In defense of Vanessa

I'm not sure why people act like it's SO crazy and stupid that Vanessa was hanging out with them so much. In the beginning she fell into it because she genuinely liked Nate and Nate genuinely liked her. Her best friend was Dan, at this point he was 100 % in this world because he was dating Serena. Maybe it made a little less sense when her and Dan broke up but he was still friends with Serena and Nate and Nate asked for Vanessa's friendship too. Maybe she could've tried to distance herself while she was in NYU but again Dan was there and so were Blair and Georgina, it's not like she wanted them to be her roomies. The only time I find her presence super annoying and out of place is in season 5 when she kept snooping around even though everyone was clearly done with her haha. But otherwise I don't think it was THAT crazy or disingenuous. And she was definitely not morally worse than Blair or Chuck, no one is worse than them.. The "at least they know they're awful" doesn't make them better people lol (people love them because they grew out of that and actually became better people). Also Vanessa didn't PLAN on drugging Serena, Juliet did. She didn't know about it. It was wrong to lie, to put the blame on Jenny and leave of course, but she was being manipulated by Juliet (she told her that no one would forgive her if she came clean but they would forgive Jenny eventually because she's related to them, Vanessa isn't). She was manipulated by Juliet during the entire thing (it's how she lost Dan too, she wouldn't have stolen Serena's phone if Juliet hadn't convinced her to because she needed it)