Heroines are pretty, Villainesses are vain

A standard convention for distinguishing heroes from villains in animation is to make the good characters attractive and the bad characters ugly.  While I am not yet going to discuss the ways this trend is enforced and what it means about standards of beauty, I am going to discuss the irony of this trend in the face of the tendency for villainous characters to be vain.

A classic, obsessed with being the "fairest of them all" to the point of wanting to kill Snow White for being prettier than her.  (Disney's Snow White)

 Not exactly villains, but certainly antagonists.  Typical "most popular girl in school" trope, where their main defining characteristics are their popularity and love of fashion. (Britt and Tiff, My Life as a Teenage Robot)

Villain, for sure.  Her main character arcs involve her feeding off of other peoples' misery to keep herself beautiful. (Spectra, Danny Phantom) - in both episodes focused on her, the way she is defeated is to be 'made ugly'.

The point I want to focus on here is, while heroines are almost universally depicted as being beautiful, they never seem to care about their looks, nor put any effort into them.  Meanwhile, characters who are portrayed as putting effort are almost always villains, where their supposed preoccupation with looks is what makes them so terrible.

However, when villains are not shown to be evil in their quest for beauty, they are (as I mentioned before), frequently drawn to be 'ugly'.  Occasionally, villains are shown to be both vain and unattractive.

So what sort of messages does this send to the target audiences of these cartoons - mostly young children? 

The Effeminate Male Villain

One common way cartoons immediately code a male character as a villain is to add some femininity (or a lot of femininity) into his gender presentation, while male heroes are almost always kept to "traditional" masculinity.  The purpose of this is to make the audience uncomfortable, feeding into assumptions that any display of femininity from a man is "wrong" and "unnatural."

This isn't a recent trope, nor is it limited to cartoons.  It goes back to the implementation of the Hays Code in the 1930s, which enforced a rule stating that any 'sexual perversion' (read: homosexuality), if it had to be hinted at at all, had to be portrayed in a negative way.  This means that any indication of effeminacy had to be on the villains, and moreover, played in a pay designed to make the audience see it as 'wrong' and 'unnatural'.  For example, in The Maltese Falcon:

 It is not only male characters who fall into this trope.  The tendency to code villains as not 'typically masculine male' or 'typically feminine female', while largely in the form of effeminate men, will also come up in other characters.  Incidentally, female villains who fall into this categorization will still be more likely to come across as the "effeminate male" category, rather than a "mannish woman".

Literally based on Divine, a well-known drag queen.

What are some other examples of effeminate male villains you can think of ?  How is this trend harmful?

The Gendering of Heroic and Villainous Traits

One trend that is consistent - and has been for the past few decades at the very least - is the way  both heroic and villainous character traits have been gendered.  Generally speaking, female heroes have been given traits associated with nurturing, maternal roles - they are most often congratulated for their compassion, kindness, and gentleness.  Consider what is used to make the audience sympathize with Disney's Cinderella, for example.  While she is shown to be relegated to working around the house, her willingness to

Male heroes are generally put in the 'heroic' role for their physical strength, bravery, and actions associated with a role of protector.  This is not to say that male heroes are not often kind, or that female heroes are rarely brave, but it is a matter of which traits are emphasized more by the story.

Villains are also given similarly gendered traits.  Female villains' failing traits are generally connected to vanity or jealousy, while male villains are often given no apparent motivation aside from pointless cruelty (for example, Hexxus from Ferngully: The Last Rainforest or Thrax from Osmosis Jones).  While greed is a common and seemingly gender neutral villainous trait, it is important to consider what the villain in question is greedy for.  Female characters are often shown to be obsessed with some material obsession - Cruella DeVille's entire reason for wanting the dalmatians is for a fur coat - while male characters are generally shown to have much larger goals - Scar from The Lion King wants the throne.  

Of course, there are always exceptions.

  
Overall, this trend in representation feeds into cultural perceptions of men and women as a whole, where women are still expected to value family and want to have children, while men are expected to be ambitious and the 'breadwinners'.   How could the fact that these representations are primarily directed towards children affect kids' worldviews?  How else are men and women gendered by their heroic or villainous traits?