping TikTok videos, we are reducing these women/girls down to the role of ‘villain’.

I could write an individual essay on each of these female characters, unpicking their so-called ‘worst’ moments and the understandable emotion at the base of it. Because that’s what I’m trying to say. We don’t have to like these female characters. I am not campaigning for everyone to love them. None of us can be loved by everyone. But can’t we try to understand them? Why do we want to flatten their stories?

Somehow people can find sympathy for fictional serial killers, but annoying girls/women? That’s where we draw the line.