As I was reading this I couldn't help thinking the article title ["I hate strong female characters"] should have been appended "or why more characters should be written like Ellen Ripley".
In the original
Alien screenplay (which I've read—it's
awful) the writers, Ronald Shusett and Dan O'Bannon, included a list of characters at the beginning and made a small note at the bottom of the page.
The crew is unisex and all parts are interchangeable for men or women.
The producers of the film decided to make the Ripley character female. (Thankfully they also rewrote most of the dialogue; the final script is written well enough that it doesn't have to have a list of characters at the beginning.)
Ripley isn't 'sassy', 'feisty' or a "damsel in distress": she's a normal, rational human being. In fact if the other characters had listened to her they wouldn't have been in the trouble they were in in the first place.
The second film,
Aliens, is even better at characterizing Ripley as a well-rounded person. At the beginning of the film she's suffering from severe PTSD as a result of the events of the first film. Eventually she gets hooped into going back to the planet where they found the Alien in the first film, and things go awry as one might expect. On the way there she gives a room full of marines a briefing about her 'encounter' in the first film. She trips over her words, words trail off... It's clear that what happened to her was very disturbing and the marines fall silent except for the female private, Vasquez, who interrupts and jokes "I only need to know one thing: where they are," as she makes a mock gun with her fingers and fires it at imaginary aliens.
Vasquez is one-dimensional character, a female character written to be over-the-top macho. So macho in fact that when we first see her one of the other (male) characters jokes "Hey Vasquez, have you ever been mistaken for a man?" To which she retorts, "No. Have YOU?"
Ultimately when shit hits the fan and there are only a few humans left they
immediately turn to Ripley for leadership. Ripley doesn't need to act like a 'bad-ass' (like Vasquez) to earn respect, she just commands it. She's smart and, though terrified, she doesn't panic and has the fortitude to persevere through the extreme circumstances she's put in.
In a twisted way it's kind of sad that Ripley is held up as a feminist icon: she is so because there are so few others.
