we’re about to get feminist for a minute, but here’s my advice of the day: let female villains be villains.
go ahead, make them awful, make them ugly, make them horrible human beings. make them bloodthirsty, make them greedy, make them abusive, make them vile, but don’t ever make them anything less than a villain, because it’s the idea of men that women are too pure to achieve true villainy. your classic villains are all men. your classic antiheroes are almost always men. your mainstream culture can’t envision a woman that can be anything more than a blank slate for a man to impress his opinion upon; their flaws must be nothing, their weakness must be zilch, and, therefore, their personality must taste like stale bread.
female heroes have to either be wonder woman or black widow – too pure for this world, or sexpot slayers from someone’s wild wet dream. the female villains, though, the female villains can’t be truly evil; poison ivy has to save orphans, harley quinn has to exist in a liminal space where she’s good but still technically a villain. i don’t want to see poison ivy go through a trite redemption arc when i don’t even see her evil in the first place. what the hell does she need to be redeemed from, the narrative squawking, “bad guy over here!” without ever once proving it? no. that’s bullshit. that’s total bullshit. get me a villainous woman i can actually be scared of