Mdtryhht

Embrace the opposite of the trope.

Is there some reason Supergirl cannot love talking fashion, and own ten pairs of shoes?

Is there some reason a brilliant chemist must also be mousy and withdrawn?

There is no reason a brain surgeon can't be emotional about receiving unexpected flowers on her anniversary.

Whatever a woman's superpowers are, there is no reason they should preclude anything ELSE in her personality, so go ahead and make her a plausible woman first, and add her superpower as more of a tool she can use when it is necessary.

The superpower may have some influence on her personality; but I'd make it more like "Hey, I'm really good at math!" and not like "I'm good at math so I must be a nerd and wear glasses and dress in a gray sack."

Find (Invent) opportunities for her to express her femininity, so she IS like other girls; and at the same time IS NOT like other girls; which probably applies to MOST girls; they all likely deviate significantly from the average in some trait or another.

The thing you're seeking to avoid is creating a character who is nothing but an inverted collection of stereotypes.

That's arguably better than just relying on the original stereotypes, but not by all that much. You avoid this by putting the work in to create a three dimensional character. Some typical advice for doing this is:

• Give her a complete backstory (not in the story, but in your mind)


• Do the research (interview, study, read about, or otherwise get into the head of someone like your character)


• Make sure she's not just serving a functional purpose in your story. Samuel Delany suggests guarding against this by giving your character three types of actions --purposeful (goal oriented), habitual (characteristic of this particular character), and "gratuitous" (related to a life outside the framework of the story).

"Strong and independent" does not have to mean "behaves in a masculine way."

• 
  Strong can simply be "has healthy self-esteem and doesn't rely on third parties for her self-image."


• 
  Independent can similarly be "doesn't require a romantic relationship and/or partner to be happy" (even if she has one, she doesn't need it).

These characteristics mean the person is whole, unto herself, and doesn't need to be part of someone else's plot. Your character can be a delicate Southern belle, a Brooklyn bulldyke, a Beach Boys tribute band singer, a biologist, a grumpy babushka, a blind dogwalker, a brine-soaked sailor, a ballerina, a biographer, or any combination thereof and be "strong and independent."

Does each character have her own arc? Does she have her own life and her own interests she is pursuing? Does she do things which don't have anything to do with the main plot of the book or any of the other characters? That is what makes her unique.

If they have literal superpowers they are already unlike their peers.

Hm, Susan flew to school. She’s not like the girls I know.

If she is a strong character who has opinions and flaws, is wrong and willing to admit it, but more often right - don’t worry too much.

Superpowers introduce another level of fantasy. Nuclear fallout makes us stronger instead of killing us.

Make her a well rounded character with problems, preferably not all of the answers and make her engaging.

Give her thoughts. Make her a pond, not a large puddle. Make her think about what she and others do. Have her own and respond to her mistakes, but as she is young, she does not know everything - might thinks she does. Give her room for personal growth and show it.

Puddle characters only reflect outward, the pond or lake takes that reflection and internalizes it.

She makes a mistake and learns from it. She might not begin with great depth, but it can develop. She learns that there is no such dichotomy in life as good/evil and that life is complicated.

Start by understanding that a girl with super-powers is a girl just like any other girl except with added super-powers.

Then understand that it is perfectly normal for girls to be capable and competent. And that those are qualities you learn from experience. So your characters would over time grow to be capable, competent and confident. Gender actually has no impact on this.

You probably should acknowledge that we live in a society where it is still somewhat awkward for young women to express being confident and capable. There are studies that suggest that in subjects such as maths girls do worse in mixed groups.

Incidentally this is also not specifically a gender issue. It is part of the process of growing up and building up your adult self. Both genders actually have the same issue. The difference is that boys are specifically told they should be confident and "man up".

The role models for girls that are pushed otoh... Fortunately you can solve this fairly easily simply by providing your girls with some adult women they can look up to.

This moves your issue from characters in focus to background characters. Your main characters would not really need to know or care if these role models fit into the trope, so you do not need to show readers either.

So I'd go with ordinary girls with super-powers, normal growing up issues with self-confidence, and good role models. Then show them organically growing into whatever you wanted them to be without changing into another character.

That incidentally is a common issue with these types of stories. If you start with the super-hero and then insert "the backstory", it is very easy to end up with two different characters. So you should make sure that the pre-powered character has enough development that carries over.

Classic Spider-Man is probably the best example why this matters, it is actually Uncle Ben and Aunt May who made Spider-Man not a radioactive spider. (And that one selfish moment that makes certain that making Spider-Man give up is well beyond the reach of normal super-villains.)

If you want to avoid showing a character as "not like other girls" then make sure your "other girls" aren't stereotypical.

The trope shows up with female characters who don't fit in. They don't have a lot of female friends, if any. When they do the stuff they like to do, they're surrounded by men. You can praise these characters all you want but the sexism sticks. Because they're doing these fun, intellectual, deeply felt things because they're different.

Don't make them different.

Make your female characters just like some other girls and very different from others. And just like some boys and very different from others. In real life, there's a mix anyway.

Our culture does steer kids from a very young age into male and female roles and activities (even when the parents don't, even when you don't think it's happening), so you'll have some lopsidedness. And that's okay. But for any large group where the social gender pressures aren't too extreme, you will have various genders doing all sorts of things and acting all sorts of ways. Show that.

Girls who like stuff that is more commonly done by boys will seek out other girls who like it too. It's only in TV shows that these girls have no female friends. Ditto boys who like "girl" stuff. Sure, maybe there are some exceptions, but it's not common.

If your female characters aren't actually doing things that most people would identify as "boy stuff", and it's just that they're strong and independent, and that is what makes them "not like other girls," then your problem isn't with your main characters but with your supporting cast. Not everyone is strong, not everyone is independent, but that has little to nothing to do with gender.

Write true to life and balance your characters out. That's how to avoid stereotypes.

I'm proud of the positive feedback I've received on the quality and quantity of my female characters, major and supporting. I'm also not given to losing my temper on the subject of how other people talk about writing. And with all that said, I'm sick and tired of seeing the word strong being followed, with or without independent, by female character(s). It's not because I'm a feminist, although I am; it's because it bespeaks a fundamental misunderstanding of how characterisation works.

As far as I'm concerned, this is required reading for anyone who wants to understand how to write female characters well - that's the operative word.

To summarise it for those without enough data on their phone to click the link, the "strong" archetype is a minimal tweak to what went before, and there are two very different meanings of the S-word that got lost along the way:

I think the major problem here is that women were clamoring for
“strong female characters,” and male writers misunderstood. They
thought the feminists meant [Strong Female] Characters. The feminists
meant [Strong Characters], Female.

So feminists shouldn’t have said “we want more strong female
characters.” We should have said “we want more WEAK female
characters.” Not “weak” meaning “Damsel in Distress.” “Weak” meaning
“flawed.”

And then the author, Shana Mlawski, herself a YA novelist, finishes with some examples of (SCs) F that work and why.

(See also this webcomic, discussed here.)

Your job as a writer is not to look up which human traits are "strong" and bundle them onto your characters; your job is to make sure the characterisation itself, including character development*, is competent. Can I believe a real human would have this bundle of virtues and vices, given where they came from and what they've been through? Does it make me want to root for them (or against, if they're the antagonist)? Can I believe, given all that they are, what they end up doing?

* When it comes to character development, there are at least three viable "arcs"; just see what works for you.

The last two novels I finished writing each have a 10-year-old female protagonist, but apart from both being smart they've got very little in common. One of them is so good at manipulating others she feels a conflict in herself, fighting not to do anything too evil. It's not a fight she always wins. (I don't blame her, given occasional but serious reasons the world has given her to turn angry.) The other is a continually downtrodden child who starts to benefit from others' kindness, but feels so guilty about not taking the reins much herself that, when she does have only-she-can-fix-it situations, she's willing to do increasingly brave things as part of them, eventually risking her own life.

Do you think you can invent something different from either of those? Of course you can! Make a list of your favourite 50 male characters; they've got nothing in common. Now imagine what an equally diverse range of female characters would be like.

Attempts to make a female character strong and unique

Well, it won't be unique! It's just an archetype now. I'm a Doctor Who fan, and every year or two the Doctor gets a new standalone female companion (well, usually, nowadays), and what winds me up is the marketing always acts as if it's something new that they're... like that. It's not unique at all. The first episode of new Who saw Rose Tyler solve a problem by swinging from a cable. And frankly, her successors aren't even following in her footsteps; they're following in those of practically every companion, regardless of gender, the Doctor has ever had.

I want them to be strong, independent, unique girls, without straying into "not like other girls!!!" territory. I don't want them to be copy/paste characters, predictable in nature, or an acre of water an inch deep, per se. How do I keep my characters unique and avoid this trope?

Let me ask you a question: do you think those other girls are all like each other? No, of course not. Every woman is somewhere on a bell curve for intelligence, somewhere else for physical strength, somewhere else again for her opinion on politics, or fashion, or whatever. I don't care how you design your next character, be they male or female. Flip coins to sort out the details if you have to. Just think about who they are from every angle you can see your story having to look at.