Further on the theme of women this month, I wanted to talk about my favorite female protagonist, Anita Blake. I could qualify this, perhaps saying just Anita Blake of the first eleven novels where she’s a badass detective and vampire slayer, and not yet a Mary Sue that talks about successful polyamory and attending therapy and sucking infinite amounts of were-tiger dick *cough*, but maybe that isn’t especially generous. I think it’s important to talk about what a break-though Anita Blake was when Laurell K. Hamilton first published her books, in the early 1990s.

Anita Blake, when I started reading these books as a teenage girl in the early 2000s, was unique in her badassery, in her agency, in her violence, in her anger problems, in her having to wrestle with a morality that became increasingly gray. I had never read a character that I actually related to before, especially a female character. To this day, Anita Blake remains the only female character who has captivated me so much, besides Elisa Mazda from Gargoyles.

Who’s your favorite female character? What made them special to you?