Romance Editor Chris has some things to say about strength and strong female characters.

Ever have one of those months in which several disparate threads from different aspects of your life all suddenly seem to be part of the same cloth? I’m having one right now. The recent truly excellent articles by carol and alex combined with the current interwebs-fueled firestorm over ‘fake geek girls’ and the collective cognitive failure of the Texas legislature have combined to give me some deeper insight into why I so dislike the ever-growing trend of the ‘kick-ass’ Romance heroine.  More specifically, the way ‘kick-ass’ has become the default instead of ‘strong’.

The kick-ass heroine possesses at least moderate physical skill, often carries a weapon, and tends towards snark. She’s usually in leather clothing and/or stompy boots (and probably has a tattoo or two).  To be clear: there’s nothing wrong with any of those attributes, taken singly or even together. But the combination is now so prevalent that it’s become the standard of  ‘strong heroine’ when it is only one example of what is truly an infinite variety -and not the most interesting at that. The clothes, the one-liners, the boots: those are just accessories.  A character isn’t strong because of how tough she looks, or talks, or even how many punches she takes:  she is strong because of what she does.

“Strength” from the Visconti Tarot Deck (15th Century)