"Strong Female" or Well-Written Female?

Gah! Enough with the "strong female"s already! When we say we want a strong female character, we mean we want a well-written, in-depth character who is independent and has lots of great personality traits but also weaknesses like any human (or non-human life-form, as the case may be) - NOT a physically strong "badass" character with no development beyond that! Seriously! So much frustration! But I have to get this rant out.

Unsurprisingly, I'm not the first person to get upset about this particular trend. +Emily Ecrivaine has also written a post about it. I recommend that you check it out, but as great as that post is, I also want to weigh in on the issue, hence this post.

I'm gonna say this right now: just because a character is strong and tough and smart and independent does not mean she is a good character (I'm talking about good/bad, not good/evil). It's like Hollywood has gone too far in the opposite direction from the weak, stupid, careless girls it's portrayed in the past (those are no good, either, just to be clear).

It's time to meet in the middle. A good character needs strengths and weaknesses; leaving one out is like drawing a person really beautiful and detailed - but leaving out an entire half. You need them both to complement each other, else you get a 2-dimensional character that leaves your readers/viewers upset (and writing rants like this).

Now that I've said 2-dimensional, the mathematician in me wants to make this analogy accurate. So what do I mean by 2-dimensional? Well, let's say the first dimension is appearance (and all the other stuff you notice at first glance/description). Thankfully, most writers (I say most, not all) are able to go a bit deeper than that. The second dimension is strengths, the third dimension is weaknesses, and the fourth dimension (yes, I'm adding a fourth dimension) is character development. Unlike physical dimensions (height, width, volume), character dimensions aren't in a specific order. If your character has an appearance and strengths, he/she is 2-dimensional. If your character has an appearance and weaknesses, he/she is also 2-dimensional. If your character has an appearance, strengths, weaknesses, and character development, he/she is 4-dimensional. (Note: I said there isn't any order, but it's kind of hard to have character development without strengths and weaknesses.)

Got that? You need several different elements to make a character. You can't just slap a vaguely defined personality and a story arc on them and call it good. I mean, think about it: you're creating a person. If people were as bad as some characters, we would have a very boring world. And if you're going to make a work of fiction, why would you make such bad characters? Why would you create a boring world when you could create an awesome one? Why put so little work into a character when you could make somebody amazing?

There's not much I can do about, say, Moffat's writing, but I can make sure that the characters I create are real (no, I don't mean they really exist; I mean realistic), and I can ask you to do the same. Let's make the world of fiction a better place.

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Coming back to this, I realize I should have included some examples of 2-dimensional characters, so here you are:

Rose Tyler (Doctor Who)

(Check out +Emily Ecrivaine's post about her dislike of Rose.)

What she has: appearance, weaknesses

What I think of her: she just stands around and waits for the Doctor to help her. She's not that smart, and she's not particularly strong. I don't see any significant strengths in her (she has compassion, but so do pretty much all the companions). She whines too much, and she always wanders off and disobeys direct orders (not that she's the only one to do so). She's extremely selfish and jealous. And she's presented as the best companion, the Doctor's love... no. Just no. 

(I'll come back to this later, but someone else needs the computer. I will provide more examples, don't worry!)