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...

Cara Mason from Legend of the Seeker

The first Woman of the Month for 2023 was Kahlan Amnell, and I always planned to include her frenemy Cara in this end-of-year retrospective, after having watched and reviewed the entirety of Legend of the Seeker’s season two, where most of her development takes place (she having made her debut in the very last episode of season one).

That didn’t work out entirely to plan, but during my stint with Covid I did end up binge-watching the last six episodes of the show so that I could give Cara a fully-informed write-up. In many ways Cara was designed to be the deliberate inverse of Kahlan, just as Mord Sith in general were a dark reflection of the Confessors.

Like her sisters, Cara was taken from her home as a child and raised in the ranks of the Mord Sith, subjected to brutal training that culminated in her having to kill her own father. Able to deflect any form of magic used against her and resurrect the dead with her Kiss of Life, she was a formidable opponent in battle, and staunchly loyal to the cause in which she was cultivated: service to Lord Rahl.

Her wake-up call comes when she’s transported along with Richard to a Bad Future in which all of her lord and master’s plans have essentially come to fruition – and it’s not pretty. The world is enslaved, her sisters are dead, and Rahl’s son is close to wiping out the last vestiges of free will. She can’t ignore the reality of what life would be like if she remains committed to Rahl, and so switches her allegiance to Richard in order to prevent it from ever happening.

Naturally, her sisters are not particularly understanding about this decision, and after they ambush her and leave her for dead (cutting off the distinctive braid of the Mord Sith for good measure) Cara permanently aligns herself with Richard. Of course, her self-justification is that he’s of the Rahl bloodline and the new heir to the D’Haran throne – but it’s clear that she simply doesn’t have anywhere else to go.

Across the course of season two, Cara rediscovers parts of herself that she assumed were gone for good: the truth about her father, her capacity for remorse, her ability to make decisions on her own rather than just follow orders – all of it lends itself to her growth.

Because the Mord Sith and Confessors are such natural mortal enemies, it’s deeply rewarding to watch Kahlan and Cara gradually warm to each other, to the point where they’ll fight each other in a “let me die first to give you a better chance of surviving” scenario. As Kahlan learns the truth behind Mord Sith training and the levels of pain and suffering that Cara went through, she softens towards her new travelling companion. In return, Cara discovers that she can place her trust in another woman, completely free of the messed-up power dynamics that define the Mord Sith.

The writers are to be commended that they never introduced a full-blown love triangle between the two women and Richard, and the episode in which Cara realizes Kahlan is willing to accept her, even after the murder of her sister, is a real eye-opener. Among these people, she can let down her guard and figure out who she is without judgment.

Cara never loses her spiky edge or sardonic attitude, but she also proves to be an interesting subject in the “nature versus nurture” debate. So much of who she is and what she knows was instilled within her by the Mord Sith, but at the same time, she has a wellspring of honesty and honour that feels like it runs deeper than the training inflicted upon her. It’s a damn shame the show ended when it did, as there was clearly still plenty of material left to explore as she continued her journey back into humanity.

At first glance, it’s hard not to roll your eyes at the premise of Cara: a dominatrix-style bisexual badass who learns to love again (especially when you take into account the obvious projection of author Terry Goodwin’s own sexual hang-ups onto the concept of the Mord Sith). And yet the writers of Legend of the Seeker did something rather incredible with that clichéd, male-gazey foundation, and turned Cara into a genuinely complex and sympathetic character.

Yoon Se-ri from Crash Landing on You

It took me an embarrassingly long time to finish this Korean limited-series drama, but I always knew I was going to see it through for the sake of Yoon Se-ri and Ri Jeong-hyeok. She’s a workaholic South Korean CEO from a wealthy but dysfunctional family; he’s a committed North Korean captain who discovers Se-ri when she crash-lands in the Demilitarized Zone after a storm blows her paraglider off-course.

If you squint, you can kind of see some Nina/Matthias from Six of Crows vibes here, in that two people from countries in conflict (or at least heightened tension) have to work together to survive a life-or-death situation. The big difference is that Jeon-hyeok is already a well-adjusted guy with a mature understanding of right and wrong, and it’s instead Se-ri who must go through a life-changing ordeal in order to come out the other side as a better human being.

Yet she is a surprisingly complex character before her stint in North Korea: not a spoiled brat, but a hardworking entrepreneur – to the point where her father is ready to announce to the rest of the family (including her two older brothers) that he plans to make her the sole heiress to the Yoon business empire. But she also casually dates celebrities, has a reputation for being a demanding boss, and nurtures odd eating habits that have earned her the nickname Princess Picky.

Clearly there’s something substantial missing from her life – in fact, it’s her attempt to fill the void inside her that leads to her signing up for a paragliding excursion in the first place. As such, Se-ri’s adventures in North Korea are not part of some wildly ambitious narrative that culminates in her forging a lasting peace between the two nations, but a character study that charts the course of Se-ri coming to terms with her own life.

Though she’s already successful in the monetary sense, Se-ri gains inner peace and self-love thanks to her experiences in North Korea, something that no amount of material wealth can buy a person. The show in its entirety is a gentle, compassionate portrayal of how people can be deeply alone even when they’re surrounded by others, and how Se-ri subsequently learns to break down barriers between herself and the world.

She may not attain a completely happy ending with the man she loves, but neither does her journey of self-discovery require her to give up her lifestyle or career in order to become a tradwife in a smalltown. Instead, it grants her a fuller, richer outlook on life that she's able to share with others.

Haruka Tenou and Michiru Kaioh from Sailor Moon

I worked my way through the entirety of Sailor Moon’s adventures across 2022 and 2023, courtesy of Christchurch City Libraries and their recent purchase of all five series on DVD. That’s rate-payer money well spent.

I knew that Haruka and Michiru (better known as Sailor Uranus and Neptune) made their first appearance in season three, and I was very much looking forward to their debut since I don’t think this show ever aired past mid-season two on New Zealand television back in the nineties (and even then, it was with the dub that Angelized the Japanese names and cut most of the episodes to shreds. Remember the “Sailor Moon Says” segments hastily edited in at the end of each episode? I’m pretty sure they were conceived by some harried executive attempting to off-set the sheer weirdness of the anime he’d been handed).

And so of course, even if my country had made it up to season three and beyond, the obviously Sapphic relationship between Haruka and Michiru would have been hastily edited and patched over with a case of: “They’re cousins. Totally cousins.”

That the two were a lesbian couple back in the nineties is a staggering thing to conceive, and I can only chalk it down to same-sex relationships being less of a cultural taboo in Japan than in America at the time (unfortunately, I simply don’t know enough about the context of all this to write about it with any great insight).

Still, all the censorship in the world couldn’t hide the fact that Haruka was a male-presenting woman. Her clothing, her haircut, her height – all of it led to the Sailor Scouts getting googly-eyed over her when she first appeared... and even a little bit after they found out she was a woman. Haruka was going to shake up gender assumptions whether the censors liked it or not, and I can only imagine the fervour of the conversations taking place on internet message boards back in the day. I mean, the dub can say they’re cousins, but then how do you explain the body language between them?

In terms of characterization, Uranus and Neptune provided a deliberate contrast to the original Sailor Scouts by being much more gung-ho in their fight against evil. For them, the ends justified the means when it came to completing the mission, and (aside from their relationship with each other) nothing was allowed to get in the way of achieving it. Things like collateral damage were just an unfortunate side-effect of the job.

Naturally, a little time spent in the company of Usagi relieves them of this mentality, and the pair become much less zealous about mowing down innocent civilians in their bid to catch the bad guy.

But either way, there was something iconic about the pair of them, from Neptune’s aquatic hair to Uranus’s towering stature – the show even side-steps any “your anus” jokes by pronouncing the word as Yer-RIN-iss. You just can’t forget the image of the two of them driving away in that convertible, the wind blowing through their hair; so utterly free and uninhibited. I can only imagine the effect they had on LGBTQ+ teens back in the nineties.

Holga Kilgore from Dungeons and Dragons: Honour Amongst Thieves

Honour Amongst Thieves was the very definition of a romp, and much of that had to do with its cast of characters, who together form one of those Ragtag Bunch of Misfits that are so much fun to watch take on the establishment and win.

Most notable amongst this particular bunch is Holga the Barbarian, and though it’s not much of a stretch to have Michelle Rodriguez play a tough girl, the combination of physical strength and prowess in battle alongside a genuinely caring and motherly nature is what makes for a surprisingly nuanced character.

She comes into Edgin Darvis’s life after the murder of his wife at the hands of the Red Wizards, stepping in as a surrogate mother to his daughter Kira. Thankfully she does not turn out to be a replacement love interest to Edgin (he isn’t her type; she prefers diminutive halflings) and instead the two enjoy a brother/sister relationship as they raise Kira and formulate heists.

There’s not a huge amount to say here, only that I enjoyed this character and her multitudes. It would have been too easy to make her either a monosyllabic warrior in furs who clubbed things with oversized weapons, or a kind and nurturing mother-figure who puts her entire life on hold to assist a single dad in the raising of his child for no good reason.

Instead, she’s a fully-formed character, and her backstory ends up being surprisingly affecting. After the initial laughter of realizing that her ex-partner is Bradley Cooper cameoing as a halfling, the pair of them end up having a heartfelt conversation about their elopement and subsequent breakup that isn’t remotely played for laughs. Holga was banished from her tribe in order to be with him, and her inability to get over that fact is what doomed the relationship.

It’s a complicated scenario, and leaves Holga with a determination to prove her worth to the world... something which turns out to be realizing her value to the new family she’s built. Aww.

Miryem Mandelstam from Spinning Silver

This was easily one of my best reads in 2023, a book that was tailormade for my specific interests: a retold fairy tale, a puzzle box plot, insightful prose and female characters; a surplus of them, who furthermore have complex and fascinating dynamics with each other. A young woman thrust into a powerful position who comes to rely utterly on the unexpected wisdom of her elderly nurse. The love between a girl and her mother, which persists even after the memory of the former has been removed from the mind of the latter.

Most significantly, a deal that is made between two women with absolutely nothing in common beyond the fact that both are beleaguered by supernatural beings with destructive designs... why not then contrive a way to pit these two entities against each other? This scene in particular made for such a fantastic reading experience – it’s a rare thing when a book truly thrills you as this one did.

Such is the richness of the book’s characterization, I could have chosen any of the book’s three protagonists for this entry: the poor farmer’s daughter Wanda, trying to protect her siblings from an abusive home. Irina, a minor noblewoman whose father finds a way to magically engineer her entry into the royal court and the path of the unmarried tsar. But it’s really Miryem, the Jewish daughter of a moneylender, who is the book’s most vital character.

Living in an unspecified Eastern-European country, Miryam’s soft-hearted father is leading the family into ruin with his inability to collect payments from his debtors. Miryam takes over the business and finds herself well-suited to the task, even if it means stirring up resentment within the community.

But because they live on the borders of Faerie, the Elf (or Staryk) King gets wind of Miryam’s boast that she can transform dross into silver – and kidnaps her with the intention that she’ll do the same for his treasure hoard.

The compelling thing about Miryam’s experiences is that we are never made to forget how vulnerable she is: despite her intelligence and determination, she’s still a Jewish woman living among gentiles who hold no small amounts of antisemitic prejudices against her. The Staryk court is a field day compared to her Christian neighbours, and author Naomi Novik is excellent at exploring the sheer amount of work that Miryam must put into keeping herself alive, keeping her loved ones safe, and doing what she knows is right.

Perhaps the book's most powerful moment is when Miryam choses to try and save the Staryk world for the sake of the three servants that helped her while she was in captivity. When her father desperately tries to talk her out of it, he quotes scripture: “Are there even ten righteous men among them?” She replies: “I know that there are three.”

This balancing act she must manage, the moves and counter-moves, the knowledge that even the wrong word or facial expression could spell her doom – it’s riveting stuff. At times the book brushes up against some of my most disliked romantic tropes, but Miryem is such a force of nature, someone guided so strongly by her beliefs and convictions, that she simply washes away any of the unpleasant implications of Novik’s dodgy understanding of love. This is a woman whose life revolves around debts and repayments, who ends up learning that there are some things within herself that cannot be bought or sold, that she herself owes a debt to concepts like common decency and shared humanity, and that people have an obligation to themselves and others – it is a strength of spirit I rarely see in this type of fiction.

Ada Harris from Mrs Harris Goes to Paris

This was a very sweet little movie, and we could all do with more heroines like its titular character – in life and in fiction. A cleaning lady in her sixties, Ada Harris has lived her entire life in the service of others, whether it’s looking after their homes, mending their clothes, or offering them emotional support in times of trouble. Gentle-natured and hard-working, she has only one glaring fault: she’s too kind.

This has given people leave to take advantage of her generosity, as she’s all too willing to waive a fee or work into the night to attend someone else’s needs.

But at long last, for what is possibly the first time in her life, she decides to treat herself. She saves up her pennies and travels to Paris to buy a real Christian Dior dress of her own – not a lofty ambition relatively speaking, but one she diligently works toward. Naturally, Paris is full of places to go and people to meet, and after her fair share of tribulations, she purchases her much-coveted dress.

Alas, another act of misguided kindness sees it destroyed when she lends it to a young woman who gets too close to a bar heater. As they say, no good deed goes unpunished.

Apparently, the original book by Paul Gallico ends with Mrs Harris coming to terms with the loss by realizing her adventures in Paris were more important than the gown. She helped a young girl find her confidence, brought two lovebirds together, befriended a hermit, and led the employees of Christian Dior on strike. But the film cannot reconcile itself to this more philosophical conclusion, and so has Mrs Harris’s friends in Paris pull together to make her a brand-new dress – the one she originally wanted before another mean-spirited customer deliberately outbid her for the design.

So Ada finally gets her chance to shine, reminding us that although kindness is important – and ultimately rewards her – one should be careful about how much you give and to whom you give it to. There is a limit to how many times you should put yourself second.

Kamala Khan from Ms Marvel and The Marvels

Okay, I’ll confess. I broke my MCU hiatus to see Iman Vellani as Kamala Khan. I’ll cop to not knowing a thing about this character, but Vellani looked so charming in various interviews and in what little promotion The Marvels was able to get, that I wanted to support her.

Her origin story is to be found in Ms Marvel, in which an old bangle that once belonged to her grandmother gifts her with the power to create “hard light.” Kind of like Green Lantern. Being a massive Captain Marvel fan, as well as a budding comic-book artist and cosplayer, Kamala is thrilled at the thought of being a superhero, and starts to practice her newfound abilities around Jersey City.

Of course, she has to face the usual teenage obstacles: an overbearing family, unrequited crushes, the popular mean girl, homework – but given Kamala’s background, we’re also given a look at more culturally specific issues: police profiling, her brother’s wedding, politics at the local mosque, and her family’s involvement in 1947’s Partition of India.

In The Marvels, a second bangle is found by the film’s villain, who naturally wants the other one to go with it. This brings Kamala into Captain Marvel’s orbit, and naturally she can barely contain her excitement as she meets her idol and goes on an intergalactic adventure to other planets... even if some of her hero worship is whittled away in the face of Carol’s more questionable decisions.

I’ll admit I’m wrung-out by superhero stories, but Kamala’s grounded nature and bubbly enthusiasm is a breath of fresh air for the MCU. The stinger promises more adventures to come, and they’re dropping X-Men hints like breadcrumbs, so maybe Kamala will be the shot in the arm that this franchise needs.

It’s a shame The Marvels didn’t do better at the box office, but the MCU has been struggling for a while now, and things had to come to a head at some point. It was essentially death by a thousand cuts, though I can’t say I buy the “too much homework” excuse though. It reminds me of how certain audiences insisted they were baffled by the fluid chronology of Greta Gerwig’s Little Women (though they had no complains about a similar tactic in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk) and in this case they seemed to be bewildered by the idea that Monica Rambeau has grown from a child to an adult in the time-skip between movies.

Watching grown men pretend they can’t understand the concept of time in order to criticize a film with women in it sure is something – in fact it’s reminiscent of a scene in Ms Marvel in which a character is unable (or unwilling) to pronounce Kamala’s name properly. So long may her story continue.

Rosaline “Ros” Meyers from Spooks

It’s been a difficult year for choosing Women of the Month candidates. Back in February I had just started watched Spooks, and picked Zoe Reynolds (played by Keeley Hawes) as that month’s chosen character.

Yet had I the power of hindsight, I probably would have gone with Ros Meyers, who not only ended up sticking around for a lot longer than Zoe (despite being introduced later) but was essentially the show’s de facto female lead for most of its ten-year run. When you think of the cast of Spooks, you’ll probably envision the team dynamic that she was a part of.

At first glance, the two characters are similar: short blonde hair and a cool demeanour, but where Zoe could still be a little idealistic and unseasoned, Ros had ice-water running through her veins. She never cracked, she never faltered, she barely smiled. I could only watch in helpless awe.  

The irony of that is she was technically introduced as one of the bad guys, the daughter of a man who was part of a right-wing conspiracy to take control of the government. Sent in to gather intelligence on MI5, she ended up realizing the true severity of what they were attempting to pull off and switched sides, eventually rising up the ranks and taking the position of Section Chief. It was a long and arduous journey, filled with inappropriate love affairs, faked deaths, an unexpected relapse into working as a mole for another shadowy cabal, and accidentally shooting one of her junior colleagues in the line of duty – all culminating in her death while attempting to rescue the paralyzed Home Secretary from a hotel rigged with explosives.

At her (extremely small) funeral, someone comments on how she was as much of an enigma in death as in life, and during her stint on the show we only got a few glimpses into her private life. At one point she takes a shooting victim to an acquaintance’s house for off-the-record medical attention, and the audience is left to infer that he’s a former lover Ros is willing to endanger for the sake of the greater good. More highlights include distracting the bodyguards of a man she’s just knocked out by flashing them, or testing the quality of a transmission by mentioning that her perfume is made from the glands of cats.

All this understates the quality of Hermione Norris’s deadpan comedic timing. On taking a suspect to an undisclosed location, he morosely comments on how cold and sterile safehouses always seem. She turns to him and says: “I live here.”

In short, she was cold, staunch, terse, pragmatic, efficient and so much fun to watch. I wish I could siphon off some of that “I don’t give a shit” attitude, since it’s very rare that you see a character who honestly doesn’t care what other people think. She didn’t.

Princess Buttercup from The Princess Bride

I watched a ton of eighties fantasy movies last April, and was somewhat surprised at how good many of the female characters are. Princess Lili is the most important plot-mover in Legend, Sarah goes through significant character growth in Labyrinth, and Sorsha was my Woman of the Month back in November 2016.

But I kept coming back to Princess Buttercup, especially after reading Cary Elwes’s autobiographical account on the making of the movie. In truth, all this entry needs is the full quote of what he had to say about Robin Wright’s performance as the titular princess:

Looking back, I think Robin’s performance in The Princess Bride is vastly underrated. Her role was to play the victim: a young woman who goes through a lot of trauma having lost her true love, but who has to essentially look beautiful in the process. That was Robin’s job: to look like a woman who would inspire a young farmhand to leave home and set off in search of wealth and security so that he might one day be worthy of her hand in marriage.

Sounds easy enough, right? Most people think if you’re blessed with the right bone structure, or if you just let the makeup and lighting crew do their work, all you have to do is bat your eyes at the camera and your job is done with a role like that. Not quite.

Buttercup falls in love, loses her love, gets kidnapped, is forced into an arranged marriage, reconnects with her one true love, and then lets him go in order to save his life. It really requires a great deal of emotional range. What it doesn’t require – or at least doesn’t display – is the comedic talent for which The Princess Bride is so well known. Goldman wrote a screenplay that we now know is filled with great, classic, funny lines. Unfortunately, few, if any, of those lines are given to Buttercup.

Robin is not merely the victim in the film; she is also the straight man (or in this case, the straight woman). And even though Westley is not exactly a comedian, he does have some funny lines, and is involved in some rather broad physical comedy. Robin’s character is permitted no such relief. From start to finish, she had to play it straight, exactly as the role demanded.

Any actor will tell you that playing the embodiment of virtue is the most difficult role you can take on, mostly because it can be so damn uninteresting. Buttercup fares a little better than most, in that she has an amusing bratty streak, but it’s still a difficult needle to thread. Despite being the titular character, around whom all the plot revolves, she’s a remarkably passive character, with only a few scenes of proactivity (leaping overboard, pushing Westley off a cliff, bargaining with Humperdinck for his safety, nearly committing suicide... yeah, it’s not a great list).

She embodies the pros and cons of being a Distressed Damsel: on the one hand, you don’t get to do much beyond get dragged around by other characters, on the other, your importance is highlighted by just how obsessed everyone else is with your safety and freedom. You’re relevant and desirable... but then, is that a good thing? Your worth depends entirely on a man’s opinion of you – and this movie makes it clear that a lot of Buttercup’s worth lies in her extraordinary beauty.

But then, it’s a satire. The whole point is that it’s vaguely ridiculous. We can apply all sorts of critique to this film and the character of Buttercup: she doesn’t pass the Bechdel or the Mako Mori Test; she’s a passive damsel in distress for most of the runtime, her beauty is her most commendable attribute, she’s essentially a Sexy Lamp for the entire third act... and yet we love her anyway.

And it’s because she personifies something we all want to believe in: true love, and utter faith, and absolute conviction. I’ve always loved her confrontation with Humperdinck, when she defiantly tells him: “Westley and I are joined by the bonds of love and you cannot track that, not with a thousand bloodhounds, and you cannot break it, not with a thousand swords,” but it is her book counterpart that does her the most justice, stating with unreserved confidence: “it doesn’t matter whether you sent the ships or not. Westley will come for me. There is a God; I know that. And there is love; I know that too; so Westley will save me.”

Ginger and Brigette Fitzgerald from Ginger Snaps trilogy

I watched a lot of werewolf movies last October, and you won’t be surprised to learn that women weren’t particularly well-served in any of them (except for The Company of Wolves). But after having watched the original Ginger Snaps film back in 2020, I followed it up this year with the two sequels. Well, technically one sequel and one prequel.

The original has since become a cult classic; the story of two misanthropic sisters with a death fetish who plan to be “out by sixteen or dead on the scene, but together forever.” Their hobbies include taking photos of their own staged deaths (complete with sharp implements and fake blood) and playing elaborate pranks on the school bully (the movie starts with them on their way to kidnap her dog).

Yes, they sound like terrible people, and they sorta are. But when Ginger is attacked by a wild animal, she starts to undergo the inevitable “this is a metaphor for female puberty and sexuality” transformation, leaving her sister to scramble for a cure. There’s a deep poignancy in Brigette having to face the true ramifications of their sisterly “out by sixteen or dead on the scene” pact, realizing that death isn’t the glamourous, hardcore ‘fuck you’ to the world they’ve always imagined it to be.

The two follow-ups aren’t quite as powerful, with Ginger reduced to an antagonistic hallucination in Unleashed as Brigette gradually succumbs to the werewolf curse, while Ginger Snaps Back is even stranger: a prequel that places the sisters in colonial Canada with no explanation as to whether they’re meant to be the girls’ identical ancestors, or reincarnations, or alternate-world counterparts.

Still, this final instalment at least has a more upbeat ending for them, with the two of them sharing in the werewolf curse and vowing to face whatever comes next as an undivided pair. The trilogy as a whole is focused on the sisterly bond between them, capturing that “you can have my kidney but not my charger” vibe that all siblings have, whether they’re squabbling or plotting or fighting or desperately trying to save each other.

Plus, the entire premise essentially revolves around Ginger getting her first period, so how could she not be on this list?

Honorary Mentions:

Marion Ravenwood from the Indiana Jones franchise

Why is Marion in the honorary mentions and not the above list? Because despite her spunk and her indisputable status as the best of the Indy girls, none of the films in which she appears really do her justice.

My biggest frustration with Raiders of the Lost Ark is that despite being such a firecracker, she never gets to impact the story in any meaningful way. I watched carefully during my latest rewatch, and her contributions amount to shooting a guy in Nepal and using a machine gun to take out some Nazis while in the grounded plane (after which Indy has to save her from the cockpit, because she’s unable to open it by herself). Even her big scene when she drinks Belloq under the table becomes a Negated Moment of Awesome when the Nazis cut off her escape attempt.

In Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, she drives a boat off a cliff and only avoids killing everyone thanks to Plot Armour. Her appearance in Dial of Destiny amounts to a mere cameo, albeit a very touching one.

Of course, I do realize that Indiana himself is something of a Pinball Protagonist in Raiders, whose actions have no bearing on the outcome of the story (in fact, you could argue he makes things worse) so it might seem disingenuous to criticize Marion’s character for something Indy’s is also guilty of... but this was the creative team that gave us Princess Leia, for heaven’s sake. Leia took charge, made decisions, gave commands. She was no Princess Buttercup. More importantly, you cannot extract Leia from A New Hope without fundamentally altering its narrative structure. With Marion... you probably could. (And you can't say that of Buttercup either).

But this was the year in which I watched all five Indiana Jones movies, so I wanted to acknowledge her somehow. The character was carried by the sheer charismatic force of Karen Allen’s performance, and so gets an honorary mention here. As Cate Blanchett said of her: "She's just this extraordinary, liberated presence on-screen. I remember seeing her for the first time in Raiders and just thinking there was no other heroine I'd ever seen as free and as feisty as that. She really created something that was utterly inspiring."

Rozenn and Dahut from The Daughters of Ys

This one is an honorary mention because neither of these women would qualify as heroines – though at the same time, I loved reading about these two sisters and their fraught relationship with each other, with the nature of power, and with their island kingdom of Ys.

Rozenn and Dahut are the daughters of the king and recently deceased queen of Ys. At first glance, they fit into the standard older/younger princess types: the elder is more responsible, foregoing the decadence of court in order to spend her time among the commonfolk, whilst the younger revels in the pomp and glamour of the court. Rozenn learns practical skills; Dahut dabbles in the same magical powers her mother possessed. Rozenn is down-to-earth and nurturing; Dahut is vain and flirtatious. Rozenn enjoys a chaste romance with a fisher-boy, while the more sexual Dahut has a string of lovers.

It's initially very clear what sister fits into the role of “the good one” and which is “the bad one.” And yet as the book goes on, it becomes clear that it’s not that simple.

We eventually learn that the prosperity of the island kingdom relies entirely on the sacrifices that Dahut has to make: a lover is regularly murdered and thrown to the ocean. This is what keeps Ys afloat, though it’s apparent that Dahut finds this burden as heavy as it is inescapable. If she doesn’t commit these dreadful crimes to keep their island home in splendour, then who will? Meanwhile, Rozenn is actively turning a blind eye to the problems at court, choosing to ignore trouble instead of taking action against it.

The great irony is that the plot ultimately turns on Dahut betraying her sister by seducing her lover, but then deciding to show mercy by not sacrificing him to the sea. Calling this “a kindness” after Rozenn has caught them post-coital, Dahut then finds herself the target of the forces that have demanded blood for all these years...

Now, I am a strong believer in people taking responsibility for their own decisions, and at no point does Dahut try to get herself out of the devil’s bargain she finds herself enmeshed in (at least, not until it’s too late). But in this case, it’s also easy to see that Dahut did not have a lot of options. She took on her mother’s responsibility to keep Ys flourishing above sea-level, performing the gruesome task that her diffident father and clueless sister would not. Should she have just let the city and all its people fall?  

Meanwhile, Rozenn enjoys the freedom of the countryside, shirking any responsibilities to the court and (one suspects) choosing to remain wilfully ignorant about what her sister is really up to. The story ends with Rozenn feeling the same regret that we do: that she did not do enough for her sister when she had the chance.

It’s tragic and complicated and inevitable, brought about by a fatal combination of external forces and internal character flaws, like all the best Shakespearean dramas. You’re left trying to imagine ways in which it all might have been avoided, while knowing it couldn’t have ended any other way. It’s a fascinating book, all the more for revolving around these two complicated sisters.

Barbie. Just Barbie.

I’m not just talking about Margot Robbie’s Barbie, I’m talking about the doll, the franchise, the icon in general. Who is Barbie? Why is Barbie? Designed by Ruth Handler in the 1950s and named after her daughter Barbara, the doll was controversial on its release and never got any less so. The debate continues, whether it’s outrage (from her detractors) over her reality-defying measurements or insistence (from her fans) that she’s a role model due to the fact that Astronaut Barbie predated any real women astronauts.

As the recent movie pointed out, before Barbie came along, little girls could only play with baby dolls in faux-preparation for becoming mothers. Barbie, with her dizzying array of careers and lifestyle choices (including “being a mermaid”) gave them a chance to project their own dreams and ambitions – no matter how vague – onto a doll that could be anything her little girl wanted her to be.

So is she a role model? Or someone whose accomplishments (and tiny waistline) make girls feel bad about themselves? Is she racist for promoting ideals of stereotypical white beauty? How many feet were destroyed in a bid to emulate her permanent commitment to stilettos? Is the recent line of more diverse Barbies enough to make up for the potentially harmful legacy she leaves in her wake?

The debate rages on and will not be resolved within our lifetimes. What cannot be denied is her ubiquitousness. Like Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny, she is everywhere and everyone knows who she is. Just off the top of my head, things like Buffy the Vampire Slayer featured Barbies as voodoo dolls in the episode “Witch”, while Debbie Jelinsky in Addams Family Values killed her parents because they bought her Malibu Barbie instead of Ballerina Barbie. The Simpsons did a whole episode about the 1992 Teen-Talk Barbie controversy, in which a doll was programmed to say (among other things) “math class is hard!”

For the record, I had several Barbies and don’t feel particularly scarred for having played with them as a child, but then of course we all have subconscious unexamined prejudices lurking around in our psyches, so who the hell knows.

Last year’s Barbie movie bit off a tad more than it could chew when it came to its myriad of storylines and ever-changing plot objectives, but the trailer promised “if you love Barbie, this movie is for you; if you hate Barbie, this movie is for you.” That’s another way of saying that it wasn’t going to commit to any definitive statement on the issue of Barbie. I can’t say I really blame them, as not for a second did I think it was going to make anything that even remotely resembled a bold feminist statement, and they ultimately went with: “being a woman is hard”.

But the discourse... oh, the discourse. I think my favourite comment can be found on this review, in which at least one individual is very upset that Kens don’t have equal rights in Barbieland. Yes Barbieland, explicitly stated to be a world that represents the collective imagination of little girls. Because apparently even children playing with dolls must think carefully about the feelings of men.

I mean FFS, that was the WHOLE JOKE. That little girls DON’T CARE ABOUT KEN. They care about dance parties and beach parties and Barbie’s friendships with other Barbies. Ken is an accessory, not the main event, and that a grown man is upset because little girls aren't being totally egalitarian while playing with their dolls in the imaginative landscape of their own minds is just mind-blowing to me. 

What’s also grimly fascinating is that Ryan Gosling’s turn as Ken is the performance that’s getting all the attention and awards buzz, even though the movie spends a fair bit of time pointing out how men get more praise and attention for doing the bare minimum. Who could have possibly foreseen that life would imitate art in this instance?

But at the end of the day, Barbie is Barbie. Some little girls will play with her and they’ll be fine. Some little girls won’t play with her and they’ll be fine. Some little girls will grow up to be profoundly messed-up individuals, but it probably won’t have anything to do with Barbie. She’ll go on living her life in plastic (it’s fantastic) and the world will continue to turn.

***

I usually follow up this list with a look at female characters featured in some of fandom’s biggest and most popular franchises, but in 2023 there weren’t many to discuss. House of the Dragon is obviously between seasons, Star Wars didn’t put out anything particularly interesting, and the MCU has finally started to peter out.

Looking back, the highlight of my viewing year was going to my friend’s place and watching The Wheel of Time and Ahsoka concurrently, both with such a surplus of female characters that it was almost dizzying. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite cover for the fact that Ahsoka wasn’t great, with tedious pacing, bland dialogue, and an overarching plot that ultimately didn’t go anywhere (hey showrunners, maybe you wouldn’t get cancelled so often if all your first seasons didn’t feel like setup for something more interesting that’ll get released at a later date).

I have a vague inkling that Gamora, Nebula and Mantis got happy endings in the third Guardians of the Galaxy movie, but have even less idea of what happened in Ant-Man (they recast Cassie, which bugged me, and apparently Wasp’s screen-time was whittled down to almost nothing – though I can’t blame them for that given the actress’s anti-vaxx stance).

Sadly, The Marvels didn’t do well, and there have been a number of rationales offered up to explain its box-office failure: superhero fatigue, its inability promote itself due to the actor’s strike, the sense of homework that surrounded it (with tie-ins to at least three Disney+ shows) and a trickling out of interest in the MCU in general.

(Though any bragging over this point from the usual suspects was somewhat muted by the absolute ass-kicking Barbie did at the box office).

Personally, I blame its placement at the end of a string of MCU duds: Multiverse of Madness, Thor: Love and Thunder, Quantumania, Secret Invasion... none of it seems to be building up to anything interesting, so by the time The Marvels rolled around, people just felt wrung out by the whole dragging-on experience. A sense of closure was achieved at the conclusion of Endgame; now each new movie and show feels like a high-budget trailer for something else, as opposed to a standalone adventure that justifies its own existence.

(Also not helping is that many of the sequels don’t even feel like sequels – Multiverse of Madness completely dropped the established rivalry between Strange and Mordo, while The Marvels has nothing whatsoever to do with Carol finding a home-world for the Skrull or the aftermath of her brainwashing at the hands of the Kree. Why get interested in long-form stories that just abandon their own plots?)

Over in DC Studios, things were equally dismal. Granted, Across the Spider-Verse gave us more Gwen Stacy, though I’m going to hold off writing about her until we get to the end of that particular story. But Mera got the short end of the stick in the Aquaman sequel due to the grotesque media circus surrounding the court case against Amber Heard, and though I was intrigued by the presence of Supergirl in The Flash, spoilers tell me she was also misused, and not even in it that much. As for Blue Beetle? Shazam? I’ve no idea what went on there.

Apparently they killed off Ilsa Faust in the latest Mission Impossible movie in order to replace her with Hayley Atwell (is this franchise completely unaware that women can co-exist?) and Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Helena in the last Indiana Jones ended up being something of a squib as well – not nearly as charming or appealing as the film itself would have you believe.

Heck, 2023 gave us a brand-new Disney Princess in Wish, and nobody cared. Things were just so lacklustre; not just for female characters, but the stories (which were high-budget, widely promoted, talent-stacked projects) in which they appeared.

I honestly can't tell you what her name is.

To sum up this year for female characters: a giant meh.

***

In my entry on Barbie, I mentioned that the imaginative spaces of little girls are completely void of men (not in the sense that they don’t exist, but that they’re not something girls or their fictional projections are required to take into consideration at all) and that thought struck me when looking over everything I read and watched this year. I’m well outside the reading demographic for Linda Chapman’s Star Friends, but I was enticed by the cover art and had “well, I’m a children’s librarian, so I should read children’s books” as an excuse – and as in Barbieland, men don’t figure into the lives or stories of protagonists Mia, Lexi, Sita and Violet. There are a few dads on the periphery of the action, but for the most part, they are simply not relevant.

Suddenly, I was fascinated. Young girlhood is perhaps the only time we don’t have to think (or care) about gender-roles in society, a psychological reality that that is reflected in books written for this age group. And there are so many book series that exist in a similar vein to Star Friends – any number of variations on princesses, animal-care, female friendships and magical phenomena, to the point where listing them all would take all day.

Give it a few more years and our reading material will soon involve men as love interests or platonic friends or enemies to defeat – but at this age bracket, the striking thing is that male characters simply don’t exist. (An obvious comparison is The Babysitters Club, which also revolves around female friendships... but because the girls are older, boys are definitely a factor in their lives).

So early childhood is the Themyscira of our time on earth... I may have to come back to this idea in a longer and more in-depth post.

Speaking of The Babysitters Club, I am continuing my reread... which is swiftly becoming a first-time read as I move out of the twenties and thirties and into the forties (it was around this point that I aged out of the series, though the very last one I read was #78). And it’s been a lot of fun revisiting the characters and places that took up so much space in my mind when I was a ten-year-old, not to mention the time capsule quality of the stories in which cellphones and the internet didn’t exist, and nobody has any problems with teenage girls looking after infants.

Of course, some parts have definitely dated, and Mary Anne is proving herself to be a fairly awful person, but this time around I have added appreciation for Stacey and Mallory, not to mention some of the peripheral characters (I think I'm starting to ship Charlie and Janine). Plus, the mysteries are a delight. Truly, there is nothing better than reading an Apple paperback from your youth and getting to the part where they find an old diary in the attic.

Do you know what fictional medium is doing fantastically well with female characters at the moment? Graphic novels. They’re flying off the shelves at the library (to the point where we had to get more expansive shelving just to hold our entire collection) and it’s rewarding to know that so many great heroines are finding their way into the hands of young readers: Tidesong, Lightfall, Swan Lake: Quest for the Kingdoms, Cat’s Cradle, Sorceline, Wingbearer, Salt Magic, Mapmakers and the Lost Legend, The Rema Chronicles, Pearl of the Sea, Hotel Dare, City of Dragons, Treasure in the Lake, The Moth Keepers, Wait Till Helen Comes, Zita the Space Girl – they were all fantastic books with gorgeous artwork. Even the ones with male protagonists (The Legend of Brightblade, Shuna’s Journey) still had strong supporting casts of female characters.

And for older readers, there was The Dire Days of Willowweep Manor, Evermore: A Post-Apocalyptic Fairy Tale, Grimoire Noir, Daughter of Smoke and Cinders, Chivalry, A Guest in the House, The Girl from the Sea, The Black Bull of Norroway, The Daughters of Ys and Her Little Reapers. It is a surfeit of riches out there at the moment, so get cracking.

I also churned through lot of solid children’s books that dealt specifically with female dynamics, such as Eleanor Estes’s The Hundred Dresses, Betty Ren Wright’s Out of the Dark, Lucy Strange’s Sisters of the Lost Marsh, Karah Sutton’s A Wolf for a Spell and J. Anderson Coats’s The Green Children of Woolpit. There was some insightful commentary in all of them, whether it was the protagonist of The Hundred Dresses coming to terms with her complicity in the bullying of another girl, or the heroine of The Green Children being cognizant of how fairy tales always try to pit girls against each other, and consciously attempting to avoid falling into that trap.

***

Being a librarian, I couldn’t help but notice a few trends in the publishing world, and there’s recently been a huge surge of Greek mythology retellings on the market: Madeline Miller’s Circe, Lauren J. A. Bear’s Medusa’s Sisters, Jennifer Saint’s Atalanta, Laura Shepperson’s Phaedra, Costanza Casati’s Clytemnestra, Natalie Haynes’s Stone Blind – the list goes on. Some even step outside the scope of Greek mythology with books such as J. R. Thorp’s Learwife (self-explanatory) and Olesya Salnikova Gilmore’s The Witch and the Tsar (centring on a young Baba Yaga). As the saying goes, everyone wants to be first to do something second.

But isn’t this a good thing? More books about women? Well, on the surface it would seem so, but the books are nearly identical in their basic formula: to take a legendary female character and make a modern woman out of her – which means anachronistically bemoaning her lot in life, girl-bossing her way to uncomplicated power, and then finding true happiness in the arms of a forward-thinking man.

Expect all the blurbs to insist that each one is: “a story of the women that have been forgotten.” One of them starts with the dedication: “For my mum, who has always thought a woman with an axe was more interesting than a princess.” Sigh.

Basically, all of them purport to be “feminist retellings” of the original myths, when all that’s really happening is a filtering of the story through a female character’s perspective. There’s nothing challenging or thought-provoking or difficult about any of them. We’re not reading about the misogyny of Ancient Greece and how the women of that time lived within it; we’re reading about our concept of modern misogyny and how these legendary women should have dealt with it.

All these books may well have been written with the best of intentions, but none of them have anything new to say, and their depictions of women are so toothless, so tepid.

Still, that’s better than what’s going on in YA at the moment, where if A.I. intelligence took over the industry and started churning out books by using an algorithm, I doubt anyone would notice. There's a spunky but shy teenage protagonist who leads a bloodless revolution by tapping into hitherto unknown inner powers (variant: a god grants them to her) and saves her people by girl-bossing her way to victory. Readers are encouraged to yell: “yaas queen!” while a love triangle between the boy-next-door and a tortured villain plays out. The latter (to paraphrase Angela Carter) will believe the heroine’s orifice is the key to his salvation. The former might be a person of colour, but the latter has to be a white guy with dark hair.

There's an enemies-to-lovers narrative with not much development in-between, which will always start with the female half of the equation getting violently assaulted, kidnapped or berated. This will require a few scenes of obligatory defiance before she learns that the world can’t be saved unless she gets over the violation to her body, agency and/or personal dignity.

The supporting cast will be made up of variants on the following archetypes: the alpha bitch, the largely voiceless person of colour, the LGBTQ representation who has a mostly off-page relationship with another character, and the heroine’s BFF. These types can be conflated or divided in a number of ways, though at some point everyone will hug tearfully.

Dialogue will be comprised of witty banter and biting declarations of self-actualization which sound like nothing any real human being is capable of saying. The title will contain two of the following nouns: smoke, rose, shadow, crown, heir, thorns, blood, court, stars, mist, ravens, queen, storms or stone. In an interview, the author will admit the whole thing started as a fan-fiction of a book that probably also started as a fan-fiction of a book.

At some point a massive fandom shipping drama will explode on social media, and somehow the Reylos will be involved. This drama might manifest as accusations of cultural appropriation, child grooming, human trafficking, or deliberately sabotaging book reviews on Goodreads, but rest assured that it’s always about shipping, and the Reylos will still somehow be involved.

Yeah, I’m generalizing – but not by much.

I know this is the part where someone pops up and says “let people enjoy things!” and “it’s just fiction!” And sure, there’s a place for candyfloss literature, or whatever you want to call it. But it’s the empty faux-empowerment and tedious repetitiveness of it all that gets my goat, in which everyone seems to be piggybacking off the success of someone else, and there’s not an original idea in sight.

Women and girls deserve better reading material. Or at least, for the good stuff (Frances Hardinge! Philip Reeve!) to get the promotion and buzz that’s currently being dominated by vapid TikTok trends.

***

When it comes to visual media, 2023 was the year of singular names that stuck out: Barbie. Nimona. Queen Charlotte. Ahsoka. M3gan. Rosaline and Enola to a lesser extent. Wednesday, though that was technically 2022. Coraline, thanks to a return to theatres in August. All of them did extremely well at the box office or on streaming services, though every time there’s a monster hit involving a female lead, everyone rushes to celebrate the fact that producers and investors will now finally acknowledge that women can carry a film or franchise... only for producers and investors to do no such thing. Ah well.

There were plenty of solid (albeit light) female-centric fantasy movies this year, from the long-gestating sequels to Hocus Pocus and Disenchanted, to The School for Good and Evil and Enola Holmes 2 (please, please can we get a third?) Kaitlyn Dever’s Rosaline was a fun diversion, and would go well as a double-feature with Daisy Ridley’s Ophelia, which also delves into the story of a periphery Shakespearean heroine. Now I’m just trying to think of a third one to make it an unofficial trilogy. Miranda? Celia? Hippolyta?

This ended up being the year for Lesley Manville, appearing in Mrs Harris Goes to Paris, The Crown, Dangerous Liaisons and Magpie Murders (I also saw her in North and South last year, and have Sherwood ready to go on my hard-drive as well). To see a woman in her sixties have adventures and solve mysteries is always a treat.

It was also a great year for Halle Bailey, who starred in both The Little Mermaid and The Colour Purple... neither of which I’ve seen. I have to admit having a deep aversion to live-action adaptations of animated films/shows, and the subject matter of The Colour Purple sounds completely harrowing, but they’re on my watchlist for Bailey’s sake. Her star is clearly on the rise.

I managed to watch plenty of classics this year, such as Roman Holiday, Casablanca, Gaslight, Psycho and The Sound of Music, and (as mentioned) the entire Indiana Jones oeuvre. April was the month for revisiting all the eighties fantasy films I was raised on, while October ended up being four weeks of werewolves. 

Over on television, the stories of Catherine Cawood (Happy Valley), Charlotte Heywood (Sanditon) and Princess Bean (Disenchantment) ended this year – three very different women in three very different genres, as did Queen Elizabeth’s in The Crown, a show whose final few episodes exist almost as a posthumous tribute to her life. Sadly, the cancellation of Westworld means that Dolores and Maeve won’t be getting the endings they deserve, though at least Freydís will be back for a third and final season in Vikings: Valhalla.

Watching Suranne Jones and Rose Leslie in Vigil was an unexpected treat (thanks sis, season two is on my watchlist) and I managed to catch up on the animated Harley Quinn (Harlivy still going strong), The Dragon Prince (Claudia made Woman of the Month in September), and the debut of Unicorn Warriors Eternal (Emma/Melinda is easily that show’s most interesting character).

I even managed to get to the theatre three times this year (which is impressive in a world where Covid is still ongoing), first to see Sense and Sensibility at the Court Theatre, then to see the Romeo and Juliet and Hansel and Gretel ballets at the Isaac Theatre Royal. Sense and Sensibility was particularly good, with an all-women cast playing multiple roles throughout the story, and earning teems of laughter from the audience.

***

So what’s on the agenda for 2024? I’m currently in the middle of the third season of Elementary, with one day a week devoted to watching the second season of The Gilded Age with mum. Having watched only two Robin Hood films last year (both with rather disappointing Marians) I’m enjoying the old 1950’s Adventures of Robin Hood starring Richard Greene, which is a fascinating look at an early serialized take on the legends, but which will take me a fair amount of time to get through. There were over one hundred episodes!

Having revisited The White Queen and The White Princess last year, I’m currently in the midst of The Spanish Princess, and plan to use that as a jumping-off point for watching The Tudors all the way through for the first time (and then Becoming Elizabeth, which has been burning a hole in my external hard-drive for a while now).

I’m looking forward to see more of Sharon Small as Barbara Havers in Inspector Lynley, though I STILL have to finish Nancy Drew, Perry Mason, Evil and The Great. Ooh, and I recently read this great article on LARB called Where the Boys Aren’t and immediately got hold of everything it mentions. So expect plenty of all-women dystopias in the near future.

And of course, I’ll get back to reviewing Legend of the Seeker and Xena Warrior Princess (haven’t done much of that latter one in a while).

I’ve also started my Buffy the Vampire Slayer rewatch! I’m posting my thoughts exclusively on Tumblr for now, as the formatting there makes it quicker to write things out, but I’m aiming for one episode write-up per week (watch Saturday night, post Sunday night). I am super looking forward to this one, and even three episodes in has got me all verklempt. Feel free to follow and comment!

There’s also plenty of female-centric projects to look forward to in the coming year: I’ve heard good things about Blue Eye Samurai and Poor Things. Furiosa is on her way, as is the second season of Arcane in November. Wicked Little Letters looks like fun, as does Damsel and Inside Out 2. That’s not even getting into all the stuff I missed last year and now have to catch up on.

Finally, my birthday is coming up in February and it’s one of the milestones. That means despite my still-massive pile of library books I have to get through, I’m going to treat myself to a month of reading all my favourite authors: Philip Reeve, Patricia McKillip, Garth Nix, Catherynne Valente, Frances Hardinge, Laini Taylor, Susanna Clarke – specifically all the books of theirs I’ve accumulated over the years and not gotten around to reading yet. For my annual leave, I plan to FEAST.