What are the steps to creating a strong female protagonist? What are the pitfalls?
She has goals for herself.
She is conflicted.
She has life-changing decisions to make.
In GOT, Daenerys faces many challenges over time, but her goal is survival, which means making peace with the barbarian king and winning him over.
She acts to reach her goals.
When Daenerys is married off to a barbarian king, she’s nothing more than a beautiful child. But she took her future into her own hands and taught herself to be a queen.
It was actually a female virtue that caused her the most trouble: she was empathetic and did not want people to suffer. She freed enslaved people and rescued war victims, and this often came back to haunt her.
But she didn’t wail, moan, or cry about her bad decisions. She always moved forward and then faced the consequences.
Keeping with GOT, Cersi was another character people loved to hate or unadmittedly loved. Looking past the incest (yes, eww, but I'm sure it was more common in that era), her complexity lay in her duality. She was manipulative, ruthless, and cruel...but she was also resilient. One of the most compelling scenes of the GOT franchise was the WALK OF SHAME.
But she did it with her head up. I can only assume she was thinking about her master plan the entire time. She was a protective mother, and her motivations, good or bad, were always to protect her children and ensure their future.
Avoid the good girl/bad girl trope unless it has thematic relevance.
One of the things most disappointing about our culture, about our ideas about women, is the good girl/bad girl dichotomy that still exists very strongly. Slut shaming is still a thing. How is that possible in the 21st century? But it very much is.
