OK, sorry I was out all day and just got back a bit ago and am tired but I will not pass up a chance to talk about Cinder Fall cos she is a great villain, spoilers ahead!
So during the early volumes Cinder is an ominous, mysterious presence in the narrative, a cryptic and dangerous femme fatale who's character seems almost performative.
Which is one of the big 'things' about Cinder!
Her intense hyper femininity is very much a façade, a front a performance she puts on. Reason being, throughout her life the people who have always held the most overt power over her were her stepmother, wicked stepsisters and the current main villain Salem.
As a result Cinder's mental image of power and freedom (These concepts go hand in hand to her) is that of extremely performative femininity. She even wears glass tipped heels to recreate the heel click sound of her wicked stepmothers own steps!
But the actual Cinder, the one behind the mask is borderline feral. She is a mass of trauma responses and deeply unhealthy coping mechanism shaped into a living weapon that is trying to be a person.
She can be incredibly cunning, but ever since losing an arm and eye to main character Ruby Rose, these traits are at war with both trauma and desperate, hungering impatience and simmering rage.
These are traumas and flaws she needs to learn how to balance. In some ways she is kind of like a fighting Shounen protagonist if they were a villain. She never gives up, she never forgets & she refuses die.
She's also low key 'cursed' with bad luck in the sense a couple of her plans have been genuinely brilliant but some external factor she wasn't aware of (But made perfect sense) fucks her over. IE, not realizing Vernal was a decoy Spring Maiden and not knowing Emerald's hallucination Semblance wouldn't work on Penny's robotic mind. IE, her defeats when cunning fails aren't authorial fiat or her being stupid, they are just every character in the story exercising agency and a villain not being anymore omnipresent than the heroes.
Cinder also clearly 'wants' connections, but she can't conceive of relationships as anything other than violently transactional or abusive at best, causing her to drive away the few people she brings close.
This is all a bit messy, but basically, I think Cinder is a great villain.
She has highs and lows, facades and true faces, genuine skill but also deep flaws, as well as growing and adapting across the series.
jbbartram-illu
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