Soi-disant is French for “so-called.” I used the expression because I haven’t been sufficiently jerky this week and it was starting to give me hives.
Anyway, I’m looking for instances in adventure fiction (film, television, literature, or even comic books) of a hero’s supposedly non-badass loved one being held captive by the villains and managing to rescue herself or himself without the hero’s aid. Please note that escapes by heroic characters don’t count. Batman, James Bond, and Ziva David need not apply. I’m looking for wives, girlfriends, and children who are decidedly NOT part of the heroic action on a regular basis being taken captive to force the hero to do something, and managing to free themselves through guile.
Husbands and boyfriends are eligible too, but only if the character would not ordinarily be thought of as a badass in their own right. So if, for instance, there’s a story in which Green Arrow is captured by a villain to blackmail Black Canary into doing something, and he frees himself before she can arrive, it’s disqualified because GA is a hero his ownself. Likewise the other way around, of course. But Mary Jane Watson SUCCESSFULLY tricking her way out of the Kingpin’s clutches would be an example.
“Delicious Indignities (or The Deflowering of Helen Axminster)” from Oh! Calcutta! Sort of. She doesn’t actually escape from her captor, but she certainly turns the tables on him.
There’s a pretty good example in the BBC Sherlock.
Mrs. Hudson is tied up and roughed up by some uncouth Americans who want something that Sherlock has. She doesn’t free herself, but she holds her own until he gets there. It turns out that she was pretending to be a lot more upset than she was and actually had the thing on her the whole time.
Since she’s a heroine in her own right, Black Widow’s reverse interrogation at the start of (and middle of) the Avengers is out, but that’s still the idea.
In the old flick The Sword and the Sorcerer, our love interest is captured by the evil king, and convinces him she wants him, so when he goes in for the kiss, she knees him hard in the groin and escapes. (She tries it again later on the king’s magician, but he’s an inhuman demon and it doesn’t work.)
Almost any female character by Joss Whedon - Buffy Summers - blonde high school girl. River Tan - mentally ill adolescent. Admittedly, they are written as heroes, but they aren’t what one normally associates with the hero trope.
I believe that Barbara Wright did this in an episode of Doctor Who. She’s a companion, and is separated from the Doctor and Ian (the strong, heroic male companion) and by the time they free themselves (from the Romans?) she’s also escaped.
Ekaterin Vorsoisson does this (sort of) in Lois McMaster Bujold’s novel Komarr. While she doesn’t escape from the villains, she manages to sabotage their weapon, which would have killed thousands.
My favorite example is Old Rinkrank, one of the lesser-known Brothers Grimm fairy tales. I get pretty tired of Cinderella and all the other useless heroines in those stories, so this one–in which the princess tricks the bad guy and escapes–is pretty great.
But perhaps the greatest one of all is Scheherazade, fabulist of a Thousand and One Nights. Not only does she manage to keep herself alive, but she weaves an incredibly complex nest of stories that subtly incorporate themes of justice and mercy, repeatedly demonstrating the superiority of mercy over justice. While the stories never end, I speculate that eventually the sultan decides to show mercy to all womanhood and commutes Scheherazade’s death sentence.
Edit: I just realized that the OP’s phrasing suggests the damsel needs to be a secondary character. If that’s what’s intended, I guess neither of these qualify; but they’re certainly both “damsels in distress” who manage to trick their captors and escape death.
The MLP episode “A Dog and Pony Show” has Rarity–the stylish, dirtphobic, “girly” character in the ensemble–kidnapped and enslaved in a mine to search for gems, leaving Spike to lead the others in a rescue attempt. While they’re looking for her, she manipulates and torments her captors to the point that, when the would-be rescuers arrive, the captors bribe them to take her back…with the gemstones Rarity had needed in the first place. It’s implicit that she could have left on her own by that point, but she was getting the kidnappers to do the dirty digging work for her.
There was the Star Trek TNG Robin Hood episode. Q set the sitch up with Picard as Robin, and hot archeology smuggler lady Vash as Marian, about to be executed by the Prince. She doesn’t escape on her own exactly, but she sweet-talks the Prince into staying her execution and agrees to marry him. IIRC, everything’s great with her until Picard shows up and she’s caught arguing with Robin Hood.
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s daughter in Commando escapes from the bad guys shortly before he shows up to rescue her. I haven’t seen the movie for many years but I recall she does it pretty cleverly.
There was the Senator’s daughter in Silence of the Lambs. “Put the fucking lotion in the basket!”
The girlfriend in Limitless was about to get attacked, until she took the smart pill and smarted her way out of her situation by using a little girl on ice skates as a Katana.
Not even close. Buffy Summer is the chosen one endowed with supernatural powers giving her strength, endurance and abilities beyond that of a mere human. River Tam is a laboratory experiment to create an assassin and likewise possesses strength, endurance and physical abilities beyond that of a mere human. Although they may be screwed up from time to time, River in particular, neither one of them can be classified as a damsel in distress. You might as well put Wonder Woman, Storm, Elasti-Girl and Super Girl in the damsel in distress category. It just doesn’t make sense. Er, just ignore that River was rescued by her brother and spent a good chunk of the pilot episode in a box.
Yes, those individuals are unique, as you say. But as I said later on down the paragraph, although they are written as heroes, their type - the flighty cheerleader, the mentally ill girl - aren’t what you associate with heroes. And yes, River was rescued by her brother early on. She rescues him later in Serenity. That’s what actually makes her fit Skald’s OP.
In the book (BOOK, not movie) “The Bourne Supremacy,” Bourne’s wife Marie is kidnapped, but she eventually escapes on her own. I forget the details, but she took advantage of the guard’s desires for her, or some such.
Danielle in **Ever After **saves herself from the creepy guy who has her captive, walks out of the castle and runs into Henry who has arrived to save her.