During a deep review of my latest book, one of the things that came up is that this idea I'd never considered before: There's a sort of psychopathic lord of the flies dominance hierarchy written in as an assumption in a lot of contemporary fiction. Western fiction lately has had a really strong dominance hierarchy implied in all of it, where you can only move up by pushing others down. By contrast, most of human history has been something like "duty-and-care" where power flows from accepting and engaging with a mandate to take care of the people you are responsible for.
Of course, dominance hierarchies do exist. That's self-evident. That doesn't mean that such a worldview should be exclusive. Great leaders see themselves as servants to their subordinates just as much as their subordinates are servants to them. You want great leaders who are competent and powerful, but you also want great leaders whose mandate doesn't just come from competence, but from service.
This is where things like the girlboss archetype becomes inevitable. If you're a psychopath whose worldview says that power is only about being at the top of the dominance hierarchy, then the only way to show you are competent and powerful is to be the strongest, most cut-throat person who never shows any weakness. The thing is, nobody wants that sort of leader. Traditionally, that person was the villain in fiction, not the hero.
The thing is, it applies to men too, so don't think I'm singling out the girlboss. Even within the past century, consider Spider-Man: The point of his character is explicitly not that Spider-Man is the strongest character, it's that he has great power and therefore must use it responsibly.
The leader isn't ideally just whoever is the strongest this week. Ideally, it is the person who can rule with justice, honor, humility, and with the goal being elevating the group you are in charge of. To forget this fact changes everything for the worse, and it's a great reason why most people feel disconnected from a lot of current media, which is laser focused on who is the strongest or most dominant rather than the most worthy.
