Strong Female Lead: How ‘Hanna’s Second Season Rewrites The Coming-Of-Age Tale For Our Time

Growing up is hard, messy, and totally and absolutely relatable. Pop culture is obsessed with coming-of-age stories, especially ones that bring something new to the genre. Which is just one of the reasons that the second season of Hanna on Amazon Prime Video is so exciting to watch.

ICYMI: the series follows 16-year-old Hanna, trained from birth to be a ruthless assassin, as she evades the relentless pursuit of an off-book CIA agent and tries to survive all the typical challenges of being a teenage girl.

The second season drops on Amazon Prime Video on Friday, July 3, and follows Hanna as she tries to stay one step ahead of the Utrax organisation, the sinister government program that created her, and unearth the truth behind who she is. When she learns about the program’s new facility, called the Meadows, she’s determined to break in and rescue her friend, Clara.

Hanna could have easily been a cliché or made its main character a one-dimensional killing machine. Instead, it rewrites the coming-of-age story for our time and creates one of the most interesting and relatable characters in recent pop culture.

“I Want To Give You The Life You Deserve”

Growing up is about finding your place in the world. It should be a time to flex your independence to figure out what you want and who you want to be.

That’s not how it works for Hanna. For her, coming-of-age means literally fighting to survive into adulthood.

Of course, lots of characters in pop culture face big threats around this time. But Hanna reframes the traditional teenage experience as something world-shattering. Growing up in 2020 is a lot different to growing up even 10 years ago. Most teenagers weren’t hunted by black ops agents, but that doesn’t mean we never felt like the world was out to get us.

Hanna acknowledges that we’re all fighting for something, whether it’s independence, equality, or a haircut that works for our face.

“You’re One Of Us Now”

“It was really brilliant to feel like I wasn’t constantly being objectified,” Esmé Creed-Miles, who plays Hanna, said in an interview about the show, adding that most young action heroines are created for men rather than being written as full, complex human beings.

For what truly feels like forever, the story arc of female characters has been tied to them finding a boyfriend or having kids. Gross. Thankfully, by now women in pop culture are being praised for their independence, strength, and a sense of identity that’s separate from male protagonists. Hanna celebrates this theme throughout its first season, and especially so in season two.

Even assassins are real people, and Hanna explores how this lifestyle would affect young girls. From returning to the forest where she grew up – a place she once resented but is now the only place that makes her feel safe – to her total inability to trust anyone, the show isn’t afraid to show the consequences of Hanna’s traumatic life, or the skills she’s learned because of it.

It’s this kind of deep dive in her emotional, physical and intellectual strength that puts the show at the forefront of this new coming-of-age paradigm.

“We’re Not Alone. We Have Each Other”

One of the best parts of any coming-of-age story is the relationships. Normally it’s with a best friend or a cute boy – but again, for Hanna, it’s a little different.

After her parents were killed and Clara was recaptured by the Meadows, Hanna has no-one. But after her discovery at the end of season one, Hanna now knows that Utrax is imprisoning a whole contingent of highly skilled young girls. Determined to rescue them, Hanna forms an uneasy alliance with Marissa Wiegler, the CIA agent who hunted her in season one. Together, they fight to take down a conspiracy that wants to control them as women and use them as weapons.

In a show all about celebrating “girl power”, their unlikely mother-daughter relationship is the perfect example of what this looks like in 2020. Despite their differences, Hanna decides she wants Marissa in her corner, and Marissa realises she’d rather be Hanna’s ally than her nemesis.

At the same time as Hanna gains a mother figure, she also acts as a protector for the other girls in the Meadows, who are all wrestling with their own coming-of-age stories. As she delves deeper into the elusive facility and grows closer to the others, she begins to question where she truly belongs.

Like everything Hanna goes through, it’s a relatable struggle for a lot of us. At its heart, every coming-of-age story is about someone finding their place in the world. That’s still true in Hanna, even though the rest of the story has been flipped on its head.

But that’s exactly what the genre needed. Hanna’s desires as an assassin and a teenager work together to celebrate a new kind of character – a strong but flawed female lead on TV. We love to see it!

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Watch Hanna season 2 now, only on Amazon Prime Video. Sign up now for a 30-day free trial.

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(Images courtesy of Amazon Prime Video)