Female Archetypes Quotes

I think that Hollywood misconstrues actresses saying, 'Oh I wanna play a strong female character,' like we all want to play, like, superheroes or something.

We love rom-coms, but it's getting to where we don't identify with any of the women in them.

We women, when we're searching for a meaning to our lives or for the path of knowledge, always identify with one of four classic archetypes.

I think the role of the Bond woman has changed so much over the years that it now doesn't follow a typical archetypical view. Before, it was very much a beautiful woman who didn't contribute much and who usually ended up getting killed or was arm candy for Bond. But now the women in a Bond movie have so much more to offer.

I'd been so tired of 'strong female characters' for so long by then. I was so tired of the way female strength was made to look cold and humorless; the way it was characterized as deviant and 'unnatural' and always lonely and exceptional. I was tired of the grim undertone of tragedy that lurked under its surface. 'Strong female characters' were never funny, and they never had any fun, either. More often than not, they were celibate, friendless, and clinically depressed. Their monomaniacal devotion to crime fighting made them lean, cranky, and impatient. Naturally, they had axes to grind: they were avenging brides, poker-faced assassins, gloomy ninjas with commitment issues. Who were these characters? What were they trying to tell us? Why didn't they ever say goodbye before hanging up the phone? And why were they always being reborn or remade as killing machines after losing everything they held dear?

[10 Things I Hate About You] keeps popping up, and it's become a go-to film specifically for adolescent girls who are trying to find their voice, which is a really important thing, and the characters in the film, the two sisters played by Julia Stiles and Larisa Oleynik, they became archetypes for young teenage girls to look up to and emulate.

I am certainly proud to add 'Korra' to the pantheon of TV characters, which is perpetually sorely lacking in multifaceted female characters who aren't sidekicks, subordinates or mere trophies for male characters.

I think part of the pressure put on 'strong female characters' comes from the fact that there is so often 'the team girl,' who must be all things to all people. Part of avoiding that is having as many female characters as I can, and allowing them to thrive in their own right, not inside a framework they didn't ask for and don't want.

There are so many female roles - particularly for young women - that are just somebody's girlfriend or somebody's daughter, or that are accessories to the main story rather than being three-dimensional characters.

All things I do are in every woman. Every woman is Medea. Every woman is Jocasta. There comes a time when a woman is a mother to her husband. Clytemnestra is every woman when she kills.

It has been said that on screen I personified the American woman.

There's a rigid template a first lady has to fit into. You're either the Dragon Lady or the Happy Homemaker.

I do think that having the villain be a woman is just as feminine, because we're not just saying, 'Women are wonderful and made of marshmallows,' but women can be anything. They can be amazing superheroes, or they can be dastardly villains, and everything in between.

These archetypal older women in movies can sometimes make my skin crawl. It's about the one dimension; it's about the lack of any texture.

The parts for women, you're either like the quietly suffering wife or the wild girl.

I always do a lot of work around characters to make them real people because, oftentimes, they really are a sliver of a person. Even with truly wonderful writers, women characters are there to emote, and they're often incredibly chaste or worthy. Or they're a 'different type of woman', which is the worst.

I do see a lot of roles that are, like, the girlfriend or the love interest or the girl next door. Maybe not totally well-rounded kinds of characters - women who are more of a plot device in a way.

I'm so sick of hearing how there's no strong roles for women. I don't care about strong roles. I just want to see women who are characters! A nun, a serial killer, a housewife, as long as there's some depth there.

So much of the literature we had to read for high school English class was filled with victimized, tragic, symbolic women who spurred the plot forward with their inevitable shunning/death/shunning-followed-by-pregnancy-followed-by-death timelines.

I'm quite drawn to women artists who use themselves in their work. There is a very feminine point of view, the use of female archetypes. I love artists who play with those kind of things genuinely.

In all legends men have thought of women as sublime separately but horrible in a herd.