DAY TWENTY - Favorite Female Antagonist: Shamiram

This one will require some explanation, since none of you have heard of her.

See, once upon a time, there was an Armenian king named Ara who was just too damn pretty to live. They straight-up called him “Ara the Handsome” he was that easy on the eyes. So the sorceress queen of nearby Assyria, a woman named Shamiram, looks at her husband one day, goes “this dude is nowhere near as pretty as Ara,” and basically punts him out of the country. She then sends a proposal to Ara. Various translations seem to disagree on whether it was a marriage proposal or a more indecent variety, but either way the point is she wanted to sex him.

Ara’s response is basically “fuck that, I happen to like my wife and anyway Assyrians suck,” so naturally Shamiram declares war on Ara’s kingdom and slaughters her way to his back door to take him by force. She gives very specific instructions to her people to not kill her pretty intended boytoy in the fighting, but alas, one of her shmuck sons fails to pay attention and drops Ara’s corpse in her lap when the fighting is done.

So what does Shamiram do?

She tosses the corpse in a pit, makes a big deal to the common man about communing with the gods to “bring Ara back to life,” finds a reasonable lookalike, dresses him in Ara’s clothes, and brings him out to wave at the crowd on holidays to placate Ara’s old allies while cheerfully ruling his country for the rest of her life. Sure, boys are pretty and all, but dude, conquered kingdom!

Now, the Assyrians and Armenians have been arguing for centuries over who actually lusted after who, whether Shamiram faked Ara’s resurrection because she was genuinely in danger from his allies or simply because the continuing fighting was unproductive and obnoxious, where she ended up after the fighting, and a host of other similar details, but I heard the above Armenian version first, and frankly I like Shamiram all the more for it. How often is a man’s virtue ascribed to his physical beauty, or a king made the ultimately unimportant trophy of a warring queen? How often does the wicked witch, by trickery and power, flat-out win? Even when I could count the folklore I knew on one hand, I knew that was rare and awesome. And hey, if you’re going to root for the bad guy, might as well root for the one who comes out on top.