Wicked Stepmother
A cruel maternal figure who mistreats the protagonist, one of the most common villain archetypes in fairy tales.
The wicked stepmother is one of the most prevalent villain types in European and Asian fairy tales. She appears in Cinderella, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, and hundreds of other stories. Folklorists interpret this figure in several ways: as a reflection of historical family dynamics (when remarriage was common and inheritance disputes frequent), as a symbolic representation of a child's anxiety about parental replacement, or as a narrative device that removes the protective parent from the story, forcing the young protagonist to become independent. In some variants, the biological mother plays the villain role — the Grimm Brothers changed several mother figures to stepmothers in later editions of their collection.