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calledchaos · 4 years

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VILLANELLE IS NOT A PSYCHOPATH, IN THIS ESSAY I WILL-

Okay, so Killing Eve is currently my favorite TV show, but there's one thing that's been bothering me since season one and it's the INCORRECT assumption that Villanelle is a psychopath.

First things first, please note I'm not a licensed psychologist or psychiatrist, but I've done a lot of research for this show (if you listen to the parcast's Serial Killers podcast, you saw what I did there 💁🏾‍♂️).

While I don't know a lot about hired assassins, I do have a fair amount of knowledge on serial killers and their traits. So let's break Villanelle's character down so I can explain why I don't believe she's a psychopath OR sociopath, for that matter.

Actually, before we even to that, let's clarify WHAT IS a psychopath. For starters, the correct medical term used, as in, when you get diagnosed it's not as a psy/sociopath but rather as having antisocial personality disorder (ASPD). A person with ASPD can be born like that (that's what we usually call a psychopath) or can become like that (that's the sociopath). Their main difference is that psychopaths are most likely to be organized and calculating, whereas sociopaths are more "react in the moment" type, they're sloppy and messy.

Here's some patterns of ASPD:

* Superficial charm;

* Dishonesty;

* Lack of empathy;

* Coldness;

* Inability to form honest relationships;

* Poverty of emotions;

* They don't think through the consequences of their actions and they don't care about them either.

* They break rules, laws, moral codes, etc.

Now you're probably going like "well, you just described V before she met Eve", BUT NO, my dear fellow gay, NO. What really sorts a person with ASPD out is their inability to FEEL REMORSE.

They CANNOT FEEL IT. It's been scientific proven that their brains are wired in a different way than the regular human. If they're in a relationship it isn't based on love, but rather some kind of profit, whether it's financial or sexual, or whatever. If they're with you it's because they WANT something FROM you. They don't form relations as in "I vs You", but rather as "I vs It".

Now what normally shapes a person's personality besides their nature it's their nurture. Villanelle grew up in a toxic home with an abusive mother. That's like... mental illness starter pack (a very familiar field for tumblr users, ain't it? Have you taken your meds today btw?). Did yall see her mother? It's pretty easy to understand why she looks for validation so desperately and why she's attracted to older women with wild hair. Mommy issues at its finest.

Now to be diagnosed with ASPD a person necessarily needs to also be diagnosed with conduct disorder before the age of 15. For what we've learned, Villanelle was a difficult child and she did set the orphanage she was living in on fire, which is one of the patterns to qualify her. But if you suffer from some kind of abuse at an early age, you will act out, one way or another. They didn't make it clear, but I don't believe she used to torture animals and commit petty crimes when she was a kid, and those are the most common behaviors of children with conduct disorder. So if she didn't behave like that, she couldn't be diagnosed with ASPD after she turned 18.

When she killed Anna's husband it was from a place of jealousy, which's pretty common for female murderers, you don't have to be a psychopath for that, could very much be a crime of passion. His castration, however, indicates she perhaps needed to set a ritual to get her point across - which she repeated when she murdered Frank, but then again that was staging the body to shock Eve... Did she want to shock Anna as well or did she want to emasculate the husband? Honestly, I don't remember what that was about. BUT had her not be recruited by the Twelve, would she had killed again? She seems to be questioning that herself and from where I'm standing, I'd say maybe no. Because SHE ISN'T A SERIAL KILLER. I mean, now she is by definition, considering she's killed a ton of people, BUT LIKE serial killers kill because that's all they know, that's the only thing that brings them fulfillment and even that it's a tricky statement, because MALE serial killers kill for satisfaction; FEMALE serial killers normally kill for profit, like a tool to reach their goal. There are very few female serial killers that I know of that kill for the sake of it or even less so, for sexual gratification.

It's difficult to follow a pattern with a character, because you don't know how accurate the writer intended to be or how vast is their knowledge on people with ASPD, but because she has shown empathy for various characters so far (Konstantin, that kid she killed in the hospital so he wouldn't have to live without his family, her brothers...) and also because she fell in love with Eve, she CAN'T have ASPD. I mean, sure when it comes to human behavior nothing is 100% certain. Gary Ridgway, aka The Green River Killer, was convicted for murdering 48 women, but by the time he was caught he was married to a woman who pretty much said he was a great, loving and caring husband and he did say he actually loved her too, but he kept soliciting service from sex workers and killing them afterwards.

The thing is, specialists say that killing can be addictive. Though I don't consider Villanelle a psychopath, I'm okay with her having psychopathic tendencies. When she said she doesn't feel anything, she's just so bored, remember? It could very much be the reason why she got stuck in killing. Her first kill, Anna's husband, got her in jail where she would've stayed if it wasn't for the 12 recruiting her. They taught her how to do the job and I believe that gave her some kind of fulfillment. It made her finally feel something and that's why she kept killing. She had to learn how to disassociate herself from what she was doing in order to keep doing it. People became just subjects. But once she felt connected with Eve, that all started to crumble down.

Okay, so the first two seasons we don't see her really loving Eve, we see her obsessing over her. And that's pretty easy to crack: there was a middle aged woman with beautiful hair dedicating her days to find Villanelle. For someone who so desperately needed reassurance and attention, that was probably a burst of excitement she wasn't used to feeling.

The game changer happened in season 3, though. That scene when Konstantin told her Eve was still alive was SO WELL DONE. The camera angle tilting to the side, the slow motion, Konstantin's voice fading away. You can actually see in her eyes she's SPIRALING and that single tear rolling down her face while she smiled... IT'S A GOOD SCENE. I think in that moment she realized her feelings for Eve were a lot deeper than just her need to have someone to control and play with. She learned that her actions almost made her lose the one person she actually loves and probably also actually loves her back and she doesn't want to blow the miraculous second chance she got.

Since she thought she had killed Eve she was even emptier inside and killing wasn't giving her satisfaction anymore, but the thought of Eve surviving made her burst with emotions. She didn't need to kill anyone now, she just wanted Eve back.

Needless to say that's NOT how ASPD works. They're literally incapable of these kind of feelings. SO the pattern I THINK fits better is NARCISSISM.

Now, see... There are 10 personality disorders divided in three groups: clusters A, B and C. Antisocial Personality Disorder is one of the four disorders in cluster B and withing this group their common trait is narcissism.

There are two kinds of narcissists, the one that concerns us here are the ones that are charming, confident, they'll do whatever it takes to get what they want, even if means emotionally abusing their peers, manipulation, lying, cheating... They think they're the very apex of the world, people that only know them on the surface love them, they're the life of the party and yada yada yada. They're normally very successful, because when you don't care about people around you, you will climb to the top way faster (most - if not all - CEOs are narcissists btw). You're gonna noticed that this description is pretty similar to ASPD, but the big difference here is that narcissists CAN FEEL REMORSE AND SHAME, people with ASPD CANNOT.

BUT being a narcissist doesn't mean you have a personality disorder, it just means you're probably a fucking jerk. What will give you a diagnosis though is when your narcissistic behavior causes you impediments. When it causes you trouble in all areas of your life, professional, personal, familiar, etc., when it makes you miserable it's when you can be diagnosed with another cluster B disorder: Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD).

It is incredibly difficult to diagnose someone with NPD, because these people very rarely see themselves as having a problem. Like I said, they normally live their best lives, no need to change anything. So when it comes back to bite them in the ass (which sometimes never happens, because the universe is unfair) and if by a miracle they realize that THEY are the problem, that's when you get a NPD ticket. If you're following my thought process you know where I'm going with this...

VILLANELLE ISN'T A PSYCHOPATH, SHE'S A NARCISSIST WHO DEVELOPT NARCISSISTIC PERSONALITY DISORDER.

While being an assassin was giving her everything she wanted, Villanelle was just fine with her nice life, cool flat and fun job. The only thing she was lacking was someone to watch movies with and being a narcissist she thought she had to control someone in order to be loved by them (narcissists are actually very insecure, that's why they're so extra with the manipulation, they don't deal with rejection well). Once she felt actual feelings, when she realized how her explosive ways almost costed Eve's life, that's when she understood that her actions took her to a place she didn't quite like anymore and if she wanted to have a another shot and do things right, she needed to change.

In real life people with NPD need a lot of therapy and even so, they won't impruve much tbh, 'cause that's just how their brains work. But for the sake of the poetry, I'm more than okay with accepting that Villaneve's connection is so strong it made an skilled narcissist assassin to come down from her high horse to put Eve as a priority. Villanelle giving Eve the option to walk away for good to have a better stable life away from the chaos their feelings for each other created is probably the most romantic thing I've ever seen and I can rant about that season 3 finale for hours too, don't try me.

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