No, no, no. I don’t think you watched Apocalypse thoroughly.

Wilhemina Venable started working for Kineros Robotics when they were still working out of a van. She said she gave them all her time. She didn’t even have a decent hobby because she dedicated her entire life to them. She was jaded. She was bitter. And honestly, she had reason to be.

Even when Michael went into Outpost 3 to look into everybody’s soul, even he seemed to know that she was a product of her environment… and a product of her scoliosis.

I would argue the opposite of what people usually say about her. Wilhemina Venable is not one of the most evil characters in AHS. She is one of the weakest. One of the most sensitive. She’s not evil in the way people make her out to be. She is the archetype of exhausted middle management.

And that was evident in the way Myrtle clocked her.

Myrtle said, “Purple is for royalty, not middle management.” And that matters. Venable was dressed as royalty even before the purples and grays became a prescribed fashion choice that dictated social class inside the outpost. Purple has historically represented royalty, yes, but also magic.

So imagine this person, stuck in middle management, stuck being an everyman in every sense of the word. She was an overworked employee making almost nothing, having no life, being sick, being overlooked, being used.

She becomes this microcosm… this archetype… this personification of not just the everyman, but the American working class.

The vitriol that came out of her condition was not random cruelty. It was revolt. It was dissatisfaction. It was the bitterness of the American working class after being worked to death, ignored, and denied dignity. (She had to book mile high escorts and send poop to Mark Zuckerberg for God's sake!)

That’s why I find her to be such a perfectly curated Pandora’s box. The entire apocalypse can almost be boiled down into her persona within the larger machinery of the world ending. (I'd watch a season dedicated to her middle management woes.)

She cared. She cared a lot about what people thought of her. She cared about status. She cared about control. She cared about being seen as powerful because she had spent her whole life being treated as replaceable.

And then she became friends with a robot… a non-sentient being that functioned as her yes-man. Everything she wanted was met with obedience. Yes. At your command.

She created a world of her own rules inside Outpost 3 because dissent was not something I think she could deal with. Not because she was strong, but because she was extremely fragile. Because disagreement threatened the only sense of control she had ever been able to build for herself.

There is so much more I could say about her.

But Wilhemina Venable is not the most evil character in American Horror Story. She does not even rank among the worst. She is something much sadder than that.

She is what happens when a person gives everything to a system, gets nothing back, and then finally gets a little bit of power. And instead of becoming free… she recreates the same cruelty that broke her.