what's funny is that women have been shipping hot male hero / hot male villain pairings since the dawn on fandom and no one seemed to have an issue with the /concept/ in itself, but switch the male hero for a heroine instead and suddenly SOMEONE HAS GOT TO SAVE THOSE WOMEN FROM THEMSELVES don't they know that those relationships and UNHEALTHY and and TWISTED and wouldnt work IRL ??!?!!?!?!?111
whatâs even funnier is that men are allowed to openly lust around female villainesses, even go so far as to have fantasies involving said women either dominating/beating the crap out of them or even defrosting their iced hearts to the charms of a dashing male self insert and no one worries if said men will be prey to abusive women irl bc of their personal fetishes or tastes in fiction
Anyone who denies there isnât a gendered double standard in how hero/villain ships are viewed needs to thinkagain. Male hero x male villain, or male hero x female villain, donât come with a thousand warnings and handwringing thinkpieces attached. But if itâs a female hero x male villain pairing, all hell breaks loose. Worse, these ships arenât even granted access to the hero/villain umbrella dynamic, nope, they suddenly get rebranded as âgood girl/bad boyâ and sneered at by some, while others will get their panties in a twist about how itâs a âbad messageâ.
Again, this is connected to the infantilization of female characters, whose gender always comes before their status as heroes.
A hero is by definition a helper, a defender, an upholder of values and virtues like compassion, selflessness, empathy. This is easily accepted in male heroes, who serve as proxies for the audience as a whole, and who both male and women, boys and girls, are supposed to identify with (and they do).
But if the hero is a woman, then the assumption is that she serves as a proxy and a /role model/ only for other females. Who, of course, being female, wonât be able to see her romantic choices in the context of an epic-heroic narrative (so: not directly and literally applicable to reality) and will knee-jerk emulate her choice of a romantic partner in real life as well.
Aside from the rampantly sexist belittlement of womenâs critical thinking and agency when consuming fiction, at the end of the day this is essentially victim-blaming logic. It puts the burden of âchoosing wiselyâ in romance on womenâthe ones theyâre claiming to protect from abuseâand holding them responsible for perpetuating âbad tropesâ and the appeal of fictional âbad boysâ (which are totally the same as real life abusive men, of course!), if the media they consume isnât wholesome or progressive enough. This only results in creating a guilt circle and putting women against other women. It drastically reduces the range of narratives available and applicable to female protagonists, and it shifts the blame from perpetrators onto victims or potential victims. Women and their tastes in fiction arenât responsible for abusive men. Abusive men are responsible for their abuse, and I promise you it makes no difference to them if the person theyâre abusing loves or hates Kylo Ren.
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