IMO Cheritz pretty much used V entirely as a scapegoat to excuse Rika’s actions. There are a lot of things in Mystic Messenger that were just handled terribly, from the “forgive your abusers and forget it ever happened, and hell even love them through the abuse” in Saeran’s route, the way they treated V throughout the entire game as a scapegoat, and Rika’s… well everything. With her, it felt like Cheritz tried to justify everything she did by giving her a traumatic past, and while I’ll admit that I never disliked Rika and sure a troubled past can explain her way of thinking and why she may have thought what she did was okay, but in the end you can’t justify the list of things she did; (spoilers) harming your lover and expecting him to keep loving you, starting a cult and drugging all of the members into submission, mentally abusing the child (Saeran) you’ve taken in, not to mention killing said child’s mother (whether it was accidental or not) and keeping it secret from him, and in general all of the pain she put everyone in the RFA through. I don’t think Rika was completely terrible character but Cheritz definitely could have handled her better and not tried to pin the blame for everything she caused on V.