attackfish (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
attackfish) wrote2012-09-03 10:07 am
attackfish) wrote2012-09-03 10:07 am
Bittercon: Female Villains
Where are the female villains in our stories today? We often speak of writing strong female characters, but what about strong female villains? The villain is often the hero/heroine in his/her own story, yet we rarely see strong female villains portrayed in SF&F. An examination of characterization that moves beyond the ever popular rape scenario that is often given as a primary motivation for women seeking revenge. Sometimes, women are just mean. Let's look at them.
Oh female villains. There are just so many angles to take this topic from, and so many things written about this topic, and so, so many ways to actually write a strong female villain, along with a whole pile of ways to write a weak one.
The lack of female villains in literature and media is a new phenomenon. Once upon a time, nearly the only way a female character could be strong was to be a villain. Female strength was a sure sign of, and could only be expressed through, evil. With the license that being evil gave her (or more accurately her creators) a female villain could be so much more fun than a mood killing mother or shrinking damsel in distress. The villain got all the best lines, all the best props, and all the best songs. (Oh Maleficent, you are the only thing worth watching in Sleeping Beauty.) And to modern eyes, looking back at these portrayals, they can feel almost like a breath of fresh air, next to our dearth of fascinating evil women. Of course, in their own time, they were reflective of their own period’s particular brand of sexism, a sexism that said that a good woman could only fit into a certain set of small boxes, and interesting, wonderful villainesses were often paired with innocent, beautiful, and utterly uninteresting heroines for them to menace. This is the evil stepmother, and the wicked witch.
Another type of old villainess is the femme fatal. She was weak physically, but beautiful and manipulative, and most of all, a sexual threat to a main male protagonist. She is a reflection of the fear society held (and holds) of female sexuality. She won’t be virginal, and she won’t settle down and be loyal to one man, but of course, women don’t enjoy sex, or at least not like men, so she must be using sex for something. She uses men. This is what makes her evil, any true evil action she undertakes is secondary. She is less of a breath of fresh air. In fact most modern villainesses share something with her in that they are sexualized, and their sexuality is a weapon they wield against the heroes.
Many female villains, past and present, especially femme fatal types, are the sidekick to a male villain, Harley to his Joker, Bellatrix Lestrange to his Voldemort, Azula to his Ozai. Many of these villains, like the above, are either in love with their master, or their master’s daughter. Like many forms of media sexism, individual examples of this trope may be fine, may even be fantastic villains in their own right, but in aggregate how we view women and female villainy, as something lesser, as something that can be blamed on an evil man. Related to the above, and also only a problem in aggregate is how often these sidekick villains turn good verses their male counterparts. This is often the fate of the less evil femme fatals.
There is smaller female villainy too, the mean girl concept, subtly referenced in the topic summary, the stereotype, true or not, that girls are more manipulative and subtly mean than boys which is becoming more and more popular. Mean girls are almost a force of nature in fiction. Any gathering with a lot of girls in it will produce them.
And there is ever that combination of racism and sexism that produces the Dragon Lady, a vicious South East Asian femme fatal, common in “Yellow Peril” stories, and other female villains meant to embody their race.
So okay, there are many many ways of doing female villains wrong, but as I said before, there are a lot of ways of doing it right. Unfortunately, it’s much harder to codify the ways to make a good female villain.
Some authors go the route of making a fascinating villain who could be male or female, who is not sexualized,and not evil in any of the stereotypically female ways. Azula, who supposedly was originally going to be a boy, is manipulative and devious, physically intimidating, and brutally sadistic. Although she is far from physically unappealing, she is rarely sexualized, and the one time she tries to seduce someone, she’s inept and terrifies her target, and it’s played for comedy. She might be the obedient daughter of her father, but she has more development and more screen time than any other villain. She is the terrifying creature who harried the Avatar across the Earth Kingdom came closer to killing him than anyone else, and she is the scariest person on the show, bar none. Avatar: the Las Airbender also has Hama. Tortured and brutalized in prison, she holds he whole Fire Nation responsible and sees no reason not to do to Fire Nation civilians what was done to her, and every reason to force Katara to follow in her footsteps.
Another great villainess in this mold is Tsarmina Greeneyes from the Redwall series (what, is this Redwall week, or something?) Tsarmina is the leader of a military dictatorship in which she uses her army of vermin to keep the local woodland creatures under control. At the beginning, she kills her less monstrously cruel father and frames her brother so that she can take power. She likewise is a powerful physical threat, a cat to the main character’s literal mouse. There is nothing sexualized about Tsarmina. She takes the usual role of a masculine villain and comes close to triumphing over our beleaguered woodlanders.
Then there are wonderful, horrifying villains who could never be anything but female. Mother Gothel from Disney’s Tangled is not only an evil woman, but an evil mother, and deftly manipulates the societal picture of an ideal mother to manipulate her victim and the audience. Unlike the evil stepmothers of old, Gothel doesn’t become overtly cruel until the very end, when she fears losing Rapunzel’s magic hair. To defeat her the heroine had to first realize she even is evil. Gothel is such a realistic depiction of the common everyday evil of an abusive mother, that many of the grown children of such people started talking about how much she reminded them of their own abuse. Equally important, she has a completely understandable motive. She wants to live. Losing Rapunzel’s magic hair means rapid aging and death for her, and like all of us, she wants a little more time. It isn’t her goal that’s the problem, it’s her methods. It’s that she kidnaps a little girl, holds her captive, and manipulates her into loving her. Were she male, Mother Gothel would lack the punch she has as a twisted mother figure.
What are some of the other challenges of a good female villain? If you have a male hero, do you run the risk of him losing sympathy fighting her? How are her actions judged differently because she’s female? What about male characters that fall into a typical female villain role, a male version of a femme fatal? An evil stepfather? And do you have any favorite female villains to share? Come on, you know you do...
Written for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
bittercon the online convention for those of us who can't make it to any other kind, on a topic adapted from a panel at the 2012 Chicon, the text of which is quoted at the beginning of this post.
Oh female villains. There are just so many angles to take this topic from, and so many things written about this topic, and so, so many ways to actually write a strong female villain, along with a whole pile of ways to write a weak one.
The lack of female villains in literature and media is a new phenomenon. Once upon a time, nearly the only way a female character could be strong was to be a villain. Female strength was a sure sign of, and could only be expressed through, evil. With the license that being evil gave her (or more accurately her creators) a female villain could be so much more fun than a mood killing mother or shrinking damsel in distress. The villain got all the best lines, all the best props, and all the best songs. (Oh Maleficent, you are the only thing worth watching in Sleeping Beauty.) And to modern eyes, looking back at these portrayals, they can feel almost like a breath of fresh air, next to our dearth of fascinating evil women. Of course, in their own time, they were reflective of their own period’s particular brand of sexism, a sexism that said that a good woman could only fit into a certain set of small boxes, and interesting, wonderful villainesses were often paired with innocent, beautiful, and utterly uninteresting heroines for them to menace. This is the evil stepmother, and the wicked witch.
Another type of old villainess is the femme fatal. She was weak physically, but beautiful and manipulative, and most of all, a sexual threat to a main male protagonist. She is a reflection of the fear society held (and holds) of female sexuality. She won’t be virginal, and she won’t settle down and be loyal to one man, but of course, women don’t enjoy sex, or at least not like men, so she must be using sex for something. She uses men. This is what makes her evil, any true evil action she undertakes is secondary. She is less of a breath of fresh air. In fact most modern villainesses share something with her in that they are sexualized, and their sexuality is a weapon they wield against the heroes.
Many female villains, past and present, especially femme fatal types, are the sidekick to a male villain, Harley to his Joker, Bellatrix Lestrange to his Voldemort, Azula to his Ozai. Many of these villains, like the above, are either in love with their master, or their master’s daughter. Like many forms of media sexism, individual examples of this trope may be fine, may even be fantastic villains in their own right, but in aggregate how we view women and female villainy, as something lesser, as something that can be blamed on an evil man. Related to the above, and also only a problem in aggregate is how often these sidekick villains turn good verses their male counterparts. This is often the fate of the less evil femme fatals.
There is smaller female villainy too, the mean girl concept, subtly referenced in the topic summary, the stereotype, true or not, that girls are more manipulative and subtly mean than boys which is becoming more and more popular. Mean girls are almost a force of nature in fiction. Any gathering with a lot of girls in it will produce them.
And there is ever that combination of racism and sexism that produces the Dragon Lady, a vicious South East Asian femme fatal, common in “Yellow Peril” stories, and other female villains meant to embody their race.
So okay, there are many many ways of doing female villains wrong, but as I said before, there are a lot of ways of doing it right. Unfortunately, it’s much harder to codify the ways to make a good female villain.
Some authors go the route of making a fascinating villain who could be male or female, who is not sexualized,and not evil in any of the stereotypically female ways. Azula, who supposedly was originally going to be a boy, is manipulative and devious, physically intimidating, and brutally sadistic. Although she is far from physically unappealing, she is rarely sexualized, and the one time she tries to seduce someone, she’s inept and terrifies her target, and it’s played for comedy. She might be the obedient daughter of her father, but she has more development and more screen time than any other villain. She is the terrifying creature who harried the Avatar across the Earth Kingdom came closer to killing him than anyone else, and she is the scariest person on the show, bar none. Avatar: the Las Airbender also has Hama. Tortured and brutalized in prison, she holds he whole Fire Nation responsible and sees no reason not to do to Fire Nation civilians what was done to her, and every reason to force Katara to follow in her footsteps.
Another great villainess in this mold is Tsarmina Greeneyes from the Redwall series (what, is this Redwall week, or something?) Tsarmina is the leader of a military dictatorship in which she uses her army of vermin to keep the local woodland creatures under control. At the beginning, she kills her less monstrously cruel father and frames her brother so that she can take power. She likewise is a powerful physical threat, a cat to the main character’s literal mouse. There is nothing sexualized about Tsarmina. She takes the usual role of a masculine villain and comes close to triumphing over our beleaguered woodlanders.
Then there are wonderful, horrifying villains who could never be anything but female. Mother Gothel from Disney’s Tangled is not only an evil woman, but an evil mother, and deftly manipulates the societal picture of an ideal mother to manipulate her victim and the audience. Unlike the evil stepmothers of old, Gothel doesn’t become overtly cruel until the very end, when she fears losing Rapunzel’s magic hair. To defeat her the heroine had to first realize she even is evil. Gothel is such a realistic depiction of the common everyday evil of an abusive mother, that many of the grown children of such people started talking about how much she reminded them of their own abuse. Equally important, she has a completely understandable motive. She wants to live. Losing Rapunzel’s magic hair means rapid aging and death for her, and like all of us, she wants a little more time. It isn’t her goal that’s the problem, it’s her methods. It’s that she kidnaps a little girl, holds her captive, and manipulates her into loving her. Were she male, Mother Gothel would lack the punch she has as a twisted mother figure.
What are some of the other challenges of a good female villain? If you have a male hero, do you run the risk of him losing sympathy fighting her? How are her actions judged differently because she’s female? What about male characters that fall into a typical female villain role, a male version of a femme fatal? An evil stepfather? And do you have any favorite female villains to share? Come on, you know you do...
Written for
bittercon the online convention for those of us who can't make it to any other kind, on a topic adapted from a panel at the 2012 Chicon, the text of which is quoted at the beginning of this post.
no subject
Incidentally I saw these comments on the avatar.spirit.net forums in case you were wondering. There's a clique of Azula fans there who have rather frustrating interpretations of the character.
I think there is something about the abusive mother that people generally find more frightening or abnormal than the abusive father. I'm thinking of the hate Catelyn Stark from A Song of Ice and Fire gets for being cold towards her husband's bastard who is raised alongside her own children and also of how psychiatry has blamed mental disorders on the patient's mother. There's this feeling that any decent woman will coo over any baby or else she's a bitch.
no subject
Ugh that seems like a particularly narcissistic view, as though being told everything is fine is more important than fixing problems. By that logic Ozai was a better mother than Ursa for thinking Azula could do no wrong, an attitude that gave her no opportunity to correct herself and created victims like Zuko and Ty Lee. (You're right, the parallels to your stalker are chilling.)
But then again dads are supposed to be the disciplinarians so how dare Ursa try to discipline her own child, including trying to get her daughter away from a self-destructive course? Narcissism + Sexism = major FAIL.
There seems to be a feeling that someone, such as Ursa or Iroh, should have fixed her.
So according to these fans it was the responsibility of everyone in the world except Azula. How nice to know we don't have to take responsibility for our own lives--classic narcissist thinking.
I've even seen a fanfic where Aang said Mai and Ty Lee had betrayed Azula on Boiling Rock and that the betrayal shattered her. Um, hello? There are more important things in the world than Azula's tender feelings, like PEOPLE'S LIVES. If her psychological well-being depended on her minions being complicit in murder, the issue is hers and not her minions'.
I don't think Azula's apologists are all narcissists, but the apologist arguments they make sure sound that way. Likely because that's the only frame that would allow nothing to be her fault.
no subject
One big problem I have with the "Iroh should have saved Azula like he did Zuko" argument is that in the end Zuko had to save Zuko. Iroh's nurturing and wisdom was a big factor but redemption isn't something you can realistically do for another person.
One fanfic author whose work I normally love decided to explain Azula by having Ozai train her to be a monster. The arguement that the author used is that "monsters are made not born" so some people just can't accept sociopathic tedencies in children there has to be some other reason.
no subject
THIS
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The one version of events where I could see the "Ozai turned Azula evil" argument was in a one-shot called Life Lessons by meltinglacier. And that story worked because it didn't do a flat good->evil progression but showed the actual components of Azula's issues like the way Ozai stripped away her capacity for trust and independent thinking. I don't think the story entirely reflects Azula's psychopathic tendencies, but I found it chillingly good just for the depiction of a controller's tactics.
no subject
The problem with a lot of the less radical Azula apologists, I think, is that they cannot accept that Azula may be both evil and abused without the abuse causing the evil. She can't be both victim and monster in their minds.
no subject
I tend to see Ozai's role as giving her a free hand for her cruelty while providing approval for what he considered to be strength, achievement and success. At the same time his treatment of Zuko showed the price of what he defined as weakness and failure.
no subject
I agree. I also don't think he ever treated her with any real love, because I don't think he's capable of it. As far as I'm concerned, those two things add up to some pretty horrible emotional abuse right there, but he didn't make her evil as much as he delighted in what was already there. I do think his treatment of Zuko contributed greatly to the paranoia that would later fuel Azula's psychotic break.
As an aside, I think she had an episode of brief reactive psychosis, of, as it looks like from "The Search" previews, longer than usual duration, which means her prognosis is good.
no subject
Yeah. The one thing I've noticed about projected narcissistic logic like this is that I hear it relatively often from the family and associates of narcissists, rather than from narcissists themselves, though I hear it from them too. Being around a narcissist who blames things on everybody else to you day in and day out warps your worldview.
I've even seen a fanfic where Aang said Mai and Ty Lee had betrayed Azula on Boiling Rock and that the betrayal shattered her.
Urge... to... kill... rising...
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I've seen this too, more based on the way he gave her a doll (which was truly clueless, admittedly, and I see it as a sign that he hadn't seen her for a while (600 day siege, plus travel and set up = about two years) and relied on a wrong-headed "all girls like dolls, right?" mildly sexist, true, but not evidence of some kind of underlying hatred of women. As for why he didn't reach out to her, how do we know he didn't? I mean, before we came home, we heard her mocking him and calling him a failure, and how do we know he didn't try and she didn't rebuff him, right when he was at his lowest, after the death of his son? It would be much more in character for her than for her to accept any overture he made.
I've seen remarks about how Zuko was a bad brother who wasn't nice to her.
Oh yes, this must be it. We see her being frighteningly sadistic to him, he must have made her that way. *pats idiots on the head*
I've even seen a comment or two about how part of Azula's problems were that Mai and Ty Lee weren't real friends.
I saw a fandom secrets post to that effect once, and almost threw up, and I don't mean that figuratively in the least. It was just a little too close to what I said to myself in my darkest moments. My first stalker and I started out as "best friends" until I tried to assert my independence. Then she assaulted me, and instead of knuckling under like I was supposed to, I tried to get away. I was the first victim of hers to try to escape before she was done with me, which was why she became obsessed. if I had just "been a good friend" and waited it out, I told myself, she wouldn't have gone "crazy" on me. It's a lie. Azula terrorized her friends, and they had the right to leave her, and leaving someone like that, especially with the power she wields, takes tremendous courage. Maybe their leaving tipped her over the edge, but the reason for that was that she miscalculated, not that she lost people she cared about.
(I'm not sure why I'm arguing this with you, since we both agree, Maybe I'm hoping an Azula apologist with somehow miraculously make it down this far on this thread? Oh yeah, Ty Zula. I want to have somewhere to link people to next time some idiot tells me I'm a homophobe because I won't read or write Ty Zula. The fact that I'm openly bisexual doesn't deter those comments, strangely.)
What interests me about those disorders being blamed on the mother was that they caught women in a bind they promised "If you do everything right, your child won't have problems!" but since one disorder was supposedly caused by cold and distant mothers, and another by overly affectionate ones, one by being too pushy, one by being to lenient, etc. women couldn't ever just say "If I do this, we'll be fine." That was aside from the fact that most of the disorders that they said that about were biological. I think it had a lot to do with blaming someone who was powerless. Mothers didn't have the clout to say "no, not my fault" so as far as the medical establishment was concerned, the problem was solved. Also, if you blame the mother (or the parents more generally) for a child's disability, it's a fantastic silencing technique. "You made your child this way, stop complaining, and asking for help or services." I saw that a lot growing up.
no subject
I have this morbid curiosity about what their reactions would be if Azula had been male .For some reason I'm thinking of Isabella Linton defending and marrying Heathcliff in Wuthering Hights, believing that she could change him.
I think one of the problems is that they only see their favorite character and what effects her while minimizing her faults to the point where they seem to think she was okay offscreen, They don't seem to consider how her behavior effects other people who are powerless to do something or even to just leave.
While I've never cared at all for TyZula your personal life experiences have given me an unforgettable perspective on both the relationship and the characters, particularyly Ty Lee. You are very brave for being so honest.
no subject
I have a feeling the fandom would find a cute little pair of leather pants to fit Prince Azul. He never beats his victims, you see, so it can't be abuse, and the people who don't like him don't understaaaaaaaaaaaaaand! (Plus the number of people who suffer under the delusion that Heathcliff the puppy-killer is a romantic hero... Don't get me started.)
I think one of the problems is that they only see their favorite character and what effects her while minimizing her faults to the point where they seem to think she was okay offscreen, They don't seem to consider how her behavior effects other people who are powerless to do something or even to just leave.
Quoted for truth. I'm pretty sure this is behind every case of leather pantsing in every fandom.
About being brave, it's strange, but my stalkers both did so much to make me feel like a coward, and like I was the one in the wrong, that as much as Azula reminded me of my first stalker, seeing her as the villain, acknowledged as a villain by almost everybody, and as one of the most terrifying villains, was wonderful. And her "friends" leaving her was shown as a moment of triumph, instead of the moment of cowardice I had always secretly believed my own escape was. I'm not sure I would call myself brave, but I'm coming to realize I'm not a coward, and I'm not weak.
no subject
And if we had a Princess Zuka they'd probably be even more judgemental when she snaps at him; I'm basing this off fandom attitudes towards Katara's hostility to Zuko before her catharsis in Southern Raiders. Speaking of Katara, why couldn't Zuka be more motherly towards Azul? It would have fixed him.
no subject
Now why can't those other people just understand that?
/sarcasm