Why the Villain Feels More Honest Than the Heroine

We were raised to root for the heroine, the girl who is good, selfless, and always willing to put others before herself. She is graceful, patient, and endlessly kind, the perfect figure to admire and emulate. But at some point, the heroine stopped feeling inspiring and started feeling artificial, as though she had been polished into a role model who was less a person and more a performance. She began to feel like a flat image of goodness, carefully constructed to be liked rather than to be real. Meanwhile, the villain, unapologetic, sharp-edged, and flawed, began to stand out as the only character who seemed to be telling the truth.

Image From: Wikipedia

Female villains have often been portrayed as cautionary figures. The witch who is too independent. The “mean girl” refuses to play nice. The femme fatale who refuses to soften her power. Each one was meant to remind us what happens when women step outside the roles assigned to them. Yet for a generation of girls who are exhausted by the expectation to smile, shrink, and remain silent, these characters do not read as threats. Instead, they read like reflections of feelings that are not allowed to surface anywhere else.

Maleficent is the clearest example of this shift. In the original Sleeping Beauty, she is cast as evil simply for being vengeful, powerful, and uninvited. Her anger is presented as irrational, her curse as the mark of a monster. She is feared because she refuses to apologize, dares to be furious, and will not accept being ignored. But when her story was retold decades later, her fury was reframed as the natural response to betrayal and grief. Suddenly, Maleficent was no longer a one-dimensional villain but a woman with complexity, contradictions, and wounds that made her feel painfully real. Unlike Aurora, who drifts through the story sweet and passive, Maleficent rages, protects, regrets, and loves, embodying the emotions that heroines are rarely allowed to show.

What makes Maleficent resonate is not her power or even her curse, but the honesty of her emotions. She refuses to hide her pain, her anger, or her desire for revenge, even when it makes her unlikable. She contains contradictions that make her believable, a reminder that real people are rarely purely good or purely bad. Aurora represents an ideal, but Maleficent represents humanity in all its flaws and fire.

There is honesty in that rage, in that selfishness, in the refusal to conform to a narrative that demands endless patience and forgiveness. While the heroine hides her flaws to remain lovable, the villain flaunts hers and forces you to look anyway. That refusal to perform perfection might be exactly why she feels more human, and why so many of us recognize ourselves in her contradictions rather than in the neat goodness of the heroine.

Liking villains is not about endorsing cruelty. It is about craving stories that admit women can be angry, ambitious, and messy without being reduced to “good” or “bad.” It is about watching a character break rules and recognizing that even if we do not agree with her choices, at least she is not lying about who she is.

Maybe we root for the villain because she carries the truths we are not supposed to speak aloud. Maybe she feels more honest because she embodies everything we have been told to bury. And maybe that is the real twist: it is the villain, not the heroine, who shows us what it means to be fully human. For Gen Z girls, who are growing up in a world that tells us to curate ourselves into perfect aesthetics and flawless performances, Maleficent’s refusal to be anything but raw and contradictory feels like a kind of freedom. She shows us that being complicated is not a weakness but a truth, and that honesty, even when it is messy, is more powerful than perfection.