rcs619 said:
Oh man, that actually reminds me of a fun character from a book series I like.
Thandi Palane is character in the Honorverse (the various side-stories and spin-offs from the original Honor Harrington book series). She lives in the year... I think it's like 4018 or something like that, and she's from a planet with such high gravity and such harsh conditions that humans from there are basically superhuman just to survive. Thandi is a hair over seven feet tall, and she's actually quite a bit stronger than she looks because her homeworld has like 40% higher gravity than Earth's. Physically, she's one of the most lethal characters in the series.
But yeah, she winds up falling in love with Victor Cachat (basically an elite covert operative for another nation in the series) who is described as, well, supremely average and unassuming... and it turns out that she's a total submissive in bed. Honestly, they're just a cute couple. Almost total opposites physically, but they're just super into each other. Watching a woman that could rip off a car door with her bare hands being gentle, or even goofy, with her significant other is cute as heck.
Honestly the Honor Harrington series is just chock-full of amazingly capable female characters, for that matter.
Thandi is from Ndebele a place that started getting genetic modification very late compared to other worlds, so a great deal of their superior strength comes from adaptation over generations. Another thing is that Ndebele a low light world, so most of the people who have long term familial roots there are very pale. The issue is that as a natural selection adaptation people from the Mfecane worlds tend to be extremely bone and muscle dense, to the point where they have no buoyancy, making them unable to float or swim in water. Strangely genetically modified highgrav people tend to be able to swim, like Honor who is a Meyerdahl Beta, or San Martinios who are adapted to live on a 2.7G world, the heaviest inhabited world in the known Honoverse.
OT: On the subject of badass women I have one trope that really grates on me, especially any more. The girl power and badass women trope in general has gotten really irritating in some respects. Girl power is one that just irks me, because it makes any and all female characters in the property it's used in automatically superior to any male character. Thus any male character has not only to be less able than female characters, but he also has to be stupid and ineffective to the point of being reduced to comic relief at best. Then there is the stain of thought where the girl power girl has to be one of the guys, but she's also still looked down on for being female, thus has to work harder to prove herself, thus is better at everything than any of the guys. I hate that, no single person is so great at everything that they beat everyone else at everything, but it's especially irritating when it's done just because the character in question is female.
This brings me to the badass female character trope, which has the tendency to have one of three back stories; a sad underprivileged past, Massimo personal tragedy, drive to prove one's self because of gender, or some combination of those. Why can't a badass female character ever just be badass because she's talented, or gifted? Why does it always have to be because of some past event that makes them need to work superduper hard. A side part of this is that it often comes at the exclusion of badass male character, the badass female always has to dominate the story, her struggles have hammered into us with the subtly of a pile and pile driver combination. When there is a badass male then the badass female exists as the counter point to the fact that there is a male badass. Why can't we just have talented badasses who are talented, skilled, or gifted, for reasons other than tragic history? Why do we always have to have a female whose badass to be a counterpoint to a badass male, or to make men in general look evil, or/and stupid? Seriously it's lazy "gender war" writing and it's stupid as hell.
Here is one of the big reasons I love the Honoverse, the vast majority of characters are badasses, but they're badasses because they worked for it. They don't all have tragic pasts, or societal disadvantages that
force them to prove themselves constantly. They're just hard working people, who have pride in the things that they do, so they work hard as a measure of personal pride. None of this personal tragedy rigimorole which generally makes people adopt a victim complex, or the "I'm gonna prove myself because I'm [insert underprivileged group label]", bs character arc.
