Overkill

01 | savior complex

Cruella Queen was the kind of woman whose beauty nations would go to war over.

Not that she should be reduced to her looks. Moxie King knew nothing about her except that she won a Grammy Award for Best New Artist the year before—she was there to watch her accept it, as well as the stunning performance she gave to open the ceremony—but she heard enough of her music to know she was equally talented as she was beautiful. Cruella established in every aspect of her life how she was a difficult person to tear your eyes away from.

Unfortunately, that also applied to the eye-catching headlines written about her.

After spending most of her life under ‌public scrutiny, albeit much less than the amount thrust upon them present day, Moxie knew better than to take anything at face value in the music and entertainment industry, and there had been many of them featuring Cruella Queen's name. Even if Moxie tried her best to ignore all of the incessant chatter surrounding Hollywood's most coveted commodities, the Queen herself was impossible to ignore, for better or for worse. Considering she recently checked herself out of rehab, Moxie believed it was likely more the latter.

Even being perceived as perfection wielded a double-edged sword when in the public eye, and Cruella Queen was seen as anything but.

The bright glow emanating from Moxie's phone was nearly blinding. Cruella's inhuman magnificence was captured brilliantly within the tiny frame of the photo sitting neatly underneath the headline. As carefully crafted as it was to pull everyone in to their tangled web of truths and fables, Moxie ignored it for the sake of the woman pictured below. Who even cared what the tweet said when she was looking at that picture?

Unfortunately, it wasn't as simple as that.

While Moxie knew better than to get sucked into the tabloids, most average social media users didn't. They flocked to the outrageous headline with their eyes wide open and uninformed opinions sharpened. There was no way Cruella Queen could make it out of that one misleading tweet without her reputation burning at the stake, but that was the nature of these types of institutions. They thrived off the pain of others if it meant they could make a profit off the highest bidder. And where public scrutiny was concerned, there was no shortage of payment.

Moxie had no idea who this woman was. She couldn't even be sure she knew her name. (Cruella Queen sounded fake as fuck.) (It sounded even more fake when she learned her sister's name was Ursula.) Despite that, she felt bad for her. If it wasn't rehab, it was her on-again, off-again boyfriend. If it wasn't her boyfriend, it was her sleazy manager. If it wasn't a man with whom she was associated, it was the unbelievable audacity to be a woman in the music industry. They always found a way to paint Cruella Queen as a villain. Opposite what innocent hero? It didn't matter. That archetype didn't need to exist. Someone else was always going to be more deserving of a more respectful headline.

"This vampire bat. This inhuman beast. She ought to be locked up and never released. The world was such a wholesome place until—" The song overlay was changed to a clip of Cruella Queen onstage announcing herself before one of her shows. "Cruella. Cruella Queen."

A light flickered in the room. Her clock. Three am.

Moxie exhaled a slow, tired sigh before rubbing her eyes and clicking off her phone. She didn't know why she gave so much thought to someone whose path she would likely never cross unless they appeared at the same award show again. Just two faces sitting on opposite sides of the crowd. A terrible thought crossed her mind that she was a bystander to the train wreck that would very likely become Cruella's career, not by any fault of her own. That was just the nature of being a woman in an industry still run by men, the all-too-frequent inability to completely control the narrative of her own life. She would fight to prove herself and the world would never let her succeed. Only once she was down and out of the spotlight would they falsify their pity and say she deserved better.