Why I Love Angry Female Characters

I didn’t use to like angry female characters. They usually tend to be “unlikable”, and they always got on my nerves. I wanted to focus more on the plot, than on the emotional development. I couldn’t connect to the emotional piece as much as I can now. Since then, I’ve grown to love them and have started to seek out books where the girls are the angriest.

I have a lot of emotions. I mean, I’m sure we all do haha. Anger is one of them that’s hard for me to feel. I don’t quite know where to put it and it’s usually so big for me, it’s hard to just sit with it. Probably another reason I stayed away from characters with those same feelings. I didn’t want to read about their anger on top of all my other feelings.

But, I’ve grown a lot emotionally over the years. I appreciate emotion more and I understand it more than I used to. I’m not sure if books have started to delve into the emotional piece more in the recent years, or I’ve I’m just starting to notice it more. Maybe I’m just connected with the current emotional state of books. Maybe the emotional piece is better written now. WHO KNOWS. The point is, since I got off track there, that I feel like I connect with the characters emotions better now.

Since anger is a frustrating emotion for me, to see it so plainly, and so unabashedly, and to see it lead to bad decisions, and good decisions, I think normalizes it for me? It makes it seem like feelings are alright. They’ll be messy, but they’ll be there, and they’ll be normal.

I like that it allows to just be human. Their human and they have human emotions and they’ll make human mistakes. I feel like this is becoming a post about unlikable female characters, but I’m honestly alright with that. I don’t know why anger is tied to unlikableness, especially with female characters.

With all this talk about appreciating anger, I’m surprised I haven’t read Anger Is A Gift yet haha. Random aside.

I just, really love to see all types of emotions in books. I love seeing anger push the characters to extremes. For them to deal with whatever fallout might happen, to use their angry in healthy ways, and to fight for what they want. It makes me feel like I can do what I want. It makes me feel like I can be angry and still do what I want. It makes me feel like I can do what I want because I’m angry. (When it’s healthy of course.) I dunno, I just really like angry female characters.

Thank you for reading!