Teela Brown

Teela Brown
species: Homo sapiens
from Larry Niven's Ringworld series
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Teela Brown is a character in Larry Niven's Ringworld series. She fulfills several uncomfortable stereotypes of female characters:

• As a member of a small team, she contributes little skillwise; her skill or aptitude is passive or minimal — in the case of Teela, she is "lucky", because she is the 6th or 7th descendant of a "birth lottery". So she's lucky to be born and this luck is the only official reason she is invited to be a member of the team.
• Her function in the story is primarily as a love interest for the protagonist; reaffirming his heterosexuality and attractiveness and manliness.
• She plays into one of the more disgusting tropes of SF featuring long-lived or immortal characters: the descendant of the man or his former lover. Like a trade-in for the new, improved, younger, hotter, model of his long-lost love.

Further reading

• Wikipedia's character sketch of Teela Brown with extensive discussion of "luck" as an attribute, and no discussion of her other main attribute ("female")