#victoria: capes used to be nicer! we'd have our little slap fights and then everyone would go home to dinner!

[motherfucker-somewhat-limited]

This exchange between Antares and Tattletale in 13.6 perfectly encapsulates how Victoria's entire attitude towards capes comes from a point of privilege and why, in turn, she's so goddamn annoying to me so much of the time.

For a person whose entire life was crafted around capes, Victoria was remarkably untouched by the damages of being a parahuman, up until Leviathan and the Slaughterhouse Nine. From the moment she triggered, she had the support of a nuclear and extended family (ignoring the fucked up dynamics therein since they didn't become fully apparent until S9 anyway). She went to school and had friends and a boyfriend. She joined the Wards, a government-regulated institution that was basically a parahuman work-study program for kids. Her earliest encounters with villains were hand-picked to be age- and ability-appropriate. Caping, to her, was equal parts performance and intellectual exercise.

And then you have Lisa: teen runaway, whose career - for lack of a better word - as a cape began when an underground criminal mastermind decided to use her and a group of other equally struggling teens as pawns in his long-running game. Lisa didn't get to choose who she fought against; when she met Taylor, the Undersiders were being pitted against Lung, for fuck's sake. If she decided she wanted to step back from being a cape for any reason, Coil would've had her thrown out on the street at best and straight up killed at worst.

During that pause after the "wriggling pieces" comment, was she thinking about Dinah, kidnapped and drugged and kept as a pet precog? Was she thinking about Alec and the rest of the Heartbroken, the horrible things they had done to them and were forced to do simply because of the circumstances of their birth? Was she thinking about the schoolkids forced to join the ABB? Was she thinking about Noelle? Was she thinking about Bonesaw, who was drafted into the Slaughterhouse Nine when she was six fucking years old?

To Victoria, kids being chopped into wriggling pieces was something reserved for only the most heinous S-class threats, while to Lisa, it's not too far removed from the grim realities of being a cape that she's been immersed in from day 1. And to Victoria, who had the blinders on for so long and has been so conditioned to care about the squeaky clean image, bringing up those grim realities is a bitchy, underhanded move and not just like an acknowledgment of how fucked up the world is.

Victoria is so accustomed to being on the high road that she thinks viewing things from anyone else's perspective means she's lowering and debasing herself, and that anyone operating on a different level from her is dealing low blows on purpose and not because they were forced to by external circumstances.