#yes this is about my villanelle character analysis that only one (1) person asked for

[antitheticaally]

You know you’ve gone off the rails about a character when you break out the DSM-V and your Psychopathology notes from 2 years ago…

[vaultdweller]

Villanelle - Families, babies and power

I’ve seen a lot of people asking - why is Villanelle suddenly so interested in her family? Why did she take that baby? This seems out of character for her. 

Here’s my shower thoughts on it all. Please take this with a grain of salt, but if I was writing the show, this is how I would approach it. 

So we start with the question - what is motivating Villanelle right now, this season? Power has emerged as a big theme for her in these first few episodes, I believe, in the context of control. After last season, where she was working for the Twelve, MI6, under Eve’s thumb, under Konstantin’s thumb, then betrayed and essentially left for dead by Konstantin/the Twelve and rejected by Eve, she’s likely feeling like she has, in a large sense, lost control over what happens to her. All of those major events, particularly in late Season 2, were all happening outside of her control, all moments where she had given control of herself over to someone else and, surprise, it ended badly. The last six months have been a recovery period for her - her relationship/marriage a means to surround herself with the familiar trappings of her old life (albeit upgraded) and resetting the clock to a time before Eve. 

And while money is one way of getting back control, what Villanelle is really after now is power - the ultimate way to control what happens around you, to you, and to other people. Power and control are influence, and for someone with a low sense of self, low empathy and fragile ego ( classic symptoms of most personality disorders, including narcissistic and antisocial) often the only way they can perceive themselves is through their effects on others. She wants to surpass those who had betrayed her before (Konstantin/Eve). We see it in her wanting to be a Keeper (even more powerful than Konstantin) so she can know who the Twelve are, not because she actually cares, but because, as Konstantin has taught her, knowledge is power. We see it in her monologue to the perfumer, about her wanting to be perceived as being so powerful it physically affects other people, leaving them no choice but to acknowledge her. 

So money and power are the main means she would perceive as gaining control, however, through the course of the series, slowly (slowly catchy monkey) a third means of control (and power) has been introduced to her: family. 

We need to start this with the assumption (and, likely, fact) that Villanelle knows nothing about family, what a family is, how it functions, and the actual bonds of family. She knows 0, as she has proven and stated several times. She knows other people care about their family members, but has no idea how or why. But by our current episode, she has seen that people will make themselves vulnerable for family (her kill in Italy S1), allow themselves to be hurt/killed to keep family safe (Konstantin S1), betray her to keep their family safe (Konstantin S2) and stand in front of an assassin to keep ‘family’ safe (bin baby and the nanny, more on that later). And what this does, I think, is reinforce to her the idea of family being powerful, or, more accurately, that family has power over you. Family causes you to do things directly in conflict with self preservation, like allowing yourself to be shot to keep them safe. Family is so powerful that Konstantin, the person Villanelle is probably closest to in the world, betrays her, and he doesn’t even like his family that much! 

So by Season 3 and her meeting with Dasha, while Villanelle is looking at ways to collect power, seeded by Konstantin’s remark at the end of Season 2, I think Villanelle is wondering about her own family as a source of power and control and it’s leading her to seek them out, through Konstantin, who seems to know about them or is at least pretending to know. 

WHY?

It’s pretty much confirmed at this point that Villanelle is going to spend at least one episode that is a Villanelle-only episode looking for her family. People are obviously a little hesitant about that plotline, which seems out-of-character and seems too much like it’s trying to redeem Villanelle in some way, or give her some kind of backstory to explain why she is the way she is. 

And they’re right. Which is why I don’t think the writers will do that. I think *drumroll*

She’s going to kill them. 

If she ends up having family still alive, I think it is, and always has been, her plan to kill them. Knowledge is power, yes, and knowing where you come from does carry a sort of power with it, but I don’t think Villanelle really has the capacity to give a shit about her parents, siblings or extended family and she has gone a long way to really construct an identity for herself that is totally separate from Oksana Astankova. 

But with her mind linking family and power/control, specifically power and control over another person, I think she will want to kill them and, in doing so, remove the potential that someone could try and use her family to exert power and control over her. Because again, she isn’t really understanding that family is about love and trust and familial bonds. She is just seeing family = power, and she is not going to let someone have power over her again. Also, killing whatever family is still out there severs one of the last ties between Villanelle and Oksana - a character point that was really dropped in Season 2 that I would love to see picked back up again. So she is effectively killing the power Oksana has over her.  

BUT WHY THE BABY STUFF?

Because power. Because babies are power. Bear with me. 

Villanelle has all this family stuff rattling around in her little brain. And she wants power. She is hungry for ways to get power. She is in a nursery with a tuning fork, threatening a baby and their nanny. The nanny is 1. upset that Villanelle is threatening the baby (rather than grateful that Villanelle is threatening the baby and not her) and 2. Willing to put herself in harm’s way for this baby. This reaction is very confusing to our little narcissistic/antisocial Villanelle, who doesn’t understand why anyone would put themselves in harm’s way for anyone else (except maybe she might for Eve but that’s a big maybe). But she discerns, through the pointing of the tuning fork and reading their reactions, that this baby has power. How does a baby have power? Because it’s cute. 

Remember, Villanelle doesn’t understand things like familial bonds, or why people would care about a useless, selfish baby. So in her mind, people care about this baby because it’s (allegedly) cute. And cute is power. So baby is power. 

And actually, she isn’t far off! Evolution has actually made babies cute so that we protect them! Good job, Villanelle! 

So she takes the baby, mostly to set up the comedic gold of Dasha dropping the baby in the bin, but I think also to study it and learn its power. Remember - Villanelle likes to study things to mimic them. 

And ultimately this all distills into her later conversation with Konstantin, where she is asking about herself as a baby. She isn’t doing it out of any particular love for babies - she wants to know if she had that same power as a baby. If she had that same influence and that ability to control others, even as a baby. Konstantin telling her she was ugly with a big head is saying no, you didn’t have that power (though I think he was just being spiteful, frankly, because Villanelle was being annoying). 

There is also the possibility that Konstantin is straight up lying to Villanelle about her family I think, in a bid to distract her and get her away from Dasha, whom I think is not actually working for the Twelve and is a double agent setting Villanelle up to get fucked (again). But there isn’t as much fun analysis with that idea, unfortunately.