Dansen said:
Recently I was challenged to think of how many tough female fighters I could think of in shounen. Not women who hold power in other forms, Im talking about fighters. The results were dismal:
Hawkeye(FMA), Olivier Armstrong(FMA), Pitou(HxH), Sui-Feng(Bleach), Morgiana(Magi) and maybe Tsunade(Naruto)
Is it really only because the genre is meant to appeal to boys, and boys cant handle seeing a strong woman? I refuse to believe that. Perhaps their is sexism in the industry, which you can pick up on from some undertones in anime. Or is it just easier to follow the status quo? It just seems like most female characters are relegated to the side so that they can cheer on the male protagonist. If they have any sort of abilities they typically are of a supporting nature, most often represented as being a healer. It gets old. Let them do something cool.
Im not saying that every series needs to fill out a female quota or anything, it would just be nice to break up some of the formulaic stuff once in a while. What are your thoughts on this and what other badass women would you add to the list.
I'm offended you mentioned Hawkeye and Olivia, but left out Izumi. The single most amazing character in FMA if you want to talk about fighting skill.
But yes, while the male characters - who are usually the main characters - get top billing and exposure in terms of who you see in advertisements, it's actually incredibly easy to find amazing female characters in shonen series. And many times they vastly outshine the males in at least one aspect.
Probably the biggest protential issue here is one others have mentioned - female characters show up, are awesomely hardcore, and then powercreep overtakes them. However, that's not exclusive to female characters. The longer the series goes, the more likely it is to scrub out good characters due to powercreep.
If I were to list all the ones I know, it'd be a very long list indeed, haha. Ones from Fullmetal were stated, The Major was mentioned from GitS, though I would also point out the ex-russian agent - Cruzkowa - in the Captivated episode, who was only caught due to political machinations but dang near got away even from Section 9.
Several characters from Naruto, Bleach and One Peice were awesome but powercreep has overtaken a majority of the cast, let alone the female characters.
One poster mentioned Lacus, which pleases me greatly. She didn't really do much in the way of fighting, but she was a political and diplomatic powerhouse that shaped a lot of happened in the show.
I forget the name of the anime off the top of my head, but it's a relatively recent one. The main female lead uses her poisoned blood to create swords out of it to hunt and kill monsters.
Speaking of blood, Blood The Last Vampire had a female lead that hunted vampires better than pretty much everyone else.
Speaking of vampires, you have Hellsing, with Integra being one of the most insane characters in the show because she could handily, personally lay the smackdown on vampires while being a totally normal human, and is the only person with the willpower to boss around THE vampire, Alucard.
So on and so forth. So like said, just because the male characters tend to get more exposure in advertisements, finding bad-ass female characters is actually very easy.