Huh. That's the third character in a row (after Faith from Mirror's Edge and Chell from the Portal games) that Anita praised that I'd describe as a "blank slate" character (in that you could replace them with cats and the game wouldn't be worse off without them). I suspect a pattern is beginning to form.
Given Anita's past work I don't find it surprising that there aren't many "defined" female characters that stand out as good to her. A lot of stabs at female characters try to make them better by making them more symbolically masculine. I was actually thinking about this earlier today:
There seem to be two major...paths of feminist media criticism. They aren't exclusionary, or even contradictory, but do emphasize different things. One path is interested in the
redefinition of traditionally female iconography, i.e losing pink as a "girls" signifier, or re-defining more masculine affectations, i.e physical strength and emotional gruffness, violent problem solving, etc as, if not explicitly feminine, more gender neutral than they currently are.
The other path is interested in the
reevaluation of traditional female iconography, i.e embracing pink as a "feminine color" or, as Anita has touched on in quite a bit of her work, changing the valuation of traditionally iconically feminine roles, attitudes and behaviors in media.
Most criticism, hers included, draws from both ways of thinking, but I think she definitely skews towards the latter and is more critical of attempts at the former