organised everything i have for it so far + tentatively cut some things (that i may put back if i find there’s missing beats but otherwise they were kinda unnecessary for the current vision) and refined my chapter two outline so if i have time at work tomorrow i can play around with it and write something like yayyyy i love when past me sets myself up like this

"You're Her Type": Anna and Eve and the Garden of Evil (+ how Eve and Villanelle learn and love)

hello everybody i have had more wine so now you're going to be subjected to my Opinions. today, we are going to be talking about eve and anna, specifically in the context of their respective relationships with villanelle. i believe that, as we wind up to another season finale, and our characters make some pretty defining choices about one another, this is a comparison that killing eve invites -- it's no coincidence that after six episodes of relative radio silence on the matter, konstantin returned anna to the show's discourse in 2x07. so buckle up. a little signposting: first we're going to break down how eve and villanelle engage with the idea of love, then contrast anna and eve's moral frameworks, and then finally explore how anna and eve have gone from almost mirror images of one another to completely divorced in villanelle's mind, and why that's a good thing. i will try and keep this shit concise, but y'all know how these turn out.

now as i've mentioned before, killing eve is a precarious cantilever of parallels. eve/villanelle are obviously our most important and riveting example of this -- initially, they have their resemblance, but we watch as they slowly and softly kill their old selves until they complement each other seamlessly. but eve/anna is a crucial secondary parallel because it contextualises the primary; it situates villanelle and eve's mutual obsession. 

i believe that as we progress through our formative years, the people around us provide us with experiences and patterns that teach us how to love, and what to expect from love. this can sometimes set us up for life (leaving us with a model that drives us to seek out healthy and productive dynamics), but sometimes, it means we don't know how to recognise or cultivate genuine affection, and we get trapped in damaging cycles. i've said before that i think eve sits on the psychopathy spectrum, but i also think that growing up, she had strong examples of relationships, which is why she is such an accomplished long-term chameleon -- she was able to maintain a marriage and friendships. yes, this was partially through self-repression, but at a base level, eve has the formulae to pass in these typical emotional environments. 

villanelle, on the other hand? anna tells eve that villanelle's father was a drunk, and her mother passed away. i doubt that villanelle had ANY actual relationships, let alone good ones, with family. she's exceptionally intelligent and a very fast learner (which anna asserts and we have confirmed on-screen almost every episode), and she's versatile. this is why she's able to craft and adopt the perfect character/personality for a particular situation -- she's built up a repertoire of dialects, micro-expressions, cue responses, etc. that allow her to smoothly navigate short-term interactions (e.g. with Sebastian, with Gemma). but prior to anna, villanelle has no people she can invest in and expect a returned investment, so she's never had the opportunity to develop skills beyond the superficial. she gets what she wants through charisma, a calculated blend of innocence and sex appeal, and transactions (i do this, you do that). 

but then villanelle meets anna, and undoubtedly forms an imprint on her of some kind, as her first "reciprocal" relationship -- the first adult to treat villanelle like she has value. obviously, the ethics of student/teacher affair are EXTREMELY dicey, but getting into that discourse will take us outside my intended scope. so here's how eve and anna differ. 1) proximity. villanelle and anna are together all the time, and this gives rise to their relationship. villanelle and eve, in the first season, are almost always apart. initially, their fascination is at least partly driven by mystery. it's not a "crime of opportunity". this is pretty much the most difficult long-distance mess imaginable. essentially, villanelle and eve both take an active role -- they pursue each other deliberately -- rather than a passive one. it's not a matter of convenience. 2) commitment. for anna, villanelle was an avenue of tourism, a compartment kept self-contained which anna could visit to re-explore youth and sexuality. but villanelle was not allowed to bleed into the rest of her life; anna wanted to keep job-husband-image just-so while also having villanelle when desired (cake had and eaten too). eve's whole life, however, orbits villanelle. her husband, her friends, her job -- these are discarded as acceptable sacrifices on the path to villanelle, rather than prioritised. while anna (potentially due to guilt) idealises the memory of her husband, eve considers niko disposable, and is a clearer iteration of herself without him.

3) psychology. anna is inarguably fucked up (she had an affair with her STUDENT), but i don't think she registers as a psychopath. she displays empathy, remorse, reticence to cause harm. eve? villanelle kind of nailed it with the "like us" thing. and this brings us to how anna and eve each fit into villanelle's life, and way of life. im making an absolute reach of a biblical reference with my title, but if for a minute we did position anna/eve as adam/eve, we end up with two items of real relevance. firstly, that eve is the one who takes the bite of the apple, and secondly, that eve is created from anna/adam. the apple as we know is symbolic of the temptation of sin. eve eats, and is cast from paradise forever. what i love about this, though, is that our eve isn't cast from paradise, she's cast from prison. eve's boring office job in witness coordination, her stale marriage, her enactment of normality day in, day out -- it isn't a utopia, not by any stretch. and i think that's only really starkly apparent to eve after all those trappings are gone; once she feels "wide awake", she realises exactly how long and how deeply she's been asleep. but anna? anna doesn't give in, or rather, she doesn't give in enough. she sleeps with villanelle, and spends time with villanelle, but when she's confronted with villanelle's capacity for violence, she retreats. she calls the police and cuts villanelle out of her life (which im obviously not going to criticise her for; it's a justifiable response), although it's too late by then. she's stranded in this halfway purgatory -- a woman whose adolescent lover murdered her husband; a woman who isn't good but won't commit to being bad, CAN'T commit. anna is undoubtedly morally grey, but (and bear with me here, because i can't think of a better way to articulate this) anna is kind of weak. she never had the guts to look at her situation for what it was, to bother to try and see villanelle beyond what she wanted her to be. she was using villanelle -- someone she could feel good about helping while simultaneously bringing excitement to her mundane life -- and set her back down when villanelle became too much trouble. what we and Villanelle learn from this is that certain parts of who she is are attractive (irresistibly so) to other people, and others are repellent. 

which obliquely brings me to the second point, that eve is created from anna. as early as 1x02, we have our attention directed to the physical similarities between anna and eve, which is perhaps part of the initial draw to eve for villanelle, but we also have their differences immediately emphasised. eve is unique from the outset, because these repellent qualities -- the enjoyment of destruction, the dramatic flair, the violence, the efficiency -- are what excite her about villanelle in the first place. villanelle's beauty/charm/off-beat humour/loyalty all come into the picture later. at the beginning, there's just a string of bodies, and that's what sucks eve in. don't get me wrong, i think it's very much villanelle's personality that eve is obsessed with -- we could see her professional but  lack of personal interest in the Ghost -- but she has always understood villanelle in the context of her darkness. it never surprises her, only intrigues her. in 1x08, we have a number of direct comparisons between anna and eve, or at least, the show recreates the same situations with each of them and watches them respond entirely differently. 

we have anna pulling the gun on villanelle. the entire time, villanelle is relaxed, stating outright that anna doesn't have what it takes to shoot. she waits her out. she has no intentions of killing anna, even though she tells irina, "i don't love her anymore." we'll come back to the significance of that statement. 

later, in the tea room, eve has a gun levelled at villanelle, but again, villanelle is certain she won't fire. eve admits that no, she can't use the gun, but rather than turn it on herself as anna did, she makes villanelle an offer: come with me; it can be just the two of us, and we can talk. in a high stress environment, eve's response is to treat villanelle like a person, not a weapon or a thing. 

so villanelle runs. and that brings us to their final interaction of the season, when they meet in villanelle's paris apartment. as they lie together on the bed, eve pulls the knife, and villanelle tells her, "you can't."

this is where eve cleaves distinctly and irreversibly from anna in villanelle's mind. like i said, a fraction of eve's initial appeal is her similarity to anna, although it's also obvious that villanelle is very much attracted to eve in her own right (in 2x03, she calls the woman she sleeps with "eve" and not "anna"). but then in 1x04, eve gets out of the car to face villanelle, and villanelle has dinner with her in 1x05, and eve begins to overwrite anna in villanelle's mind. how can we be sure of this? because in 1x08, when villanelle is sneaking past anna and irina in the apartment, she pauses and stares, even though it's vital that she get to her passport quickly. what's notable about this particular moment is that this is the only shot where anna could easily be mistaken for eve. this is what prompts villanelle to linger for that extra beat. 

so we have that initial similarity, then a merging, then an overtaking. but when eve stabs villanelle, she becomes removed entirely from anna in villanelle's mind. she goes from "you're like anna" to "you're more interesting than anna" to just "eve". because along many other things, eve has the capacity to surprise villanelle. she doesn't take the easy or the expected choice. not only does she understand villanelle's language of extremities and violence, she speaks it. this is what villanelle means by "like us" in 2x07; she and eve are more similar than they are different. 

and now we're circling back to villanelle's defence to irina -- "i don't love her anymore!" obviously, this line carries all kinds of implications, but the most critical is that villanelle conceptualises herself as someone capable of love. she doesn't say "i don't like her anymore" or "i don't want her anymore" or "i'm not obsessed with her anymore". she chooses and uses "love". 

with anna, though, it never could be a mutual, reciprocal love, because she and villanelle don't mean the same thing when they use that word. they have fundamentally different understandings of what love means. so even though, ostensibly, it seems like villanelle broke her learned pattern by seeking anna out, she actually perpetuated it -- anna is another authority-position adult who discards villanelle, who misunderstands her and pushes her away (again, fair enough; villanelle is very complicated and dangerous). but eve? look at eve's initial constructions of love. she loved bill, but remains infatuated with his murderer. she loved niko, but when he questioned her rather than supported her, she discarded him too, and went from upset to acceptance in a matter of DAYS after what was presumably a 15yrs+ partnership. 

and then look at her with villanelle. it's not conventional or healthy, but they have a much more compatible interpretation of interpersonal relationships. they're both quite manipulative, but they don't see this as an issue -- the manipulations are a means to the end of helping the other. villanelle is very transactional (she sends eve clothes and perfume, wants to make her favourite recipes), but eve responds very well to the expressing affection through gifts and gestures; far less well when niko and kenny try to show care by giving eve instructions or suggestions. they each romanticise eve stabbing villanelle ("i think about it all the time"), yet neither of them believed villanelle would go through with the hit on eve, because violence plays a deliberate, rather than random, role in their dynamic, which they both comprehend innately. eve stabbed villanelle to assert their equality; she probably did it because villanelle's first response was to say, "you can't", and eve needed to prove she could. but they're on different terms by the time they meet again, and harming each other is no longer a productive currency, no longer has purpose; instead, they hurt others, and help each other, as a way of affirming the growth of their connection. 

for eve and villanelle alike, the other represents a deviation from their established learned patterns, but an important choice for them personally. eve isn't going for the stable, normal relationship that she's been brought up to seek out; instead, she's gravitating towards the possibility of someone who embraces her complexity and darkness, and will give her space and means to explore and express herself. and villanelle isn't recreating a nonreciprocal relationship where she is used/enjoyed and then discarded; she's chosen someone who has the potential to be longer-term, who genuinely cares about her holistically. 

from where we're standing before the finale, it looks like they may learn to "love" each other, in the way they are each capable of. villanelle and eve aren’t a relationship that can exist in heaven, because they’re not people of paradise; whether they’re the apples or the snakes or the gods in this equation, the pertinent fact is that are each other’s gateways into a world that fits them, and gives them what they need. is that fucked up? absolutely. is it kind of nice? I think so. it’s certainly gripping as all hell to watch.

xx. see y’all on the other side if we survive tomorrow’s episode.