Powerful men are always monsters, so much that monster isn’t a marked category for men. We create heroes out of powerful men, the story disguising the villainy beneath. But no powerful woman is a happy warrior; she’s a trauma monster. The depictions of female villains in both fiction and reality are a reminder that female-ness itself is scary, shrill, and hysterical, either oversexualized or monstrous for its failure to be invitingly sexual. To put women in power without changing our whole society means raising them up as fantasy villains. To have a TV show for a male audience in which female characters dominate the landscape, the female characters must be murderers and psychopaths; everybody can be comfortable with that.

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If men can be accepted as powerful warriors, as complex figures capable of fighting for power without losing sight of integrity, capable of seeking glory without that seeking turning into a bloodbath of betrayal, then the hope is that women, in fiction, in life, and in the places somewhere in between the two, might one day be allowed the same consideration. Female heroes—the proverbial “strong female characters”—exist, but in both fiction and life, they are portrayed as one-dimensional, or fail to rouse any real belief or excitement, falling quickly back into what reads as villainy, such as Game of Thrones’ mostly botched attempts to write Daenerys, the closest thing they have to strong female character who isn’t evil, as an inspiring leader. Their flaws quickly disqualify them from heroism, rather than offering the complexity we seek out in male characters. Flawed male heroes are still heroes, but a flawed female character immediately becomes a villain. Villains are often more fascinating and more honest characters than heroes, but in consigning female characters to these roles, women are once again asked to bear the burden of the ugly truths of both heroism and villainy.