The Girl Boss Problem: Why Invincible Characters Are Boring and What Actually Works

The girl boss has no flaws, no growth, and nothing she has to earn, and those are the exact things that give an audience a reason to care about a character. See how to build characters that feel real.

Strong female characters were never the problem. Hollywood and the publishing industry have confused “strong” with “invincible” and “empowering” with “has no character arc,” and I think it’s cheated audiences out of a generation of heroines worth remembering. A character who starts powerful and ends powerful with nothing interesting happening in between is a screensaver.

Which invincible female characters 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. For more, see why your characters feel flat and ghostwriting a multi-Book series.

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 powerful, gets more powerful and ends the movie having learned nothing except that she was right all along. Mascots have more of an arc. 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 is 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, she earned it. By season three or four, the character was wearing thin because the writers kept repeating the same beat: Daenerys arrives somewhere, everyone underestimates her, she reveals her power, she 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.

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 instead of 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, and it keeps being wrong.

This one stings more than the rest, because every actress on that list could have carried a real character. They were handed a costume and a power set, and the writers went home early.

Watch: The MARY SUE PROBLEM | Perfect, Powerful, UNWATCHABLE!, Snarky Jay

Why Do Invincible Heroines Keep Happening?

The problem comes from writers too scared to let a woman on screen be wrong about anything. Flaws feel risky. A female character who makes bad decisions, who fails, who has weaknesses, might get the writers called sexist. So they play it safe by making her perfect, and what they end up with is worse than a flawed character: a boring one. I blame the studios for this more than anyone, because audiences keep walking out and the studios keep refusing to listen.

The irony is that the characters audiences love (the ones who get quoted, cosplayed, and remembered decades later) are all 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 is 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.

Men get written this way too. Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, the Amazon Prime Video series starring John Krasinski that ran from 2018 to 2023, had an okay first season. The action was great and the drama was fine. Ryan himself is a Gary Stu, the male Mary Sue. He has no arc, he doesn’t grow, nothing can kill him and he almost has superpowers. It makes for a very poor story.

Which strong female characters work, and why?

Ellen Ripley (Alien, Aliens). The template. Ripley is 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, because she refuses to quit. Forty-seven years later, she’s still the standard.

Sarah Connor (The Terminator, T2). Sarah Connor’s arc across two films is among 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. That transformation comes through loss and years of knowing something nobody will believe. Her toughness in T2 is powerful because you watched her become that person. Loss and waiting broke her into a badass, and you saw it happen.

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’d never make it onto a motivational poster, and she’s gripping in the way that complex, difficult, fully realized characters are convincing.

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’s power and she’s 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 and 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’s ruthless, profane, manipulative, and trying to prevent humanity from destroying itself. Avasarala lies, schemes, and uses people, and she’s among the most magnetic characters on television. She works because the writers let her be morally complicated. She’s a person working through impossible situations with imperfect tools, and she’s interesting to watch.

That’s the list I’d hand any writer who thinks flaws weaken a heroine. Every one of these women makes a mess of something, and I remember every one of them for it.

What Separates Strong Female Characters That Work?

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. (See also my review of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) 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, struggle with anything or earn anything, and because they don’t pay any price for their power, the power means nothing. Audiences connect with characters who bleed, fail, make terrible decisions and keep going anyway. I’d take one Ripley over a dozen flawless heroines, and I think most viewers would too.

Writing a strong female character isn’t complicated. Give her a goal. Give her flaws that interfere with that goal. Make her win through struggle and sacrifice. Let her fail sometimes, and let the failures change her. That’s a formula for good characters of any kind. The trope fails because it forgets to make these women human, and putting women at the center was never the problem.

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