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You’re listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief, I’m Eric Molinsky.

There’s a term that gets used a lot in sci-fi fantasy criticism: the strong female character. And that’s with air quotes.

JAN: Well, there’s usually only one, you can’t have more than one because then that will upset power of the entire universe.

Jan Combopiano is a senior vice president at Catalyst, a non-profit that works to advance women and business – and she’s a big sci-fi fan.

JAN: It feels like oh she’s there so we can move on. We don’t have to know anything about her, She doesn’t have to have a history.

LINDSAY: She don’t need no man. But she will find one. That will be part of her arc.

Lindsay Ellis is a media critic.

LINDSAY: She often likes to shit on other women to prove what a badass she is, and she tends to resent whenever people point out her woman-i-ness. A lot of time the quote strong female character is like you’re playing a video game and she just drops out of the sky. And she’s just standing there. LINDSAY: Da da da da. Yeah, she’s just standing there with fists up already, her ponytail, she’s just ready to fight.

CAROLYN: A trope I hate, I have five brothers, my Dad was in the army, her abilities were always explained away she got them from a man.

And here’s Carolyn Cox, an editors at the website, The Mary Sue.

CAROLYN: And she’s gorgeous and flawless at the same time, no matter what life- threatening situation she’s in, she has time to shave her armpits.

And after all her tough talk and great hygiene, she ends up being a damsel that the hero has to save.

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JAN: She has to earn his attention. And once she’s earned it. She’s the chick, she’s the girl, she’s the thing he has to save to prove his manhood. He becomes a better hero because he saves such a strong person.

Look, I’m a guy, and this really bugs me. I love these movies, and I get frustrated when one of the main characters is boring and underwritten, and it’s obvious that their lack of character development comes from a place of fear.

And I’m honestly shocked at the way the studios refuse to make toys of the female heroines. The execs argue well, girls don’t buy action figures – and everyone who complains is just citing anecdotal evidence.

Well, here’s some anecdotal evidence. I was at New York Comic Con last fall and there were there several huge displays of every Lego mini figure you could imagine – of the male characters. While I was there looking around, several girls came up and asked for Batgirl, Supergirl, Wonder Woman – and even the villains, Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn. They had only made a few and sold out that day -- the first day of Comic Con. The girls walked away disappointed.

The studios also claim that women will see movies about men, but men don’t see movies that star women. When you bring up the Alien franchise or The Hunger Games, they dismiss them as flukes.

So that was the state of frustration until this summer, when something happened that was really surprising to me. A few films came out featuring “strong female characters” – and who write about sci-fi and fantasy, who I like to read regularly, disagreed with each other about these characters, and whether they should even rethink the whole problem.

Now the only way to talk about this subject to go heavy on the spoilers because this debate is all about what happens in these films.

So first I want to talk about Avengers: Age of Ultron. Since Iron Man 2, Scarlet Johansson has been playing Natasha Romanov, aka Black Widow, a former Russian spy who now works for us. In the first Avengers movie, the villain Loki tells her that he knows all the bad stuff she’s done.

CLIP: AVENGERS 3

A lot of Black Widow fans were curious – what is this big weight that she has on her shoulders? The answer was not what they were expecting.

In the sequel Age of Ultron, there’s a budding romance between Natasha and Bruce Banner, aka The Hulk. And when he tells her they can’t be together because he could never be a husband or father. She reveals that the final stage of her training to be an assassin – she was sterilized. And then she says, “You’re not the only monster on the team.”

JAN: And all I can think of is wait, what? You’re a monster because of what? No, this is really not happening, this isn’t her.

Jan Combopiano was one of the many Black Widow fans that were upset.

JAN: It’s not saying that it’s bad, that she wants to be a mother, if that was the story and we had seen steps in previous movies that she wanted to be a mother then it wouldn’t have been so shocking, but it came out of nowhere. That reveal about what happened to her in red room was awful and if stopped there without the monster comment, I don’t think we would’ve had this Twitter war. I don’t know that we would’ve had quite as much vehemence about it.

Although the “are we gods and monsters?” theme does come up, like all characters at some point do wrestle with am I a god or a monster?

JAN: I mean they both could be considered a monster, especially him. He’s a big green guy who destroys city – that’s probably the definition of a monster. Her because of her red ledger, she’s being going around killing people for the KGB or whatever all these years, she could be a monster but the fact she’s a monster because she can’t have children? I don’t know, the connection that you’re a god because you create something? That’s Tony Starks story, he creates Ultron, and he creates The Vision.

Right, Jarvis.

JAN: Right. Thor is a god! But Black Widow and Hawkeye, they’re supposed to be people. She’s an awesome person. She’s always quick with a quip, she’s very funny, she’s very smart. To me it felt like a slap in the face to her as a character.

But a lot of women saw that scene differently, like Carolyn Cox.

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CAROLYN: That scene in particular didn’t offend me, the way it was framed, it wasn’t being shown all women feel this way, one individual sharing her experience as opposed to Jurassic World, Bryce Dallas Howard is firm she doesn’t want to be a mother, everyone makes her out to be a monster for that and I appreciated Age of Ultron one woman’s perspective.

But that wasn’t the end of it. During the press junket, a reporter asked Jeremy Renner and Chris Evans if they were bothered that after fans speculated that she might hook up with either of their characters, now she’s being paired up with Bruce Banner. They were clearly bored and punchy after a long day, and joked that she was a slut and a whore. And that sparked a social media firestorm.

Chris Evans issued a sincere apology, but Jeremy Renner thought the whole thing was ridiculous. They were joking, she’s a fictional character, why is this a big deal?

CAROLYN: I think it was very clear how little grey area is afforded to her. In that interview called her a slut that is how women, we’re not allowed to go in between to be ambiguous about what partners in real life humans flirt with someone, wind up with someone lese, lone female character is a slut or promiscuous, that would never happen with Tony Stark.

JAN: There are so many double binds for women. They can’t be too caring and soft because then they’re wimps and they’re not a strong female but if they’re too strong and too ballsy then people don’t like them, so they have to navigate this really narrow bridge between both of those. Male characters can be complete assholes and no one cares.

What surprised me most about this whole discussion was that I didn’t know so many women felt a strong connection with Black Widow. I thought she was another “strong female character” that had to be perfect. I didn’t get the nuance of what made her special – that so few heroines ever get a dark past with a redemption story.

I felt the same way about Furiosa, Charlize Theron’s character in Mad Max: Fury Road – I thought she was just another strong female character. So I asked Lindsay Ellis, what did I miss?

LINDSAY: She does get hurt and physically really feels it and she needs Max like that last really long chase scene of them saving each other 26 times, which I thought was 5 great, they defeat the bad guy together but it’s ultimately Furiosa’s story so she pulls the thingie out of the bad guy’s mouth.

The thingie is his menacing breathing apparatus. In that movie, Furiosa has escaped the clutches of a post-apocalyptic warlord called Imorton Joe. And she stole his captive brides – some who are pregnant – and she’s driving them back to her home base.

It’s implied that Joe raped Furiosa and the brides, but we don’t SEE the rape on film, which we usually do in these stories, and that’s another problematic trope of the “strong female character.”

So Mad Max was celebrated by feminists – and denounced by misogynists. But then the media critic Anita Sarkeesian wrote a bunch of tweets slamming the movie, saying, “It makes me profoundly sad that mainstream pop culture now interprets feminism to mean women can drive fast and stoically kill people too!”

This is the same Anita Sarkeesian that was persecuted by trolls who threatened her life because of her critique of video games. So for her to denounce Furiosa was shocking to a lot of her supporters.

LINDSAY: To hold to that analysis you have to ignore the vulnerability that Furiosa is allowed in the narrative, and that’s there and important which is why so many women related to her so intensely, as opposed to female character that isn’t allowed vulnerability, to be sad, to be scared.

But what about her argument – that the action-adventure genre is inherently male because the characters solve their problems through violence?

CAROLYN: It’s something I inherently disagree with.

Carolyn Cox.

CAROLYN: I grew up loving action movies, I’d be watching it regardless, to have access to action movie that doesn’t offend me as a women is so profound and usual. I don’t need Wonder Woman just don’t offend me. CAROLYN: And this has been discussed, having a woman doesn’t need to be fulfilled by a romantic relationship she’s having a platonic relationship of mutual respect between her 6 and Max and he almost plays the female role in that movie the role women put in furthering her agenda. He’s furthering her agenda and he’s tortured, he’s physically abused. CAROLYN: We see more of his abuse then we see any of the women, which is huge.

Years ago, the cartoonist Allison Bechdal wrote a frustrated article about the bare minimum she expects from these movies. The Bechdal Test ended up becoming a cornerstone of feminist pop culture criticism, much to the surprise of Bechdal herself.

The test is pretty simple. There should be more than one woman in the movie. The have to talk to each other – about something other than a guy.

LINDSAY: I think, people tend to misappropriate it.

Lindsay Ellis:

LINSDAY: It can be used as dismissive thing this idea if a movie passes it instantly feminist which is super reductive and doesn’t pass it. To me it’s more about who makes the movies, and how they see the world, and how that reinforces how we see the world.

Which is why Jan prefers a different standard – the Mako Mori test. That idea comes from the movie Pacific Rim, which is about people in giant robot suits fighting monsters. It does have only one “strong female character” – Mako Mori -- but her story arc doesn’t rely on the male hero.

JAN: When she was a child, these giant monsters that come from another dimension, and destroyed Hong Kong, she was a child, sitting there crying and this giant robot came by and saved her and it turned out to be Idris Elba who is fabulous person, and he became her surrogate father, and so they have this whole relationship how let go of a child, how do you let go of a parent to become who you need to be as an adult. The fact that I have to mention that that’s exciting and interesting to me as an adult woman in 2015 is kind of shocking how many movies are like that.

Whenever this discussion comes up online – and it gets heated really fast, like at the level of gun control, Obamacare and Israel. A lot of men will question why this debate even matters. Aren’t there more important issues to care about in the world?

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For one, the fortunes of entire companies are being propped up by “tent pole movies” with big special effects – which are supposed to appeal to a very wide demographic. That’s why this failure of imagination among filmmakers and studio execs is so frustrating.

Lindsay says, there’s another reason why this matters.

LINDSAY: We need to be more aware of women and the way that men treat them, do the male characters respect them? Do they feel the need to do this, I didn’t know a girl could punch thing. Like Max lands there, oh, she can drive for a girl! LINDSAY: Yeah, she never does that! Just the level the respect that Hawkeye and Black Widow have for each other, and that gets glossed over, they have platonic relationship, no one questions it, no one says are you guys doing it? They never disrespect each other, deep level of trust, great that’s there, important that’s there, part of thing we need to see of, young boys, media is very important to learning empathy in our culture.

Empathy is something we are sorely lacking in our culture right now. But Carolyn says, there’s only one way to get real change.

CAROLYN: If there are more women creators out there, we’ll gradually start to whittle away at that ingrained fear of women taking something away from us, and we’ll start to see all creators as equal.

There are women directors and writers attached to a few future DC and Marvel movies. But until a movie starts shooting, you can’t count on anything.

I think what makes any character a strong character is that they’re allowed to make choices. And the fact so many people have disagreed this summer about the choices these female characters are making is a sign of progress. Even if they make bad choices, at least they have a mind of their own.

Well, that’s it for this week’s show, thanks for listening. Special thanks to Lindsay Ellis, Carolyn Cox, Jan Combopiano and Shana Mlawski. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at emolinsky. The show’s website is imaginary worlds podcast dot org.