Pretty Little Liars’ Most Fascinating Character
Some characters ignite emotion. Some steal the hearts of audiences. And then there are characters like Mona Vanderwaal—the ones who become the best part of the entire show. In Pretty Little Liars, Mona wasn’t your average suspect or even villain. She was the epiphany of what made the liars so fucking awful in the first place.
Long before bigger reveals and more complicated villains arrived, Mona set the standard. She was smart, wounded, funny, dangerous, unpredictable, and always ten steps ahead of everyone around her, including the police, and all while maintaining perfect hair, a high GPA, and a high-ranking position in the French club! Depending on the season, she could be a victim, mastermind, ally, enemy, survivor, or all of them at once.
And that complexity is exactly why Mona Vanderwaal remains one of the best-written characters in Pretty Little Liars. We can’t discuss Mona without getting into heavy topics like identity, power, performance, humiliation, revenge, and the desperate need to be seen; let’s chat about Mona Vaanderwal and all the times she’s made us want to scream.
Before Mona Became “A”
When we first meet Mona, she’s a dweeb who was often ignored and made fun of by Alison and the other liars. In the books, she’s chasing behind Alison and Spencer, trying to get their attention to hang out. On the TV show, it’s the same, only with Aria rather than Spencer. They run away from her until they end up in a back alley, where they spot Aria’s father having an affair.
Fast forward a year, Aria is back from Iceland and shocked to see that Mona now appears to be the classic popular it-girl, alongside Hefty Hanna. The pair were stylish, sharp-tongued, socially aware, and inseparable. On the surface, she looked like someone who had won the game of high school.
But Mona’s story began long before that makeover.
Before the confidence, the status, the cruelty, Mona was one of Alison DiLaurentis’s favorite targets. She was incessantly mocked, shamed, and treated as invisible unless Alison decided to make Mona the brunt of her jokes for the day. In the show, that history becomes the emotional root for Mona’s anger. She didn’t just dislike Alison—she internalized everything she represented.
Shaped by humiliation, Mona decided she would never be powerless again. Thus, the birth of A.
The Night Alison Disappeared
Mona had been taunting Alison with angry texts, threatening notes, and even physical masked harm for almost a year before her disappearance. Whenever she got the opportunity to scare the shit out of her bully, she took it. That included harassing her on the night of Halloween, threatening to kill her when she went on her search for A, and genuinely making the girl fear for her life so much that she faked her death at 15.
Fuming and desperate to end Alison’s torment for good, Mona found her way in the Dilaurentis backyard with a shovel in hand. Seeing Bethany parade to the house, thinking it was Alison, all the torture flashed before her eyes, and she swung. With the blond hair and yellow top as confirmation, she fled the scene of the crime, convinced that she had killed her lifelong bully.
So on her drive home, imagine the wave of emotions she felt, spotting Alison drifting on the side of the road, in shock and covered in dirt. She used the opportunity to convince Alison that she would only be safe if she evaded Rosewood, allowing everyone to believe she was dead. Terrified by the events leading up to this moment, Alison takes Mona’s advice, giving some of her own, to help Loser Mona become the new it-girl.
The Complexity of Mona & Hanna
After Alison disappears, Hanna and Mona reinvent themselves together, stepping into the social vacuum Alison left behind. But even in that friendship, there’s all this tragedy and trauma that Mona had buried deep under the surface, and Hanna was too naive to see it.
Mona didn’t just want popularity. She needed it. She needed proof that she could be the kind of girl that people noticed, and feared, and respected. As much as she hated Alison, she needed to be her, or outdo her, and that was the only way she knew how to be happy within herself.
I love talking about Mona’s character because her lore is so dark and twisty and ironic. She learned from her experience as a victim that cruelty creates control, and control is power. That power is what drives Mona in her core. It’s her defense mechanism, because without power, without A, deep down all she really is is Loser Mona, and that terrifies her.
Hanna and Mona were best friends before Alison recruited Hanna to her posse and labeled Mona a loser. Honored to be popular and included, Hanna reluctantly shunned her friend. This is part of the reason Mona feels so resentful of Hanna and gives her the brunt of the “A” torment when she becomes close with the liars again. It’s much more personal. Thus, one of the most emotionally complicated dynamics in the series.
The ouija board, the riddles, and the blackmail forcing the girls to betray one another were all expressions of Mona’s need to control the emotional terms of every relationship around her. The deep connective relationships that she lacked in her own life. Even when she wanted connection, she wanted power more.
There is a lot of debate on this topic, given that A technically brought the liars back together, but I think it’s easily debunked by the notion that Mona is paranoid and extremely insecure. She saw Hanna go out of her way to talk to Spencer at the mall and give her fashion advice. She saw Hanna wave at Aria when the pair spotted her in Fitz’s class on the first day of school. In Mona’s mind, with Aria back, it was probably just a matter of time before Hanna abandoned her again, and technically, she was right.
I talk way more about the unique dynamic of Hanna and Mona here, so check it out if you haven’t already.
Mona as the Original “A”
When Mona is revealed as A in the season two finale “Unmasked”, it works within the confines of the story because it feels so personal.
Mona’s reveal is built on:
- Her awful history with Alison
- Her complex friendship with Hanna
- Her presence at major events like the fashion show
- Her intelligence constantly being underestimated
- Her resentment toward the liars
She didn’t just threaten the Liars. She studied them. She isolated them. She weaponized their insecurities. She created games where the only real goal was psychological control over them. The same psychological control they had over her.
That’s why her version of A feels so much more effective than the later versions. It’s intimate. We’ve gone through this whole journey with her, and I am so glad the showrunners decided to keep her on, because her character continued to develop and steal my heart right up to the show’s finale.
Rehabilitation or Regression?
After her reveal, Mona is sent to a mental institution named the Radley Sanitarium. You’d think the writers would have just left her there to rot, occasionally using her to move the plot forward or give an answer the liars couldn’t find on their own. Thankfully, they had enough sense to keep Mona on as a series regular.
This decision was definitely for the best, because once the hoodie came off, Mona was even more fascinating to watch on screen. Vulnerable, isolated, and heavily medicated, she still managed to be as cunning as ever. According to Dr. Sullivan, she was diagnosed with a “perpetual state of hyperreality,” paired with extreme intelligence and high-functioning traits. This girl was the reason I was still clocking in every week to find out what the hell was going on.
Was she just a minion for an even bigger bad? Was she hallucinating from all the drugs? (Yes). Would she get some form of redemption arc? There was so much left to explore with her, and I was sat for it all.
We know that during this time, Cece frequently visited Mona for information about her stint as A. She later used this data to appoint herself Mona’s silent partner and, after the lodge fire, to take the game entirely from her.
Even after the lodge fire, though, there was constant back-and-forth with the audience. Is she really a victim in all of this, or is she playing the liars? Can she be trusted? There would be instances where she would help the girls, but she’d be so secretive and still watching the liars from the shadows, so it was always so hard to gauge where her loyalties lay. I lived for it.
It also seems that Wren was her doctor, or at least one of the doctors on her team at this time. It’s unclear if it was him or Cece who gave Mona the information needed to get in and out of Radley, but considering that Wren didn’t turn out to be a villain or have a scene explaining this, we’re going under the canon of Cece being the culprit. However, the Mona and Wren relationship is so fascinating, and I wish we had more of their therapy sessions shown.
Regardless of who was on this girl’s rehabilitation team, Radley didn’t stop Mona from blackmailing Lucas, Melissa, or Toby to do her dirty work on the Halloween train. She was still actively working as A until the lodge fire. I don’t think the Radley Sanitarium ever truly helped anyone, and it deserved to be shut down.
From Villain to Victim
One of the many reasons Mona’s character is so refreshing is that the show kept evolving her role. She went from mastermind to pawn. From hunter to hunted. She was the one who built the game, just to become a player on the board.
When Cece took the game from Mona, though, she lost a lot more than her sense of control; she lost her identity. It was stolen from her, much like she stole Alison’s. This is what drives her to play double agent in season 5, fake her death, and expose A. Of course, the plan backfired, because A knows everything and probably had cameras hidden somewhere inside of Mona’s bedroom. So when Mike found the fridge full of blood and confronted her about it, it’s likely that Cece witnessed that entire encounter on her surveillance and adjusted accordingly, resulting in Mona’s abduction.
The worst part about Mona being put in the dollhouse was that she was forced to become Alison. Had she always envied Alison and wanted to be just like her, if not better? Yes. Did she not create an entire persona and torment Alison’s friends, getting off on the impersonation? Also, yes. However, being forced to actually cosplay Alison in an underground dungeon, facing “the hole” whenever she wasn’t compliant, had to be the darkest shit this show ever did.
I would also like to take this opportunity to give Ms. Janel Parrish her flowers, as she was phenomenal in this role. It’s such a shame that we didn’t get any time with her to unpack the trauma of the dollhouse, as we did with the other girls. There was one scene in the time jump where Mona asked Spencer if she still had nightmares, and I would have sat for a mini-series of Mona’s therapy sessions with Dr. Sullivan.
Final Thoughts
Mona Vanderwaal’s story is ultimately about transformation—what people become after humiliation, what they pursue power for, and whether reinvention can ever truly heal damage buried deep within ourselves.
I will note Mona’s role in kidnapping Spencer for Alex Drake in season 7, as well as her kidnapping Alex and Mary before fleeing to Paris with them. Personally, I didn’t like this ending. I think the poor girl just needed some genuine friends beyond the world of high school teen drama. I won’t even mention the Perfectionists, because I didn’t care to watch that show further than episode 2.
If you enjoyed this breakdown, you’d love this one! Subscribe to my YouTube channel for more Pretty Little Liars deep dives, character analysis videos, rewrites, and storytelling discussions. Next week, we’ll delve into Hanna and Mona’s friendship, and you can read that here.