friends

Here five of my favorite maligned or frequently bashed female characters in media, based on my own memories and a brief review of fandom wiki pages.

1. Ginny Weasley (Harry Potter)

Even when I (and most of us) still liked the HP books, I had mixed feelings about how Ginny was developed as a love interest for our hero, but that had more to do with Rowling’s frequent inability to write a convincing romance than anything objectionable about Ginny herself. (We all remember Harry’s chest monster, don’t we?) I admired her bravery and how readily she shot down her brothers’ attempts at slut-shaming, and I also liked thinking about her backstory with Tom Riddle and how it might have informed the young woman she became. I did not appreciate it when other readers insulted her or mischaracterized her in fanfic because they wanted Harry to end up with somebody else.

2. Dawn Summers (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

I wrote about Dawn for a Fandom Throwback Thursday post last year (after the actress who once played her, Michelle Trachtenberg, unexpectedly passed away). Although I didn’t start watching BTVS until after the show ended, I was aware that making fun of Dawn – particularly at screenings of the musical – was a fandom tradition, and one that made me very uncomfortable. I found Dawn, in all her emotional messiness, to be a compelling character, and I never thought that she, or Michelle, deserved the vehement hatred that the fandom directed at her.

3. Jean Grey (X-Men: Evolution)

In his recap of an early episode of XME, Jay Edidin (then writing under his old name) noted “a running theme with Jean: the subtle disharmony between the perfect façade people see and the fact that she’s really only got about as much of her shit worked out as the next scared teenager.” I think that this is a brilliant take on her character, but it also serves as a reminder that many viewers in the fandom of the early 2000s – including myself, sometimes – only saw Jean’s model-student persona and judged the hell out of her for it, dismissing her as a shallow and fickle Mean Girl with no substantive inner life or real problems (never mind that her powers could be incredibly destructive to herself and others if left unchecked).

4. Gwen Cooper (Torchwood)

As a spinoff from Doctor Who, Torchwood struggled at first to find its own narrative identity. The early episodes positioned Gwen the Nice Girl Swept Up In Alien Adventures – the equivalent of a companion for the Doctor – as well as a source of morality and human empathy for her colleagues, who’d lived behind the curtain of “normal” life much longer than she had. For this reason, especially in earlier episodes, she came across as sanctimonious at times – much like Jean in XME – and I admit to having been one of the viewers who was dismissive or and even hostile toward Gwen, especially when I thought that the show was trying too hard to make me like her. (A lot of audience hostility, which I find a lot harder to understand or forgive, was also probably due to shipping preferences and Gwen’s own sexual and romantic choices.) Once she was given storylines that leaned into her flaws and messiness, I started to enjoy her character a lot more.

5. Joan Watson (Elementary)

I was lucky to have missed a lot of this drama while it was happening, but according to Fanlore and other sources, much of the negativity toward Joan and toward Lucy Liu (including some inexcusable sexism and racism) was generated before the show even aired, primarily from fans of BBC Sherlock. Thankfully, once Elementary was underway, both the show and its Watson deservedly gained their share of fans.