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the thing with rachel is that she both has & lacks self awareness, in the sense that she swears up and down that she's not doing anything wrong because this is just how the tower works, but the problem is she uses the problematic morality of the tower to inflict unnecessary harm.
i was thinking about this when wangnan forgave lurker for killing nia (catboy), with his reasoning for it being that he's killed a lot of people to get to the 20th floor and the tower divides people and essentially pits them all against each other to force them to hurt and kill.
but wangnan doesn't forgive rachel for killing prince and akraptor because at the end of the day, rachel commits unnecessary harm on purpose. i think this is linked to this deep psychological response to overcompensate. she definitely has an inferiority complex, but a bit warped.
rachel goes out of her way to use the tower's structure to act sadistic and brutal because it makes her feel good to assert superiority over others, all while using the tower's setup as an excuse for her behavior. except wangnan sees through that.
he knows the difference between people who climb the tower, who make attachments, and try to do as little harm as possible. or at least people who are forced to commit harm because they are forced into situations where they need to corrupt themselves to push forward.
but rachel regularly does things out of cruelty's sake, or just to make herself feel good. she *brutally* beat edin dan to the point where he was disabled for like. two entire years, just because she felt like it and wanted to assert herself.
she actively goes out of her way to disturb bam's circle, hurting khun & others, attempting to kill people close to him and sabotage his efforts while he never actually reciprocates the maliciousness. even at the end of s2 when she almost kills khun, she blames it on the tower.
and she states that she's only doing what everyone else is doing, and that she's a bad person because everyone who climbs the tower has to do bad things. which might be true, but she's not only doing the things she has to. she's going above and beyond to make everyone miserable.
she even namedrops arlene just to force bam to keep chasing her, though if you think about it, it's so deeply cruel after everything he's gone through and everything he's *currently* going through.
at this point, i think she uses the tower's lack of ethics as an excuse to do things that make her feel good, actions that range from hurting others to straight up killing them. she genuinely enjoys using powerful people, such as white, as her "legs" to bring her up the tower.
it's very human but also very bitchy in a way i can't totally describe. it's as if her being aware of her own weakness makes her successes in using stronger people actually carry more weight, since she knows she's useless but still finds a way around it. i think she loves it.
manipulating stronger people makes her feel powerful since she understands her weakness, it's almost a greater flex than it would be if she was as strong as they are. that being said, i think she still wishes she were pretty and strong and all that. but she's making things work.
