attackfish | Bittercon: Female Villains

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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

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.

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Maleficent from Disney's Sleeping Beauty. Like Tsarmina, she's powerful in a way that we see in male characters, but she's also uniquely female in a way that's not sexualized or weakened.

.... who you mentioned. Bah.

Favorite line in the whole movie: "Did you hear that, my pet? All these years, they've been looking for a baby." She's the only one in the whole movie who gets to snark.

It's interesting that some of the most intense female villains are from fairy tales. You noted Maleficent and Mother Gothel. I'm in the midst of one of the Dresden Files books, which of course feature the fairy queens--Mab being the most malevolent. Even the "good" queens are manipulative, as fairies are.

Part of it is just sheer quantity. A lot of fairy tales, and a lot of female villains.

On a side note, I tend to like the villains in the adaptions better. They usually get a musical number: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VillainSong

For better or worse, the capacity to do evil is often associated with strength. The current dearth of female villains strikes me as an attempt, on the part of authors of both sexes, to make up for all the years of wicked witches and femmes fatale and dragon ladies, but it's kind of ham-handed. Female characters can be strong these days (strong on their own, not just by manipulating strong male characters into doing things for them) which is a huge improvement to be sure, but their strength must be used in the service of good: a mildly updated version of the Victorian idea of women as inherently pure and saintly. In the real world, there is certainly no lack of examples of powerful women who are every bit as villainous as their male counterparts, and yeah, it would be nice to see this acknowledged better--particularly outside the realm of fairy tales and cartoons aimed primarily at children.

One of the (many, many, many) reasons I keep coming back to Darkover every few years is because MZB's characters are first and foremost people, good and bad in equal measure; their sex may limit what they can do within the context of the culture, but it does not limit who they are. Which, given how she set the world up, is a particularly neat trick, and one from which many other authors could learn a great deal.

If you have a male hero, do you run the risk of him losing sympathy fighting her?

I think so, although this changes by degrees over long stretches of time. One thing I remember annoying me when I was a kid was how the hero in a lot of TV and movies would be taunted with the line "You wouldn't hit a girl/woman, would you?" or would actually say "I don't hit girls/women" to the female villain. Nowadays, if those lines are used at all, it's delivered ironically or quickly subverted on-screen.

That said, I think you can risk losing sympathy, and the perception of worry over how an audience might react to seeing man-on-woman violence is there. I remember how a few web commentators on LoK were surprised that Nick showed Amon flat-out hitting a restrained Korra in Episode 4, and he was the villain. So I guess male villains aren't supposed to hit female heroes because it makes them look too evil?

How are her actions judged differently because she’s female?

Female villains tend to have excuses for their actions, whereas male villains can simply be villainous. TV investigative crime dramas are the clearest example of this. Serial killers are a dime a dozen on the CSIs of the world, but female serial killers seem to always have a tragic backstory that drives them.

If I had to think of a male counterpart to Mother Gothel, I'd probably point to John Winchester from Supernatural. He's not outright villainous as Gothel, and the show even presents him as heroic on several occasions, yet the damage he did to his sons gets demonstrated at length over the show's run. The show's leads, Sam and Dean, both love and hate for their father, wanting to live up to his legacy as a hunter but also calling each other out when they start to behave like him. Rewatching the first season, it's hard not to see John Winchester as the show's first Big Bad instead of the Yellow-Eyed Demon.

For better or worse, the capacity to do evil is often associated with strength.

The idea that strength is necessary for evil, and that we ladies are somehow deficient in strength and therefor unable to be properly evil, carries on into how people treat the victims of women in the real world. My dad was abused first by his mother, then by his first wife (who also abused my siblings) but that somehow must be less damaging, or he must be weaker than the victim of a man. An extra layer of victim blaming. I've been stalked twice. The second time was by a man (teenage boy, actually, but he and I were both teenagers) and while I couldn't get anybody to help me at the time (I later found out his family were organized crime, and nobody was helping me because they didn't want to get shot) everybody I tell the story to now gives sympathy and tells me how horrible that must have been. But it was so much less horrible than my first stalker, the sociopathic ten-to-fourteen-year-old girl, who stalked me for four years. Most people laugh at that one. Obviously, she couldn't really have done any harm, she's just a girl. I'm told by other victims of violent crime that this is a common pattern.

particularly outside the realm of fairy tales and cartoons aimed primarily at children.

Particularly inside the realm of media for children, in my view. Although there are more satisfying villainesses there proportionately, children's media catches them young, and since stories shape our understanding of the social world, the younger, the better.

Yeah. In my ER days, I took care of a hell of a lot of victims of domestic abuse. More of them were women than men, and the women's injuries were usually worse--but that was a trend, not a hard-and-fast rule, and men who suffered some truly horrible injuries at the hands of their wives and girlfriends also had to suffer the scorn of medical and law enforcement personnel who really, really ought to have known better.

I'm not really sure I have the words for how angry this made me, and still makes me as I think about it years later. Also other kinds of scorn directed at other kinds of victims, of course, including the old-fashioned "she must have been asking for it" victim blaming in rape cases. Okay, actually, I'm going to try to stop thinking about it now, because I can feel my teeth grinding and blood pressure rising to no good effect.

Agreed that sending balanced messages in children's entertainment is probably more important in the long run. It's just that as an adult, I'd also like more stories, targeted at adults, which handle this problem well. (Which isn't to say that adults can't enjoy children's fare, of course;

goth_hobbit and I are rewatching Avatar at the moment and having a lot of fun.) Hopefully as more children grow up on stories which present characters with every possible combination of attributes, as adults they'll turn their hand to telling such stories themselves.

One thing I remember annoying me when I was a kid was how the hero in a lot of TV and movies would be taunted with the line "You wouldn't hit a girl/woman, would you?" or would actually say "I don't hit girls/women" to the female villain. Nowadays, if those lines are used at all, it's delivered ironically or quickly subverted on-screen.

While this ideal is frequently no longer spoken, we still have the phenomenon of the designated chick fight, where any female on the heroes' side is tasked with taking out the female villains. One of the great tings about the finale of A:tLA was that Zuko actually fought his sister and was winning before she turned him into a smoking heap and Katara had to finis the job. He even knocked her to the ground. No designated chick fight there, and definitely no loss of sympathy for Zuko for hitting a girl.

Amon was an interesting case, a lot of us were freaking out over how much the Equalists dragging her into the dark reminded us of the imagery of sexual violence to give a crap that Amon hit her in the face. They didn't go there, but it made me realize that the visual language of captivity when applied to women and girls always suggests something else with it.

female serial killers seem to always have a tragic backstory

God! It took Criminal Minds until season six to give us a female villain without a tragic backstory. Granted, a lot of their male serial killers have tragic backstories, and there are more of them, but still. Also, it's said on the show several times that female serial killers never kill for sexual gratification, which, yeah, do you want me to link you to some examples of women who did just that? It sounds like the same kind of thing people do when they say "women don't rape!" yes, yes they do.

John Winchester and the evil father brings up something else interesting. While society often says that women are harmless or not true villains, or not responsible (can I argue that's part of a larger societal trend of stripping women of their agency? Yes I can) but evil mothers, or evil seductresses can conversy be treated worse than their male counterparts. An evil seductor, unless he goes beyond seduction to rape, or he's kinky or queer, rarely has his sexual proclivities seen as part of is villainy, and an abusive father is much more able to argue that he Did What He Had To Do.

My sister's an ER nurse, and my mother's a non-ER nurse, and they sometimes swap stories, and my mom has had to tell my sister to shut up fairly frequently because of her victim blaming. I've also had friends whose psychologists victim blamed them. I agree on not talking about this now. Oy.

This. If we get it into kid's books and shows, those kids'll get it into the adult books and shows soon.

(You will never get me to stop praising A:tLA)

an abusive father is much more able to argue that he Did What He Had To Do.

Oh yes. An abusive mother comes across as a betrayal of their expected role as a nurturer, and it's typically played as a very harsh revelation for the POV character, while an abusive father is presented in stories as 1) an obvious asshole with which neither the characters and audiences are supposed to have any emotional investment in from the get-go, or 2) someone who Did What He Had To Do but went too far. Neither case inspires the same sort of betrayal or emotional response (in fiction) as a mother in the same position.

Even John Winchester is a slow burn dismantling of Mode #2 listed above. On a first viewing of the series, you trust he's doing what he's doing for a reason, just like the brothers trust him. Then there's a sense of dawning realization for you and the brothers that the John Winchester was, in fact, a complete asshole. He could have been a good hunter and a good father, as their adopted father/mentor Bobby demonstrated after John's death, but failed.

It's things like this that make me wish I could like Supernatural, but the amount of racism and sexism (at least in the later seasons when I tried to watch) wow. It's never a trope I liked, given how gendered it is, and also how much of a bullshit excuse it almost always is.

An abusive mother comes across as a betrayal of their expected role as a nurturer. This. Because we don't have the same expectation of the nurturing, safe father that we do of the mother, characters like Gothel don't work quite as well as fathers. They are almost betrayal of the audience.

You know, as much as I hate the I Did What I Had To Do excuse, I'm using it with the main character's mother in my novel, but for her, it's more immediate. She's no trying to toughen her up, just keep her family from killing her child. I'm worried that the fact that she's a mother and not a father will be held against her. didn't think about that before.

Fascinating topic and discussions! Speaking of gender roles and villains, am I the only one who thinks Azula purposefully dresses as a boy throughout the series, with the sole exception of "The Beach?" Her clothes and hair are alike in style to the clothes boys and men wear, with the full topknot, pantaloon-like pants and the armor, and I don't see other girls and women, except women in uniform, dress like her.

To be sure Azula's not hiding her gender at all; she's liberal with the makeup, for one thing. Still, I got the strong impression that she knew she would be taken more seriously if she dressed in a masculine way. I've seen it in real life, too: the first female presidential candidate in Korea that I know of (back in the 90s) dressed in a suit and had short hair, and I heard she did the same throughout her political career to be taken seriously. I don't entirely rule out gender identity or just plain taste for her or Azula, but it seemed to me Azula's outfit demonstrated that sexism was a real force even in the Fire Nation.

Azula's is such an interesting case in female villainy and sexism. The canon I thought made her extremely interesting, but the ways fandom treated her showed a lot of the pitfalls you mentioned. It's like some fans really like her but can't live with her as she is, and so they distort her image. The ones I find prevalent and problematic:

1. It's all Ozai's fault - A favorite interpretation among Azula's fans seems to be that Ozai turned her evil when she was young, usually during a short period of time (in a version of events I call Evil Summer Camp) before the "Zuko Alone" flashback. These fans seem to want to excuse or externalize Azula's evil so their favored character won't be, you know, evil. To be sure it's not just female villains who get this treatment since you see Zuko in Leather Pants all the time.

2. She's harmless - Some fans also minimize the impact of her actions since most of her worst acts of villainy failed or were reversed (edit: reversed, not revered), i.e. Aang's death, the conquest of Ba Sing Se etc. Uhh, no? SHE ALMOST ENDED THE AVATAR CYCLE. It was only by luck, foresight, and Katara's skills that the world still has an Avatar. Azula also subjected Ba Sing Se to brutal foreign occupation in addition to the oppression they were already living under. I find the idea that she did no harm as problematic as the idea that she can't be evil on her own.

3. Azula as femme fatale - I was once complimented for portraying Zhao as Azula's ally without writing creepy sexual subtext between the two. My reaction: "Huh?" She was eleven at the point I was writing her, even less interested in sex than she would be at fourteen, how could there be subtext with Zhao?

And then I learned Azula/Zhao subtext was nothing new in fandom. Which is like Bizarro World, because if there's one thing we know about Azula it's that she's horribly inept at flirting, much less seduction. Where did Azula as sexy-Lolita come from? (Let's not even get into the Misaimed Fandom of Lolita.) It's like fans don't know what to do with Azula and have to pigeonhole her into familiar categories, no matter how gross and ill-fitting.

Pictured in the icon: Complex female character done right in the form of Artesia by Mark Smylie. Worker of dark sorceries, priestess, kingslayer, beloved queen, war criminal, brave captain. She also has sex with lots of different partners for the sheer pleasure of it, and never has any underlying agenda.

Edited 2012-09-04 00:22 (UTC)

I think it has less to do with masculinity and more to do with militarism. She, like Zuko, wears a modified military uniform until she gets home, where she wears what looks like a traditional robe for an heir to me. It's the same one her brother wears, and looks like a less impressive version of their father's clothes. Other than that, we see her in Kyoshi dress, modified Dai Li dress, a dressing gown, and her beachwear. I think she goes for armor for the same reason Zuko does. It emphasizes her rank, and subconsciously, what her father did to her brother makes her feel just as insecure in that rank as her brother does. That's just my read on it, though. You're interpretation is just as valid as mine.

It's always hard for me to talk about how fandom treats Azula, even harder for me to talk about her in canon, because intellectually, I can talk about how she's a complex and frightening female villain, but emotionally, she's all bound up for me in my feelings about my first stalker. There are a lot of objective similarities, some of which I talk about here: http://attackfish.livejournal.com/104944.html?thread=1211888#t1211888 (second part) and other victims of hers actually warned me not to see A:tLA because she reminded them so much of the same person. This is also why I can't read Ty Zula. Every time I look at Ty Lee, and the way Azula covertly threatened her into joining her, I see me at say, thirteen, terrified, and trapped, and always smiling.

Honestly, the idea that Ozai turned Azula evil bothers me, but not as much as the idea that Ursa did, which I also see a lot of. The logic usually goes "She thought there was something wrong with Azula, so she didn't love her, so she favored Zuko and abused Azula" which as I wrote about in the above link, makes me want to throw up. Then there are the people who say that Ozai must have sexually abused her, which along with saying sexual abuse makes someone evil, we have no evidence for it. Sexually abused girls usually aren't almost completely unaware of themselves as sexual beings as she is in canon. This ties into the Azula/Zhao thing, and how strange that seems to me too. Well, there is the way she almost seems to be trying to seduce her brother at points, but that just points to more unawareness on her part.

Anyway, we know Ozai gave her plenty of warped ideas, and shaped the form her evil would take, and given what Bryke have said about choice, and everybody being capable of good and evil, I think we're supposed to read it as non-inevitable, that Ozai's warped raising and favoritism made her evil, but I believe in inborn sociopathy (my first stalker started young. I now a victim of hers from when she was five.) and Azula, with the way she lies, and her shallow affect, and lack of affective empathy, combined with keen cognitive empathy (she knows what others are feeling, with often piercing insight, she just doesn't care) and the way she uses her "friends" and brother all say sociopathy to me.

The idea of Azula as harmless is maddening. She is easily the most effective villain in the series. I don't even... What? Seriously? People actually try to say that?

Honestly, I can't see her ever being interested in Zhao, and certainly not as a child, mostly because he's not nearly as smart as she is. She would have him as a minion, or not at all. He is a Long Feng to her. And for God's sake, she has clearly never had a relationship before, as seen in The Beach. Azula might be hot and evil, but she is not some kind of femme-fatal.

*makes note to check out Mark Smylie*

Ah, militarism makes sense as well. She's not really trying to hide her gender so that may be the better interpretation.

Yes, Azula is quite the budding sociopath. A while ago I did a post (http://lalunatique.livejournal.com/17835.html) referencing an NYT article (http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/magazine/can-you-call-a-9-year-old-a-psychopath.xml) about what are called prepsychopathic children. It was chilling how well Azula fit the profile, including what you said about reading people extremely well but not caring whom she hurts.

Urgh, I'd totally forgotten about the Ursa-turned-Azula-evil theory and just remembering it makes me sick. There is no sane reading of canon in which Ursa is an abuser, and it's really one of those things that say more about the fans saying this crap than about the canon. Do these people live in a world where Azula's behavior is somehow okay, or Ursa's speaking firmly (not angrily, not violently or disparagingly, but firmly) against such outrageous behavior is somehow abusive and not part of being a responsible parent? I don't even want to know the kind of people who have such a warped view of behavior and discipline.

Research indicates there's definitely an inborn component to psychopathy, and in the article I've linked it says about 50% of prepsychopathic children go on to become psychopathic adults. On the flip side 50% do not, and it seems loving parenting can make a difference--sort of a double bind, since it's hard to be loving to someone who seems incapable of love. I hope against hope your stalker grew up to be a healthier adult, though her family situation and lack of discipline couldn't have helped there.

Artesia could have been pretty big if the story were complete, but it's been abandoned mid-Volume 4 for like eight years now and I don't have a lot of hope of its continuing. The three volumes that are out are good with a memorable central character, epic story, and a sprawling world that also became the subject of a tabletop role-playing game, but my guess is Smylie couldn't deal with the sheer scale of the story. He's a much writer than, say, Gisele Lagace whose art I love but whose writing leaves much to be desired, but for something of Artesia's size he may have been better off with a co-writer.

The last line: "He doesn't scream as much," he told me. "He just does what he wants and then lies about it." Struck me. That was my stalker. She was never loud or overtly violent (at least not at that age) ad her aggression was always directed either at one of her siblings or one of her carefully picked victims, chosen for their perceived lack of trustworthiness by everybody around. She later would become more overtly violent as she got bolder, and that was what led to her getting some kind of psychiatric care at 19. There wasn't a lot of impulsiveness, in other words, just a lot of calculation. This makes me wonder (and I hope I'm wrong) if nurturing behavior on the part of the family does more to teach the child to mimic normal behavior when they have to or disguise their psychopathy than really help them, because my stalker's mother was very nurturing to her, and her father treated her as his shining light, and she was very good at hiding what she was in public.

Do these people live in a world where Azula's behavior is somehow okay, or Ursa's speaking firmly (not angrily, not violently or disparagingly, but firmly) against such outrageous behavior is somehow abusive and not part of being a responsible parent?

The latter I think. The idea that a good mother should always think their child is the best, and perfect, and there's nothing wrong with them, and that's real love is strong in some people. The fact that my mother (and father) did not go into denial about my extremely bizarre childhood behavior is what got my seizures and immune disorder diagnosed, and is the reason I'm alive. My stalker's denial about her daughter's behavior led to her daughter having free reign to torture her mother's other children and a string of unrelated victims. Somehow I can't see a mother thinking something is wrong with her child's behavior as a lack of love or a sign of abuse, but a lot of people do.

That's a real shame. I understand what it's like to lose steam on a story, but it's a shame.

Its not just Ursa who gets blamed; I've seen fans imply that Iroh is a misogynist because he didn't reach out to his niece like he did Zuko. I've seen remarks about how Zuko was a bad brother who wasn't nice to her. 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. There seems to be a feeling that someone, such as Ursa or Iroh, should have fixed her. I also get the feeling that this is one of the reasons why some people ship TyZula; they want Ty Lee to heal her with unconditional love. To me it seems like a classic abusive relationship except that the abuser is female instead of male.

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.

Somehow I can't see a mother thinking something is wrong with her child's behavior as a lack of love or a sign of abuse, but a lot of people do.

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.

Well, her apologists tend to focus on a few moments in The Beach and ignore just about everything else or perhaps they think the behavior in Zuko Alone comprised her worst moments rather than being typical for her. One fairly common argument is that Azula had a harder time than Zuko because he had good people in his life and she didn't after Ursa left.

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.

I've seen fans imply that Iroh is a misogynist because he didn't reach out to his niece like he did Zuko.

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.

Ugh that seems like a particularly narcissistic view

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...

Redemption isn't something you can realistically do for another person.

THIS

I understand completely about wanting to argue this; I only lurk on the avatar.spirit.net boards because I don't have the eloquence or stamina to take on these people. (there's a 140 page thread on Azula and redemption) so I settle for venting in relative privacy.

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.

I know better than to go over there, or I would end up screaming.

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.

I wonder if there is a greater percentage of female villains in YA - maybe that's related somehow to the evil stepmother archetype in fairy tales. Disney's got Maleficient but also Cruella de Ville. Harry Potter's got Bellatrix Lestrange, but also Umbridge (though Umbridge, too, seems to prefer to be a sidekick). Sarah Cross's Dull Boy has a female villain. Rick Riordan's Olympus books have male and female villains, but in the newer series Gaea seems to be more powerful than any of the gods and must be kept asleep. In the Mythos Academy books, Gwen Frost's main enemy seems to be female (a classic Mean Girl type).

I can't think of many more offhand, but then not all stories have villains at all.

And Ursula, and Cinderella's stepmother, he evil queen in Snow White, Mother Gothel, and... Disney has quite a few, though many of them are from their older movies.

Bellatrix is not only a sidekick, but is fanatially devoted, and possibly infatuated with Voldy. Umbridge, I think would happily take power on her own if she were in a position to do so. Look how fast she changes masters. She's another character who would lose a lot of her punch as a man, without her technocolor cats and pink sweaters. She's like an all grown up Darla Dimple.

YA is disproportionately written by women, as is Romance. Maybe women are more comfortable writing female villains? (Rick Riordan excepted, who draws from a source full of evil witches and vengeful goddesses)

Jim Hines has female villains too, in his fairy tale series which are at least verging on YA - but obviously there's a strong fairy tale influence there, and he's a notable feminist himself.

And he has a truly awesome blog too!

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!

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.

Why couldn't Zuka be more motherly towards Azul? It would have fixed him.

Now why can't those other people just understand that?
/sarcasm

Edited 2012-09-07 04:16 (UTC)

I have no problem thinking that luck and circumstance played a role in Azula's and Zuko's lives, but I get angry when people talk like it's ALL luck which is plainly not true because both these characters made choices, as all people do. As you said, we all have to walk our own paths.

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.

It's always depressing how easily narcissists create enablers. Escape from Freedom indeed.

Don't get me wrong, while I don't think Ozai turned Azula evil (though he clearly provided rotten genes) I do think he shaped the direction in which to channel her proclivities. I also think his abuse of her contributed to her breakdown at the end of the series. He probably didn't treat her with any real love. Most psychopaths learn to manipulate the affection other people have for them, but we only ever see Azula manipulate with fear. I think that's pretty telling.

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.

The fic I referred to was Notes on a Daughter and the Stalking Zuko series by emlettish. I find it good though I don't quite agrees with her take on Azula.

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.

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.

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.

So true. Mostly notable villain from book/movie, etc is male. If there's female villain, then she's only a sidekick.

I also hate tropes "hero won't hit a girl" and "designated chick fight" Please. She's a competent fighter. If the hero fight and defeat her, it won't be called female abuse. Don't want to fight just because she's a female, that's sexist.

If you like anime/manga, just watch Full Metal alchemist. There's a scene heroine fighting male villain. The male villain don't show any mercy and beat the heroine until her arm is broken. The heroine take it cool and continue to fight him. There's also a cool fight between female villain vs male hero.

Yes, he's that huge.

A female fatale villain that not only sexy, but also can fight.

Edited 2013-01-23 06:26 (UTC)

I mentioned Azula before, but she's another good example of a villainess who fights the heroes, and never goes for the designated chick fight. The epic fight in the finale is her verses her brother. And you know what, nobody hated Zuko for fighting a girl, because it wasn't a boy verses a girl, it was Zuko verses Azula.

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Bittercon: Female Villains

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