Male authors writing female characters vs female authors and male characters

[Datepalm]

I think part of it is also that tropes to some extent still grow out of a sexist, patriarchal cultural tradition, so if your baseline is a common trope - the damsel in distress or the femme fatale or whathaveyou, no matter how much you try to add on theres still that root there. OTOH, man-tropes also grow out of the same landscape, but theres less complaint about flat, emotionless jock heroes who fulfill some stereotype of maleness, and I do think theres enouh depth in both cases that there are contemporary tropes that aren't sexist. I think mad evil henchperson is a role I would like to see more women filling, really.

[Lady Blackfish]

And that's where context comes in, because I'd love to see more colorful evil henchwomen, but if that's a book's only female character (and this book has a premise/setting where it would make more sense to see more women), then it could come under criticism for a different reason.

Re. emotionless manly men, I think pop culture in general does a somewhat decent job of criticizing this from the 1990's onward (not sure about SFF books specifically), though perhaps not thoroughly. I would agree that in general masculinity tropes ought to be scrutinized more, at least I know I wouldn't mind.

Depth is often said to rescue tropes from being trite or problematic, and I think there's a good amount of truth to that, which is why I think the chart would've been better served if they chose only characters who were pretty flat.

[Mad Monkey]

but the problems aren't exactly the same across the board so it makes some amount of sense to talk about specific issues with stereotypes that female characters often have, IMO)

Oh, yeah, definitely you can talk about the issues surrounding female characters and stereotypes by themselves. I mean, Jesus Christ, we've just burned through 22 pages of this stuff, and no one's even been compared to Hitler yet!

I don't think it goes so far as to cover every category of trope ever known to female characters ever, though, so I don't think the problem with it is that it attacks the very idea of tropes, exactly.

Oh, I was being hyperbolic, but I do feel that it is too broad. I think the "henchperson" trope is one that bothers me. Saying that the trope of "female employee of a criminal organization" is somehow an irredeemable stereotype pretty much kills that part of the discussion for me. I do agree that female characters who fit too neatly into one trope and don't develop anywhere past that are bad, but that's not the trope's fault. That's the fault of an incompetent writer, and I have a hard time believing that it's impossible (or even especially difficult) for a book to write a female character that can be described as "Henchlady" and add other traits to her. The fact that authors choose not to doesn't mean that the trope itself is defective.

I mean, seriously, this is a trope that was used (in my view, brilliantly) in a children's Saturday morning cartoon. They were working under constraints that no fantasy novelist were dealing with; 22 minutes a day, 1 day a week, and having to keep things PG-13 rated. Any author that can't handle tropes effectively without turning them into lifeless cliches doesn't have any business being published.