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A Character with Some Courage in It



I am a big fan of Joss Whedon for a lot of reasons, with The Avengers only be a small recent reason.  This video delves into the question Joss gets asked over and over again:  So, Joss, why do you always write these strong women characters?  I can identify.

In gaming, playing a strong woman character, I've been asked the similar question:  why are you playing woman character?  Joss gives all the right answers in this video.

For me, the biggest woman character I play and explore in my fiction is Crayla.  Crayla is strong, slightly defiant, and has a complete psychological profile that I have worked on, pieced my way through, and tried to figure out.  In some ways, I never quite figure her out all the way, and that too, is part of the enjoyment.  There comes a unique perspective in playing a woman character that you just don't get with playing a male character, as either a man or a woman.  Joss explains that too.

It is cool too, since all the gaming systems have pretty much standardized on non-gender-biased worlds.  The world doesn't fight back so hard, though sometimes the GMs and other players don't get it, and they end up becoming the obstacle.  Bleed from the real world into the game world is always interesting.

At one point in playing Crayla, one of her companions was mauled by a bear after she had brushed him off (it turned out the other character was having some mental issues, which ultimately cause the character to get mauled by the bear).  In a heart-wrenching scene, she goes to see him in the temple where the priests are trying to reassemble him and heal him and they don't know if he is going to make it.  This happens just after she has started to make a connection with him, after perhaps 3 or 4 days of working with him.  For her, this connection is a big deal, and well, seeing him ripped apart after she blew him off, she actually stumbles a bit walking away from the scene.  (The GM did an excellent job describing how gruesome it was.)  The GM actually took issue with the fact that she would respond that way "after only a few days".

It was so odd that he would choose that behavior to consider "wrong" after all of the craziness that the players through into the other characters that simply made no sense.  It went beyond a character or player bias... in my mind it was clearly a character gender bias that made no sense to me at the time.  Since then, playing other characters, it has become clear to me that often we draw boxes around characters based on our own lives and we don't like when those boxes get broken.  I'll have to share more on that another day.

In the recent weeks I am watching Marvel's Agents of Shield, and I'm not sure quite where Joss is going with the characters yet.  I see a mix of characters in it... strong, weak, experiences, naive, still looking for a place.  It's a strange hodge-podge.  Still, I am looking forward to where they end up.  I can tell that the series will be another exploration as Joss always does, because all of the characters have enormous potential to grow.  With Joss, I know the journey will be true, perhaps tragic, frustrating, yelling at the screen "Damnit, Joss", as another character dies, but true.  And I don't need to ask why there are strong woman characters in the mix.
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