I'm still marveling at her just holding on to the villainess role like a lifesaver. What do you even call whatever the fuck's wrong with her? Twist of Cain?
I guess I'd call it "having her character sacrificed on the altar of the story every so often" because I think you nail it when you say "villainess
role." Right now she's not doing evil for the sake of doing evil, or for personal gain, or malice, or through negligence. If the point is to protect her psyche, she's clearly smart enough to rationalize her way out of the problem. So we're left at "become the evil you're afraid exists in the world, to justify hardening your heart." And the result is "scenery-chewing villainess" instead of "realistically awful person."
It's very much the kind of motivation that's easy to arrive at in an armchair psychoanalysis fashion, and convince yourself it's true because it tells a complete story... but it's absolutely not the kind of thing a real person thinks to themselves ahead of time as their motivation to act. That's bananas.
When she isn't behaving like this, I think her characterization as a pragmatic not-that-mean Mean Girl is actually really well done, and it's so close to another possible version of her role in the story that I have to assume the author is avoiding it deliberately for some reason:
A version of Hebikawa that's naturally cynical and callous, and has fully accepted that nice girls finish last would see her younger self in Kusunoki and want to make her more snek-like
to protect her from a world she knows is too harsh to accept that kind of defenseless naivete. One that would love to go through life like Kusunoki does, but has been burned way too many times. I'm not really sure yet why this path wasn't chosen, because it doesn't even need a radical change to come back around to the light side - apply one Magic of Friendship directly to the forehead and she'd be strong enough to not have to be afraid anymore.
It's a real weird choice.
Hebikawa totally has a Danzig poster in her room, though.
