Characters / Velma

Characters in Velma.

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SCOOBI Gang

As a whole

• Action Survivor: With Daphne being a full-on Action Girl, Norville training in swordsmanship, and Velma using her intelligence and Improvised Weapons. Fred only survives because he is the primary target of the serial killer, who plans on keeping him alive to use his body for project SCOOBI.
• Adaptational Jerkass: With the exception of Norville, the gang are a lot more mean-spirited in this adaptation.
  • While Velma is usually a Deadpan Snarker, it's more playful in other depictions compared to here. In the teaser alone, Velma's Establishing Character Moment is writing a mean-spirited message to HBO Max over ridiculous changes being made to a reboot and ends it by wishing death upon them. This carries over to the show proper, where Velma is seen as incredibly snarky and overly judgmental of others to the point of annoyance.
  • Fred is typically portrayed as a Lovable Jock and the Team Dad. Here, he is portrayed as a shallow, spoiled jerkass with misogynist tendencies, claiming he can't remember Velma's name because he blatantly thinks that she's unattractive.
    Fred: I have a disease where I can't recognize people who aren't hot.
    Velma: Is it called "rudeness"?
  • Daphne is portrayed as an insufferable Alpha Bitch who at first seemed to have abandoned her friendship with Velma for popularity, someone she is almost always on good terms with in other depictions and is also shown to indulge in criminal behavior. Later subverted, as it turns out, that Velma was the one ended their friendship under the belief that Daphne was going to do this anyway, and she's felt hurt by that ever since.
• Adaptation Personality Change: While Velma is known for having moments of sarcasm in the shows, this adaptation of Velma is more judgmental and bitter as she insults everyone. Fred is also a perverted, spoiled Manchild who only remembers women by beauty compared to the usual Nice Guy depiction who rarely flirts with anyone aside from occasional moments with Daphne. Daphne is the mean popular girl while Norville is friendly but submissive in his desperation for Velma's affection and lacks his Big Eater and Lovable Coward traits he's known for.
• Dysfunction Junction: All four main characters don’t have issues with their parents; they have subscriptions.
  • Not only is Velma dealing with a Missing Mom, but her dad is a selfish jerk that sees nothing wrong with taking his teenage daughter to a strip club and letting her drink herself sick. He’s also the primary source of Velma’s unrepentant Jerkass behavior judging by his behavior towards his new partner Sophie and his overall dislike of being a father to his daughters. Diya is also shown after her return to be one of Velma’s biggest enablers of her attitude, especially with how Velma was such a bratty child to her.
  • Fred’s father is a severe case of Testosterone Poisoning trying to force his son to conform to his ways and his mother has infantilized him to the point where he’s unable to take care of himself. And his mother also happens to be the serial killer because she wanted a much more successful child than Fred so she wanted to switch his brain with that of the popular girls so she can have a perfect successor.
  • Daphne’s biological parents are criminals who abandoned her in the crystal mines by choosing the crystals that they were illegally selling over their infant daughter and her biological mother also smoked heavily during her pregnancy. Her father even admits to her that they don't deserve her before attempting to betray her. At the very least, she has her adoptive moms who love her very much despite being utterly useless and incompetent detectives along with doing nothing to discourage her thrill-seeking tendencies.
  • While Norville gets along the best with his parents compared to the others, his father has no means to stand up for himself and his mother is visibly traumatized by the experiments her mother conducted. And they have a rather strange sex life.
• Fire-Forged Friends: They ultimately come together to solve the main mysteries, but this is subverted at the end of season one because of their unresolved differences and drift apart.
  Fred: (annoyed) We're not friends! Norville killed my mother.
  Norville: She tried to kill me, first!
  Fred: Only because she was possessed by the ghost of your grandma.
  Velma: Fred, ghosts are not real.
  Daphne: (sarcastically) Oh, what a surprise. Velma's standing up for Norville, the love of her life.
  (Cue Wimp Fight between the gang)
  • Played straighter in season two, where they eventually manage to reconcile and become True Companions.
• Nice, Mean, and In-Between:
  • While Norville is the nicest by far, Velma has proven to be the meanest, and both Fred and Daphne are in-between, having a bit more redeeming qualities than her.
  • This applies to their families as well. Norville's family are nice like him despite his grandma being a Mad Scientist who abandoned them for her research, Fred's family turn out to be mean like Velma (with one of them being worse than her), and Velma and Daphne's families are in-between, with Velma's being Not So Similar to her, and Daphne's adopted and birth parents contrasting each other.
• Promoted to Love Interest: Usually all the gang are strictly platonic friends with Fred and Daphne having heavy Ship Tease and even being a couple in many iterations (plus one iteration putting Shaggy and Velma being as a Beta Couple). However, in this version, their love lives are even more complicated due to how everyone at one point has been attracted to Velma, changed relationships, and even lost attraction as the series went on.
• Race Lift: All the human members of Mystery Inc. are white in most continuities. Here, while Fred remains white, Velma is South Asian, Shaggy (under his real name of Norville) is Black/biracial, and Daphne is East Asian (but still naturally red-haired).
• Society Is to Blame: Daphne, Norville, and Velma have varying degrees of hostility towards society. Velma is the loudest as she says that minorities sell drugs to escape poverty while white people do it to make money and then says that society is to blame for enabling her to dress up as a man and take advantage of male privileges. Daphne claims that she has more sympathetic reasons to sell drugs because she's trying to find her biological parents despite being happily adopted by two moms. Norville is probably the most merciful but still expresses schadenfreude over Fred being falsely accused of being a killer and going to prison since he's white.
• Younger Than They Look: Despite looking like they could be in their twenties, they are stated to be in high school and around 15-16 years old.

Velma Dinkley

Velma Dinkley

Voiced by: Mindy Kaling

The main character of the show.

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• Abusive Offspring: When she was younger, Velma was a huge Enfant Terrible who frequently hit her mother, called her an "old bag", and damaged her belongings. She also fights with her father, behaves aggressively and cynically toward him, and locks him, Amanda, and Sophie out of the house so she can watch TV with her mother.
• Accidental Misnaming: An occasional Running Gag is background characters misnaming her as "Vermin Dorkly", much to her chagrin.
• Adaptational Angst Upgrade: Velma feels guilty over her mother's disappearance, which manifested in her starting to have vivid hallucinations whenever she tries to solve a mystery, as she feels that her love of doing so is what caused it.
• Adaptational Curves: Velma is more on the chubby side in this show than she is in other Scooby-Doo media.
• Adaptational Dumbass:
  • Velma seems to lack her usual keen insight, often making incorrect assumptions about people, despite her own belief that she is smarter than everyone around her.
  • In most adaptations, she is shown to be the top student in her school. This series establishes that Velma's grades slipped after her mother vanished, resulting in her becoming a barely passing student. She even copies Norville's homework.
• Adaptational Protagonist: In a lot of Scooby-Doo properties, Velma is a main character but the role of protagonist goes to Scooby (with Shaggy often serving as the Deuteragonist. Velma is the main protagonist of this show due to Scooby being Adapted Out.
• Adaptational Sexuality: Velma herself also appears to be bisexual in this version, showing attraction to both Fred and Daphne and Norville by the finale.
• Aesop Amnesia: When it looks like Velma might have learned to be a little less awful of a person, the lesson never sticks until Norville finally gets fed up with her behavior and calls her out. Even after her part in solving the mystery, she’s still as much of a terrible person as ever.
• All Take and No Give: A lot of the relationships Velma maintains have her either monopolizing the other's time and resources or feeling as if her needs and wants should come above everything else.
• All There in the Manual: Velma's age is confirmed to be 15 by the official Twitter account for the show.
• All of the Other Reindeer: Velma has never fit in with her peers, due in no small part to how off-putting, weird, and unpleasant of a person she is. As a result, Norville and Daphne have been her only friends.
• Anti-Hero: Although she's trying to find her Missing Mom and stop a killer at the same time, Velma is an Unscrupulous Hero at best because she's selfish and manipulative with a pitiful backstory of losing her mother, and a Nominal Hero at worst for being more interested in finding her Missing Mom, ending her hallucinations, and proving that neither she nor Velma is the murderer. The reason Velma isn't a full-fledged Villain Protagonist is that she's trying to find her mom, is trying to stop a serial killer, and she does have moments where she realizes how her selfishness is affecting her friends (even if those moments are short-lived).
• Attention Whore: Especially as a child, Velma can be an absolute nightmare when she’s not the center of Daphne’s attention. In the present day, she’s constantly trying to get focus off of the current mystery at first so that her mother can be found, not considering that it may be connected.
• Beauty Is Bad: Velma certainly believes this, constantly Slut-Shaming other girls for mocking her and being more of a Female Misogynist than she dares to admit.
• Believing Their Own Lies:
  • Her statement that Daphne ditched her to join the popular girls is this because it was actually herself that ended their friendship, but due to her Never My Fault mentality she projected it onto her former friend in order to make herself the victim.
  • The same goes for her claim that Fred stole the credit from her and that she was the one got the gang together, because in the actual events of the series she was the one who took all the credit in solving the mystery while the other three did more work and were just given token gestures. She also didn't even bring them together as even friends since by the end of season one they all are at each other's throats due to multiple reasons (some of which stem from her).
• Big Eater: In contrast with how Norville lacks this trait as a stand in for Shaggy, Velma is the one who is constantly stuffing her face with food.
• Bigot with a Crush:
  • Despite having racist and misandrist views towards white men, she has shown strong attraction towards Fred.
  • Even though she's a Female Misogynist with contempt for more conventionally attractive girls, she harbors strong, rocky feelings for her childhood friend, Daphne.
• Big Sister Bully: She isn't fond of her baby half-sister, Amanda, due to seeing her as a symbol of her family's dysfunctional status and the fact her father tends to favor her (even though he neglects her as well). She destroyed her stuff with great pleasure when they needed to move her and her mother out of the house, drops her, calls her “fugly”, refers to her with it pronouns at one point, and contemplates selling Amanda on the dark web. At the end of the season, she even locks her out of the house alongside her dad and Sophie, so she can live alone with her mother.
• Bollywood Nerd: Due to her Race Lift, she fits the role of one except for the fact that she doesn't keep her grades up after her mother vanished and regularly steals from Norville's homework for answers.
• Book Dumb: Unlike her other iterations, this version of Velma has gotten extremely poor grades since her mother disappeared and even has to pawn off Norville's answers in order to barely pass.
• Bratty Half-Pint: Even before her mother disappeared, Velma was an absolute brat to everyone, drove her parents crazy, and was a possessive friend to Daphne. In fact, during Christmas, she whined about finding her gifts early and asked her mother to give her more, which is partially what led to Diya going missing.
• Bratty Teenage Daughter: She certainly fits the trope in her family dynamic by being disrespectful to her father and his girlfriend, incredibly self-centered, and obnoxious.
• Bullying a Dragon: In a series of self-defense matches in "Velma Kai", she's put against Daphne and knows all too well that Daphne is the better fighter, and she will get butchered. Velma then tries to beat Daphne by humiliating her in front of the school by exposing her mental health issues, but this only rallies the school against her, and Daphne still beats her in a fight.
• Card-Carrying Jerkass: When it's stated her mom needed to be kept happy for three days in order to restore her memories (while knowing so much had changed since she was gone), she states that would take a lot of lying and proudly says she's good at it.
• Character Shilling: Although she is usually despised by a lot of the town, there are those like Blythe Rogers who give her praise for being smart and a good detective, which comes off as an Informed Attribute due to the fact that she often makes incorrect assumptions due to her bigoted views and lacks any keen insight to find or connect clues on her own.
• Clashing Cousins: Episode 9 shows she has this type of relationship with her cousins since she made Norville write a bogus article praising her while bashing them in the headline.
• Commander Contrarian: Whenever Velma is presented with an idea, she always tries to undermine it or poke holes in it. When the school introduces self-defense classes to help the girls defend themselves from the killer, Velma immediately speaks against it by saying that men should be taught not to kill women and treats the idea as another moment of society punishing women for the crimes of men. However, self-defense classes are still important skills to have in this situation and Velma's idea is the equivalent of a mild reprimand, especially since the killer had already murdered 2 girls at this point and was past the point of needing to be told that murder is wrong. Even the principal has to point out to Velma that they can't undo centuries of toxic masculinity in one class, and they only had $50 in the budget.
• Control Freak: She is very bossy and controlling of her two only friends who she often demands to pay attention to her needs and tries to manipulate them into doing what she wants.
• Consummate Liar: As soon as Velma encounters a problem, her first priority is how to lie her way out of it. She even lampshades how good of a liar she is in episode 9 when her mother Diya is found with amnesia and they have to make sure it seems nothing has changed since she was kidnapped (including the fact that her dad started a relationship with Sophie and had another child).
• The Cynic: Velma has a negative view of the world, and she often says how unfair it is or how injustices are around every corner. This is also deconstructed through Velma's personal life, as this attitude has left her with very few friends outside of Norville and Daphne, with Gigi even encouraging Norville to leave Velma so he can learn to stand up for himself. Her attitude also makes her unhelpful and counterproductive, with the few times she does make an effort to help to turn out to be just as misguided and ineffectual as the society she speaks so badly of, just for different reasons.
  • When the school introduces self-defense classes in "Velma Kai", Velma immediately speaks against it and says men should be taught not to kill women but has to be told that the school can't change society overnight and self-defense classes are within their budget. It also would have pointless and moot since the killer was a woman.
  • In "Velma Makes a List", Velma is then tasked with making the hottest girls in school ugly so the killer will lose interest in them, and she does this with extreme bitterness. Olive points out that Velma is just slut-shaming them and being just as sexist as the men by restricting their personal choice and self-expression.
  • This is even pointed out by Daphne, who's upset about Velma disguising herself as a man in "Fog Fest". Velma tries to apologize for lying but she changes her words by blaming society instead and saying she would have tried it because she thought she could get away with it as a man, only for Daphne to call her out for abusing her trust once more.
• Deconstructed Character Archetype: Velma is a deconstruction of Insufferable Genius. She expects to be venerated and heeded because of her intelligence and honesty. However, because she lacks any form of tactfulness or any idea of compromise with her beliefs, she has very few friends outside of Daphne and Norville, who also struggle to deal with her selfish behavior and dismissive attitude. When prompted to give an opinion, few are willing to actually listen to Velma's ideas because she presents them in such a hardline way that it detracts any supporters before she even finishes her argument.
• Disabled in the Adaptation: Velma has vivid hallucinations indicating a severe mental disorder, which she had never had in previous iterations. Subverted when the season one finale reveals her hallucinations were caused by hypnosis.
• Disappointing Older Sibling: Even though her younger half-sister, Amanda, is just a baby, she has great disdain for her older sister and glares at her whenever in contact. The biggest reason is how nasty and cruel she treats her just for being the daughter of Sophie. It also doesn't help at the end that Velma locks her, her mother, and their father out of the house, so that she could live only with her mother.
• Does Not Like Men: Velma has a prejudice towards males, especially white men (despite her crush on Fred), and frequently states that men are given benefits and privileges because of their sex and race. Whereas women like Velma have to work hard and endure sexism.
• Easily Forgiven: Played With. Norville and Daphne will often forgive Velma for her selfish and manipulative behavior, and even Fred forgives her for falsely accusing him after being exonerated, but it gradually puts a strain on their friendship due to her chronic inability to learn from her mistakes. Other characters who aren't as close to Velma often point out the All Take and No Give dynamic of their relationship and try to convince the trio to distance themselves from her. By the end of the first season, her actions and the complicated Love Quadrangle have ruined her relationships with the three of them.
• Enfant Terrible: Apparently, Velma was so awful as a child that her dad thought that she drove her mom away from them alongside him being a bad spouse. Her behavior ran from bullying her mother regularly to pushing Daphne away from her party (and stealing her cake) just because she wasn't paying attention only to her.
• Entitled Bitch:
  • Despite criticizing all white men (especially rich ones) as being like this, it's a perfect description of herself since she blames society for supposedly mistreating her due to being a woman of color when she doesn't get her way.
  • She has always been possessive of Daphne since they were kids and got so mad that she was befriending the popular girls that she cut things off with her. In the present, she goes back to her old ways and tries to always make herself her top priority.
  • She also has this attitude towards Norville, despite her not wanting anything to do with him romantically. She feels that Norville was obligated to spend time with her no matter what (going as far as to talk about him to Gigi as if he's her property), and this caused her to destroy Norville and Gigi's relationship.
• Even Bad Women Love Their Mamas: Despite abusing her as a child, Velma genuinely loves her Missing Mom and will do anything to find her.
• Even Nerds Have Standards: Despite being low on the school hierarchy, she even looks down on her fellow band geeks.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: More like Jerkass who doesn't understand why anyone would be appalled by her horrendous actions, the best example is when she tried to humiliate Daphne by reading her diary about seeking help from Lamont about her mental illness issues and instead of the crowd joining in mocking her they instead booed her for such a dirty tactic.
• Fat Bitch: She's slightly overweight and is overall cruel, cynical, and vindictive towards everyone because her mom went missing.
• Fatal Flaw:
  • Arrogance: Velma expects to be venerated and heeded because she's the smartest in her school, not understanding that how she presents her argument is just as important as the facts. Her judgmental nature and bitterness leave her with very few friends outside of Daphne and Norville, and few are willing to listen to her arguments because of her aggressiveness. Daphne reveals that Velma ended their friendship because Velma expected Daphne to abandon her for popularity, not understanding how much Daphne values their friendship and how heartbroken she would be.
  • Impulsiveness: Velma knows she's smarter than everyone else and she admits that she will often pre-judge people before she gets the full story. In episode nine, she finds a welder's mask and immediately calls the police on Norville's father where they raid his home during Norville's birthday, point multiple firearms at Lamont, and destroy his house with a tank. As Norville angrily points out afterward, Velma never bothered to call Norville first and didn't explain herself over the phone. A lighter example is how her friendship with Daphne originally ended, Velma assumed Daphne would abandon her for a more popular clique and chose to end their friendship, something that deeply hurt and upset Daphne because she never once considered abandoning Velma for popularity.
• Female Misogynist: Despite fancying herself as a feminist, she has a low viewpoint of other women that fall into conventional beauty standards and like being attractive to others. As a result, she has a condescending view of them as being dumb and shallow and being victims of the patriarchy.
• Friendless Background: In the fourth episode, she talks about having issues fitting in growing up.
• Freudian Excuse: Velma's cynicism and vindictiveness are a result of guilt because she believes her mom went missing because of her dreams of being a detective, as well as her father's bad parenting skills.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse:
  • Although Daphne and Norville pity Velma for losing her mom, even they don't believe it excuses her selfishness and how she treats them. Daphne tells Velma (who was in disguise) that Velma only cares about her Missing Mom and treats everyone else as irrelevant. After getting his father nearly arrested and then trying to blame the cops instead, Norville says he no longer cares about Velma's mom and calls her a terrible friend for treating him so horribly. Even her dad agrees that while he and Diya contributed with how their daughter turned out, he also points out she was hard to handle when she was younger and stressed them out.
  • And as the frequent flashbacks show, even before her mother's disappearance she was a horrid, bratty child who tormented her parents, possessive over her Only Friend, and terrorized her fellow classmates. One could say that she didn't turn bad because of what happened to her mother, but she was always bad from the beginning and Diya being out of the picture gave her even worse qualities.
• The Gadfly: Deconstructed. Velma frequently comments on gender roles, the patriarchy, racism, etc., and often makes fun of people through scathing remarks. However, it's shown repeatedly that people will get pissed off at her for doing this and will do something to either shut her up or get back at her. Sheriff Cogburn hits Velma with a car after she broke curfew and insults Serpico, and Daphne brutally defeats her in a fight because Velma believed that reading her diary to everyone would win the fight through emotional damage.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: She is infamous in town for having a bad temper and especially when she is insulted or feels wronged by others. She is even voted in the school yearbook as "Most Revenge-y" and frequently shown to make proclamations to murder people (but never acts on it).
• Hallucinations: Ever since her mother went missing, Velma has been having hallucinations involving skeletal hands and monstrous vines. They're usually triggered when she attempts to solve a mystery because Victoria hypnotized her to make it harder for her to find her mother, which could ruin the Jones matriarch's plans.
• Hated by All: For most of the series, almost no one respects or likes Velma for very good reason. She is an unpleasant egotist who is judgmental and bitter towards everyone, especially those she sees as privileged or upholding cultural beauty standards. Even her family seems to have limits with her, with her father thinking she's a weirdo and mocks her behind her back with his girlfriend. Sophie, the aforementioned girlfriend, shares the same sentiment and tries to do everything in her power so her daughter doesn't become like her sister, and her half-sister hating even being held by her. While her mother is more cordial to her when they reunite, even she was often fed up with being mistreated by her daughter when she was younger (and even asked when she was back if she was annoying when she remembered that Velma whined for her to get her more presents after finding hers by accident). Although Norville, Daphne, and Fred have all been attracted to her, she has time and again repulsed them with her selfish and horrendous behavior towards them. The only people who seem to not be hostile towards her are Donna and Linda (Daphne's moms) and Lamont, but even they turned against her when she tried to shame Daphne for seeking therapy for her mental problems.
• Holier Than Thou: Velma believes she knows better because of her intelligence but she has to be repeatedly reminded that she shouldn't be so selfish and inconsiderate of others, especially with Daphne and Norville.
• Hollywood Atheist: In episode one when she is being interrogated, she states there is no God just because Daphne's moms are taking her case.
• Honor Before Reason: Velma refuses to open up her Missing Mom's gift to her until she found her. For a person loving to solve mysteries, not opening the last thing her mom bought before disappearing and which was actually in her car that was left abandoned is a new level of incompetency. The same goes for the police that did not check the gift as it highly likely can provide clues for her disappearance or at least provide a paper trail of movement. And goes to a new level when Velma wants to throw away the gift without opening it. To rephrase it, Velma wants to throw away evidence without checking what's inside the box, the same box her mom gave her just before disappearing. Although the gift proved to be irrelevant to the case in the end, it was still a shockingly incompetent move for Velma.
• Horrible Judge of Character: Velma admits, she has a habit of pre-judging people before she gets all her facts. She believes her father drove her mother away, but Velma was also a horrible kid who drank stolen alcohol, broke her mother's laptop, and sprayed a water hose on her mother. She ended her friendship with Daphne under the belief that she would end it first, not understanding how Daphne would feel about it. She at first thinks that Sophie has something to do with the murders with no hard proof just because she hates the fact that she's dating her dad while her mom's still missing. She also accuses Fred of murder because he's rich, not just because a lot of the evidence was pointed to him being the killer. Accusing Norville's father of being the serial killer and rallying the police to their house on Norville's birthday after merely seeing one piece of circumstantial evidence destroys her friendship with Norville.
• Hypocrite: Velma is often shown not to practice what she preaches, especially when it comes to racism and sexism. She is very outspoken about how women and people of color are judged unfairly in society, but she often unfairly judges white men throughout the show, and her ideas of what womanhood should be are just as restrictive as the sexism she claims to hate so much.
• Ignorant of Their Own Ignorance: Multiple, multiple, MULTIPLE times when she makes a statement about feminism, culture, ethnicity, whatever, it's always said in such an insulting way that the people she's supposedly fighting for point out she doesn't even know what she's talking about.
• Ignored Epiphany: Up until the point where Velma ends up driving Norville away from her, she remains an unrepentant Jerkass without any regard to anyone but herself despite the havoc that she’s helped cause.
• Infant Sibling Jealousy: Since Sophie was pregnant with Amanda, she's never been comfortable or happy that her dad has another kid through his girlfriend (especially since she still is not over her mother's disappearance and believes her to be kidnapped, which turns out to be correct). As a result, she often shows animosity towards Amanda and refuses to bond with her. The feeling is mutual since her younger sister refuses to even be held by her.
• Informed Attractiveness: Each member of the mystery gang manages to gain a crush on her; Daphne likes Velma's candidness, Fred likes her inner beauty after reading The Feminine Mystique, and Norville just finds her attractive. However, Velma is arrogant, manipulative, and selfish as she's sent Fred to jail for biased and shallow reasons, exposed Daphne's mental health problems to win a fight, and repeatedly treats Norville like her best asset and personal property.
• Informed Attribute:
  • Velma is often stated to be intelligent, but she does little to nothing to show this. Most of the advancements in the murder mystery came not from any of her keen insight, but through coincidence and the work of others. Not to mention, she constantly steals homework answers from Norville.
  • Velma often proclaims that a woman of color like her has to work hard to achieve as much success while a privileged white man has everything handed to him. In reality, she actually mooches off of others, especially Norville, when it comes to school work and solving the case.
• Informed Poverty: The show states her family is so poor she can't afford another coat, but they have regular luxuries everyone else has and the fact that Sophie is the owner Spooners and has a side business as a baby photographer as well should give them extra income, unlike how her mother was an unemployed mystery writer.
• Insufferable Genius: Deconstructed. Although Velma is indeed a genius and very smart for her age, her overall bitterness and cynicism give her a very poor social life and it appears that Norville is her Only Friend.
• I Resemble That Remark!:
  • After being told by her dad she was labeled most vengeful by the school year book, she instantly starts maliciously formulating a plan to get back at them.
  • When she is disguised as a man she hears Daphne talk about her caring about so much about her Missing Mom that no one else matters, by the end of the first season she's proven exactly right with her relationships with the other three in shambles but she cares more about the fact she's got her mom back and despicably locks her father, Sophie, and Amanda (a baby) out of the house so they can live together.
• It's All About Me: Several times in any given circumstance or conversation, Velma will try to make it all about her Missing Mom as a way to get attention back on herself. By the end of the season, Norville has had enough of this behavior and cuts ties with her, moving to a new school.
• Jerk Justifications: Velma's bitterness and judgmental behavior are a result of guilt because she believes her mother disappeared because of her detective skills and her guilt manifests into nightmarish hallucinations. She and Daphne were also childhood friends until Daphne fell into a popular crowd and Velma felt abandoned.
• Jerkass Realization: In the first episode, Velma eventually came to realize that she was a nightmare child who drove her mother insane with her antics. She has a few more of these as she continues to realize how overly harsh and judgmental she's been towards others (particularly Daphne), as well as how she's been taking her friends for granted. And then promptly returns to her normal bitchy self by the end of the episode.
• Jerkass: In a World of Jerkass and Adaptational Jerkass among the main characters, Velma manages to be the worst among them all by being an arrogant, narcissistic, judgmental, petty, hypocritical, cynical, sexist, racist, violent prone, and borderline sociopathic Insufferable Genius with a black and white, misanthropic view on the world. She generally treats everyone even friends and families like tools to use to her further goals and makes them do grand gestures for her which she never repays back. She tries to paint herself as spouting the truth when it's really just an excuse to say cruel things to people to emotionally hurt them. It's no wonder in-universe she is Hated by All and people hold great contempt for her.
• Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: Every time that it seems that Velma will realize she needs to change her Jerkass ways, she goes back being the way she was before, and nothing ever sticks. Any seemingly nice thing she does has an ulterior motive to it or has someone suffer as a consequence.
• Karma Houdini: She never really gets her comeuppance for falsely accusing Fred of the murders and getting him placed in jail. She even takes satisfaction that a white man got unjustly sent to prison while knowing full well he's innocent.
• Karmic Butt-Monkey: She is often at the brunt of physical violence from being run over by a police car to being beaten up by Daphne, but it is often satisfying.
• Kavorka Man: Gender-Inverted. Even though Velma has been treated as being unattractive in personality and looks wise, she still manages to have the three other main characters fall for her.
• Know-Nothing Know-It-All: Despite insisting she's the smartest person in town, she's frequently shown to come to wrong conclusions due to her own biases which leads one person being put wrongfully in jail while the other has his home destroyed by the police.
• Lack of Empathy: Velma, at her core, is a self-centered individual who believes everyone should cater to her desires, even when it inconveniences them tremendously. She often makes big demands but never considers returning the favor at all. She never says sorry when any of her actions harm others, like when Fred got arrested due to her pinning the blame on him and bullying him in court. She even says she finds delight that a rich white guy like him got wrongfully convicted, or when she tried to publicly humiliate Daphne to win the tournament and refused to admit she did anything wrong. A prime example is when, in the season one finale, instead of feeling sorry that Fred lost his mother, she gloats about solving the case and distastefully twerks in front of her corpse.
• Lazy Bum: Despite proclaiming how she has to work diligently to get anything that Fred has instantly handed to him, Velma in practice tends to pawn off work to other people and reap the rewards of it. She frequently comments how she doesn't try to do any chores around the house, mooches off of Norville for homework answers, relies on others to give her the clues to the mystery, and when she had to pretend to be Amanda's mother she often tried to pawn her off to others to take care of her.
• Likes Older Men: She comments on William being a "dilf" after seeing a picture of him.
• Loser Protagonist: Velma is portrayed as being Hated by All in all the town for being an obnoxious, self-righteous Insufferable Genius with absolutely next to no friends except Norville and Daphne. The popular girls frequently butt heads with her, she is considered hideous by everyone around, no one respects her enough to listen to her (extreme) opinions, and even her family are at their limits with her.
• Love Epiphany: In the tenth episode, after listening to old voicemails Norville left her, Velma starts realizing that she reciprocates his feelings for her.
• Malcolm Xerox: Velma has several traits of this, she frequently talks about white men stealing credit from women of color and frequently mentions how hard it is for people of color to work in society. The problem, however, is that Velma has hardline views on identity politics and it prevents people from listening to her points because her opinions are expressed too aggressively. Hypocritically, Velma frequently criticizes society for racism but uses Fred's skin color when she accuses him of murder, which had nothing to do with the murder because Fred had suspicious connections to the victim. Velma is also known to play race cards when talks about how minorities are represented on TV and admit to prejudging people.
  Aman: I'm sure you'd agree it's possible Fred didn't do it.
  Velma: Fred's a rich white guy with a tiny dong, he did it!
• Manipulative Bitch: Velma has a knack for manipulating people who are close to her like Daphne and Norville to do her bidding by playing up their friendship and feelings for her in order to get what she wants.
• Master of the Mixed Message: She has a crush on Fred in spite of him being a bigot, but then loses all romantic interest in him after she turns him into a feminist and he starts reciprocating her feelings.
• Maternally Challenged: When Velma poses as Amanda's mother to not upset her mom about her father moving on she shows herself to be terrible at it: she drops her, calls her "fugly", easily loses her, sometimes forgets her name, steals her blanket when she's sleeping with her, has trouble diapering her, and relies on other people (especially Norville) to do all the heavy lifting when it comes to caring for her. She even lampshades she shouldn't be taking care of kids.
• A Mistake Is Born: Aman mentions her being an unwanted pregnancy when he and Velma talk about how to handle Diya finding out about Amanda without her knowing she is his daughter with Sophie.
• Mike Nelson, Destroyer of Worlds: Velma manages to get Fred sent to prison by making classist remarks about him being rich instead of showing the evidence, only to find out that he was innocent the entire time. She then accuses Norville's dad of murder and nearly has him arrested but is proven wrong again, resulting in Norville ending their friendship.
• Moral Myopia: Despite being frustrated with other people's bigotry, she is quite a vocal racist and sexist against white men.
• Narcissist: Throughout the series, Velma displays textbook traits of being one: she thinks of herself as smarter than everyone else (which she's not) which makes her look down on others, she's only interested in those she deems useful to her, she is obsessed with being the center of attention and throws fits when she's not, she has a Never My Fault mentality and refuses to admit when she's wrong, and is shown to be manipulative to everyone around her so that they can do stuff for her.
• Nerdy Bully: She's a standard nerd like her other incarnations (except having low grades after her mother's disapearance) but is shown to be an unrepentant bully.
  • She has shown to target Daphne in the past due to them falling out as friends when she became popular with the hot girls. She frequently writes proclamations of hate for her in the form of graffiti, physically assaulted her in the showers, and also tried to humiliate her in front of the school by reading her diary about her mental problems, which backfired when everyone instead booed her for such a dick move and this prompted Daphne to kick her butt.
  • With the Girl Posse, she frequently slut-shames them and verbally treats them as being dumb and shallow. She also has a bit of Condescending Compassion for them seeing them as victims of the patriarchy and needing her help from being unshackled from society's standards.
  • She is stated to knock down cheerleader pyramids for fun.
  • Even though Norville is shown to be her Only Friend, she frequently mistreats him by forcing him to do all sorts of tasks for her and never returns the favor. She also doesn't mind rudely bashing his parents in front of him and knows she won't usually get criticized for it.
  • She frequently ridicules Fred for being a rich, white guy and even body shames him multiple times due to having a Teeny Weenie. She also insults his intelligence by stating he's too stupid to even cut his own food (which is proven true in court).
  • Despite being in the band herself, she sees her fellow band mates as being losers beneath her and would rather be as far away from them as possible.
  • As a kid, she often tormented her mother to the point she was often under stress and at her wit's end.
  • She is horrible to her father, his girlfriend, and her baby half-sister to the point at the end of the final episode she locks them out of the house, so she could live alone with her mother.
• Never My Fault: This is a common flaw of hers which is never admitting her mistakes:
  • She blames Daphne for ending their friendship and moving on with the hot girls, when it was her who cut things off first because of her jealousy.
  • After she calls the police and accuses Norville's dad of being the brain kidnapper based on circumstantial evidence, leading them to basically destroy Norville's home, she has the nerve to blame the police for it instead of herself. This causes Norville to finally see how terrible of a person she is, call her out on constantly mistreating him, and leave her.
  • She firmly believes that nothing is ever a teen's fault and that they are just products of their parents' actions.
  • After her male persona, "Manny", is exposed by Fred in front of Daphne, she tries to justify herself deceiving her by claiming it was because she enjoyed the lack of consequences she faces as a guy.
• Nominal Hero: Velma is only helping find a serial killer because she was accused of being the killer after a body was found in her locker. After that, she's only interested in finding her mother, Diya, which happens to be connected to the murders. When she does find her mother, her motive changes to proving her innocence after Diya is accused of being the killer.
• No Social Skills: Velma has issues reading social cues of others when she goes out her way to look down on people when socializing with them. Even Daphne tried to advise her to be less judgmental one time and she didn’t take it. Also, the other kids even call her "weird" for her antics at times.
• Nostalgia Filter: She has a rose-tinted glasses view of when her mother was still around that makes her oblivious to how really unhappy her parents' marriage was like and she actually treated Diya. As a result, she is very hostile to Sophie and hopes when her mother comes back she's kicked out (even after she had Amanda).
• Oblivious to Love: She remains completely oblivious to Norville's blatant crush on her, mainly because she's too busy pining for Fred and Daphne and trying to find her mom. It's only when she actually listens to Norville's many voicemails that she finally realizes this and decides to reciprocate it.
• Oblivious to Their Own Description:
  • She constantly chastises rich white men like Fred for being entitled assholes who have everything handed to them and yet still treat themselves as the victim when they mess things up because of their fragile egos, which actually can practically sum up everything about her in the series and lacks any self-awareness about it.
  • Another time is when she's complaining about the hot girls list and saying it shows how men make everything about them and what they want, while again being oblivious how much it describes her character in general.
• Paper Tiger: Although Velma loves to criticize and insult people, she's quickly dominated in an actual fight and backs down just as quickly when someone retaliates. She humiliates Daphne in a fight by reading out her mental health issues but is defeated with a single punch because this only gave Daphne another incentive to fight more viciously and rallied the school against herself. Norville and Olive also bite back against Velma, and she backs down with the confrontation.
• Pet the Dog: Even though she lacks any big redeeming attributes, she does save the brains while Daphne just say to leave them because she wants to learn to actually tolerate them as Daphne's friends.
• The Pig-Pen: She is shown to have bad personal hygiene, frequently engaging in gross habits like eating out of trash cans and vacuum cleaners, refusing to go to the dentist, and peeing in the shower.
• Playing the Victim Card:
  • She frequently sees herself as a victim of society's racism and sexism for why she's treated as the Butt-Monkey by everyone while ignoring the fact she's a toxic person who uses any excuse to lash out at people and a self-righteous jerk who often can make other people's lives worse or treat them like her pawns.
  • Her falling out with Daphne turns out to be this because it's later revealed that Daphne didn't actually ditch her to be popular but Velma herself ending her friendship because she believed she would eventually do it. In other words, all sympathy from Velma losing her previous friendship evaporates once you realize she destroyed it out of jealousy and is now projecting blame onto Daphne.
  • She hypocritically projects this onto all rich white men like Fred who she thinks have everything handed to them while not being self-aware of it and play the victim when nothing goes right for them because of their egos.
• Politically Incorrect Hero: On a hypocritical level, Velma mostly acts this way about Fred being the killer because he is a rich guy with a small penis, and even does an offensive remark about the sickle cell. She even body shames the hot girls for being hot until she realized what she has done, while she tries hard to be the inverse, she plays it straight without knowing it until being called out.
• Practically Different Generations: She is fifteen years older than her infant sister, Amanda, and even pretended that she was her daughter so that her mother wouldn't find out Aman had moved on with Sophie.
• Protagonist-Centered Morality: Played for Laughs as the show's main humor, then played straight depending on the situation; Velma is an unrepentant and judgmental cynic who literally can’t spend a single conversation without being insulting and patronizing to everyone around her, while believing herself to be the smartest and most capable person in town and the only one who can fix every problem. While this view is subverted often, there are other times when the narrative wants to treat her as being in the right.
• Psychological Projection: Whatever flaws she has she usually projects onto other people:
  • She assumed without any proof that Daphne would ditch her for the popular girls and as a result cut her off first without any regards to her own feelings.
  • She perceives all white men (especially rich ones) of having too much privilege, having everything handed to them, and always whining about nothing going right for them due to their egos, which is a perfect description of Velma's general attitude in the series.
  • Her assumptions that the popular girls are just victims of the patriarchy concerning looks is just her projecting her feelings about what womanhood should be like.
  • Her statement that Fred took all the credit for getting the gang together is this when she was the one who got all the credit for solving the mystery without acknowledging her friend's contributions and was even the one who founded the gang when it was him who do.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons:
  • While she was right for the fact that middle aged men shouldn't determine beauty standards (especially for underage girls), she was just mad white men did it which is rooted in her racism.
  • She is right that Fred didn't murder the girls, but her reasoning is because he's a Manchild who can't take care of himself or even cut his own food.
  • She is justified that the police should have done better to find her mom, but dismissing a serial killing spree helps no one.
  • She is very dismissive of Lamont's ability as a school guidance counselor, but it's not due to the fact he lacks the credentials but because he's a white man and has no respect for the occupation.
    • She does the same thing when Lamont tries to explain her mother's diagnosis that a more certified professional should do it, but the only reason why Velma attacks him is just because he's a white guy.
• Shared Family Quirks:
  • While she and her father aren't exactly close, they do share a number of aspects with each other which is being slightly overweight, sarcastic towards others, are not above doing questionable acts to get their way, blame others for their faults and actions, and tend to be bad romantic partners who take their significant others for granted.
  • She also shares a lot of traits from her mother where both like to make pop cultural references, are competitive with their family, are pretty narcissistic about themselves, make nasty comments to people who they are supposed to be closed to, and have a nasty, vengeful streak against anyone who they feel has wronged them.
• Soapbox Sadie: Velma holds a number of progressive ideals and isn't afraid to constantly express them. Unfortunately, she does it in such a judgmental and overly aggressive way that she's basically become a parody of the "Social Justice Warrior" stereotype, which a number of other characters call her out on.
• Small Name, Big Ego: Velma arrogantly sees herself as the smartest person around when in reality it's anything but that. It is shown throughout the series where she gets many assumptions wrong due to jumping conclusions or bigoted views. She doesn't keep her grades after her mother disappeared and in the current day resorts to copying Norville's homework answers. Also the other three do more work solving the mystery than her, but she takes all the credit.
• Smug Snake: In spades.
• Spoiled Brat: Despite supposedly coming from a poor family, as a child Velma acted like this where she threw tantrums when she didn't get her way and her mother enabled her by giving into her demands. She still acts this way as a teenager by throwing a hissy fit whenever she wants something done and her loved ones have to do what she demands in order to have any sort of peace.
• Stealing the Credit: Despite Velma barely doing anything to help solve the mystery (mainly finding evidence by coincidence and an Internet search), she gets the majority of the credit (and a day named after her) in the mystery being solved while Norville, Daphne, and even Fred did more work.
• Straw Feminist: She speaks her mind a lot, and a lot of the things that she talks about usually involves the patriarchy and beauty standards enforced by white men. While she's right half the time — inevitable, since she lives in a World of Jerkass — she's also really pushy and condescending about it. It gets to the point where the Girl Posse at her school in "Velma Makes a List" accuse her of being just as sexist in the opposite direction.
• Suicidal Overconfidence: Velma genuinely thought that exposing Daphne's mental health issues was going to be enough to win the match and thought the school would support her for this. Instead, the school rallies against Velma instead, and Daphne is given another reason to beat her up.
• Teens Are Monsters: She grew from being an Enfant Terrible to this in her teen years. She constantly shows herself to be a cruel, selfish, vengeful, and mean-spirited person who uses her so-called friends as pawns, is a bigot towards anyone she views as more popular or privileged than her, and has a huge Lack of Empathy for everyone else's problems. Her most noted example of her status is when she is the only one shown happy that Fred's mom, Victoria Jones, was killed by stalactite and was hit by Norville's bullet and impaled. All she cared about was that she "solved" the mystery and not the fact that Fred had to see his mother die so horribly, even if she was trying to remove his brain. Also, she locked her father, his girlfriend, and her half-sister (who is a baby) out of the house so she could live with her mom only.
• Token Evil Teammate: Despite being the protagonist, she's considered to have the least redeeming qualities out of the gang. Even Fred and Daphne are saints compared to her. One very defining moment that exemplifies this happens in the climax of the season one finale, where Norville manages to redirect a bullet from the murderer (Victoria Jones/Fred's mom) which instead hits a stalactite on top of her, resulting in it coming down to skewer her and cover everyone around her in blood. Fred, Daphne, and Norville react to the gruesome death they just witnessed with appropriate shock and horror. Velma, on the other hand, quickly becomes ecstatic over what just happened, taking credit for solving the case and twerking over the corpse victoriously.
• Toxic Friend Influence:
  • Velma is this to Norville, by manipulating his crush on her to help her with any goal she needs. This is especially noted in episode 9 where she convinces him to do several illegal acts to keep up the charade for her mother which could jeopardize his mom's career and break his parents' trust.
  • It's downplayed for Daphne since she already was involved with criminal acts but Velma does pressure her to give her mother's file case which would be going against her mothers' trust.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: As a child, she displayed a lot of troubling behavior: being possessive of her friends, drinking her mother's booze stash, and tormenting her parents (especially her mother).
• Uncleanliness Is Next to Ungodliness: Velma is an Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist who has bad personal hygiene, frequently engaging in gross habits like eating out of trash cans and vacuum cleaners, refusing to go to the dentist, and peeing in the shower.
• The Unfavorite: Even though her father neglects his parental duties on both his daughters, he still at times favors Amanda over Velma, especially due to how unpleasant it is dealing with her.
• Ungrateful Bitch: A common trait of Velma is that she expects people to do big favors for her and never shows full gratefulness for it. Even when she appears to do so, she easily switches to complaining over a petty detail or even screws them over at a later date when it helps herself.
• Unscrupulous Hero: Velma's mother, Diya, disappeared when Velma was young, and it left her bitter and selfish towards others for not finding her and it left her extremely vitriolic towards her father for moving on to his girlfriend and putting his needs above Velma's. She shows very little to no remorse for wrongfully accusing Fred Jones and Lamont Rogers of murder and even does a victory dance in front of a traumatized Fred after his mother is killed in front of him because Victoria was the real killer.
• Unreliable Narrator: Velma usually narrates the end and the beginning of the episodes and in the beginning of the first one she states that she was the one who brought the gang together and not Fred, while he took all the credit. At the end of the first season, that actually is shown to be reversed. She is given all the credit for solving the mystery and gets a day in her honor while the others (who did more work) are just given token gestures. Also she doesn't do anything to bring them all together and are not even close friends with one another due to drama caused between them over the season (some of which stems from Velma's romantic indecisiveness).
• Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist: Velma is a judgmental, arrogant asshole who treats everyone around her like garbage and doesn't learn or grow in any substantial way.
• Useless Protagonist: Despite being the main character in a detective show, Velma actually had very little involvement in gathering clues; her impulsiveness makes her a bad detective since she has jumped to conclusions twice in the story. Velma falsely accuses two men of murder and only finds evidence either by accident or because someone provided it to her either directly or indirectly.^note  Norville is the one who figured out that Brenda was killed because of the photos in Spooner's Malt Shop bathroom; Daphne is the one who talks about Fred's insecurity about being seen in that bathroom, which leads to Velma jumping to the incorrect conclusion that Fred is the murderer. Norville is the one who convinces Fred to reveal that Velma's mom was at his house the night she disappeared. Fred is the one who finds evidence of the previous owner of his home (Dr. Perdue) by sneaking into his father's office; Norville is the one who explains Dr. Perdue's backstory by talking to his parents; Velma's dad Aman confirms that it's Diya's handwriting on a note Velma found; and it's Diya's manuscript that reveals the invisible ink on the note (something Velma only found by accident when she swatted an insect with it). When they find the killer's phone, Daphne finds the fingerprints to unlock it through blacklight. Velma then has to wait for Diya's memories to come back so she can reveal the killer. Daphne's birth mother is the one who sends Daphne the locket she found in the caverns. Velma only recognizes the symbol through the logo on her glasses because Norville mentions them in one of his many voicemails. She does reveal that Fred can't be the killer because he doesn't know how to use a knife, and she also finds the killer by merely looking up Victoria Jones on the internet and finding her relation to the general, which connects the evidence to her. Victoria isn't even defeated by Velma; she is ultimately killed by Norville deflecting a bullet from her own gun into a pillar that impales and crushes her to death.
• Weak, but Skilled: Although Velma isn't the best physical fighter, she's smart and uses her intelligence to outwit her opponents. However, she does forget that her opponents are still a threat to her even if she outsmarted them.
  • In Velma Kai, she tries to prove that emotional damage is worse than physical damage by reading out Daphne's mental health journal but all this does is enrage Daphne and encourage her to fight more aggressively as she just punches Velma out of the ring.
  • After Velma insults Sheriff Cogburn, he just hits Velma with his car before leaving.
• What Do They See In Her?: From start to finish, Velma has been a self-absorbed, manipulative liar with little to no respect or regard for the people around her. She’s had Fred sent to prison, was overly possessive of Daphne’s attention, and very controlling of Norville and disregarded his feelings, and yet all three of them are attracted to her.
• With Friends Like These...: Although Daphne and Norville have been her only friends, she treats them both like dirt and is very controlling and possessive of them. She often asks them to do big favors for her, while never expecting to do the same for them. With Norville, she often belittles his feelings and even bashes his parents in front of him.
• Wrong Genre Savvy:
  • Velma believes she's the progressive underdog in a society that favors white men and undermines women and people of color but more often than not, she has to be told that her efforts to help are misguided or she presents them in a way that's so cynical and aggressive that it appears selfish and biased.
  • Although Velma is right that men shouldn't kill women, the principal has to tell her that she's demanding social change overnight and that self-defense classes are a quicker and more effective first step in dealing with a serial killer. Also, the killer wasn't even a man, but a woman, which made her assumption even more wrong.
  • Velma then tries to beat Daphne in a fight by reducing her to a point of emotional vulnerability through humiliation but loses the fight because all this accomplished was making Daphne angry enough to fight more aggressively and it rallies the crowd against Velma for using a dirty tactic.
  • Velma is also tasked with making the hottest girls in school ugly so the serial killer will not target them but is told by Olive that she's being just as sexist for slut shaming them and that not all women are the same as Velma.

Norville Rogers

Voiced by: Sam Richardson

Velma's best friend.

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• Accidental Hero: He unwittingly helps Velma solve the case by directing her attention to her glasses, which was made by a company owned by Fred Jones's family. He also came to help Velma, not knowing that she was being held at gunpoint at the time and he accidentally kills Fred's mom by deflecting a bullet into a pillar above her.
• Adaptational Intelligence: While his original counterpart is usually more average intelligence, here, due to Velma's Adaptational Dumbass, she regularly copies answers from his homework, which shows he currently gets better grades than her. Also, she has to go to him to get make her a fake report card to make it seem she kept up with her grades while her mother was gone when she hasn't.
• Adaptational Skill: In this version of the character, he's into fencing and swordsmanship to the point he even has a collection of swords. This comes to be an important skill when he pulls a Big Damn Heroes moment in the climax and causes the killer's death by deflecting a bullet with his sword.
• Blade Enthusiast: Has a fondness for swords and is an aspiring swordsman, from collecting them, to having fencing as a hobby, to transferring to a sword-themed school in episode ten before coming back in a Big Damn Heroes moment to use his sword skills to deflect a bullet, resulting in the killer's death.
• Comic-Book Movies Don't Use Codenames: Most versions of the character are better known as "Shaggy". This version solely sticks with his real name.
• Dogged Nice Guy: While Norville is still described as a "beta male" type doing it for love, compared to Manchild Fred and Alpha Bitch Daphne and even how judgmental Velma herself can be, the guy spends his first few appearances going out of his way to help Velma with her sleuthing, including almost letting a bunch of criminals take his kidney for 500 dollars, and realizing at the end of the episode that trying to buy her love isn't the way to go.
• Extreme Doormat: Both Gigi and his mother agree that Norville deserves better than Velma and he is way too forgiving of her.
• Fatal Flaw: Leniency. Norvile is way too nice and forgiving for his own good and is all too willing to put up with Velma's selfishness out of love for her. When he and Gigi start dating, she suggests that he cut Velma out of his life so he can learn to stand up for himself because she's taking advantage of him. He and Gigi eventually break up because Gigi finally accepts that Norville doesn't like her as much as he likes Velma. Even his mom suggests that he leave town and go to another school because Velma is that bad a friend to him.
• Grew a Spine: After Velma accuses his father of being the killer, he finally loses his patience with her, berates her for selfishness and cuts off his friendship with her. He does eventually come back to help her in the final episode.
• Hopeless Suitor: Because Velma struggles with her attraction to Daphne and Fred and doesn’t feel anything romantic for him, Norville is desperately pining after Velma in the vain hope that she will be his girlfriend. By the finale, Velma realizes she loves Norville too... after having already gotten into a relationship with Daphne. It's unclear by the end of the season whether the two are together or not. However, at the end of season two, Velma ultimately chooses Daphne over him, and he accepts it.
• In Name Only: Although Norville is based on Shaggy, his design and personality are different, with the only connections to Shaggy being associations with food and wearing similar outfits. Although Shaggy is known to have a large appetite, Norville is a food critic and isn't shown to have a large appetite. Shaggy is also known to be superstitious and quick to believe in the supernatural, whereas Norville is said to be smarter than Velma, to the point where she copies his work.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: After doing everything he can to help Velma's mother regain her memory through many painstaking actions which includes masquerading Amanda as his and her child, Velma has the nerve to accuse his father of being a serial killer without his knowledge based on flimsy evidence and get their house destroyed by the police. This makes him put his foot down and temporarily end their relationship.
• Not So Above It All: Although Norville may be the nicest of the gang, he’s not a very good boyfriend to Gigi, has a horrible sense of judgement in regards to Velma, took schadenfreude in Fred getting falsely imprisoned, and is indirectly responsible for the death of Victoria Jones, though she was revealed to be the serial killer.
• Token Good Teammate: Out of the main characters, Norville is probably the most well-adjusted and better-natured because he's not spoiled horribly by his parents (unlike Fred), not insecure about his family situation (unlike Daphne), and he's altruistic (unlike Velma). Although he's by no means perfect or even a saint as shown by how inattentive he is to Gigi, he's certainly better than the other main characters.
• Trademark Favourite Food: Shrimp chips. It's so much that it's even mentioned on his official character profile.
• You Don't Look Like You: While Velma, Daphne, and Fred are recognizable as Scooby-Doo characters, Norville looks nothing like any incarnation of Shaggy before or since. Shaggy is white with stubble on his chin, light brown hair and Skintone Sclerae; Norville is black, has hair that sticks up and a small beard, and has whites in his eyes. He does, thankfully, still have matching clothes with a loose green t-shirt and brown pants.

Daphne Blake

Voiced by: Constance Wu

Fred's ex-girlfriend.

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• Action Girl: She's capable of fighting and defending herself, which is best shown by the number of times she's able to effortlessly beat up anyone, even fight off the killer.
• Adaptational Sexuality: Daphne is usually only attracted to men in other series, but here she has shown to at first date Fred, then go after Velma (and even had some feelings for Gigi).
• Adaptation Name Change: Downplayed. In this iteration, Daphne's last name "Blake" is derived from the combination of her moms' last names "Blay-Ke".
• Adoption Angst: It turns out that Daphne had taken to dealing drugs in order to raise enough money to find her birth-family.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Daphne is a popular girl at school who has a loving set of lesbian parents. She also deals drugs on the side for money to hire a private detective to find her biological parents, for no other reason than she feels justified in doing it because she's seen it on television.
• Creepy Child: She shows shades of this, such as trying to drown Krista in a puddle with a Slasher Smile over a petty argument in the premiere episode, viciously stabbing her opponent in the self-defense class tournament from "Velma Kai" and holding a knife to Olive's throat just because she pushed Velma for no reason. Even when she was younger, she lit a desk on fire with an Evil Laugh and walked dangerously on the edge of the school roof.
• Fetishized Abuser: Being an adrenaline junkie, Velma's aggressive possessiveness towards her is one of the reasons she's attracted to her, though even she has her limits.
• Hypocritical Humor: She almost drowns another girl in the first episode over a petty argument but gets miffed when Velma throttles her (to death in her own words) in the shower.
• Informed Flaw:
  • She says to Norville she never fit in with everyone due to her adoptive background and her love of danger, but the fact that she was in with the popular girls until she left the brains for dead contradicts this.
  • She supposedly suffers from mental health issues due to being abandoned by her biological parents, but outside of her own claims, she doesn't show any notable symptoms.
• Like an Old Married Couple: Despite her and Velma treating each other horribly, they put up with each other's abuse the most and stayed friends despite Daphne having every right to ditch her. She forgives Velma for being selfish, for reading out her journal that was filled with her insecurities and mental health problems by beating her up, and she even stayed with her after when Velma disguised herself as a man and seduced her. Then when they do become a couple, Velma blurts out Norville's name when professing her love as the killer corners them.
• Long Hair Is Feminine: Daphne has long, red, hair.
• Mysterious Purple: Daphne mostly dresses in purple (even at Fogfest◊) and has a Dark and Troubled Past from not knowing who her birth parents are.
• Pink Means Feminine: Daphne's color scheme is mostly purple but incorporates a lot of pink as well, such as her purse, leggings and kneesocks.
• Thrill Seeker: The reason she's danger-prone in this adaptation.

Fred Jones

Voiced by: Glenn Howerton

The fourth member of the group. He's kind of a phallus.

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• Adaptational Dumbass: Previous iterations of Fred were well-adjusted and could be clever in setting up traps (though some could be airheaded). Fred in this show is a spoiled sheltered Manchild who can't even cut a piece of steak.
• Adaptational Wealth: In most adaptations, Fred is usually depicted as middle class, but here he is shown as a wealthy heir to a family business.
• Butt-Monkey: Although many of the characters are subjected to moments of embarrassment, Fred seems to be unable to go five minutes without something humiliating happening to him.
• Buxom Beauty Standard: Fred's rationale for including Kimmy on his list of the five hottest girls in the school is that she has large boobs.
• Character Development: Fred is the only member of the group who has gone through a personal arc and development compared to the others who are fairly static. He started out as a shallow spoiled rich kid who couldn’t even take care of himself but over the course of the show, he was falsely imprisoned, learned about feminism, and eventually realized that his parents were horribly abusive. He’s notably the only one of the group in the finale who’s shown by himself after the death of his mother (the serial killer) and presumably the arrest of his father. Considering how desperate he was to get their approval; Fred now seems to accept that they were not Good Parents or people.
• Delusions of Parental Love: After his mother tricks him into thinking she was possessed by the ghost of Edna Purdue, he refuses to believe she willingly tried to kill him by removing his brain so it could be switched with a female one.
• Distressed Dude: He gets kidnapped by the killer in The Stinger of "Fog Fest" and spends the majority of "A Velma in the Woods" Locked in a Room with three talking brains in jars. He gets kidnapped again offscreen alongside Daphne in "The Brains of the Operation" and it's revealed that he's the primary target of the killer.
• Extreme Omnisexual: Rather than cure him of his wandering eye and chauvinism, reading Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique just makes Fred realize that he should be creeping on women with "inner" beauty, too.
• Foil: Fred is meant to be a complete foil to this iteration of Velma as a spoiled rich white boy who has everything handed to him, while Velma a "supposed" poor girl of color has "to work to get where he's already is". However, interesting enough it contrasts how they develop throughout the series, while Velma doubles down on viewing herself as a victim of society and refusing to grow believing everything is everyone else's fault. Fred on the other hand is called out often and as a result tries to grow himself and become a better person. Their statuses at the end are even contrasted with each other with Velma gaining her mom back, kicking her dad, his girlfriend, and half-sister out of her life, and getting undeserved recognition for a mystery she didn't really crack, while Fred loses his mother, cuts out his dad, and by himself tries to be more independent.
• Freudian Excuse: Fred's misogynistic Jerk Jock exterior is all done out of insecurity towards being a late bloomer still undergoing puberty, particularly when compared to his more masculine father.
• Godwin's Law of Facial Hair: In an attempt to clear Fred's name, Victoria has Fred dressed in makeup so he can look innocent to the crowd as he walks to the courthouse. However, due to the rain, the makeup smears and it unwittingly gives Fred a toothbrush mustache, and a picture makes Fred look like he was giving a Nazi salute.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: When he’s mocked and belittled (a constant in this show), Fred can have some very powerful temper tantrums.
• I Reject Your Reality: Even after his mother is exposed as the serial killer and plotting to scoop out his brain with another girl's, he refuses to believe she did it of her own will and thinks it has to do with the ghost of Edna Purdue possessing her. As a result, he starts a ghost hunting company in order to pursue the supernatural and prove that his mother wasn't depraved enough to kill him.
• Momma's Boy: Due to his coddled upbringing, he's very attached to his mother and speaks fondly of her. This is weaponized against him when Victoria turns out to be the serial killer and pretends to have been possessed by the ghost of Purdue, so her son doesn't turn on her for trying to swap his brain with that of Velma.
• Manchild: Fred is a rich kid so spoiled that his own body hasn't matured, being a late-bloomer puberty-wise who can't cut his own food.
• Spoiled Brat: Played straight at first with how he was heavily coddled by his mother but eventually, it’s revealed that his Abusive Parents constantly shame him and threaten to kick him out of the house if he doesn’t conform to their demands. Rather than accept responsibility, however, his mother decides that he’s a lost cause and works towards replacing his brain with a popular girl’s.
• Teeny Weenie: Fred's smaller-than-average genitals are a frequent target of mockery.
• Token White: Fred is still a white man while Norville is black, Velma is South-Asian, and Daphne is East Asian.
• Why Couldn't You Be Different?: Fred’s parents spoiled him to the point where he’s unable to take care of himself yet they’re lamenting about how Fred isn’t the proper heir to Jones Gentlemen’s Association. His mother takes it to such extreme lengths that she’s willing to remove Fred’s brain altogether and put a popular girl’s brain in his body.

The Gang's Families

Dinkley Family

Aman Dinkley

Voiced by: Russell Peters

Velma's father. He kinda just checks out.

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• Accidental Adultery: His relationship with Sophie turns out to be this when Diya proves to still be alive and was actually kidnapped as Velma speculated. Both his daughter and estranged wife treat everything as if it was an affair when it was more like this.
• Amoral Attorney: As a lawyer, he is willing to lie in order to win a case.
• Aesop Amnesia: Even though he blatantly says his skills as a husband and father drove his wife away and caused Velma to turn out the way she is, he still at times can be a bad boyfriend to Sophie and tries to get out caring for Amanda.
• Awful Wedded Life: Which is how the found amnesiac Diya recovers her memories, as she remembers that she hated being married to him and is glad that he moved on to Sophie.
• Bumbling Dad: He's an incompetent lawyer and father. He's terrible at connecting with his oldest daughter, while also doing the bare minimum helping take care of his youngest. He was a lousy husband to Diya, while he's not as bad as this to Sophie, he still makes her do the majority of Amanda's caregiving. He also is shown giving his underage daughter booze.
• Consummate Liar: Whenever there is trouble the usual tactic is to lie his way out of it. This is also seen with the way he handles Fred's case.
• Fat Bastard: Downplayed. While he's not a fully awful human being with an average dad bod, he really isn't a good father nor husband/boyfriend while also being a questionably moral lawyer.
• Henpecked Husband: In his relationship with Sophie, he is constantly seen to be under her thumb and does what she demands. He and Velma even lampshade she has him whipped. While not as focused on, there are hints he was also like this with Diya when they were together.
• It's All About Me: Just like his daughter, he displays a lot of selfish qualities like pampering his girlfriend (and later his second daughter) over attending to his first daughter's needs. However, even when he pampers Amanda and Sophie, he tends to get out of doing any actual parenting by acting like he wants to spend time with Velma or burying himself in work.
• Jerkass: Just like his daughter, he tends to not be the most pleasant person to be around. For both his daughter and girlfriend, he talks behind their back to each other and regularly tries to skip out on raising his children by burying himself in work.
• Kavorka Man: Downplayed. While he's an average looking man, he managed to be married to Diya (who still looks attractive in her middle age years) and get a younger, hot waitress girlfriend, who also gets pregnant with his second daughter.
• Lazy Husband: Despite pampering his girlfriend during her pregnancy, he tries to weasel out of helping with parenting Amanda. And obviously in the past and present, he doesn't even try to raise his oldest daughter properly.
• Money Dumb: Despite the Dinkley family supposedly being financially strapped, Aman spends recklessly on Sophie's side job as an online model.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Aman helps Velma get into the mansion to clear her mother's name and gets the police to help them and is later locked out of the house with Sophie and Amanda, so that Diya and her can live together.
• Parental Neglect: He was pretty neglectful to his daughters and has a hard time connecting with Velma.
• Permissive Parents: When Aman actually tries to bond with Velma (to get out of taking care of Amanda) his idea of a good time together is going to a diner turned strip club and allowing her to drink beer despite her being fifteen.
• Resentful Guardian: He regularly shows a lot of frustration with having to raise Velma due to how obnoxious and unpleasant she is, while burying himself in any work so he can avoid having a personal relationship with her. He even states that she was an unwanted baby to her face.
• The Unfair Sex: His relationship with Sophie gets flak for moving on too quickly from Diya and treated as an affair, while Diya's implied fling with a waiter on a cruise ship is depicted as a light joke.
• Workaholic: He usually buries himself in work to avoid facing his duties as a father and husband/boyfriend.

Diya Dinkley

Voiced by: Sarayu Rao

Velma's missing mother. Her disappearance kicks off the show.

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• Accidental Misnaming: Just like her daughter, she is mistakenly named as Diya Dorkley when she is reported in the news.
• Alcoholic Parent: In the flashbacks, she is shown as being a huge drinker with her preferred booze being bourbon, which is has to do with the fact that her husband was a terrible spouse, and their daughter was an Enfant Terrible.
• Alliterative Name: Both her first and last names begin with a “D.”
• Amateur Sleuth: She tried to investigate the case of Perdue by exploring the Jones mansion. It's deconstructed due to the fact that she wasn't prepared to go up alone against Victoria Jones and as a result she was kidnapped and brainwashed for two years while no one knew where she went.
• Awful Wedded Life: Rather than get mad that her estranged husband moved on, she's actually relieved because she was never happy being married to him.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Although initially depicted as being nice by the series' standards, she subtly is shown to have a lot of unpleasant qualities: she was a big drinker who stunk up the house, she thought that Daphne would be the one to get pregnant, openly admitted she accidentally dropped Velma off the bed as a baby, and approved of her daughter locking her father, Sophie, and Amanda (a baby) out of the house so they can live alone together.
• Cigarette of Anxiety: In the flashback, she was shown smoking outside the house due to the stress of home life and tried to lite it out whenever her daughter was around.
• Clingy Jealous Girl: She gets very defensive about Sophie being around due to the fact she past flirted with her husband and suspects she and her estranged husband got together while she was gone. She eventually is proven right but then becomes relieved because she could finally leave her loveless marriage.
• Doting Grandparent: While not actually a grandmother, she initially treats Amanda kindly when Velma tries to pass her off as her daughter.
• Her Code Name Was "Mary Sue": The manuscripts we see on the show are mentioned to be terrible by Velma due to not minding swatting bugs with them. One of them called "Detective Jinkies: The Case Of The Invisible Ink", which Velma finds the phone number of the serial killer, shows the main character is named after Diya herself except with the surname Jinkies, has really clichéd writing, and in-story the hidden message was a love confession by Santa Claus. And going by the titles of one of the them the "Stabbening" it's blatantly ripping off other works.
• Hollywood Healing: She lost her eye due to Velma splashing water on her which caused a cigarette to burn it, but in the present it seems to okay and not popping out like in the flashback.
• Hypocrite: She gets on Sophie and Aman's case for flirting when she was still around, but a Noodle Incident involving a male waiter on a cruise ship shows she might have had a wandering eye as well.
• It Runs in the Family: When you take a good look at her actions, it is not exactly a mystery as to how Velma turned out the way she did.
• Know-Nothing Know-It-All: Despite being depicted as a bookworm who likes quoting obscure references, she shows she's this since she ignorantly believes you can get pregnant by sitting on a public toilet seat when Velma tries to lie about Amanda being her daughter.
• Missing Mom: She’s been missing for two years in the show and her only appearances before her return in the eighth episode are through Velma’s flashbacks.
• Mistaken for Servant: When she is found she is mistaken as a maid of the Jones.
• Morality Pet: Despite her many, many flaws, Velma genuinely does love her mother and is very happy to reunite with her.
• Mystery Writer Detective: She is a (bad) mystery writer who tried to investigate the Dr. Purdue case but was captured when she was caught snooping around the Jones' mansion which used to belong to her.
• Not So Above It All: Although at first she seems nice by the show's standard, she still has moments that show she can be just as much as a Jerkass as the rest of the characters.
  • She tells Velma to close the curtains with Aman, Sophie, and Amanda trapped outside, she knows her daughter locked them out so she and her could live in the house without them.
  • An episode earlier, she nonchalantly mentions how she should be careful about letting Amanda sleep on the bed since Velma had accidentally dropped off herself.
  • Also in that same episode she makes a comment about how she thought that Daphne would be the one to get pregnant when Velma was pretending to be the mother of Amanda.
• Parent Never Came Back from the Store: She was supposed to go to the store to get new Christmas presents for her daughter after she found her original ones and begged for more, but never came back and her car was found abandoned with the aforementioned present. What really happened is that she was kidnapped while she was investigating the Jones' mansion in connection with the Perdue case and got hypnotized by Victoria Jones into helping revive the project.
• The Pig-Pen: Before Sophie moved in, the house stank of booze and was filthy in contrast with how the Spooner's Malt Shop owner kept things spotless and a dream home as described by Velma herself, who doesn't even like her dad's girlfriend. She was even stated as smelling like booze by her daughter and is said to be defensive about personal hygiene.
• Pushover Parents: Flashbacks show that Diya did nothing to stop Velma’s bratty and destructive behavior but instead suffered through it. In the present time, she’s just as enabling as ever and lets Velma do what she wants, including locking Aman, Sophie, and Amanda (who is only a baby) out of the house.
• Sibling Rivalry: In episode 9, it's mentioned she has sisters with kids that she's always been competitive with and that's why Velma made Norville make a fake news report about herself so her mother can gloat about her to them. Aman even encourages her to call down by saying she's more attractive than one of her sisters.
• Tomato in the Mirror: She is horrified to discover that she's the serial killer who wanted to put her daughter's brain into a popular girl's body so she can be too. However, this is subverted when it's revealed that she's actually the Unwitting Pawn hypnotized by the real killer to frame for their crimes.
• Ungrateful Bitch: Even though she is right to have misgivings about her husband moving on too quickly after her disappearance, they still tried to accommodate her after she had gone through the ordeal of being kidnapped so she wouldn't lose her memories. This makes her approving of her daughter locking them out of the house look like this.
• Wicked Stepmother: After Amanda is revealed as Aman's daughter with Sophie, she loses any positive interest in her and doesn't mind Velma locking her out of the house alongside her parents (even though she's a baby).
• Woman Scorned: After learning that her husband moved on from her with Sophie and had a baby together, she treats it as an affair and at the end of the season endorses Velma locking her father alongside the other two outside of the house so they can live alone together.
• Would Hurt a Child: Downplayed but present. She willingly locks Amanda (who is an infant) out of the house because she's the child of her ex-husband and his new girlfriend and so she can live alone with her daughter.

Sophie

Voiced by: Melissa Fumero

Aman's new girlfriend.

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• Alcoholic Parent: Like Diya, she drinks a lot of booze to drown out her troubles, especially when she has to move out of the house to avoid freaking Diya out and losing her memory.
• Butt-Monkey: After her daughter's birth, she never seems to catch a break: she's stressed handling her daughter when her boyfriend doesn't seem interested in helping her, said boyfriend and his daughter play a prank taking her baby from her crib, she has to deal with her boyfriend's estranged wife coming back and having to move out of the house to hide he's moved on from her. When she secretly sneaks back to get Amanda's blanket, she gets caught then has her daughter pass off as Velma and Norville's daughter to keep the charade up, and in the final episode she, her daughter, and boyfriend are locked out of the house so that Velma can live with her mother.
• Camera Fiend: She loves taking pictures of every little moment to put on her social media account, which includes showing off pictures of her naked body and dressing up her newborn daughter, boyfriend, and herself in cosplay.
• Good Parents: While she's not the best stepmother figure to Velma, she is very attentive to her own biological daughter, Amanda, whom she is very doting and protective of. And when she actually tries to be a good parental figure to Velma, she does a better job at it than her boyfriend. For example, taking Velma's hallucinations more seriously than Aman does and snapping her out of them.
• Hidden Depths: Despite the narrative making her out to be a homewrecker who is trying to replace Velma's mother, she does show that she has concern for Velma and later even Diya. For the latter, she actually tries to make sure she doesn't go to jail and even saved her life when she has a hallucination when her own boyfriend wasn't taking it seriously. She also was worried about Diya's memories being lost and was at the hospital with the others to check on her, while also willing to move out the house (with some grievances) and go along with passing her daughter Amanda as Velma and Norville's so she wouldn't freak out from the revelation.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: She might not always be nice towards Velma, but she has moments when she shows she cares about the girl and does try to help her like saving her from her hallucinations and being grateful she helped her get to the hospital when she went into labor. And despite the fact she didn't have to do it, she did try to accommodate the found amnesiac Diya to not lose her memories by leaving the house (even though it meant she had nowhere to go).
• Money Dumb: Before Amanda was born, she tended to spend a lot of expensive stuff for her, including a two thousand dollar baby carriage that hovers.
• Ms. Fanservice: She doesn't mind showing off her pregnant body to her OnlyFans.
• Neat Freak: This is why the Dinkley house is so clean (before and after Diya comes back) due to the fact she tends to freak out if anything is a mess. However, this for some reason doesn't apply to Spooners which was stated by Velma to cause a health inspector to say "I quit".
• Shameless Fanservice Girl: She sees nothing wrong with being nude in front of Aman's underaged daughter for a pregnant photoshoot.
• Spicy Latina: She's a Shameless Fanservice Girl who likes to pander to her online following.
• Parent with New Paramour: To Velma, who sees her as a homewrecker taking her mom's place and is vocal about finally kicking her out, even after Amanda is born. Sophie herself doesn't help by making rude comments about Velma, but other than that, she does show she can care about her by snapping her out of her hallucinations, trying to convince her to work at her diner, and driving her to school.
• Pushover Parents: Although she doesn't really parent Velma and isn't really her stepmother due to Aman not being officially married to her, she does seem to be very permissive to her behavior towards her like letting her insult her, easily quit her job at Spooner's, destroy her stuff (and Amanda's) when trying get the house back to what it looked like when Diya was missing, and even let her daughter be masqueraded as Velma's daughter to not upset Diya with revelation her husband moved on. The once exception is when in episode five when she wanted to make sure that Velma kept the house clean as the band had their sleepover.
• Wicked Stepmother: Velma certainly sees her as this to the point she states that Sophie would make her bedroom into an exercise room if she died. She doesn't help by making occasional insulting comments at Velma's expense, but on the other hand, she does show she can be nice to her.

Amanda Dinkley

Sophie's daughter.

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• Affair? Blame the Bastard: Due to the show treating Aman and Sophie's relationship like an affair and not getting married, Amanda like her parents are targeted for contempt by Diya and Velma, who don't mind locking her out of the house alongside them so they can live alone together.
• Annoying Younger Sibling: Velma is annoyed to have a baby sister through Sophie, and she makes no effort to connect with Amanda. The feeling is mutual on Amanda's part, who always scowls at her older sister, refuses to be held by her, and even at one point tried to defecate on her when she needed her diaper change.
• Brainy Baby: In Season 2 she's smart enough to come up with jokes, including using her Babble Box to pretend to be the killer.
• The Determinator: When she is separated from her mother she is determined to get back to her at any cost while escaping being in her older sister's presence. She even rolls out of her stroller in order to get her mother's diner.
• Enfant Terrible: Subverted. Due to having such contempt for her older sister, she refuses to warm up to her and gives her a hard time. However, everyone else not Velma, she actually is happy to get along with, especially Norville who was attentive to her needs when she was being masqueraded as her sister and his child.
• Evil-Detecting Baby: While not so much evil, but just Jerkass since she dislikes her older sister, Velma, who has a nasty personality and treats her like garbage.
• Shared Family Quirks: Just like her older sister, Amanda is very attached to her own mother and is willing to do anything to reunite with her when Velma lies about her being her daughter with Norville.
• Half-Sibling Angst: Velma gives her a lot of grief for being her father's daughter with his girlfriend. She also gets this from Diya after it's revealed she is actually Aman and Sophie's daughter and is shown to be very mad at Velma for locking her out of the house with them.
• Parental Favoritism: Downplayed. While Aman does show more favor towards his younger daughter and gives her more attention than Velma, he still tries to dodge his duties towards her and uses work and hanging out with Velma as excuses.
• Practically Different Generations: She is a newborn, and her sister is fifteen years older than her, and was even passed as Velma's daughter so Diya wouldn't freak out about Aman moving on and having another child with Sophie.
• Three-Month-Old Newborn: She's supposed to be a newborn but she's frequently shown to have development that is more around an one year old: having limb & head mobility, eating solid foods like cereal, showing tooth growth, and even being able to stand up on her feet.
• Toilet Humor: Due to being a baby, she is often used for poo and pee jokes.

Rogers Family

Blythe Rogers

Voiced by: Nicole Byer

Norville's mom.

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• All There in the Manual: According to the official Twitter account of the show, she married Lamont to get back at her mom.
• Black Boss Lady: She is black, and the principal of Crystal Cove High School.
• Happily Married: Despite her husband being a pushover for her, they do have one of the stable relationships in the show.
• Excellent Judge of Character: After her son tells her about Velma's plan to lie to her mother about Amanda being his daughter with her, she blatantly states that he needs to get better friends than her and move to another school.
• Loved by All: Unlike her husband, she gets respect from the student population and other adults.
• Not So Above It All: Like so many nicer characters on this show, she does show some unpleasant qualities like admitting she didn't want a child and wants to avoid being seen around the band geeks when she drops off Norville for a sleepover.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: She's the principal of Crystal Cove High School and is willing to help Velma's investigation by sharing her Dark and Troubled Past about her Mad Scientist mother.

Lamont Rogers

Voiced by: Gary Cole

Norville's dad.

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• Astonishingly Appropriate Appearance: Being the dad of Norville "Shaggy" Rogers in this continuity, Lamont more closely resembles his son's original counterpart, but with different clothing and a full beard.
• Bumbling Dad: Although he's a good father to his son, he fumbles at his job and is generally looked down upon by staff and the school population.
• Butt-Monkey: No one ever takes him seriously as a guidance counselor and shoots down his authority on anything, requiring him to wear a special jacket to do so.
• Doting Grandparent: Although Amanda is passed as being his granddaughter due to Velma lying to her mother about her and Norville being her parents, he happily plays the role and takes loving interest in her.
• Good Parents: He might not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but he obviously loves his son and tries to help him the best way he can (even if his advice might not be the best). He even made him a sword for his birthday even though it didn't come out right.
• Happily Married: Despite being a Henpecked Husband to his wife, they have a stable marriage compared to the other parents on the show.
• Henpecked Husband: He constantly does anything his wife asks him, to the point that he will even move stuff out of her ex-boyfriend's home.
• Hippie Parent: He's a guidance counselor who utilizes a special jacket to charm his students into talking about their problems and the reason Norville's a Dogged Nice Guy.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Even though he tries to help Velma with Diya's condition (even to the point taking care of Amanda when she is passed as her and Norville's child), she readily accuses him of being the serial killer with flimsy evidence and calls the police on him which destroys his house.
• Open-Minded Parent: He doesn't mind his son pretending to masquerade as Amanda's father so Velma's mom wouldn't find out her husband had moved on with Sophie.
• Red Herring: He’s suspected of being the murderer because he has a welder’s mask in his office. Velma unsurprisingly jumps to the wrong conclusion and has the man swatted. She finds out the hard way that Lamont made his son a sword for his birthday, which is why he has the mask.
• What Does She See in Him?: Velma sees Blythe's reputation as a person ruined by being a high school principal married to a high school counselor.

Edna Perdue

Voiced by: Vanessa Williams

Norville's grandma (through Blythe). She died some years ago.

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• Black and Nerdy: She is black, and a Mad Scientist.
• Mad Scientist: She experimented with Brain Transplant called project SCOOBI to swap the brains of "meddling kids" with military soldiers and succeeded.
• Posthumous Character: She is long dead in the present day, but her work ties into season one's plot. Subverted in season 2, where she is revealed to be in hiding from the military.

Blake Family

Donna Blay and Linda Ke

Voiced by: Jane Lynch (Donna); Wanda Sykes (Linda)

Daphne's adoptive moms.

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• Happily Married: Even though they are not always the most competent detectives alive, they really do love each other and have a stable relationship like the Rogers couple.
• Mama Bear: When Daphne is listed as one the killer’s next potential targets, they both keep her locked in her bedroom and put locks on her window to prevent her from getting out and the killer from getting in. They even save her from her criminal biological parents before the latter betray her.
• Ms. Vice Girl: Both mean well and love both each other and Daphne dearly but are pushovers who are not all that great at their job.
• Police Are Useless: It's acknowledged that Donna Blay and Linda Ke suck at being real detectives. Not only are they dragging their feet in finding Diya Dinkley, but they treat Daphne outing Velma as a murder-suspect as a mild inconvenience and they even try to encourage Velma — who is a teenager with no experience solving real mysteries at this point — to do their job for them. They are also useless with their daughter's borderline criminal behavior, doing nothing to stop her drug dealing and violent tendencies.
• Pushover Parents: A worse case than Diya, as they regularly let their daughter get away with many crimes despite being detectives, which includes violently stabbing a student in front of them.

Carroll and Darren

Voiced by: Ming-Na Wen (Carroll); Ken Leung (Darren)

Daphne's bio-parents. They abandoned her.

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• Affably Evil: They're unrepentant criminals who abandoned their biological daughter, Daphne, for their illegal mining operations, but they treat her with nothing but respect when they meet, and her father admits she deserved better than them before betraying her. He even asks Norville's help for his passive-aggressive issues when he visited Fred in prison. Carroll even left an apology note with a vital clue to Daphne in the finale before casually revealing she stole ten dollars from her locker.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Darren first appears as a background character when Norville is trying to find a way to get money for Velma's case file so he can guilt her into dating him. He later turns out to be part of the Crystal Mine's gang and Daphne's biological father.
• Outlaw Couple: Although it's not confirmed they are married, they are romantically together and are part of a criminal gang.
• Parental Abandonment: They both abandoned Daphne as a baby so they can make off with treasure.
• Would Hurt a Child: Darren pulled a gun on Daphne and would have shot her had Donna and Linda not intervened.

Jones Family

William Jones

Voiced by: Frank Welker

Fred's a-hole dad.

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• Abusive Parents: Fred's dad is more of a guy who wants his son to be the ideal man in a jerk way.
• Ambiguously Bi: William is married to Victoria, but Fred mentions that he has a special drawer with “men’s workout magazines” in it, suggesting that they may actually be gay magazines that he’s secretly looking at.
• Pet the Dog: When Fred is being arrested and escorted to a squad car, Mr. Jones shielded Fred from the paparazzi when his son’s bathrobe came loose and exposed his body to the crowd. He may be an abusive father with a highly toxic mindset, but protecting his naked teenage son from being photographed was one of the more decent things he’s done.
• Red Herring: He showed numerous ominous behaviors, like having plans to do insurance fraud and was spying on Victoria and Daphne talking through a portrait in their room until it was revealed he was an Unwitting Pawn hypnotized by his wife like Diya was.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: He disapproves of Fred being interested in Velma not because she's a terrible person that got him sent to jail but due to the fact that she's a "homely" girl who doesn't fit his definition of beauty.
• Strong Family Resemblance: He looks like a middle aged version of his son.

Victoria Jones

Voiced by: Cherry Jones

Fred's equally worse mom.

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• Abusive Parents: She’s verbally abusive to Fred and once threatened to kick him out of his home if he failed to become Fog King. According to Fred, she and her husband thanked the North Koreans for kidnapping his brother, making him believe that they won’t pay any ransom for his life.
• Even Evil Can Be Loved: Despite how horribly abusive she is, Fred still loves his mother. He was sincerely broken up by her death and left a rose on her gravestone.
• Everything's Sparkly with Jewelry: Victoria wears a necklace with a blue gemstone; if supplementary material is to be believed, it costs $2,800.
• Light Is Not Good: Has blonde hair and wears a long, white dress with white shoes, but is an Abusive Mom and the true killer.

Crystal Cove High

Olive

Voiced by: Fortune Feimster

A blond girl, who's the resident Alpha Bitch.

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• At Least I Admit It: She openly admits that she's a bitch who loves looking hot and calls Velma out for pretending to be Holier Than Thou.
• Everyone Has Standards: She's an Alpha Bitch bully, but even she disapproves of Velma's behavior towards everyone. She also kicks Daphne out of the Girl Posse for trying to leave the brains of the murdered girls in the mines.
• Hypocrite: While it’s completely justified for Olive to call Velma out on the latter’s terrible attitude, Olive can still come off as hypocrite since she is still a shallow bully who picked on Velma for shallow reasons.
• Hypocrite Has a Point: Olive is still right to be fed up with Velma's attitude towards everyone despite her being a bully.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Olive may be an Alpha Bitch who regularly picks on Velma. However, given Velma’s general self-righteous and downright mean-spirited behavior towards pretty much everyone, it’s easy to see why Olive is such a prick to her in return.
  • In "Velma Kai", she's completely right to call her out for reading Daphne's diary in front of the school and reveal that she has mental health issues in an attempt to ruin her popularity.
  • She also makes a good point to Velma by saying her definition of “womanhood” is more restrictive than the Girl Posse's in "Velma Makes a List".

Gigi

Voiced by: Yvonne Orji

She's the Beta Bitch but, underneath, she can be nice (sometimes).

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• Hollywood Healing: After almost dying from a bee sting in episode 6, she is alright without any real damage done to her overall health.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: While she can be a petty Beta Bitch at times, she genuinely likes Norville, and she is disgusted with Velma for never appreciating him. She was also willing to keep Norville’s relation to Edna Perdue a secret from Velma and only relented when she was tricked into revealing it.
• Military Brat: Her father is shown in to be in the military.
• Only Sane Woman: While Gigi isn't perfect compared to the rest of the popular girls, she comes across as the most reasonable and level-headed.
• Plot Allergy: In episode 6, she gets stung by a bee and almost dies due to the adrenaline shots being used all on Velma during her hallucinations. She manages to recover the next episode without any real huge consequences and it's never mentioned again.
• Significant Wardrobe Shift: Downplayed. After the events of "Velma Makes a List," she's inspired to take on a style she's more comfortable with, a pair of Rough Overalls

Brenda, Krista, and Lola

Voiced by: Shay Mitchell (Brenda); Debby Ryan (Krista); Kulap Vilaysack (Lola)

Three girls a part of Olive's girl posse. They don't last long, though.

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• Back from the Dead: They get their bodies back in the season two finale.
• Brain in a Jar: It's eventually revealed that this was their actual fate, their brains having been scooped out and placed in jars with electronic eyes to view their surroundings.
• Casting Gag: Brenda and Krista are voiced by actresses familiar from playing television popular teen-girls.
• Reports of My Death Were Greatly Exaggerated: They were thought to have died after their brains were scooped out, only for it to be later revealed that they live on, albeit in the forms of a Brain in a Jar.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: Double Subverted. While their bodies are long dead, their brains remain alive and rescued from the killer's hideout. However, they remain Flat Characters like the rest of the Girl Posse aside from Olive and Gigi.

Others

Sheriff Earl Cogburn

Voiced by: Stephen Root

The town sheriff who isn't good at his job.

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• Bigot with a Badge: He pretty much acts sexist to Velma whenever he interacts with her.
• Expy: He bears a strong physical resemblance to Barney Fife.
• Hate Sink: Judging by the way he is written and being unpleasant in his actions, he can be a character designed for audiences to dislike but ends up on the opposite way with the audience reaction with him being against whom his victim is, even if said victim is an underaged girl.
• Jerkass to One: He makes sexist comments against Velma and even runs her over at one point. Despite all of this, he never does the same for other women including Donna and Linda who are fellow co-workers.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: He ran over a teenage girl for petty reasons with no serious repercussions other than a Groin Attack by her. He gets murdered by a new killer in The Stinger of the finale.
• Police Are Useless: He's even more useless than Donna and Linda since they're more like Brilliant, but Lazy while he declares the mystery solved just because the serial killer is said to be a ghost.
• Would Hurt a Child: He rammed Velma, a teenager, without hesitation with his car just because she broke curfew.

Mayor Dave

Voiced by: Jim Rash

The town's mayor.

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• Dirty Old Man: He's a middle-aged man who perves on the underage high school girls.
• Hypocrite: He sets a curfew preventing anyone from being out after dark when the serial killer is still around but doesn't follow his own protocol and gets thrown in jail with others who broke the rule.
• Mayor Pain: He spent ten thousand dollars on a banner for the citizens to celebrate being murder free for two weeks, only for it to be immediately irrelevant when Lola's murder is announced, much to his dismay.

Harry Meeting

Someone who worked with Mrs. Purdue.

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• Greater-Scope Villain: He founded project SCOOBI to use Edna Perdue's work to infiltrate "meddling kids" by swapping their brains with his soldiers. He's also the father of the serial killer, Victoria Jones, who attempted to recreate her dad's work to further her husband's family business.
• Posthumous Character: Just like Edna Purdue (actually unlike her), he is long dead, but his actions still play an integral part of the story, and he is the father of Victoria Jones, who recreates his work for her plan.

Don

Voiced by: Gary Anthony Williams

Gigi's father from the military.

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• Ascended Extra: A minor character in season one who is promoted to supporting in season two.

Amber

Voiced by: Sara Ramirez

A nonbinary newcomer in season 2.

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Thorn

Voiced by: Jennifer Hale

Amber's aunt and a former member of the Hex Girls.

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The Killer (season 1) (spoilers)

Victoria Jones, Fred's mom.

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• Behind Every Great Man: She turns out to be the driving force behind making Jones Gentlemen's Accessories into the successful company it is today and is determined to not to see her life's work be undone by her son's lack of business savy.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Victoria comes off throughout the series as only a passive socialite and an enabler of Fred's whole personality. The final episodes first reveal her to be the real Man Behind the Man of the family company and then the serial killer, revealing her as a Manipulative Bitch who masterminded everything in a lifelong Evil Plan.
• Didn't Think This Through: She went through with murdering three popular girls for their brains without assessing whether they'd even be interested in taking over Fred's body and the company; They weren't.
• Evil Matriarch: Victoria is the killer and she’s been trying to find the perfect brain to replace her son’s so that he will be a successful heir to the family company.
• Evil Plan: Victoria tried to remove Fred’s brain and replace it with someone else’s so that he can run the family company.
• Gold Digger: She only married William due to the fact that he was wealthy.
• Hate Sink: Her abusive nature to Fred and killing innocent girls to have one of their brains replace his out of selfish intentions shows how she is a character meant to be hated.
• It's All About Me: Her intentions are rooted into making sure everything she worked for isn't ruined since she didn't raise her son properly to inherit and as a result she is resorting to killing girls for their brains, so that they can replace her son's which would end in him being killed.
• Never My Fault: Instead of realizing she spoiled her son too much, she instead treats him as inherently incompetent to sufficiently run a business and resorts to a convoluted scheme to replace his brain with a smarter person (which would result in killing him).
• More Deadly Than the Male: Fred's mother is shown to be way worse than her husband and wants to kill her son by replacing and discarding his brain.
• Samus Is a Girl: The serial killer wore a welding helmet and miner clothes that passes them off as a man. Their true identity is Diya Dinkley and Victoria Jones, in which the latter is controlling the former to frame for her crimes.
• Would Hurt a Child: She is willing to murder and scoop out the brains of girls in order to place them in the head of her son which would kill him.

The Killer (season 2) (MAJOR SPOILERS)

Voiced by: Jason Mantzoukas

The Ultimate Life Form of project SCOOBI, a talking dog named Scrappy.

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• Adaptational Ugliness: Scrappy is covered in stitches, has 6 nipples, and additional emphasis on his jowly face. He has bright yellow eyes and sharp looking teeth.
• Animals Lack Attributes: Averted with his six nipples.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: While Victoria Jones's motive was to use project SCOOBI to replace her son's brain with a popular girl's, Scrappy wants revenge against his creators for constantly tormenting him after he proved to be too popular.
• Female Misogynist: A Gender-Inverted subversion. While his victims were all men, complete with mutilated crotches, they were all part of his creation and participated in the vicious torment of him. He also had no qualms in murdering Velma when she turned on him.
• Hero Killer: He successfully causes Velma's death, who in turn, kills him from the inside as a spirit.
• Nigh-Invulnerability: Even a missile launched at him couldn't obliterate him. What were his creators thinking making him like this? It takes Velma's death to finally kill him by possessing him as a ghost.
• Obviously Evil: Despite his menacing appearance, he at first claims to be Not Evil, Just Misunderstood, but later admits being the Big Bad of the second season.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: His motivation was to kill his creators for abusing him.
• Walking Spoiler: Velma still couldn't use Scooby-Doo because of Executive Meddling, so they brought back his nephew instead.