Here’s a fun game for those at home: See how long you can click through, before you get too depressed to continue. Teenager, go-go dancer, hooker, teenager, “MILF”… yep, that’s enough for me! Who’s Number One? Ellen Ripley? Seems reasonable. And that’s when I clicked “close gender.”
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35 Comments
Oof, scooped by Tiger Beatdown! I’m working on coding this list to see how many characters are the protagonists, how many are villainous, how many are hyper-sexualized, if there is any shred of diverse representation of women, etc. It is, yes, depressing.
Gertie? Mrs. Danvers? And… I’m done. I got through 12.
I made it through the first 16 before I got bored and started skipping around.
Then I stopped when I eventually skipped to the dog from Lady and the Tramp.
If we’re going to include animated females, it had to be Lady? Lady? Of all the female animated characters, it was a dog?
Anybody else find animated characters included in this list who are, you know… human?
K: I saw Jessica Rabbit and Chihiro from Spirited Away. Also, Dory from Finding Nemo. Like Lady, they wouldn’t make my list of top animated female characters. (I didn’t get all the way through the list either, but I started at the other end.)
Forget cartoon characters, if an Alien was to look at this list they would think Pam Grier was the only black female human. Deplorable.
I made it to #86. I couldn’t get past a “female” psycho Venus Fly-trap character apparently voiced by all men.
I am annoyed. 100 characters and they picked Summer Finn from 500 Days of Summer but no Buffy and no Lola from Run Lola Run? Seriously?
Number 15 was Audrey from Little Shop of Horrors. Not Audrey the woman. Audrey the plant, who is voiced by men (“to distinguish her oddness” quoth the list. Keen.) Soooo…you can be an awesome lady, but only if you’re played by a dude? Is this the logic?
Sins against feminism aside, these click-through lists are a sin against web design and web writing. I’m pretty sure there’s a verse in Neilsen 10:14 about how thou shalt not make clickthrough slideshows or thou shall be killed with blink tags.
I swallowed my vomit and clicked through the whole list. Four characters of color. One is a cartoon. Two are Pam Grier. The fourth is a child. So not just all black women, but in fact all adult women of color are Pam Grier. Fantastic!
What I hate is that the fact they are women is constantly highlighted. If this was a list about men it would be “he was a great doctor”, “a fearless warrior” etc etc. Things that have nothing to do with their genitals basically (at least some of them). For the a womyn’s list, their sexuality and gender identity feature prominently, with a glorification of T&A pics to complement the list. Pisses me off. Of course, in many mainstream movies, womyn are there to be “eye-candy” regardless of the role…
Also, they add Marge Gunderson from Fargo in there and what is the description?
“Jovial (and heavily pregnant) police chief of Brainerd – not Fargo – whose maternity leave gets put on hold when a faked kidnapping spirals into murder.”
JOVIAL AND FUCKING HEAVILY PREGNANT. ONE OF THE BEST, STRONGEST FEMALE CHARACTERS IN THE HISTORY OF CINEMA – AND SHE’S DEFINED BY HER PREGNANT UTERUS.
Kill me now.
I think this says it all: “for the sake of this article, it’s all about the catsuit”.
Clearly there’s a feminist fail here, but it’s also just so BORING for the lady audience. I’m SO bored with pretending to care about these kind of lady prototypes. I want to run around and do stuff, and frankly, there’s a limit to how much I’m endeared by tossed crumbs like Ripley and Ms. Thelma. I would like to have a lady just *do* stuff without the plot being structured around the notion that- congratufuckinglations!!, a lady can do stuff. And I wouldn’t mind if these roles weren’t a reinterpretation of a stock male hero and were, y’know, their own damn entities, their own damn tropes. I want to be Cleo in Cleo from 5 to 7 and run around and *think.* I don’t need to blow anything up; I don’t need to drive off a damn cliff. I don’t want to be a dude-atron, but thanks much for your paternalistic generosity, Ridley Scott!
dude. AUDREY 2?! seriously? a fucking PLANT?!
2011. Over one hundred years of film and this is the summation of woman’s worth. I don’t know what’s worse – how badly this list fails or how little it could have done better.
This really reads like a list of female characters who are liked by men, in films which are written by men, and directed by men.
I skipped a lot, but I didn’t see one film by a woman in the top 20.
As advertised, here’s the breakdown. Probably the most depressing stat is that there are almost as many non-human, non-humanoid characters (3) as there are characters of color (4). One surprising depressing stat is that only 79 of the characters have full names.
Had me at Baby, with the whole this is how girls learn to be women. Right.
Couldn’t make it any farther than “Jewish princess”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish-American_princess_stereotype
Yeah. That’s just not okay.
You know, I didn’t *hate* the list. I mean, they had some great choices (Veronica Sawyer, anyone?) as well some crappy ones. But I was surprised the missed Milla’s character Leeloo in The Fifth Element. I seriously loved that role to pieces because there was this completely blank slate that managed to figure out how to kick butt via the Internet. I don’t know, I just felt like the list was….without something. Cohesion, maybe.
Like Catwoman. Michelle put so much more nuance into her character that the looks fell far to the bottom of why her character worked so well. It didn’t touch on the vulnerable sexuality, the stretching personalities too thin and not knowing which one you really are.
It seemed very T&A versus why the characters really worked.
Haha, there’s more Swedish women on the list than black women. And they didn’t even include Ingrid Bergman or Greta Garbo.
Why not make a new better list?
A few they missed that would be on my list:
Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard
Noi from Ruang rak noi nid mahasan
Christiane F. from Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo
Elin from Fucking Åmål
Petra Von Kant from Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant
Sally Bowels from Cabaret
Jeanne d’Arc from La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc
Charlotte Andergast from Höstsonaten
Lena Nyman from Jag är nyfiken – gul
“Fucking Åmål” was called “Show me love” in English.
(Åmål is a really small Swedish town and the film is about two girls who both defy gender norms, one being a lesbian and Elin being a “slut”, and then they find each other and oh my god this is THE teenage film for my generation, everyone go find a subtitled copy right now!)
How about Starbuck from the BSG reboot? I mean, it’s not a film, it’s a series/miniseries, but I thought she was an awesome example of a female character who was doing shit without the plot being about how she was a female character who could actually do shit.
Um, I agree the list is really fail and no, I don’t think Vivian’s any kind of a role model as a character, but describing her simply as/calling her a “hooker”? Isn’t that disrespectful towards sex workers?
Of course they’ve got “Breaking the Waves” on there. Of course they do.
And as an aside? Why the fuck can’t T&A go together with a great character? Seriously.
And has any commenter considered the fact that the list is probably predominantly white (admittedly ridiculously so) because Hollywood has scripted better roles for white women? Rather than that the creators of the list skewed white? Just a thought…
P.S.- Fuckin’ Summer Fynn? WHACK.
NO BUFFY?????
“And the inspiration for a subgenre of porn remains a satisfyingly flirty, filthy archetype.”
Yikes.
“And as an aside? Why the fuck can’t T&A go together with a great character? Seriously.”
For that first to happen it’d be nice if women didn’t constantly get defined by the TnA and largely nothing else. Cariacatures are not characters.
Sharon Stoned,
Because when all they focus on is the T&A, then they’re doing a disservice to the female characters. Like not focusing on the fact hot women can also kick some serious butt when they want because their looks are only a fraction of their personality, not the defining element.
Yeah this list just points to a bigger problem (at least to me) which is where are all the women directors? There are some great characters on the list (Ripley being number one is such a cliche, as great as the character and Weaver are though) but the majority of characters are out of films directed by men. It reminds me of something an acquaintance once said about how there are more films that exclude women while decrying sexism than there are films that actually include well-written female characters.
Also, I love the inclusion of Breaking the Waves in a subversive kind of way.
How about Celie Johnson from The Color Purple? Any one of the women from Fried Green Tomatoes? Any of several Katherine Hepburn characters? Any of the sisters in Crimes of the Heart? Rose Castorini from Moonstruck? Miss Jane Pittman? And, if you’ve got to have Julia Roberts in there, how about as Erin Brokovich or Shelby Eatenton (Steel Magnolias) or Daisy Arujo (Mystic Pizza), instead of what’s-her-name in Pretty Woman, who barely has a personality?
Totally concur that this is not a “best female characters” list, but a “female characters that dudes enjoy” list.
The commentary for Princess Leia said that her “fire” was probably because she had to wear her hair in buns and *tape down her breasts*? And that she was “rewarded” by getting to let her hair down and wear a metal bikini? For Pete’s sake!
I lol’ed when I saw that most of the top 20, ahem, ‘greatest female characters’ were from sci-fi and horror. I mean, of course they were.
Also, some of the “female characters” were real people (Bonnie Parker, anyone?) Not to mention the way that for each of the animated characters, the writer went out of his way to say that the voice acting was ok and all, but the real artists were the male designers. Ok, then.
And- HOW STUPID DO YOU HAVE TO BE TO THINK THAT AUDREY 2 IS A FEMALE CHARACTER, I MEAN SERIOUSLY