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Wow, it has been over a month since I did one of these Top Five posts! At this point I'm just hoping I get all of them answered less than a year from the time I originally did the meme.
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lacewood asked me for my Top Five Awesome Ladies, which aside from being impossible to narrow down also has to be distingished from Top Five Badass Ladies (and also Top Five Cross-Dressed Ladies, and also Top Five Villainous Ladies, etc. etc.)
1. The Witch, Into the Woods
Man, I waffled over whether to do the Witch or the Baker's Wife here - Into the Woods was ridiculously formative for me from a very young age, which as one of these Top Five questions is about musicals I will probably be discussing again - but in the end I had to do the Witch, because she's selfish and ruthless and a really terrible parent who genuinely loves her daughter and the driving force of the plot and the smartest person onstage, and most of all because of Last Midnight. Because the villagers aren't good, they're not bad, they're just nice; the Witch isn't good, she's not nice, she's just right. I learned that difference young, thanks to her, and it's an important difference. (Personally I am all too aware I hit 'nice' a lot more than I hit 'good' or even 'right'. It's something I'm trying to work on.)
2. Sophie Hatter, Howl's Moving Castle
So speaking of the drawbacks of 'nice' - okay, so the wonderful thing about Sophie, about Howl's Moving Castle as a book (yes, I know this is a movie screencap, but it's what I've got), is that getting transformed into an old lady by magic is genuinely liberating for her. She gets to be cranky and bad-tempered and rude and that is AMAZING. She can go adventuring, and stick her nose in where it doesn't belong, and have raging weed-killing temper tantrums (one of the best scenes of all time, perhaps) and she doesn't have to be nice anymore. Of course the crankiness and the strong-mindedness and the busybody nature doesn't go along with being an old woman, it was there all the time, and by repressing it she was becoming small and shrunken. By letting it out - by deciding that she is going to not let anyone else make her decisions for her, and more than that, she is going to be vocal about it - that's when she starts becoming really herself. And that is a super important story for me.
(I also love that her badassery is not at all ever about beating people up. It's about being really excellent at cleaning and sewing and hatmaking! And also some magic in there too; she is eventually the best witch in Ingary, but also, and possibly more importantly, THE CLEANEST.)
3. Kyoko Mogami, Skip Beat
Skip Beat is newer to my heart than most of these others, but I have to put Kyoko here because - man, Kyoko is one of the most complex female characters I have encountered in a manga. It's amazing. I loved her from the beginning when she stops compresing herself into a submissive ideal and releases all her furious demons of anger, because, well, see above, that's a story I always love, but she's a hell of a lot more than that too. She's the enthusiastic genki girl and the determined, perfectionist artist and the lonely, psychologically damaged teenager and the LOOMING AVATAR OF PURE HATRED, all at the same time! Skip Beat's SUPER INTENSE METHOD take on the craft of acting is - okay, totally hilarious, but it also allows each role that Kyoko plays to bring out a new aspect of her personality. She's been the victim of bullying, but she can also be the bullier. She veers away from ALL ROMANCE but pursues friendship with the single-minded intensity of a thousand terrifying suns. She loves princesses and flowers and fairy tales and she ALSO loves her EVIL GRUDGE DEMONS. She's constantly being complicated, which makes her continually fascinating.
4. Lady Sybil Ramkin, Discworld
I knew I was going to put a Discworld lady here, I just couldn't decide on which - Susan? Granny Weatherwax? Gilda? - and then of course I realized that my choice of Lady Sybil inevitable from the start. This is partly because I love her a lot, in all her tiny-dragon-obsessed, regal, eccentric, outdated, grandiose glory, and partly because I am sort of bitter at how underused she has been since Guards, Guards! I want to see more of Lady Sybil, Hereditary Socialite, Wife and Mother and Dragon-Breeder, being an epic force of nature! Using her social connections to organize political rallies! Aiming loaded baby dragons at people! Why does the world give me only tiny snippets of this. :(
5. Dalbi, The Legend
Dalbi: such a minor character in the kdrama Legend I bet many people don't even remember she exists! Which, in a cast that includes Sujini and the Oracle and Ba Son (BA SON <3333), is totally understandable. Legend has an extreme number of awesome ladies, an I can't say that Dalbi's even my favorite. But I want to talk about her anyway, because here's the thing: Dalbi is a minor character, a grieving widow whose husband is killed somewhere in the first few episodes and then gradually comes back to life and has a hilariously awkward romance with Jumuchi of the Epic Facial Hair. It would be really easy for that to be her whole story - and in a series less committed to drawing well-rounded female characters, it probably would be. But Dalbi also happens to have been employed managing the storerooms of a noble house. She's bored one day while sitting around pining, so she decides to calculate the food and water needed to feed the king's army! You know, on a whim. And it turns out you know what's really useful during an invasion? Maybe even more useful than barbarians with axes? People who know math.
And I want to talk about this because it's one of the things that shouldn't be so rare, in writing a range of female characters in your story - you have the ladies who shoot arrows and throw fire, and you have the ladies who politically scheme, and those ladies are important to have in a story. But also, you have the ladies who save the day by keeping house, and tallying provisions, and doing domestic math. And that's what tends, I think, to get overlooked. That range is important.
AND NOW, AGAIN, I STOP.
Anyway,
lacewood asked me for my Top Five Awesome Ladies, which aside from being impossible to narrow down also has to be distingished from Top Five Badass Ladies (and also Top Five Cross-Dressed Ladies, and also Top Five Villainous Ladies, etc. etc.) 1. The Witch, Into the Woods
Man, I waffled over whether to do the Witch or the Baker's Wife here - Into the Woods was ridiculously formative for me from a very young age, which as one of these Top Five questions is about musicals I will probably be discussing again - but in the end I had to do the Witch, because she's selfish and ruthless and a really terrible parent who genuinely loves her daughter and the driving force of the plot and the smartest person onstage, and most of all because of Last Midnight. Because the villagers aren't good, they're not bad, they're just nice; the Witch isn't good, she's not nice, she's just right. I learned that difference young, thanks to her, and it's an important difference. (Personally I am all too aware I hit 'nice' a lot more than I hit 'good' or even 'right'. It's something I'm trying to work on.)
2. Sophie Hatter, Howl's Moving Castle
So speaking of the drawbacks of 'nice' - okay, so the wonderful thing about Sophie, about Howl's Moving Castle as a book (yes, I know this is a movie screencap, but it's what I've got), is that getting transformed into an old lady by magic is genuinely liberating for her. She gets to be cranky and bad-tempered and rude and that is AMAZING. She can go adventuring, and stick her nose in where it doesn't belong, and have raging weed-killing temper tantrums (one of the best scenes of all time, perhaps) and she doesn't have to be nice anymore. Of course the crankiness and the strong-mindedness and the busybody nature doesn't go along with being an old woman, it was there all the time, and by repressing it she was becoming small and shrunken. By letting it out - by deciding that she is going to not let anyone else make her decisions for her, and more than that, she is going to be vocal about it - that's when she starts becoming really herself. And that is a super important story for me.
(I also love that her badassery is not at all ever about beating people up. It's about being really excellent at cleaning and sewing and hatmaking! And also some magic in there too; she is eventually the best witch in Ingary, but also, and possibly more importantly, THE CLEANEST.)
3. Kyoko Mogami, Skip Beat
Skip Beat is newer to my heart than most of these others, but I have to put Kyoko here because - man, Kyoko is one of the most complex female characters I have encountered in a manga. It's amazing. I loved her from the beginning when she stops compresing herself into a submissive ideal and releases all her furious demons of anger, because, well, see above, that's a story I always love, but she's a hell of a lot more than that too. She's the enthusiastic genki girl and the determined, perfectionist artist and the lonely, psychologically damaged teenager and the LOOMING AVATAR OF PURE HATRED, all at the same time! Skip Beat's SUPER INTENSE METHOD take on the craft of acting is - okay, totally hilarious, but it also allows each role that Kyoko plays to bring out a new aspect of her personality. She's been the victim of bullying, but she can also be the bullier. She veers away from ALL ROMANCE but pursues friendship with the single-minded intensity of a thousand terrifying suns. She loves princesses and flowers and fairy tales and she ALSO loves her EVIL GRUDGE DEMONS. She's constantly being complicated, which makes her continually fascinating.
4. Lady Sybil Ramkin, Discworld
I knew I was going to put a Discworld lady here, I just couldn't decide on which - Susan? Granny Weatherwax? Gilda? - and then of course I realized that my choice of Lady Sybil inevitable from the start. This is partly because I love her a lot, in all her tiny-dragon-obsessed, regal, eccentric, outdated, grandiose glory, and partly because I am sort of bitter at how underused she has been since Guards, Guards! I want to see more of Lady Sybil, Hereditary Socialite, Wife and Mother and Dragon-Breeder, being an epic force of nature! Using her social connections to organize political rallies! Aiming loaded baby dragons at people! Why does the world give me only tiny snippets of this. :(
5. Dalbi, The Legend
Dalbi: such a minor character in the kdrama Legend I bet many people don't even remember she exists! Which, in a cast that includes Sujini and the Oracle and Ba Son (BA SON <3333), is totally understandable. Legend has an extreme number of awesome ladies, an I can't say that Dalbi's even my favorite. But I want to talk about her anyway, because here's the thing: Dalbi is a minor character, a grieving widow whose husband is killed somewhere in the first few episodes and then gradually comes back to life and has a hilariously awkward romance with Jumuchi of the Epic Facial Hair. It would be really easy for that to be her whole story - and in a series less committed to drawing well-rounded female characters, it probably would be. But Dalbi also happens to have been employed managing the storerooms of a noble house. She's bored one day while sitting around pining, so she decides to calculate the food and water needed to feed the king's army! You know, on a whim. And it turns out you know what's really useful during an invasion? Maybe even more useful than barbarians with axes? People who know math.
And I want to talk about this because it's one of the things that shouldn't be so rare, in writing a range of female characters in your story - you have the ladies who shoot arrows and throw fire, and you have the ladies who politically scheme, and those ladies are important to have in a story. But also, you have the ladies who save the day by keeping house, and tallying provisions, and doing domestic math. And that's what tends, I think, to get overlooked. That range is important.
AND NOW, AGAIN, I STOP.