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.