Heroine of the adventure stories in Xena: Warrior princess TV series (1995) and the hunger games movie (2012)

Popular literature is literature that is enjoyed by a large mass of people and favor with large audiences. This thesis aims to explore how American action cinema builds gender roles, specifically the portrayal of female characters as action heroine. The research have two statement of the problem, the research question is: 1) how are the heroism acts of heroine portrayed in Xena: Warrior Princess and The Hunger Games Movie?; 2) how are the masculinity aspect of heroine described in Xena: Warrior Princess and The Hunger Games Movie?. This research focused on analyzes a heroism and masculinity of the female action hero or heroine represented in Katniss and Xena character. The theories that have chosen by the researcher is from Margery Hourihan that compatible for this research to solve the statements problem are heroism and masculinity of heroine. The researcher use comparative method to describe the differences and similarities on those characters, also to solve and replied the problem in this research systematically and accurately. Therefore, in analyzing this research, the researcher uses etnography technique to take the data which process the capturing some scenes of the data. Process capturing get several scenes which reveal heroism and represent of masculinity aspect of the characters. The heroine acts in Katniss and Xena characters shows that female action hero in the story has both of heroism acts and masculinity aspects that represented by they characteristics. As the result of this research, the heroism acts explain the herosim through characterization, what heroine speaks, setting, and conflict from the character as heroine then comparing both of the character. The masculinity aspect that described by them characteristic showed that female heroine also have a masculinity aspect of physical action through character/role development. The both of film have the different representative to show how the female action hero appear. Differences and similarities in the character of a hero illustrates that these characters contribute to solving each case as a female hero. This is also a proof that the actions of the heroine have evolved strongly and also pushed the wave of feminism to become wider