I’ve always been drawn to fantasy heroines who are powerful, complicated, and occasionally terrible at making decisions. Give me the woman who keeps making mistakes. Give me the heroine who falls in love with the wrong person, trusts the wrong ally, or refuses to give up on someone even when common sense, and everyone else, says she should.
Those are the characters I remember long after I’ve finished the book.
And the following women?
Well, these are three heroines I don’t play about. Go complain to you mother if you don’t agree, but keep their names out of your mouth!
Yeine from The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N. K. Jemisin
Yeine has been in my top five list of favorite fantasy heroines for years. Thrust into a deadly struggle involving gods, politics, power, and family, she’s forced to navigate a world where every decision has consequences.
What I love most about Yeine is that she isn’t perfect. She’s angry, stubborn, vulnerable, and sometimes wrong. Her mistakes don’t make her weak—they make her human. For readers who love epic fantasy, powerful heroines, and gods meddling in mortal affairs, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is unforgettable and is on my ‘keeper’ shelf in both paperback and hardcover formats.
Sunshine from Sunshine by Robin McKinley
If I had to choose one of my favorite fantasy heroines of all time, Sunshine would be at the top of the list.
A yearly reread, I remember being gobsmacked the first time I read this book. For the first time, at least for me, the ‘epic quest’ sounded like something I—a normal, out of shape, student-loan-having woman with no swashbuckling skills whatsoever, and with somewhat lethal taste in men (vampires?) could actually accomplish. Before fantasy romance became the publishing powerhouse it is today, there was Sunshine. Part urban fantasy, part vampire novel, part romance, and entirely its own thing, the book remains unlike anything I’ve ever read.
What makes Sunshine so memorable isn’t that she’s the most powerful woman in the room. It’s how relatable she is. She’s practical, funny, stubborn, exhausted, occasionally overwhelmed, and constantly trying to navigate situations that are far bigger and stranger than she ever expected. She feels like a real person dropped into an extraordinary story.
Like many of my favorite heroines, Sunshine makes choices that should probably get her into trouble—and usually do. That’s part of what makes her so compelling. Long after I forgot plot details from other books, I remembered Sunshine herself.
Phèdre from Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey
Phèdre is the most extravagantly constructed of the three. Carey’s prose is absolutely decadent. I stayed up all night to finish Kushiel’s Dart, even calling out of work the next day, belly happily full, my brain captivated by what I’d just read. Any book that can make me ignore both sleep and gainful employment deserves a permanent place on my yearly reread list.
The world is intricate, the politics are BYZANTINE, but what keeps her from feeling like a fantasy archetype is how much Phèdre costs herself. Her compassion isn’t a virtue that pays off cleanly. It gets her into trouble, repeatedly, on purpose. Like many of my favorite heroines, Phèdre’s greatest strength is also the thing most likely to break her heart.
Dragon from Undertow by Joss Dey
Dragon belongs in the company of these women because she’s driven by the same thing: a willingness to keep trying long after she should know better.
And the truth is, if Dragon was my friend, I would’ve staged an intervention long ago.
A gifted fixer with a dangerous magical talent, Dragon sees not who people are but who they could become. It’s a beautiful gift. But it’s also the reason she repeatedly chooses people who hurt her, people she knows will probably hurt her. She ignores red flags like it’s her job. She thinks love equals self-destruction. And she keeps trying to fix people who don’t want or deserve to be fixed.
I can’t help but love her for that.
Because as long as those bad decisions are hers, specific to who she is—the girl who uses her magic to fix the men she dates, the one who has gods and myths for parents, the one who works at a hair salon because making people better is coded onto her DNA, the one who has to figure out her bullshit so she can get the love she deserves and, oh yeah, save the world—then why should she be sidelined or dismissed?
Like Yeine, Sunshine, and Phèdre, Dragon isn’t compelling because she’s perfect. She’s compelling because her greatest strengths are often the very things that get her into trouble. Her compassion, hope, and determination make her powerful—but they also make her vulnerable.
She’s the kind of heroine who keeps trying to save people, even when it’s destroying her.
Which, now that I think about it, might be exactly why she belongs on this list.
Why I Love Messy Heroines
Whether it’s Yeine, Sunshine, Phèdre or Dragon these women share something important: they’re allowed to be human.
They aren’t memorable because they’re perfect. They’re memorable because they’re allowed to want things, to mess things up, and to keep going anyway. That’s rarer than it should be.
So yeah, bring on on the addicts, the heroines with terrible judgement. The ones who keep falling for the wrong monster. The ones who try a lot.
That b!tch usually makes everything worse, but honestly, that’s my ride or die right there.