In recent years, strong female protagonist online fiction has gained wide popularity among Chinese women for its feminist narratives. It challenges patriarchal gender norms by featuring highly independent, powerful women and emphasizing their personal achievements over heterosexual romance, while also exposing tensions between individual success and collective empowerment. Current scholarship has offered qualitative accounts of its feminist tendencies, yet it has not systematically examined how this genre challenges or reproduces gendered norms through stylistic and narrative structures. To address this gap, this pilot study examines 60 strong female protagonist novels together with 60 romance and 60 male-oriented novels as reference corpora, all drawn from Tomato Novel, one of the most popular free online fiction platforms. The two reference corpora are regarded as embodying more traditional gender ideologies and serve here as baselines of gender conventions. Combining machine learning, corpus linguistics, and character network analysis, the study asks how strong female protagonist fiction reconfigures normative gendered dispositions in heroine characterization, and whether it elevates the collective status of female characters and fosters interactions among women.

The methodology consists of two parts. First, dependency parsing was used to extract words associated with protagonists, which were then employed to train a Nearest Shrunken Centroid classifier to distinguish strong female protagonists, romance heroines, and male-oriented heroes. The latter two were taken to embody conventional femininity and masculinity, respectively. The model achieved over 89% in both accuracy and macro-F1 score. Stability selection was subsequently applied to identify discriminative lexical items for each type. These items were qualitatively examined to compare inter-category differences, supported by collocate analysis and by a visualization generated with a pre-trained Word2Vec model to illustrate their relative proximity. Second, co-occurrence networks of the twenty most frequent characters were constructed for each novel, with gender manually annotated within a binary framework for analytical consistency. Comparative analyses across three genres then analyzed gender differences along three dimensions: (1) character visibility, assessed by the gender distribution of characters and the relative mention frequencies of male and female characters; (2) character importance, measured through four centrality indices that capture how structurally important male and female characters are within the networks; and (3) interaction patterns, captured by the proportions of different gender pairings and supplemented with gender assortativity, which indicates tendencies toward same-gender connections.

The results reveal three main patterns. First, verbs governed by strong female protagonists are more agentive and action-oriented than those of romance heroines, which stress emotion and passivity. While resembling male-oriented heroes, strong female protagonists enact a distinct mode of agency that is embodied and procedural, marked by tactical adjustment rather than outcome-driven dominance typical of male-oriented heroes. Second, the relative scarcity of heterosexual vocabulary sets strong female protagonists apart from the other two types while the prominence of 孩子 (“child”) differentiates strong female protagonists from male-oriented heroes. Third, although strong female protagonist novels do not raise female characters’ overall visibility and importance beyond the heroine and still privilege cross-gender interactions, they place comparatively greater emphasis on female–female ties, which potentially enable visions of female solidarity. Taken together, these findings illustrate the interplay of subversion and accommodation in strong female protagonist fiction.

This study advances an empirical analysis of the multi-faceted feminist discourses in strong female protagonist fiction and the tensions it negotiates, particularly the discrepancy between protagonist empowerment and the marginalization of women as a group. It further contributes to the understanding of contemporary Chinese grassroots feminisms, especially the strand of neoliberal feminism in the Chinese context. Moreover, this research illuminates how gender dynamics in fiction operate through multiple intersecting mechanisms and provides a transferable framework for the multidimensional analysis of gender representation in Chinese fiction.