Expansion of the Female Leaders’ Rights and Prerogatives in Magic Worlds of Fantastic Beasts and Beings

The article is devoted to detecting and tracing the phenomenon of female leadership through the latest evolution of such a mass culture genre as fantasy. We are interested in explicating the means of the obvious and necessary growth and expansion of rights and prerogatives given to female leaders in the fantasy films, serials and books during the last decades, as well as their impact on the life of our society and its cultural practices.An especial attention was paid to the serial products of the years 2021 and 2022. This study had to take into account the article by Elizabeth Turello, published in 2021. Regardless of the fact that our predecessor does not mention women as leaders but rather simply stresses their active role in the development of the plot, we believed ourselves obliged to concentrate first of all on the visual material which appeared after the date of publication of the above mentioned article.Texts (in a broad sense of the term, verbal and visual) taken into account range from prequels of the “Game of Thrones” and “Lord of the Rings” to such a vivid parody as “Wednesday” (one should also mention “Harry Potter” as well as the “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them”). This material was selected with the use of qualitative and quantitative approaches in order to match criteria of representative value. We also included in our analysis two books of Portuguese provenance written somewhat earlier, 2002 and 2004, which allow us to illustrate the depth of contamination and intermingling of the motifs as recognizable signs proper to the magic worlds of fantasy.The possibility of a positive impact of an increasing role of female leadership in the creative fantasy world on gender role patterns in the real life is taken into account in the article as well.