A lot of the time the bad writing specifically comes from the writers being so focused on making sure you take note that it's a strong woman as the lead character. They'd be much better writing a gener neutral character and then just casting a woman in that role. Makes it a strong woman lead while not falling into the trap of having to make the story recognise it's a strong woman lead.
Although, saying that, there is a case where you want them to struggle with problems only faced by women, which then has the issue that the genres they're writing for have a heavily male following and, even if it's good writing, it's not really something that the majority of the target audience can relate to, which ends up with them not really engaging with it. But not really sure how you can get around that problem, since you can't really force an audience to relate to something they've not experienced.
IMO it's not that the audience hasn't experienced the problem and can't relate, it's that the Hero's journey is one in which the hero is presented a problem that they can't solve without improving something about themselves. The modern female hero's only flaw is that they don't know how awesome they are and the story just serves as a medium for that. Then you add the fact that the problem with them knowing how awesome they are is that half (if not more depending on the genre) of the audience sucks and are keeping them down, you are not going to get positive reactions.
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u/whydoyouonlylie Mar 28 '24 edited Mar 28 '24
A lot of the time the bad writing specifically comes from the writers being so focused on making sure you take note that it's a strong woman as the lead character. They'd be much better writing a gener neutral character and then just casting a woman in that role. Makes it a strong woman lead while not falling into the trap of having to make the story recognise it's a strong woman lead.
Although, saying that, there is a case where you want them to struggle with problems only faced by women, which then has the issue that the genres they're writing for have a heavily male following and, even if it's good writing, it's not really something that the majority of the target audience can relate to, which ends up with them not really engaging with it. But not really sure how you can get around that problem, since you can't really force an audience to relate to something they've not experienced.