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For every hero, there is a villain, and for every villain there should be a story. But, how much do we really know about the villain? Gender and Female Villains in 21st Century Fairy Tale Narratives: From Evil Queens to Wicked Witches seeks to fill a gap in the field of gender representation and character evolution, with chapters centred on female villains in the fairy tale narratives of the twenty-first-century media.

This book aims to bring together a collection of interdisciplinary research on the evolution of female villains from television and film, the impact of these characters on filmmaking, storytelling, narrative structures and considerations with regard to gender representations.

Within the realm of fairy tale study, the characters of princesses, princes, heroes and the damsels-in-distress have been researched extensively. However, the female villain has rarely been the central focus of academic study. This book is the first collection of chapters based on female villains in the twenty-first century fairy tale narratives.

A motif, as defined by Jean-Charles Seigneuret (1988, p. 17), is an ‘essential part of a contemporary academic discipline known as thematology or thematics’ and that ‘two factors may explain the rise of the thematological method: its interpretive potentialities and its intrinsic congruency with the history of ideas’.

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm first introduced the story of Snow White and her evil stepmother the Queen in 1812. Decades later, the character of the Queen, who later becomes the Evil Queen, is depicted in copious narratives and several different mediums. A central parallel in most of the representations of this character is that she is presented as evil. As such, how the Evil Queen character is represented in media sees a congruence of specific aesthetical characteristics, which combines to symbolize a rhetorical motif for evil.

The mere sight of Disney villains have struck fear into the hearts of many a child. From the Evil Queen, to Maleficent, to Ursula. From the black flowing capes to the ashen skin and pointy horns, the aesthetic of these villains alone is often enough to evoke a sense of dread in the audience. Ursula from The Little Mermaid (1989) may not be officially a queen in the Disney universe, but she is a notorious villain amongst fans. Although The Little Mermaid was released in 1989, the film, and thus Ursula, have a fanbase that has evolved and grown up to now, despite the film not being remade into a live-action version as yet. This chapter will analyse the comments of three fan-made YouTube videos regarding Ursula, and will examine the fan comments, with specific focus on the comments regarding Ursula's physicality or any positive comments about her. This will show fan positivity towards a villainous character, despite what may be depicted as a negative body image. Ursula, an octopus, looks quite different from other villains. The primary research methodology will include participatory culture and discourse analysis in order to understand why fans adore her, and how they do not necessarily accept her as a villain, but that there is an outpouring of positivity towards her body image.

To study how twenty-first-century fairy tale retellings recombine villainy and motherhood, this chapter analyses two mother figures in Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (2019): Aurora's godmother, Maleficent, and Aurora's soon-to-be mother-in-law, Queen Ingrith. I argue that Mistress of Evil attempts and fails to trouble the Good/Terrible Mother binary, ultimately reconfirming traditional notions of the Good Mother, by juxtaposing two mother villain characters. Ingrith first appears to be the epitome of the Good Mother, but the film quickly reveals that she is actually the stereotypical evil mother-in-law who uses the Good Mother image to mask her villainy. By exposing Ingrith's lie, the film debases the myth of perfect motherhood, suggesting that the image of the ‘Good Mother’ is only used to vilify other women in order to control people, but it also uses the Good Mother image to highlight how Terrible Ingrith is. Maleficent, on the other hand, vacillates between twenty-first-century images of the Terrible and Good Mother, specifically the aberrant and supermother. Rather than balancing these images and depicting a more nuanced motherhood, the film switches Maleficent completely between these two extremes, making her seem more villainous when she is aberrant and more motherly when she steps into the role of supermother. Whereas the representation of Ingrith highlights the lie of the Good Mother, Maleficent is forced into becoming a variation of that image. I argue that while Mistress of Evil attempts to reveal the pernicious nature of the Good Mother myth, it ultimately reconfirms it for a new generation of women.

The Witcher (Netflix, 2019) premiered seven months after Game of Thrones (HBO, 2011–2018) concluded. Given the similarities of genre (historical/high fantasy) and audience (indicated by nudity, violence and profanity), comparisons were quickly drawn. Game of Thrones earned criticism for the ‘sexist’ outcomes for some of its female characters, and so early analysis of The Witcher often evaluated its female representation and feminist values.

This chapter argues that the female representations in season one of The Witcher offers prominent female characters who are imbued with agency, institutional power and well-developed narrative arcs. These representations are somewhat at odds with some initial reaction to the show as sexist. Notably, it uses a dialectic approach to women who are framed by males as villainous (as Stregobor characterizes Renfri in ‘The End's Beginning’). However, the spectator positioning challenges this through devices such as its unrestricted, non-linear narrative structure.

Nevertheless, The Witcher encodes female characters with power as ‘other’, enhancing this otherness through magical abilities. Its archetypal male protagonist further emphasizes the difference of the female deuteragonists, placing him at various times in opposition to characters such as Ciri, Yennefer and Calanthe. This chapter also considers the issues of intersectionality in relation to Yennefer, whose transformative narrative arc has provoked ableist criticism, and how her representation is also impacted by the racial discourse in the series.

Through textual analysis and with reference to relevant folkloric, feminist and media scholarship, this chapter interrogates the representations the significant women of The Witcher through the lenses of gendered authorship, essentialist ‘female’ concerns, such as motherhood, the dynamics of the gaze and the varieties of responses to the female characters evident in online discourse.

The Evil Queen is a staple character in many fairy tales, but perhaps one of her most famous incarnations is as Snow White's evil stepmother. In order to gain a better understanding of the dynamics of gender and morality in this story, this chapter analyses three different versions of the fairy tale Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: the Brothers Grimm's nineteenth-century text, Disney's 1930s film adaptation, and The Snow Queen's Shadow, a contemporary novel based loosely on a mix of well-known European fairy tales. The chapter explores what, exactly, marks the Queen as evil in the different versions, how her morality interacts with questions of gender and cultural context, and how the different versions portray the relationship – and often the moral dichotomy – between the Evil Queen and Snow White.

Snow White is one of the most popular fairy tales worldwide. Therefore, it is not surprising that the story has been reconsidered multiple times during the current trend of producing fairy tale adaptations. Especially the Evil Queen has become an object of further examination in many recent instalments of the story. In this chapter, I analyse the revision of Snow White's stepmother in the book series The Lunar Chronicles (2012–2016), the films Mirror Mirror (2012), Snow White and the Huntsman (2012) and The Huntsman: Winter's War (2016), as well as the TV-series Once Upon a Time (2011–2018). Compared to other villains in recent fairy tale adaptations, who are, like Maleficent, redeemed, the queen remains an embodiment of evil and terror in most adaptations. I outline the depiction of the Evil Queen in present-day US-American fairy tale narratives, assessing what makes her the most villainous woman in all the fairy tale realms and questioning why many of these stories try to understand but do not forgive her. The focus of this investigation is on the backstory that she is equipped with, her crimes, and her ultimate fate. Although she has been abused, traumatized, and betrayed, she seems to remain an uber villain, not only attempting to kill her stepdaughter but also destroying nature, starving her people, and spreading a deadly virus. This kind of representation might result from the fact that her opponent is by the very name the purest fairy tale princess ever known.

Some of the most recognizable ‘evil’ fairy tale characters are the stepmothers; second-wives who enter happy households, and seek to subjugate their step-children. This character arc is due to be dismantled. Patriarchal regimes over time have constructed realities where women and power do not go together. In early-to late-modern (white, European) societies, patriarchal structures placed restrictions on the decisions women could make with their lives. This meant that women with status were left with very few options to earn an income. The aim for this analysis is to show this distortion of upper-class female reality by analysing the portrayal of the stepmother characters in four fairy-tale film narratives released since 2000, focusing on the Cinderella and Snow White narratives (two of the more widely disseminated fairy-tale stories). By illustrating how little information is given about their lives before re-marrying, this chapter will demonstrate how audiences are still ignorant to the backdrop of wealthy male superiority and the patriarchal structures that would lead to a woman remarrying for economic security, showing them in a more sympathetic light.