{"id":317,"date":"2021-11-02T12:43:37","date_gmt":"2021-11-02T19:43:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312\/?p=317"},"modified":"2021-11-02T12:43:37","modified_gmt":"2021-11-02T19:43:37","slug":"now-im-the-bad-guy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312\/2021\/11\/02\/now-im-the-bad-guy\/","title":{"rendered":"Now I&#8217;m the Bad Guy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ena Lucia Portela\u2019s \u201cCinderella\u2019s Secret Dream\u201d highlights the problematic portrayal of the evil villainess. Portela demonstrates this through Cleis\u2019 own criticism of the heroine, \u201cCleis couldn\u2019t imagine anything more boring and stupid\u2026 She longed to play the \u201cvillainess,\u201d an evil woman who gets her kicks committing all sorts of dastardly deeds\u201d (2). The evil woman is active, she gets to do the \u201ccommitting\u201d; in contrast, the ingenue is acted upon, and the only thing she can do is cry. However, it is precisely the agency that positions the villainess\u2019 as evil. They become transgressive figures and must be made into a villain in order to subdue their appeal. In the classic trope, there are only two options: you can either be the sweet, \u2018morally correct\u2019 woman that is submissive, or if you want agency, it must mean you are evil and monstrous.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">However, Portela criticizes this dichotomy. In contrast to the original fairy tale, Cleis must have her own agency. She must be the one to buy her own dress, to bring herself to the party, and, most importantly, to get herself away from the party. Like her own stepmother, she must take action for herself. Perhaps also like her stepmother, she perpetrates the downfall of another woman. Just like how the old housekeeper now makes Cleis do the housework, Cleis makes Lotta take her place in the demented mansion of Price Charming. In this comparison, Lotta was truly the one without her own agency &#8212; her life is almost entirely determined by her mother. Cleis is the only one to make it out of the town and achieve her own dreams. Through the success of Cleis, Portela offers a different option from the classic dichotomy, one far more realistic and probable: we all have, and we all should, exercise our own agency, even if it makes us the villain sometimes. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ena Lucia Portela\u2019s \u201cCinderella\u2019s Secret Dream\u201d highlights the problematic portrayal of the evil villainess. Portela demonstrates this through Cleis\u2019 own criticism of the heroine, \u201cCleis couldn\u2019t imagine anything more boring and stupid\u2026 She longed to play the \u201cvillainess,\u201d an evil woman who gets her kicks committing all sorts of dastardly deeds\u201d (2). The evil woman [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":52974,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[109],"class_list":["post-317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-span312","tag-week9"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/52974"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=317"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":318,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317\/revisions\/318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span312\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}