Women of the Year: A Retrospective 2025

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).

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:

Women of the Year: A Retrospective 2024

This post comes a little later than usual, as I feel like I’ve been running behind on practically everything for an entire year. Still, I always get there eventually, and so here is my retrospective on the female characters of 2024: not the twelve I selected as Woman of the Month, but the ones I discovered, enjoyed or was impressed with over the course of the entire year, who didn’t get the chance to be spotlighted. 

Looking back, we actually had a pretty good stretch of female characters throughout pop culture in 2024. The problem is, I didn’t watch any of shows or films in which they appeared. Tired of committing to new projects only for them to get cancelled almost immediately, I stared watching (or rewatching) media that I knew wouldn’t disappoint me.

As such, a lot of the women featured below are from stories that aired or were published some time ago. Two inclusions have admittedly more to do with how the characters are presented in their given narratives rather than the characters themselves, as I’ve noticed some interesting changes in how women are being portrayed across fiction recently, brought on by authors becoming more self-aware about certain gender-specific clichés and tropes (though this isn’t always a good thing).

In any case, you get to read my half-formed thoughts on the subject. I’ve tried to keep my stream-of-consciousness blathering under control, but no promises.

Women of the Year: A Retrospective 2023

It is now my mission to write up all the end-of-year posts that I usually have finished by this point in time, but which I’m running behind on thanks to that pesky Covid-induced delay.

As ever, this is my annual post of female characters I watched or read about during the course of the year who didn’t make the cut for Woman of the Month, but were still engaging and noteworthy. It also works as something of a retrospective concerning female characters in general for 2023, specifically in the realm of mainstream pop-culture entertainment.

As ever, there were the usual problems: women getting fridged to motivate a male character, writers being blatantly terrified of any complexity or shortcomings in their depictions of women (which inevitably leads to accusations of girl-bossing or Mary Suedom) and women who are genuinely spunky and charming, but who never actually get to impact the plot in any meaningful way (Marion Ravenwood, Kitty Softpaws, Cara Dutton...)

Plus, there is still that pervading assumption that women have to be relatable role models – which means that when characters like Evelyn Quan Wang or General Nanisca come along, it feels like a genuine (and glorious) shock to the system.

But my main issue with female characters in 2023 is simply that there wasn’t much to get excited about. With one obvious exception (she’s blonde and shares her name with an outdoor cooking device) it was a fallow year for female characters – at least in the media I consumed.

Part of that had to do with the fact I simply didn’t watch as many shows or films this year. Because I’ve been burned so many times with unceremonious cancellations on streaming services, I ended up sticking with shows that aired decades ago (Spooks, Sailor Moon, Elementary) which left me with a much smaller pool of female characters to choose from. For the first time ever, I had to skip a Woman of the Month post and write it out later, simply because I had so few options.

And more generally speaking, there just didn’t seem to be many compelling female characters on display this year. I’ll have more to say about that in a bit, but for now, here are some of the women worth your attention from an otherwise not-hugely-inspirational year...

Women of the Year: A Retrospective 2022

Another year, another bevy of female characters that didn’t quite make the monthly cut, but which are still worth appreciating and discussing. In general, I feel that 2022 was a good year for female characters. Most of the stuff I watched avoided any gratuitous fridgings or assaults (even the Game of Thrones spin-off had a profound decrease in rape and nudity) and there was an uptick in unapologetic portrayals of women who are difficult, unlikeable, messy or all of the above.

Fandom still has a lot of trouble with this concept (the truest dictum I ever saw on this subject was: “ya’ll want complex female characters until you actually get them”) but it’s heartening to see that writers in general are feeling brave enough to commit to more multifaceted portrays of women, depicting them not as either devils or angels, but as people.  

There’s still a lingering fear I think, that female characters have to be presented as strong and good and better at things than everyone else; that they have to be role models for fear of criticism or accusations of sexism. I like watching an assertive woman strut her stuff as much as the next person, but when you end up with identical women girlbossing their way through stories, you just end up with bored viewers (and probably fending off tedious Mary Sue accusations).

This was also the year in which there was vocal pushback against internet trolls that lose their minds over female or non-white leads in their favourite franchises. Spoiler alert: both She Hulk and Scream 5 explicitly acknowledged this phenomenon and baked it into their storylines, with She Hulk depicting an MRA-type organization who launch a campaign of physical and sexual harassment against its protagonist, and Scream 5 eventually revealing its killers to be entitled fans who are literally murdering people in an attempt to get their beloved IP back to its roots.

Ignoring toxic fans is no longer an option, and creatives are fighting back. For better or worse, they’re now recognized elements of pop-culture. And what do you know? By an amazing coincidence, more than one of the women below the cut are characters that have enraged them...

Women of the Year: A Retrospective 2021

This is always my favourite post of the year, a chance for me to delve into my absolute favourite subject: the representation of female characters throughout media and pop-culture.

Every month I dub a fictional character my Woman of the Month, but there are always plenty of spots left over, and so I do a retrospective of the entire years’ worth of interesting female characters that maybe didn’t get the limelight they deserved.

And this is just the stuff I was able to consume this year: at the end of the day I’m just one person, and there is so much material out there. If you have recommendations, or specifically a female character of any kind that you felt got short-shrift in the public discourse, then by all means throw your hat in the ring.

Below are the female characters that didn’t quite make the monthly cut, but who I still found noteworthy in what they brought to the various stories they were a part of. There are less of them this year, partly because I’m exhausted, partly because I didn’t watch or read as much, and partly because a lot of what I did get through has already featured on his blog in the past (for example, I watched the fifth season of Supergirl last month, but Kara Danvers and Nia Nal have already been written about in earlier posts) but hopefully you’ll still find something of interest.

Women of the Year: A Retrospective 2020

If you’re reading this, then you survived 2020. Congratulations. It was a year that’ll be defined by the Coronavirus pandemic and the lengths we all went to in trying to contain its spread, the consequences of which will be felt for years to come. Several weeks were spent in lockdown, which afforded us all one sliver of a silver lining: time to catch up on our backlog of reading and viewing material.

Wherever you are in the world, I hope you had a satisfying Christmas and New Year, even if it was considerably more low-key than usual.

As you may remember (as I’ve brought it up enough times) my profound weariness with the way female characters were treated throughout 2019 inspired my New Year’s Resolution: that I would try to focus on women-created and women-led media for the duration of 2020. For the most part I stuck to this promise, seeking out material that I might not have even heard of without this prerequisite, and it was rewarding to not only discover so many new stories and great female characters, but also revisit plenty of my own favourites.

The twelve most significant heroines of the year were featured in my Woman of the Month series, but there are always plenty more that are notable for their charm, complexity, uniqueness, and tenacity. They all got me through this year...

Women of the Year: A Retrospective 2019

In the middle of the year, I has planned to start this annual post by saying 2019 was the year of giving with one hand and taking with the other. Now I'm more inclined to say that 2019 was the year male writers took a long hard piss over the three most iconic female characters of the decade.

Granted, I haven't seen The Rise of Skywalker yet, though my friend was able to break it down for me in great detail, and I've spent the last few days fluctuating between "well that doesn't sound SO bad" and "for the love of God, what the FUCK??"

I was mostly saved by the fact that I have been steadily (even subconsciously) disengaging with Star Wars since The Last Jedi, and the final few trailers for The Rise of Skywalker pretty much sealed the deal. I'll watch it eventually (and perhaps even do a more in-depth review) but that'll be months from now, once the final shreds of investment are gone and the on-line fandom meltdowns have ceased.

But for now a part of me is genuinely hurting, knowing that the brave girl who once snatched a weapon out from under the man who tortured and terrorized her and used it to defend herself against him, is ultimately forced by the sequels to form a quasi-romantic attachment to that self-same man who has spent the better part of this trilogy violently assaulting her both physically and emotionally. It's pretty sick-inducing, even if she IS finally free of him by the end.

All I can do is walk away thinking that at least Rey got off lighter than Black Widow, who joined Gamora at the bottom of a cliff to save Jeremy Renner, or Daenerys Targaryen, who had to be put down like a dog because women can't handle power, strong emotions, heredity madness, or... I dunno, PMS? We may as well throw in ALL the misogynistic cliches.

As of now, I feel utterly wrung out by these big franchises and their complete inability to do right by their female characters. I'll have more to say (or rant) about later, but for now here are the runners-up for women of the month. Pickings were slim, I'm afraid.

Woman of the Year: A Retrospective 2018

It's that time of year again: time for my annual round up of fantastic female characters that I've discovered in film, on television, and throughout a variety of novels. Though I featured the twelve stand-outs for each month of the year, there are plenty more women who made the runners-up cut, and it's always fun to feature them in their own blog-post.

As it happens, there are three major themes to this year's women: Difficult Women, Superhero Women, and East-Asian Women.

In the first group we had a surplus of ladies who were given personalities and storylines that up until pretty recently only straight white males could get away with. Think Don Draper or Tony Soprano or Walter White or Dexter Morgan.

But my reading/viewing this year ran the gamut from women who are downright despicable (Villanelle from Killing Eve, Mary Anne Mowbray in Dark Angel, Serena Joy of The Handmaid's Tale, Gone Girl's Amy Dunne) to ambiguously unlikeable (Becky Sharpe in the new Vanity Fair miniseries, Grace Marks in Alias Grace, Annalise Keating in How To Get Away with Murder) to broken and/or complicated women struggling to do the right thing despite their spiky, brittle personalities: Camille Preaker in Sharp Objects, Rachel Watson in The Girl on the Train, Maureen Robinson in Lost in Space, the assorted housewives of Big Little Lies).

Heck, even Disenchanted's Princess Bean with her drunken irresponsibility fits in here.

And though I haven't checked in with them in ages, three major shows ended this year (or will next year) that starred women who could fall into any of the above three subcategories: Elizabeth Jennings from The Americans, Olivia Pope from Scandal, and Carrie Mathison from Homeland.

It demonstrates two things: firstly that actresses are getting better, juicier and more challenging roles, and secondly that female characters are being recognized as having just as much capacity for complexity and moral ambiguity as male ones. Of course, all but two of these women are white (unsurprisingly, the two exceptions feature on a Shonda Rimes show) so there's still plenty of progress to be make – and yet I'm an optimist.

All send a clear message: women don't have to be nice to have interesting stories to tell.

Then there's the ever-increasing roster of female superheroes emerging from the shadows to enjoy the spotlight. In the wake of Wonder Woman's 2017 debut  came a host of other crime-fighters, and this year alone I had Woman of the Month posts focusing on Sara Lance (Legends of Tomorrow), Shuri (Black Panther), Misty Knight and Colleen Wing (Luke Cage/Iron Fist).

We're now into our fourth season of Supergirl, and the second of Jessica Jones. We got our first look at Batwoman on Arrow, and an exciting new trailer for Captain Marvel. Sequels were also kind, with Ant-Man sharing the spotlight in Ant-Man and the Wasp (the first Marvel film to have a female superhero in the title), Helen Parr returning as Elastigirl in The Incredibles 2 and Domino being an unexpected delight in Deadpool 2.

And though I haven't caught up yet, I heard Iris West had a great season of The Flash along with her time-travelling daughter Nora, a host of animated girls in Marvel Rising: Secret Warriors, and news on the development of films involving the likes of Silk, Black Cat, Batgirl, Black Widow, Birds of Prey and the Gotham City Sirens.

Heck, there were even YA novels by Sarah J. Maas and Leigh Bardugo that explored the backgrounds of Selina Kyle and Diana Prince before they took on their superhero (or villain) mantles.

And of course, though it stretches the definition of "superhero", we finally debuted our first female incarnation of the Doctor on Doctor Who.

After so many previous disasters to bring superhero women to the big (and small!) screen, they have finally ARRIVED.

And finally, an increase of East-Asian women, from the runaway success of Crazy Rich Asians to my revisit of Grace Nakimura in the Gabriel Knight games of the nineties. Kelly Tran penned a passionate defence of her right to exist in The New York Times after increasingly gross attacks, and so many more Asian faces appeared on my radar:

Jessica Huang in Fresh Off the Boat, Mia in Humans (whose actress will also be Minerva in Captain Marvel), Constance in Ocean's Eight, Lara Jean in All the Boys I've Loved Before, Hazel Wong in the Wells and Wong detective series, Colleen Wing in Iron Fist, Sun in Sense8, Anna Fang in the Mortal Engines film (and book Night Flights that was inspired by her fantastic performance) and even Nagini in the Harry Potter verse, contentious though that development may be.

It sounds as though Michelle Yeoh is getting her own spin-off for her character in Star Trek: Discovery (hopefully not her evil counterpart) and let's not forget the upcoming live-action Mulan starring Liu Yifei, or the short Pixar film Bao involving a Chinese-Canadian mother dealing with empty nest syndrome.

Okay, so bottom left is a picture of Katie Leung from a Poirot
mystery, BUT she was the inspiration for Robin Stevenson's
Hazel Wong, so she's featured here honorarily.

And on a personal note, I even saw a Beauty and the Beast ballet this month which featured Sophia Bae as an Asian Belle.

Oh, and a special shout-out to Artemis from Young Justice, who'll be returning early next year and who manages to fit into ALL THREE of the above categories.

On a broader note, I also ended up reading a lot of children's fiction this year (and watching their subsequent film adaptations), and found they involved a great deal of young heroines: Arietty Clock from The Borrowers, Mary Smith from The Little Broomstick, Princess Cimorene in Dealing with Dragons, Anna Sasaki from When Marnie was There, Maria Merryweather in The Secret of Moonacre, and even an unnamed little girl in the adaptation of The Little Prince.

Women negotiating power, women who were difficult without being villains, women from classic literature, women facing the relentless difficulties of male-dominated spaces – there was something for everybody. So perhaps in place of Difficult Asian Superheroes, I should simply say: this was the year of Unapologetic Women.

Here are the rest of the standout women I discovered in 2018...

Women of the Year: A Retrospective 2017

When it came to my viewing material in 2017, it was a year for feminist icons. I finished Xena Warrior Princess, revisited Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and got started on The X-Files, finally meeting Agent Dana Scully in the process. I was introduced to the likes of Laura Cereta, Ada Lovelace and Katherine Johnson. I watched The Handmaid's Tale and Still Star-Crossed and Big Little Lies.

This year we saw women as Jedi, women as Star Fleet captains, a woman as the Doctor. We got Michael Burnham and Jessica Jones and Rosaline Capulet and Eleven. It was the year of Rose Tico, Phillipa Georgiou (however briefly) and the announcement of a live-action Mulan. A couple of days ago the trailer for an all-woman Ocean's Eight was dropped. We got Amazons and Valkyries and the Dora Milaje. It's like the universe has decided if we can't have a woman for President, we're damn well gonna get women as EVERYTHING ELSE.

Korra and Asami returned from their honeymoon holiday in deep canonical love. I discovered the wonderfully damaged-but-not-broken Dutch on Killjoys. Max not only survived the conclusion of Black Sails, but prospered. Orphan Black stuck the landing and gave its clones a beautiful send-off, filled with happiness and love and each other.

And of course, there's no ignoring the fact that TIME Person of the Year were the Silence Breakers who spoke up about the rampant sexual harassment culture in Hollywood and beyond.

That many of the above are women of colour is a vindication of my prediction at the end of 2016: that storytelling in all its forms would step up to the plate, that now more than ever artists from all over the world would recognise the true need for representation. It's far from perfect, and we can certainly keep doing better, but my inner optimist believes it's a solid step forward.

There were a few hiccups along the way. Two beautiful doctors, Veil from Into the Badlands and Claudine from Versailles fell to the Stuffed in the Fridge trope, killed off pointlessly to agonise and motivate their male counterparts. Kara Danvers on Supergirl found herself orbiting a black hole of a love interest. There were some complicated developments in The Last Jedi (don't worry, I'll get to that in good time). I'm still on the fence about Eleanor Guthrie's fate on Black Sails, but they did so well by almost all the other women on the show that I'm liable to give them a pass.

When you look at the bigger picture, I honestly believe things got better – and will keep getting better. So beyond my twelve women of each month, here are some of the other ladies that made an impression...

Women of the Year: A Retrospective 2016

Okay, so I have one more thing to post before getting to Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

For the past year I've been choosing one woman per month to showcase on my blog, and it's though it's been a difficult task, happily the difficulties have arisen from a surplus of great female characters, not an absence. Now that the year has come to an end, I've posted my twelve Women on the Month on Tumblr, and I thought I'd expand the project to some of the ladies who didn't make the cut – not because they weren't fab in their own way, but because – well, when you limited yourself to only one per month, not everyone can be included.

So here's my list of the great female characters I discovered or revisited this year; those who I found the most inspirational, the most enjoyable, the most well-rounded, the best written and performed.