Back to the question:
How can you create a strong female character?
And bluntly, the answer is you can't. Because all the attributes that people accept easily and instinctively, as "strength" are not strength.
They are the markers of acceptable manliness. Conversely, therefore, only a man can have them, and a man who doesn't have them isn't really a man.
In this playing field, therefore, it is impossible for a character to be female and strong, because you can be strong, or you can be feminine, but you can't be both.
(Caveat: I don't believe that. I explained strength in the previous entry. But people do. Or maybe they don't, but they act as if they do.)
And so people trap themselves. Men aren't free to be strong because they've been told from day one that machoness is strength, and they pursue the first when the really need the second, and women aren't free to do even that because they're told that strength is a man's domain.
Because this is what they've been told. And unless you know exactly where you're looking, it looks like the truth. Because the only way to find out if you're strong is to test you, and watch the fakes fall.
And bluntly put, I'm getting to the age when I'm realising that it's a better world when the average person on the street doesn't have to find out if he really is strong, because making sure that doesn't happen is what civilisation is for.^
^It also means that those who most firmly wish for the world as they wish it to end so that they can show how strong they are are the ones who will most rapidly find out that they are not, in fact, strong at all.
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