On Themis [6.4 SPOILER]

[Eisi]

I have to say, I was floored by that ending (in a good way.) Even media that allows for a great degree of complexity and depth in its female characters and avoids the usual potholes when it comes to writing women often cannot help but sink into that "becoming a parent changes you"/ "parental love conquers all" stereotype, so to see a mother not only not fall prey to that but be so thoroughly unrepentant in seeing her child as nothing but a test subject and manipulating their entire relationship from his very birth was huge. That's icy, even by Western media standards, and we're talking a JRPG here, where moms either wind up dead or as an inoffensive background character who hangs out the washing and wonders what to cook for dinner.

And dialling that back, reflecting on her relationship with Lahabrea and what it likely actually would have meant to her (absolutely nothing), and just how much that would mess with anyone's head, given how significant it clearly was for him... it's just overall psychopathic levels of cruelty, and while it is tremendous that a female character has been allowed to be so diabolically evil, my biggest takeaway is I don't think the poor guy even needed the sundering to jump off a ledge by the end of all of that, lol.

I love this because it circles back around to treating a previously considered anti-feminist archetype - the devouring mother - as now being bold and feminist again.

The devouring mother is an exclusively female archetype seen in for example the witch in Hansel and Gretel, she desires to eat her children and they way she does that is by rearing and pampering their child and making it love them, keeping them dependent and killing of their self-hood, instrumentalizing them for their eventual consumption.

This pretty neatly fits Athena too and it's precisely because it's a Japanese game that we see it, in the west such a character would likely be considered anti-feminist because it feeds into a previously established misogynist trope.

I completely agree with you though, I think Athena being an unrepentant villain is not only fresh, like who else do we have, Valens van Varro? But it's imo also feminist.

[Brinne]

I completely agree with you though, I think Athena being an unrepentant villain is not only fresh, like who else do we have, Valens van Varro? But it's imo also feminist.

Not all of them may be as major as a central raid villain, or as over-the-top, but there's also the likes of Asahi, Nabriales, Teledji Adeledji, and some would argue Zenos (I'm not sure that I would, though, in his case), that I can think of.