Can be from any kind of media.
For me it’s Margot from The Magicians (which is interesting because in the books she is anything but) and Jesse Faden from Control.
Risa Hawkeye from Fullmetal Alchemist
Or Olivier Mira Armstrong, for that matter.
True. I need to rewatch brotherhood. I was a OG FMA-anime fan way back in the day before I even knew it was based on a manga or that the anime just made up its own ending so it took me a while to even give brotherhood a chance.
Zoe, Inara, Kaylee, and River. Mic drop.
Major Matoko Kusanagi from the Ghost in the Shell series.
Chandler Bing
Wow I haven’t watched that show in ages, but I totally remembered that bit!
Kim Wexler from Better Call Saul 😍
So timely for me… I love that character and just rewatched Better Call Saul! She is very attractive, even referenced for that trait multiple times in the show, but they never actually sexualize her. Across ~4000 final hours of show footage, her character was all about her work ethic, her intelligence, and her loyalty. Do you realize how rare that is for a modern young, attractive female character!? Rhea Seehorn is an amazing actor…
I came here to mention her. She should be a case study on how to write believable, badass and strong characters
Totally agree. She feels like a Dostoevsky character. Not a character, at all, just…a person. Totally believable.
Ripley
Captain Janeway
Aloy from the Horizon games was my first thought.
Couldn’t tell you why, but my mind went straight to Wonder Woman.
Lara Croft from the first “Tomb Raider” movie, played by Angelina Jolie.
Adding my vote for Ellen Ripley.
There are others that come to mind from more obscure movies I’ve watched more recently, like the women in Grandma (2015), Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020), and even Men (2022), also non-fictional women like those in Kokomo City (2023). There are so many more I can picture in my mind but can’t put my finger on the movie and or am just shit with names so I can’t think of them right now, but might come back to update.
Don’t think I’ve seen that review of Alien before. Thanks for sharing it.
Literally the first name that popped into my head when I saw the question. There are plenty of other good choices, but she has to be near the top of any list.
Incidentally… am I having federation issues? This is the only comment I see mentioning Ripley. I see 11 comments currently…
Incidentally… am I having federation issues? This is the only comment I see mentioning Ripley. I see 11 comments currently…
I see 36 comments, mine and 3 others mention Ripley, so yeah, probably a federation issue.
Linda Hamilton - Terminator
I had to say something different, because I would have said Ripley first.
+1 for each of those, and i’ll add clarice starling, uhura, michael burnham, Evelyn Quan Wang (everything everywhere all at once), helen lyle (candyman)
From T2. Sarah Conner from the first movie barely has enough sense to keep herself alive, but boy did she take her short comings seriously between movies.
True. I was speaking generically, but yeah, she was quite fragile in the first.
Hetty Lange
First who popped into my mind was Friday Jones from Robert A. Heinlein’s Friday.
I love that book.
The Boss, MGS
Not Big Boss, the man with the eye patch and is a bad guy, the woman who taught him and the mother of Ocelot
She was such a badass woman that she inspired basically everyone around her to try to mold the world in the way they thought she saw it. Shes a great example of a woman/mother who’s a badass directly because of the skills normally associated with those roles. Yeah, she can fight and kick your main characters ass, but that’s mostly because she’s spent time nurturing him and caring for him to the point where he emotionally cannot fight her. She regularly disarms strong, imposing men (some with superpowers like lightning channeling) by just looking at them sternly and implying she’s about to call them by all 3 of their names in a disapproving tone
Time and again she does badass things while she’s alive, and her death is technically the catalyst for the rest of the series as those who loved and admired her try to shape the world as she saw it, which isn’t even something she herself did because of her loyalty to her country.
Oh and she’s voiced by the same woman who does Pearl from SpongeBob, which is wild
