[Discussion] Flawed canon and "bad" characters

[anenko.livejournal.com]

Who are your favourite "guilty pleasure" female characters? The ones who aren't good examples of what can be done with female characters, but who you deeply love anyway?

Have you spent hours creating backstory for a female character whose sole purpose in canon is to provide eyecandy for fanboys? Do you feel wildly passionate about a woman from a badly written, sexist series? Is your OTC a woman who died in the first episode of a new series, before the opening credits even began to roll?

Comments

[copracat]

Modesty Blaise. A character invented for strip comics in the sixties is going to have characteristics that might make you wince, but I love everything about her: her not quite perfect beauty, her almost super-hero fighting skills and her General-worthy strategising and tactics, her encyclopedic knowledge, that she achieved crime world domination by age 26 and retired to become a part time good guy, her loving platonic relationship with non-sexual life partner, Willie Garvin, her only close long-term relationship.

I adore the pulp-style novel titles: Last Day in Limbo, The Impossible Virgin, Night of Morningstar, A Taste for Death!

She owns a flat in Paris! A villa in Malta! Not only is she a fighting machine of death, she can carve gems, is a crack shot, speaks ten languages (only six fluently!) and has a bit of a weep after the tough jobs, but she only weeps on Willie.

Honestly, I wouldn't bear any of this in a modern novel.

[rez-lo.livejournal.com]

Yes! And I was really afraid to watch the 2004 production of My Name Is Modesty (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0347591/), but I loved it. Kind of a lot.

[copracat]

I saw the movie with Terrence Stamp as the queerest Willie Garvin ever! I was too timid to watch My Name Is Modesty but I may now, at your recommendation.