Teff was never created to be an out-and-out society threatening supervillain, running roughshod over reality without concern for consequence, smashing normative power structures incidentally as she exerts her influence, truly unleashed.
She was never created for that. And honestly, I doubt she could fit into that archetype or group.
But still I think about it a lot.
Cynthia Broadmoore wasn't intended to embody a trans metaphor, but she fits so well in that role that I glimpse it in her again and again. That her personhood is always in question, that she was made rather than born, that she's seen as a sex object when there's so much more to her, that her survival strategy was either living invisibly in the gutter, or making herself useful to the powerful. In her found family, consisting of other monsters.
I think the reason she fits this role where my other non-binary characters do not is that she is so profoundly mortal compared to them. She's superintelligent and possessed of many frightening powers, but these aren't such that she can rise above the consequences of humanity's opinion of her. If they decide to crush her, they will. She isn't an Arial, who is so untouchable that it bores her to advertise her might.
Arial is infatuated with the notion of living as an ordinary person, even as her power steadily increases to a point where it will become impossible to maintain the illusion. Because she's so powerful, I've had to hold her back from acting as a world-changing force just for the sake of plausibility, of having stories that aren't boringly one-sided; and so the picture of her which emerges is of an individual of vast unearned power and privilege, who spends most of her time keeping herself amused in fairly mundane ways, and doesn't use her power to help people unless she finds it entertaining. The alternative, where she gets involved, is a story where she changes the world so profoundly and catastrophically that this becomes the story. I realized a while ago that present-day Arial isn't suitable as a protagonist; she's more of a force of nature in the background of others' stories. I can't lend her my conscience. And I don't think she'd want it!
Wednesday's setting is essentially a fantasy world, even though in terms of science and technology it's virtually identical to ours. I say this because Wednesday's gender, her sexuality, her anatomy, barely play a role in her story. Her being a chick with a dick is largely unremarked upon, it barely impedes her... there are always prejudiced jerks, but she can live her life. Maybe she lives in a world where the various liberation movements of the 1970s actually stuck; if it were our world, the disapprobation regarding her gender and sexuality would be constant and inescapable; it would shape her entire life. And she should be concerned with other matters: 'am I ruining Nicole the way I ruined Greta?' 'how could I possibly be this old?' 'how will I dispose of the body this time?' etc.