High Heel Face Turn - Television Tropes & Idioms

Lex Luthor and his five Mooks. Guess which one betrays him.

Many (male) villains have female henchpersons who loyally serve by their side — until they meet the hero and are won over to the side of good. They don't always have to fall in love with the hero (though this is very frequent), but his upright manliness will inevitably get them to reconsider their evil ways.

It seems that in order for a female villain to be irredeemable, she has to be more evil than the male villains. To actually be killed by the end of the movie, she has to be way more evil than the male villains. She more or less has to backflip over the Moral Event Horizon shouting woohooo!

Related to Beauty Equals Goodness and Double Standard — both henchmen and ugly, older Rosa Klebb type villainesses seem far less prone to being redeemed. Interestingly, the Beauty Equals Goodness aspect could be read as yet another way in which this trope might be considered sexist: Pretty women who are appealing to men are much more likely to be redeemed than less conventionally attractive women.

(On the other hand, the mirror-image phenomenon exists in romance novels, soap operas, and similar genres, in which a handsome and charismatic bad guy is much more likely to be redeemed by the heroine's love than an ugly man.)

Compare Closer To Earth. See also Sorting Algorithm Of Face Heel Turning, Mad Scientists Beautiful Daughter, the Dark Chick and the Femme Fatale. Contrast with The Vamp and Daddys Little Villain, who are usually too evil to be redeemed. Also contrast with In Love With The Mark, a Gender Flipped version... with assassins! Also see Sex Face Turn, the hero's usual technique, and Deliver Us From Evil. See also Men Are The Expendable Gender.

Examples:

Anime and Manga

Sizer of The Violinist Of Hameln probably counts.
Chane Laforet of the Lemures, in Baccano!.
- Of course, her comrades were planning to kill her in the end, and it could be argued that she remained true to the groups original purpose (protecting her father)...
- Heck, she was three quarters of the way through turning before the show even started, and her whole team knew it.
Nico Robin in One Piece, although technically, half of Baroque Works' number agents were female.
- Not just that, she only palled around with bad people mostly because it was ultimately the only way for her to be safe...ish from the world government.
- Boa Hancock is a better example, as she is in the female Shichibukai and pulls a Heel Face Turn entirely out of love for The Hero.
In Get Backers, a lot of the female villainesses are this.
Guren, one of the few major female filler antagonists in Naruto, does a High Heel Face Turn after coming to love Yukimaru, and cooperates with Naruto to ensure his safety. Unfortunately, she apparently dies protecting him. Or not.
- So did Konan, the only female member of the Akatsuki, who admits that her morality and motivation completely depend on her childhood friend Nagato. So when he goes the route of Redemption Equals Death, she follows the new goals which he strove for.
  - Haku is an interesting subversion of this trope. For one, he's male (though Dude Looks Like A Lady is in full effect), and it's not that he betrays the villain (Zabuza) so much as his sympathy for the protagonist causes him to falter at the last minute; he can't bring himself to kill Naruto, which ultimately leads to the villain's demise.
Fresh Pretty Cure: Setsuna Higashi goes from the sole female member of an evil organization (Eas) to Fourth Ranger to the Cures (Cure Passion) in episode 23. This helps her in episode 25 when she has to battle an impersonator of her former self.
In the Utawarerumono anime, Touka of the Evenkuruga tribe is the only woman fighting on the side of Kucca Kecca, and the only one to later join the protagonist.
Renee in Innocent Venus when she rediscovers her feelings for an old flame.
Pixie of the Big Bad Four in Monster Rancher.

Comic Books

In the Green Lantern/Green Arrow teamup "Hard-Traveling Heroes II", Crackshot does this with barely a thought. Her boss is kind of weirding her out, Green Arrow's really hot, what's to consider?
In Batman #4, Queenie, a member of the Joker's gang, became the first criminal to deduce that Bruce Wayne was Batman and ended up falling for him. She later took a bullet intended for the crime fighter.

Film

Numerous Bond girls, but probably Pussy Galore most famously.
- And Bond's Epic Goods turn her straight, apparently!
- Another Bond film provides a great example of a villainess being too evil to turn: Xenia Onatopp doesn't simply kill people but literally gets an orgasmic thrill from murder.
Eve Teschmacher in the 1978 Superman movie and Kitty Kowalski in Superman Returns.
- Miss Teschmacher's betrayal was really Lex's own fault — he's so horrible to both of his henchpeople throughout the movie that the only reason Otis didn't betray him too was because he was too stupid to realize just how much Lex hated him.
  - The last straw for Miss Teschmacher involved sicing a missile on her mother's hometown. That led her to save Superman's life in exchange for his stopping that missile which was headed for Hackensack, NJ.
Mirage in The Incredibles. (Played more realistically than the usual, since her Heel Face Turn comes not through falling in love with the hero but more sensibly through realising that her villainous boyfriend/employer doesn't actually care if she lives or dies.)
- I see Mirage as a Punch Clock Villain who didn't realize at first that the project she was working on was truly heinous. Her Heel Face Turn actually begins when she learns that Syndrome has no qualms about killing children.
- Well she was complicit in the deaths of dozens of superheroes - and if her conversations with Mr. Incredible are any guide was cold blooded enough to happily chat with them beforehand (making her talk of "valuing life" a touch hypocrtical).
Lyranna from Beastmaster 2.
Subverted in Creature from Haunted Sea: the main character repeatedly tries to get the girl to turn good, but she's not interested.
Sala, in The Movie of The Phantom. No explanation is given, it seems to happen purely because the Laws of Trope demand it.
- This is decently explained after they encounter the old world pirates and she determines that staying with the main bad guy is likely to see very bad things happening for her as one of only two women in the group.
Eve Kendall in North By Northwest. Although it turns out that she was a Reverse Mole all along.
The Baroness in the 2009 live action GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra, fighting her way free of the nanomites to help Duke. Stays good until the end, though the nanomites are still there, and could be subverted if her brother had a second control device to drag her back.
Averted in the Straight-to-DVD release Green Lantern First Flight, where despite Boodika not being anywhere near as evil as the Big Bad Sinestro who she has allied herself with, but still ends up dying via impalement when Hal tricks her into shooting an energy rod to make it explode.
L Change The World, a spin-off live action movie of Death Note basically has the female minion stab the male "Big Bad" in the back in an Eviler Than Thou moment and then still manage to be saved from dying in a terrorist-esque suicide by the end. The "Big Bad" still died, of course. Even though what the female minion had been planning was arguably worse.
Trudy Chacon in Avatar is the only one of the soldiers who does a Heel Face Turn: the other characters who turn are either scientists or Jake Sully who (very literally) Go Native, but Trudy is simply one grunt amongst hundreds and has no particular reason to turn good other than this trope being in play.
- So having a moral code that can determine an atrocity doesn't count? Is there a "I didn't sign up for this" trope? That's more what this is, she even says that.
- The issue is not so much that Trudy objects as it is that no male soldiers or pilots do - why doesn't the "I didn't sign up for this" standard apply to them too? That the only female soldier (with lines anyway) is also the only soldier to have second thoughts is this trope in action.

Literature

Nicci in the Sword Of Truth series, though this is more about Richard changing her view on life than his sheer manliness, though that did help a little.
Michael Stackpole of the X Wing Series books and comics is good at subverting this. All of his villains are more or less equally evil, including Ysanne Isard, Leona Tavira, and The Mole, Erisi Dlart. Isard is the Big Bad, but she's not insane, just ruthless and calculating. Several people pull Heel Face Turns, but while there's a couple women among them they turn because Defeat Equals Friendship and because they were helped, like the men.
Happens rather frequently in Leslie Charteris' The Saint novels.

Live Action TV

This happens nearly Once an Episode in The Wild Wild West.
The writers of the original Star Trek seemed incapable of thinking women could be evil. Even villainesses tended to get the soft-focused-cheesy-musiced-hey-it's-a-hot-girl treatment. Women who did do bad things were typically portrayed as naive and/or misguided and therefore more deserving of pity than blame. Prime examples of this are Lt. Marla McGivers and Dr. Janice Lester. Due to Values Dissonance, modern-day viewers tend to take rather less kindly to these characters than was intended.
- What about Sylvia in "Catspaw"? Not only is she an unmitigated villainess, she dies — along with her more sympathetic male partner.
  - That wasn't really a "she". More an "it". Its undisguised form looked like it was made out of pipe cleaners.
Female villains in Power Rangers generally need to take a One Winged Angel form in order to be destroyed. Notable aversions include Vypra, Miratrix, and...yeah, especially since Miratrix was just trapped in a crystal, much like Kamdor prior to PROO. Notable examples of being played straight include Itassis and Necrolai/Leelee's Hot Mom Nikki, both of whom were redeemed at the end.
- No mention of Astronima anyone? This abided by both parts of this trope, being the first acting-Big Bad to have a Heel Face Turn and then getting cybernetically altered so she was RIDICULOUSLY evil so she could assume the role of true Big Bad... and then turning good in the end anyways.

Video Games

Cerl in Breath of Fire. Unfortunately, Redemption Equals Death.
- She got better with time travel though.
In The Neo Geo Arcade game Magician Lord, the female mini boss is the only enemy character who doesn't visibly explode, instead slumping over in defeat. Odd as her female bodyguards and the mooks die in firey explosions like everything else.
The female second-in-command of the Korriban Academy can be given one in Knights of the Old Republic if you help her kill Uhtar Wynn, then defeat her.
In Final Fantasy II, Leila does a Heel Face Turn after the party defeats her crew, and joins them.
In Final Fantasy VI, Celes is the first of the Empire's generals to turn against the war.
In Final Fantasy IX, General Beatrix does one after realizing what Queen Brahne is planning. Queen Brahne gets one just before her death.
In Mega Man X: Command Mission, although it's more of a Strange Bedfellows scenario, Ferham, one of the last members of the Rebellion, helps her enemies (X and his allies) defeat the Big Bad Redips/Spider by removing the Applied Phlebotinum that made him nearly invincible, allowing the heroes to ultimately defeat him. In the end, Ferham, like most other examples, pulls off a Redemption Equals Death to destroy the Applied Phlebotinum so that it will not fall into the wrong hands ever again.
it can be difficult to actually characterize the rebels in that game as outright evil; all of them seem to be genuinely dedicated to their ideals, and given the depiction of the federation government in that game its hard to condemn them.
Averted in the Dark Forces Saga; in Jedi Knight, the Dark Jedi who gets a Heel Face Turn is the teenage boy. The female Dark Jedi is The Dragon and is killed just before you face the Big Bad. Desann's apprentice Tavion is spared by Kyle in Jedi Outcast, but she just comes back even more pissed off as the new Big Bad in Jedi Academy.
Knights Of The Old Republic: One scary male leader of the Sith academy. One treacherous but hot female underling. Guess which one you have a chance to turn towards the light?
In the second of the Baten Kaitos series, Baelheit's little girl, Milly straight out defies him when the trio finally faces off against him in is floating empire. She pretty much confesses her love for Sagi in her sidequest just before this boss battle.
Indicators are that the upcoming City of Heroes update, Going Rogue, will have an example of this in demon-summoner Desdemona's background. She seems to be the likely contact for Villains seeking to turn Hero.
Belleza of Skies Of Arcadia pulls this because she finds Vyse attractive.
- To be fair, she was never all that evil to begin with. Her goal was to unite the world under one nation so that there would be no more wars. Once she realizes that Galcian just wants the world to suffer, she decides to sacrifice herself to kill him, by ramming her airship into his escape pod, when he tries to run away after Vyse and the others defeat him. It wasn't just that she thinks Vyse is hot.

Web Original

The eponymous supervillainous Leather, of the Interviewing Leather journalfic by Eric Burns, vents her spleen about the sexism of this trope at length in part 7 of the series. Interestingly, Leather herself is the result of a Face Heel Turn, as she was originally the superheroine Dynamo Girl. No, she does not redeem by the end of the story.

Webcomics

Therkla (who may or may not also be a Cute Monster Girl) from Order Of The Stick. Of course this could be a subversion as she remains loyal to her master (trying to make a compromise between the two sides) and ends up suffering Redemption Equals Death for her trouble...
In Sin Fest Fuchsia is executing one against the devil himself. Unusually, it is not the manliness of Criminy who occasioned this change, but rather the fact that he treated her like a decent person.
Mosp in Sluggy Freelance, although Isp and Osp disagree. She was involved in a Love Makes You Evil betrayal in the past, and cares for Torg because he was the first person to show her kindness. She suffers Redemption Equals Death.

Western Animation

In the made-for-tv movie Operation: Jet Fusion for The Adventures Of Jimmy Neutron, Jet Fusion tries to invoke this trope on Beautiful Gorgeous, Prof. Calamitous's daughter. It fails though.
In Mickey Donald Goofy The Three Musketeers, Pete's lieutenant, Clarebelle Cow, betrays him when she falls in love with Goofy.
Jinx from Teen Titans
Rogue from X Men Evolution (although given that she was only on the bad guys' side because she thought the X-Men wanted her dead, this is pretty justified).
Blackarachnia from Beast Wars once she gets involved with Silverbolt (although Megatron trying to create a future in which she didn't exist didn't help any, either).
Arguably Hexadecimal from ReBoot. She always loved Bob, but she really begins to turn after Bob defragments her masks, restoring her face, which eventually leads to her Heroic Sacrifice to save the entire Net mid-Season 4.
Averted in Kim Possible with Shego, who massively subverts the trope at the end of at least two episodes which look like they're heading in this direction.
- And then she does it anyway in the finale, but at least she's not the only one.
Megara from Hercules, anyone?
- To her credit, she was never evil in the first place.
Mai and Ty lee, part Azula's Quirky Miniboss Squad in Avatar The Last Airbender, have a Heel Face Turn some episodes before the finale. Azula on the other hand, stays evil all the way to the end, and though she shows a human side in the Grand Finale, it's not a pretty one.
- It's debatable whether Ty Lee fits this trope, since she was aligning with her buddy Mai instead of the manly hero. It's also an interesting chain of Face Heel Turn since Ty Lee did a Help Face Turn to align with Mai, who had done a High Heel Face Turn to align with Zuko, who had done a Mook Face Turn to align with the gang.
- Also note that Ty Lee herself is a stunned as anyone else (or quite possibly more) by her actions.
In Wolverine And The X Men, Emma Frost betrays the Inner Circle out of a combination of her love for Cyclops and the fact that hanging around with the X-men has caused her to grow a conscienve. This trope is averted by the Inner Circle's other female member, Selene, however; she's portrayed as an entirely unrepentent sadist and schemer throughout.