Surprisingly, not a plot device

I wrote about this just over a week ago, but I'm a real broken record here.

There exist several tropes to do with wild and mysterious and dangerous and sexy (always sexy) women and frankly I'm bored of all of them. I'm bored of them because they're just another little box to be squeezed into (and inevitably fall short, because I'm a human being and not a set of narrative devices). I'm bored of them because being reduced to a one-dimensional stock character, even a sexy, artsy, mysterious one, is boring in itself.

For example, I'd like to think I can be sexy, artsy and mysterious - maybe not all at the same time, but I've definitely been all three of these things to different people. I can also be silly, cute and make enormously stupid mistakes, which kind of ruins the mystique but also makes me...well...me.

Nobody needs yet more flowery descriptions of girls whose sole defining qualities are being mysterious and vaguely dangerous. You know what we need? Women. Fleshed-out women who take up space on the page, who may be hurt by their relationships but who are not presented as hollow or burnt out, who don't exist just to look pretty and be completed by some painfully mediocre man.

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