India, Jan. 10 -- The princess and the witch. The girl-next-door and the vamp. The loveable female lead and the jealous rival. For as long as we've been writing stories, we've been depicting women heroines and antagonists as black-and-white, inverses of each other. In YA romance books, the heroine usually is not like other girls (aka bookish, smart, and can actually talk about things other than makeup), while her rivals were exactly like other girls; shallow, vain, and artificial. In films too, this good-bad polarisation was everywhere. In the 2006 film High School Musical, Gabriella Montez (Vanessa Hudgens) was the shy, nerdy wallflower whom rich it-girl Sharpay Evans (Ashley Tisdale) loved to hate. There was a phase in the 2000s where Bipasha Basu played the sultry, sexually promiscuous, femme fatale who leads the hero astray. Deepika Padukone in Cocktail (2012) came across as more wild than liberated. Even Queen (2013), which had strong female leads, did subtly portray Kangana Ranaut's Rani as the innocent Indian woman who didn't drink alcohol or wear "Western" clothes, in antithesis to Lisa Haydon's more outspoken, free-spirited Vijayalakshmi. The bad girls, and women, were either the ones who paid too much attention to their clothes, flaunted their superior connections, or seduced the hero. It was like an Elphaba and Glinda binary - before we realised that Elphaba isn't really the villain, and Glinda isn't completely the angelic person she seems to be. "Historically, even "bad" women in fiction had to remain palatable and likeable in some way," says Anisha Lalvani, the author of Girls Who Stray (Bloomsbury India, 2024). Cue the sexy outfits and glamour-dipped-in-poison aura. "Now, we're resisting that-portraying the truth of women's inner lives without sanding down the edges." The script has flipped - and with it, the way we describe women leads too. Promiscuous? Get with the times, boomer - she's just confident in her sexuality. Bold? She's independent and decides what she wants to do with her life. In Lalvani's novel, the 23-year-old unnamed protagonist repeatedly makes the wrong choices, and gets herself into situations she could have avoided. "But she's not an idiot - she knows what she's doing," says Lalvani. "It was my way of testing the boundaries of what women are 'allowed' to do on the page." As more women take control of their own narratives, whether it's in literature, film, or music, the bad girl is slowly taking centre stage. The main characters struggle with their emotions, do wrong things and hurt others and themselves. Lalvani says it's a rebellion against overly simplistic characters - as well as a sort of defiant reaction to the typical heroine men love to idealise. She drew upon her "own thoughts and anxieties and conversations that I had with my friends over the years" to create her protagonist. "Everybody is both good and bad," says Lalvani. "We make good and bad choices, and there's constantly a tussle between the two." More women authors - and women-centric films - are presenting their heroines in this way, as complex human beings who make mistakes and can be redeemed, not doomed to punishment. In Bad Girl, a 2025 Tamil film about coming-of-age in India, director Varsha Bharath portrays Ramya (Anjali Sivaraman) as a girl resisting all the things she's told to be - a virgin, an accommodating woman, a mother someday. She smokes, drinks, and has sex - scenes which caused an uproar even before the film was released. Suchi Talati's Girls Will Be Girls (2024) showed a young girl's sexual awakening - and why it wasn't shocking or something to tsk-tsk at. Even mainstream films and shows, such as Gehraiyaan (2022) and Made in Heaven (2019) have women protagonists who are more true to life; people who mess up but aren't the less loveable for it. In social media terms, it's being a baddie and reveling in it. Haters gonna hate. So why not give them something to talk about?...