The Hunger Games has this same feminist problem. Other than the initial volunteering to replace her younger sister, Katniss never makes any decisions of her own, never acts with consequence— but her life is constructed to appear that she makes important decisions. She has free will, of course, like any five year old with terrible parents, but at every turn is prevented from acting on the world. She is protected by men— enemies and allies alike; directed by others, blessed with lucky accidents and when things get impossible there are packages from the sky. In philosophical terms, she is continuously robbed of agency. She is deus ex machinaed all the way to the end.

That’s why The Hunger Games is such a diabolical head fake.  Forget about it being entertaining, which I concede it is.  It has managed to convince everyone that a passive character whose main strength is that she thinks a lot of thoughts and feels a lot of feelings, but who ultimately lets every decision be made by someone else– that is a female hero, a winner. You wouldn’t allow yourself to like a story where the woman lacks agency, so it’s clothed in a vampire story or a female Running Man so it sounds like she’s making things happen.  Or, if you prefer, in order to allow you to like an anti-feminist story, it is necessary to brand it as a vampire story or a female Running Man.   Regardless of how you phrase it, the purpose is to get you to like this kind of a story. It wants you to think this is the next step in female protagonists.  But it’s a trick: nothing has changed since the royal ball.  

That these “adolescent girl” stories– Twilight and THG– have women who are essentially lead by men, circumstance, and fate– whose main executive decision is “do I love this guy or that guy”– is a window on our culture worth discussing.  When you have a daughter, your first question should be, “how is the system going to try to crush her?"  and plan accordingly.  This story’s answer is, "no matter what happens, just talk a lot and it’ll sort itself out."  That Jezebel is distracted by the racial angle here strikes me as an unconsciously deliberate avoidance of the larger issue.  Oh, the audience is racist, that’s the problem.