veronica sawyer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
couldbebeautiful) wrote2017-05-03 10:08 am
couldbebeautiful) wrote2017-05-03 10:08 am
Entry tags:
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
maskormenace app.
< CHARACTER INFO >
CHARACTER NAME: Veronica Sawyer
CHARACTER AGE: 17
SERIES: Heathers the Musical
CHRONOLOGY: Post-Dead Girl Walking (Reprise), pre-I Am Damaged
CLASS: Anti-hero. Veronica starts in the hero category, but slides into anti-hero (one would argue anti-villain) once she's with the Heathers and then JD, before settling on anti-hero at the end of the musical.
HOUSING: De Chima #3, if that's okay! I've already asked the players there for permission and they agreed.
BACKGROUND:
Warning: Heathers, and the movie that it's adapted from, is a black comedy about two teenagers who murder people and then stage them to look like suicides. The story thus deals with murder and suicide (faked, attempted, and real), but it also brings up and treats in a mostly flippant fashion: self-harm, bullying, peer pressure, mental disorders, eating disorders, slut-shaming, date rape, homophobia, violence, unhealthy relationships, school bombings, and probably other subjects that have slipped by me. These subjects will be discussed in this app, so it's best to be cautious and step lightly.
Sherwood, Ohio, circa 1989, is much like any other sleepy American town in an eighties teen movie, and its school Westerburg High is exactly the kind of hellhole you would expect to find in teen movies of the time. You can liken Westerburg's social hierarchy to a jungle, wherein the popular kids are the rulers of the school, the teachers are useless, and everyone is left to fend for themselves in this horrifying landscape right out of a nature documentary. Veronica, at the start of her senior year, is one of the unlucky losers, for all her intelligence and wit, and is aware of and frustrated by both it and the danger her low social status puts her in from everyone else, which is why, when given the opportunity to rise up by helping the clique of popular girls known as the Heathers (so called because the members are all named Heather), Veronica takes the opportunity. She signs up for immunity from harassment and gets so much more than that, becoming a part of the Heathers.
Unfortunately, being one of the Heathers becomes much more than she bargained for. Heather Chandler, the "mythic bitch" leader of the group, is an unrepentant bully who pushes around the other Heathers and revels in her power, and under her thumb, Veronica ends up reluctantly participating in her cruel pranks along with the other Heathers: Heather Duke, the yearbook committee chair who allegedly has "no discernible personality" as far as Veronica is concerned, and Heather McNamara, who be described as a weak-willed ditz striving to please everyone. One of these pranks involves Veronica forging a party invitation in the handwriting of a particularly stupid jock named Ram Sweeney to give to her old friend Martha Dunnstock, also known disparagingly as Martha "Dumptruck" and a frequent target of the Heathers' bullying, under threat of the Heathers destroying her own social life and tearing down her social status.
Incidentally, however, this very incident is witnessed by Jason "JD" Dean, who Veronica grows attracted to when she meets him and he quotes Baudelaire at her. It also helps that he later proves that he can more than hold his own in a fight against Ram and Ram's dumb jock friend Kurt Kelly, beating them up with a book and drawing Veronica's attention even more to him. This, unfortunately, is going to prove to be a horrible character judgment on Veronica's part.
Some time into the year, the Heathers (and Veronica) are invited to a party at Ram Sweeney's place. This is where a number of events happen:
This chain of events fucks over Veronica's chances of surviving the weekend with her reputation intact, and she knows this. In her inebriated state, she breaks into JD's home, and the two of them have very enthusiastic sex and become An Item. In her sobriety, Veronica decides to apologize to Heather for ruining her night, but indulges herself by playing a prank wherein she spits up in the mug where she's mixed together Heather's hangover cure. She brings JD along with her, and JD makes an identical mixture while she's mixing the one she spits up in—only JD's cocktail has drain cleaner. Veronica, distracted, takes JD's cocktail instead of hers, and long story short, Heather Chandler dies. In her panic, Veronica takes JD's suggestion that they make the prank gone horribly wrong look like a suicide, faking a suicide note and leaving it by Heather's corpse before the cops get there.
Unfortunately, this leads to Heather Duke's takeover of Heather Chandler's position as head Heather. Veronica's not pleased about this, and she's even more displeased when Heather McNamara calls her to the cemetery for help, which turns out to be the two Heathers using Veronica as a shield against date rape by the drunk Kurt and Ram by offering her up instead. Veronica manages to get out of it by giving the two jocks even more booze, but her reputation suffers anyway: the next day, the jocks spread around a rumor that they had a threesome with her, and she ends up getting labeled a slut. Veronica breaks down crying, and JD offers her comfort and a chance to get back at the two jocks by playing a small joke on them.
This small joke involves shooting "tranquilizer" bullets at them and faking a suicide pact between gay lovers.
Veronica agrees to the prank, luring the two jocks with a threesome with her, and gets the jocks to strip down to their skivvies before JD jumps out and shoots Ram. Veronica misses Kurt, but immediately figures out that it is not a joke and that Ram is dead. JD then murders Kurt before he can get away, and reaffirms his love for Veronica, who is horrified, even moreso when she realizes that JD is convinced the murder spree is somehow making the world a better place and that he's planning to murder Heather Duke next. She manages to talk him down, threatening to break up with him if he goes through with his plan, but this is only temporary. In fact, Veronica herself knows that it's only temporary, because she dissuades Martha from investigating JD and possibly becoming his next target (and also finding out about the murders) by telling her that Veronica was the one who forged the dead Ram's invitation to her. (Martha later attempts to commit suicide because of this, though she survives the attempt with some broken bones.)
It's after this that Veronica becomes a part of a school assembly held by the guidance counselor Ms. Fleming. This is the place where a number of events happen:
Veronica manages to stop Heather McNamara from killing herself, and in the process forges an actual friendship with her. JD tries to talk Veronica into murdering Heather Duke again, but Veronica turns him down and they have an argument. In the process, JD reveals himself to be carrying a loaded gun, and this tips Veronica over into breaking up with him and storming out. Unfortunately, this pushes JD into full-blown insanity, blackmailing Heather Duke with evidence that she and Martha used to be friends as kids to get her to circulate a "petition" amongst the students of Westerburg. This "petition", framed as a call to remember the recent victims of suicide, is actually a fake mass suicide note, because JD is planning to murder the entire student body of Westerburg by blowing them up at the pep rally and win Veronica back. Considering that he also dropped by Veronica's house and convinced her parents she was thinking of committing suicide, and then broke into her home to try and win her back, you can see his logic is a bit flawed.
Veronica barricades herself inside her closet while JD is ranting in her bedroom, and fakes her own suicide to get him to back off. JD does back off from her, but the grief solidifies his resolve to blow up the school. Veronica follows after him with a croquet mallet, now willing to die in order to keep her ex from killing her classmates. She confronts him in the boiler room where he's arming a bomb, he points a gun at her and she stands her ground, and the two of them get into a fight that ends in the gun going off and JD getting shot in the gut. Veronica is unable to revive him in order to get him to tell her how to disarm the bomb, so instead she lugs the bomb to the football field where it'll explode and take only her with it, noting the irony that she never got to write her own suicide note.
And that's where she'll be coming in.
PERSONALITY:
Veronica starts the musical as your typical teen movie heroine: an awkward yet intelligent loser with a sharp wit and a yearning for something that she doesn't have, which in this case is protection from the problems that come from being somewhere in the bottom of the social ladder of high school, and a lot of teenage angst that she writes about in her diary. She ends it with a body count, a dead boyfriend, and more trauma than a teen movie heroine should really deal with, which is probably a sign that she is not, in fact, the typical teen movie heroine, although she probably desperately wishes she was.
First and foremost, Veronica is a teenager. This means that she has a lot of typical teenage angst, confusion, and rebelliousness that initially finds an outlet in her diary, where she writes down her innermost feelings. This emotional turmoil gets exacerbated by Veronica finding herself—at the very least—an accomplice to the murders of three of her classmates. She plays it off by writing in her diary that "[her] teen angst bullshit now has a body count", but it's something that seriously upsets her and makes her even more of an emotional mess than she would've been in another teen movie: before the murders, her chief worries were her social status and which schools would accept her come graduation, but once she realizes that she has become an accomplice to murder (at least), she becomes much less worried about her future and more worried about not getting arrested, not killing anyone else, and also not dying herself. Her "teen angst bullshit" shifts from a nebulous dissatisfaction with the state of her life to the very concrete worry of keeping it, and keeping it in a normal state.
Veronica's also got a sharp wit—too sharp, to the point of cutting—and, according to the movie at least, a high IQ. She introduces the characters in the musical with a snarky blurb about them, calling Kurt Kelly "the smartest guy on the football team, which is kind of like being the tallest dwarf", for example, and noting that Heather Duke has "no discernible personality, but her mom did pay for implants". Veronica's a smart girl, displaying both a good memory for literature (she recognizes the quote JD tosses at her at their introduction as being from Baudelaire) and a keen knowledge of how her high school works, noting that "this ain't no high school, this is the Thunderdome" and being able to identify who she wants to get in with if she wants to not get harassed by people and raise up her own social status. She plays this wit and intelligence into not getting torn apart in school, and also, dissing people both out loud and in her diary.
That being said, Veronica can empathize with others with surprising ease, and initially writes that she "believes there's good in everyone", though this belief is somewhat dented in the first song and gets badly shaken over the course of the show. Still, Veronica's tendency towards empathy stays surprisingly consistent throughout the show, as she first shows it in the opening number "Beautiful", where she attempts to help out a guy who got pushed to the ground, asking, "hey, are you okay?" and getting rebuffed. She claims in "Candy Store" that giving a forged love note to her old friend Martha would kill the poor girl, she saves Heather Duke from a jock's wandering hands in "Big Fun" (though when she gets flipped off she gets in an insensitive jab at Duke's bulimia), and even after JD murders three of her classmates, she tries to understand his pain. She regretfully laments, about Kurt and Ram at their funeral, that "they were just seventeen, they still had room to grow, they could've turned out good." She even angrily shouts at a teacher for failing to help Heather McNamara, one of the Heathers and someone who tried to use her as a shield against date rape, after McNamara confesses to thoughts of suicide and gets mocked by the student body for it, and goes after McNamara in order to stop her from committing suicide.
Veronica, however, does display an ambition to be something more than what she is, and is willing to do almost anything to get there, initially. In "Beautiful", she expresses a desire to "get [her] diploma, wake from this coma" and get out of town, and cites a desire to get into an Ivy League college, namechecking Harvard and Brown. She also notes that she wants, at the very least, the Heathers' immunity to the things Veronica, as a typical teenager, is exposed to: "They're solid Teflon. Never bothered, never harassed. I would give anything to be like that." She even tells her mother that she wants "more out of life than liverwurst", referring to her mother's concern that associating with the Heathers is changing her for the worse. And it is changing her for the worse, making her compromise her morals in order to accommodate them.
She can be somewhat petty and catty as well, as most teenagers are. Unlike JD wanting to straight up murder people for spreading rumors about his girlfriend, or Heather Chandler's sheer meanness, though, Veronica's idea of revenge runs more towards harmless pranks and cutting remarks. She hocks up some phleghm to spit into Heather Chandler's hangover cure, for example, and gets in an insensitive jab at Heather Duke's eating disorder before that. She initially only goes along with JD's plan to fake a gay suicide pact between the two jocks who spread rumors about her because she believes his story about the bullets being heavy tranquilizers. She doesn't want to kill them, is deeply horrified when Heather Chandler dies even though Chandler belittled and bullied her and the rest of the student body, as when Ram and Kurt are murdered even though they attempted to sexually assault her and spread rumors about her having sex with them. She just wants stuff she can laugh about in her diary.
Veronica is not exactly the kind of person who will easily give up things that she's fought for, not even if giving it up would mean that she would be better off in the long run, even if it wasn't even worth it in the first place. She's aware, on some level, that what she is doing is wrong and goes against her own morals, but at first she reluctantly compromises them anyway, because she doesn't want to give up the status, then later, because she doesn't want to give up her boyfriend. After all, they're the things every kid in her school wants: popularity and love. Both of these, she finds out, are not all that they are cracked up to be, and she deeply regrets the things she does to keep them. But she keeps them anyway and tries to make them work for her, staying with the Heathers even when she is disgusted with herself for going along with them and staying with JD even after the murders, trying to convince him to just be a normal seventeen-year-old in "Seventeen" and covering up for him in the meantime. Even she's got her limits, though, immediately attempting to resign from the Heathers after they try to play a very cruel prank on Martha and breaking up with JD when she realizes he's carrying a loaded gun around. Some things even Veronica can't stand for.
Still, Veronica does have a darker side that she keeps tightly under wraps. The movie is much more explicit about this, as she writes about wanting to kill people in her diary, but in the musical Veronica mentions having to "fight the urge to strike a match and set this dump ablaze" in "Beautiful", referring to her school. This side of hers comes into play more often when she's hanging around JD, as she's willing to go along with his plan to get revenge on the jocks and covers up the murders by breaking Martha's heart, but Veronica at heart is not a dark person, and indeed she regrets many of her darker actions.
I've mentioned that she compromises her morals in order to accommodate the Heathers, and then later JD. Yes, Veronica's got morals. They're badly shaken by her participation in the Heathers' bullying and her active role in covering up the murders, but they're there. She is a good person, she even initially believes herself to be one in the beginning of the musical, but as the show goes on, she finds herself doing more and more morally grey things, going from forging notes to being complicit in the murders of three of her classmates to possibly having an indirect hand in the attempted suicide of her best friend, and grows more and more disgusted with herself because of her own actions. This disgust and guilt seems to manifest in the form of her dead classmates haunting and taunting her with the things she's done, as best exemplified in the song "Yo Girl", which is the song where Veronica grows more and more stressed because of the consequences of all her actions coming back to bite her. If one goes with the explanation that the ghosts are just Veronica's hallucinations, then it's the point in the musical where Veronica's guilt and self-loathing truly take root.
By the time of her canon point, Veronica has hit an emotional rock bottom. In contrast to her earlier idealistic assessment of herself and her earlier reluctance to give up her social status and keep her soul intact, Veronica shows a willingness to sacrifice herself if it means that other people will live, claiming that "no one here deserves to die, except for [her] and the monster [she] created" as she marches to the boiler room with a croquet mallet. She also displays a self-loathing that manifests in calling herself "a horrible person" and, about a minute or so past her canon point, saying to JD that "[she doesn't] deserve to live"—she is deeply disgusted with herself and the things she's done, and is willing to die to make up for all of it and keep her fellow students safe. This hearkens back to her belief that there is good in everyone, because at heart Veronica truly believes that everyone deserves a chance at redemption, at being good. It's just that at her canon point, she personally does not think the same of herself, and it will take some work for her to at least believe herself worthy of living.
tl;dr: Veronica Sawyer's a mess of a person who's Trying Her Best, it's just that she accidentally got caught up in murder. Oops.
POWER: Veronica is canonically an unpowered person, but she's got an uncanny gift for forgery in both the musical and the movie, forging a hall pass and two suicide notes and claiming that she also does report cards, letters of absence, and other official documents.
CHARACTER NAME: Veronica Sawyer
CHARACTER AGE: 17
SERIES: Heathers the Musical
CHRONOLOGY: Post-Dead Girl Walking (Reprise), pre-I Am Damaged
CLASS: Anti-hero. Veronica starts in the hero category, but slides into anti-hero (one would argue anti-villain) once she's with the Heathers and then JD, before settling on anti-hero at the end of the musical.
HOUSING: De Chima #3, if that's okay! I've already asked the players there for permission and they agreed.
BACKGROUND:
Warning: Heathers, and the movie that it's adapted from, is a black comedy about two teenagers who murder people and then stage them to look like suicides. The story thus deals with murder and suicide (faked, attempted, and real), but it also brings up and treats in a mostly flippant fashion: self-harm, bullying, peer pressure, mental disorders, eating disorders, slut-shaming, date rape, homophobia, violence, unhealthy relationships, school bombings, and probably other subjects that have slipped by me. These subjects will be discussed in this app, so it's best to be cautious and step lightly.
Sherwood, Ohio, circa 1989, is much like any other sleepy American town in an eighties teen movie, and its school Westerburg High is exactly the kind of hellhole you would expect to find in teen movies of the time. You can liken Westerburg's social hierarchy to a jungle, wherein the popular kids are the rulers of the school, the teachers are useless, and everyone is left to fend for themselves in this horrifying landscape right out of a nature documentary. Veronica, at the start of her senior year, is one of the unlucky losers, for all her intelligence and wit, and is aware of and frustrated by both it and the danger her low social status puts her in from everyone else, which is why, when given the opportunity to rise up by helping the clique of popular girls known as the Heathers (so called because the members are all named Heather), Veronica takes the opportunity. She signs up for immunity from harassment and gets so much more than that, becoming a part of the Heathers.
Unfortunately, being one of the Heathers becomes much more than she bargained for. Heather Chandler, the "mythic bitch" leader of the group, is an unrepentant bully who pushes around the other Heathers and revels in her power, and under her thumb, Veronica ends up reluctantly participating in her cruel pranks along with the other Heathers: Heather Duke, the yearbook committee chair who allegedly has "no discernible personality" as far as Veronica is concerned, and Heather McNamara, who be described as a weak-willed ditz striving to please everyone. One of these pranks involves Veronica forging a party invitation in the handwriting of a particularly stupid jock named Ram Sweeney to give to her old friend Martha Dunnstock, also known disparagingly as Martha "Dumptruck" and a frequent target of the Heathers' bullying, under threat of the Heathers destroying her own social life and tearing down her social status.
Incidentally, however, this very incident is witnessed by Jason "JD" Dean, who Veronica grows attracted to when she meets him and he quotes Baudelaire at her. It also helps that he later proves that he can more than hold his own in a fight against Ram and Ram's dumb jock friend Kurt Kelly, beating them up with a book and drawing Veronica's attention even more to him. This, unfortunately, is going to prove to be a horrible character judgment on Veronica's part.
Some time into the year, the Heathers (and Veronica) are invited to a party at Ram Sweeney's place. This is where a number of events happen:
1. Veronica gets drunk.
2. Martha shows up because of the false invitation and is almost humiliated in front of the school, only for Veronica to stop the cruel prank the Heathers have cooked up.
3. Veronica resigns from the Heathers.
4. Heather Chandler calls her out on her resignation and threatens to destroy Veronica's reputation.
5. Veronica vomits on her.
This chain of events fucks over Veronica's chances of surviving the weekend with her reputation intact, and she knows this. In her inebriated state, she breaks into JD's home, and the two of them have very enthusiastic sex and become An Item. In her sobriety, Veronica decides to apologize to Heather for ruining her night, but indulges herself by playing a prank wherein she spits up in the mug where she's mixed together Heather's hangover cure. She brings JD along with her, and JD makes an identical mixture while she's mixing the one she spits up in—only JD's cocktail has drain cleaner. Veronica, distracted, takes JD's cocktail instead of hers, and long story short, Heather Chandler dies. In her panic, Veronica takes JD's suggestion that they make the prank gone horribly wrong look like a suicide, faking a suicide note and leaving it by Heather's corpse before the cops get there.
Unfortunately, this leads to Heather Duke's takeover of Heather Chandler's position as head Heather. Veronica's not pleased about this, and she's even more displeased when Heather McNamara calls her to the cemetery for help, which turns out to be the two Heathers using Veronica as a shield against date rape by the drunk Kurt and Ram by offering her up instead. Veronica manages to get out of it by giving the two jocks even more booze, but her reputation suffers anyway: the next day, the jocks spread around a rumor that they had a threesome with her, and she ends up getting labeled a slut. Veronica breaks down crying, and JD offers her comfort and a chance to get back at the two jocks by playing a small joke on them.
This small joke involves shooting "tranquilizer" bullets at them and faking a suicide pact between gay lovers.
Veronica agrees to the prank, luring the two jocks with a threesome with her, and gets the jocks to strip down to their skivvies before JD jumps out and shoots Ram. Veronica misses Kurt, but immediately figures out that it is not a joke and that Ram is dead. JD then murders Kurt before he can get away, and reaffirms his love for Veronica, who is horrified, even moreso when she realizes that JD is convinced the murder spree is somehow making the world a better place and that he's planning to murder Heather Duke next. She manages to talk him down, threatening to break up with him if he goes through with his plan, but this is only temporary. In fact, Veronica herself knows that it's only temporary, because she dissuades Martha from investigating JD and possibly becoming his next target (and also finding out about the murders) by telling her that Veronica was the one who forged the dead Ram's invitation to her. (Martha later attempts to commit suicide because of this, though she survives the attempt with some broken bones.)
It's after this that Veronica becomes a part of a school assembly held by the guidance counselor Ms. Fleming. This is the place where a number of events happen:
1. Heather McNamara confesses to having thought of killing herself to escape the heavy peer pressure.
2. Heather Duke turns on her fellow Heather and sics the student body, in all its cruelty, on her.
3. Veronica's faith in her teachers and grown-ups in general is shattered and, in her rage, she ends up confessing to the murders.
4. Nobody believes Veronica.
5. Heather McNamara tries to commit suicide via overdose.
Veronica manages to stop Heather McNamara from killing herself, and in the process forges an actual friendship with her. JD tries to talk Veronica into murdering Heather Duke again, but Veronica turns him down and they have an argument. In the process, JD reveals himself to be carrying a loaded gun, and this tips Veronica over into breaking up with him and storming out. Unfortunately, this pushes JD into full-blown insanity, blackmailing Heather Duke with evidence that she and Martha used to be friends as kids to get her to circulate a "petition" amongst the students of Westerburg. This "petition", framed as a call to remember the recent victims of suicide, is actually a fake mass suicide note, because JD is planning to murder the entire student body of Westerburg by blowing them up at the pep rally and win Veronica back. Considering that he also dropped by Veronica's house and convinced her parents she was thinking of committing suicide, and then broke into her home to try and win her back, you can see his logic is a bit flawed.
Veronica barricades herself inside her closet while JD is ranting in her bedroom, and fakes her own suicide to get him to back off. JD does back off from her, but the grief solidifies his resolve to blow up the school. Veronica follows after him with a croquet mallet, now willing to die in order to keep her ex from killing her classmates. She confronts him in the boiler room where he's arming a bomb, he points a gun at her and she stands her ground, and the two of them get into a fight that ends in the gun going off and JD getting shot in the gut. Veronica is unable to revive him in order to get him to tell her how to disarm the bomb, so instead she lugs the bomb to the football field where it'll explode and take only her with it, noting the irony that she never got to write her own suicide note.
And that's where she'll be coming in.
PERSONALITY:
Veronica starts the musical as your typical teen movie heroine: an awkward yet intelligent loser with a sharp wit and a yearning for something that she doesn't have, which in this case is protection from the problems that come from being somewhere in the bottom of the social ladder of high school, and a lot of teenage angst that she writes about in her diary. She ends it with a body count, a dead boyfriend, and more trauma than a teen movie heroine should really deal with, which is probably a sign that she is not, in fact, the typical teen movie heroine, although she probably desperately wishes she was.
First and foremost, Veronica is a teenager. This means that she has a lot of typical teenage angst, confusion, and rebelliousness that initially finds an outlet in her diary, where she writes down her innermost feelings. This emotional turmoil gets exacerbated by Veronica finding herself—at the very least—an accomplice to the murders of three of her classmates. She plays it off by writing in her diary that "[her] teen angst bullshit now has a body count", but it's something that seriously upsets her and makes her even more of an emotional mess than she would've been in another teen movie: before the murders, her chief worries were her social status and which schools would accept her come graduation, but once she realizes that she has become an accomplice to murder (at least), she becomes much less worried about her future and more worried about not getting arrested, not killing anyone else, and also not dying herself. Her "teen angst bullshit" shifts from a nebulous dissatisfaction with the state of her life to the very concrete worry of keeping it, and keeping it in a normal state.
Veronica's also got a sharp wit—too sharp, to the point of cutting—and, according to the movie at least, a high IQ. She introduces the characters in the musical with a snarky blurb about them, calling Kurt Kelly "the smartest guy on the football team, which is kind of like being the tallest dwarf", for example, and noting that Heather Duke has "no discernible personality, but her mom did pay for implants". Veronica's a smart girl, displaying both a good memory for literature (she recognizes the quote JD tosses at her at their introduction as being from Baudelaire) and a keen knowledge of how her high school works, noting that "this ain't no high school, this is the Thunderdome" and being able to identify who she wants to get in with if she wants to not get harassed by people and raise up her own social status. She plays this wit and intelligence into not getting torn apart in school, and also, dissing people both out loud and in her diary.
That being said, Veronica can empathize with others with surprising ease, and initially writes that she "believes there's good in everyone", though this belief is somewhat dented in the first song and gets badly shaken over the course of the show. Still, Veronica's tendency towards empathy stays surprisingly consistent throughout the show, as she first shows it in the opening number "Beautiful", where she attempts to help out a guy who got pushed to the ground, asking, "hey, are you okay?" and getting rebuffed. She claims in "Candy Store" that giving a forged love note to her old friend Martha would kill the poor girl, she saves Heather Duke from a jock's wandering hands in "Big Fun" (though when she gets flipped off she gets in an insensitive jab at Duke's bulimia), and even after JD murders three of her classmates, she tries to understand his pain. She regretfully laments, about Kurt and Ram at their funeral, that "they were just seventeen, they still had room to grow, they could've turned out good." She even angrily shouts at a teacher for failing to help Heather McNamara, one of the Heathers and someone who tried to use her as a shield against date rape, after McNamara confesses to thoughts of suicide and gets mocked by the student body for it, and goes after McNamara in order to stop her from committing suicide.
Veronica, however, does display an ambition to be something more than what she is, and is willing to do almost anything to get there, initially. In "Beautiful", she expresses a desire to "get [her] diploma, wake from this coma" and get out of town, and cites a desire to get into an Ivy League college, namechecking Harvard and Brown. She also notes that she wants, at the very least, the Heathers' immunity to the things Veronica, as a typical teenager, is exposed to: "They're solid Teflon. Never bothered, never harassed. I would give anything to be like that." She even tells her mother that she wants "more out of life than liverwurst", referring to her mother's concern that associating with the Heathers is changing her for the worse. And it is changing her for the worse, making her compromise her morals in order to accommodate them.
She can be somewhat petty and catty as well, as most teenagers are. Unlike JD wanting to straight up murder people for spreading rumors about his girlfriend, or Heather Chandler's sheer meanness, though, Veronica's idea of revenge runs more towards harmless pranks and cutting remarks. She hocks up some phleghm to spit into Heather Chandler's hangover cure, for example, and gets in an insensitive jab at Heather Duke's eating disorder before that. She initially only goes along with JD's plan to fake a gay suicide pact between the two jocks who spread rumors about her because she believes his story about the bullets being heavy tranquilizers. She doesn't want to kill them, is deeply horrified when Heather Chandler dies even though Chandler belittled and bullied her and the rest of the student body, as when Ram and Kurt are murdered even though they attempted to sexually assault her and spread rumors about her having sex with them. She just wants stuff she can laugh about in her diary.
Veronica is not exactly the kind of person who will easily give up things that she's fought for, not even if giving it up would mean that she would be better off in the long run, even if it wasn't even worth it in the first place. She's aware, on some level, that what she is doing is wrong and goes against her own morals, but at first she reluctantly compromises them anyway, because she doesn't want to give up the status, then later, because she doesn't want to give up her boyfriend. After all, they're the things every kid in her school wants: popularity and love. Both of these, she finds out, are not all that they are cracked up to be, and she deeply regrets the things she does to keep them. But she keeps them anyway and tries to make them work for her, staying with the Heathers even when she is disgusted with herself for going along with them and staying with JD even after the murders, trying to convince him to just be a normal seventeen-year-old in "Seventeen" and covering up for him in the meantime. Even she's got her limits, though, immediately attempting to resign from the Heathers after they try to play a very cruel prank on Martha and breaking up with JD when she realizes he's carrying a loaded gun around. Some things even Veronica can't stand for.
Still, Veronica does have a darker side that she keeps tightly under wraps. The movie is much more explicit about this, as she writes about wanting to kill people in her diary, but in the musical Veronica mentions having to "fight the urge to strike a match and set this dump ablaze" in "Beautiful", referring to her school. This side of hers comes into play more often when she's hanging around JD, as she's willing to go along with his plan to get revenge on the jocks and covers up the murders by breaking Martha's heart, but Veronica at heart is not a dark person, and indeed she regrets many of her darker actions.
I've mentioned that she compromises her morals in order to accommodate the Heathers, and then later JD. Yes, Veronica's got morals. They're badly shaken by her participation in the Heathers' bullying and her active role in covering up the murders, but they're there. She is a good person, she even initially believes herself to be one in the beginning of the musical, but as the show goes on, she finds herself doing more and more morally grey things, going from forging notes to being complicit in the murders of three of her classmates to possibly having an indirect hand in the attempted suicide of her best friend, and grows more and more disgusted with herself because of her own actions. This disgust and guilt seems to manifest in the form of her dead classmates haunting and taunting her with the things she's done, as best exemplified in the song "Yo Girl", which is the song where Veronica grows more and more stressed because of the consequences of all her actions coming back to bite her. If one goes with the explanation that the ghosts are just Veronica's hallucinations, then it's the point in the musical where Veronica's guilt and self-loathing truly take root.
By the time of her canon point, Veronica has hit an emotional rock bottom. In contrast to her earlier idealistic assessment of herself and her earlier reluctance to give up her social status and keep her soul intact, Veronica shows a willingness to sacrifice herself if it means that other people will live, claiming that "no one here deserves to die, except for [her] and the monster [she] created" as she marches to the boiler room with a croquet mallet. She also displays a self-loathing that manifests in calling herself "a horrible person" and, about a minute or so past her canon point, saying to JD that "[she doesn't] deserve to live"—she is deeply disgusted with herself and the things she's done, and is willing to die to make up for all of it and keep her fellow students safe. This hearkens back to her belief that there is good in everyone, because at heart Veronica truly believes that everyone deserves a chance at redemption, at being good. It's just that at her canon point, she personally does not think the same of herself, and it will take some work for her to at least believe herself worthy of living.
tl;dr: Veronica Sawyer's a mess of a person who's Trying Her Best, it's just that she accidentally got caught up in murder. Oops.
POWER: Veronica is canonically an unpowered person, but she's got an uncanny gift for forgery in both the musical and the movie, forging a hall pass and two suicide notes and claiming that she also does report cards, letters of absence, and other official documents.
Slurpee Generation: Veronica can generate slushies from the palms of her hands. The flavor changes with every time she uses this power, though, so if she wanted to make herself a free cherry Slurpee then she'd end up having to go through multiple cups before she gets a cherry-flavored slushie. At least they're edible.
Voice Mimicry: To accompany her talents in forgery, Veronica can mimic other voices, so long as she's had a conversation with them. It isn't enough that she merely heard their voices, she has to have spoken with them before she can take on their voice, but once she does, her voice can become a perfect duplicate of theirs, right down to the accent and manner of speech, no matter what the vocal range, age or even gender. Unfortunately, once she imitates a voice, she's stuck with it for an hour. So if she, say, made a prank call pretending to be an old man, she'll sound like an old man for an hour. Also, she can only imitate humans, not aliens, robots, or animals.
See the Me Inside of Me: Veronica can see or hear manifestations of another character's guilt, unseen or unheard by the character the power is working on. These manifestations of guilt can take any form at all, it's up to the player to decide how Veronica sees or hears them and if they even make sense to her at all: they can be ghosts much like hers who hold the character's guilt over their head, or they can be disjointed and metaphorical imagery, or they can just be whispers in the back of Veronica's head, or they can be out-of-context visions. In turn, however, the other character will also be able to see Veronica's ghosts: her three dead classmates Heather Chandler, Kurt Kelly, and Ram Sweeney, who can appear in any combination whatsoever to send Veronica on a guilt trip, though Heather Chandler appears most often. This ability is only active when Veronica's emotional state is in turmoil (which is often), otherwise it lies dormant, but there is the option of learning to at least turn it off and on at will.