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I wrote a thing. What if we all just said no to Madonna-Whore dichotomies, the idea that there can be only one Good Woman in a story, etc.? Vashti and Esther actually illustrate a fairly common pattern that we're seeing play out a lot online (1/x)
And that's basically a version of the radical flank effect. The first woman to stand up to male authority/expose corruption/etc. usually has a dramatic fall, & it appears that her actions didn't change anything. Along comes a woman with a "softer" approach, who moves the needle.
Ahasuerus is so incensed at the idea of Vashti not doing as he tells her that he... ends up doing everything Esther tells him.
And all we know about Vashti from the actual text of the megillah is that Ahasuerus decided to hold a banquet with lots of drinking where every man's request was to be fulfilled, and Vashti held a separate banquet for the women, and refused to come when called.
So, if I didn't know any of the midrash, the way I'd read that on its face is that Vashti held a banquet to keep all the women away from the drunken predations of the men.
And then the king tells her to come display her beauty to his dudebro friends, and she says no. And everyone loses their shit because maybe women won't obey men anymore. (This isn't my interpretation, this is literally what the megillah says.)
So it is not at all a stretch to read Vashti as a feminist hero. The problem is, as soon as people start doing that, the automatic corollary seems to be to read Esther as a victim.
And again, reading Esther as a victim isn't a stretch. She's a teenager who enters a harem to try to save her people from genocide. That's... not actually a love story.
But in this story that's pretty obviously a fairy tale, in this holiday about joy and indulgence and sticking it to people who want us dead, why can't we have two heroines? This isn't Highlander. There can be more than one.
Let's celebrate Vashti, and all those women who sacrifice their peaceful lives, their careers, their reputations, etc. to draw lines in the sand, stand up to corrupt authority, expose bad actors and broken systems.
And let's celebrate Esther, and all those women who work patiently and gently around male egos to get some good done in the world, who play nice within systems to crack open locked doors, who swallow their pride and save lives.
We need both--and a myriad of other approaches--and we need to lock arms and laugh in the face of demands that we compete.
