Some Comments on Empathy and Female Leads

I saw this discussion on Facebook about how people tend to end up hating any female lead of a show after the third or so season. Reasons varied, though most of it was just frustration over them not getting their shit together by then. Or not heading in the direction they should have logically gone. Or not hooking up with the person the audience liked. 

Have I felt this way in the past? Yes, but I'm honestly trying not to these days. I think people are way too hard on female leads or honestly, just female characters in general. We don't want them to have problems because we tend not to have empathy for women when they have problems. 

I mean, unless the woman is being abused. We can usually handle her being abused SO LONG AS she is trying really hard to get away from her abuser.

Think, Daenerys Targaryen the first season of Game of Thrones. People rooted for her when she was trying to stand up to her abusive brother. When she started wanting to reclaim her throne and slept with whatever man she wanted (but not the man some people wanted her to be with) and made some decisions that were violent but within reason of the world she was on, people started to hate her. By the time the creators ruined her character and made her go insane for handwave reasons, people were happy to see her die. Not me, but other people. 

It seems that we don't really want complexity from our female characters. They can have problems, but those need to be solved and handled so the show can go in other directions. We don't want them to have breakdowns and setbacks they created on their own. We certainly don't want them to be flawed. Though, at the same time, we don't want them to be perfect because that would just be unrealistic. 

Diane Nguyen is a good example of this. On Bojack, she's set up as a foil/eventual love interest. Had the show gone the way shows like this typically go, by the end of the series, Bojack and Diane would be together. 

But that doesn't happen. Diane not only marries someone else early into the show, but by the time the show ends, she is with someone else completely. She and Bojack never really happen. 

A lot of people hated Diane. There really is no GOOD reason for it. She can be hypocritical and judgy at times, though when she is, the show usually walked into the issues, showing how complicated they really were. She can be selfish and frustrating. However, she's arguably less immoral and destructive to others than Bojack is. Sure she hurts some people she's involved with but said people are usually equally guilty in the matter. 

To me, Diane is a very realistic person. She's talented but has a lot of mental and emotional damage. Despite that, she mostly holds a job and works on things throughout the whole show. She has a time when she doesn't really accomplish a lot, but it's when she's the most broken. Even then, she still manages to salvage herself and write another book. 

But the thing is, Diane is given a lot of room for the audience to see her faltering. There is a lot of time for the audience to have empathy for her. The problem is, some people just didn't. They are so unused to having to spend time dealing with a woman's headspace and personal struggle that they just decided it was a waste of time for the show and resented her for it.  

I think it's a big step in the right direction that we're adding depth to the characters we see in our media. I know some people maybe aren't ready to handle those characters, but trust me, as someone who spent their childhood mostly seeing male characters and reading about male characters (with a smattering of love interests and secretaries, and villainous women tossed in for flavor), you can learn to relate to the human element in us all.