Character Study- Ellen Ripley

In storytelling, it is often the case that someone does something so well and it is so original and successful, that for the rest of time other storytellers attempt to harness this idea for their own and come up short. But they keep trying and saturating the zeitgeist with these poor imitations until even the original loses its brilliance and becomes nothing but a cliché, a shorthand joke for those in the know. One such example is the kick-ass female lead. If you take a woman and make her...