#where i felt overshadowed ALL THE TIME and i just assumed they’d use other footage

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so….. “see myself in a documentary” was an item on my bucket list that i didn’t know i had but can now be crossed off…….

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Why Didn’t the Other Siblings Include Vanya?

It’s a question I’ve heard often from fans of this show, and honestly, it’s a fair one. Vanya was deliberately excluded from everything—missions, family photos, conversations. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d awake on Christmas morning to find that her siblings had begun opening gifts without her, or get to her own birthday celebration to see that they’d already blown out all the candles on their cake and were in the process of dishing it up. Why? If all of her siblings were treated badly by Reginald, why did they not band together, support Vanya, and stand up to their shitty excuse for a dad? 

The answer lies in a deceptively simple concept known as scapegoating. 

Of Scapegoats and Other Roles

I say deceptively because it’s probably an idea most people are familiar with. Pick one person, assign them the blame, and let everyone else move on with their lives. Any fan of this show would immediately think of Vanya whilst reading the Psychology Today article on scapegoating, and rightly so. However, as that and many other articles hint, it’s far more complex—and ugly—than one might assume. And it can be difficult to explain, because survivors of child abuse likely never had to articulate it. The scapegoat dynamic was something they knew instinctively without fully comprehending what it was or why it was happening. So, I’ll do my best to explain how it works. 

If you’ve heard the term scapegoat, you’ve probably also heard the term golden child. These two roles are opposites. Where the scapegoat receives most of the blame the family has to offer, the golden child receives most of the praise. Where the scapegoat is painted as deliberately evil or a perpetual fuckup or both, the golden child is painted as a hero who can do no wrong. If you’re thinking of Vanya as the scapegoat and Luther as the golden child, then you’re on the right track. 

However, between those two extremes is a whole spectrum of roles. Sometimes these roles are fluid, but more often than not they’re permanent and only change when the family undergoes a drastic shift. Maybe the family has a Diego, who envies the golden child and jockeys for favor that will always be out of reach. Maybe they have a Klaus, one whose failures would be enough to make them the scapegoat were it not for the current scapegoat’s failures overshadowing theirs. Maybe there’s an Allison, one who is disliked by the parent(s) but manages to be useful enough to escape punishment; or maybe there’s a Ben, who has everyone’s pity and sympathy and is still miserable. Maybe there’s a Five, a rebel who defies the family’s rules and pays the price. 

If none of these roles sound fun to you, then congratulations—you’re on your way to understanding what life in an abusive household is like. 

Abusive Parents Ruin Everything

Living with an abusive parent (or two abusive parents, or—in my case—an abusive mother and her Flying Monkey) is like living with a bomb. The bomb has a timer, but it is constantly reset and doesn’t operate by any sort of internal logic. It might say you have 3 days to detonation when you leave for school, but by the time you return it’s down to 15 seconds. The golden child always has the most time before detonation, and they’re sometimes able to buy a few more minutes or hours, but even they’re not shielded from the blast. 

The scapegoat, as you might imagine, is the one whose presence is usually responsible for setting off the bomb. Maybe this earns them some pity from their siblings, but there’s also something darker: a sick sense of relief that they were not the ones receiving the brunt of the parent’s anger. You see, the parental bomb operates on different rules depending on which child they’re interacting with. Equal treatment in an abusive household is a pipe dream. The golden child has it the best, the scapegoat has it the worst, and everyone else is just trying to get through the day without stepping on any landmines. If the scapegoat triggers one—well, that’s one less landmine anyone else has to step on. 

But what happens when someone defies the family’s roles and treats the scapegoat well? The short answer: Nothing good. 

We learn from Vanya’s memoir that Five was the only one to treat her as an equal, the only one who felt like a sibling to her. Although we don’t see much of the fallout from this, I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that there would have been fallout, and it would have been ugly. Remember that Five wasn’t just treating Vanya as an equal, reaching out to a broken girl and giving her the inclusion she craved—he was defying what Reginald saw as the rightful order of things, defying Reginald himself. You don’t do that in an abusive household. You don’t defy your parents. You don’t question why your brother gets better treatment than you, and you don’t tell your dad to treat your sister right. You accept it, or you risk earning the same treatment as the scapegoat. 

Divided You Fall for Everything

Risk of poor treatment (and perhaps permanent loss of position—for instance, Klaus shifting from secondary scapegoat to primary scapegoat) is not the only reason abused kids don’t stand up for the scapegoat. 

Abusive parents are masters of pitting their kids against each other, and the primary way they do this is through selectively limiting the information they have. In Vanya’s case, I think Allison was the only other sibling who even knew Vanya had been locked in a soundproofed room in the basement. From the look on Klaus’ face when he sees her, it stands to reason that he had no idea—his horror, pity and rage are those of a man who just now learned his sister suffered the same fate he did. To that point, he probably believed, along with the others, that she was sick and had to be kept quarantined. 

That half-truth changes everything. If you knew your sister was locked in a soundproofed room in the basement for no reason other than that your dad was afraid of her, you’d understand why she emerged broken, and why she later become resentful. But if you thought she had a contagious disease, and was simply kept off on her own for her own good and the good of the family, her attitude upon emerging might come across as downright bratty. You had TB, Vanya! What were we supposed to do, parade through your room sharing your straws? Did you want the rest of us to catch it too? 

I have no doubt that Reginald used selective manipulation of the truth in other ways too. Maybe he told Luther that Klaus refused to learn to control his powers, leaving out any of the horrific mortal wounds Klaus remembered seeing on the ghosts who appeared to him. Maybe he told Allison that Diego was always throwing a tantrum about this or that, conveniently failing to mention that his refusal to bend on unreasonable rules was the cause of those outbursts. There are countless ways Reginald could have set his kids against each other, and he would have exploited them all. He would have known, instinctively if not consciously, that if they ever sat down and honestly discussed the shit he put them through, then they would realize they were all victims—and they would band together to unseat him. 

They Deserve It And Other Lies We Tell Ourselves

There’s one more piece at play here, and this is probably the darkest of them all: cognitive dissonance. 

You’ve probably heard that term too, but in case you haven’t, it’s “the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, especially as relating to behavioral decisions and attitude change.” In an abusive family, it means stuffing your empathy deep down inside and convincing yourself that your siblings deserve what they get. Even if you know they don’t. Even if you’re not sure. Even if you’ve suffered the same treatment they’re getting. You tell yourself they earned it—because your parents tell you that you earned what you got. 

Fortunately, cognitive dissonance can be overcome. We see its beginnings when Allison sees Vanya off by herself in all of the surveillance footage. The sight engages her sympathy, shows her where she’s gone wrong, and inspires her to make a change. We see it again when Klaus and Diego witness her locked in the soundproofed chamber and lash out at Luther for putting her there. They’ve seen the truth, and they’ve realized that things are far worse than they let themselves think. They knew it all along, but they’ve at last seen just how horrific things really were. 

Conclusion

The question of why the other Hargreeves siblings didn’t include Vanya is a simple one, but its answer is anything but. And the thing is, it should be simple. Why did they leave her out? Why didn’t they realize how wrong it was? Why didn’t they love her enough? 

I think they did love her. But in abusive households, love is never as simple as it should be. Abusive parents don’t make love simple. 

And that’s the problem.