Chapter 3 - VICKY

The Psychology of Vicky

Abandon hope all ye who enter…

Everybody who has seen Fairly OddParents knows Vicky. Even Chip Skylark's song `Icky Vicky' (which is not about pumpkins) calls her a `fire-breathing dragon in a pair of black jeans'. She's evil, manipulative and thrives on money and children's misery.

However, is this really her fault?

Vicky has always been among my favourite characters (it goes Timmy, Wanda, Mr. Crocker and then Vicky herself, if anyone's interested) because she was such an interesting person. Not so much an enigma, but interesting nonetheless.

She's so fascinating because of one thing- what made her so mean? People aren't born cruel- I've yet to see an evil baby or a toddler leading an army- have you? (Napoleon doesn't count- he was just short.)

I thought for while and finally came up with this: It's her parents' fault. You may not believe me, but it's true.

While you read this, just ignore episodes like `Vicky Loses Her Icky' and others that say she was born evil- just pretend that this is a real situation (I am perfectly aware that the creators of the cartoon are always right- this is just a hobby of mine).

Her parents are completely spineless and never punish their eldest daughter, right? They've probably been this way ever since Vicky was a little girl. Imagine that you're about five years old. You accidentally drop, say, a milk bottle on the floor and it smashes. Your parents quietly clean it up and nothing more is said. They don't tell you to be careful, they just silently clean the kitchen floor and leave. Nonplussed, you continue your day. A while later (it could be hours or days away) another accident occurs, like you traipse mud through the lounge after coming inside from a rainy day. You look behind you and know that you've done something wrong. You wait for your parents to either tell you off or at least explain that you've broken a rule, but instead your mother or father (I'm not going to be sexist) cleans it up without a word.

This whole scenario could (and in this case, would) continue for years, and each time you would get a little more worried- not matter what you do, your parents don't react. This means that you could do anything and nothing would matter. Now, this is a terrifying thought for any child- if nothing you do affects your parents, how do you know whether you've done something wrong, unless you know yourself? And there's always that part of you that thinks `why don't they care enough to stop me?'.

You may be thinking as you read this, “Ha! No kid thinks like that!” Okay, kids may not think that in words, but the feeling is definitely there. Boundaries are a form of love, and show the child that the parents care about them enough to pay attention to them,. So if a parent doesn't set boundaries, they deprive their children of one form of love.

Right, get back into the daydream. You're about ten and, through many attempts to get your parents to react, you've become known as a `trouble kid'. You bully other children to get a reaction from teachers and maybe to take out your fear an utter frustration on somebody else. By this time you may feel resentful of your parents and view them as `weak'. You may get told off by teachers, but when they send home letters to your parents guess what? Nothing happens. If anything, it drives your parents into an even worse state of mind- they may feel that if they say anything to you, you'll only become more rebellious and maybe even hate them.

It's a vicious circle. The more you push at the non-existent boundaries, the more your parents are afraid to enforce them, which in turn makes you push at them more… it's never ending. And as a child, you won't know how to sit down and tell your parents about the problem because you may not even realise it yourself.

Say, now, that you're fourteen. You're parents, because you're a villain in a comic strip, have become truly afraid of you because at a point in time you've turned on them in a desperate attempt to `feel solid ground' as it were. You're no longer known as a `trouble child' but as a `completely out of control' teen. This isn't your fault, you just desperately want someone to tell you to stop. And it can't just come from anyone, it has to come from your parents.

One day, one of your attempts earns you money. Maybe another bully at school paid you to beat up a child for you or something. You get an allowance anyway, but now you can buy something a little bit bigger.

You buy something with the money and, for the sake of argument, let's say it's a huge bag of makeup. Being an inanimate object, it doesn't have a mind. This means that it doesn't think you're horrible and isn't afraid or angry at you. You feel safe knowing that, as an item, you are firstly, better than it, and, secondly, you don't have to intimidate it to gain it's respect.

Yeah, once again this sounds incredibly stupid. You wouldn't necessarily think it out loud, but the feelings are in there. Seriously, deep down it's a gratifying thought.

This whole scenario goes on for a while- you get money for performing various `dirty' tasks (and by dirty I mean violent). The people you are cruel to in order to get paid may threaten to tell a teacher or other powerful authority, but brute intimidation shuts them up quickly. Then somehow, your attention is turned to babysitting. I think you can guess the rest.

So you see- Vicky isn't incredibly evil, just frightened and very, very angry at everybody. You see? It took me a whole hour (maybe longer) to explain Vicky's situation (that's longer than a whole double episode). That's a lot of typing.

Maybe she deserves to be pitied rather than hated, what do you think? And did she really deserve a song about her?

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