Reddit mentions of Freedom & Necessity

Steven Brust and Emma Bull's Freedom & Necessity was written this way. There are 4 POV characters, and Emma Bull wrote 2 and Steven Brust wrote 2. A fun game if you've read their other work is to guess who wrote which characters (hint: the split wasn't done along gender lines). The book is great, although one caveat: it's an epistolary novel, told through the letters the characters write each other, so if that's a style that bothers you (as it does some people), then the book won't work for you.

Susan Voigt from Freedom and Necessity: brilliant, brave, and practical. She listened well, wouldn't abandon a friend for anything, pushed herself beyond what she thought possible without so much as a drop of faith in what the outcome might be, because she knew she had to.

Lyra Belacqua from the His Dark Materials trilogy: clever and fierce, a convincing liar, tomboy, and survivor whose friends mean the world to her, too. She travels from one end of the world to another, one world to another (a few times), to do right by her friends and improve the universe.

Dory from Finding Nemo: she doesn’t let herself be defined by her limitations, and she remains confident and trusts that things will work out even when they don’t look too good. She keeps her spirits high no matter what sorts of adversity she faces, and she tries hard to help out and build others up rather than tear them down. She’s a little fish in a big ocean, but she still manages to change the lives of others for the better.

Wesley from A Bomb Built in Hell. This is not a good man, but I appreciated his careful and methodical approach to everything and his ability to compartmentalize his thoughts and experiences. Cold and practical, without much emotion, neither particularly smart nor exceedingly dumb, but knew how to work hard and didn't think twice about the effort required.

Michelle from the Burke series: another smart survivor, capable of enormous hate and tremendous love. Not very practical, and on the surface she doesn't seem that great, but her intensity and love make her the role model I wish I'd had when I was growing up.

I particularly relate to different characters (of either gender) at different times, in different moods, so I don't think I'm much help on this question.

I did not differentiate between male and female characters. (If it helps, I identify as a pretty androgynous female, neither very feminine nor masculine, and have been like this my whole life.)

The characters who basically suck are always the ones that are cliched or one-dimensional, one-trick ponies that reside on one end of the gender-stereotype spectrum or the other. This article from PCGamer on Ellie from Borderlands 2 kind of illustrates the problem of "dealing" with female characters in the video game industry. (Take the following with a grain of salt, since the game hasn't been released yet!) I think they're making progress -- at least they didn't make her a smokin' hot girl with a massive hex wrench set -- but the article seems to make her out to be a female skin on a male character. I don't know if this is an artifact of how it was written, or if that's what the designers/writers/artists were going for, but any time there's a female character that's super masculine, all I can think is that some executive said, "Let's make this movie/book/game different! I know, let's make a female character totally burly!" Contrast this with a character like Leeloo from The Fifth Element: she was completely naive (in the strictest sense -- she wasn't human and didn't have any experience with our known worlds or their people), but not stupid. She soaked up information faster than a sponge takes up water. She was a fighter, but relied on being small, wiry, and quick and much as she relied on her strength. She was not, however, invincible.

I guess the summary is that, to me, a good character doesn't rely on gender, because it's about as useful as height, age, race, or sexual orientation when it comes to indicating what someone's like at his or her core. :)