This poll will be open till March 9th, 2012. For purposes of this poll, we're only counting fictional tv, and we're counting characters not actresses. It pains me to say this, but we're probably best off having separate polls for international television.

The voting weight, I've decided arbitrarily, will work as follows: your top vote will receive six points, your second-place vote will receive five points, your third-place vote will receive four points, your fourth-place vote will receive three points, and your fifth-place vote will receive two points. This will allow a character who shows up in last place on three ballots to have as many points as a character who shows up in first place on one ballot, but nowhere else.

You also have one negative vote, an "I hate Dana Scully/Buffy/Xena" point, which you can cast against someone, but you have to give an explanation of what you dislike about her.

At any time until March 9th, you are free to revise your ballot, in case you think of someone else, or in case you want to change your vote in order to push the current leader out of what you feel is an undeserved pack-leader status.

Here are my votes:

#5: River Song (from Doctor Who 2005)
#4: Faith Lehane (from Buffy and Angel)
#3: Caroline Forbes (from the Vampire Diaries)
#2: Veronica Mars
#1: Buffy Summers

Negative vote: I'm thinking about it.

Who are your choices? Feel free to discuss why or why not you're voting for someone.

Ok, I've been thinking over this for a bit. I reckon I've got a handle on most of my choices, but I reserve the right to change my mind! I presume the "international TV" exclusion means we are talking just about American television? Not that it'd make much difference, except for the possible inclusion of an Emma Peel or Gwen Cooper: I don't have enough knowledge of non-English language TV to comment on those, and I presume anime action heroines should also be similarly excluded?

Before we get to those, I'm kinda intrigued by some of Yāoguài's choices, having never watched Game of Thrones, Veronica Mars or The Vampire Diaries - the last-named, in particular, seemed like nothing more than a lame Twilight knockoff from the promos [oh, look: a teenage girl falls for a vampire...emoting ensues...] but if Forbes is good enough to rank above Faith... I do want to watch Game of Thrones, but we just haven't found any open slots in our TV viewing of late: as soon as one series ends, it seems two more start up, and they just put the first six seasons of Supernatural on Netflix, which will keep us going for about the next, oh, ten months or so!

5. Nikita [2010 version]. This is the first series which really brought Hong Kong levels of ass-kickery to American network television, mostly thanks to Maggie Q. I have largely been disappointed by the second season, which has got more than a bit whiny, but the original broke new ground in action-heroism.

4. Sydney Bristow, Alias. One of these days, I'm going to have to go back and re-watch this series, as I've been doing with Xena. I remember it being essential viewing at the time, but I'm not certain exactly why. Having just watched Korean series Killer K, clearly heavily influenced by it, must have had something!

3. Honey West. The original action heroine, even if Anne Francis really couldn't do anything except front-flip the villains. But it was a truly novel concept, to have a woman take the lead in a series with any kind of fighting; even though she had a partner, there was no doubt who ran the show, figuratively and literally.

2. Buffy Summers. Seven seasons and 144 episodes. Not bad for a series based on a failed feature movie. With some of the crispest writing on TV anywhere, this set the bar in terms of characterization and dialogue. While admittedly, this ran out of steam before the end, it could still pack a punch, and confronted death in a way few other shows in the genre did.

1. Xena. The Warrior Princess broke the mould of action heroines, by being the first one who looked like she genuinely could kick your arse. Lasted six seasons and 134 episodes, entirely in syndication, without the backing of a network. Sunk by the 'shippers as I recall, but we'll see how that holds up as I continue re-viewing it), The show also gave us Hudson Leick's Callisto, the finest action villainess of them all, and Zoe Bell. But Lawless was its focus, and rightfully so.

The Vampire Diaries is far from high art, but discussions of its originality are inherently awkward. Because the first three Vampire Diaries novels were published in 1991. That's fourteen years before Twilight, and six years before the Buffy tv show.

The Vampire Diaries TV series changed the characters' hair colors and ethnicities. In the original books, the main character is a teenaged blonde. Her best friend is a redhead who becomes a witch. They have a normal guy friend, with no powers, who is in love with the blonde, and hates the fact that she loves a vampire.

The mean popular cheerleader is a brunette. The main character falls in love with a brooding young man who turns out to be a vampire-with-a-soul, consumed with guilt over the harm he's done. This brooding vampire has a brother, who is punk and murderous, but seems to have some redeeming qualities. The murderous punk vampire is a romantic at heart, and for more than a century he's been in love with the female vampire who turned him.

Buffy, Willow, Xander, Cordelia, Angel, and Spike all seem to have forebears in the Vampire Diaries books -- so much so, I'd say it's pretty definite that Joss and co. looked to the series for inspiration.

I felt awkward nominating the character I nominated. In the first season, we thought she'd been terribly miscast. She was weak and annoying and it seemed like she was a complete waste of screen time. But this is part of the difference with tv based on novels: she was going to undergo a major change in season 2, and she had been cast with that change in mind. After the change, we're disappointed when she's not on an episode.

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Back to the poll: oh heck, I hadn't thought about British tv. I'm leaning toward saying they should be included. What do people think about that?

I've decided to remove Arya Stark from my list. My original nomination was based more on the character from the books, and while one can reasonably conclude the show will follow that path of development, it hasn't happened yet in the first season, so it's not fair to include her based on what she's likely to do rather than what she has done.

Not a hard list for me to make as I haven't seen much more than five. Alias made little impression--even though I watched the whole series, I can't remember much about it. There's Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, but that's a pretty dark series that doesn't really come to mind when I think action heroine.

5) Xena (Lucy Lawless on Xena: Warrior Princess) First two seasons or so. Campy parts of the show aside, Lucy Lawless brought a strong presence to the character when the scripts called for it.

4) Faith Lehane (Eliza Dushku on Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

3) Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar on Buffy the Vampire Slayer) First two seasons or so. They were just grinding it out by the end, but there was a cool mood at the beginning of the series when Drusilla still loomed as a destabilizing, unpredictable, boundary-less force that countered the artificiality of Buffy and co., Spike was menacing instead of pathetic, Angel was an intense presence instead of a comedian trying not to seem like one, and there was a clever and surprising interplay between a bright high school world and a dark underworld (but not the brittle, smart alec, mood-killing kind of clever that draws undue attention to itself, as the show later became more reliant on—even more so on Angel).

2) Echo (Eliza Dushku on Dollhouse) They really tapped in to something with a character who was a 'blank slate' and had various personalities 'uploaded' into her when needed. Eliza Dushku was more convincing at some than others but often the most compelling parts were Echo's 'blank' state, where there was a guileless, yet still strong, quality about her, in constrast with the sassy or defiant persona she usually tends toward. But the writing was inconsistent, lacked direction, and turned to melodrama and 'surprise twists' toward the end of the second season.

1) Nikita (Peta Wilson on La Femme Nikita) You could tell a lot of thought went into the characters in the first two seasons or so before they too fell into the trap of melodrama, shock tactics, and surprise twists you so often see shows fall back on when they're unsure where else to go with what they’ve created and fear repeating themselves.

Vampire Diaries I watched a number of episodes of and wouldn't be averse to seeing more of. I was surprised at how well Amy Acker pulled off the transformation from Fred to Illyria on Angel, so if there’s a similar sort of transformation with Caroline Forbes, I’ll keep it in mind. Veronica Mars I may yet see since I liked Kristen Bell in Heroes.

This is turning out to be really interesting! Some observations so far:

* There's one show that has two characters on the list.
* There's one character that has two actresses on the list.
* There's one actress who has two characters on the list.

Without scrolling up, can you name them?

Glad I visited this board in time to vote (I'm not on here as often as I'd like to be; too little time!). My top 5 U.S. TV action heroines (and in many cases it's hard to rank them) would be:
1. Nikita from the original La Femme Nikita TV series (played by Peta Wilson).
2. Xena
3. Buffy
4. Sabrina on the 70s show Charlie's Angels (played by Kate Jackson, whom I had a colossal crush on).
5. Emma Peel on The Avengers; I'm counting this as an American show because it ran regularly on a U.S. network. (I had a teen crush on her, too!)