The girl with many faces is a trope I noticed specifically in iZombie (a show that I adore) and Dollhouse (a show that I liked a lot). It also appears to varying degrees in other shows such as Agent Carter (which I adore) and probably Alias (a show I haven’t seen) but to varying degrees. What is the girl with many faces? Well, she’s essentially whatever you want her to be. In the case, of iZombie and Dollhouse she is the main character but in almost every episode she takes on either all or part of an entirely different persona.
What’s cool about this? Well, audience members of different personality types can identify with the character depending on who they are in the episode. She can be anyone’s Mary Sue or fanfiction character, taking on the traits you want including butt-kicking, seduction, and intelligence. She can be confident or meek having tech skills or be handy with sewing. The world is her personality.
What isn’t so cool? Well, sometimes the development of female character as an individual is lost. This point often becomes part of character building. In iZombie, Liv is constantly battling with who she is on and off particular individual brains. However, characterizing Liv is still sort of difficult and comes into a sort of stark contrast with Gwen, the character in the comic that iZombie is based off of, who gets memory flashbacks but does not take on the personalities of those individuals. In Dollhouse, this comes with Echo’s increasing self-awareness but still Echo is essentially a tabula rasa for whatever the writers decide who she’s going to be. In both cases, there is a need to write at least two parallel personalities and sometimes the life of either the “true” main character or their “personality of the week” falls a bit short.
Beyond how well this is executed, it was an interesting trope to identify because it perpetuates an odd facet of gender in America. To a certain degree, women are taught to be what they are told to be. Meaning women are taught that whatever someone tells you to be you sort of should be. Women’s behaviors and personalities are encouraged to be more adaptable than men’s. This isn’t always true but I don’t think it’s accidental that both Dollhouse and iZombie focus on females who changes personalities as opposed to males. It is true that both do have male characters who take on different personalities but most cases these examples don’t highlight the extreme differences between one personality and the next, with much more detail given to the female personalities than the males. Or there are a larger number of female-centric episodes as opposed to male centric episodes. The one exception that I can recall is in season 1 of iZombie where Lowell mentions he’s on “gay brain.” However, almost every other male zombie appears to be unaffected, or only minimally affected, by the personalities of those they eat. Dollhouse also had Victor, a male doll, but it’s difficult for me to recall more than a few episodes that had his new persona as a main focus.
This isn’t necessarily a bad device. I really like(d) both of these shows. They have (had) good action, story, and writing with awesome female leads (and we need more of them). But why do cool women have to also be something like 30 other women. Yes, as a young girl I wanted to be all things awesome but at the same time it would be nice to have cool female characters that didn’t have to change all the time to fit the situation. And there are good examples of this, but at the same time why does it appear so often? Is it really so difficult to write one, stable although reflective and evolving, female personality?
