I love this long quote / short essay by Junot Diaz. I’m so tired of terribly written women characters, and his comments go a long way towards exploring that dynamic in writing.
Last year I was super excited to watch Daredevil on Netflix…until the first episode came out. In the first episode, a woman wakes up to find a bloody corpse next to her. Then Daredevil finds her, takes her home, says, “Girl, you in danger, do not I mean DO NOT return home to your murder scene apartment because bad guys will kill you.”
So what does she do? At 3 am, in Hell’s Kitchen of all places, she sneaks out of Daredevil’s apartment and returns home. WTF?!?!? Have none of the writers ever met a woman? Do you not know that we spend our Whole Entire Lives managing our safety even in broad daylight? The only way any woman would do these things would be if she were actually clinically certifiably insane.
So why did she do them? So that the hero could show up and save her. She did something literally no human would do just to further the story beats of the male main character. So I stopped watching.
I was happy to watch a show about a guy who’d been given superpowers by a freak chemical spill. But with that woman character? I couldn’t watch it. Too unbelievable.
Radio Sof 