Entertainment with female protagonists.

[JediMB]

I've seen some great recommendations in this thread. I'll have to keep my eye on it for stuff I haven't watched/played yet.

Now, it's been so long since I played it that I'm not entirely sure if I can recommend it, but there's Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem for the Gamecube. While a majority of the playable characters are male (as the game takes place in various different eras of human history), the current-day "main" protagonist (Alexandra Roivas) and one other are women with, as I recall, rather interesting story arcs.

I really need to play the game again. And maybe chip in for the spiritual sequel's crowdfunding [http://www.precursorgames.com/shadowoftheeternals/].

 

[A Weakgeek]

The Perfect Dark series! Ok, so the games aren't really filled with much story or character development, but the books and the comic series made me fall in love with Miss Dark. She's funny, smart, tough as nails, but still very human. She's suffers greatly after the loss of her father (suffering from Survivor's Guilt), is trying to figure out what to do with her life, and questions herself and her abilities and actions, wondering what it makes her as a person. If you can, track down Perfect Dark: Initial Vector, Perfect Dark: Janus' Tears and Perfect Dark: Second Front as they are most excellent. Also, get the games. You can get Perfect Dark Zero for about $5 USD and that's not bad at all, and you can get the HD remake of Perfect Dark on XBLA for about $10 USD or so.

Spoiler: Just look at mah cosplay of her! I just love this character to bits!

I know I might be coming across as a huge asshole for asking this, but what exactly counts towards the "Dont self advertise" rule here on the escapist? Posting your own cosplay pics doesnt seem to count. So is it ok when its a picture of yourself doing something? What about video?

Meh, nevertheless cool cosplay.

 

[Legion]

The Perfect Dark series! Ok, so the games aren't really filled with much story or character development, but the books and the comic series made me fall in love with Miss Dark. She's funny, smart, tough as nails, but still very human. She's suffers greatly after the loss of her father (suffering from Survivor's Guilt), is trying to figure out what to do with her life, and questions herself and her abilities and actions, wondering what it makes her as a person. If you can, track down Perfect Dark: Initial Vector, Perfect Dark: Janus' Tears and Perfect Dark: Second Front as they are most excellent. Also, get the games. You can get Perfect Dark Zero for about $5 USD and that's not bad at all, and you can get the HD remake of Perfect Dark on XBLA for about $10 USD or so.

Spoiler: Just look at mah cosplay of her! I just love this character to bits!

I know I might be coming across as a huge asshole for asking this, but what exactly counts towards the "Dont self advertise" rule here on the escapist? Posting your own cosplay pics doesnt seem to count. So is it ok when its a picture of yourself doing something? What about video?

Meh, nevertheless cool cosplay.

If they had posted a link to a cosplay site and said to go there, that would count as advertising. Posting a picture of yourself embedded into the site does not count, no more than posting a picture of your pet or gaming set-up would be.

If you embed a YouTube video you made and it is relevant to to the topic then that is normally okay too, as long as there is discussion value to it rather than "Go check out my channel".

The no advertising rule tends to be to discourage people using this place as promotion of non-Escapist related material. If it is embedded the in the vast majority of cases it is seen as fine.

 

[JediMB]

Again with all due respect, bullshit. The Bechdel test is not objective proof of anything, under any circumstance, especially not the representation of women in media... As a scathing indicement of the concept is this: Frank Millers Sin City passess this test, yet Vagina Monologues fails it. I'm just going to let that sink in for a second... A piece of regressive bullshit written by Frank "i can't write a woman without making her a prostitute" Miller's work passed the test... But a broadway play written by feminists, for feminists, funded by feminists & with an all female cast, fails a supposedly objective test about womens representation in media.

People tend to misunderstand what the point of the Bechdel Test even is. Both the ones who use it as a guideline for individual movies and the ones who dismiss it as pointless. The Bechdel Test can't, by any means, be used to determine if a specific piece of entertainment is good or bad, if it's sexist, or if it has "good" female protagonists.

What it does is show a rather uncomfortable trend throughout the entertainment industry (that entertainment tends to be dominated by male characters, and the plots driven by their actions), and with this trend in mind the test was created for the express purpose of failing a majority of our entertainment. I'm sure you can agree on that there should be more movies out there with at least two women who have a conversation about something other than a man, but of course that doesn't mean a movie with a single female protagonist can't be a fantastic and progressive piece of entertainment.

 

[BrotherRool]

Kim Possible! It's harder to find a better protagonist, and unlike almost any of the cartoons I watched as a child, I found I could still watch Kim Possible today and still enjoy it.

From the looks of it Kim Possible just seemed like a blend of 'girl power' and 'if you try hard and believe in yourself you can do anything' type of protagonist so I avoided it. How far off was I?

Actually pretty far off. It's never even really highlighted that she's female, this is like a Buffy/Alex Rider thing where you take some strange and exciting and mix it with teenage life and teenage problems to give it some weight. They just happened to pick a girl.

And she does try hard and believe that she can do anything, but generally not in the way that you're thinking of. She's one of those super over achievers you get at school who get top marks in all their exams, can study well, is good at sports and involved in absolutely everything in official school life. The one who organises the end of school dance (the dance that people actually like). And there's even a jokey in-universe reason for it. Her Dad's a rocket scientist and her Mum's a brain surgeon and their family is always played as comically gifted.

So it's not like she's some average kid thinking 'If I believe in myself I can do this!', she's the person who believes in herself that she can do things because she's always found herself to be good at nearly everything, including working hard.

And the writers actually recognise it too, which is good. It's one of the only shows that when they have an episode dealing with the hero's flaws, I actually recognised the hero as having those flaws. (Normally in shows it's like they decide to be a little bit racist for one episode and get over it, or are bossy for one episode and then get over it). When she finds things she's not actually good at, she gets really frustrated over that and a little bit jealous of the people who can. She does care about the people around here, but she's so used to do everything well that playing second fiddle doesn't come easily to her.

EDIT: Also, she often doesn't end up on those episodes getting good at the things she can't do. It was something she wasn't good at, but more often than not if she works hard, she can become okay at it instead of instantly mastering it when she learns her lesson

 

[BrotherRool]

Okay, I can't add a whole lot to this list, but for books I'd throw in Terry Pratchett's Monstrous Regiment

I love how the plot of Monstrous Regiment ends up =D I think it's probably one of my favourite Terry Pratchett books, which is saying a lot

EDIT: Whoops, sorry I forgot I'd already made a post

 

[Angie7F]

What about the general Shoujo Manga genre?

Any YAi Yazama manga has good female protagonists.

 

[Uhura]

I always get really confused when people argue about the merits of the Bechdel Test. Surely the idea of the test is to divide works of fiction into two categories:

A: films/books etc. in which two or more women have a conversation about something other than a man
B: films/books etc. which do not feature two or more women having a conversation about something other than a man

That's it. It doesn't say anything about how good the film/book is or how feminist the film/book is. It doesn't comment on the quality of works of fiction.

I just don't get why people get so upset over the test.

 

[soren7550]

The Perfect Dark series! Ok, so the games aren't really filled with much story or character development, but the books and the comic series made me fall in love with Miss Dark. She's funny, smart, tough as nails, but still very human. She's suffers greatly after the loss of her father (suffering from Survivor's Guilt), is trying to figure out what to do with her life, and questions herself and her abilities and actions, wondering what it makes her as a person. If you can, track down Perfect Dark: Initial Vector, Perfect Dark: Janus' Tears and Perfect Dark: Second Front as they are most excellent. Also, get the games. You can get Perfect Dark Zero for about $5 USD and that's not bad at all, and you can get the HD remake of Perfect Dark on XBLA for about $10 USD or so.

Spoiler: Just look at mah cosplay of her! I just love this character to bits!

I know I might be coming across as a huge asshole for asking this, but what exactly counts towards the "Dont self advertise" rule here on the escapist? Posting your own cosplay pics doesnt seem to count. So is it ok when its a picture of yourself doing something? What about video?

Meh, nevertheless cool cosplay.

The 'no self advertising rule' applies to a user posting a link and saying "Hey, go check out my thing that isn't here" or "Hey, buy this thing" and the like.

Me posting a picture of myself in a cosplay because I mentioned how much I love the character of said cosplay doesn't count as self advertising since I'm technically not advertising anything.

 

[Belaam]

Back to the OP, just realized the tv show Veronica Mars isn't here.

It should be.

 

[Launcelot111]

Back to the OP, just realized the tv show Veronica Mars isn't here.

It should be.

Jesus, thank you. It shouldn't take 74 posts for Veronica Mars to pop up in a thread about female protagonists.

For the uninitiated, Veronica Mars is a petite blonde high school girl who is revealed to be the ultimate badass as she manipulates and tases the criminal element of her town as she pleases. Watch the hell out of it.

As for other random bits of entertainment:

Parks and Recreation is the most consistently funny show on TV these days, thanks in large part to Leslie Knope and April Ludgate.

Wonderfalls, in which a young woman is told by talking gift shop trinkets to help people around her. Only 13 or so episodes were made, but they were a lot of fun

Friday Night Lights has a vast number of male characters, but it also has Tami Taylor, who in my book is the greatest female character of any creative work I've seen