The progression of the “Villainess” trope
Y'know, thinking about it, it's very ironic how a trope made to subvert one's expectations & give more depth to 1 dimensional villains in cliche novels by "humanizing" them more & providing their side of the story, eventually became oversaturated with cartoony villains & flat MCs. Thus, completely failing in its goal to "subvert expectations" as it too turned into mind numbing cliche, becoming the exact opposite of what the troupe initially aimed to achieved.
I am talking about "Villainess" series.
I remember seeing a twitter post a while back saying how a lot of the villainess stuff the authors & studios are putting out nowadays lack any sort of nuance when it comes to its characters. And how a lot authors simply switch the roles of the cast (Like: OG MC -> villain | OG villain -> MC) & call it a day. And I 100% agree with that.
This troupe kinda ended up becoming the dictionary definition of the saying, "You either die as a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become a villain” lmao
What could've been an opportunity to write nuanced villains & morally ambiguous main characters, turned EXACTLY into the cliche it was pocking fun at.
In an attempt to reveal how the MCs of your typical cliche novels can also be in the wrong at times, flaws that the story & its (in-canon) fandom may purposefully ignore, the villainess stories ended up doing EXACT SAME thing EXECPT this time it's the "villains" doing it rather than the OG FL or OG ML of the “OG novel”. In an attempt to stop cliche villains from remaining cliche, while we did ended up getting slightly more nuance for the “OG villain” characters, in the process, the OG MCs turned exactly into those flat cliche villains.
Alot of villainess series poke fun at the troupes they themself use, but not in a satirical way.
So many villainess series poke fun at the OG novels for being problematic or stupid & the fandom of said novels basically ignoring its flaws & problems, only gushing over the OG FL. Which yea, is nice & all, but y'know... that's exactly what those villainess series do too. SO MANYY of them borderline have the FLs participating in literal slavery. & More often than not have a borderline colonizer ML. Not to mention the numerous which carry weird undertones of colorism, and many such other things. All the while, the fandom of these villainess series continue to ignore their glaring problems & flaws & instead just gush over the FL and ML.
And I'm not even saying this in a hating sort of way (well, aside from the series with issues of colorism, orientalism, etc). Moreover, this is all not to say that one can not enjoy such stories, because admittedly, there is indeed fun in just reading a simple and familiar story line. But this is all more me being intrigued by this trope’s almost ironic progression as companies rush their staff to produce something which they think will be able to ride the waves of the current trends, only for the vast majority to simply drown in a sea of mediocrity (with many even being canceled due to this)
[Though I mean, something as simple as villainess tropes won’t be the only one to go through this. Like a lot of Shakespearean works, a subversion of the classics & typical troupes back then, got turned into ones of those classics and by many are now considered cliche. And that's just scrapping the bottom of the barrel!]
