Something I heard a lot over the 10’s is how women are generally afforded a lot less leeway than men when it comes to bad behaviour, and one area this came up a lot was in the White Male Antihero trend in television, mostly embodied by Walter White of Breaking Bad and Don Draper of Mad Men. A show about a woman acting as badly as these men would not have her rise so effortlessly and it would not be as popular. This has lead to a countertrend over the course of the 10’s of shows about difficult women – arguably, starting with Orange Is The New Black – that continues today. It’s a discussion that always made me think of my favourite difficult female characters; women who were intentionally written to be abrasive and hard to like in some fashion. My all-time favourite example is Robin in the webcomic Shortpacked!. She walks an incredibly delicate line as a character – she’s never intentionally trying to hurt anyone, but the fact that she has low ambitions that she chases with unshakeable resolve means she at best constantly steps on the toes of others and at worst is destructive. She alienates most of the other characters early on by pushing (and sometimes breaking) boundaries, lives her life wildly irresponsibly, and is often the source of chaos.

There are two counters to this. The first is that she’s genuinely sympathetic in her aim: she wants to extract as much joy from life as possible. She chose to work in retail because she wants as little responsibility as possible, she genuinely wants to forge a found family with her friends, and she often feels awful about her mistakes and strives to change. Her development is about finding a way to cultivate joy in her life without hurting other people, and it lets you see how she’s one expression of a human need. The other counter is that often her chaotic destruction is more of a cleansing fire. Ethan and Amber are the other two main characters, and they’re much nicer people who get all the good and bad that can come with that – Ethan’s politeness and general empathy for others can sometimes lead to him holding back uncomfortable truths and often leads to him trying to compromise with people even when that slows him down. That’s not just in the sense of fatally compromising his own goals – although this happens and leads to him being very unhappy in his life – but in that he’ll spend so much time and energy trying to argue people into agreeing with him even when it’s clear the other side will not budge. Meanwhile, Amber begins the series totally lacking any self-confidence and afraid to leave her comfort zone.

Robin’s chaos has a habit of uprooting these characters from their uncomfortable ruts. In a direct sense, she has a habit of jumping onto the most obvious solution to a problem, and while the other characters have to clean up her plans into something more sensible, they do nonetheless get what they want; my favourite example of this is when Robin finds out where Amber’s internet boyfriend lives and knocks her out to take her to meet him, something that acts as a big step on Amber’s journey. In a less direct sense, she ends up becoming a symbol for chaotic behaviour to the others. Sometimes they imitate her attitude in smaller, less destructive ways (like when Ethan decides fuck it and impulsively goes back on stage to do standup comedy again, right in the middle of a shift) and sometimes they realise they’ve become a little too much like Robin and back down. This doesn’t undermine how abrasive Robin can be, especially early on – she essentially browbeats her way into moving in with Amber, a woman she has known all of a month, and she harasses Ethan until he eventually can’t stand to be around her. But it does show how being difficult can be a good thing.

What are your favourite difficult female characters?