Youll know this horrible old woman better as The Wicked Stepmother, who spawned the stepsisters that give our Cinders such a dreadful time at home. Lady Tremaine doesnt have any evil hell-powers, and shes not a witch, a demon, a fairy or a boggart. She has no real authority except for in the family home, and shes not obviously psychotic or sociopathic. Despite all of that, shes one of the very worst, and deserves to be the Disney Villain that breaks the top ten. Why? Well, she might not try to hurt or kill Cinderella, but she gets pleasure out of humiliating and victimising her for years. Lets not forget that our heroine loses her mother and her father in short order, and that Lady Tremaine and her verminous daughters then treat her as a slave in her own home. Cinderella is made of stern stuff, though. She refuses to break under the weight of all their cruelty, remaining sweet, kind and beautiful, a princess in all but name which only makes things worse. Lady Tremaine is a socialite, obsessed with status, determined to make good marriages for her girls and so climb the ladder - but next to Cinders, her daughters look like the selfish, snout-faced warts that they are. That only results in more torment, of course, because Lady Tremaine is a sadistic creature. So determined is she to pull Cinderella down and keep her in her place, when she realises that the woman that Prince Charming is seeking is her stepdaughter she actively tries to sabotage the royal romance, locking Cinderella in the attic and breaking the glass slipper. Of course, this is counter-productive: Cinderella is, for all intents and purposes, the daughter with the noble marriage shes been waiting for all these years. But Lady Tremaine is too blinded by vindictive mean-spiritedness to see it. Plus she has massively evil hair. Just look at it. Evil.
Professional writer, punk werewolf and nesting place for starfish. Obsessed with squid, spirals and story. I publish short weird fiction online at desincarne.com, and tweet nonsense under the name Jack The Bodiless. You can follow me all you like, just don't touch my stuff.
