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" Right now, we&amp;#039;re experiencing the rise of strong heroines. Gone are the shrinking, fainting violets of ages past. Now, we can run, fight, and wield weapons as well as the boys. It&amp;#039;s pretty awesome. When I started writing about Tris, the main character of the Divergent series, I was going for a strong heroine. She may start out small and mild-mannered, but she transforms into someone you definitely wouldn&amp;#039;t want to mess with. But as the series went on, I found myself worrying about this strong-heroine thing a little. By valuing characters who possess physical strength and unfailing mental mettle, are we limiting women, the same way the shrinking violet is limited? Are we saying you can be whatever you want to be, ladies, but you&amp;#039;ll be considered strong and worthy of our attention only if you fulfill a narrow set of criteria? The truth is, while I love me some traditionally strong female characters, what I really want to see is the rise of complicated heroines. Heroines who aren&amp;#039;t always nice or who don&amp;#039;t always know what the right thing to do is \u2026 or aren&amp;#039;t sure if they want to do it. Heroines who fail big, who drive their own stories, who you sometimes love, sometimes hate, but who always feel like real women.  Kristen Bell as Veronica Mars Take Veronica Mars. She&amp;#039;s a private eye deeply troubled by her best friend&amp;#039;s murder. She is resilient, smart, and funny and has a wide array of stylish jackets. She&amp;#039;s also suspicious of everyone, occasionally obnoxious, and not always in touch with her own emotions. She is strong, but that&amp;#039;s not the word I would use to summarize her \u2014 in fact, I can&amp;#039;t choose one word to summarize her because she has way too much going on. That&amp;#039;s what I love the most: heroines who can&amp;#039;t be condensed into a single word or even a small set of words. Heroines who take up far too much space to be stuffed into a box.  Anna Gunn as Skyler White in Breaking Bad That was the kind of heroine I tried to develop in Tris. She&amp;#039;s not always powerful, lovable, and unstoppable. It&amp;#039;s characters like her who tell us that it&amp;#039;s okay not to be strong or nice all the time or to do everything right. When we care about a complicated heroine&amp;#039;s story \u2014 Skyler from Breaking Bad or Cersei from Game of Thrones or Katsa from Graceling \u2014 even if we don&amp;#039;t always like or agree with them, we can at least say that our own stories are worth caring about \u2026 even when we don&amp;#039;t do the right thing or save the day. We can be emotional, sensitive, quiet, brash, angry, smart, careless, confused, determined, and brave all at the same time \u2014 we can be more than just strong.  Lena Headey as Cersei in Game of Thrones Photo credit (from top to bottom): Shailene Woodley as Tris in Divergent (Jaap Buitendijk/Summit Entertainment); Bauer-Griffin/Getty Images; Everett Collection (2) "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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