What Your Favourite Female Antihero Says About Your Relationship With Anger

Just like Anya Taylor-Joy, “I have a thing about feminine rage.” But rarely do portrayals of angry women match my own experience with that powerful emotion.

I know it's a truism, but it needs saying anyway: culturally, women are not allowed to express anger. That's why we rarely see an accurate depiction of it on screen. In real life, an angry woman is told to relax, that she's being emotional, that she's aggressive, or whatever else you were called the last time you reacted to someone crossing a boundary. A guy can punch a hole in a wall, and people will find a way to say why that’s okay. For a woman, the only socially acceptable reaction is crying. So we cry because we're not allowed to be angry, and men are angry because they're not allowed to cry—seriously, in patriarchy, nobody's winning.

What we do instead is fantasize—and those fantasies tend to surface in the onscreen characters we find secretly relatable. They give shape to a question most of us don’t get to answer in real life: if we could express our anger freely, what would it actually look like?

That’s why the rare portrayals of female rage in its full, destructive potential feel so compelling. And it’s also what makes them revealing. Using Myers-Briggs as a lens, I’ll break down what your favorite female antihero says about your own relationship with anger.

Amy Dunne — Gone Girl 

If your favorite villain is Amy, your anger stems from idealism and chronic self-abandonment. 

The reason Amy Dunne became a cultural phenomenon wasn't that she framed her husband for murder while actually murdering another man. It's because of the Cool Girl monologue, a blistering critique of the pressure society puts on women to suppress their true personalities to become a man's fantasy. I still get chills when I listen to it. The way she put words to an experience millions of women recognize instantly: the feeling of living your life for the validation of men.  

Amy's rage begins when she realizes she has spent years performing a version of femininity that appealed to Nick—eating pizza, drinking beer—only to eventually be replaced by a “newer, younger, bouncier cool girl.” Unfortunately for Nick, Amy is an absolute nutjob, so instead of simply leaving him, she decides to teach him a lesson in the most cruel, psychotic way possible. Of course, we condemn it. This is bad, wrong, wretched behavior. But in the darkest corner of your mind, there’s a part of you that understands it, isn’t there?

Amy is most definitely an INFJ. She lives inside her head, which is why she doesn't erupt when she gets angry. She's deeply reflective and guided by a profound sense of purpose. She seeks revenge on Nick because he violates her values. She held up her end of the deal; he didn't. And so she deploys her excellent planning skills to prove a point.

Amy tends to resonate with Intuitive-Feeler types, our INFJs, ENFJs, ENFPs and  INFPs. These types adapt to external circumstances (a.k.a other people’s expectations) quickly and understand what is required of them socially and emotionally. At their best, this makes them empathetic and insightful. At their worst, it can leave them disconnected from their own wants, opinions and limits. In that context, Amy represents a breaking point—the fantasy of what happens when you stop accommodating and swing all the way in the opposite direction. Not healthy, not justified, but emotionally recognizable.

If Amy is your favorite, your anger is likely tied to moments where you realize you’ve been shaping yourself to be accepted and it’s no longer working, or no longer worth it. You can tolerate a lot, but eventually there comes a moment when “being liked” starts to feel like a loss rather than a reward. That’s Amy’s story. She played her role obediently, right up until the moment she decided she would rather become a villain than keep shrinking herself for a guy.

Villanelle — Killing Eve

If your favorite villain is Villanelle, your anger stems from helplessness. 

Villanelle is everything Amy is not: impulsive, reckless, spectacular and completely unbothered by what anyone thinks of her. Where Amy plots in silence for months, Villanelle stabs someone at a dinner party just because they annoyed her. She literally castrated her French teacher’s husband because the only reason Anna loved him was that he had a penis, so she got rid of the obstacle. 

But underneath her eccentric clothing and dark humor hides an abandoned child who’s been repeatedly stripped of control over her own life. Her response to that vulnerability is becoming the person nobody can control ever again—not even herself. If Amy’s rage is intellectualized and moralistic, Villanelle’s is pure, unhinged chaos that demands immediate release. 

She’s a classic ESFP who experiences life through action rather than reflection. She’s rash, instinctive, driven by whatever her desire dictates in the moment. As in, she has no impulse control whatsoever. Her anger erupts the second she feels trapped, humiliated, rejected or powerless. This is why she tends to resonate with all the Sensing-Percieving (SO) types—ESFPs, ESTPs, ISFPs and ISTPs. These types often have a complicated relationship with restriction. They’re highly aware of what they want, but can become frustrated when circumstances, rules, expectations or other people stand in their way. That is why Villanelle is your fantasy. She answers the question: “What if I could just remove the obstacles?”

If Villanelle is your angry girl, don’t worry, you’re not a psychopath, you just want to not be told what to do, ever, by anyone, for five minutes. Which is a reasonable thing to want. Just stay away from murder. 

Cersei Lannister — Game of Thrones

If Cersei is your favourite, your anger is tied to a lack of recognition. 

Cersei embodies the palpable, slow-burning fury of being the most capable person in the room where lesser men get handed everything she was never allowed to want. Her appetite for power is as unmatched as it is unbecoming. She’s smarter than Jaime, more strategic than Robert, more ruthless than half the Small Council, and her reward for all of that is a loveless marriage to a king who calls her by his dead girlfriend's name. She says it directly to her father's face: “I should have been born a man.” This sentiment resonates with anyone who has experienced double standards and discrimination. 

Cersei’s rage isn't as impulsive as Villanelle's, and it isn't as idealistic as Amy's. It's cold, cunning and patient. Cersei plays chess in a world where the men around her boast about nailing it at checkers. She doesn't blow up at the dinner table. She poisons the wine they’re drinking to toast their own achievements and then looks straight into their eyes as they choke. Interestingly, her name comes from Circe, the witch who turned Odysseus's men into pigs. Just saying.

Cersei is an ESTJ: ordered, hierarchical, loyal to her bloodline and absolutely no one else's. She believes in the system and that she should be running it. She's strong, uncompromising, protective and possessive—a real lioness. She’s deeply distrustful and suspicious of everyone, and beneath the cold exterior is someone who feels every slight, every betrayal, as a profound personal wound.

Cersei is the antihero of choice for Sensor-Judgers—ESTJs, ISTJs, ESFJs and ISFJs. We call these types Preservers, because they know the exhaustion of giving everything to a structure, a family, or an institution and receiving neither credit nor gratitude in return. Your anger, like Cersei’s, lives in the gap between what you're capable of and what you're permitted to do with it. It’s about dismissed ambition, but also about unrewarded loyalty, unacknowledged effort, and the pain of being omitted by the people you've cared for and supported for years. Cersei is the fantasy of making the system that exploited you finally answer to you.

Fleabag — Fleabag

If Fleabag is your favorite representation of female rage, your anger is tied to being cut off from your emotional life.

I instinctively knew Fleabag deserved a place on this list, but I struggled to pinpoint exactly why. She’s definitely angry, but why?  The answer came from an unexpected source, the book Letting Go by David R. Hawkins. He describes rage as a form of grief, and suddenly it clicked.

Her self-destructive behavior, her tendency to push people away, her self-abandonment—it’s all grief. And through her grief we learn a lot about Fleabag: that she cannot let a feeling arrive without immediately turning it into a joke, a flirtation, a confession to camera, or another bad decision. We could argue that all the women on this list are grieving something, but Fleabag deserves special attention because very few women go around framing their husbands for murder or blowing up cathedrals. Absurdly many women, however, act like Fleabag. That's why we fell in love with her. We recognize ourselves in her even when we can't explain why.

Fleabag is avoidant, dismissive and deeply disconnected from her own pain. The fourth wall—her constant conversations with the audience—is brilliantly used to represent the distance between herself and reality. She never fully inhabits her own life. She's always narrating it, joking about it, observing it from a safe distance.

She grieves the loss of her mother, the only person who truly understood her. She grieves the loss of her best friend, whose death she feels responsible for. More broadly, she grieves every instance of abandonment, misunderstanding, rejection and disappointment. She resents her family for pushing her away while simultaneously making herself impossible to reach. Her anger has nowhere obvious to go, so it turns inward.

Fleabag is often typed as an ENTP, and honestly, it makes sense. Beneath her chaotic exterior is someone sharp, restless, emotionally avoidant, and allergic to being pinned down. She tends to resonate with Intuitive-Thinker (NT) types—ENTPs, INTPs, ENTJs and INTJs—because they too tend to process difficult emotions indirectly. Rather than expressing anger openly, they intellectualize it, joke about it, romanticize it, or distract themselves from it entirely. Fleabag does not avoid feelings because she has none. She avoids them because she has too many, and turning them into jokes is easier than sitting with them plainly.

If Fleabag is your favorite, your anger probably appears in disguise. You tell yourself you're fine. You throw yourself into work, relationships, anything that prevents you from sitting alone with the hurt. But underneath the humor and the skepticism is often a painful truth: you are mourning. Not a person, maybe, but your own ability to feel something without immediately turning it into an act.

The Villain Inside

The list is far from exhaustive. There are plenty of examples I could have used—The Bride from Kill Bill!—but that isn't really the point. What I'm trying to show is that the characters we relate to the most often reveal something uncomfortable about our own inner lives. So the question is: who’s the villain inside you?

Is she angry because she's spent years trying to meet other people’s expectations? Because she's tired of being taken for granted? Because she's constantly underestimated? Because her tight reign on her emotions is holding her back? Whatever your anger stems from, it's worth asking what it's trying to tell you.

For a long time, I felt a profound sense of guilt and shame about my own anger. Anger is bad, right? That's what we’re taught. But anger isn't bad. Anger is normal. More than that, it's intelligent. It tells us when a boundary has been crossed, when something feels unfair, when a need isn't being met, when we've been tolerating too much for too long. As Harriet Lerner says in her book The Dance of Anger, anger isn't the problem. The problem is refusing to acknowledge it, because that’s when resentment and passive-aggression set in.

So before you embark on an elaborate revenge plot against everyone who has ever wronged you, maybe listen to what your “inner villain” is trying to tell you. You don’t have to become her to learn from her—you just have to stop pretending she isn’t there.