User blog:X9 The Android/PE Proposal: Gerda

Hello guys! Today, after Halloween's Eve, here's my seventeenth PE proposal, and it's about Gerda, the secondary antagonist of the dark fantasy adventure film Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, the anticipated sequel to our beloved 2014 Maleficent live-action remake film.

WHO IS SHE / WHAT HAS SHE DONE?
Gerda is Queen Ingrith's right-hand and henchwoman. When Ingrith's son Phillip proposes to Aurora, Ingrith invites Aurora alongside Maleficent and Diaval to a royal dinner on the Castle of Ulstead to celebrate their upcoming wedding. When first seen, Gerda is on the castle's underground chambers working on Ingrith's weapons. When the guests arrive, Gerda announces their presence, but the dinner goes horribly wrong and Maleficent is framed from poisoning King John, forcing her to flee. As Maleficent flies away from the castle, following her mistress' orders, Gerda dutifully goes up to the top of a tower and shoots Maleficent with no qualms, shooting her down, but Maleficent is thankfully rescued by Cronall.

Later on, when Queen Ingrith realizes that mixing iron powder with a magical flower known as a Tomb Bloom produces a red colored mixture that can destroy fairies by turning them into inanimate objects or disintegrating them into nothingness, Gerda is asked by her Queen to retrieve all Tomb Blooms she and her men can. While collecting the flowers, Gerda and her men spot Maleficent and Conall, leading to a skirmish which ends with Maleficent surviving but with Conall dying at the hands of Gerda, who fatally wounds him with her weapon, leading him to later die from his injuries.

With all flowers collected and too much killer dust produced, Queen Ingrith invites all the inhabitants of the Moors to come to the wedding day of Aurora and Phillip. However, to massacre the magical creatures, Ingrith orders her men to let them pass first and lock them into a wedding chapel, where once there, Gerda starts playing the organ, which shoots the dust into the air and starts killing most creatures there, like the trees, while she continues to play the organ. Realizing that someone must stop Gerda's piano, Flittle sacrifices herself and enters into the organ, getting killed in the process but transforming into blue flowers which block all the organ's pipes, letting the organ unusable. Irked, Gerda tries to get the organ work again but Knotgrass and Thistlewit avenge their sister by attacking Gerda until Gerda loses her balance and falls off the chapel's balcony likely to her death, leaving Queen Ingrith with nothing more but than her remaining soldiers.

What's the work
Maleficent: Mistress of Evil is a 2019 dark fantasy film and the sequel to the 2014 film Maleficent, which is a live-action remake from the 1959 animated classic Sleeping Beauty. The duology is about a witch known as Maleficent, who curses a little baby named Aurora after King Stefan, her father, inflicts damage on her. However, over the course of time, Maleficent realizes her motherly love towards Aurora and redeems herself, leading her to join her "goddaughter" into new adventures.

MORAL EVENT HORIZON
Unlike most antagonists of the film or its predecessor, who either followed orders or were consumed by fear, Gerda lacks any redeeming qualities. Every PE villain must have crossed the Moral Event Horizon to be PE, and Gerda absolutely crosses it not when she agrees to join Queen Ingrith on her genocidal campaign to wipe out magical creatures but when she kills Conall and dutifully agrees to massacre all of Aurora's magical friends on her wedding day.

HEINOUS STANDARDS/MITIGATING FACTORS?
While Queen Ingrith is the main antagonist of Maleficent: Mistress of Evil and Maleficent's archnemesis, Gerda definitely stands up as a serious villain, as Ingrith exposes some comical traits during the film and has a tragic past. Whereas King Stefan, the main antagonist of the first film, became evil due his greediness and subsequent paranoia on what Maleficent wanted to do to his beloved daughter, Gerda has no comical nor redeeming qualities at all and easily is the most serious villain of the duology. Sinister and heartless, Gerda does whatever her Queen orders her to do, like crafting weapons, but her extreme loyalty to her Queen goes to the point of agreeing to aid her on her campaign to eradicate all magical creatures, from the inhabitants of the Moors to Maleficent's species, which shows us how uncaring Gerda can be by refusing to acknowledge what her Queen plans is totally wrong.

In regards to killing, Gerda has no qualms on shooting Maleficent, an innocent magical woman who has nothing to do with King John's temporal death (aside that Gerda well knows that her mistress is the true responsible), just to follow orders, which would have ended with Maleficent drowning if Conall didn't arrive to rescue her. Her murderous and genocidal side is shown when she goes along Ingrith's men to collect all the Tomb Bloom flowers necessary to create the mixture with iron powder to kill all magical creatures. During the subsequent skirmish, Gerda shows no remorse upon fatally wounding Conall as long he doesn't interfere with her Queen's plans.

But Gerda's genocidal and darkest side is finally shown when the wedding day, as according to Queen Ingrith's plan, the Moors inhabitants are allowed to pass first and are locked into the chapel, where Gerda starts playing the organ on a balcony, which releases the mixture and starts killing most of the magical creatures there while Gerda continues playing the piano in spite of their mercy screams, demonstrating how sadistic and merciless Gerda is by refusing to stop her massacre because she is just following orders. Before her defeat, when Flittle sacrifices herself and ruins Gerda's organ, Gerda only cares for her organ and tries to make it work again even if that means pulling out the plant remains of Flittle and the only thing of her which is still on the world, leading Knotgrass and Thistlewit to make Gerda pay for her cruel actions.

VERDICT
Taking all of this into account, I would say yes about considering Gerda to be approved as PE.