We’re pleased to announce the start of a new ongoing blog series! Defiant Scribe is now going to be showcasing a particularly awesome fictional character every once in a while. The criteria: The character must be either a person of color, part of the LGBTQ community, female, or intersectional. They must also be badass, of course. We’ll be featuring characters from movies, TV, stage shows, comic books, and video games—we don’t discriminate ‘round here. If you’d like to suggest a character for us to feature during an upcoming installment, we’d love your input! You can find out how to submit your favorite characters at the end of the article (but please keep in mind our criteria when making your suggestions).

All that being said, let’s get to the good stuff! For the first edition of our Badass Character Spotlight, we are shining the light right onto…

Natara Williams!

Now, those of you who aren’t hardcore hipsters (though really, if you’re not a hardcore hipster, what are you doing here?) may not know who Natara Williams is. But one of the great things about this series is the opportunity to give props to the unsung heroes of the fictional character world, and Nat definitely deserves props.

One of the protagonists from the EA-produced visual novel, Cause of Death (a criminally underrated, now-retired cell phone app that was more interactive book than video game), Natara Williams was a straight-up badass. She was also an extremely well-written woman of color, which is—let’s face it—a rarity.

Natara Williams was born Natara Mansingh, but she changed her name upon starting college to distance herself from her über-wealthy family. Reason being: she wanted to avoid receiving preferential treatment. Nat’s cool like that.

Though originally planning to become a businesswoman (which she also would’ve been badass at), she ended up pursuing criminal psychology after the murder of her friend. Eventually, she became an FBI criminal profiler—and boy, was she a good one. She would go on to defeat numerous serial killers, traipse around the world taking down baddies left and right, rescue her boyfriend-slash-partner after he was kidnapped by a drug cartel, and basically win at life. But what really made Natara special was her extraordinary intellect and amazing insight, compassion, goodness, toughness, and how willing she was to put aside her own feelings—and herself—for the greater good. So let’s hand it to Natara for being a well-developed, well-written, badass character—one that we should all aspire to be like.

So! Have some suggestions for future installments of this badass-characters series? Write to us at thepeople@defiantscribe.com. In the meantime, we’ll be back next week with yet another awesome character.