Tough Guys...And Girls

Recently Pluto TV was showing Earth Final Conflict on its Sci-Fi channel and for no real reason I started rewatching the whole series on Amazon Prime without the obnoxious Siesta Key commercials.

The premise of the show was kind of like V where aliens come to Earth and while they seem good at first, under the surface they're not that good, so there's a Resistance to oppose them.  I wrote an entry about the show about 2 years ago and one thing I noted was the large amount of turnover in the series.  As part of this, Renee Palmer was introduced in Season 3 as a Resistance fighter who also was CEO of the powerful tech company Doors International.

For two seasons she and a dude named Liam Kincaid were sort of a low-rent Mulder and Scully opposing the alien schemes.  At the end of the fourth season, though, Liam disappears while trying to get two alien species to merge their life forces or whatever.

In the fifth season, Renee is pretty much on her own to fight against a new race of aliens who are sort of like energy vampires.  This season is not really much fun to watch.  For one the new aliens are a one-eighty from the previous ones.  But mostly because they had Renee get all pissed off and brooding.  She becomes so obsessed with killing the aliens that she frees a serial killer (played by Superman's Margot Kidder) to try to figure out a weakness on the aliens.  That's definitely not fun.

Then that made me think of other examples like Linda Hamilton in the Terminator movies or Jamie Lee Curtis in the Halloween movies where they get all pissed off and bitter and brooding to show how tough they are.  It made me think about the nature of toughness in movies and TV.  To be tough, does a character have to be pissed off, bitter, and brooding?

I don't think so.  Sure there are male examples of this like Batman or The Punisher, but what about Captain America?  Or Spider-Man?  They're not wimps but they're also not pissed off and bitter.  Really I think what makes a character tough is more whether they can get up when they're knocked down.  Like Captain America in Endgame ready to face off against Thanos and his minions alone.  Or Spider-Man getting beat up by Mysterio, Vulture, Green Goblin, the Lizard, Venom, Doc Ock, or whoever and still getting up to save the day.  Or Rocky getting beat up by Apollo Creed, Clubber Lang, or Ivan Drago and still going round after round and (usually) winning.

So really we should apply the same principles to female characters.  They don't need to be pissed off and bitter and wearing a tank top to be tough.  All they need is to get up when they're knocked down.

You know a female character who is tough that way?  The Scarlet Knight.  Emma Earl is almost never pissed off and bitter--and I don't think she ever wears a tank top.  She's mostly kind and courteous and caring, but she also doesn't give up.  Ever.  Not even when she thinks her child is dead.  That's toughness.