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If you’ve watched a movie recently where a female character has no flaws, no growth, no personality beyond being powerful, and no moment where she earns anything she gets — congratulations, you’ve met the girl boss. She’s everywhere. She’s boring. And the writers who keep creating her are doing more damage to female characters than any villain ever could.
The problem isn’t strong female characters. The problem is that Hollywood and the publishing industry have confused “strong” with “invincible” and “empowering” with “has no character arc.” A character who starts powerful and ends powerful with nothing interesting happening in between isn’t a strong character. She’s a screensaver.
The Characters That Don’t Work
Rey (Star Wars). The defining example of everything wrong with the girl boss trope. Rey picks up a lightsaber and is immediately better than trained Jedi. She flies the Millennium Falcon on her first try. She uses Force abilities that took other characters years to develop. Nothing is earned. There’s no training montage because she doesn’t need training. There’s no failure because she doesn’t fail. Compare her to Luke Skywalker, who got his hand cut off, lost every fight until the final one, and spent an entire movie training in a swamp. Luke’s victories meant something because he’d been broken first. Rey’s victories mean nothing because she was never at risk of losing.
Captain Marvel (Carol Danvers). No character arc. Flat. Boring. She starts the movie powerful, gets more powerful, and ends the movie having learned nothing except that she was right about everything all along. There’s almost something antagonistic about the way she’s written — she’s so certain, so untouchable, so devoid of vulnerability that the audience has nothing to connect to. A hero who can’t lose isn’t a hero. She’s a special effect.
Daenerys Targaryen. She started fine. The early seasons put her through real suffering — sold to Khal Drogo, stripped of agency, forced to survive in a world that treated her as property. When she took control of that situation, it was earned. By season three or four, the character was wearing thin because the writers kept repeating the same beat: Daenerys arrives somewhere, is underestimated, reveals her power, conquers. By season five, she’d become a generic malicious character, and the final season’s heel turn felt less like tragedy and more like the writers running out of ideas.
Evelyn Salt. I loved the movie. The character is flat and dull. Angelina Jolie commits fully to the physicality of the role, but Salt has two settings: stoic and angry. There’s a good thriller underneath the character, but the character herself is an action figure, not a person.
Lara Croft (the Jolie films). Cute, but she’s a poorly written superpowered woman with no character arc. She starts competent, stays competent, and never faces a challenge that changes who she is. The plot happens around her. She doesn’t grow through it.
Catwoman, Supergirl, Mystique, Maleficent. The same pattern repeating across different properties. Characters defined by their powers or their attitudes rather than by internal conflict, growth, or any quality that makes them feel like actual people. Hollywood keeps thinking that giving a woman a superpower is the same as giving her a character. It’s not.
Why This Keeps Happening
The girl boss problem comes from writers who are afraid to let female characters be flawed. Flaws feel risky. A female character who makes bad decisions, who fails, who has weaknesses — someone might call that sexist. So the writers play it safe by making her perfect, and in doing so, they create something far worse than a flawed character: they create a boring one.
The irony is that the characters audiences actually love — the ones who get quoted, cosplayed, and remembered decades later — are all deeply flawed. Nobody remembers Captain Marvel’s personality because she doesn’t have one. Everyone remembers Ripley’s terror, Sarah Connor’s desperation, and Lisbeth Salander’s rage.
As The Critical Drinker has pointed out repeatedly on his channel, the issue isn’t about gender. It’s about craft. A character who faces no real challenges, earns no real growth, and has no real flaws is a bad character regardless of gender. The girl boss trope just happens to be the most common way this failure manifests right now.
The Characters That Work
Ellen Ripley (Alien, Aliens). The template. Ripley isn’t written as a “strong female character.” She’s written as a competent person in a terrifying situation who survives through intelligence, determination, and willingness to make hard decisions. She’s scared. She makes mistakes. She loses people she cares about. Her strength comes from the fact that she keeps going despite all of it, not because she’s invincible but because she refuses to quit. Forty-five years later, she’s still the standard.
Sarah Connor (The Terminator, T2). Sarah Connor’s arc across two films is one of the best character transformations in cinema. In the first film, she’s a waitress who can barely process what’s happening to her. In the second, she’s a hardened warrior who’s been preparing for the apocalypse. The transformation is earned through trauma, loss, and years of living with knowledge nobody believes. Her toughness in T2 is powerful because you watched her become that person. She wasn’t born a badass. She was broken into one.
Lisbeth Salander (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). Deeply flawed, traumatized, brilliant, antisocial, and dangerous. Nobody would call Lisbeth a “girl boss” because the label is too shallow for what she is. She’s a survivor of horrific abuse who turned her damage into capability without ever pretending the damage doesn’t exist. She’s not empowering in the motivational-poster sense. She’s compelling in the way that complex, difficult, fully realized characters are compelling.
Bobbie Draper (The Expanse). A Martian marine who’s physically imposing, tactically brilliant, and driven by loyalty to her people. What makes Bobbie work is that her strength creates problems for her. Her aggression gets her in trouble. Her loyalty blinds her to political realities. Her identity as a marine is challenged when she discovers that the institutions she serves have betrayed her. She has power and she has flaws and the flaws are just as important as the power.
Naomi Nagata (The Expanse). An engineer whose intelligence is her primary asset, but whose past — an abusive relationship, a son she lost — drives her decisions in ways that aren’t always rational. Naomi makes bad choices because of her trauma. She puts herself and others at risk because of emotional wounds that haven’t healed. She’s brilliant and she’s broken and the show never pretends those two things cancel each other out.
Chrisjen Avasarala (The Expanse). A politician who is ruthless, profane, manipulative, and genuinely trying to prevent humanity from destroying itself. Avasarala lies, schemes, and uses people — and she’s one of the most magnetic characters on television. She works because the writers let her be morally complicated. She’s not a role model. She’s a person navigating impossible situations with imperfect tools, and she’s fascinating to watch.
The Difference
Every character on the “works” list shares something the girl bosses lack: consequences. Ripley loses her crew. Sarah Connor loses her sanity. Lisbeth carries her trauma in every interaction. Bobbie loses her squad and her faith in Mars. Naomi loses her son. Avasarala loses people she sacrifices for the greater good and has to live with those choices.
The girl bosses don’t lose anything. They don’t struggle with anything. They don’t earn anything. And because they don’t pay any price for their power, the power means nothing. Audiences don’t connect with perfection. They connect with characters who bleed, fail, make terrible decisions, and keep going anyway.
Writing a strong female character isn’t complicated. Give her a goal. Give her flaws that interfere with that goal. Make her earn her victories through struggle and sacrifice. Let her fail sometimes. Let the failures change her. That’s not a formula for female characters — it’s a formula for good characters, period. The girl boss trope fails not because it centers women but because it forgets to make them human.
Get in touch if you need help writing characters with actual depth.