How long am I gonna be explaining to people, I wonder:
Villanelle is a compelling and relatable character—and so similar to Catra—& her relationship with Eve heart wrenching to watch because she turned herself into a weapon at a young age so no one could hurt her anymore? (And Catra and Villanelle are both power bottoms, and no, that’s not a joke—it’s character info.)
It’s why her backstory episode with her mom in S3, and the final shot of her crying on the train, are so perfect, for all people’s complaints about S3. And then she grew and changed. And Eve came back. And she let someone hurt her. She let someone in.
Because no, most people don’t have mental health scarring to the degree that Villanelle has. (A lot of that—the spy stuff, the Twelve—can be read as a way to personify a general sense of governmental repression anyway.) But there’s something very real about being a soft-hearted person who forced yourself to become a survivor, scrapping from day to day to find any reason to live, and then finally finding someone who understands you and doesn’t want to hurt you.
And for Eve, it was compelling because she was closeted. All the trappings of her old life—from Nico and their flat full of chickens, to her desk job—were symbolic of repressive, misogynistic, comp-het culture as a whole. Villanelle represented burning all of it down: rebellion, anarchy, honesty, freedom.
And it is absolute crap—not to mention WILDLY homophobic—that it would be anything RESEMBLING a “relief” for her to lose that freedom; to say her queerness and desire for more were a phase, and she’d be happier going back into repression.
It’s crap. And it’s one of the many reasons I have to be a writer.
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