I’ve never understood why more Action/Adventure/Fantasy/Sci-Fi/Comic Book heroines aren’t written like Marion Ravenwood.
She’s the best because she’s not perfect. She’s not an impossibly beautiful scientist waiting for the right alpha male to love. She’s not an impossibly self-assured and well-coiffed teenager there to fulfill adolescent male fantasies. She’s not even an emotionally invulnerable, weapons-wielding badass.
Marion is a grown ass woman with her own business, her own problems, her own mistakes, and her own unique charms and strengths. Not to mention the bittersweet, and realistic, sexual history she has with Indy.
The fact that Indiana Jones’s first cinematic love interest is a 27 year old alcoholic (whom he seduced when he was 27 and she was a teen) says a lot about Indiana Jones. It says a lot about him that he still cares about her, even though there’s still a meanness to some of their interactions. It tells the audience a lot about how high the stakes for this particular adventure are if he is willing to bring such a complicated woman back into his life for help. It reveals that this is a man who has been on adventures—and who has made personal mistakes—for over a decade.
Basically, it tells the audience that Indiana Jones is an equally complicated grown ass man if this is the woman he loves. He’s going to make mistakes and he’s going to have to reckon with them. It makes the character and his adventures more realistic and more exciting.
More Marion Ravenwoods, please.