Velvet is the main antagonist of Trolls Band Together. She is a Mount Rageon fake pop-star who captures and tortures Trolls to gain their talents and become famous. She is Veneer's older twin sister.
Appearance
Velvet and Veneer, being twins, are both spindly, attractive, doll-like, pearly-white-skinned humanoid giants with green hair, deep-blue eyes, lavender-pink rosy cheeks and sports minimal makeup.
Velvet's hair is longer and wavier and has been kept in a high-ponytail, with the two longest parts of head ornaments vaguely resembling the letter “V”. In addition, her eyes possesses fluttery-like lashes, and her makeup consists of sparkly-light violet eyeshadows and fuchsia lip gloss. Her blue eyes are comparatively darker than Veneer's.
Velvet and her brother both wore V-neck gold tank tops worn under similarly-designed crop-tops with pointed shoulder-pads, followed by crystal accessories. In this case for Velvet, her gold attire is followed by a matching miniskirt, and her accessories includes a spiked-tiara, two chokers with one of them having a diamond-shaped pendant, bracelets on both her wrists, and high-heeled boots; all of them made out of grape-purple crystals. She also dawned a set of fuchsia-purple, teardrop-shaped dangle earrings.
As a child, her hair was shorter and donned with a light blue headband. She wore a short-sleeved purple dress with a light lavender cross in the middle, and white shoes with purple stripes.
Personality
Velvet is the "leader" of the twins and the mastermind of the pair, being the one to conspire to kidnap and imprison Floyd, as well as the main ambition behind the duos raise to fame and fortune. She believes her brother and herself are deserving of the life their fraudulent lifestyle they've created together.
Velvet herself as an individual sports a very egotistic personality being prideful, spoiled and bratty as she desires to be heavily loved by everyone. Velvet acts spoilt and loves the attention her fame brings her, while talking to Kid Ritz she acts confident and constantly reiterates how much she loves herself. However, when not in the spotlight, she doesn't want to work hard to achieve her goals morally, preferring to be greedy and can have a temper. She is also a control freak, who believes that asserting dominance is her form of love.
She ends up disregarding other lifeforms like the Trolls and Crimp, and is very manipulative to ones, such as Veneer, who love her. In fact, she is happy to abuse, torture or even cost another lifeform, which sometimes included her loved ones, their lives to reach her goals. She is nearly completely unapologetic and showed zero remorse for her actions even after being arrested. Despite of her high intelligence, Velvet's ego blinds her from understanding her mistakes and can make her very gullible, and in many cases unable to expect consequences for her actions.
Relationships
Veneer
Veneer is Velvet's younger twin brother, and both share a passion, aspiring to be big stars despite lacking talent. Despite being twins, Velvet makes Veneer dependent on her decisions by allowing his love for her to lead him astray. She consistently disregards his opinions, often rejecting his many suggestions, not giving him space to have separate visions, and serving as a bad influence on him. Despite this, they seem united, with Velvet enjoying 'sharing' fame with Veneer, and it is shown several times he idolized her, a fact she is aware of as he often lifts her ego. Her manipulations are highlighted when she calls him a 'beautiful idiot,' picking up and putting him down in one statement.
Even when Veneer publicly exposes their scheme and accepts imprisonment, Velvet considers her brother's admission of guilt foolish, ironically claiming she 'doesn't even know him'. Veneer also points out she does know the real him, but asked him to change for her. This shows how Velvet has been under the belief that she must control Veneer to make sure he loves her by becoming the person she desires from him.
Floyd
Having described her as a heartless diva and a "succubus", Floyd is Velvet and Veneer's former captive, whom they exploit to gain singing voices. Velvet is the one who actively treats Floyd with more cruelty, even going as far as to harm Floyd's brothers and friends physically. She also finds Floyd sacrificing himself for his brothers foolish and confusing. However, Floyd would later get his payback on her, when his words finally proved to have gotten through Veneer on betraying her and her getting arrested.
Crimp
Crimp is Velvet and Veneer's assistant. Velvet regards Crimp as useless, showing Veneer how to mistreat her as well. Crimp would eventually arrest Velvet in the end as payback.
Other Trolls and Rhonda
Akin to how she treats Floyd, Velvet is cruel and heartless towards other Trolls and creatures, also viewing them as below her both literally and metaphorically. This is evident when she tried stomping onto Queen Poppy, Viva, and Branch, and even swatted Branch for trying to reach Floyd. She also gladly tossed Rhonda into the cramped closet, showing callous disregard to the Trolls' companions as well. In fact, even till the end, she fails to understand the Trolls' altruism, proving how she doesn't care about their positive qualities at all.
Skills & Abilities
She has all the abilities of a Mount Rageon.
By placing a Troll in a diamond bottle, she and Veneer can take the singing abilities of any Troll and use it for their own means. The bottles are made of diamond, and can only be shattered by a close family harmony.
Music
It should be noted that both she and Veneer actually cannot sing at all, hence needing to rely on the singing of the Trolls.
Velvet is the lead singer of their duo and Veneer backs her voice up. They sing in a "Call and Response" style of music where Velvet sings to Veneer and he responds to her or vice versa.
In their final song medley, Velvet's singing displays huge amounts of her just showing off what she is capable of. As a female vocalist, she goes higher than Veneer is capable of singing as a male and uses vocalizations, falsettos and head vocals, singing higher then Veneer can manage to produce, and whilst he sings the same amount as her, he is reduced to back up singer due to her higher volume and general need for the spotlight. During his solos, or when singing in sync with Velvet, Veneer attempts to harmonize and sings his normal routine, though it's frequently drowned out by Velvet.
Dancing
Despite lacking in singing, she and Veneer are apt in dancing. However, Velvet is not content with her current dance moves, and therefore wants to steal more of Floyd's talents.
Forgery
Velvet is extremely apt in imitating and impersonating handwriting, with how she managed to forge Floyd's handwriting to trick John Dory into believing her.
Vehicle Maneuver
As seen in the climax's car chase, she is shown to know basic vehicle driving skills.
Intelligence
Being the smarter one, Velvet knows how to lie and scheme to her own advantage, for example giving Veneer fake compliments to force him into complying, or deceiving Crimp into making vacuum shoulder pads with the excuse of wanting smoothie machines, as well as making a special parking lot to trick John Dory into her trap. However, she is still gullible to those who are skilled on pretending death in front of her, and is incapable of adapting to unexpected situations like being exposed by Veneer publicly.
Songs
Trolls Band Together
Etymology
Velvet is a type of fabric, renowned for its smooth texture and high quality. This further vindicates her huge ego and larger than life attitude. Her name is also derived from the eponymous color that symbolizes power and wealth, pertinent to her thirst for accruing more fame and fortune.
Her name is also ironically a dentistry term, specifically 'velvet etch', which is a chemical in a special syringe for cleaning in between the teeth and metaphorically referencing how she has been desperately orchestrating her own scheme as a fake celebrity to cover up her own flaws and insecurities.
Medical Status and Issues
Age and Birth Details
Similar to the birth order of many Trolls characters, Velvet is portrayed as the slightly older child in her family compared to her brother. This is also confirmed through movie dialogues about how Velvet met Veneer when he was a baby, though the 'time' of this encounter remains unknown as Velvet has a habit of exaggerating, leaving Veneer looking at her with confusion.
Her age is unknown, but since all the known Mount Rageons are teenagers, it has been confirmed that she is also a teenager.
The movie strongly suggests that she and her brother are fraternal twins, due to their similar height in childhood flashbacks, as well as identical skin tone, eye color, and hair. Her status as a twin is also confirmed in Sister Squad/Band-tastic Brothers and The Art of DreamWorks Trolls Band Together, as well as a deleted storyboard for the movie.
Trivia
General
- Velvet and Veneer's relationship is an ironic juxtaposition to the Trolls. While the Trolls help their siblings with love and care despite their previous separations to lift one another up in the end, Velvet metaphorically and literally drags down Veneer who makes him overdependent on her, even if her influence is terrible on him.
- Velvet and Veneer are nods to fake-celebrities. This happened from time to time in the 80s and 90s, wherein people with talent were deemed not good enough to promote so their talent was used and a someone else much more marketable was taught how to pretend. The most famous example of this being Milli Vanilli.
- Velvet and Veneer are the only Mount Rageons to be confirmed to have parents. However, both parents remain mentioned and are left unseen.
- According to DreamWorks Trolls Twitter account, Velvet's 75 Soft Challenge list includes:[1]
- Yelling at Veneer for making her participate in this challenge, and then getting Crimp to do it for her later
- Bossing Crimp and Veneer around every hour (because she believes that someone has to be the boss here)
- Taking yacht out every weekend with Veneer
- Counting all her loyal followers every morning
- Finding a new Troll every time she needs to sing (she doesn't want to practice for an hour)
- Having Crimp polish all of her nice things
- Reminding Veneer she's the boss whenever she gets the chance
- She is so far the first main antagonist from the Trolls movies that didn't die or got redeemed.
Specific To...
- Trolls Band Together
- Although displayed in the movie that she and her brother were raised in the suburbs, an interview from the filmmakers revealed that he and Velvet were presumably forced to live and work below the cloud line of Mount Rageous, which are the lower class working districts.[2]
- Velvet is considered to be an extremely dangerous villain from the movie, as she knows what she is doing hurts Floyd but refuses to choose other options.
- Velvet is the only Trolls Band Together character who didn't receive a post-production interview for her voice actor, presumably due to Amy Schumer being a controversial figure.
- Following the prior, Velvet is also the only character with two separate voice actresses, Brianna Mazzola taking on her singing voice whilst Amy Schumer holds the speaking role.
- Velvet can be regarded as a dark foil to John Dory, as both are older siblings with massive egos. However, while John Dory eventually comes to realize his flaw of being too egotistical, and actually prioritizes his family first, Velvet demonstrates no care for Veneer as she allows her ego to blind her, leading to her losing everything including her own brother.
- Velvet's plan didn't include include capturing Branch. Like the Pop Trolls she seemed to be unaware of him being in BroZone and this was also part of her downfall.
- Both Velvet and Veneer's hairstyles during their last concert symbolize the two major clefs of the music scale, with Velvet's representing the treble clef.
- There was formerly a scene in storyboards of Velvet forcibly spraying Floyd's essence into Veneer's throat, then closing her brother's coughing mouth with her fingers afterwards.
- Other Media
- In Trolls Band Together: The Junior Novelization, Velvet and Veneer were originally planned to be defeated together by falling off the yacht and into the river, prior to being arrested. Velvet would also accidentally expose herself with her horrible singing voice, even when pleading the audiences to not listen to Crimp.
- There was also another scene where she showcased her mistreatment towards Veneer by spraying Floyd's essence into his mouth without warning him, with said warning given much later after she sprayed.
- She was also going to be cuffed by Veneer instead of Crimp, while also briefly admiring the cuffs herself.
- After her defeat, she would sing out a horrible voice that ended up exposing herself to the fans.
- However, with the novelization being considered to be beta manuscript, these alternative scenes are therefore only considered as filler or alternative canon.
- The only information that can be considered canon from the Junior Novelization is Velvet has always been intended to be the older sibling, even before it was established she is a twin.
- However, with the novelization being considered to be beta manuscript, these alternative scenes are therefore only considered as filler or alternative canon.
- In early concept artworks, both Velvet and Veneer were intended to be Bergens instead of Mount Rageons.
References
| Trolls Band Together characters | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Trolls - Main Characters | ||||
| Queen Poppy • Branch • John Dory • Bruce • Floyd • Clay • Viva • Tiny Diamond | ||||
| Trolls - Minor Characters | ||||
| Guy Diamond • Satin & Chenille • Biggie • Cooper • Prince Darnell • King Peppy • Grandma Rosiepuff • Ablaze • Hype • Boom • Trickee | ||||
| Bergens | ||||
| King Gristle Jr. • Bridget • Miss Maxine • Aunt Smead | ||||
| Mount Rageons | ||||
| Velvet • Veneer • Kid Ritz | ||||
| Vacaytioners | ||||
| Brandy • Bruce & Brandy's Children | ||||
| Other Characters | ||||
| Mr. Dinkles • Cloud Guy • Crimp • Rhonda | ||||
| Cut | ||||
| Unknown | ||||