Tropes and Cliches

Strong Female Characters

What is a strong female character? Well,I'm pretty sure it depends on who you ask.  I mean there is nothing wrong with a female character that can hold her own, but I'm pretty sure that's just focusing on the strong part.

Now a strong female character doesn't necessarily have to be a fighter. She can be a goofball, a brainiac, or just comfortable in her own skin.
Nowadays people associate the " strong female character" archetype with characters like Buffy, Wonder Woman, and Black Widow. Now when I said they don't have to be asskickers, but that's what they associate this character type with. 

. For a while there were five main types of female characters: The Mom, the Silly One, the Sexy One, The Harden Badass,and the ever so common Damsel in Distress.  In most cases, many writers just took one of the many male character archetype( i.e. the Lancer, the Tank, the Smart guy, the Everyman, etc.) and just made them female,which worked for a while. That was until some stereotype of the character pops up, like the Tank telling someone not "act like a girl" when the Tank is in fact a girl. Any why are they always sexy or average ( and never in between)? Bayonetta is the character that comes to mind when I say this, but the thing is many females focus on her looks ( which she knows she's hot, but at the same time she's never sexualized by any of the male characters in her games) and not on the fact she literally went to hell and back for a childhood friend...On top of her battle with amnesia. And on the other end of this is Toph from Avatar the last Airbend. I mean she gets a pass because she's like 12, but the girl is a tank and blind.
And there is almost no way of writing one with out making her an ever so hated Mary Sue. 

Now going back to a female character not needing to be an asskickers, look at Shuri from Black Panther. She's a crazy smart teen, whose intelligents rivals that of Tony Stark and Bruce Banner, and not all that good in a combat situation ( but was willing to fight none the less) Dipping into anime and manga, late Naruto and early Naruto Shippuden Sakura Haruno, who I have a tendency to rag on, is another example of a strong female character( and I'm sure Hinata Hyuga can fit into this as well).They both weren't all that strong to begin with and were decent fighter...well Hinata more than Sakura. They both admitted to themselves that they weren't as strong as their teammates, yet they still pushed through and became two badasses in their own right.

A strong female character is hard enough to write, but the best way is to write what you see as strong. In literature( or any early media), females are always the support or the damsel. Now you can make a strong female character with out the unnecessary bullshit.