#i literally roll my eyes every time anyone asks for female k.illers that are unapologetically evil

[bells-of-black-sunday]

Not to "I've been laying in bed for 3 hours and can't sleep" ramble, but:

I do think there's a very weird phenomenon in general with f.andom where characters will be released with either a vague backstory or ones you just kind of have to guess and then as soon as it becomes concrete a lot of people utterly hate it and blame everything under the sun for why. "It removes their agency", "It makes them too similar to x", etc. Really I think it boils down to people getting really attached to one idea for a character they had and are now upset that the source material doesn't back it up anymore.

I most often see it with female characters which no surprise there, misogyny is rampant in f.andom spaces. Everyone loves evil male characters and people tend to rush to find a way to justify their actions or make them a depressed sad boy they can coddle, but will tear evil female characters apart for every small thing that usually is either intended for you to hate her for or completely made up. I think I see this a lot in spaces like d.bd or mainly with A.udrey in d.arkest d.ungeon though to be honest I've seen it even with the morally grey female characters there too, because of the above reasons.

I still to this day see people complain about b.hvrs "bad writing" for making Julie not be a helpless victim and instead make her complicit and often times the driving force in the l.egions actions. B.hvr has a lot of bad writing, but their cleaning up of the l.egion and making their lore consistent is genuinely some of their best work. The comics are really fun to read give flavor to members that genuinely had no character to begin with while preventing S.usie from being pushed into this weird "I'm a helpless teenager who has no agency in any of my actions" box the f.andom tends to put her in. It's great, I genuinely loved reading them to the point where it got me back into reading in general.

I really think the writing in D.arkest D.ungeon is fun and purposely ambiguous, but never to the point where you don't know what's going on. I really don't know what people expected from a mercenary whose title is "grave robber", but being mad that she's killed people is really stupid. I don't think making her husband abusive removes her agency if we went by that logic then people should also hate S.armenti's lore, because he was also abused and that should remove his agency too right? So why doesn't anyone get mad at his lore? Aside from the obvious misogyny, I think people genuinely hate female characters that are unapologetically horrible people and I'm going to be blunt: As bad as it is, it feels like people think there is only one outcome from abuse situations and it just makes the person nice and kind.

Her having an abusive husband doesn't remove her agency at all. She could've run away, she knew when he'd get drunk and pass out, she could've left at any moment and she did leave most nights. We are told that explicitly. Instead she chose to poison him, that is her choice, no one forced her to do that. Same with how no one forced her to use up all of her wealth or start grave robbing for money. She did that anyway. Believe it or not, but most resurrection men were poor people, not rich people stealing bodies and selling them to medical colleges. There's many things she could've done to keep her wealth, but instead she chose to go dig up her husband's grave.

It doesn't make her at all similar to D.ismas, she had a choice, he literally needed to do one last job to have money to eat. She's not remorseful at all, it's kind of obvious from her lines and trinkets. I think she's a very fun and compelling character same as J.ulie. People keep wanting more evil female characters, but the minute we get them it's immediate backlash.

Like why do y'all keep asking for things when you can't even handle a murderous teenager or a morally dubious victorian woman?