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[melissa-titanium]

IDID. A DOODLE ABOUT THIS WHEN U FIRST @ ME IN IT BUT INEVER FUCKING SENT I TBECAUSE I NEVER FUCKING FINISHED MY REPLY BUT.

"V was a quiet kid because she was shy, Doll was a quiet kid because she was introverted. Those are two very different types of people"

IM GIGGLIN. also holy fuck the low empathy part is. i absolutely get you i feel like i never see stuff about low empathy & if i do its usually super like. negative :(

ALSO YES. i think it's said alot so i'm basically just repeating what you said but v keeping everyone at arms length to protect them. she went through an unfathomable amount of terrible experiences & came out of it coping in a way that was unhealthy. she kills because she's afraid, because she thinks if she immerses herself in her new role and removes herself from the people she used to trust, it won't hurt as much.

AND THANK YOU. THANK YOU SO FUCKING MUCH. I NEVER EVER EVER SEE ANYONE TALK ABOUT N'S LOW EMPATHY (there may be another word for it um) IT'S MY LEAST FAVORITE PIECE OF MISCHARACTERIZATION ABOUT HIM. you can be nice and not empathize. n is, for the most part, shown to be unfazed by any death or what he's doing.

i can make a list of times he's not reacted to pain/violence & a list of times he has, but arguably one of the most important scenes of showing his character is one of the last few scenes in pilot -- after he's broken into the bunker, and killed a half a dozen workers in cold blood. his disposition implies he's more worried about mundanely upsetting people than he is about killing. "i ruined your card game, and made you have an awkward moment with your dad..." notice how he doesn't mention LITERALLY KILLING PEOPLE until after uzi brings it up? in v's introductory scene where she's ripping a worker drone to pieces, n looks uncomfortable in the sense that he thinks he's walked into something he shouldn't. at least that's how i took the scene; that it might make her uncomfortable that he's there -- not that he's uncomfortable over the fact that she's just killed an entire family and is feeding a drone's entrails to him while his remaining family members watch. when v kills one of uzi's classmates in cabin fever, he leans up to her and makes an irritated remark at her about it. about killing someone.

the complexity of how he views death is infinitely more interesting than the way people dumb it down to "oh no, oh no! ive been killing people oh nooo :( im so terrible!!!!" if anything, he's probably more distraught about how he DOESN'T feel that way. he's literally been reprogrammed into believing that's his purpose and that it's perfectly okay, it's hard to work out of that habit. the reason v differs from this is that as i explained before, she does it to cope. she's been put into this role of the merciless killer, and she knows damn well there's nothing she can do to get out of it, so why even try? she falls into the role, pushing away the drone she was connected to when she was still in the mansion to try and protect him & make herself feel better. she kills because she thinks she's supposed to ; and maybe somewhere along the way it became enjoyable, she MADE it enjoyable so she could deal with the fact that she even had to do it in the first place. she was trying to forget, to remove herself from who she was and solidify what she's going to have to be until the inevitable end of this planet and this life.

ok i went on a tangeant about v and n. oops

UR SO FUCKING RIGHT ABOUT THE SCENE BETWEEN HER AND KHAN THOUGH. OH MY GOD OH MY GOD I NEVER SEE ANYBODY MENTIONING IT. he makes a witty remark at her about it and she doesn't know how to follow up . instead opting to just..leave. i read a lot of her falteringly desperate attempts to reach out as more... she was conflicted, so she couldn't outright tell anyone she needed help . LITERALLY WHAT YOU SAID

lizzy is something of an asshole, bluntly put. we see how she behaves with doll! literally their first focused scene is lizzy making a joke about her Dead Fucking Parents. you could possibly argue her allowing doll to continue her cannibalism spree/revenge plan was out of fear... BUT, she's clearly got no issue with prodding the bull, so i'd argue otherwise.

doll's been festering in her hatred for YEARS, probably a good portion of her life, if the assumption that her parents died when she was young is true. she's had no outlets, no one who will seriously listen to her (lizzy doesnt count as i said before) & similarly to uzi has lost all trust in the adults around her (considering what you saw of her apartment & how the adult drones are like, i wouldn't put it past them to have just... not checked her house all those years. not checked up on her.)

so when she finally sees someone's like her, someone understands, and there's the possibility of reaching out, she's conflicted. she tries to do it, but after so long of being disconnected, she's unsure. she doesn't know how. she's jumpy, teleporting away or lashing out at the slightest suggestion that she's in danger, all while grappling with the fact that she's not the only one with this issue any more. she has someone who's probably worse off than her, who she could potentially sympathize with... but she doesn't know how, since she's never had the chance to learn.

and even in the end. she's ripped down, disemboweled & left to die , but even then she makes a futile attempt to reach out. but, like every other attempt -- it fails.

V and Doll; trauma, mental disorder, and low empathy.

Very recently on my notifications I received a reblog by @aroaceweirdos101 to a response I've made to a post talking about how Doll went through so much more pain than V, and it made me realise that the response in question was actually, like, really good.

I had genuinely forgotten and underestimated how good of an analysis of both V, Doll, mental health and societal stigma it really was.

Now, of course, I disagree with the sentiment that Doll suffered more than V and fully believe that out of the two V endured way more pain and trauma than Doll; yet, although the responses in the comments checked out with what I previously said, they felt... meaner?

Like, the answers went to the opposite extreme of the original comment and tried to downplay Doll's trauma in comparison to V's, almost implying that Doll was a b##ch (which she was) for snapping as hard as she did when V still managed to retain a sense of restraint; and I disagreed with that, so in response I wrote this:

*Look, I believe both Doll and V are interesting characters, and although I feel more sympathetic towards Doll, I definitely believe V went through so much more pain than Doll and had way more reasons to snap and be the way she is now, but I just really hate people who use that as an excuse to label Doll has the more evil of the two or "she was always just a psycho, she just needed an excuse to snap"; it's especially disheartening when people straight up interpret her as unreademable or pure evil, when V and N's body count is 10 times higher than Doll's.

Also, I'm sorry but I really can't stomach the possibility of Liam redeeming the genocidal war machine and not the broken orphan created by said psycho, it literally would be the fictional pinnacle of "since these are the protagonists, they can get away with as much as they want and are always in the right"; I'm fine with the way Doll died because it was done by Cyn and there wasn't any moral lesson to be gained from our protagonists about it, but if it was done by N, Uzi, or worst of all V again, it should have played out like "we have reasons to do the things we do, and you have yours, unfortunately we're on opposite sides and you are hurting us so we must kill you now".

The human (worker drone) mind is extremely fragile, and some people, due to a probably inherited and undiagnosed mental illness or a particular personality type, are more at risk of snapping then other people, yet instead of being understanding towards those who are born with more issues than others (especially women, look up Azula or Ashley Graves) we tend to isolate, demonize and then kill them because they were incapable of fitting into the larger societal standard of acceptable social behaviour, even when said society never did anything to help them meet its unreachable standards because it required too much work from society's side to give you the special attention you needed in order to make you work and fit in.

V was a quiet kid because she was shy, Doll was a quiet kid because she was introverted. Those are two very different types of people and one of them (Doll) was inherently more at risk of developing mental health issues than the other due to their personality type and how it's stigmatized.*

Here's also the original post made by an anonymous user on @md-confessions

Also, here's the link to another post still talking about V and Doll. I made two comments in response, but neither of them is particularly well thought out and since you can't correct them I left them as they were.

Now, back to the highlighted part:

I want to use this response as a springboard to talk about the main differences between Doll and V when it comes to their different handling of their decaying mental health and why it's unfair to say that one of them was worse than the other based on their actions and attitude towards the problem.

(Also, all of the Murder Drones characters are extremely complex, and the fact that the show doesn't have filler makes it harder to get a good grip on one's particular mindset, so if it seems like I'm talking more about Doll than I am about V, it is because V is the most complicated character in the cast and I'm not as confident to talk about her as I am with Doll; it took one entire year to finally understand Doll as well as I do now, so V is a touchy subject for me that's why I might not do her justice).

First of all, it has to be said: Doll is a sociopath, V isn't, despite appearing like one. And that's ok.

When I say that I feel more sympathy towards Doll than I do for V, this is what I mean: I don't sympathise with Doll heartlessness more than I do with V jackassery; rather I understand and relate with Doll's low empathy since I also have low empathy as well, and it is quite common for people like us to be misunderstood for uncaring individuals.

It's the same reason why I and many others tend to like villains and sympathise with them more than we do with the heroes (Lord Shen from Kung Fu Panda 2 is the perfect example for this); it's quite common for villains to be written as individuals with low empathy, as an highly empathetic individual tends to be harder for the audience to buy as an antagonist, since you need to justify why someone this caring is committing all this heinous and terrible stuff, but if that person is already unemphatetic by nature, than it's just a matter of establishing their goals and motivations. These people also tend to be ostracized by their environment and go through a gruesome and violent death because it's socially acceptable to let these despicable individuals find comeuppance through death since they lack the traits that make a person traditionally good.

So, when people use the "So what? She's got dead parents. Many others do, including Uzi, who's also infected with the Absolute Solver, yet they have not become cannibalistic serial killers obsessed with revenge" as a slight against Doll it's not entirely fair because from what we've gathered in the show the other worker drones don't suffer from sadistic impulses and sociopathy like Doll does, even if they (Rebecca) are pretty uncaring. (Side note, Uzi also suffers from sadism/sadistic impulses, but not from sociopathy, hence the main difference between the two).

V, on the other hand, despite what her introduction and psycho girl persona might trick you into believing, was never a sociopath nor did she struggle with low empathy, she was, instead, a pretty timid maid who suffered through unspeakable physical and psychological trauma that led her to adopt this fake identity to cope for the atrocities that she was now committing for the company (Absolute Solver) and the safety of N; V cared about N in a pretty normal person kind of way: she kept N at arms length and hid the truth from him so that he wouldn't get hurt, all while detaching herself from the actions she was now committing, not saying Doll wouldn't or didn't commit any of these actions, but V did them in a way that better aligns with someone who doesn't suffer from sociopathic disorder.

Speaking of N, since he has been mentioned, I'll say that while Uzi suffers from sadism but not low empathy (she has shown to be pretty empathetic many times), N doesn't suffer from sadism but from low empathy; as better explained by a section of this post made by @melissa-titanium :

N x Doll

Don't believe me? Then maybe you should rewatch the series again because N's unemphateticness is his own can of worms to delve into.

But back to Doll, it's time to dissolve (😏) one of the oldest misconceptions surrounding her character:

Doll reached out for help. A lot. She just didn't have any luck with it.

Call me crazy, but the more I thought about it, the more I realised that the fandom wide spread belief that Doll rejected all the help that was handed to her to be a massive lie, and in fact, Doll actually tried to reach out way more than you thought, arguably, even more than Uzi:

The impact that Yeva's education has had on Doll's life can only be noticed in this way: Yeva extended her hand to Nori and she accepted it, thus, it is fair to assume that Yeva taught Doll to be pretty open to others and to give a hand to someone in need (the show was rewritten after the pilot, so ignore the incongruences with Doll's initial characterization), and in fact, after enduring the trauma of watching her parents die, she opened up to Lizzie for help and support, unfortunately, Lizzie wasn't exactly the right person to talk about these things (no offence to her, all of Uzi's classmates suck for one reason or another, including Uzi herself, I guess that's what happens when you are stuck inside a bunker your whole life), after all, Doll was still killing and cannibalising her classmates.

Then, before she went back to gain her revenge, she tried to get Uzi on her side, which wasn't an attempt to open up, but she was still willing to connect, even if for the wrong reasons. Finally, once she discovers that Uzi also has the Absolute Solver, she promises to help her out, and at this point, Doll wishes to talk it out with Uzi, but because she is surrounded by the Disassembly Drones (V), she can't.

And now, for the most interesting discussion, there's this brief and frankly weird moment in episode 5 where Doll compliments Khan for raising Uzi, and while Khan laughs it off immediately, since he is a dumbass, this could have been a perfect opportunity for him to reach out to Doll and reason with her, since she's clearly putting aside whatever her objective actually is to talk to him, but he doesn't catch on, and this leads Doll to immediately closing herself off again and returning to the mission, and like, maybe we all kind of underestimated how much significance this moment carried, but consider this:

Doll, at this point in time, has been living out in the cold for what... a month? Six months? A YEAR? If we exclude J and Cyn from the equation, this is probably the only social interaction she ever had since The Promening, yet, because of Khan's lack of touch, she immediately reminds herself of the massive disconnection between her and the other workers (eh ehm sociopath) and thus storms off rapidly; this moment is actually quite painful when you look at it from this perspective, yet it's also, the only interpretation that makes sense? Otherwise how do you explain the existence of this moment when Murder Drones is a show infamous for his high plotting and lack of filler? They had to go out of their way to animate this, so why did they play it off in this way?

Tessa is a meanie

Penultimately, and again, I want to bring up a post by @capnsaltsquid since that's where I got the inspiration to write this paragraph off, Doll opened up to J and Tessa to get the answers she was seeking, yet not only Tessa shot her in the face for s###s and giggles, but then proceeded to fraternise with her parents murderers, and at this point, she closes herself off enough to realise that she might have to unintentionally kill Uzi and leave everyone in the dust if she wants to get anything at all.

But unfortunately, that is not the case, she dies of a lonely, meaningless, gruesome death, and at this point, she still tries and finally succeeds in reaching out to Uzi, and yet, like all of her previous tries, this is unsuccessful, as Uzi has other things in mind right now.

To wrap things up nicely, both V and Doll went through severe amounts of trauma and handled said trauma in a similar yet also different way, since they are different individuals who process emotions and love differently, thus the actions they took made sense for the person they were and should only be judged in the context of their writing and characterization.