That's a reasonable question! I haven't really had the chance to get into Starlet as a character as much as I'd like, but we'll get there, and in the meantime I never mind answering honest questions.

Alec does a lot of horrific things. Ultimately the stories I'm writing could be summed up as being about a horrible family and the people they hurt, and Alec is probably the biggest contributor to the latter. I can see how after a while it might seem like I'm just adding atrocities for the sake of adding them, but I feel like Star is key to the themes I include for a number of reasons: she illustrates the class components of Alec's misdeeds; her family situation and upbringing contrast strongly with Isabelle's, deepening the exploration of childhood vulnerability; and in the end she, like Isabelle, finds happiness and healing far away from those who hurt her.

In a lot of ways, Starlet is kind of an exercise in comparing and contrasting with Isabelle. They're both genderfucked, highly dissociative people left disabled by childhood abuse, robbed of normal development by adults who should have done better. However, Star primarily faced neglect and uncaring, casually exploitative caretakers, whereas Isabelle suffered from her father's obsession and desire to possess her. Star's greatest childhood trauma, being raped by Alec, was done once and with brutal disregard for her, whereas Isabelle was carefully groomed into a decade of abuse over a long time. Both of them were rendered vulnerable simply by the fact that they were children of evil, heartless individuals, but in the end they're able to decide who they are as their own people beyond what happened to them.

I think that's the crux of it. If you think of Starlet as nothing more than what Alec did to her, of course it's going to seem gratuitous, because all it really does is serve to illustrate something that we already know: that Alec is a sick motherfucker who should be hanged in the streets. We're already very aware of that! It's Starlet's life after that encounter, especially as an adult forging her own way, that makes her interesting and meaningful as a character.

Thank you very much for the question! If you want more details on Starlet's life I recommend you ask my friend Voros, who created her. Here's the link to his askbox: https://revospring.net/@veresvoros