The strong female character is a stock character, the opposite of the damsel in distress. In the first half of the 20th century, the rise of mainstream feminism and the increased use of the concept in the later 20th century have reduced the concept to a standard item of pop culture fiction. This narrative cliche is separate and distinct from the notion of a female character who is well written, granted some form of agency, and whose actions and desires occupy a central place in the story in a way that is unusual in the history of women in literature and women in film.
Whether female characters are strong enough is often used as a gauge of story quality by critics, in a similar manner to whether the story passes the Bechdel test. However, some have criticized this metric for causing authors to avoid creating female characters with realistic weaknesses.[1] The female characters that fall into this trope are often reduced to having one dimension with little development throughout their arc.[2]