While i agree Riya alone is not is not to be blamed . Why blame only Riya when others like shivam nimmi preti khusiya are , who have seen and have been at receiving end of shanti's conspiracies have short term memories , they never bother to connect the dots. Personally i do like Riya , i also like ekta , some of them here are not impressed, which is fair enough . What i feel personally is some things shown in serial are correct and you can co relate to your personal life specially if you've lived in a nuclear family and married in a joint family but tell me, why an educated girl like Riya is finding it so difficult to find out what a manipulative woman shanti n sarla are ?? One incident is more than enough ..each human being is empowered with observational skills and merely observing shanti one can know what type of a woman she is. In the serial we saw riya's dadi bua warning her so many times about Shanti and yet Riya vehemently refused to believe her. She didn't believe one of her own people and thats a mistake . She sees day in and day out sarla keeps coming to shanti sadan and doesn't even lift a finger , fleeces them of their hard earned money and all she does is run her guttermouth and leaves no stone unturned to humiliate her neices and her sis in law .. in real life how can a girl like Riya not sense this ?
Maybe that girl will not talk/discuss about their verbal atrocities with her hubby and mil but atleast she will try to be careful enough not to be a puppet in their hands , which CVS are showing that way. Again in real life , the criminal conspiracies of people like Sarla are short lived specially if they live in a small city , where each one knows one another.