The message " a lot of women can be taken seriously, but it's because they're evil" is more distubing that " a minority of women can be taken seriously", because the underlying message is " good women can't be strong.
Ah, you finally came up with an interesting argument. Well, when you're dealing with shows this old, the underlying message will always be, "A good Japanese girl is going to be submissive and traditional and not do anything like what you see in this show."
That's just what Japan was like at the time. I feel like you have to look at these shows while considering that was the dominant subtext of mainstream Japanese entertainment. In light of this dominant trend, how did the show treat its recurring female cast?
I think your analysis of the female villains in Sun Vulcan is a bit flawed, from that perspective, because the female villains in that show aren't depicted as being strong
because they're evil. Sun Vulcan never seems to go out of its way to explicitly connect the two qualities.
A sexist show of that era would, I think, be implying or outright stating that the female villains would somehow become good if they adopted more traditional gender roles. It would villify them as much for behaving like men as for their flamboyant evil deeds.
Sun Vulcan just doesn't do that. Sun Vulcan's female villains are written in almost the exact same ways their male counterparts of this era are, even using basically the same character types. That's basically the
definition of progressive writing.
It is strange if you think it's vitally important to depict a token "good" woman who can be a hero, but... honestly, was any show,
ever, improved by tokenism? Token characters are inevitably boring. Being forced to stand in for every member of a given group forces them to be bland and inoffensive.
