The Ultimate Kick-butt Heroine

Over the Christmas weekend, we went to see AVATAR with our family back in Missouri. It was captivating. Avatar had everything~a sympathetic hero, a huge conflict, a special world with magic dripping from every fern, a fascinating indigenous culture with a well-developed spirituality, and most importantly for me, a love story at its heart.

Neytiri, the beautiful Na'vi heroine, is a total alpha female. We first meet her stalking and planning to kill the invading hero. Fortunately, she has a change of heart. Then in some spectacular action, she saves him from a pack of creatures (a cross between wolves and saber-tooth tigers) and manages to beat them off while wearing hardly a stitch on her lovely blue body. Her snarl alone is enough to send some of them scurrying.

Needless to say, the hero is more than intrigued.

I've never written what I would call an alpha female (probably because I myself am a sniveling beta) but I'm tempted to try it now. Neytiri is undoubtedly fierce, but she is also uniquely feminine. The trick to making her work, I think, is making sure the hero is an uber-alpha. He has to be in order to be worthy of her.

Have you seen AVATAR? What did you think?