@xeraeus replied to your post “@nerdgod555 mentioned you on a post “DEAR MM FANDOM: RIKA DID NOTHING...”
Amazing how Rika only defense is she was abused as a child she gets to drug and fuck up everyone's life through it. No mm characters had a great childhood they all experienced some type of abused. Did they start a c u l t tho??
It’s almost like Rika’s characterisation and story arc are flawed and the devs couldn’t decide if they wanted her to be villain, victim or both and flipflopped between them all at the cost of narrative cohesion and enabling woobification the world over.
Like damn if you want her to be cruel and past the point of redemption, let her. If you want her to be misunderstood and a victim of her own circumstances, let her. Don’t, however, try to fuse them if you’re not going to address them. It literally doesn’t matter how sad Rika was as a kid; that alone is not a redemption arc for brainwashing and torturing vulnerable people as an adult.
If you’re going to show her enthusiastically shoving elixir down someone’s throat and other wacky shit, the fact that she was bullied isn’t going to magically cancel it out...ESPECIALLY if you’re also exploring the tragic pasts of other characters who didn’t turn to evil shenanigans after living through similar (and-in some cases- worse) circumstances. Redemption arcs don’t work if instead of addressing that the aggressor is an aggressor and needs to make amends, you backtrack everything and make them a victim.
As a writer, the handling of Rika makes me so ANGRY because she could have been so much more interesting and a genuinely incredibly villain. Like...imagine if V had approached Rika at the beginning and planned Mint Eye with her, pulling her from therapy because there was so much beauty in her pain and nothing wrong with her, only to chicken out after he realised he’d made a huge mistake. What about if V genuinely believed her to be dead and all the cutesy Rika stuff is genuinely 100% real to the RFA as MC comes to know them, making her reveal that much more dramatic.
I just