Women of the Year: A Retrospective 2023

It is now my mission to write up all the end-of-year posts that I usually have finished by this point in time, but which I’m running behind on thanks to that pesky Covid-induced delay.

As ever, this is my annual post of female characters I watched or read about during the course of the year who didn’t make the cut for Woman of the Month, but were still engaging and noteworthy. It also works as something of a retrospective concerning female characters in general for 2023, specifically in the realm of mainstream pop-culture entertainment.

As ever, there were the usual problems: women getting fridged to motivate a male character, writers being blatantly terrified of any complexity or shortcomings in their depictions of women (which inevitably leads to accusations of girl-bossing or Mary Suedom) and women who are genuinely spunky and charming, but who never actually get to impact the plot in any meaningful way (Marion Ravenwood, Kitty Softpaws, Cara Dutton...)

Plus, there is still that pervading assumption that women have to be relatable role models – which means that when characters like Evelyn Quan Wang or General Nanisca come along, it feels like a genuine (and glorious) shock to the system.

But my main issue with female characters in 2023 is simply that there wasn’t much to get excited about. With one obvious exception (she’s blonde and shares her name with an outdoor cooking device) it was a fallow year for female characters – at least in the media I consumed.

Part of that had to do with the fact I simply didn’t watch as many shows or films this year. Because I’ve been burned so many times with unceremonious cancellations on streaming services, I ended up sticking with shows that aired decades ago (Spooks, Sailor Moon, Elementary) which left me with a much smaller pool of female characters to choose from. For the first time ever, I had to skip a Woman of the Month post and write it out later, simply because I had so few options.

And more generally speaking, there just didn’t seem to be many compelling female characters on display this year. I’ll have more to say about that in a bit, but for now, here are some of the women worth your attention from an otherwise not-hugely-inspirational year...

Women of the Year: A Retrospective 2021

This is always my favourite post of the year, a chance for me to delve into my absolute favourite subject: the representation of female characters throughout media and pop-culture.

Every month I dub a fictional character my Woman of the Month, but there are always plenty of spots left over, and so I do a retrospective of the entire years’ worth of interesting female characters that maybe didn’t get the limelight they deserved.

And this is just the stuff I was able to consume this year: at the end of the day I’m just one person, and there is so much material out there. If you have recommendations, or specifically a female character of any kind that you felt got short-shrift in the public discourse, then by all means throw your hat in the ring.

Below are the female characters that didn’t quite make the monthly cut, but who I still found noteworthy in what they brought to the various stories they were a part of. There are less of them this year, partly because I’m exhausted, partly because I didn’t watch or read as much, and partly because a lot of what I did get through has already featured on his blog in the past (for example, I watched the fifth season of Supergirl last month, but Kara Danvers and Nia Nal have already been written about in earlier posts) but hopefully you’ll still find something of interest.

Women of the Year: A Retrospective 2019

In the middle of the year, I has planned to start this annual post by saying 2019 was the year of giving with one hand and taking with the other. Now I'm more inclined to say that 2019 was the year male writers took a long hard piss over the three most iconic female characters of the decade.

Granted, I haven't seen The Rise of Skywalker yet, though my friend was able to break it down for me in great detail, and I've spent the last few days fluctuating between "well that doesn't sound SO bad" and "for the love of God, what the FUCK??"

I was mostly saved by the fact that I have been steadily (even subconsciously) disengaging with Star Wars since The Last Jedi, and the final few trailers for The Rise of Skywalker pretty much sealed the deal. I'll watch it eventually (and perhaps even do a more in-depth review) but that'll be months from now, once the final shreds of investment are gone and the on-line fandom meltdowns have ceased.

But for now a part of me is genuinely hurting, knowing that the brave girl who once snatched a weapon out from under the man who tortured and terrorized her and used it to defend herself against him, is ultimately forced by the sequels to form a quasi-romantic attachment to that self-same man who has spent the better part of this trilogy violently assaulting her both physically and emotionally. It's pretty sick-inducing, even if she IS finally free of him by the end.

All I can do is walk away thinking that at least Rey got off lighter than Black Widow, who joined Gamora at the bottom of a cliff to save Jeremy Renner, or Daenerys Targaryen, who had to be put down like a dog because women can't handle power, strong emotions, heredity madness, or... I dunno, PMS? We may as well throw in ALL the misogynistic cliches.

As of now, I feel utterly wrung out by these big franchises and their complete inability to do right by their female characters. I'll have more to say (or rant) about later, but for now here are the runners-up for women of the month. Pickings were slim, I'm afraid.

Woman of the Year: A Retrospective 2018

It's that time of year again: time for my annual round up of fantastic female characters that I've discovered in film, on television, and throughout a variety of novels. Though I featured the twelve stand-outs for each month of the year, there are plenty more women who made the runners-up cut, and it's always fun to feature them in their own blog-post.

As it happens, there are three major themes to this year's women: Difficult Women, Superhero Women, and East-Asian Women.

In the first group we had a surplus of ladies who were given personalities and storylines that up until pretty recently only straight white males could get away with. Think Don Draper or Tony Soprano or Walter White or Dexter Morgan.

But my reading/viewing this year ran the gamut from women who are downright despicable (Villanelle from Killing Eve, Mary Anne Mowbray in Dark Angel, Serena Joy of The Handmaid's Tale, Gone Girl's Amy Dunne) to ambiguously unlikeable (Becky Sharpe in the new Vanity Fair miniseries, Grace Marks in Alias Grace, Annalise Keating in How To Get Away with Murder) to broken and/or complicated women struggling to do the right thing despite their spiky, brittle personalities: Camille Preaker in Sharp Objects, Rachel Watson in The Girl on the Train, Maureen Robinson in Lost in Space, the assorted housewives of Big Little Lies).

Heck, even Disenchanted's Princess Bean with her drunken irresponsibility fits in here.

And though I haven't checked in with them in ages, three major shows ended this year (or will next year) that starred women who could fall into any of the above three subcategories: Elizabeth Jennings from The Americans, Olivia Pope from Scandal, and Carrie Mathison from Homeland.

It demonstrates two things: firstly that actresses are getting better, juicier and more challenging roles, and secondly that female characters are being recognized as having just as much capacity for complexity and moral ambiguity as male ones. Of course, all but two of these women are white (unsurprisingly, the two exceptions feature on a Shonda Rimes show) so there's still plenty of progress to be make – and yet I'm an optimist.

All send a clear message: women don't have to be nice to have interesting stories to tell.

Then there's the ever-increasing roster of female superheroes emerging from the shadows to enjoy the spotlight. In the wake of Wonder Woman's 2017 debut  came a host of other crime-fighters, and this year alone I had Woman of the Month posts focusing on Sara Lance (Legends of Tomorrow), Shuri (Black Panther), Misty Knight and Colleen Wing (Luke Cage/Iron Fist).

We're now into our fourth season of Supergirl, and the second of Jessica Jones. We got our first look at Batwoman on Arrow, and an exciting new trailer for Captain Marvel. Sequels were also kind, with Ant-Man sharing the spotlight in Ant-Man and the Wasp (the first Marvel film to have a female superhero in the title), Helen Parr returning as Elastigirl in The Incredibles 2 and Domino being an unexpected delight in Deadpool 2.

And though I haven't caught up yet, I heard Iris West had a great season of The Flash along with her time-travelling daughter Nora, a host of animated girls in Marvel Rising: Secret Warriors, and news on the development of films involving the likes of Silk, Black Cat, Batgirl, Black Widow, Birds of Prey and the Gotham City Sirens.

Heck, there were even YA novels by Sarah J. Maas and Leigh Bardugo that explored the backgrounds of Selina Kyle and Diana Prince before they took on their superhero (or villain) mantles.

And of course, though it stretches the definition of "superhero", we finally debuted our first female incarnation of the Doctor on Doctor Who.

After so many previous disasters to bring superhero women to the big (and small!) screen, they have finally ARRIVED.

And finally, an increase of East-Asian women, from the runaway success of Crazy Rich Asians to my revisit of Grace Nakimura in the Gabriel Knight games of the nineties. Kelly Tran penned a passionate defence of her right to exist in The New York Times after increasingly gross attacks, and so many more Asian faces appeared on my radar:

Jessica Huang in Fresh Off the Boat, Mia in Humans (whose actress will also be Minerva in Captain Marvel), Constance in Ocean's Eight, Lara Jean in All the Boys I've Loved Before, Hazel Wong in the Wells and Wong detective series, Colleen Wing in Iron Fist, Sun in Sense8, Anna Fang in the Mortal Engines film (and book Night Flights that was inspired by her fantastic performance) and even Nagini in the Harry Potter verse, contentious though that development may be.

It sounds as though Michelle Yeoh is getting her own spin-off for her character in Star Trek: Discovery (hopefully not her evil counterpart) and let's not forget the upcoming live-action Mulan starring Liu Yifei, or the short Pixar film Bao involving a Chinese-Canadian mother dealing with empty nest syndrome.

Okay, so bottom left is a picture of Katie Leung from a Poirot
mystery, BUT she was the inspiration for Robin Stevenson's
Hazel Wong, so she's featured here honorarily.

And on a personal note, I even saw a Beauty and the Beast ballet this month which featured Sophia Bae as an Asian Belle.

Oh, and a special shout-out to Artemis from Young Justice, who'll be returning early next year and who manages to fit into ALL THREE of the above categories.

On a broader note, I also ended up reading a lot of children's fiction this year (and watching their subsequent film adaptations), and found they involved a great deal of young heroines: Arietty Clock from The Borrowers, Mary Smith from The Little Broomstick, Princess Cimorene in Dealing with Dragons, Anna Sasaki from When Marnie was There, Maria Merryweather in The Secret of Moonacre, and even an unnamed little girl in the adaptation of The Little Prince.

Women negotiating power, women who were difficult without being villains, women from classic literature, women facing the relentless difficulties of male-dominated spaces – there was something for everybody. So perhaps in place of Difficult Asian Superheroes, I should simply say: this was the year of Unapologetic Women.

Here are the rest of the standout women I discovered in 2018...

Women of the Year: A Brief Retrospective

This time last year I was optimistic about the future of female characters in entertainment media. After all, 2015 was the year of Imperator Furiosa, Katniss Everdeen, Agent Carter, Jessica Jones, Supergirl and Rey (Skywalker?) Aside from the obvious caveat that they were all white women, it was a banquet of three-dimensional and critically acclaimed lead females.

By comparison, 2016 was the year female characters were slaughtered en masse. Laurel Lance, Abbie Mills, Vanessa Ives, Liz Keen, Elektra Natchios – sure, some of these deaths were (or will be) reversed, but the shocking thing is that they were all the female leads of their respective shows.

Supporting characters didn't fare much better: Lexa from The 100, Camilla Marks from Empire, Mary and Nora from The Vampire Diaries, Denise Cloyd from The Walking Dead, Root from Person of Interest, Poussey from Orange is the New Black – what makes it especially chilling is that each and every one of these women were queer.

In the space of a week I watched Kaira get shot in the head at point-blank range on Indian Summers; followed by Vikings dispatching two of its reoccurring characters in a single episode: Yidu was viciously drowned in a river and Princess Kwenthrith stabbed to death. The show returned six months later and promptly shot Aslaug in the back.

In fact, the only death of a woman that was handled with dignity and respect was that of Margaery Tyrell on Game of Thrones. And seriously, if Game of Thrones has the best example of how a female character's demise should be handled, then something has gone terrifyingly wrong.

Other iconic characters were treated badly: Agent Carter was cancelled, Uhura was wasted in Star Trek Beyond, and most of the publicity surrounding the second season of Supergirl revolved around the introduction of her male cousin (to be honest, I wasn't particularly fazed by this, but it was definitely a talking point for a lot of people).

It was relentless.

Yes, we had Ghostbusters – but just look at the sheer amount of vitriol that surrounded its release, with the actresses enduring misogynistic and racial harassment on-line. Honestly, the next time I hear a guy say women are too emotional, I'm going to secretly think about the hysterical meltdown those dudes had over this movie and laugh my head off.

There is some light on the horizon, with Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel heading their own movies next year – but again, we're talking about white women. Black women, Asian women, First Nation women, Latina women ... they all deserve complex and three-dimensional heroes too, and God knows they deserve it after this garbage fire of a year.

Edit: since originally writing this, Sonequa Martin-Green has just been cast as the lead on Star Trek: Discovery, so – whoo hoo!

Edit: since that update, we've lost Carrie Fisher, our irreplaceable Space Princess. Because 2016 is determined to suck right till the end. 

Yet for all of this, I'm an optimist. I truly believe that things can and will get better; that progress is being made – and will keep being made, even if it can feel excruciatingly slow sometimes, or that for every two steps forward we take one back. 2017 is going to be a difficult year in so many different ways, but it's when times are tough that artists get to work; telling stories that inspire, that galvanise, that punch holes in the status quo. And for my part, I'm going to do my best to promote them.

***

I've decided to present this retrospective in the same way I did last year, by simply listing the female characters I discovered, enjoyed and appreciated in 2016 but who (for reasons of there only being twelve months in a year) didn't make it onto any of my Women of the Month posts.

Some of them were introduced to the world in 2016; others arrived much earlier but only came to my attention this year. In each case, the woman in question piqued my imagination, either through her design, characterization or place within the narrative. Unfortunately there's not as much diversity here as there is in the "official" women of the month posts, and neither are there as many characters featured as last year – but in the latter case we'll just have to call it quality over quantity.

Women of the Year: A Retrospective 2016

Okay, so I have one more thing to post before getting to Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

For the past year I've been choosing one woman per month to showcase on my blog, and it's though it's been a difficult task, happily the difficulties have arisen from a surplus of great female characters, not an absence. Now that the year has come to an end, I've posted my twelve Women on the Month on Tumblr, and I thought I'd expand the project to some of the ladies who didn't make the cut – not because they weren't fab in their own way, but because – well, when you limited yourself to only one per month, not everyone can be included.

So here's my list of the great female characters I discovered or revisited this year; those who I found the most inspirational, the most enjoyable, the most well-rounded, the best written and performed.