In the course of a conversation with my niece and nephew today about nonbinary characters in fiction, Dragon jumped in to say that he thinks it's much harder to have strong female characters when the gender roles are less binary. I didn't really get the chance to question him further about this, but what I think he means is that female characters can't be considered "strong" unless they push back against their gender roles to find a space they want to inhabit, defined only by their own determination of what it means to be a woman.

To be clear, I don't agree with this—nor do I agree with his confident assertion that media these days contains no strong female characters (the women in The Expanse, alone!)—( but it did make me think about how we define 'strong' characters... )