Howdy howdy! I wrote an article on Villainess Manga and put it on ao3. It's about how Villainess manga has changed because of Wish Fulfillment stories. You can find it here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/74681766/chapters/195045121 or you can read it in the keep reading.
If you have any suggestions or feedback, I'd love to hear!
An Essay on Villainess Manga, or Help, My Subgenre’s Homogonizing and my Villainesses aren’t Mean Anymore!
An Introduction to Villainess Manga: Why Are Villainess Manga Read in the First Place
Villainess Manga (Or Manhwa, or Manhua, or even webcomics) are simply put, comics that feature a main character who is referred to as a “Villainess”. This may be a role or title they’re referred to in the future, past, or even present, and it may even be a title they didn’t earn themself. Often times, our main character is either reincarnated into a story as the Villainess of the tale, or our main character was a Villainess in her past and now has decided to change her ways (via time travel, or living her new life in exile). This means that our main character can be put in a wide variety of situations and still be called a Villainess. Reincarnates and decides to become a baker instead? A staple in the “genre”! Goes Back into the past to exact revenge in a cruel and unusual manner? A common occurrence. A villainess who’s trying to survive her extremely murderous family by convincing them she’s murderous too while trying to escape? You’re looking at one of our most well known classics, Roxana. Have fun!
Okay, but what’s the point of classifying them as Villainess, instead of cooking or revenge or psychological? Girlhood and the expression of it on the “Negative side”. Our main characters aren’t Heroines or Side Characters. They’re the women who are expressly meant to be seen in a negative light, by the role they’re in. And that can be used to show how to get out or through those negative views to live a better life, or used to show when being bad is the best way to get through a situation. Also, and this is very important, sometimes they’re just really cool.
What Changed
Something that’s been popping up in this “genre” is an influx of… not using the villainess role to its fullest let’s say. Instead, these villainesses are changed or outright start not as villainesses, but as Heroines, but now in a different hair color. Black hair, instead of pink. It’s not just that there are some manga that are being pushed out just to make more money, which is fine, but they’re doing it poorly and against what the niche was originally meant for. A Villainess isn’t someone that just was bullied and now needs to be swaddled, she’s someone who was hated widely, and now has to deal with those consequences.
But then, how did this change even happen, from a character exploration to something that seems to be just another Heroine Fantasy?
It happened because of something called Wish Fulfillment.( And money and Capitalism, but that’s not very specific in this current age.)
Purely Wish Fulfillment in Villainess Form
What exactly do I mean by wish fulfillment? Isn’t all art to be shared a form of wish fulfillment? Sort of, but not to the extreme that’s happening to cause a whole genre niche to switch. What we’re looking at is Purely Wish Fulfilment, where something was made just to fill in a specific need, and nothing else. Someone saw an empty space, and thought to fill it. It’s great for scratching specific itches… but when there’s so many of them, all without saying anything about what they’re made about, it squishes down what the art was originally made to be a part of. Making it a whole bag of M&Ms when it was meant to be trail mix.
These M&Ms, or specific Wishes to fill, usually come in two varieties. The Villainess being praised by the world, or the Villainess is against the world and is ready to fight tooth and nail.
The Villainess Turned into A Sweetheart!
With the sweeter side of these wish fulfillment stories, we see our villainess is just a beaten down character by the world who just needs love and everything will finally be great. The story asks that you pity this Villainess for being the Villainess of the story, and once that’s out of the way, she will now get all the love she was never given. If she was reincarnated, she is now loved by everyone who meets her and sees her great new ideas for improving the world like soap. If she’s always been a Villainess and now she’s being exiled, she was never really at fault in the first place and they’ll wish they still had her excellent mind as she now lives a happy relaxing life. She was never in the wrong in her life, and now she gets the great reward of fluffy creatures, good food, and a hot male lead(s) to follow her every word like a duckling. Which, I won’t deny, sounds like something fun to read if you’re in the mood for it.
Things like My Lady Just Wants to Relax exist for a reason. Sweet wish fulfillments are great for when your mind is just in need of something sweet to turn your brain off to. But once again, we run into that M&M problem. What does My Lady Just Wants to Relax actually do with its main character being a villainess? It gives her a bit of trauma to be resolved via her new harem-found family, and that’s it. It’s a problem to be solved easily as a way to make a bond between the main characters, and not an exploration about femininity in any form. The role of Villainess could have easily been replaced with Previously Bullied Heroine, and nothing would have changed.
In contrast, however, there is a manga that does have a Villainess making food premise as its wish fulfillment, that I believe does explore what it means to be a Villainess. Lady Rose Just Wants to be a Commoner. This is a manga in which once again our main character is a Villainess exiled who decides to make food in her new commoner-life (she bakes bread, in this case. She’s not the owner of the bakery either, she just bakes bread.), but this time she’s being inundated with men from her life as a Villainess who just want her to come back to her old life. Except the life she lived before was a mask she wore, something to present a face of perfection that nobility demanded while playing her role. A mask she doesn’t want to wear anymore, because it literally traumatised her. All while still showing scenes of her making good food, becoming friends with another woman, living her life freely. This is a story where you cannot swap out being the Villainess with being a traumatised Heroine without changing the meaning of what’s being said about the story. With being a Villainess here, she’s someone who has hurt others while forcing herself into being someone unapproachable for her own survival as a noble. But if she were a traumatised Heroine, she’s now no longer someone who has had any fault in this situation, and instead is now someone learning how to overcome that trauma to live a new life. A story that has its place in being told, but not the same as before. It doesn’t hold the same meaning for the readers. It is an exploration in being the Bad Guy in a story and coming out of it.
The Villainess Yearns For Revenge
Here, on the darker side of Wish Fulfillment stories, getting revenge. Our villainess has been pushed around by the world, or more usually her family, and now she’s out for revenge! This usually comes in the form of time travel, coming back to the past after being betrayed with new future knowledge to make sure the thing to fight back against can’t gain a foothold to be able to stab our main character in the back. These types of stories usually have the people opposing our Villainess as evil awful people who are caricatures we all should root against, such as an evil stepmother who’s stolen all of your money, or a “Heroine” sister who’s done everything to make our main character take the fall for being evil.
We’ve all had times where we’ve wished we could take revenge, to not turn the other cheek when someone did something wrong against us. An itch that needs to be scratched, and feels great to scratch in the form of revenge stories. And, when a Villainess is in these types of stories, she usually does do things that would put her as someone hated by the world, putting her against the world! Exactly what we were looking for, right? Something that would be filled by a story like The Villainess Turns the Hourglass, wherein our Villainess comes to the past after being executed because her sister positioned her as a criminal, and so she reenacts revenge against her sister and stepmother who caused her downfall. She manipulates people, she lies, she… fake flirts with her stepbrother. She’s a Villainess through and through! But once again, it must be asked… what exactly does all of that explore about being a Villainess? What it means to take purposefully evil actions to enact a plan that gets you hated? Or does it just fill that itch that says “I just want to get one over on them and get away with it”?
In contrast, I’d like to bring Villains are Destined to Die. This one may not be exactly getting one over, but it is definitely a revenge. In this, our main character is transmigrated into a Villainess who’s despised by her family for having tantrums and not being the daughter they were using her to replace. In return, she makes sure they realise that the pain they’ve caused her currently and in her past (pre-transmitigation) was unjust, and that they’ve long since gone past the point of ever being fully forgiven. Less of a direct revenge than The Villainess Turns the Hourglass of turning the family against each other to implode, but a devastating revenge in my opinion. In this, being a Villainess is directly in front for why people don’t like her, and it’s in turn why she fights back in evil ways. Her maid uses needles to stab her awake each morning because she’s basically abandoned by her family? Use that needle to blackmail that maid into treating our Villainess like her boss and eventually helping with other less than legal things. In the Villainess’ past pre transmitigation, she shot at other nobles with her bb gun? They were putting insects in her tea and otherwise harassing her. It’s a cause and effect, a showing of how someone could become a Villainess (especially through ways that a Villain wouldn’t normally face, such as being harassed at tea parties) and when’s the right time to fight back and be a Villainess. Against someone who has knowingly caused you harm and intends to continue. When the other won’t listen to you in any other way. When you are in danger, mentally or physically. Protect yourself, fight for yourself. A ‘Do not go quietly in that gentle night”, sort of message. It’s a story that’s very sympathetic to the woman who used to be our Villainess pre transmitigation, the woman who had been bullied and harassed her whole life and fought back with teeth. And every woman needs a bit of that, in a world where woman are told to pull their teeth and be gentle.
They Used to Bite.
The thing about Villainess stories in general, is that they’ve changed. They used to bite. They used to talk about the different aspects of what it means to be a woman. They used to be a story that held meaning in what they were talking about. Now, with so much Wish Fulfillment being put on the market, they’ve just become a marker that says “This girl’s got issues :C” and says good enough with that. They’ve become a marker the same way that “Werewolf boyfriend” is a marker for what kind of monster you’re dating. It’s become a filler title, instead of a title that says “We are going to be looking into some things that you as a woman should look at”. It hurts a bit to know that the old ways of Villainesses are going or are smothered under everything else. I’m not against Wish Fulfillment, but I’ve had enough sweets. Please, just let me eat something real again. I just want to read about a story where being considered evil actually means something. I just want to stop feeling like being a woman means that you’re supposed to be a figure who never does anything wrong. I just want to be seen as real. Why is that wrong?
