And rooting for people who do bad things.
CINDERELLA’S CRIMES is coming in just a few weeks and the ARC is in reviewers’ hands right now — which does make me a little nervous! The protagonist is evil. She does bad things. Sure, she figures the people she hurts deserve it (and if you squint and view things in as black-and-white a manner as she does, they almost sort of do — but not quite!). If you’re going to be turned off by a woman doing horrific things, this book isn’t for you. The list of Cinderella’s crimes includes petty theft and clever grifts but also murder and arson.
Get ready.
So why did I write this? Why do I think this is fun?
Cinderella as a character in the classic story has very little agency. She wants things, but she needs other people (and other peoples’ magic) to help her get what she wants. She’s dependent. She’s sympathetic, but little more than that.
So I swung hard in the other direction. Cinna is not sympathetic, but she has a hell of a lot of agency. She knows what she wants, and literally nothing is going to stop her from getting it.
She’s a classic villain!
So many of us love the villains in fiction. They’re styled dark and clever, given angsty character arcs and rough backgrounds. They push h and for what they want, and that’s both fascinating and exciting. And then we love to see them lose.
In the real world, though, villains don’t always lose. And sometimes, once you see who’s really playing to win, it’s clear that all of the players are villains. Or sometimes the villains are just that good. Sometimes, their methods are horrific but their aims aren’t totally off base. In other words, there’s a lot more to life than just seeing identifying the bad buy and watching them fall.
What then?
Well, in CINDERELLA’S CRIMES, if we have to root for a villain to win, at least she’ll be a glamorous underdog, too.