[ essay ] Win Quickly and Permanently: Veronica's Issues Part 1
Enabled like an enabling thing by Pell-mun here, the long-promised guidebook to why Veronica's life is fucked up six ways til Sunday and why it doesn't seem like it is by how she's acted so far. Warning for MASSIVE spoilers for Seasons 1 and 2 of Veronica Mars.
"The best way to dull the pain of your best friend's murder is to have your mother abandon you as soon as possible. It's like hitting your thumb with a hammer. Then, when it's throbbing so badly you don't think you'll survive, you cut the damn thing off."
Let's start off with a spoiler-free summary of where Veronica's at when the series begins. The series starts off with Veronica the way we know her now. We're told that she used to be a much different girl, popular with a very close-knit clique comprising of her boyfriend, Duncan Kane, her best friend and Duncan's sister, Lilly and Logan Echolls, Duncan's best friend and Lilly's on-again off-again boyfriend. Her hometown Neptune has a massive gap between the classes, the haves rolling in money and trustfunds on one side (which the popular kids and incidentally her friends belong to) and the have-nots. Her father was the town sheriff however, and as she said herself it lent her a certain status at the very least. Her life was happy, shiny and great and so was she, sweet and slightly naive. Until everything changed.
It started when Duncan abruptly broke up with her. Completely confused, Veronica sought Lilly's help in figuring out why he just started acting like she didn't exist. At first Lilly was encouraging, and then afterwards Lilly's attitude about Veronica getting together with Duncan did a 180 too. And if Veronica thought her life was over then? It certainly didn't prepare her for what happened just after. On the way home with her dad, he's called to a disturbance at the Kane family and while her dad tells her to stay in the car, spotting a basically catatonic Duncan causes Veronica to go in anyway. What she sees? Lilly's body by the pool, an incredibly ugly head wound, the blood and her eyes blank and staring.
This is where everything goes terribly and completely wrong for the Mars family. Keith (her dad, the sheriff), for whatever reason of his decides to go after Lilly and Duncan's father, Jake Kane for the murder. The town is thrown into an uproar, Jake Kane's company Kane Software is pretty much responsible for most of the wealthy residents' income. The result? Keith is thrown out of office, the whole town ostracizes the Mars family, they lose their house and Veronica's mother, unable to take it bails on them. Someone else (Abel Koontz, a disgruntled former employee of Kane Software) is convicted after Lilly's shoes were found in his possession thus closing the case and making the Mars family the town joke. Keith decides to stay in Neptune, sets up shop as a private detective and tries to move on.
Not so much for Veronica. Not a lot is told about the time post-Lilly's death and pre-pilot episode except for flashbacks. She loses her best friend, her mother and her friends after they decide to shun her too for the whole going-after-Lilly's-own-dad thing. Logan himself confronts Veronica about it, unable to take that Veronica's dad would go after a grieving father. Supposedly, she's given an ultimatum. To stand by her dad or her friends. Having picked her dad, life is pretty much hell for Veronica. From what we can gather from the flashbacks, she was gossiped about constantly, possibly bullied and harassed, definitely her reputation was being torn down. But kids, it's not over yet. Determined to prove that she wasn't going to be a doormat to their abuse, Veronica shows up at an 09er party (the cool rich kids, the name for the clique being taken from the 90909 zipcode where they live) and... afterwards, well Veronica doesn't remember exactly what happened. We do know she wakes up in bed the following morning, her underwear gone and realizing that the worst had happened, goes out to her car newly decorated with the word SLUT and attempts to report the crime to the police. Her dad's successor to the position of sheriff (Don Lamb) basically dismissed it as another attempt by a Mars family member to bring the rich folks down. "I'll tell you what, Veronica Mars, why don't you go see the wizard? Ask for a little backbone," he tells her.
And that's only the stuff Veronica knows about in the pilot episode. Broken? Emotionally gutted? Not our Veronica. She, as she advises one friend later, gets tough and learns how to get even. Cuts off her hair, starts working at her dad's detective agency and learns all about the seedy side of life, well more than she already has. So let's begin with Veronica's actual issues which obviously all come from the morass of emo above (and then some).
You Mess With the Bull... - or how Veronica will fuck your shit up if you cross her.
With all the spunky and strong girls in camp, it should come as no surprise to anyone that Veronica is much tougher than she looks and talks sometimes. Yes, her snark can be biting and leavened with darker humor and she's been pretty helpful to several campers so far but make no mistake about it: Veronica will have no qualms about trying to destroy you if you mess with her or anyone she cares about. But how much weight does that carry considering that she's in a camp with the Slayer, a robot, people from the future, superheroes and shinigami? Well, what she lacks by way of physical destructive ability, she makes up for in sheer ruthlessness.
The thing about Veronica is, while she will rarely go for you unprovoked, if you make the mistake of not being able to take her down (physically, emotionally) with one hit, she will go for your throat. I'm actually reminded of something Ender Wiggin said in Ender's Game, when Ender was asked why in a fight when he was being bullied by a group of boys and having taunted the leader of the bullies to fight him one on one and managing to knock him down, he kept kicking the boy against all the playground fight rules (let him get up and go for you again) And Ender answers with something along the lines that his aim wasn't to play fair but to win, not just that one fight but all the other fights in the future. As one small perpetually bullied boy at school and home, he learned that to end all future fights with his classmates, he had to destroy this one so completely that they'd never have another shot to go for him again... or would want to.
Now as stated earlier, the true extent of the snubbing and the harrassment Veronica must have endured after Lilly's murder and their family's humiliation is something we'll have to imagine for ourselves. But evidently, it was enough that Veronica developed a thick exterior, an automatically defensive stance and that same philosophy Ender has when it comes to fights and confrontations. There are several examples of this in the series and let's start off with a smaller one.
In 1x05: You Think You Know Somebody, Veronica is partnered with a girl named Ashley in journalism class to practice their interviewing skills. The following exchange ensues:
Ashley: So, Ms. Mars, how do you respond to rumors that your boyfriend hooked up with strippers in Tijuana last weekend?
Veronica: Ms. Banks. Have you decided which parent you're going to live with after the divorce? And if I may, a followup: can you believe your father's choice in mistresses?
[ and by the girl's reaction, we can probably assume that no, she didn't know or at least was in deep denial. ]
In 1x06: Like A Virgin, while a teacher calls Veronica's attention in class:
Mrs. Murphy: Veronica. You seem to be in a sharing mood. Why don't you tell us your position on this?
Dick: All fours?
[ and later on, Veronica strolls past Dick and his messed up car with a very telling smirk ]
Veronica's Voiceover: "All fours," huh, Dick? You mess with the bull...
I'm a little hesitant to use the events in 1x20 M.A.D. as an example because Veronica didn't go through with her retaliatory act on behalf of her "client", Carmen but only by the request of the girl herself but the episode shows a great deal about Veronica's attitude. A jerkweed named Tad actually blackmails his girlfriend into staying with him when she wants to break it off as they've been dating since she was a freshman and he's graduating now and going to (I think!) the naval academy. To get her to stay with him, he uses a video he recorded on his cellphone of Carmen... pleasuring a Popsicle, which Carmen has no memory of doing. She hires Veronica to get the cellphone back which our girl does but it turns out Tad is a bit smarter than that, having made copies of said video. Veronica proposes that all they need to do is find something to hold over Tad to keep him from posting the video online and completely humiliating Carmen and making her a downloadable joke. Mutually assured destruction, Veronica says, destroy me and I'll destroy you worse. And what does she come up with? Getting Carmen and another person (a gay classmate named Seth who's been the target of Tad's homophobic remarks) to set Tad up as gay by way of some manipulated pictures and edited and spliced phonecall, getting Mac to create a website for it and finally confronting Tad, telling him that if he posts that video of Carmen, she'll send the link to the website to his future classmates at the academy, knowing full well it'd get Tad kicked out and destroying a future he's planned on.
Obviously, the creep deserves it especially when it comes out that the reason Carmen couldn't remember it was because he'd slipped GHB into her drink, hoping to take advantage of the drug. But this for me illustrates my point. Mutually assured destruction... more effective as a threat and with the implied risk that the other person might go through with it anyway... but at least you get the eventual satisfaction of striking back. Carmen refuses to get her revenge though, leaving Veronica confused and protesting that she couldn't let him get away with it.
There are probably more examples I could bring up but those and this last one stand out for me. In 2x05: Blast From the Past, Veronica and a new girl and Wallace's love interest, Jackie lock horns, having a very mutual dislike for each other and both being somewhat possessive of Wallace. Jackie though comes up with a plan to humiliate Veronica, setting her up to appear on a psychic cable show. Veronica thinks she's doing Jackie a favor and exposing a fraud who'd stolen Jackie's credit cards but in fact, Jackie had managed to get some embarrassing information from Veronica and fed them to the psychic. The psychic then told Veronica about said secret (Veronica once upon a time used one of those creams sold on infomercials: MammoMax to (you guessed it!) increase her endowments) It was a clever enough plan to take Veronica down a peg by embarrassing her in front of everyone who watched the show (which is actually most of Neptune High, including Duncan and Logan (then boyfriend and ex, respectively)) Veronica's reaction? She wants payback and she wants it to hurt hard. How is she going to accomplish it?
Veronica had previously bugged the sheriff's office and was able to record some incriminating evidence of Lamb extorting money from Jackie's father (Terence Cook, a famous baseball player with a gambling problem) with his own evidence that Terence had thrown a game in order to pay back some debts he owed. Veronica's plan? Having that recording played at the Neptune High Homecoming Dance. It served the dual purpose of destroying Lamb and of course, getting her revenge on Jackie. It always struck me as being a little out of proportion to what was done to her, destroying Jackie's father's career, reputation and of course very publicly humiliating Jackie on an entirely different level. And certainly, I'm sure being able to take down Lamb played a factor into it, and Veronica wouldn't that have ammo if it weren't for Terence Cook's own doing but the point is, Veronica was going for an extremely damaging blow against Jackie in contrast to what was done to her (YMMV of course!) And again this time, Veronica was only stopped by Wallace's request that she drop it, but not without some argument ("You know I can't just let it go!")
Not to say however that at every slight offense, Veronica will cut you bad but one of the key points about Veronica as a character is how she operates on a level of trading favors and offenses. Payback and revenge, hurt me and I'll hurt you so much worse so you won't want to try me again. This is a major issue for Veronica because in these cases, her own anger and drive for revenge could blind her and cause more damage to herself (and her relationships) than to the intended target. So how will this play for camp? Obviously, there's only so much she can do and Veronica is currently valuing her survival and focused on solving the mystery enough that she will hopefully not get into a situation where this will be provoked. But from what we've seen, Veronica knows where to aim her shot where it hurts, how to time it for maximum damage and isn't intent on letting you live for another day. But what damage she'll wreak will be emotionally, gathering information (which is what she's doing now) will help her provide ammo for it but short of godmodding PSYCHICNESS AND L337 SEARCH ENGINES LOLZ, this will take a while. But hey, revenge is a dish best served cold right?
In Part 2: cynicism is the way of Veronica's life, the rape, how not to deal with your emo. And part 2 might take a while... at least not by tomorrow but I hope I'll be able to post it shortly!
"The best way to dull the pain of your best friend's murder is to have your mother abandon you as soon as possible. It's like hitting your thumb with a hammer. Then, when it's throbbing so badly you don't think you'll survive, you cut the damn thing off."
Let's start off with a spoiler-free summary of where Veronica's at when the series begins. The series starts off with Veronica the way we know her now. We're told that she used to be a much different girl, popular with a very close-knit clique comprising of her boyfriend, Duncan Kane, her best friend and Duncan's sister, Lilly and Logan Echolls, Duncan's best friend and Lilly's on-again off-again boyfriend. Her hometown Neptune has a massive gap between the classes, the haves rolling in money and trustfunds on one side (which the popular kids and incidentally her friends belong to) and the have-nots. Her father was the town sheriff however, and as she said herself it lent her a certain status at the very least. Her life was happy, shiny and great and so was she, sweet and slightly naive. Until everything changed.
It started when Duncan abruptly broke up with her. Completely confused, Veronica sought Lilly's help in figuring out why he just started acting like she didn't exist. At first Lilly was encouraging, and then afterwards Lilly's attitude about Veronica getting together with Duncan did a 180 too. And if Veronica thought her life was over then? It certainly didn't prepare her for what happened just after. On the way home with her dad, he's called to a disturbance at the Kane family and while her dad tells her to stay in the car, spotting a basically catatonic Duncan causes Veronica to go in anyway. What she sees? Lilly's body by the pool, an incredibly ugly head wound, the blood and her eyes blank and staring.
This is where everything goes terribly and completely wrong for the Mars family. Keith (her dad, the sheriff), for whatever reason of his decides to go after Lilly and Duncan's father, Jake Kane for the murder. The town is thrown into an uproar, Jake Kane's company Kane Software is pretty much responsible for most of the wealthy residents' income. The result? Keith is thrown out of office, the whole town ostracizes the Mars family, they lose their house and Veronica's mother, unable to take it bails on them. Someone else (Abel Koontz, a disgruntled former employee of Kane Software) is convicted after Lilly's shoes were found in his possession thus closing the case and making the Mars family the town joke. Keith decides to stay in Neptune, sets up shop as a private detective and tries to move on.
Not so much for Veronica. Not a lot is told about the time post-Lilly's death and pre-pilot episode except for flashbacks. She loses her best friend, her mother and her friends after they decide to shun her too for the whole going-after-Lilly's-own-dad thing. Logan himself confronts Veronica about it, unable to take that Veronica's dad would go after a grieving father. Supposedly, she's given an ultimatum. To stand by her dad or her friends. Having picked her dad, life is pretty much hell for Veronica. From what we can gather from the flashbacks, she was gossiped about constantly, possibly bullied and harassed, definitely her reputation was being torn down. But kids, it's not over yet. Determined to prove that she wasn't going to be a doormat to their abuse, Veronica shows up at an 09er party (the cool rich kids, the name for the clique being taken from the 90909 zipcode where they live) and... afterwards, well Veronica doesn't remember exactly what happened. We do know she wakes up in bed the following morning, her underwear gone and realizing that the worst had happened, goes out to her car newly decorated with the word SLUT and attempts to report the crime to the police. Her dad's successor to the position of sheriff (Don Lamb) basically dismissed it as another attempt by a Mars family member to bring the rich folks down. "I'll tell you what, Veronica Mars, why don't you go see the wizard? Ask for a little backbone," he tells her.
And that's only the stuff Veronica knows about in the pilot episode. Broken? Emotionally gutted? Not our Veronica. She, as she advises one friend later, gets tough and learns how to get even. Cuts off her hair, starts working at her dad's detective agency and learns all about the seedy side of life, well more than she already has. So let's begin with Veronica's actual issues which obviously all come from the morass of emo above (and then some).
You Mess With the Bull... - or how Veronica will fuck your shit up if you cross her.
With all the spunky and strong girls in camp, it should come as no surprise to anyone that Veronica is much tougher than she looks and talks sometimes. Yes, her snark can be biting and leavened with darker humor and she's been pretty helpful to several campers so far but make no mistake about it: Veronica will have no qualms about trying to destroy you if you mess with her or anyone she cares about. But how much weight does that carry considering that she's in a camp with the Slayer, a robot, people from the future, superheroes and shinigami? Well, what she lacks by way of physical destructive ability, she makes up for in sheer ruthlessness.
The thing about Veronica is, while she will rarely go for you unprovoked, if you make the mistake of not being able to take her down (physically, emotionally) with one hit, she will go for your throat. I'm actually reminded of something Ender Wiggin said in Ender's Game, when Ender was asked why in a fight when he was being bullied by a group of boys and having taunted the leader of the bullies to fight him one on one and managing to knock him down, he kept kicking the boy against all the playground fight rules (let him get up and go for you again) And Ender answers with something along the lines that his aim wasn't to play fair but to win, not just that one fight but all the other fights in the future. As one small perpetually bullied boy at school and home, he learned that to end all future fights with his classmates, he had to destroy this one so completely that they'd never have another shot to go for him again... or would want to.
Now as stated earlier, the true extent of the snubbing and the harrassment Veronica must have endured after Lilly's murder and their family's humiliation is something we'll have to imagine for ourselves. But evidently, it was enough that Veronica developed a thick exterior, an automatically defensive stance and that same philosophy Ender has when it comes to fights and confrontations. There are several examples of this in the series and let's start off with a smaller one.
In 1x05: You Think You Know Somebody, Veronica is partnered with a girl named Ashley in journalism class to practice their interviewing skills. The following exchange ensues:
Ashley: So, Ms. Mars, how do you respond to rumors that your boyfriend hooked up with strippers in Tijuana last weekend?
Veronica: Ms. Banks. Have you decided which parent you're going to live with after the divorce? And if I may, a followup: can you believe your father's choice in mistresses?
[ and by the girl's reaction, we can probably assume that no, she didn't know or at least was in deep denial. ]
In 1x06: Like A Virgin, while a teacher calls Veronica's attention in class:
Mrs. Murphy: Veronica. You seem to be in a sharing mood. Why don't you tell us your position on this?
Dick: All fours?
[ and later on, Veronica strolls past Dick and his messed up car with a very telling smirk ]
Veronica's Voiceover: "All fours," huh, Dick? You mess with the bull...
I'm a little hesitant to use the events in 1x20 M.A.D. as an example because Veronica didn't go through with her retaliatory act on behalf of her "client", Carmen but only by the request of the girl herself but the episode shows a great deal about Veronica's attitude. A jerkweed named Tad actually blackmails his girlfriend into staying with him when she wants to break it off as they've been dating since she was a freshman and he's graduating now and going to (I think!) the naval academy. To get her to stay with him, he uses a video he recorded on his cellphone of Carmen... pleasuring a Popsicle, which Carmen has no memory of doing. She hires Veronica to get the cellphone back which our girl does but it turns out Tad is a bit smarter than that, having made copies of said video. Veronica proposes that all they need to do is find something to hold over Tad to keep him from posting the video online and completely humiliating Carmen and making her a downloadable joke. Mutually assured destruction, Veronica says, destroy me and I'll destroy you worse. And what does she come up with? Getting Carmen and another person (a gay classmate named Seth who's been the target of Tad's homophobic remarks) to set Tad up as gay by way of some manipulated pictures and edited and spliced phonecall, getting Mac to create a website for it and finally confronting Tad, telling him that if he posts that video of Carmen, she'll send the link to the website to his future classmates at the academy, knowing full well it'd get Tad kicked out and destroying a future he's planned on.
Obviously, the creep deserves it especially when it comes out that the reason Carmen couldn't remember it was because he'd slipped GHB into her drink, hoping to take advantage of the drug. But this for me illustrates my point. Mutually assured destruction... more effective as a threat and with the implied risk that the other person might go through with it anyway... but at least you get the eventual satisfaction of striking back. Carmen refuses to get her revenge though, leaving Veronica confused and protesting that she couldn't let him get away with it.
There are probably more examples I could bring up but those and this last one stand out for me. In 2x05: Blast From the Past, Veronica and a new girl and Wallace's love interest, Jackie lock horns, having a very mutual dislike for each other and both being somewhat possessive of Wallace. Jackie though comes up with a plan to humiliate Veronica, setting her up to appear on a psychic cable show. Veronica thinks she's doing Jackie a favor and exposing a fraud who'd stolen Jackie's credit cards but in fact, Jackie had managed to get some embarrassing information from Veronica and fed them to the psychic. The psychic then told Veronica about said secret (Veronica once upon a time used one of those creams sold on infomercials: MammoMax to (you guessed it!) increase her endowments) It was a clever enough plan to take Veronica down a peg by embarrassing her in front of everyone who watched the show (which is actually most of Neptune High, including Duncan and Logan (then boyfriend and ex, respectively)) Veronica's reaction? She wants payback and she wants it to hurt hard. How is she going to accomplish it?
Veronica had previously bugged the sheriff's office and was able to record some incriminating evidence of Lamb extorting money from Jackie's father (Terence Cook, a famous baseball player with a gambling problem) with his own evidence that Terence had thrown a game in order to pay back some debts he owed. Veronica's plan? Having that recording played at the Neptune High Homecoming Dance. It served the dual purpose of destroying Lamb and of course, getting her revenge on Jackie. It always struck me as being a little out of proportion to what was done to her, destroying Jackie's father's career, reputation and of course very publicly humiliating Jackie on an entirely different level. And certainly, I'm sure being able to take down Lamb played a factor into it, and Veronica wouldn't that have ammo if it weren't for Terence Cook's own doing but the point is, Veronica was going for an extremely damaging blow against Jackie in contrast to what was done to her (YMMV of course!) And again this time, Veronica was only stopped by Wallace's request that she drop it, but not without some argument ("You know I can't just let it go!")
Not to say however that at every slight offense, Veronica will cut you bad but one of the key points about Veronica as a character is how she operates on a level of trading favors and offenses. Payback and revenge, hurt me and I'll hurt you so much worse so you won't want to try me again. This is a major issue for Veronica because in these cases, her own anger and drive for revenge could blind her and cause more damage to herself (and her relationships) than to the intended target. So how will this play for camp? Obviously, there's only so much she can do and Veronica is currently valuing her survival and focused on solving the mystery enough that she will hopefully not get into a situation where this will be provoked. But from what we've seen, Veronica knows where to aim her shot where it hurts, how to time it for maximum damage and isn't intent on letting you live for another day. But what damage she'll wreak will be emotionally, gathering information (which is what she's doing now) will help her provide ammo for it but short of godmodding PSYCHICNESS AND L337 SEARCH ENGINES LOLZ, this will take a while. But hey, revenge is a dish best served cold right?
In Part 2: cynicism is the way of Veronica's life, the rape, how not to deal with your emo. And part 2 might take a while... at least not by tomorrow but I hope I'll be able to post it shortly!