Charlotte, a new girl at Vendetta’s school, arrives determined to make a friend. An “impossibly cheery”[4] optimist, Charlotte rapidly becomes the foil[1] and tormentor of the morose and vindictive Vendetta, by insisting on befriending her.
Vendetta is a selfish little girl with the power to make fiends, “hideous things” which she has unleashed on her town to bring it under her reign of terror. The coastal town of Clamburg, once a thriving tourist destination, has become a grim, forbidding place, with stores shuttered and the populace cowed before the horror of Vendetta’s watchful fiends.
Vendetta is unable to elicit anything but saccharine friendliness out of Charlotte, and so makes the first of many fiends that are specially designed to “destroy” the newcomer. After demonstrating that her oblivious joy makes her immune to the dangers and terrors of all of the fiends, Charlotte declares that she and Vendetta are “going to be best friends forever and ever.”
In subsequent scenes, Charlotte displays an ability to change the nature of some fiends into helpful friends, further frustrating Vendetta’s efforts to undo her. Being “oblivious to all that is bad and mean in the world”,[5] Charlotte neither acknowledges the damage caused by Vendetta’s fiends, nor the threat Vendetta herself poses over Clamburg. Nearly all of the residents, including Vendetta’s parents, come to hate or fear Charlotte more than they do Vendetta within the first six episodes.
Charlotte never discovers or understands that Vendetta despises her, and Vendetta is never able to get rid of Charlotte. While this conflict is never resolved by the end of each episode, some minor developments appear to continue between episodes, like the introduction of Buttons 2 and an enormous statue that Vendetta has raised of herself.
