Much to my surprise, I’m on day 3 of the A to Z Challenge and I’m still using female baddies. Not sure if I should cheer because there are some neat female characters, or ponder if there are too many out there.
I’ll explore that question throughout the A to Z Challenge. Today I’m just going to revel in a wealth of Circes.
Circe – the original version was a Greek goddess and sorceress. Best known for her appearance in the Odyssey, she invites the wandering Odysseus and his crew to a fewat, where she turns his men to swine. Only divine intervention in the form of Hermes saved Odysseus, and gave him the information he needed to trick Circe to release his men. Once spared, they spent a year with year, feasting and ‘you know’ before moving on.
ere. How to begin to dissect her? Lets start with incest, but she does love her brother, even if its the wrong way. We then move to her obsession with obtaining and wielding power, but for her children she desperately loves.
Or perhaps we look at the degree to which her father overlooked her. He never saw her potential as anything but a pawn to marry off. A situation many woman can relate to.
And yet, she damns herself because she seems incapable of learning, of bursting out of the jumble of anger, resentment and uncontrollable hunger that drives her. If she loses her loved ones, one by one to her ambition, she keeps moving in the same direction. She is to be pitied even as we hate her with every new action she takes.
What will happen to her this year? What do you think?
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I like female villains – they always seem to have better motivation to be the bad guy, although obviously this is down to the writer.
Debbie
And the reader. We also look for certain things. The joy of being a writer is that we are also readers. Thanks for dropping by.
Doing crazy things to protect their children seems to be a common trait for female villains. Don’t see it so much with the men…
I think the mom vs mom dynamic really comes out in Alien 2 (where Ripley takes on the queen to protect the girl) and Janeway vs Borg Queen. Its the mom vs mom dynamic which nuances the female protagonist, because we get a mom protecting her young, and that creates a human opening..