Everybody remembers Ripley, but Aliens was a solid gender equality movie… filmed way back in 1986. Remember Vasquez and Ferro? Totally believable, flawed and likeable badasses. I find today’s characters to be way too perfect to be believable. Wonder Woman is a good example. I find her annoying.

Where is the love for Chrisjen Avasarala? The UN General Secretary Queen of the Earth from The Expanse lore? The Space Iron Lady!

I admire her more than other traditional depiction of bad ass action stars who are either a man or a woman. I realised I admire mental acuity more than raw strength. Avasarala is Machiavellian but a pragmatist, and ready to get her hands dirty if needs be in spite of her privileged upbringing. Her main drawbacks though is that she is too willing to get her hands dirty, especially at the first episode when she personally oversaw the torture of a Belter in a blacksite. She was also willing to use her family image to gain political sympathy. But one could argue it’s for the greater good, not that I am excusing both of her egregious and questionable actions. As I said, she is a pragmatist after all and looks at the bigger picture and have long term scope. She was right about slowly colonising the New Worlds. Avasarala is an anti-hero but she’s right in more ways than none.

Take your pick.

Not a single person mentioned Lucy Lawless? Where my 90s kids at?

Summer Glau: Am I a joke to you?

‘Landlady’ is the absolute correct choice.

From Wikipedia:

Cheung Cheun-Nam, known professionally as Yuen Qiu (Chinese: 元秋; born 19 April 1950), is a Hong Kong actress and martial artist. She is an expert of both Chinese martial arts and Beijing-opera skills, and was apprenticed at the Peking Opera School under the same master, Yu Jim-yuen, as Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung.

After being away from the Hong Kong film industry for nearly 20 years, she landed a role in Kung Fu Hustle only by chance. She was accompanying a junior woman fellow of the China Drama Academy at the audition but the director’s eye was on her. It was reported that Stephen Chow convinced her to take on the role only after unremitting and persistent persuasion.[citation needed]

Yuen later appeared in the movie Kung Fu Mahjong, with Yuen Wah, and has been active in cinema since then. (20 more films)

Ellen Ripley, no contest.

No superpowers, no special training, no special technology. Simply the wisdom to see a job that needs done and the bravery and determination to do it.

Every female character in The Expanse. There simply were no non-badasses in that show🙃

Michelle Yeoh

Might want to add River Tam from Serenity as well.

Beatrice Kiddo from Kill Bill

Don’t mind me, I’m just here to mention princess Mononoke and lady Eboshi from the same movie, I would list a few but there’s too many comments to parse so I just looked for those thinking they might not have been mentioned.

My biggest issue with most strong women characters in action movies is they seem to be swappable with a male and nothing changes.

They’re strong characters who are portrayed as a woman.

Take Ellen Ripley for example: strong woman. Can’t be played by a man as the character no longer makes sense. Has to be a woman. Someone else would get it wrong.

Also I’m getting tired of the “I had X amount of brothers” or “dad taught me Y” as justification. Why can’t a woman be strong on her own? Why does it have to be a man making her strong?

If you’ve never seen kung fu hustle don’t sleep on it any longer.

• Tank Girl
• Wynonna Earp
• Tokyo Gore Police
• Buffy and Xena are classic
• Ghost in the Shell if counting anime