The life and death part doesn't bother me, even though this is the first time anything has really interacted from outside of a session on the inside.
Aranea controlling Damara into tossing stuff around is
almost Hussie contradicting himself. Troll Powers have always been a magic crutch for whatever needed to happen in the story, but a
long long time ago Aradia stated that Vriska's mind-control didn't work on her. Since if it did, their feud would never have been a thing.
The obvious answer being that identical trolls don't work the same way. There's been several big hints that Aranea is way better at mind-controlling people than Vriska and more subtle about it.
That's one thing I really like about this turn in the story. Doing something nobody in the audience expected is only Step 1 of a beeg tweest. It needs to make sense in retrospect, and Aranea had everything going for her to be another villain except the motivation (and any particular reason to be relevant). Then Vriska found her and taught her everything about being awesome, all of which she taught herself from a journal written by an Aranea who got her wish for more confidence and initiative.
And now where Vriska fucked up two session trying to create the (then) ultimate villain just to destroy him, Aranea's going to try to prevent the creation of a villain (somehow) and fuck up all of existence. Turns out I bet on the wrong Serket.