From Charmed Trauma to Wheel of Time Triumph

Once upon a time, being a "strong female character" meant you could throw a punch, deliver a quip, and die beautifully in a man’s arms. Maybe you got to cry once but beautifully, maybe you sacrificed everything tragically, but you never got to be angry and right. You never got to be whole.

Enter the golden age of the trauma queen.

Buffy Summers, Piper Halliwell, Cordelia Chase. Women who fought gods and demons while carrying grief like a second weapon. They weren’t just powerful—they were punished for it. Betrayed by friends, killed off in finales, resurrected only to suffer again. Their arcs weren’t just dramatic—they were warnings. Power had a cost. And that cost was usually everything.

We loved them because we had to. They were all we had. And so we learned to celebrate their pain because it felt like ours.

But look around now. Something shifted.

The Wheel of Time gave us Moiraine Damodred: cold, brilliant, deeply emotionally repressed—and still allowed to survive. Egwene al’Vere is ambitious, stubborn, soft, hard, traumatised—and not a footnote in a man’s story. These women aren’t punished for being more. They’re not reduced to martyrs or moral lessons. They get to be angry. They get to be complicated. They get to live.

Jessica Jones walked into our lives drunk, damaged, and pissed off—and she stayed. She didn’t have to smile for us. She didn’t have to get “better.” She was enough as she was: furious, flawed, alive. And also generally right.

Yellowjackets didn’t just tell us girlhood was terrifying—it told us it could be terrifying and powerful. It let women be violent, sexual, broken, and haunted, and never once asked us to like them for it. Even The Last of Us—a show born from male-led gaming—lets Ellie be so much more than a plot device. She’s rage and grief and something defiant that refuses to be defined. She isn’t a symbol for Joel’s redemption. She’s a girl who survives her own way.

We couldn’t have had these women in 1998 or 2003. Hell, even 2009. Or if we did, they would’ve been killed them off by act three. Or whatever TV’s version of Act Three is—season three, probably.

Compare that to the 90s, where Piper was made to suffer for the plot, Buffy’s leadership was questioned at every turn, and Cordelia—god, Cordelia—was turned into a vessel, erased from her own arc and killed offscreen.

Back then, if you grew? You died. If you loved? You suffered. If you led? You fell. Strength was a tragedy. And heaven help you if you weren’t likeable.

Now, growth can be incomplete. Healing can be angry. You can break down without breaking apart. We’re seeing women who don’t have to trade softness for power, or lose everything to be taken seriously. We’re seeing choice. Finally. And for queer audiences—especially those raised on subtext and coded pain—seeing complexity without punishment feels quietly revolutionary.

Is it perfect? Absolutely not. House of the Dragon, can you please chill with the trauma-through-childbirth thing? I can’t sit through another one. And also enough with the sexual-assault-as-character-development, because yikes. It’s giving written by a middle-aged man who probably doesn’t know how to talk to his daughter. But there is progress. And it feels radical.

These new heroines are doing something their predecessors never got to: choose themselves. And in doing that, they’re teaching us that survival isn’t just about living—it’s about refusing to apologise for it.

Blessed be the messy ones. The ones who don’t tidy up their trauma for the audience. The ones who refuse to be palatable. The ones who keep going, not because it makes a good story, but because it’s the only way forward.

We’ve come a long way from Sunnydale. And we’re just getting started.