It’s time for my favourite annual post: a look back at all the female characters I discovered, revisited, and/or enjoyed watching or reading about across the course of the past year. As I’m sure you know, I start every month with a post that spotlights a female character of note, the only two rules being that she has to be a somewhat inspiring figure, and that I can feature only one woman per project (though I can always include more from the same narrative universe in these end-of-year retrospectives).
But last year I decided to do something a little different and make 2025 the Year of the Villainess.
What struck me whilst selecting and compiling these twelve women is that female villains are so often twisted reflections of abnormal femininity. They are women… but wrong.
There’s the overbearing mothers (Norma Bates, Agnes Skinner, the Queen of Shadows in Mirrormask), the abusive nurturers (the Other Mother, Mother Gothel, Nurse Ratchet), the abnormally masculine (Agatha Trunchbull, Lady Macbeth; who asks to be unsexed: “come to my woman’s breasts, and take my milk for gall”), and of course – the crazy bitches (the Queen of Hearts, Daenerys Targaryen, Hexadecimal, Drusilla, even Azula in her final stretch of episodes). In that last case, it’s often the woman’s loosening grip on reality that proves to be her downfall.
Then there are the monstrous mother-figures (pick a stepmother, any stepmother from a fairy tale), the jealous harpies (now pick a stepsister, or any character that’s ever been played by Lucy Punch), the embittered crones desperate to regain their youth (Lamia from Stardust, the Sanderson Sisters, Mother Gothel again), the Alpha Bitches (Regina George, Libby Chessler), the Ice Queens (the White Witch, Hans Christian Anderson’s Snow Queen), the Women Scorned (Hera, Alex Forrest, Isabella of Gisborne) and the Femme Fatales, who use their sexuality to get what they want (Melisandre, the Brides of Dracula – honestly, there are too many of these to name, though shoutout to Delilah, the Ur-Example).
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| It was at that moment Hylas knew... he'd fucked up. |
Occasionally you get women that’ve been possessed by greater powers that transform them into dangerous threats (Jean Grey, Azkadellia from Tin Man), and sometimes they’re just unrelenting, unthinking forces of nature (Shelob, Eris, the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, weather events that are usually given feminine names and pronouns). Oftentimes, many of these categories can overlap.
Just take a moment here to try and imagine any of these archetypes applied to a male villain. It’s not impossible, and yet it’s also much rarer. When men are villains, it’s usually to do with the corruptive influence of power, or misguided motivation born of desperation or deceit, or the complexities of the human psyche, or… ya know, a woman made him do it. For female villains it’s usually about being the wrong type of woman: a bad mother, or a manipulative seductress, or either so emotional that it disrupts her mental faculties, or not emotional enough for her to count as a proper woman.
Obviously not always, but I feel reasonably comfortable making that generalization. When one looks back at some of our earliest villainesses, the likes of Lilith and Circe and Morgan le Fay, it’s easy to see what they have in common: their own hard power (generally manifesting as magic) and a disregard for male authority. What need have they for men when they have their own inherent abilities to serve and protect them? Stories about such figures read more like cautionary tales to a male audience about the dangers that women pose than anything to do with the characters themselves; a warning not only about the sexuality they embody, which can easily lure a man to his doom, but the dangerous subversion of male power.
It’s rare that a female villain is allowed motivation that transcends gender-coded characterization (“who’s the fairest of them all?”) or which doesn’t embody the anxieties the patriarchy has about them (their sexuality, their mental state, their unchecked emotions), or refrains from commenting (even implicitly) on how she should be controlled, dismissed or ridiculed. When someone like Demona from Gargoyles comes along, who is driven by a multitude of inner demons (her self-loathing and guilt, her desire to protect her people from discrimination, her hatred of human beings), it’s worth sitting up and taking notice.
Again, I want to stress that this is a generalization. I’m well aware that the rogue’s gallery of fictional villains has its fair share of abusive fathers, power-crazy tyrants and tantrum-throwing manchildren (the concept of an incel has definitely been the inspiration for several male villains over the last few years). But are there a lot of old men who are vilified for being old and therefore undesirable? Men that are considered unnatural because they’re unfeeling or “icy”? Do we see a lot of men seducing women for nefarious ends (and don’t say James Bond – he’s not only a designated hero, but considered a stud for how many beautiful women he can bed). Are there as many evil stepfathers as there are stepmothers? And if there were, would they be regarded as being as monstrous as an unfit mother?
When there are more male villains anyway, it’s rather obvious to see how the female ones are broadly divided into several recurring categories and themes, and most of them have their roots in what it means to be an “incorrect” type of woman. Simply put, female villains are often the ones that don’t comply with the patriarchy’s expectations of them: to be nurturing, beautiful, virtuous, young, submissive, obliging and preferably sane.
I could write a thesis on all this, but there’s definitely no time for that! Just food for thought as I delve into some of the other compelling villainesses that didn’t make this year’s short list, but who are definitely worth mentioning in some capacity:
Morgan le Fay from Arthurian Legends
Also known as “Morgana” or “Morgaine,” this sorceress very nearly made it onto one of the monthly posts, as she’s as famous as any villainess from Shakespeare or Greek mythology. The only reason she didn’t is because there are so many variations of her, and not all of them paint her as a villain – in fact, she was a heroic figure in two of the three Arthurian-based dramas I watched in 2025, and still held plenty of sympathy in the third.
Even some of her oldest incarnations can portray her as an ambiguous figure, and despite the animosity she holds toward her half-brother, she’s almost always depicted as one of the women that carries him across the waters in his barge to Avalon. She hovers in the background of plenty of other tales published across the centuries: Anonymous’s Gawaine and the Green Knight, Hans Christian Anderson’s The Wild Swans, Cressida Cowell’s The Wizards of Once series, remaining an enigma throughout.
Plenty of noteworthy actresses have brought her to life over the years, each one bringing a different reworking of the character: Helena Bonham Carter, who is made beautiful through fairy glamour, Katie McGrath, whose compelling Start of Darkness arc disappointingly became a one-dimensional smirk-a-thon, Eva Green as a power-hungry princess robbed of her birthright, Helen Mirren as a sultry seductress, Julianna Margulies as a mystical priestess, along with plenty more. She is a woman with many faces and as ephemeral as mist, making any attempt to pin down a definitive interpretation as pointless.
To speak more broadly when it comes to female villains in general, a huge number are placed under the umbrella term of “witch,” from the Greek Circe and the Biblical Witch of Endor, to the Wyrd Sisters and Baba Yaga, to the three Sanderson sisters of Hocus Pocus or (just to throw in a completely obscure example) Orla Brady’s Tamlyn in Sinbad. Witches have always reflected cultural anxiety and made for easy scapegoats in times of trouble, which segues nicely into our next entry…
The Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz
Is there a more iconic female villain… ever? To really underscore just how influential Margaret Hamilton was in the role of the Wicked Witch, consider that for millions of people, this is the character they immediately think of when they hear the word “witch.” All her key attributes: the pointed hat, the broomstick, the cackle, the long fingers – were consolidated in the popular imagination by her performance.
This is especially true when it comes to her distinctive green skin, which was a creative decision made by the studio to capitalize on “glorious technicolour” and has become synonymous with witches ever since (the exact shade is even copyrighted!) I repeat: the cliché of the green-skinned witch was an invention of this film, and there are no recorded examples of any such thing prior to its release.
Many of our childhoods were spent being captivated by this woman, and though she never crossed into being traumatically evil (we’ll leave that to Angelica Houston’s The Grand High Witch) there was something about her: the attention she drew, the fear she inspired, the power she could call upon. She’s so much more present in this film than in Baum’s original novel, and she’s since spiralled out into yet more interpretations: Evillene in The Wiz, Azkadellia in Tin Man, Theodora in Oz: The Great and Powerful, Zelena in Once Upon a Time, and of course, Elphaba in Wicked.
And she not only has the film’s most memorable leitmotif, but also some of its most famous lines: “I’ll get you my pretty, and your little dog too,” “what a world, what a world,” and “fly, my pretties, fly!” – though of course she never actually said that last one. (The line is simply “fly, fly!” but Pop Culture Osmosis means everyone combines it with the “my pretty” phrase she utters earlier). And of course, one of the all-time greatest entrances committed to film – interrupting the triumphant final note of “Ding, Dong the Witch is Dead” in a billowing burst of orange smoke. As far as big entrances go, I think it tops even Darth Vader emerging from the smoke in A New Hope.
So, is the Wicked Witch of the West the most famous witch in the world? Well, she reshaped the archetype and changed how we visualize evil witches forever. Her look is now considered generic, when at the time it was wholly innovative, and the qualities she portrayed introduced a brand-new cliché that witches (real or fictional) are still trying to escape from. So I’d say yes, she’s definitely up there.
Aunt Gladys from Weapons
We were introduced to Aunt Gladys only last year and yet she made such an impact it feels like we’ve known about her forever. And maybe we have – as C.S. Lewis once said: “we are born knowing the witch, aren’t we?” Despite Amy Madigan’s half-campy, half-menacing performance, there’s something very primal and familiar about this old crone.
But it’s difficult to stray too far from a deeply misogynistic interpretation of this archetype – she is after all an ugly old crone who kidnaps children in the hopes of regaining her health and youth. What could be more repulsive? (I say that sarcastically and sincerely). She’s the witch in the gingerbread house, the wicked stepmother before her mirror, the bloodsucking vampire, the cuckoo in the nest/neighbourhood – everything we’ve been taught to hate and fear about women since the earliest stages of our childhood. But hey, when a cliché is performed with this level of panache, sometimes you just gotta go with it.
Zach Cregger apparently gave Amy Madigan a choice on what this entity really was: either an elderly woman who turned to dark magic to stave off illness, or an ancient being doing her best to impersonate an ordinary human being, constantly moving from town to town to perform her parasitical magic. Maybe one day we’ll learn more, but for now, that she remains such an enigma is what makes her so terrifying.
Bavmorda and Mombi from Willow and Return to Oz
This choice is more in honour of an actress than the characters themselves, as the late, great Jean Marsh certainly commits to her “evil queen” roles in Return to Oz and Willow, successfully disturbing the dreams of more than a few kids growing up in the eighties. It’s actually rather interesting to compare these two characters: Mombi’s motivation seems to be merely spite and vanity, in which she steals the heads of lovely young women for her own gratification, but who is ultimately subservient to the Nome King. One her final scenes depict her groveling on the floor in front of him.
In marked contrast, Bavmorda uses her sorcery to pursue a traditionally more male-coded ambition: world domination. This character is a typical fantasy Dark Lord, whose interests lie solely in conquest and subjugation, with no clear motivation beyond the fact that this is what Dark Lords do. The unusual thing is, of course, that she’s a woman – and not a sexy seductress either, but a middle-aged matron. In fact, I’d go so far as to say her costuming deliberately tries to code her as rather nun-like.
The character’s one concession to femininity is that she’s a mother, though it doesn’t feel like a narrative accident that her young, beautiful daughter betrays her for the love of a man, or that her arch-nemesis is an infant girl she tries to kill in an arcane ritual. Sure, we’ve seen daughters double-cross their tyrannical fathers for a hot young boyfriend before, but I’m struggling to recall any male Dark Lords whose downfall hinged on a baby girl.
That’s the point of course. Like the Evil Queen in Snow White, Bavmorda and Mombi are older women who are intent on destroying their younger counterparts. An old and deeply misogynistic cliché, but it makes for some evocative sequences, whether it’s the headless Mombi lurching after Dorothy in the hall of mirrors, or Bavmorda using her sorcery to turn an entire army into pigs. Circe, who was surely the inspiration for this scene, would be proud.
Fleabag’s Stepmother from Fleabag
I had to get an evil stepmother in here somewhere, they’re a staple of the genre. (Though to get technical, this character actually starts as the protagonist’s godmother, before she marries her widower father). As it happens, some of the earliest evil stepmothers in fairy tales weren’t stepmothers at all. The first edition of the Grimm Brothers’ take on Snow White describes the Evil Queen as the princess’s mother, only for this to get changed to stepmother in subsequent editions.
On a similar note, I vividly remember a quasi-cousin years ago recounting the plot of The Sixth Sense to me before I had seen it, and describing Kyra’s killer as “her stepmother,” even though there’s no indication in the film that she’s anything other than the girl’s biological mother. Clearly the idea of a mother poisoning her own child was too much for my cousin to comprehend.
My point is, stepmothers come in handy for exploring the tension that can exist between old and young women (the jealousies, the insecurities, the conflicts) without things getting too fraught. In the case of Fleabag, the unnamed stepmother is a rampant narcissist, around whom everything must revolve at all times, and who for whatever reason has targeted our protagonist as a rival that must be destroyed at all costs.
What makes the character so compelling is the fact she’s played by the insurmountable Olivia Coleman, who slathers every dig, every barb, every sneer and insult in a veneer a sugary sweetness that breaks only very occasionally. Look, just watch the video:
Bet Sykes from Pennyworth
I am allowed one completely obscure female villain on this list! No doubt named after the Dickensian villain, Sykes was played by Paloma Faith across the three seasons of Pennyworth, a truly bizarre Batman prequel which not only explored the early years of Alfred Pennyworth before he became a butler to the Wayne family, but which seemed to take place in an alternate Britain of the sixties run by fascists. It’s truly something, and though I’ve only seen the first season, Sykes was easily one of its quirky highlights.
Let’s see, she’s a lesbian sociopath devotedly in love with Pennyworth’s girlfriend (who was terrified of her) that gets saved from public execution by her sister and gradually forms a quasi-friendship with our main character. Wikipedia tells me that she dies and gets resurrected as a P.W.E. (person with enhancements) that gives her preternatural physical strength. Man, I really need to get back to this show.
So much of her appeal is to be found in Paloma Faith’s performance, for as terribly dangerous and deranged as Sykes is, she sees herself as a completely normal young woman, and can’t fathom why anyone would be afraid of her. Like I said... it’s something.
Kuvira from The Legend of Korra
Azula is obviously Avatar: The Last Airbender’s most memorable female villain – heck, its most memorable villain, period. But Kuvira, who was introduced at the end of The Legend of Korra’s third season and becomes its antagonist in the fourth is – dare I say it? – even more interesting. Designed as a deliberate contrast to the show’s previous villain Zaheer, who was essentially a libertarian trying to sow chaos and anarchy, Kuvira was a budding authoritarian who strove for law and order by any means necessary.
She also became something of a mirror to Korra herself, and that their names both start with K can’t be a coincidence. When Korra was psychologically at her lowest point, Kuvira was calm, disciplined and in control. Gradually the tables were turned, leading to a Not So Different Remark from Korra (which is interesting, as it’s usually the villain, not the hero, making such comparisons) and a measure of grace extended to Kuvira despite her assortment of crimes.
Like Azula, there are plenty of Freudian Excuses at work: abandonment issues, a need for control, a very overachieving foster mother. Despite her goals and tactics, it’s not difficult to discern where Kuvira is coming from, and her rehabilitation continues well into the graphic novels (which I maintain are a pretty good continuation – why is everyone so down on them?)
Dedra Meero from Andor
One of the many gifts of Andor was that it gave us an “on the ground” look at the way the Empire was run – not with the space wizards and dark lords and horned assassins, but the ordinary people that kept the machine chugging along. Foremost among them was Dedra Meero, who has many admirable qualities: intelligence, initiative, determination, competence, and enough wisdom to realize that the Empire’s hack-and-slash methods are often detrimental to getting results. As a result of all this, her boss warns her early on to: “watch your back.”
This drive ends up being her undoing, as her determination to find the rebel agent known as Axis, long after his relevance to the Resistance has passed, creates as intel leak that eventually leads to her imprisonment and the destruction of the Death Star. But before that, we get to explore the portrayal of a woman who is so fixated upon her own career advancement that she’s long-since given up on her own humanity. Perhaps she never had it in the first place, as being raised in an “Imperial kinderblock” can’t have been much fun.
In many ways she’s a pitiable figure, as you feel there wasn’t much chance for her to grow up to be anything other than what she is, and a part of you does want to see her succeed in her all-male work environment… but then you watch her torture a woman or assist in a genocide and you’re hit in the face with the horrifying mundanity of evil, in which participating in mass murder is just the means to an end, regardless of how jittery she might feel in the minutes leading up to the bloodbath.
Dedra is a compelling look at how evil cannot work unless there are willing, unquestioning participants in its employ, and Denise Gough delivers an incredible performance that’s completely bereft of any vanity. You can see for yourself in various interviews that she’s an attractive woman, but as Dedra she commits completely to the ugly sneer that perpetually marks her face, an expression that only starts to crack at the show’s conclusion, when all her hubris finally catches up to her.
Her greatest mistake was believing that the Empire would reward her ambition and drive – hah! Fascism only wants your obedience, something Dedra finds out the hard way, after she’s lost everything to the machine that she served so loyally.
Amy Dunne from Gone Girl
To quote the character herself: “I’m that cunt.” The monstrousness of Amy, the sheer levels of her cunning and manipulation, her ten-steps-ahead planning, the unmitigated narcissistic psychotic joy she gets out of ruining people’s lives… is actually a bit inspiring. No one likes to admit it, but it is.
A cheating husband, a controlling ex-boyfriend, parents that exploited her childhood for their shitty children’s books, a town of rubberneckers and busybodies who are more thrilled than concerned by the disappearance of a young housewife – they all get a dose of their own medicine when someone even worse than themselves decides to wreak vengeance by faking her own murder.
In many ways, she plugs in nicely to what I was saying at the start of this post: that female villains are often the embodiments of men’s worst fears about women: in this case, Amy is a Woman Scorned, Manipulative Bitch, Wounded Gazelle and Femme Fatale all in one. Who could blame them for being terrified?
She almost works too well as a villain, as there have been several chilling real-life incidences of men using the “gone girl” defense after their significant others have mysteriously disappeared. Likewise, Amy’s false rape allegations have not aged well in a world where they’re rarely taken seriously anyway. It’s important to remember that Amy is not out to revenge all of womenkind, as she dislikes women just as much as she does men (remember her derisive “cool girl” monologue?) And yet, you can’t help but admire her just a tiny bit, even if you would never, ever invite someone like her into your life.
Because this is a work of fiction. Nobody was harmed in the rampage of Amy Dunne, and there’s a dark delight to be had in watching her elaborate subterfuge unfold.
Marisa Coulter from the His Dark Materials trilogy
Marisa Coulter (usually referred to as Mrs Coulter) is almost an accumulation of several villainess archetypes: she’s certainly a Femme Fatale, using her sexuality and charm to get what she wants. She’s a Manipulative Bitch, who can coax and wheedle others into doing her bidding. Although another (more benevolent) female character is overtly referred to as “the serpent,” Mrs Coulter very much embodies the negative connotations of that creature: she’s sensual, cunning and not to be trusted, with a honeyed but forked tongue that can do great evil.
As the story unfolds we gradually discover the true depths of her depravity: how she entices children off the streets in order to perform cruel experiments on them, the zeal with which she engages in torture and murder, the ease with which she lies and manipulates. Her inner soul is on display for all to see: a golden monkey that is beautiful to look at and yet deeply unnerving in how violent it can become, often at the drop of a hat.
Mrs Coulter has committed her life to the Magisterium (the Church) not out of a sense of true faith, but because it is a system that best facilitates her own ambitions; an alliance which certainly makes for odd bedfellows: an ancient misogynistic institution and a highly sexualized young woman. You can tell, despite her cruelty, that Pullman enjoyed writing her, with descriptions such as: “a lady in a long yellow-red fox-fur coat, a beautiful young lady whose dark hair falls shining delicately under the shade of her fur-lined hood. The lady’s daemon is moving out from beside the fox-fur coat. He is in the form of a monkey, but no ordinary monkey, his fur is long and silky and of the most deep and lustrous gold.”
Despite it all, a tiny sliver of love for her child finally manages to sneak its way into her, and for Lyra’s sake she uses all her powers to destroy the angel Metatron – condemning herself to fall forever into the Abyss. Even after her body dies of either its injuries or starvation, her sentient ghost will still be plummeting downwards, into the darkness, for all eternity. Excuse me while I go scream into a pillow.
Miranda Richardson from Most of Her Back Catalogue
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Do you need a villainess who can project coldness, madness, stateliness, childishness, rank snobbery, or some combination of all of the above? Call Miranda Richardson.
This is another “more the actress than the character” entry since Miranda Richardson filled my late childhood and adolescence with her particular brand of villainy: the womanchild Queen Elizabeth I in Blackadder, the wicked stepmother Queen Elspeth in Snow White: Fairest of Them All, the cunning and raspy-voiced Queen Mab in Merlin, the cold and manipulative Lady Crane in Sleepy Hollow, the cruel Queen in Jim Henson’s The Storyteller (episode “The Three Ravens”), the mad Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland… hmm, there are a lot of Queens in that lineup, which speaks to the level of class and inherent power she brings to each role.
She’s a controlling mother as the Duchess of Kent in Young Victoria, the snobbish aristocratic Lady Ashford in Belle, the religious fanatic Emily Brent in And Then There Were None, the gossipy tabloid reporter Rita Skeeter in Harry Potter, and the sadistic Mrs Tweedy in Chicken Run. (She was also going to be in the cancelled Game of Thrones spinoff Bloodmoon, and I’m holding out hope that one day we’re going to see some of that footage).
In fact, she’s probably played each of the villainess archetypes that I mentioned at the beginning of this post, mostly in a lot of period dramas. She just has the face for it.
Honorary Mentions:
Hester Shaw from the Mortal Engines quartet
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Hester Shaw’s life is a sad, strange one. Orphaned and disfigured at a young age, she falls into the care of Shrike, a terrifying resurrected soldier who teaches her his only skill: how to kill. Finding she has a talent for it, Hester goes in search of her parents’ killer, the explorer Thaddeus Valentine, only to be thwarted in her attempt to assassinate him by the boy she later falls in love with.
After the destruction of London and some romantic jealousies, she eventually settles down and has a child – but this isn’t the end of her story. In fact, it’s only the end of book two out of four, and many years later her daughter is kidnapped, requiring Hester to call upon all her hunting skills to track her down – only to find she prefers this violent, merciless lifestyle.
Hester is not in any way a likeable character, in fact at times she can get quite frightening. Out of “love” for Tom Natsworthy and fear that she’s losing him to another woman, she calls upon a number of mercenaries to destroy the Traction City upon which they’re travelling, caring nothing for the innocent lives aboard if it gets her what she wants. Years later, she abandons her husband and daughter because their life of domesticity is “boring” and she longs to return to the hardscrabble life of a bounty hunter with Shrike.
There are so many complexities to Hester: her self-loathing, her identity crisis over her father, her insecurity about Tom, her affinity with Shrike and the appealing possibility of having no feelings, her complete lack of maternal instincts, the fact her search for her daughter becomes an excuse to embrace violence again – she makes all the wrong choices, she never fits in, and she never truly finds peace.
Like Jen from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or Scarlet O’Hara from Gone with the Wind or Alicent Hightower from House of the Dragon, Hester is too much of an antihero to be considered an outright villain, but she remains an unforgettable character, with dark pools of turmoil inside her: secrets, inadequacies, violent tendencies – and because there’s no therapy in this dystopian future, she’s got no chance of working through it. Though she’s reconciled with Tom before the end, there’s no epiphany or reckoning or arrival at some greater understanding for her.
With her scarred face and iconic red scarf, she strides through this series as its most compelling character, and though her life is an unhappy one, I’m glad Reeve never compromised on her lack of compromise. She was who she was, significant flaws and all.
Becky Sharpe from Vanity Fair
Conniving little Becky Sharpe is a creature of contradictions, especially in the feelings she musters in the reader. In any other book, especially these days, we would be rooting for the underdog to climb the social ladder and stick it to all the aristocratic snobs that get in her way. Sure, she manipulates and deceives, but the people on the receiving end deserve it, right?
Well, the difficulties of enjoying Becky’s antics are to be found within the very first chapter, when she defiantly throws her school’s parting gift of a dictionary out the carriage window at the dour, disapproving old Miss Pinkerton. It’s a funny, triumphant moment – or at least it would be if we didn’t know that Miss Pinkerton’s kindly sister had gone to considerable trouble to ensure Becky received a copy of the dictionary along with all the other girls.
Becky cannot snub Miss Pinkerton without disregarding the feelings of her sister, and so it goes throughout Becky’s unscrupulous ascent of the social hierarchy. It’s impossible to get to the top without kicking a few good people along the way – and let’s be clear, she has very little compunction about doing so! Various adaptations, especially the one starring Reese Witherspoon, cannot help but admire the character’s tenacity, though when you read the book, it may come down to what you dislike most: the corruption and hypocrisy of the English class system, or a girl who will do anything to be a part of it.
Another good encapsulation of Becky’s mindset is when her husband and son discuss Jane Sheepshanks, another genuinely good woman. At their praise, Becky sneers: “I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year.” She truly seems to believe it’s easier to be good if you are rich, though it’s becoming increasingly clear with each passing day just how depraved and monstrous that billionaire class really is. That’s the tragedy of Becky Sharpe – the empty, paltry prize she’s after isn’t worth the having, and she’ll never, ever know it.
Miss Havisham and Estella from Great Expectations
I sometimes wonder if these two were the inspiration for Amy Dunne – Miss Havisham is the Woman Scorned and Estella the instrument of her revenge. But in their case, I can’t bring myself to call them villains, as both are just as much victims of the world they live in as they are antagonistic forces in the famous Dickensian story.
In her youth, Havisham made the mistake of giving her whole heart to someone (the wise know you must always keep a tiny bit back for yourself) and subsequently had it broken. In her suffering, she adopts a little girl called Estella, and raises her to be a punishment for all mankind: beautiful, sultry, cold, unfeeling, beguiling… the whole thing is a fascinating premise, and an example of misplaced vengefulness at its finest.
Well, in theory. You don’t need me to tell you that Havisham’s plan is insane, and the two women don’t really manage to bring harm to anyone except Pip, our innocent young protagonist. Nice going ladies, you certainly showed those men a thing or two!
Yet you can’t fully condemn the pair of them. Havisham is a twisted wreck of a woman who can’t get over her heartache, and poor Estella never stood a chance after being raised by such a creature. She’s only what Havisham molded her into, and the little girl she was quickly loses her innocence to the education she’s subjected to. The psychological games that must have taken place between these two would have been off the charts, but sadly this is a tale told from Pip’s point-of-view and so whatever twisted Gothic codependent dramas went down between them tragically remains off page.
Interestingly, Havisham is usually portrayed as a shrivelled old hag in her rotting wedding attire, when in fact the timetable of the novel’s events mean she still has to be rather young – late thirties or forties. Yet our image of the embittered old spinster-crone is pervasive, and only recently have we seen Havisham being played at an appropriate age by the likes of Helena Bonham Carter and Gillian Anderson.
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There are more. So many more. But the truth is, I’m not familiar with Nurse Ratchet from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Annie Wilkes from Misery or Cathy Ames from East of Eden, even though they’re some of the most famous female villains out there. There are also longstanding iconic villainesses I simply didn’t have room to showcase such as Ursula the Sea Witch from The Little Mermaid, or the Queen of Hearts from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, or even Delilah herself from the Bible (though the 1949 film sees fit to make her a sympathetic figure. So often these old films surprise you, in this case that it had the wherewithal to give the world’s most famous seductress depth and regret).
Angelica Houston’s Grand High Witch left her mark on a many a nineties child (heck, my second cousin had to be taken to a therapist after she saw The Witches as a child and was so traumatized she started having panic attacks whenever she saw an old woman) and Disney can always be counted upon to deliver a larger-than-life animated villainess (I’ve already mentioned most of them, so let’s off check the rest of the boxes: Lady Tremaine, Cruella de Ville, the Evil Queen, Yzma, Mim, and… er, Madame Medusa, I guess. Does anyone else remember her?)
Psychotic children can also be a lot of fun (even if many of them are actually adults trapped in a child’s body) whether it’s Abigail or Claudia, M3gan or Esther Coleman – again, female characters are portrayed as horrifying subversions of what they’re meant to be; in the case of little girls, innocent and sweet and harmless. This is also the crux of characters like Jane Hudson in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? or Baby Doll in Batman: The Animated Series, each reflecting a distorted view of girlhood, whether it’s an elderly woman behaving like a child, or a grown woman who cannot age due to a genetic condition.
Heck, Batman gives us quite a few unforgettable villainesses, whether it’s Harley Quinn or Catwoman or Poison Ivy, or antiheroes like Amanda Waller, though the MCU is less on the ball. Off the top of my head I can only think of Cate Blanchett’s Hela and whatever the heck was going on with Wanda in the Doctor Strange sequel.
We can’t forget the nihilistic Jobu Tupaki in Everything Everywhere All at Once, or the power-hungry Nancy Downs in The Craft, or Elsa Schneider in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (who has a great humanizing moment when she weeps at the burning of books during a Nazi rally, a reaction which ultimately doesn’t mean a damn thing since it doesn’t spur her to stop working with the Nazis).
Ooh, then there’s the Other Mother from Coraline, the cruel Miss Minchin from A Little Princess, Cersei Lannister from Game of Thrones, the repulsive Dolores Umbridge from Harry Potter (so weird that her creator ended up just like her), the enticing Carmilla from… well, Carmilla, and Morgause from Arthurian legend – she’s so often conflated with Morgan le Fay that a lot of people forget she was originally the mother of Mordred. And shout out to the Reverend Mother of Kirklees Abbey who successfully poisons and murders Robin Hood. We know so little about her, and yet it was a woman’s hand that finally felled the legendary hero.
Also, would Hyacinth Bucket from Keeping Up Appearances count as a villain? She certainly was a menace to her neighbours…
As for things I watched this year specifically, I greatly enjoyed Sarah Parrish’s performance as Pasiphae in the otherwise terrible Atlantis, as she managed just the right balance of campiness and sincerity. Christina Cole had a small but juicy role as the snotty Blanche Ingram in 2006’s Jane Eyre (spare a thought for that foolish character, who is a false lead twice over – first because Rochester is already married, and secondly because he never had any real interest in her anyway).
Tamzin Grieg took on the role of Malvolia in Twelfth Night and definitely drew some pathos from the situation, while Emma Corrin as Cassandra Nova was so good in Deadpool and Wolverine, I dearly hope they find a way to bring her back. And of course, the Xenomorph Queen in Aliens. Again, we’re talking iconic levels of villainy here.
And though I’m getting ahead of myself, I’m currently watching Emma Rigby as the Red Queen in Once Upon a Time in Wonderland, and she’s killing it. I vividly recall people ridiculing her performance back when it first aired in 2013 for being too artificial and exaggerated… only for the show to hit the halfway mark and reveal that this was precisely the point. It was all part of the showy façade the character was putting on.
Villains in general usually come in two flavours: either just misunderstood, or guilty of crimes so heinous that they’re completely unforgivable (though if they’re popular enough, they’ll probably be given a free pass by the narrative anyway). In the case of Rigby’s Anastasia, she does do terrible things, but never to such an extent that she feels undeserving of forgiveness, or unable to atone for what she’s done. As such, the story works. (Certainly much better than Regina’s arc in the mother-show, whose mass murder and rape of other characters is just glossed over by the writers).
Finally, it’s my opinion that everyone is allowed to have ONE (1) villain character they can defend to the death, and mine is definitely Isabella of Gisborne from the BBC’s Robin Hood. SHE DID NOTHING WRONG! I’m not kidding, I will defend every last thing she did, up to and including her decision to execute Meg.
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| Image of a woman not doing anything wrong, ever. |
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So, when it comes to the Wicked Witch, the Mistress of All Evil, the Serving-Looks Cuntress, her Satanic Magnificence, or just That Bitch, what is it about female villains that make them so captivating? How are they different from male villains? Does being a woman make them scarier? More sexualized? More effective?
I think the reason we enjoy female villains to the extent we do is because they step outside the designated roles permitted for women. By definition, they have to be selfish or psychotic, subversive or sultry, hideous or powerful or all of the above. Whether she’s a demonic force that devours babies or a cruel mean girl who takes cheerleading way too seriously, the fact that she’s a terrible person is oddly alluring – because she’s free. She can do whatever, say whatever, feel however she wants. She doesn’t care what people think of her, and she doesn’t feel guilty about anything she thinks or feels. She can be overtly sexual or grotesquely ugly, speak her mind or not share with anyone, act rageful or vengeful or petty... she’s free.
Even when they’re framed as distortions of what society thinks a woman should be, even when the narrative ends up punishing them for their transgressions, there’s always something engrossing or even enjoyable about watching female villains – and they’re often far more memorable than their male counterparts.
So if I could draw one conclusion about the subject of female villainy after twelve months of highlighting some of my favourite female villains, it’s that their appeal lies in the simple fact that (to one extent or another) they are free. In turn, watching them is freeing. And that is a very enticing concept.
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But what about the rest of the female characters I watched this year? How did they do? Well, I’m not going to mention everyone, as another good thing about devoting a year to villainesses is that I now have a year’s worth of positive female characters in my back catalogue, which is a relief since there have been times in the past when I found it difficult to find anyone to spotlight.
Honestly, it was a bit of a mixed bag. On catching up with so many of the big franchise instalments of the past few years, I was disappointed to find that Lucilla in Gladiator II was completely wasted, Elsa in Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning was pointlessly killed off, and Asha in Disney’s Wish was practically a non-entity. Two years later and do people even remember that film?
Moana’s sequel film was pretty lacklustre (though it made bank, so obviously something worked), and the stories of three other fairly significant female characters came to a disappointing end: Claudia in The Dragon Prince just sort of gets ignored, Belinda Chandra on Doctor Who ends up saddled with a child she didn’t ask for, and Eleven from Stranger Things is – maybe dead? Maybe in exile? Heck, even if I found a way to reconcile myself to that, I’m even more annoyed that the Duffers went to all the trouble of bringing back Kali only to make her a dead plot device. (And I otherwise generally liked the final season!)
I was also pretty bummed to watch the latest big-screen treatment of The Three Musketeers and discover that they went ahead with the death of Constance de Bonacieux. Yes, I KNOW she dies in the book, and at least this adaptation doesn’t make Milady directly responsible, but I thought we’d all collectively agreed to grant this character clemency and let her live! Nobody wants to see Constance get fridged these days.
That’s not even getting into the treatment of women in shows like Camelot (Morgan le Fay, Designated Villain), Crossbones (Nenna, Chuck Cunningham Syndrome), Sinbad (Nala, abruptly Put on a Bus), NBC’s Dracula (Lucy, Psycho Lesbian), or Atlantis (Medusa, Stuffed into the Fridge) – though they at least have the excuse of airing over a decade ago. We should be doing better now! Then there are the women who feel like they’ve been temporally displaced. The last Pirates of the Caribbean film was a turd, but Carina Smythe stuck out like a sore thumb in the same way Talisa did in Game of Thrones: she was too modern, too manufactured, too self-consciously a cutout figure of what a clueless male writer thinks a Strong Female Character should look like. She ends up being one of those “I like science!” girls, whose stated interest has no impact on the plot and provides no insight into her character. (Heck, Elizabeth Swann turns up in the last few seconds and doesn’t get to speak a word).
I’m having some internal conflict lately about this sort of thing: obviously female characters that are no longer distressed damsels or useless loads is a good thing, but if they still aren’t being written with anything that remotely resembles interiority or realism, then we’re really not that much better off than we were eighty years ago.
But I’ve kept most of my ire for Netflix’s live-action take on Avatar: The Last Airbender, and in order to save time, I’m just going to cut-and-paste my comments back when I watched it:
[The show’s] worse crime is the treatment of the characters. Everyone suffers to one extent or another, but Katara definitely gets the worst of it. The thing that gets my goat about the shippers who wanted her to hook up with Zuko is all the faux feminist screeds they’ve come up with in the intervening years, which only exist in order to elevate their shipping grievances to the level of a moral violation.
All that blather about how she became an “air-bending broodmare” and a “voiceless prize for Aang” … well, how do you like her now she’s been written YOUR way, as meek and bland and stripped of all her important attributes? It's neatly summed up with the fact that it is not Katara’s anger that releases Aang from the iceberg, but a timid attempt to waterbend.
These days it’s more important that a female character be likeable than human, and since we’re terrified of girls being righteously angry instead of sweet and submissive, Katara has been remade into a vapid girlboss nurturer – just the way fandom likes them. Because the less complicated a girl is, the easier she is to project on, so in this case I really hope they do go ahead with making Zutara canon. Like Reylo, it deserves to exist in an embarrassingly inferior product. Sometimes the worse thing you can do to a fandom is give them exactly what they want.
This is the future of female leads, and right on cue there are new reports that Toph will be characterized as more feminine. Just FUCK OFF. FUCK OFF FOREVER!!
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Whew, okay – let’s move to more positive matters.
I kickstarted the year with some Shakespeare, and sometimes, if you look at it the right way, the Bard gives his female characters their due. Ellie Kendrick brings an unforeseen amount of spunk to Juliet at the Globe’s 2009 production of Romeo and Juliet, while Phoebe Fox knows how to wring the laughs out of the Countess Olivia in the National Theatre’s 2017 take on Twelfth Night. Viola has got to be Shakespeare’s most winsome heroine, and I can’t imagine anyone not rooting for her, an assignment that Tamara Lawrance fully understood. (I’ve also seen The Merry Wives of Windsor for the first time this February, and as I said to my friend at the time, it felt like an apology for The Taming of the Shrew, so more on that later).
Women often get short shrift in historical fiction (Florence Pugh and Lily Rose Depp do their utmost as Elizabeth de Burgh and Catherine of Valois, but the writing simply isn’t there) which means that Jodie Cormer’s performance as Marguerite de Carrouges in The Last Duel is worth paying attention to. A Rashomon-style film about the last duel fought in France over a woman’s accusation of rape is pretty fraught material, but the film takes advantage of its own medium to grant veracity to her narrative. Each retelling of the chain of events that lead up to the attack starts with a placard that reads “the truth according to Sir Jean de Carrouges” or “the truth according to Jacques le Gris,” but when it’s Marguerite’s turn, the words fade out until what remains is simply “the truth.”
As someone who is already interested by the concept of fiction and conflicting testimonies and the “truth” of stories, this adds another layer of fascination. Even though the film is based on real events, it’s still a work of fiction – but that gave the writers and director the power to decide what actually happened.
And they decide to brook no room for debate or denial. Despite the levels of cross-examination that Marguerite is subjected to in the story, the audience is not permitted to argue the facts of what happened to her outside the context of the film. Marguerite’s version is framed as the incontrovertible truth – the writers believed her, and they crafted this story as proof of her claims. There’s a real power to this decision, which in turn leads to a profound sense of relief that’s almost dizzying. The film made her truth the objective truth – it’s fictional and yet it’s real at the same time.
(And for the record, not a single word of Marguerite de Carrouges’s testimony in her own words exists).
Towards the start of the year I revisited some of my favourite authors: Patricia McKillip, Meredith Anne Pierce, Garth Nix, Susanna Clarke, Frances Hardinge, Philip Reeve – and one of the many things they all have in common is the care and interest with which they write their female characters. Nettle of Hardinge’s Unraveller is young woman working through her trauma by helping others, McKillip’s Gulia Dulcet from Song of the Basilisk is a lover of beauty but also possessed of deep common sense, Garth Nix introduced me to the mildly hapless but headstrong Susan Arkshaw in The Left-Handed Booksellers of London, and Brown Hannah of Pierce’s Treasure in the Heart of the Tanglewood goes through a transformative experience from Green to Golden to Russet in her seasonally inspired take on the Persephone myth.
And as for Reeve – where do I start? Along with the aforementioned Hester Shaw, the Mortal Engines series gives us Fever Crumb, Anna Fang, Freya Rasmussen, Wren Natsworthy, and most recently Tamzin Pook. And of course, there’s his new fantasy trilogy starring Utterly Dark, but I’ll keep quiet on that for now as I want to explore it in more detail later…
Morrigan Crow’s story continued in the long-delayed Silverborn, Vanja’s story came to an end in Margaret Owen’s slightly-disappointing-but-still-satisfying Holy Terrors (hey, at least the girl got over her commitment issues), and I’ve currently got my hands on Skye McKenna’s Stonewitch, which I wasn’t able to start last year, though am definitely looking forward to what happens to Cassie Morgan next.
2025 also saw the release of the latest Hunger Games book, though it was a little short on female characters – which is only surprising since Katniss has become such an important character in the annuls of fictional female characters. It’s not hugely surprising considering Haymitch takes over as the book’s narrator, but characters such as Louella Mcoy and Lenore Dove only exist in order to ramp up the angst in our male character (I mean, the latter is quite literally named after The Lost Lenore by Edgar Allan Poe). Again, Suzanne Collins was somewhat restricted by the canon she had already set down in her prior books, but it’s still a bit of a shame to have such a male-centric instalment in a series that was practically defined by its female lead.
On the other hand, graphic novels continue to be a fantastic source of great female characters: Beatrice in Lightfall, Zuli in Wingbearer, Suri in Cat’s Cradle, Helen in Helen of Wyndhorn, Bernice in Harrow County, Alanna in the adaptation of Tamora Pierce’s The Song of the Lioness, Diana and Lissa in The Old Willis Place – and of course, Kara in Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, which forms the basis of the upcoming James Gunn film. Seriously, if you’re in need of a gift for a young lady and have no idea what to get her, look at the graphic novel selection of your closest bookseller!
My sudden urge to watch Holliday Grainger costume dramas led me to several period films, including Anna Karenina, Jane Eyre, Great Expectations and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. (You know what other actress kept popping up this year, completely by accident? Olivia Williams, who appeared no less than five times in various projects). These films/miniseries were interesting to watch as comparison pieces, not only against the different versions of themselves, but also to each other – for instance, it’s pretty eye-opening to see the difference in how Anna Karenina and Charlotte Chatterley are treated by the narrative for having an extramarital affair, or how Jane Eyre and Estella Havisham’s experiences as adults are so contingent on their troubled childhoods.
As ever, books like these can contain surprising levels of insight into the lives of women long before any women’s rights movements, and even older manuscripts such as Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval feature a wide variety of gems from horrific to surprising, such as:
“And the king, who was fond of Kay and held him dear at heart, sent to him a most learned doctor and two girls who were pupils of his, who put his collar-bone back in place and bandaged his arm and joined the broken bone.”
Or:
“[A knight] is beating a girl terribly, who is crying that she would rather die than lie with him, for he has killed the one she loved. The knight calls upon the hermit to marry them, and threatens him with ill treatment if he refuses; but the hermit says he will do so only if the girl consents. Perceval tells the knight that he is foolish to try and take her as his wife by force, and that it is wicked for a man to dishonour a woman, because it was through a woman that the world was redeemed: “woman was the first bridge,” he says, “by which God passed into Hell to rescue all his friends.”
But also:
“If a man kisses a woman and does no more when they’re alone together, then I think it’s his decision, for a woman who yields her lips gives the rest most easily to her whoever makes the effort. And though she may defend herself, we all know, without any doubt, that a woman wants to win in all things but one: that struggle in which she grabs the man by the throat and scratches and bites and wrestles, but wants to be beaten. She struggles, but she longs for it; too cowardly to grant it, she wants it to be taken by force, but then shows neither willingness nor thanks.”
Yikes, way to ruin things, Troyes. At least the character saying all this is a bad guy, but no one leaps to the girl’s defence, even though her version of events is the true one (proving that Marguerite de Carrouges was not alone in her troubles).
This segues nicely into my next two themes, which was Arthurian legend and Greek mythology, which are filled with complex yet inherently mysterious female characters. Like, for example, how cognizant was Lady Bertilak in Gawaine in the Green Knight? Was she following her husband’s orders when she tried to seduce Gawaine, or did she do it of her own volition? Maybe she was an agent of Morgan le Fay? Or under a spell? Maybe she didn’t want to do it at all, or maybe she was disappointed that Gawaine managed to resist her. We just don’t know.
The old stories are full of these kinds of contradictions, in which women are fascinating, often powerful, but also profoundly underexamined. This was also the year I found out Camilla even existed, and watched a number of variations on Penelope, Atalanta, Medea, Ariadne – and most important, finally tracked down the full documentaries that feature Anjali Jay and Angel Coulby as Medea and Calypso respectively.
You know who else turned up a lot? Nimue. She’s not the first female character you think of when you hear the words “Arthurian legend,” but she was all over the place in 2025: the protagonist of Cursed, the most interesting part of The Winter King, the female lead in The Bright Sword, the love interest in 1998’s Merlin, and perhaps even featured in Arthur: Legend of the Sword (the mage-like character is never named onscreen) and Here Lies Arthur (the protagonist’s name was given as Gwynna, but she fulfils the role of Nimue in several respects). Perhaps her proclivity is down to being most mutable figure in terms of what she does and how she’s often conflated with other figures.
And hey, speaking of the old stories, this was the year we got a brand-new Maid Marian, as portrayed by Lauren McQueen in MGM’s Robin Hood. She was… good. Not bad, not great, but… good. (And still no word on a renewal).
It’s no wonder that many of these women are used as fodder for “modern retellings,” and though there’s not a lot of positive things to say about the influx of Greek retellings by writers who want to tell the “untold stories” and the “forgotten histories” of these extremely famous mythological/legendary women, occasionally something can pop up that brings an interesting, fresh perspective. Such as Wonder Woman Historia by Kelly Sue DeConnick!
Speaking of the Amazons, another prevailing theme this year was the Amazon Brigade (in one form or another) which I always enjoy – not so much for the martial aspect, but the camaraderie that’s so seldom seen between female characters. Let’s see, we had the Amazons in Wonder Woman Historia, the Aes Sedai in The Wheel of Time, the Bene Gesserites in Dune, the Flying Ferrets in the Mortal Engines series, the Dora Milaje of Wakanda Forever and the Kyoshi Warriors in Avatar: The Last Airbender (which at least reminded me of their superior incarnation in the animated series).
But as it happens, this is another trope I’m having trouble with these days. On the one hand, we like to see women warriors onscreen because it’s kinetic and proactive and exciting to watch. On the other, anything that’s pro-violent these days kind of gets me down. Nobody should have to know how to inflict pain on anyone else in this world in order to survive, least of all women – so let’s take a moment to recall the stone criers in The Rings of Power, a semi-mystical healing group entirely made up of dwarf women:
Ah, that’s better.
What I did love in an uncompromised way is that a lot of the above groups are morally questionable and made up of quarrelling factions among the women, which always makes for some juicy conversations and dynamics.
This seems like a good time to go through the rounds of what I call the Big Three of franchises: Game of Thrones, Star Wars and the MCU. How’d they go with their female characters in 2025? Well, after a massive catchup with their material, it’s hard to really separate what came out last year with what came out all the years before that, and none of it was great, exactly.
Kleya was an absolute powerhouse on Andor, though I felt that Mon Mothma (despite her big speech and the courage required to deliver it) felt rather ushered around by other characters. Vel was good, but Cinta fell to the Bury Your Gays trope, which was especially infuriating given that it was such a passive, entirely accidental death. In a show where the writing is otherwise so impeccable, it was almost jaw-droppingly obtuse to foreshadow the disaster by having the women insist that they and they alone were going to be the only ones carrying firearms during their mission. As soon as that was uttered, you knew immediately what was going to happen.
I actually stopped my MCU binge just before getting to Thunderbolts, though I heard that Yelena is essentially the new face of the Avengers, and that Sue Storm was instrumental in saving the day in The Fantastic Four. As for everything else between Endgame and the upcoming Doomsday? Er, highlights involved Wanda going evil over her imaginary kids, the deaths of Jane Foster and Queen Ramonda, a team-up between the Marvels that flopped, Ironheart getting review bombed, and some serious Trinity Syndrome going on in Shang-Chi and the Ten Rings.
As for Game of Thrones, it took a break in 2025. I caught up with the second season of House of the Dragon and have watched the trailer for the third, and there’s not a lot to say beyond the fact I can at least appreciate Rhaenerys and Alicent are still being promoted as the show’s co-leads.
Likewise, Galadriel still feels like the protagonist of The Rings of Power’s big ensemble cast, sisters Valya and Tula Harkonnen are the main characters of Dune Prophecy, and though we had to say goodbye to Michael Burnham of Star Trek Discovery, at least she got herself a good sendoff. On the other end of the scale, it’s a shame that Mae and Osha’s story was cut short on The Acolyte (I didn’t love it, but I would have returned for more) and I’ll be mourning the cancellation of The Wheel of Time for a while yet. There were so many women in that thing. So, so many.
Tudor Month led me to several women whose lives are seldom explored in various biopics (Lady Jane Grey, Mary Boleyn, Jane Seymour) as well as the usual suspects (Queen Elizabeth and Anne Boleyn) and at least one original character (Lady Grace Cavendish, the protagonist of the Lady Grace Mysteries), whilst Pirate Month was just crawling with them: Geena Davis as Morgan Adams in Cutthroat Island (a film that isn’t great, but also rather unfairly maligned) and the incredible lineup of complicated women in Black Sails (Eleanor, Madi, Anne, Max, Miranda to name but a few). Even 2012’s Treasure Island miniseries found room for a subplot involving Jim’s mother and Silver’s wife looking out for each other while their men were away.
Folk Horror November provided several incredibly good performances, even if the characters could be a bit underserved. Naomi Harris is incredible in The Third Day (there’s a scene in which she learns the paternity of the baby she’s just helped deliver, and – damn, that’s some capital-A Acting right there), and Charlotte Spenser appropriately spirited in The Living and the Dead. Also notable is Mary Woodvine as the unnamed scientist in Enys Men, Morfydd Clark as a grieving mother in Starve Acre, and even Samantha Béart as the voice of Thomasina Bateman in The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow (a character I’m sure was named after Anya Taylor-Joy’s character in The Witch).
All of them have to call upon a wide range of fear and determination and bravery and mounting horror as they’re swept up in unforeseen supernatural circumstances, and even though this genre has no obligation to be kind to its female characters – or in fact, any of its characters – there was no shortage of them. Since my ongoing obsession with Victorian Era ghost stories are rather low on women (looking at you, M.R. James) it was good that folk horror could pick up the slack.
And of course, Magical Girls. What a wonderful genre this is. Female friendships, female power, female autonomy – hell yeah. I wound my way through Cardcaptors, Winx, W.I.T.C.H. and finally K-Pop Demon Hunters and there’s nothing to complain about here. Keep up the good work, all Magical Girl creators!
Finally, in October I wrote a post on the way vampires have steadily evolved into something quite different for women, who are now not so much victims as willing participants in vampiric seductions, but I’ve already written a whole essay on it with more to come, so I’ll let you read that instead.
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An interesting take on a preestablished character that I didn’t have a lot of time to write about earlier in the year (and whose story isn’t wholly finished, so perhaps I’m being pre-emptive) is Chani from Dune, as played by Zendaya. After getting only about five minutes of screentime in Part I, she comes to the foreground in Part II, playing her as a very different sort of woman than how she appears in Frank Herbert’s original novel: a skeptical warrior rather than a true believer.
Chani [is turned] into a point of view character, who spends the film suspicious of Jessica, resentful of the Bene Gesserit's planting of a messianic myth that has assigned Paul a key role in her culture, and who, instead of placidly accepting the position of concubine after Paul's triumph over Feyd-Rautha and betrothal to the princess Irulan, walks away in a rage over his choice to launch the galactic jihad.
There is, too, something almost focus-tested in the way the film handles Paul and Chani. An awareness that the audience who will flock to the movie to see their teen idols don't want to be reminded that Paul is an aristocrat raised with an unthinking belief in his right to rule, whose problem with the Fremen worship of him is that he would rather be their duke. That they will be happy to see Zendaya playing a kickass warrior woman, but might recoil from a version of her who is a desert tribeswoman with a baby on her hip. The result doesn't so much humanize and deepen these characters and their setting, as swap out one set of stereotypes for another, this one with the sheen of progressivism on it.
This goes back to what I was saying earlier about Carina from Pirates of the Caribbean and Talisia from Game of Thrones, that there is something so preoccupied about the way they’re written. Now, on the one hand, I can totally understand why writers might want to “update” certain characters in adaptative material. Nobody wants to watch a period-appropriate character who is downright racist or misogynistic, no matter how “realistic” it might be, and if that means we have to watch a couple of self-conscious scenes involving an early nineteenth century gentleman being nice to the Black waiter or verbally supporting the suffragettes… well, that’s just the price we pay to not feel queasy while trying to enjoy our period dramas.
In the original novel, Chani’s narrative purpose is predominately as a love interest to Paul and one-half of a difficult (but predetermined) choice he has to make. In the film, she’s a fierce warrior who teaches Paul about the Fremen way of life; a woman who may fall in love with him but isn’t buying any of his Chosen One destiny crap. At the conclusion of the original novel, Chani is accepting of the fact Paul will have to marry another woman, and that her infant son was murdered as part of the war effort. In the film, she never has a child at all (which may cause story problems in Dune Messiah) and on realizing that Paul is going to go ahead and marry Princess Irulan, she abandons him for the desert.
On the surface, one interpretation clearly feels better than the other, and yet I feel Chani’s character could have been explored and deepened without taking the easy route of putting a weapon in her hand and calling her a “badass.” Would you rather watch a complex housewife or a bland warrior woman?
At the same time, I’m loathe to sound anything like these cultural warriors who seem to spend every waking moment screaming about fictional women doing things onscreen. As a general rule, anything that they hate is probably something that I’m going to defend, and as I’ve said before, I don’t want to return to the days of one-dimensional damsels in distress (plus I’ve heard about what they’re doing to Eloise in the latest season of Bridgerton and hoo boy, am I getting ready to start ranting about that one).
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| Somebody get her out of there! |
But in this case it feels like some potential was lost by modernizing the story, and that Chani isn’t allowed to simply exist without undergoing a degree of reinterpretation. It’s a weird comparison, but remember the episode “I Only Have Eyes For You” in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in which the school is being haunted by a woman who had an affair with a student which ended with him kind-of accidentally shooting her before killing himself? It was a morally murky situation all-round, because – who exactly is to blame? The teacher grossly overstepped her boundaries, but the student threatened to kill himself in front of her.
These days this sort of material wouldn’t get touched with a fifty-foot pole, as writers would foresee the interminable discourse raging throughout the fandom, and do everything in their power to avoid it. But in 1998, the show could just let the scenario exist without casting any moral judgment on it, letting viewers make up their own minds on how to feel about it.
Something vaguely similar happened in the month I watched Studio Ghibli films alongside some early DreamWorks offerings: the likes of Shizuku and Haru just seem so effortless next to the likes of the 2000-era’s “feisty” Tzipporah, Chel, and Marina, who all feel like they went through careful levels of box-checking analysis which still didn’t allow them to feel like fully-dimensional people (that said, I did enjoy Marina, especially that they weren’t afraid to give her cropped hair). And once more, the likes of Carina and Talisia, who both felt so out of place, so anachronistically deliberate. You can just feel the difference, and it’s fascinating that you can twig to it every single time.
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Another hotbed female-centric topic that kept popping up this year was: women and babies. Over the course of the year three women had babies, and fandom got a bit weird about it. In the teaser trailer for Avengers: Doomsday, Steve Rogers is seen cradling a newborn, presumably his and Peggy’s. The final shot of Andor depicts Bix holding a baby, presumably hers and Cassian’s. Finally, Belinda Chandra’s story in Doctor Who ends with her becoming the mother to a very young child that is… hers? The Doctor’s? Another man’s entirely? It was deeply unclear, and not a particularly satisfying conclusion to her arc since she had at no point in the preceding episodes expressed any interest whatsoever in raising a child.
(By coincidence, I also watched 2008’s Crooked House, which ends with a woman undergoing a horrific C-section at the hands of men intent on stealing her baby. Juliette in Starve Acre also gets weird about losing a child, and ends up breastfeeding a hare. And apparently the latest season of Bridgerton features Francesca weeping because she wasn’t able to conceive a child before her husband died, which she believes was her singular purpose in life. Likewise, Chani giving birth to Paul’s firstborn is omitted entirely in Dune: Part II, which was a deliberate choice that may have ramifications down the line).
So… women have babies and nobody can be normal about it. There’s so much to say about it that I’m not going to say anything about it, as otherwise this post would be twice as long as it already is. But you don’t need me to tell you that a. reproductive rights are a fairly massive real-life issue, and that b. a lot of fandom’s grousing over the above examples have more to do with shipping than with a woman’s autonomy. As it happens, I don’t think Bix was particularly well-served in the second season of Andor, but the furore that her final scene inspired was something else, and I suspect more than a little brought on by Jyn/Cassian shippers who felt… betrayed, somehow? Even though nothing we saw onscreen negates the dynamic they had in Rogue One?
Likewise, it’s not hard to imagine that most of the debate around Steve and Peggy having a child has to do with Stucky shippers who are still mad about something that was obviously never going to happen never actually happening. The only example here that warrants any kind of serious debate or criticism is Belinda Chandra, and it’s easy to pinpoint that as an issue of sloppy writing brought on by behind-the-scenes drama.
I don’t really have a point to make here, only that the subject popped up a lot, so let’s move onto another recurring theme of this year: women faking their own deaths. Lucy Grey Baird in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes may or may not have escaped a murderous young Coriolanus Snow, Elphaba escaped Oz with her boyfriend in tow at the end of Wicked: Part II, and Eleven also may or may not have faked her death at the end of Stranger Things – either sacrificing herself to save the world, or finding a way to escape the army and strike out on her own. Again, it was just a little funny to see this trope pop up in regards to a female character so often over the course of 2025.
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Okay, it’s time to wrap this up. There are a handful of other notable female characters I watched this year that are worth a quick mention: Hayley Atwell’s Grace in Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning, Cailee Spaeny’s Rain in Alien: Romulus, Lupita Nyong’o’s Roz in The Wild Robot, Alyla Browne and Anya Taylor-Joy’s Furiosa in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, and Lauren Holt’s Freya in Predator: Killer of Killers. Oh, and I did watch The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim in July and then totally forgot to add it to that month’s reading/watching log (there was a LOT of stuff watched that month). In any case, Héra (voiced by Gaia Wise) was fantastic, and I’ll have to go back and add the film to the log.
I also enjoyed McKenna Grace as Phoebe Spengler in the Ghostbusters legacyquels, especially her Sapphic-tinged friendship with Melody in the second one (plus Janine finally got to use a proton pack!) and Winona Ryder revisiting Lydia Deetz in Beetlejuice with Jenna Ortega as her daughter made for a surprisingly decent sequel. And as terrible as the last Jurassic Park movie was, it’s always nice to see Laura Dern as Ellie Satler. So many good actresses in so many juicy, central roles.
If nothing else, Deadpool and Wolverine inspired me to seek out Jennifer Garner’s Elektra film (yeah, I know it’s bad but I still want to see it), and though Sinners was first and foremost a vampire flic, it certainly committed to the act of going down on women, so kudos for that Ryan Coogler. Julia Garner put in a great performance as the deeply flawed Justine Gandy in Weapons, and of all the MCU films I binged this year, Shang-Chi and the Ten Rings stands out for its variety of female characters, all played by solid actresses (that said, the viral promo for Doomsday featured twenty-seven chairs for its main cast, and only five of them belonged to women, reminding me why I never had a huge amount of interest in this franchise in the first place).
Doctor Who, The Gilded Age and Slow Horses generally did well by their female characters, and though there were some points of contention in the final season of Stranger Things (namely Eleven and Kali) I thought Joyce, Max, Nancy, Robin and Holly were given a strong sendoff. I’m kind of with the Duffers on this one regarding the backlash: give ‘em a break.
Rachel Zegler also had a good year, appearing in Evita in the West End and causing a bit of ruckus with the production’s decision to have her sing the musical’s signature song “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” live to an outside crowd, while the paying customers had to watch her from a livefeed. To quote one commentator: “Sorry, are you saying I’ve paid £350 [roughly $470] for 2 tickets and she’s singing the biggest number outside at people who haven’t paid?” Um, yeah. That was precisely the intent behind this creative decision, my dude.
And of course, the ongoing adventures of The Babysitters Club. I love those girls (well, not Mary Anne) and looking ahead at my reading schedule, it looks like they’ll be with me for a few more years to come. In March I’ll be catching up with the second part of Wicked and the tragi-comedy of Elphaba and Glinda, and since I totally dropped the ball on Xena Warrior Princess and Buffy the Vampire Slayer last year, I’ll hopefully be getting back to watching/reviewing their shows soon.
Just for the record, this latest nonsense about how a Black woman can’t played Helen of Troy is laughably out-of-date, since here’s who played that character in Xena way back in the mid-nineties:
2026 is shaping up to be a good year for the ladies, as we’ve got the Buffy reboot and the new Supergirl film, Enola Holmes 3 and another female Avatar in the latest offering from Avatar: The Last Airbender. The Knights of Guinevere has been picked up for production (yay!), Laika’s Wildwood is on its way in October, and I’m looking forward to seeing those mad scientist ladies in Pixar’s Hoppers.
The latest season of Bridgerton has already dropped, and I’ll get to that in due course (listen closely and you can hear me sharpening my knives). I’ll be catching up with Lyra Silvertongue, Deryn Sharp and Tamzin Pook in the latest novels of the Book of Dust, Leviathan and Mortal Engines series, and however else Christoper Nolan’s latest offering turns out, I’m curious about how the plethora of women in The Odyssey will be reinterpreted this time around.
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