Bittercon: Female Villains

[attackfish]

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.

Comments

[sharkflip.livejournal.com]

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.

[slimequeen.livejournal.com]

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.

[danielmedic.livejournal.com]

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.

[lavanyasix.livejournal.com]

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.

[lalunatique.livejournal.com]

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.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

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.

[kencana-kencana.livejournal.com]

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.