Elizabeth Barrette (ysabetwordsmith) wrote,
Elizabeth Barrette
ysabetwordsmith

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Dark Ladies

The world needs more female archvillains

Well, let's see ...

I have Dr. Infanta, who is cute if she likes you but scary as fuck when crossed.  Captain Right is half of Kraken's top leadership, and the one who does most of the facetime meetings because her other half hates to.  The two of them have tremendous power.

Koroleva, the Chessmistress, is another powerful manipulator but hasn't appeared very often.  Of course Farce has some of the highest screentime.  Fortressa is fine with women but downright cruel to men, and not picky about whether they deserve that.  Cacophony isn't interested in taking over the world, but she does have something that men don't like to see in women: a loud voice.  Cold Shoulder is notable for responding to sexual assault by freezing most of Rabid City.  I love Dvorak because she's such a fantastic foil for Qwerty -- they're like the bad older sister and good younger sister, only not actually related.  And Dvorak is the more powerful of the two.  

Not a lot of my series have major villains.  A Conflagration of Dragons is, logically, split about half and half on the sex of the dragons eating their cities.



If you want more female villains, feel free to prompt for them.
Tags: gender studies, networking, reading, writing
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  • 2 comments
Lyria is good to her family and allies, indifferent to most people, but anyone who tries to hurt people she cares about tend to die horribly or wish they COULD die.

In the same series, assuming I ever finish it, the villain threatening to take over the multiverse is a female of her species. Some of her allies are goddesses.

The second of my Traipah series has a (usually) female appearing hermaphrodite species (the Ah'koi Bahnis). In that book, the group that wants aliens off their planet are a group of AKB.

In the Ravenstone series, there's a terrorist group of dark witches led by a woman. They're not important to this first book, but will come up more in the later books.

The only real problem I have with female villains is that in the real world, men do tend to be more inclined toward villainy than women, though many of the modern villains trick people into voting them into office, own a corporation, or work at Wall Street. Female criminals in our world tend to have really good reasons for what they do, namely just trying to survive, protect people, or get revenge for something like rape. Not always, obviously, but a lot.
Lyria is powerful enough to make an excellent Dark Lady!