Examining archetype of Heroes, Villains and redeemers-of-bad-boys

[sierraleone]

Let me start off with first warning for length 😀

I had actually started thinking on the problematic depiction of villainesses quite a while back, and then when we had our discussions on the Rumbelle Dilemma recently and I started examine the inter-related tropes of Hero, Villain, men and women.

Note: lots of stereotyping in this post, which only reflect how I think people are generally depicted, not that I feel it is accurate or as it should be.

I don’t think the hero archetype or the villain archetype is the problem. It is more basic then that, it is the underlying archetype(s) that is problematic.  That is, the traditional archetypes of men and women, and how their presumed attributes inform their gendered roles.

“Traditional/natural” “masculine” attributes are basically two things: brawn, and brain. That is, strength, as well as analytical/rational thinking (reason/logic/cleverness).

“Traditional/natural” “feminine” attributes are sorta two things: generative/caring, and emotional/intuitive. Generative is due to women’s much larger role in reproduction. Infants require extensive care (again gendered due to biology), however that attribute/skill is presumed of women at all times regardless of their household composition. Women’s emotional/intuitive attributes are used in support of her caring tasks.

I am excluding sexual attributes, as that is a whole other can of worms. Describing the attributes a little more fully:

“Masculine” Attributes: strength and reason. These attributes are value-neutral. Strength can be used positively: to protect or build. It can also be used negatively: to ham or destroy. Reason/logic/cleverness is also neutral, and can be used for good or ill ends. Prized stoicism could be seen as an example of using “strength/rationality” to suppressing the “weaker/feminine” emotional side. Strength and reason are both tools that allow men to be regular people, or to have extra-masculine attributes allowing them to be heroes or villains. Men can also use this attributes for all sorts of other jobs/roles/functions. These attributes give men/male characters with a broad canvas to explore.

“Feminine” Attributes: generative/caring, and emotion/intuition. These are not neutral things from a human/societal point of view. If these attributes are weakened/missing then a communities quality of life quickly goes down, and at worse ends all-together. With these proscriptive attributes women are traditionally held responsible for proving hands-on/direct support to physiological well-being (cooking, cleaning, clothes-making, child/elder/infirm-care, organizing, all that unpaid domestic labour involved in running a household smoothly), as well as doing the emotional labour to ensure people’s psychological well-being. With regards to emotions, they are hard to predict and they drive human behaviour to ends reason & logic could never dream of alone. Since emotions are held as much more volatile than strength and reason (and may make one “lose” strength and/or reason) it often creates a judgment of our emotions as either good or bad. Since women’s attribute/role of generating/sustaining life is absolutely essential, it is so important that she is rewarded when her emotions are positive and/or in support of that role, and punished when they do not. These attributes quickly become a role, one role: the supportive role of caretaker.

These of course aren’t the only human attributes, but (outside sexual attributes) if I distill traditional gendered attributes down as much as possible, that is what I come to. There is nothing wrong with any of these attributes; the problem is with our perception of them, their perceived value, and how they inform rigid gender roles.

Once I start comparing these stereotypical attributes/roles of men/women to the attributes/roles of heroes/villains I can see where story-telling problems that come up with regard to both the bad-boy redeemed-by-girl, and the villainesses.

Heroes & Villains:

Heroes that benefit society can’t be heroes without someone/something to protect. Heroes are hyper-masculine: hyper-strong and/or hyper-rational/clever. The difference from villains is that heroes are often made moral enough that they don’t always require an intimate stake to be a hero and protect people. Villains, or bad boys, need to be given a good reason to redirect their strength and/or reason from harming/destroying/apathy, to protect/build/care. Insert woman-love-interest here (or, occasionally, child).

Life is held sacred, so by extension women are sanctified or demonized depending on their adherence to their essential attributes. Hyper-masculinity is neutral, and can be used for good or bad ends, to become a hero or a villain. Hyper-femininity, women generating and caring for life, is considered a good in and of itself. When women even just neglect/abandon their role they are unwomanly (note: but not manly) and threaten those who rely on women for care and support. They are “bad girls”.

In these complimentary roles, it doesn’t seem like men make women better women, they just protect them. While women make men better men. They give men a purpose, and they provide needed unpaid domestic/emotional labour.

So, traditionally, women, while she has positive attributes, she doesn’t have attributes that will do her well in a battle of muscle or brains. The man/hero has found something to protect, and his role has meaning. The woman has found something to assist/sustain giving both her role and his role meaning simultaneous (though likely she is going from one support role to the next). She occasionally needs the man to protect her because she is weak (physically and mentally). She constantly sustains and motivates him with hearty healthy food and darned socks and emotional encouragement. And since “lacking” the neutral “male” attributes of strength and rationality she is not considered suitable for, or worthy of, any other roles.

So, a bad man is a man who used his neutral attributes to harm/destroy. Then is not a bad woman who has used her attributes in a way that harms? And since female attributes and responsibilities are the essence of life, any deviation from what is considered required of women’s essential attribute/role is viewed as unnatural, neglectful, harmful, and even sinful.

Heroines following the traditional masculine hero mold are mostly a danger to gender roles, but do not represent a risk of real danger to people or property (outside of fighting villains). She may or may not be neglecting her “feminine” attributes/role. So, to follow established gender roles, it will traditionally take a man equal/(preferably)greater in physical/logical strength to her for her to fall in love.

Villainesses are a different matter. Unlike the heroine she has almost definitely abandoned her role as a woman, and has even gone further into causing harm and/or destruction. She is working against the hero (and occasionally besting him), and possibly working with a villain (encouraging villainy instead of trying to redeem them). All this means she has and is using masculine attributes, and well enough so that she doesn’t generally need (nor probably want) a man for protection.

 

So males can still be men, with neutral masculine attributes, whether they are regular men, heroes, bad-boys, or villains. They can choose to use their attributes for care or for harm.

Women can only be women when they have feminine attributes, and they can be regular women, or the occasional heroine who additionally has masculine attributes but the potential to settle-down. In this paradigm bad-girls or villainesses are just failed women, fundamentally broken. The villainess has both abandoned her “essential function” (in neglecting to care for others), and has moved into opposition to her function (by actively harming others).

And not only is a villainess a failed women, but she doesn’t need protection. She has the same problem finding a partner a heroine does, her partner traditionally needs to be her equal/better. Plus, in the villainesses’ case, to match the trope of a redeeming-lover, to meet her many needs her lover has to have lots of feminine emotional attributes: love, patience, and encouragement. He has to be a good person that is willing and able to do that. Plus, maybe cook some decent meals, and darn some socks 😉

So a villainess needs what is considered a unicorn-crossed-with-a-yeti in our culture: a good man, with hyper-masculine attributes equal/better than the villainess, and overt/hyper-femininity, and is willing to put all his energy and skills into redeeming a bad girl/villainess. This moves the villainess from not just fundamentally broken, but to nearly irredeemable, as what is it going to take to find a guy like that? Villainesses take note: don’t do it, to find such a man will near impossible. 😉

Bad boys/villains apparently have little difficulty finding hyper-feminine women willing to put all their feminine energy and skills into his redemption. Some of these women certainly seem weak in reason, rationality, and logic. :side-eye:  (does hyper-femininity often = martyr-complex?)

So, villains are just potential heroes using their neutral masculine attributes to harm, and just needs to be convinced a loving woman needs a man’s, his, protection to start his path towards redemption.

How do you convince a villainess to turn around? Like the male villain, she needs someone worth it, of a personal stake, that requires her protection. And, due to traditional gender roles, our culture won’t let it be a man (somehow that would sully his man-hood or something). It has got to be a culturally-appropriate weaker subject: kids! That fits in with our gender roles just dandy. And does a double whammy, on both the villainess’ masculine attribute/positive role (as protector of the weak) and feminine attributes/proscribed role (as mother-figure to a child).

See: Regina, Zelena, heck even-sorta Cora and Emma.

I wonder if that is part of the appeal of the SwanQueen? It allows a villainess redemption to be helped along through a love-interest, something which rarely happens. And I can understand people seeing more meaning and depth there than intended due to the maturity of their relationship that has developed.

Looking over these tropes I did think of one type of  “bad-girl” seen regularly. The closest thing to a regular bad-girl in our culture is a cold/aloof/career-oriented women with no man to cook a roast for, or kids to clean running noses of, who’s future seems destined for spinster-hood. Sometimes a man will sweep her off her feet, make her fall in love, and “redeem” her into her “proper” role.

I do not dismiss or de-value the importance of the traditional roles of men and women (note: as in the roles are important, not who does them). Both protecting/securing people/neccessities, and daily life’s domestic logistics, people-care, and emotional labour, are all vitally important.

And being the mid-wife (pun totally intended) to another person’s redemption is a powerful and amazing thing, as that redemption mid-wife as turned someone that harms/indifferent, into someone that cares and protects/sustains life. A hero may kill/confine a villain, which brings down the villain population one, but a redemption mid-wife does that, plus puts the hero column up one.

But we should recognize that it isn’t a cure-all, doesn’t always work, that it is sometimes represents ones-sided relationships that are unhealthy, dysfunction, enabling, and/or co-dependent.

We should also recognize that there are some men who do their fair-share (or greater) of domestic and emotional labour, and/or who have relationships with women who have emotional difficulties greater than the norm. Men who know how to do emotional/domestic labour well, and/or do so equally, are not Unicorns-crossed-with-Yetis-rare.

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