You know how when you’re a kid, one of the favorite games to play is hide and seek? And how fun it was to find places to hide and try and stump the seekers? Well, you notice something kind of funny when you watch kids play that game.

No one looks up. Sometimes a kid will climb a tree or hide in a high place and they’re rarely found. Kids just don’t look up when searching for things, they don’t look above eye level.

I’ve noticed that adults tend to do this too. The only difference is that our eye level is higher.

It doesn’t just apply to our physical actions — though we only tend to notice the bugs on the walls and not on the ceilings — but also our metaphoric tendencies.

You see, whenever the whole character debate, particularly in regards to female characters, comes around again, I notice some glaring absences. When discussing interesting characters, well-developed characters, there’s inevitably a listing of “good” female characters. And they almost always correlate with the age of the person making the list. And god forbid any of those women be over forty. You see more older men on these listings, of course, because it’s more common to see older male characters. It’s just, unfortunately, not acceptable to be female and over forty.

And it’s not that there aren’t older female characters all over tv. came up with a whole list of older female characters (which incidentally sparked this semi-rant). It’s just that in a lot of ways, I think fandom is really uncomfortable in being asked to identify with experiences or people outside of their respective realms of experience. This is why we don’t have a lot of fanfic or essays about lower class or ethnic characters in comparison to the sexuality or feminism-based fic and essays. The reason given is always “I’m white! It isn’t right!”. (Interesting how no one uses this reason not to write male characters.) A lot of people in fandom connect with shows because they find characters they can identify with and relate to emotionally or mentally (occasionally physically). Sometimes it’s the plot that draws people in but it’s the characters that will make or break a show and characters that fans can’t relate to, characters who aren’t “like them” are ignored as uninteresting or flat.

That doesn’t mean it only goes one way. Many Snape fans of “notable age” in Harry Potter fandom, for example, are completely unable to relate to any of the teenage characters that are the books’ focus (this goes for a lot of the older generation fans but I’ve noticed that the Snape fans seem to be more extreme, or perhaps more vocal, about this) even while writing the younger characters in relationships with Snape. Or ignoring them completely as Snape is paired with someone his age or older, if that’s your fancy.

With female characters in particular you have a double whammy as far as fandom’s concerned. We, as much as anyone, play into the idea of age as “enemy” and aging specifically being a female enemy. (Men age with dignity and grace, women just get old.) The movement for more beautiful characters? Often centers around size and not age, showing where our biases even in what we want to see physically out of women on tv is.

But why, exactly, is age the enemy when there are so many interesting older characters present in media, even television media (i.e. land of the shallow and pretty)?

In closing, I give you a list of over 40 developed female characters over 40 in the order I think of them. You might even want to take a shot at writing one of them as an over forty woman(or one in a fandom that isn’t listed here because I don’t know the source):

1. Lisa Cuddy; House
2. Stacy Warner; House
3. Laura Roslin; Battlestar Galactica
4. Ellen Harvelle; Supernatural
5. Elizabeth Weir; Stargate: Atlantis
6. Alana Baldwin; The 4400
7. Nina Jarvis; The 4400
8. Diana Skouris; The 4400
9. Brenda Johnson; The Closer
10. Anita Van Buren; Law and Order
11. Jenny Sheppard; NCIS
12. Hollis Mann; NCIS
13. Milly French; Numb3rs
14. Angela Petrelli; Heroes
15. Catherine Willows; CSI (oh, god, where are the working mom fics?)
16. Joy Lass; Dead Like Me
17. Ruth Fisher; Six Feet Under
18. Kerry Weaver; ER
19. Willhemina Slater; Ugly Betty
20. Paige Taggart; Odyssey 5
21. Molly Kagan; The Starter Wife
22. Tami Taylor; Friday Night Lights
23. Beverly Crusher; Star Trek: The Next Generation
24. Katherine Pulaski; Star Trek: The Next Generation
25. Joan Burton; Army Wives (over forty and black!)
26. Denise Sherwood; Army Wives
27. Claudia Joy Holden; Army Wives
28. Kathryn Janeway; Star Trek: Voyager
29. Diane Russell; NYPD Blue
30. Megan Donner; CSI: Miami
31. Stella Bonasera; CSI: New York
32. Maxine Gray; Judging Amy
33. Amy Gray; Judging Amy
34. Irina Derevko; Alias
35. Madeline; La Femme Nikita
36. Julia McNamara; Nip/Tuck
37. Martha Kent; Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (and I suspect Smallville too, but since I abhore the show, someone else will have to verify)
38. Gail Green; Jericho
39. Kristin Westphalen; seaQuest
40. Iris Crowe/Irina Belyakov; Carnivale
41. Ruthie; Carnivale
42. Rita Sue Dreifuss; Carnivale
43. Delores Herbig; Dead Like Me
44. Joyce Summers: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
45. Jane McPherson; Popular

And as extras, characters who are over forty but cheating for some reason:

Marge Simpson; The Simpsons
Peggy Hill; King of the Hill
Amanda; Highlander
Darla; Buffy: the Vampire Slayer/Angel
Drusilla; Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel
Susan Ivanova; Babylon 5
Roxy Harvey; Dead Like Me
Daisy Adair; Dead Like Me
Zhaan; Farscape
Andromeda/Rommie; Andromeda

There’s loads of them out there, so long as you’re not looking for young characters! I mean, this list doesn’t even include characters who start out in their 30s and would have aged over time during canon like Sam Carter in SG1 or Mac on JAG! And yes, I realize a lot of these characters are never explicitly stated as being over forty but they all carry family members (namely adult or high school age children) or job/positions in life that would be indicative of this age. Just remember that if you argue it isn’t canon because canon never says, you’re still buying into the idea that the characters have to be young! Do they really need to be in their thirties to be interesting? No! They’d be interesting even if they were in their 80s!

So go forth and procreate! So to speak.