Disney’s Most Valuable Screenwriter Has Had Enough of the ‘Strong Female’ Trope Linda Woolverton, the Disney screenwriter who reimagined Belle as a bookworm and crafted Sleeping Beauty’s Maleficent into a fearsome antihero, has heard the “strong female character” trope since her earliest years at the studio, and she doesn’t have a lot of patience for it. “It’s just an easy term,” she said in a recent interview with IndieWire. “What does it mean?” “Now that we’ve made a lot of progress as women,” Woolverton said. “Now [that] we’ve gotten ourselves in a position of like, ‘Oh, we can actually do things now,’ let’s do it. Let’s just not repeat the past, or not just take out a male protagonist and plunk in a female protagonist and call it good. I think that the feeling now that ‘Wow, we can have women flying around, and shooting rays at things, and blowing buildings up, just like the men always did’ — that’s great, but I think it’ll get really boring really quick, unless we add something, really the truth about ourselves.” "We’ve broken the door down, good for us. We slammed the door down through a variety of reasons, and we had a lot of leaders who helped us, and a lot of movements that helped us, like the #MeToo movement and others. Now we’ve stormed the castle, and we slammed the doors, and now we’re standing on the door, kind of like huffing and puffing. Okay, now the question for me is, okay, now what are you going to do with it? What are you going to do with it?’ That’s what I want to see.” While this may be a high-risk topic, I think she's looking at it from a comparison of past/current trends/values and an artistic view of trying something new. Personally, I think she's being fair and balanced about it and I find it encouraging, in a way, to see that one of the pioneers of the strong female trope wants to try something different.
Good article, but that title is just asking for trouble, and its not even accurate. She doesn’t make any pronouncements on feminism at all, just a particular trope.
If anything, it's about continuing feminism past the point that was previously considered the goal when it came to female characters in media.
I read the whole article linked and it gives some valuable insight into the screenwriter's creative thought process. Agreed that the article's original title isn't quite accurate to its actual (and more nuanced) content, and seems deliberately worded to drum up clicks. I changed the title of the thread to something more neutral and reflective of what the article is really talking about. If anyone has any questions or concerns regarding this change, please feel free to contact me over PM. Thank you.