Chicago Fire Seems to Be Pushing Yet Another Strong Female Character Under The Bus

The writers create amazing female leads and then gradually regress them into annoying and oversimplified caricatures of themselves. This time, fans brought up that this is happening to Stella from Chicago Fire.

In the episode where they need to rescue a guy from a bunker, she had a problem with Severide, who was willing to disregard the fact that there was a tripwire involved.

Stella tried to prevent him from going in considering it could be a trap and he was risking a big explosion. This could take the lives of multiple people, but Severide still did it his way — it turned out OK, but…

There were no solid grounds to assume the tripwire was a scare tactic. Severide just ignored the danger and went in, and Stella was completely right to first question him, and then refuse to work together.

He disregarded what could've become a catastrophe because of being overconfident, and she was not along with that. But the writers made it look like she was wrong and he was the real hero for saving the guy in the bunker.

They made Stella look annoying and self-centered when in reality she was the one actually trying to prevent a disaster. Fans claim that it's always troublesome for writers to properly write strong female characters.

Somehow, they either turn each one of them into an unrealistic Ms. Perfect, which is always annoying by itself regardless of gender, or make them appear annoying even when they're completely right — like in this case with Stella.

The solution seems pretty obvious: both male and female characters have to be written with the same approach.

They need to be real people who can be good at one thing and bad at another, be a champion on Monday and a loser on Thursday. Not one character is supposed to be one-dimensional.

On the other hand, strong female characters are often judged more severely by the fans, too. So could it be on the viewer as much as on the writer?

We'll leave it to you to decide for yourselves.