My frustration with "Strong Female" Characters

[Esquilax]

In today's media why in order to have a strong female character does there need to be such a hatred for traditional female roles. Why can't the strong female character not like getting dirty? Or think pink is pretty? Have a love for shopping? Or squeal over sparkly things without being called stupid? It seems to me now being a strong female character means being a man with boobs.

That's easy, in a reactionary kind of way; if those traditionally feminine roles are what was associated with female characters before, and those old characters are weak female characters, then strong female characters must be the opposite of those things!

That's the problem; writers mistaking the tropes for how they're used. The reason women had been relegated to a set of archetypes within fiction had nothing to do with their love for pink or anything, and everything to do with the role they were given in the narrative. It's pretty easy to see how someone might mistake those feminine things as being the source of the problem, given that in many cases it was all those female characters had.

But that still doesn't fix anything, it just establishes a false dichotomy: characters that associate with X = bad. Characters that associate with not X = good. Handily, this completely misses the point: we're not after strong female characters, we're after interesting characters in general, irrespective of gender. To say "these are the traits that make a bad female character," is to merely define yet another stereotypical type of fictional woman into existence; just another stock character of the type one typically tries to escape from when designing male characters.

I don't understand why so many people seem to mistake "approaching three dimensional" as being the hallmark of a strong female character. It's far easier than that; just stop treating tits like something that transform a personality into a specific set of shapes. Just write for people, goddamn it.