THE ELONGATED SHADOW OF IAGO

SPOILER DISCLAIMER:
This post contains spoilers for Cinderella 2015, Frozen, and Westeros canon. Highlight if you wish to read them.

-- And what a character is Iago! undaunted John Eglinton exclaimed. When all is said Dumas fils (or is it Dumas père?) is right. After God Shakespeare has created most.

Let's face the facts: John Eglinton was freaking right. When Othello came out for the first time at Whitehall (at the then royal court of the Stuarts), the Bard of Avon had created a revolution in villainy. A revolution whose effects still last to our days, given the humongous amount of Chessmaster Magnificent Bastards and their Xanatos Gambits that have come to our days.

Already in the seventeenth century, playwrights created countless Iago expies. And that's not all... Let's skip to more recent times!
In my 1990s childhood, there was David Xanatos. As in Xanatos Gambit. And Scar, the usurper in The Lion King, described by Stefan Kanfer as "an Iago figure given the purr of motiveless malignity by Jeremy Irons".

In the present day, Hans of the Southern Isles and Petyr Baelish (AKA Littlefinger) owe an equally important due to the elusive ensign, being his descendants so to speak. And so do the wicked stepmother and the Grand Duke, retooled as an evil chancellor, who conspire in this year's (2015) springtime Cinderella.