Likable heroines or Femme Fatales?

I am just wondering what characterists does a female character -have- to be in order for the audience like her. Taking my cues, so far, from the recent bestsellers.

Mostly what I have is that she has to be a "nice" girl. In that she can be "feisty" but not aggressive feisty. In some way she has to be -pretend- to be independent and feisty while actually being very traditional waif and submissive.

Let her bat her eye at a cute man passing by who is not the hero or deemed other triangular love interest she is deemed a whore or a bad girl. Or let her have ambition then the readers (alot of time other women) will label her as a bitch. If she does what she has to survive, she's a bitch. And if you compare this to male characters who do what they gotta do, we call them heros.

I guess what I am getting to is that I wish to make a bad girl the heroine of a story. And I mean, mean. I like bad girl characters. When they have a back story, they are usual more interesting than the "nice" heroine. They are not as boring (depending on the writer).

Example: You have a rich noble girl and a pretty peasant girl. Already, you think you know the story. Pretty peasant girl somehow ends up saving the day or doing something where she ends up with the prince/king and she was the fairest of them all. While the rich noble girl will somehow learn her lesson and end up landing face down in a pig sty. This is likely due to the nobel girl having teased the peasant girl sometime in her life and now divine karma has dolled out retribution.

BUT what if... the peasant girl was jealous and secretly looked down on everyone around her because she thought she was better. She might have caught the prince's attention and given her an ego inflation. The noble girl sees this and can't stand her for it. Or something along those lines... what then? Who do go for?

Ignoring Hermione for a moment.

I would toss worries about "likeable" out the window and go for something more like "compelling"

did your sample of female characters include:

*Kate from Lost
*Elphaba from Wicked
*River Tam (and Zoe Washburne) from Firefly
* Xena

and from the non speculative fiction world
*Sue Sylvester from Glee
*Eva Peron a la Evita
*Samantha Jones from Sex in the City

If you look, there is a wide variety of women characters that people love to follow, and I wouldnt limit your options.

I think what you're describing with the poor but nasty peasant and the rich but nice noble is more of a class thing than a gender thing. There seems to be a strong trend to upturn the traditional, fairy tale thing of blue-blood always re-surfacing and winning in the end (Cinderella, say).

I've been facing that issue in my own book at the moment, as my heroine is a nice and studious lass of noble birth who likes to pull apart mysteries and has the advantage of a good education. The villain of the piece is the daughter of a non-noble freeman who got knighted for services to the earl. Its only when I've stepped back and looked at the whole thing from a class perspective that I've suddenly got terribly embarrassed about the underlying messages about class values and the newly rich... Unfortunately, the villain's husband - who is form a long line of nobles - is also a good, if weak, man. which just emphasises the 'problem' more.

My response is to try and make it mostly about personality, and to show a range of people, including good merchants and bad nobles. I guess, making sure that everybody gets their just desserts is one way of doing it. That or just revel in the cruelty :p

bad girl heroine for the sake of being a bad girl can get a bit angsty and strained for the reader to plough through, as much as unshakeable goodness can be wearing from the other direction. I guess real people occupy the grey space rather than absolutes, so that is probably the more convincing line to aim for.

When it comes to moral decisions, choosing between good and bad can rapidly become dull, but forcing a person to choose between two equally bad options is just good, non-fairytale drama!

There is no set rule about what you -have- to do.

Instead of making the character good or bad, focus on making the character a person. One with motives, wants, ambitions, fears, faults, likes, and dislikes. Until you have that, the entire aspect of alignment is moot.

Aren't femme fatales the sulty women from those old spy thrillers that seduce men spies so they can steal the evidence, a giant pile of cash, and lead the spy off the trail? Or, in another context, those fireflies that give off an incorrect light pattern to attract a species of male with protective poison in it so they can eat them whole and use the poison to protect their own eggs from predators?

We hear people find them complex and interesting. Usually they tend to be dangerous. Until then, my anthropomorphic firefly has sworn off women ever since the last one tried to bite off his head; he's celibate for now.

I'd like to point out that this is similar to the madonna-whore complex which seems prevalent in our society, is a social construct, and is really f*ing annoying. I don't write "good girls" and "bad girls", I write good and bad PEOPLE, some of which happen to be female.

And that's not even getting into a few characters who have orange-blue moralities, which I can't honestly depict as good OR evil.