Female Characters Who Should Have Stayed Single: Part 1

This ended up being a “part one” of a series of articles about this topic that I have planned, as there are many more female characters to come that I think should have ended single at their story’s conclusion, and I’m sure there will be more to come in the future! I decided that instead of cramming them all in one article, I’d break it up into a series so each character gets the amount of time she deserves in relation to this discussion. 

Most people, especially women readers, will know that all too often, female characters get defined by their romances and their (typically) male love interests much more frequently than the reverse is true. There seems to be such a trend in fiction that a woman protagonist has to have a love interest in her story. And if there’s a love triangle, she has to choose one of the other. I’ve never seen a F/M/M love triangle end with the woman deciding she’s better off without them both. 

Now that’s not to say that a great female character is by any means ruined by having a love story or falling in love. It doesn’t make anyone lesser or weak to love, and I’ve seen some really great love stories in TV, movies, and written on the page, love stories that I was rooting for the entire time. A well-written love story can be great. The problem is that with the push towards female characters almost always ending up with a male character romantically by the end of the story is that not all these romances are well written. Sometimes the relationships are depicted as toxic, one-sided, or downright abusive, but because of the trend that women have to be coupled in fiction, the authors or creators still have the woman end up with their love interest by the end, even if it’s not what’s best for them. 

The problem with this is the impact that it has on female readers and viewers, especially young girls. When this ideology gets pushed over and over and over again, it subconsciously teaches girls that it’s better to be in a relationship—even if it’s unhealthy or you don’t want to be in it—than it is to be single. In real life, we already teach girls to accept unhealthy forms of affection, as early as first grade when they’re told that the reason a boy teases her or bullies her is because he has a crush on her. Women and girls are conditioned their entire lives to tolerate abusive and/or toxic behavior from men for the sake of being loved. 

Personally, I feel we have a responsibility to teach future generations that that’s not true. We need to teach girls that toxic love isn’t fun, it’s unsafe. We need to teach girls that’s it’s better to be safe and single and happy with yourself than to be stuck in an unhealthy relationship. We owe it to girls to teach them to respect their rights and protect themselves. And quite honestly, we owe it to boys to, to stop what toxic masculinity has taught them growing up. If we keep pumping out media that shows them jealousy, possessiveness, and verbal abuse is the appropriate way to show affection, how will they ever learn any different? Instead of romanticizing toxic male love interests, we need to uplift healthy ones. 

So without further ado, here are four female characters from popular TV and fiction that I believe should have ended up single. 

Part One: Katniss Everdeen, The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins) 

Ah, one of the great YA love triangles that plagued my generation in the 2012 era. Were you Team Peeta or Team Gale? Which boy was best for Katniss to end up with?

I’ll tell you: neither.

Back in the day, when I was thirteen and I read The Hunger Games trilogy for the first time, I was totally Team Peeta. I think this was mostly just because I was young, didn’t understand much about literature, and because Peeta got way more page time the Gale did in the first book, so I simply grew more attached to his character. I can assure you that my adolescent self was never thinking critically about what was actually best for my childhood heroine. Then I reread The Hunger Games as an adult during the pandemic, and I was struck by a sudden what was I thinking when I realized that I had actually shipped Katniss and Peeta at some point. 

Now, to say that I’ve reconsidered Everlark doesn’t mean that I’m on the Everthorne bandwagon either. I never wanted Katniss to be with Gale even as a teen, and I think there are a lot of valid reasons not to. 

1. It follows the trope of a boy who didn’t know he had feelings for his female friend until after someone else did. This is a type of jealousy trope that is common in teen love stories, and I don’t really like it because it usually paints the female character as a prize for two boys to compete over. 
2. Gale is also jealous of and threatened by Peeta and the fact that he means something to Katniss now, and it makes him too insecure in his tenuous relationship with her. He never seems to believe that Katniss’ feelings for him might be genuine and that her feelings for Peeta were an act. But Katniss is not in a mental headspace where she can or should have to feel pressured to reassure Gale of her feelings constantly. Romance is the last thing on her mind after what she’s been through. 
3. Gale and Katniss have completely different priorities after the first book. Prior to the events of book one, Katniss and Gale might have made a decent couple. They were close, they worked well together, and they both loved each other’s families dearly. But after the games, Gale became focused on romance, on expressing his feelings for Katniss. But the problem is timing. Katniss is traumatized from the Games, and she’s focused on surviving, since the Capitol’s hold on her hasn’t ended after the Games. Gale is not giving Katniss the space she needs to recover after what she’s been through, and it often comes across like he doesn’t take her trauma seriously. His push towards a budding romance with her is way too fast and too soon after the Games. 
4. Gale became an increasingly violent and angry person. His development is understandable given his life experience, and I’m not negating that at all. But I think that development turned Gale into a type of person that Katniss doesn’t need in her life. She’s had her unfair share of war and violence and unrest during her experience in the Games and being the face of the Rebellion. She doesn’t need to be constantly subjected to it from a romantic partner. 
5. Prim’s fate. There are differing interpretations of the level of guilt Gale bares for this one. Some people think that Gale was aware of where/when his bomb was going to go off, and therefore knew it would kill Prim, but this isn’t how I understood it when I read Mockingjay. My personal interpretation is that Gale designed the bomb that President Coin used that killed Prim, but I never got the impression Gale knew where or when it was being used. Considering he was off on Katniss’ mission with her before it happened—not with Coin in District Thirteen to be part of the plan to drop the bombs at the President’s mansion that day. Plus, he and Katniss were sneaking into that very location to assassinate Snow. It doesn’t seem likely that Gale would go along with that plan if he knew bombs were about to be dropped, and even if he did, he wouldn’t have known that Prim’s medical unit would be there, or that Prim would, since she was only in training to be a doctor at the time. That being said, while I don’t think Gale personally killed Prim, I still don’t think Katniss could ever realistically have a healthy relationship with him after what happened. She knows Gale designed the weapon that was later used to kill her sister. Even if he didn’t murder Prim, that association is always young to exist in her mind. 

Katniss and Gale being a couple could have worked if Suzanne Collins had developed their relationship and Gale’s character differently. It could have been a story about Katniss’ real feelings being for her friend who helped care for her family, but she has to fake being in love with someone else to protect everyone else she loves. This works better with the story’s thematic concerns, and it almost did end up being this. But unfortunately it doesn’t work based on the way it’s written because Gale ends up being jealous, borderline possessive, unsympathetic to Katniss’ experience in the Games, and honestly a little too violently natured in the end. 

That being said, I still don’t think Peeta is a better choice. In fact, recently I’ve come to the understanding that Peeta might actually have been the worse choice, despite him being the one Katniss ends up with. 

So let me explain. There are a lot of fair and reasonable arguments against Peeta being with Katniss. 

1. They’re sixteen at the start of the story, and Peeta has supposedly had a crush on her since kindergarten and even admits to watching her walk home from school every day. They were not friends through childhood. This is an unrequited infatuation that lasted over a decade for Peeta, if he’s not exaggerating. That’s pretty creepy actually. 
2. Katniss never initially has real romantic feelings for Peeta. Their relationship is based on her faking being in love with him for survival. She only “develops” real feelings after pretending for long, when loving Peeta became entwined with survival for Katniss, which should leave the reader wondering how genuine her “genuine” feelings actually are, or if survival has just been so engrained in Katniss that she doesn’t know how to not love Peeta. 
3. Peeta and Katniss suffered an immeasurable traumatic experience together twice being in the arena together, so any bond they share is inevitably a trauma-bond. 
4. Peeta lied to the entire world and told them Katniss had married him and was pregnant with his child. Yes, on Peeta’s behalf this was a survival tactic to try and stop the seventy-fifth Hunger Games, but Katniss is never told beforehand that he is going to say this, so she’s essentially trapped into assuming a wife/mother role in her relationship with Peeta, or else she risks both their lives. 
5. Peeta almost choked Katniss to death. Yes, he was hijacked and brainwashed against his will, and it’s not his fault that happened to him. Peeta is a victim of the capitol’s oppression and evil. But the fact that it wasn’t his fault doesn’t erase the trauma that it caused Katniss after he nearly murders her. Being with a the boy who almost killed her—even if he wasn’t in control of his own behavior when he did—is absolutely not conducive to healing from trauma later in life.  

In fact, I don’t really see how either Katniss or Peeta can heal and go on to have a healthy relationship after what they went through. I’ve already explained above how Peeta is tied to Katniss’ trauma, which will hinder her healing later, but the reverse is true too. 

Peeta was literally brainwashed into believing Katniss was an evil murderer and weapon who needed to be destroyed. I’m not a psychologist, but I don’t think intense torture-based brainwashing and conditioning goes away very easily, and I imagine that for people who are subjected to this, recovery is probably a lifelong process. So it does beg the question of how Peeta can actually make a full recovery from his hijacking when Katniss—the person that the Capitol associates his brainwashing with—is constantly around him since they’re now married. If this ending were more realistic, Peeta would always be on the verge of relapsing because of Katniss’ presence, and that in turn would force Katniss to have to live in fear, constantly worried that her husband might snap and try to kill her someday. 

That’s not really a happy ending to me, reading and interpreting this story again as an adult. I would have rather seen Katniss and Peeta go their separate ways, so they could both heal from their trauma without each other around, constantly reminding each other of the trauma they shared. Katniss would be safer, and it would thematically tie the story together better, because Katniss would finally be free from having to be tied to Peeta to survive. She could just survive on her own, as she proved time and time again that she is capable of doing.

I get that Collins wanted to give her fans a happy ending, and since so many of them were rooting for Katniss to end up with Peeta, that putting them together seemed like a happy ending. But it’s only happy on the surface level. We need to give up the idea that a happy ending for a female character means she needs to be in a relationship by the end. It’s only happy if it’s a healthy relationship. Women ending up in toxic or unhealthy relationships are not happy endings. 

There’s even a chapter in Mockingjay that sort of tricks the reader into thinking this is where the story is going. A chapter in which Gale and Peeta discuss knowing that eventually Katniss will choose to be with whichever one of them she can’t survive without. Hearing Gale say this really hurts Katniss, as it should. But honestly, does anyone think Katniss needs either one of them to survive, that she can’t survive without a boyfriend? 

She’s stronger than that, and having her end the story single and learning to recover and finding her own way in life now that she’s no longer living in fear of the Capitol would have reinforced that. I would have rather it ended that way instead of Katniss ending up with the boy she was forced to love to save her life and who eventually almost killed her himself.