Writing Intriguing Female Characters in Xianxia

Beyond the Great Beauty: Writing Women Who Actually Belong in the Story

Xianxia has no shortage of beautiful women. They have eyes like autumn water, brows like distant mountains, skin like jade and hair like ink. Their robes drift behind them in the mountain breeze. Entire banquet halls fall silent when they enter. Young masters forget how language works. Sect elders sigh over their extraordinary elegance.

Wonderful. What does she want?

That is where things sometimes become rather less clear. The problem is not beauty. Xianxia is a genre of heightened aesthetics. Everyone is beautiful. The men have cheekbones sharp enough to open correspondence. The demons are beautiful. The morally questionable immortal who has spent thirty thousand years brooding on a mountain is beautiful. Even the villains tend to have better hair than I have managed at any point in my life.

Nor am I arguing that every heroine needs to be a sword-wielding Strong Female Character™ who refuses help, wins every argument and communicates largely through weaponry and contemptuous eyebrow movements. That is simply another template.

What makes a character interesting is not whether she is sufficiently strong, sufficiently independent or sufficiently politically admirable. It is whether she has a life.

She wants things. She has obligations. She makes decisions. She has relationships that exist independently of romance. She is good at some things and hopeless at others. She can be brave and frightened, generous and selfish, perceptive and spectacularly wrong.

Most importantly, she is not the only person who should possess agency.

The best stories are full of characters pursuing their own objectives. The heroine wants something. The hero wants something. Their families want things. Their enemies certainly want things. The sect elder who has appeared for only six minutes probably has seventeen opinions and a grievance dating back to the previous dynasty.

Those objectives collide, and that collision is where the story happens.

Giving your heroine agency therefore does not mean reducing the men around her. Quite the opposite. A romance becomes much more interesting when both people have lives worth disrupting.

Beauty Is a Description, Not a Personality

There is nothing inherently wrong with writing an exceptionally beautiful woman. Beauty can be enormously useful in storytelling, particularly in a genre where appearance, reputation, lineage and status may all carry social weight.

Perhaps people underestimate her because they assume she has lived an easy life. Perhaps her appearance makes her politically valuable and her clan has spent years arranging possible marriages around her face. Perhaps beauty gives her social capital she has learned to wield with frightening precision. Perhaps she hates being looked at. Perhaps she rather enjoys it.

She may be perfectly aware that half the cultivation world considers her breathtaking and have decided this is their problem rather than hers.

The useful question is not whether she is beautiful, but what her beauty does inside the story. Does it create opportunity, vulnerability, jealousy, reputation, pressure or expectation? Does she use it? Does somebody else try to use it? Has she learned to distrust praise because praise is frequently followed by a request?

Beauty can become political currency. A woman may be valuable to an alliance because of what her marriage represents. She may be treated as evidence of her family’s prestige. She may be envied for an advantage that has actually restricted her choices from childhood.

Equally, she may understand exactly how much influence a beautiful face gives her and use that influence quite cheerfully.

All of those possibilities turn appearance into character material. If none of them matter and her beauty exists primarily so that everyone else can comment upon it, however, then we have not created much of a character.

We have created an extremely decorative plot coupon.

And the problem with decorative plot coupons is not ideological. It is dramatic. Plot coupons cannot surprise you.

Give Her a Dao Before You Give Her a Romance

One of the most useful questions you can ask about a female character is brutally simple: if the love interest disappeared from the manuscript tomorrow, would she still have a story?

If the answer is no, the problem is not necessarily the romance. The problem is that nothing else has been built underneath it.

A xianxia heroine has access to an extraordinary range of possible ambitions. She may want immortality, revenge, enough power to protect her clan, or the chance to rebuild a disgraced sect. She may want to master a forbidden technique, restore her family’s reputation, surpass her shifu, understand why her cultivation has stalled or discover what really happened three hundred years ago when everybody agreed never to mention the Eastern Pavilion again.

She may want political authority, intellectual mastery or to become the greatest healer of her generation. She may be trying to protect a sibling, fulfil a promise made to a dying master or stop her sect collapsing under the combined weight of debt, incompetence and an unfortunately persistent demon infestation.

Or perhaps her ambition is much quieter. She simply wants enough power that nobody else gets to decide her future for her.

And she may want love as well.

Those things do not compete. In fact, romance becomes more interesting when it collides with a life already in motion.

The same applies to the man.

If his entire purpose is to appear at strategically useful moments, rescue her, gaze intensely and wait for her to recognise that he is clearly the correct romantic answer, then he has not been particularly well served either.

Give him ambitions, obligations, friends, loyalties and terrible decisions of his own. Let him occasionally choose something she wishes he had not chosen. Let them want incompatible things.

Now we have a romance.

A romance between two fully constructed people is almost always more interesting than one in which one character possesses goals and the other possesses eyelashes.

Ideally, both should possess goals and eyelashes.

Agency Does Not Mean Freedom From Constraint

There is a tendency in some modern fantasy to demonstrate agency by making a heroine behave as though the culture around her simply does not exist. Nobody can tell her what to do. She rejects every obligation, ignores reputation, refuses tradition and rides away on a horse, dragon or flying sword while everybody else stares after her in admiration.

The difficulty is that removing every restraint also removes many of the interesting decisions.

A woman living inside a xianxia world may be constrained by family loyalty, sect hierarchy, filial obligation, reputation, political marriage, disciples who depend upon her, vows she has sworn, debts she owes, heavenly law or a cultivation technique with some extremely inconvenient small print.

Those constraints do not make her passive. They create the conditions within which she has to act.

She may obey, rebel, compromise or manipulate the rules. She may publicly bow while quietly rearranging the entire board underneath everybody. She may decide that one obligation matters more than another. She may comply today because doing so gives her room to act tomorrow.

The same principle applies to every important character.

A hero who can always ignore his clan, abandon his responsibilities and solve every difficulty through superior cultivation is not especially interesting either. Give him people he cannot simply abandon. Give the villain obligations. Give the sect leader a council capable of saying no.

Constraints create choices. Choices create consequences. Consequences create story.

Agency is not the ability to do whatever you please. It is the ability to choose what you will do when several possibilities cost you something.

Let Power Cost Her Something

Power becomes boring when it solves everything. This applies equally to male and female characters.

The strongest cultivator in the room may be impressive for several minutes. After that, we need another problem.

Perhaps her cultivation technique damages her body, or her reputation makes genuine friendship difficult. Perhaps leadership means every mistake harms people beneath her. Perhaps political authority requires alliances she finds morally repugnant. Perhaps immortality has separated her from generations of mortal family.

Perhaps the technique that makes her formidable in battle is precisely the technique preventing her from ascending. Perhaps every advancement takes her further from the ordinary life she once imagined.

Or perhaps she has spent so long becoming self-sufficient that she is now extremely bad at recognising when she needs help.

Again, balance matters. If she can defeat the male lead in combat, excellent. That does not require him to become useless. Perhaps he understands court politics better than she does. Perhaps she can bring down a demon lord but would rather face another one than negotiate a trade agreement.

Characters become useful to one another when competence is distributed rather than concentrated.

Strength should carry consequence. Authority should create responsibility. Talent should occasionally open doors into rooms the character would rather not have entered.

The interesting question is rarely just Can she win?

It is what happens if she does?

Do Not Mistake Masculinity for Strength

One of the stranger habits of supposedly progressive character writing is to demonstrate that a woman is strong by giving her traits traditionally coded as masculine while treating traditionally feminine traits as evidence of weakness.

She fights, drinks, refuses dresses, dislikes embroidery and thinks every woman interested in marriage or beautiful clothing is frivolous.

This seems a rather roundabout way of demonstrating women’s worth.

There is nothing wrong with a female warrior. Xianxia and wuxia traditions have long contained women who fight, command, cultivate and undertake dangerous journeys. A sword-bearing heroine is hardly an intrusion into the genre.

But martial ability is only one form of competence.

A healer may save the swordswoman’s life. A diplomat may prevent the battle entirely. A mother may keep a collapsing family functioning. A scholar may recognise that the ancient inscription everyone else intends to activate actually translates roughly as DO NOT TOUCH THIS.

A merchant who understands supply lines can be rather more useful to a sect than six men dramatically waving swords at an empty treasury.

Nor does competence require rejecting femininity. A woman may enjoy beautiful clothes, flowers, jewellery, cooking, children, music or romance and still possess formidable agency. She may distinguish twelve grades of silk and know exactly where to put a sword if negotiations deteriorate.

Likewise, male characters do not need to demonstrate masculinity every fifteen minutes. A formidable swordsman can enjoy gardening. An immortal general can be an excellent father. A terrifying demon lord may have surprisingly strong opinions about soup.

The more room characters have to become specific people rather than representatives of gender, the more interesting everybody becomes.

Give Her Relationships With Other Women

One of the simplest ways to tell whether a female character has genuinely been integrated into her world is to ask who the other women in that world are to her.

Her mother, grandmother, sister, shijie, shimei, female shifu, disciple, maid, healer, political ally, employer or enemy may all matter. Perhaps there is a sect leader she fears, a demoness she reluctantly trusts, an aunt who has been interfering in her life since infancy, or a merchant who considers her sword technique excellent and her understanding of compound interest embarrassing.

Women do not have to like one another to have meaningful relationships. They can compete, misunderstand one another, love each other deeply, disappoint one another or resent each other for thirty years over something neither now remembers accurately.

They may cooperate because an existential threat has appeared and resume their argument immediately afterwards.

The point is not that every heroine requires an approved quota of supportive female friends. That would merely replace one formula with another.

The point is that she should belong to a social world.

The Bechdel Test — Useful, Crude and Quite Revealing

The Bechdel Test emerged from Alison Bechdel’s 1985 comic Dykes to Watch Out For, from an idea Bechdel credits to her friend Liz Wallace. Its requirements are famously simple: there should be at least two named women who talk to each other about something other than a man.

It is a remarkably low bar.

It is also not a quality test.

Two women can spend ten minutes discussing the optimum location for concealing a corpse and pass with honours. An excellent story centred almost entirely on one woman could fail because there is nobody else available for her to speak to.

The test does not tell us whether a story is feminist, progressive or even particularly good.

What it does reveal is whether women possess narrative existence when men are temporarily removed from the conversation.

For writers, that is useful.

Female Social Worlds in C-Drama

One thing I have noticed after watching a great many Chinese historical, costume and fantasy dramas is how frequently women occupy substantial social worlds of their own.

This is an observation rather than a claim that somebody has scientifically established C-drama superiority in the International Bechdel Olympics.

Women talk about family, rank, business, household management, medicine, reputation, politics, cultivation, inheritance, revenge, food, children, money and survival. Sometimes they support one another. Sometimes they are attempting to ruin one another before breakfast.

Either way, they have things going on.

Blossoms in Adversity is an excellent example. Once the men of the Hua household are removed, the women do not simply sit by the gate awaiting rescue. Much of the story becomes about women learning to survive together.

They argue, organise, work, earn money, care for children, make mistakes and reassess one another.

Hua Zhi has a romance, and an important one, but the romance does not create Hua Zhi. She already has a story.

Flourished Peony offers another version. Its heroine’s world encompasses business, flowers, economic independence, social status and relationships with other women. Romance matters, but it exists alongside a life being actively built.

Legend of the Phoenix, The Blue Whisper and The Double provide different examples again. Their women may be friends, relatives, rivals, enemies or reluctant collaborators.

They do not need to sit in a circle affirming one another’s life choices.

They simply need to matter to one another.

Even palace dramas can pass the Bechdel Test repeatedly while women spend much of their time attempting to poison each other over imperial favour. Passing the test clearly does not guarantee enlightened social arrangements.

It does, however, mean the women have relationships, strategies and conflicts directly with other women.

The Xianxia Bechdel Question

For xianxia writers, I would take the idea slightly further.

Put two of your female characters alone in a room and temporarily remove all male characters from the conversation.

What do they have left to discuss?

Cultivation? Sect politics? Their disciples? Medicine? Money? Family? A feud that has been running for three hundred years? A forbidden technique? Whether ascending to immortality is actually worth all this trouble? The suspiciously convenient death of the previous sect leader?

Who stole the last respectable bottle of wine from the sect cellar?

If there is plenty to discuss, excellent. They probably have lives.

The same experiment works in reverse.

Put two male characters in a room and remove the heroine. Can they discuss duty, ambition, family, fear, cultivation or their plans for the future, or do they merely compare notes on which one of them is going to marry her?

If every character can survive the removal of the romantic lead for a few pages, you probably have a much richer cast.

Let Romance Complicate Her — Not Consume Her

There is nothing inherently less serious about romance. Some extraordinary stories are fundamentally love stories.

The problem arises when love erases everything a character previously cared about.

She has spent centuries seeking revenge, then she meets him and revenge disappears. She has dedicated her life to becoming sect leader, then she meets him and apparently leadership was simply something she was doing while waiting. She has survived war, betrayal, cultivation deviation and three heavenly tribulations, and suddenly the only remaining question is whether he remembers their childhood promise beside the peach tree.

At that point, the romance has not developed her character. It has replaced it.

The same thing can happen to male characters. The brilliant strategist who spends twenty episodes pursuing a complicated political objective may suddenly abandon all rational thought because the heroine has been kidnapped for the fourth time.

If falling in love makes everybody temporarily foolish, that can actually be rather human.

If it permanently removes every previous motivation, something has gone wrong.

Love should complicate the lives that already exist. It may alter priorities, expose vulnerabilities, create obligations or force choices neither character expected to make.

But change is different from erasure.

A good romance creates more story, not less.

Do Not Turn Her Into the Prize

There is another entertaining way to remove a woman’s agency: have several men desire her and then allow the men to conduct the entire relationship discussion among themselves.

There is nothing inherently wrong with several people being attracted to the same woman. Romantic triangles can create excellent conflict.

The trouble begins when the plot starts resembling a martial arts tournament in which nobody has remembered to ask the trophy whether she wishes to be awarded.

Pursuit of Jade offers an especially memorable version of this. Apparently, holding a knife to a man’s throat can be a surprisingly effective opening gambit in the cultivation-world dating scene.

Several men become interested in the heroine and increasingly view one another as obstacles to be removed, outmanoeuvred or defeated.

Meanwhile, the person whose romantic future they are discussing is standing right there.

This does not only diminish the heroine. It diminishes the men as well.

Instead of being people capable of recognising her preferences, deciding whether those preferences are compatible with their own and perhaps gracefully — or extremely ungracefully — dealing with rejection, they become competitors in a celestial raffle.

That is less interesting for everybody.

Suppose one suitor realises she does not love him and withdraws because his dignity matters. Suppose another knows perfectly well she prefers somebody else but cannot quite persuade himself to stop trying. Suppose a third discovers that what he thought was love was actually admiration, loneliness or wounded pride.

Now each man has an arc too.

The heroine can prefer one man, neither man, change her mind or decide that romance is currently somewhere below prevent destruction of mortal realm on her list of priorities.

Everybody still gets to want things.

Nobody becomes the prize.

Allow Her to Be Wrong

Interesting people are wrong. Frequently. Sometimes spectacularly.

Your heroine should be allowed the same privilege.

She can misjudge somebody, trust the wrong person, overestimate her abilities or cling to an idea because abandoning it would mean admitting that twenty years of sacrifice were wasted.

She can believe she wants revenge when what she really wants is acknowledgement. She may believe she wants immortality when what she actually fears is death. She may think she is protecting somebody when she is really controlling them.

The same courtesy should be extended to everybody else.

A male lead can mistake protectiveness for the right to make decisions on somebody else’s behalf. A father can genuinely love his daughter and still make a disastrous choice for her. A rival can behave appallingly for reasons that make sense to her.

Characters do not need to be correct for their feelings to be real.

Allowing people to make understandable mistakes gives other characters something meaningful to respond to. They argue, forgive, refuse to forgive, learn or double down spectacularly.

That is considerably more useful to a story than assembling a cast around one character who is always right.

Use Cultural Context Without Turning It Into a Cage

Xianxia is not modern Britain, America or Australia wearing historical Chinese clothing. But neither is it a museum display.

The genre draws from Chinese philosophy, religion, history, mythology, martial traditions and literary conventions while creating worlds in which people fly on swords, live for thousands of years and occasionally discover that Heaven has taken a personal interest in their romantic arrangements.

Cultural context matters. Family structures matter. Filial responsibility matters. Sect hierarchy matters. Reputation may matter. Marriage may carry political significance. Gender expectations may exist.

Ignoring all of that can produce characters who feel less like inhabitants of a cultivation world and more like twenty-first-century tourists who have somehow acquired excellent robes.

But cultural pressures should create story rather than end it.

A woman shaped by a hierarchical society may become exceptionally skilled at indirect power. A man expected to continue his family line may find that expectation colliding catastrophically with his cultivation path. A daughter may manipulate the very concept of filial duty that supposedly restricts her. A dutiful son may discover that obedience to his father requires betraying his sect.

Nobody needs to behave like a modern Westerner for agency to exist.

In fact, characters often become more interesting when they take the values of their own world seriously and still arrive at different conclusions about what those values require.

Xianxia Gives You Permission to Push Further

Xianxia is particularly generous territory for character creation because cultivation changes the rules.

Once people can live for centuries, fly, transform their bodies and accumulate power unavailable to ordinary mortals, questions of gender, family, inheritance and authority become speculative questions as well as cultural ones.

What happens to gender expectations when a woman can live for eight hundred years? What happens when physical strength depends upon cultivation rather than body size? What happens when a woman becomes more powerful than every man in her clan?

Equally, what happens to traditional male obligations when immortality becomes possible? What does inheritance mean when Grandfather is still alive after nine generations and shows absolutely no inclination to vacate the family leadership?

What happens when a sect has been led by women for twelve generations? What happens if men and women cultivate differently? What happens if they do not?

What happens when a goddess, demoness or immortal has watched entire political systems rise, flourish and collapse?

These questions are not invitations to discard cultural logic. They are invitations to follow the logic of the world you have actually created.

Xianxia is not historical fiction with extra lightning.

It is speculative fiction. Speculate.

A Quick Audit for Your Xianxia Woman

Before declaring a female character finished, try answering these questions without mentioning how beautiful she is.

What does she want outside romance? What would she still pursue if the love interest disappeared tomorrow?

What does she believe about power, duty and cultivation? Not what the story believes. What does she believe?

What will she sacrifice, and what will she refuse to sacrifice?

Which obligation can she not simply walk away from? Family, sect, disciples, oath, reputation or debt?

What advantage causes problems for her? Beauty, rank, talent, wealth, lineage, power or immortality?

Which woman has shaped her life most strongly? For better or worse.

Where is she wrong about herself?

What does she envy?

If the male protagonist vanished, what would her story become?

And perhaps we should add one more:

If she vanished, would the male protagonist still have a story?

If the answer to either question is no, one of those characters may need a little more construction.

The aim is not to make the woman independent of every other human being. People influence one another. Love matters. Family matters. Friendship matters. Dependence can matter.

The aim is to make the relationship a meeting between two stories rather than allowing one character to become an accessory to the other’s.

Common Pitfalls Worth Watching

The Great Beauty Who Does Nothing

Everybody talks about her, wants her or fears losing her, while she herself contributes remarkably little.

Beauty may explain why people notice her. It cannot make decisions on her behalf.

The Invincible Strong Female Character™

She wins every fight, argument and moral dispute. Nobody can teach her anything because she is already correct.

This is not a gender problem. Invincible male protagonists can be equally tiresome.

Give competent people problems competence cannot solve.

The Woman Who Hates Women

Every other woman is stupid, vain, shallow, jealous or morally inferior, thereby proving how exceptional our heroine is.

Unfortunately, this rather limits the available supporting cast.

Let other women be clever too. They can still disagree. In fact, two intelligent women with incompatible objectives generally produce much better trouble.

The Woman Who Thinks She Has a Prior Claim

Then there is the woman who becomes incandescent with jealousy because another woman has attracted the attention of the man she considers hers.

The difficulty is that, remarkably often, he has never actually agreed to this arrangement.

Perhaps they grew up together. Perhaps their families once discussed marriage. Perhaps she has loved him silently for ten years. Perhaps she brought him medicine during a childhood fever and has consequently spent the intervening decades assuming Heaven itself notarised the relationship.

None of those things necessarily tells us what he wants.

Yet instead of confronting that rather inconvenient question, she directs all of her rage towards another woman who has apparently “stolen” him.

Nobody involved has much agency left at that point.

The rival woman becomes an obstacle. The man becomes property. The jealous woman loses every previous ambition and turns into a full-time romantic border patrol officer.

At times, the whole thing begins to resemble a slightly alarming cultivation-world rendition of You Belong with Me, except nobody has established whether the gentleman in question belongs with anybody.

Jealousy itself is not the problem. Jealousy is wonderfully useful.

Give it roots.

Perhaps she was genuinely promised a political marriage and now faces public humiliation. Perhaps the man’s behaviour encouraged expectations. Perhaps losing the marriage threatens her family’s future. Perhaps she knows her jealousy is irrational and cannot stop feeling it.

Now there are competing interests rather than a cardboard villainess.

The Romance Personality Transplant

She begins with ambitions, beliefs, friendships and responsibilities, then falls in love and all of them disappear.

This can happen to male characters too.

Love should add complications to a personality, not perform an emergency personality replacement.

The Historical Excuse

“Women couldn’t do that.”

Sometimes that may be a genuine cultural constraint worth exploring.

But in a world where people routinely levitate while fighting three-headed serpents over stolen spiritual artefacts, it is reasonable to ask which parts of historical reality your fantasy world has preserved and why.

Constraints are useful.

Unexamined assumptions are less so.

The Twenty-First-Century Tourist

At the opposite extreme, your heroine behaves as though she has been dropped into the cultivation world from a modern university campus and is astonished that nobody else shares her assumptions.

Let her challenge her culture if that is who she is.

But let her also be somebody produced by that culture.

Let Her Be a Person Before She Is a Symbol

You do not need to write the perfect woman.

Please don’t. She sounds exhausting.

Nor do you need the perfect man.

Characters are not employment references.

You need people who want things, value things, misunderstand things and occasionally make decisions that cause several chapters of entirely preventable trouble.

Give your heroine a past and a future she is trying to reach. Give her people she loves and people she absolutely cannot stand. Give her responsibilities she resents but still fulfils. Give her contradictory desires.

Then do the same for the people around her.

Give the male lead a life she interrupts rather than a vacancy labelled HEROINE REQUIRED. Give rivals motives beyond jealousy. Give parents reasons for their bad decisions. Give antagonists objectives they would pursue even if the heroine had never been born.

Then put all of those people together.

Their goals will overlap. Their loyalties will conflict. They will misunderstand one another. They will cooperate when they would rather not, and occasionally refuse to cooperate when any sensible person would.

Romance can arrive and make everything considerably more inconvenient.

That is the advantage of balancing agency. Nobody has to be diminished to make another character interesting.

Instead of one protagonist dragging a collection of plot functions behind them, you get a world full of people capable of changing the direction of the story.

And that is what makes characters — women and men alike — worth following through three realms, two reincarnations, seventeen misunderstandings and at least one entirely avoidable heavenly tribulation.

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