Thank you!

Yes, exactly. It seems the yearning for strong female roles is a reaction against weak female roles; and is completely understandable. Too many times a female character will be added as part of the plot (a goal, a reward), part of a 'B story' (romantic interest, mirror for the protagonist to externalise his 'inner journey' in the pauses between his 'outer journey') or by convention. I think this comes about because the appetite for large scale film production requires a certain type of story, serving certain types of theme.

As #kleinbl00 says, even the iconic female roles in film history in which women 'equal' men in male action started out as male because their stories and their solutions to the story problems require violence and conquest rather than communication and reconciliation. But this shouldn't be the aspiring goal of our modern female mythological heroes any more, for my own taste, than our male ones.

Personally I think the issue is more subtle than male/female, for there are many men who yearn for more egalitarian, subtle and complex stories and roles and role models equally shared by both sexes.

Riane Eisler created the paradigm of a tension between dominator culture and partnership culture which respectively attributes traits of power hierarchy, domination and submission and rule of might to certain groups of men and women, and conversely traits of cooperation, communication and negotiation to others. Whilst her paradigm is far-reaching and applies to the entire evolution of humanity, so I'm doing it an injustice to reduce it here, I believe stories written for and about the second group would naturally offer more complex roles to both men and women; for their domain is different and their range of solutions is different.

For better or worse, cinemas, these huge, sacred amphitheatres into which our society makes pilgrimages to sit in silence and contemplate our contemporary myths, do offer us our morals, our emotional and rational teaching. The majority of those myths are now very little different from the eye-popping, exaggerated tales of ancient Greek, Celtic, Vedic, Icelandic cultures.

However it does perhaps offer insight into #kleinbl00's question about what we are supposed to do. We could try rowing out into that ocean, the dominator vs partnership paradigm, to cast our nets and fish for ideas. As #NikolaiFyodorov suggests, novelists have been sitting on the shores hooking out wonders for some time. Novels are quiet and subtle and cultivate the forest of the unconscious like a slowly spreading moss. Cinema is more like a forest fire. If we write stories which offer an alternative to the dominator paradigm, we also offer an opportunity for rapt listeners to be consumed in a conflagration of new themes, new ways of thinking about the world, new solutions to contemporary problems. And all cunningly disguised as a Saturday night's entertainment.