recently (and by recently i mean, since act 7 – if it was around before then i didnt see it) some hs bloggers, namely lesbian hs bloggers, have been presenting a lesbian reading of vriska that is pretty convincing imo. @revolutionarygays has written about it at length and unfortunately i cant… currently find any of her posts on the topic for u but im sure if u asked she would elaborate ;0
basically to my eyes, vriskas childhood and history of interactions with boys is very sympathetic and relatable to a lot of lesbian readers… she spends her whole childhood trying to aspire to mindfang, this high-femme fatale ideal who, in accordance with troll social norms, had both male and female sexual conquests and populated her quadrants the way a healthy, “normal” troll adult would be expected to, but her most important relationships (or the ones she devotes the most space in her journals to) are with men. so vriska tries to follow in her footsteps – she pursues a black romance with eridan (to mirror her ancestors kismessitude w dualscar) and red with tavros (ditto for the summoner) – but its very quickly made PAINFULLY clear that she doesnt have any actual investment in either of these relationships
eridan is introduced complaining about vriskas lack of commitment or interest in their kismessitude, and when vriska actually gets her hands on tavros, shes massively disappointed in the experience. its a hallmark adolescent gay experience of “maybe ill start being interested in the other gender when i date/kiss/have sex with them” and the ensuing disappointment when you find none of the joy or contentment in doing Straight Things, as heteronormativity had told you you would. hell, she only started interacting with john because terezi did it first – look how quick she is to bring her up in their first conversation!
on the other hand, vriska has a turbulent and passionate relationship with basically every girl she interacts with. she has a fucking emotional breakdown when faced with the reality that the once bright, cheerful aradia is now a lifeless shadow of her former self, and specifically that shes that way because vriskas the one who killed her (and that she was manipulated into doing so by scratch). kanaya, vriskas former moirail, punches her in the face and vriska immediately starts waxing red for her. (and that relationship was pretty frantic for a moiraillegiance in the first place – look how many 8s vriskas dropping near the end there.) … and i dont even have to address her relationship with terezi, because theyre obsessed with each other.
tl;dr vriskas struggle with gender norms, compulsory attraction to men (dont want to say compulsory heterosexuality because trolls dont have that, and compulsory bisexuality sounds stupid), and inability to pinpoint her feelings for girls as “romantic” is relatable to lesbian readers. she is lesbian-coded if nothing else.
this is SUCH a good post – i have to call it a night but i will definitely elaborate on this VERY soon!!
i think vriska’s very tomboyish and messy presentation (she.. appears to wear makeup? maybe? but to this day i don’t understand if it’s a stylistic choice or actual proof that she puts on makeup every day) also further her being gay-coded… vriska is very easily the most tomboyish and aggressive girl in homestuck, and her complete disenchantment with every boy she’s ever attempted to court is a huge part of her character.
it’s worth noting too that the only characters who can pull genuine softness and affection out of vriska are girls. she was absolutely smitten with meenah, very introspective and chatty and inquiring and just generally very devoted to her. she actually went out of her way to sincerely tell kanaya she appreciated her before she disappeared. she was very good, honest, and supportive of terezi in a way that made terezi genuinely feel better. vriska was the only person terezi opened up to – dave and karkat tried so hard to push terezi to open up to them but she was closed off and vague. but with vriska? she spills her feelings honestly and unprompted because she respects and admires vriska, and wants their relationship to be built on trust and honesty
vriska’s a miserable asshole 99% of the time but the only real emotion we’ve seen from her is either through introspection or connected to her relationships with the girls around her – never the boys.
vriska really was a broken abused child tho. like i’m not saying she did nothing wrong or whatever, she’s like chronically stupid and full of bad decisions but like. she was a teenager and her life was so fucked up. it was so fucked up. she hates herself so much. she’s gay and considers herself unworthy of love because she’s impulsive and has poor social skills due to chronic childhood abuse. i love her and feel sorry for her and that’s just how it is on this bitch of an earth
keys to understanding why ppl love vriska, or understanding why u still root for her beyond her awkward funniness and pseudo charisma, or understanding why you feel bad for her but can’t figure out why:
1) she’s being abused by her guardian figure almost as blatantly as dave is. when she touches on this there is an underlying sense of anxiety and pain that sets her apart from her peers, much like dave is set apart from the other kids bc his guardian is blatantly abusive but (like vriska) he isn’t sure how to come to terms with or acknowledge it, much less explain it to his friends. in vriska’s case, her friends (for decent enough reasons) resent her for being insufferable regardless. outside of homestuck itself the paradox space comic “vrisky business” deals with this heavily and i while bring this up on a regular basis it’s still true
2) doc scratch is a pedophile. beyond being obviously a child predator, one of his primary targets is vriska. vriska is an easy target, of course, bc she’s already been dealt a pretty fucked up hand in life. vriska calls doc scratch as a “creep” more than once, to his face, refers to his behavior towards her as “getting off on [a young girl]”, and expresses extreme distress towards him continuing to have conversation with her when she’s asked him to leave her alone. she mentions that she’ll log out so that he’ll leave her alone… but then he takes control of her account and forces her to log back in and talk to him.
i mean i feel like this is laid on pretty fucking thick but in case the implication went over your head: it’s a metaphor for CSA lads
terezi alludes to the damage doc scratch has done to vriska during her own (rife with sexual innuendo and all around fucking creepiness, because he is Literally a pedophile) conversation with doc scratch while trying to get revenge on vriska for aradia’s murder:
“no wonder she snapped” – vriska took a sharp downturn under the influence of doc scratch, and the reader sees it firsthand. the murder of aradia was largely orchestrated by doc scratch, who forced vriska’s hand even while she frustratedly explains that these are her friends and she didn’t want to hurt them
here’s the whole pesterlog, since it’s all pretty telling:
take note that vriska calls doc scratch a “sick fuck” almost immediately after he contacts her. she’s very much backed into a corner here. tbh there’s a looot to pick up on in this conversation between them re: vriska being abused by an adult man
I find this really fascinating, since I am a victim of childhood parental abuse and yet I hated Vriska because her behavior towards Tavros was reminiscent of my abusive parent. Admittedly I was pretty young when I first read it and I could not pick up on metaphors for shit, and definitely missed the part about her being a victim as well. While I am coming to see her more as a grey character (thanks to things like this) I am still not sympathetic to her belittling of others and harsh self-righteousness. Survivors can be as kind as anyone else and their unhealthy behaviours shouldn’t be dismissed because of their past trauma.
Yeah, absolutely, plenty of perfectly interesting characters ping to close to home for me to enjoy. Heck, plenty of actual real people come too close to my trauma buttons for me to want to spend time around them or be a part of their healing, even though I still sincerely wish healing and mental healthiness for them.
So this isn’t meant to be a “you are wrong for not enjoying these characters” post.
This is just me picking at what pings me about them.
I have major imposter syndrome in my life. I was raised by an abusive narcissist and have hella fleas from that. I have a lot of trouble distinguishing extrinsic and intrinsic motivators. I am a pleaser and an overachiever, and I have lots of trouble not letting external sources define what my identity should be or how I should pursue happiness. I am meanest to others when I say the things in my head that I am already saying to myself. (I don’t think I do this much anymore. I am getting better on both ends, but I hope especially the first.)
Anyway.
Characters that externalize their self-hatred onto others in ways I find interesting: Vriska, Bakugo, Loki
These are not nice people; these are, in fact, distinctly abusive people. To me, they are also engaging, sympathetic, and more than anything fascinating characters because they are all so clearly unhappy. Because they are all, so clearly, equally cruel to themselves.
Like, example:
Loki finds out he’s an ice giant and literally tries to genocide all ice giants. And on the one hand, hello, genocide, wtf, but on the other hand it is impossible for me not to see that as the intensely suicidal gesture it is. Notably, immediately after his attempted metaphorical suicide is stopped, he literally jumps off a bridge.
Now Vriska. Damn, that girl is messed up. Does anyone even know why she walked Tavros off that cliff? Does Vriska? What the fuck. What the fuck.
You want to understand what’s going on in Vriska’s head, you just have to look at the conversation she has with her dead self. (Andrew Hussie is a master of metaphorically presenting serious mental issues like depression and suicidal ideation as conversations w/ self. See the conversation Dirk has with AR.).
I mean, seriously, this shit is vicious.
She explicitly points out that she’s never felt happy. (And later that she’s never felt safe.)
She explicitly characterizes her own desire to be happy as “selfish” and “narcissistic.”
She is not allowed to want small, nice things that make her feel safe. Not only is she not allowed, wanting happiness makes her bad as a person.
And she repeatedly frames all this in the most gaslight-y, emotionally charged, self-hating language imaginable: “the worst kind you’re capa8le of”, “stupid”, “self-indulgent”, that she deserved “to get killed”.
Live Vriska frames personal growth as explicitly incompatible with happiness. She is supposed to do what’s necessary (as defined by unclear sources, but most strongly linked to her ancestor and her society) and live up to exterior expectations.
Live Vriska frames this intensely vitriolic, negative, self-hating take on life as “harsh truth” that she (dead, happy Vriska) “USED to understand.”
Live Vriska is not allowed to feel bad when bad things are said about her because these “tiny little 8arbs” are harsh truths and part of life (and not, you know, devastating and abusive attacks on her sense of self and desire for happiness/safety/stability.)
Live Vriska has normalized abuse. She does not recognize it aimed at herself. She, in fact, mirrors and echoes and amplifies the abusive messages she has internalized, both to herself and to the people around her.
Vriska, quite explicitly, believes happiness is selfish, believes she is not allowed to feel bad about abuse, believes she deserves anything bad that happens to her, considers herself an inherently bad person, and hatesherself.
And the thing is, like:
Vriska is 13-16 over the course of the comic.
13 year olds aren’t born with these ideas existing in their heads. They learned them somewhere. They heard them over and over. They were hurt, repeatedly, and repeatedly told that wasn’t hurt, that was harsh truth, and having bad feelings about what was happening made them weak and selfish. Made them deserve what happened to them. Their sense of normal and not normal and abusive and not abusive was deeply distorted by their childhood environment.
(Like, possibly, having a parental figure who has trained you to sacrifice other child victims to her for your own continued survival.)
And, you know, I also think we have evidence that Vriska’s particular mental set up makes her more vulnerable to this. Shades of BPD or NPD, she seems to react very strongly to perceived criticism and to have a very externally-defined sense of self. We know she can hear other people’s thoughts; we know she is sensitive (or even hypersensitive) to other people’s perceptions of her.
We see this even in the happier, shaking-off-old-patterns, dead Vriska. Dead Vriska spends some time with a (significantly older) troll she admires and you can see how malleable her sense of self is, her sense of goals and values are, as she almost completely remakes her identity in Meenah’s image.
Also, returning to the topic, hell yes Vriska is abusive towards others. Hell yes she causes a lot of harm and emotional damage (and death!!). And hell no those people don’t owe her any more of their time or trauma.
But I do think it’s clear her abusiveness towards others hella mirrors the patterns of abusiveness she’s playing out in her own head. You can see the things she says to herself in the things she says to others. You can see her turning around and mirroring the “hard truths” she’s internalized, and all the uncontrollable scariness of the world she’s in. (If you don’t do these things, if you don’t live this way, you will be hurt and you will deserve it. You will deserve to die.)
And I still don’t know what the fuck was going on when she mind-controlled Tavros off a cliff in some kind of hysterical fit, but just in writing this post I have had the dawning, creepy realization that that was a very chilling manifestation of “I’m hurting you to help you grow/this is the only way” coupled with the enactment of a suicide.
…..Yikes.
Anyway, tl;dr: I find Vriska very interesting and I am like 99.999% convinced that live Vriska has the (so far) failed character growth arc and dead Vriska has the actual successful character growth arc (as resolved by her eventual reunion with much healthier partner dead Terezi).
yeah, they’re very encouraged to toxic rivalry, distrust and only thinking your quadrants and those affecting them (so, quadrant corners, MAYBE) are relevant (THANKS DOC SCRATCH), so i’m really feeling the parallel to toxic masculinity. i mean, vriska and eridan are acting like their behavior is the epitome of a cool, admirable troll. and terezi was destroyed after she killed vriska, even though she felt she wasn’t supposed to be. like. dude. the whole alternia setup is trying its best to create an army, not a coherent people. no intergenerational bonding, and the only parallel bonds allowed are romantic ones and tons of propaganda about their glorious empire. it’s way easier to make people feel like everyone (else) is disposable like that.
i’m going to rip off someone’s arms and legs next time i see someone go
“omg that’s like blahblahblah in homestuck!11! they’re like exactly the same tehehe!1121!1”
NO, FUCK YOU.
GO DIE.
Doesn’t this post remind you of Karkat? It reminds me of Karkat.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: one of the reasons Homestuck was so popular and omnipresent (and subsequently overloaded everyone’s dashes) was Andrew Hussie’s uncanny ability to make significant symbols out of (or even mythologize) SO MANY random everyday things.
I totally get why non-fans found it annoying. Homestuck was (is!) basically 1000 semi-incomprehensible in-jokes. On the other hand, it’s a FASCINATING example of effective world-building and symbol transformation. Let’s call a spade a spade – but what’s a spade? What is the significance of a chainsaw, a bike horn, a broken sword, a cue ball, a cake? Consider: a pool table, a deck of cards, a computer program, a chess board. Would you like to play a game? The list goes on and on.
Yes! Homestuck tied the repeating nature of story-telling and coming of age myths to meme culture. Because myths ARE memes. Memes have existed forever. And they’re everywhere.
OP fucking deactivated
well, if you’re on tumblr and the mere mention of a popular fandom gives you a rage aneurysm, that’s your only recourse, isn’t it
You gotta decide for yourselves whether people in the year of our lord 2017 should be judged entirely by the words and thoughts and ideas they put out into the world years ago in different life stages. Like. This isn’t a problem that’s going to go away. Increasingly now the history of people’s entire life journey is accessible via some social media snap shot in the wayback machine or some ancient chat log sitting on someone’s hard drive out there. We don’t all start from the same place. A lot of us start from positions of privilege, from systems learned from parents or other family or institutions with power over us that influence our way of thinking when our brains are first developing the capacity for empathy and understanding.
And we grow. And we create. And we experience things. And we talk with people. We make friends. We read feedback. We listen to some and we disregard others, and years later, some (but by no means all) of what we disregarded we might think about again and realize was good feedback and helpful advice.
Our opinions change. Our understanding of our own privilege changes. Our understanding of media and propaganda and narrative and power structures and justice change. Our biases shift. Our politics change. Our worldviews are shaped by our conversations and our experiences and the things we take to heart and the things we lock outside.
Hussie used to interact heavily with the fandom. There is so much text from him out there saved in archives that has been pored over again and again and again by people with axes to grind, people with their own agendas, people who feel wronged and hurt and ignored by someone they maybe once respected and looked up to.
Anyone with that much text over that long a period of time has something fucking problematic out there waiting to hang them, I guarantee it. Back in 2012 the r-slur and the a-slur were common slang used by elementary school kids, let alone ppl frequenting the various rancid asscracks of the internet. Then awareness campaigns took root and opinions and language shifted for the better and suddenly a lot of text written without that mindfulness started looking really nasty, didn’t it?
We as a society are going to have to make some hard decisions in the very near future about how much rope we need when we’re eyeing those gallows for people we feel wronged by. How much someone’s opinion now means when their opinion five years ago might have been the exact opposite. How much good faith to extend to people who grow and change and understand their younger selves had some Bad Opinions about the world, but can’t erase the words they said, and have to live with them for the rest of their lives because people looking for ammunition can find it in ample supply. How much someone’s actions now count for weighed against their words in another fucking life.
There are quotes out there where Hussie said some stupid shit. There are a million words of Hussie quotes out there. I don’t know how old you are, but if you’re an adult, I can almost guarantee you that you can go back some number of years and remember a version of you that you’d be terrified of the internet finding today.
The dude gave us one of the most queer-positive, transformative and engaging pieces of media of all time. It wasn’t perfect and he wasn’t perfect because nothing and no one is. The queer community is always so goddamn hypercritical of its prolific creators, in part because we’re desperate for the things we want and never get and it’s so frustrating to find people who *almost* give you what you want – and god knows the mainstream media isn’t listening, so where else do we have to turn but inward? We’re a stymied, frustrated group desperate for representation on all sorts of underrepresented axes of oppression and no one story is ever going to satisfy everyone. But Homestuck was so big, so expansive and meant so much to so many – of course there’s a lot of bitter disappointment out there.
How much rope do we need to hang someone? How much history do we need to build a gallows out of plank by fucking plank to feel morally justified?
balencia said: Technically, Dad Egbert/Crocker is also born normally.
See, I don’t know about that. If Dad Egbert was the biological son of Jane + random person and Dad Crocker was the biological son of John + someone, why would he be identical in both universes? And it’s not just the symbolic artstyle – John recognizes him immediately. The Nature Of Dad is a mystery to me.
Hmmm…
Some Headcanon Possibilities:
John and Jane are genetically identical? And so were the people they had Dad!Crockerbert with??
Was gonna suggest Dad might also be an adoptee, but isn’t it mentioned canon that Jane and John are his bio parents? Looking at the wiki just now maybe not, so he could be. 2a. It just occurred to me for the first time that, John and Dad!Crocker was not only John being given Jane’s Dad reunion, but also Dad!Crocker meeting his own long-dead father, but as a kid? Who he’d probably recognize pretty easily since Crockerberts keep photo albums and family mementos everywhere?? That makes the whole sitch even weirder, even if it does -partially- explain why Dad!Crocker would be so happy to see him.
John and Jane are genetically identical, and there’s something particular to paradox-goo-based-genetics that is overriding, ensuring that the offspring of Players are exact reiterations of themselves across all timelines and continuities, just like their parents.
Dad’s a Guardian and Guardians, due to the role they play in Players’ lives Pre-Game, are kept consistent across iterations by The Game. 4a. The prob with this would be that we see part of the Players’ responsibility in The Game is to create themselves, so presumably if this were the case John would have also been asked to carry out the tl engineering needed to create Dad in both Timelines.
Dad!Egbert and Dad!Crocker aren’t actually identical, just close enough in appearance to fulfill the same archetype in John’s mind at the moment of their “reunion”. John seems to be living in his house alone at the very end, so it may be that, with time, John noticed the differences, physical and otherwise, between Dad!C and his Dad.
Total story convenience and there actually is no textual, non-meta, explanation for it.
Yeah! I think it’s really interesting how Hussie textually represses things the kids themselves repress – it says it right there in the text you ARE John, you ARE Jade, etc etc. If that character is repressing it, it’s obscured from the reader as well, encoded in symbols and manifestations and word associations. Keeping things hidden really gives a sense of how resistant the kids are to certain ideas – the only thing is that since the 2nd-person artifice is ultimately false, you don’t always get to see what happens when the kids learn what you learn.
can you imagine reading the entire comic and coming away from it like, here is my cool rose lalonde meta! she had a good caring mom who was never neglectful and was just being a drama queen. the end
i really do love all lalondes and looking at homestuck’s most clear-cut discussion on addiction unsympathetically is really shallow regardless, but the effects growing up with someone who was a good person but a bad mom had on rose are consistently downplayed every time they’re brought up?
like, when she’s talking about how she always understood her mom was also a sister figure before she knew about ectobiology but that her maternal responsibilities were “displaced” rose blames herself for being too immature, she thinks it’s her fault for being a kid and wanting a mother figure at all, and that’s only reaffirmed! from there on out her relationship with her mom is used as a foil to dave’s abusive childhood. i think that could have been really well done if she was portrayed with…literally any sympathy when that came up? in dave and dirk’s convo she’s basically called ungrateful for having pent-up frustration towards her guardian when his was much worse, and again there’s nothing at all to refute that! i don’t think dave’s a bad person for having those feelings at all, or that mom didn’t care about her, or that bro absolutely was worse, but it still sort of stings that her internalized guilt / sense of responsibility for her emotionally neglectful upbringing is upheld as correct.
even when roxy came directly into play rose’s first instinct is to ask john to tell roxy she’s “sorry for being a shitty daughter,” because she still thinks that entire dynamic was her fault! and then when she and roxy meet they hug and hang out and it’s really sweet but that baggage is still never really worked out or acknowledged. that’s one of many loose threads in hs, ofc, but the way that it’s suggesting that rose’s resolution was just to be kind and open towards this new Second Chance with someone like her mom sort of makes it worse than the other instances where issues went untouched imo! i love rose and roxy and i want them to be close and sweet but the lack of baggage affirms that rose’s anger was dare i say Invalid, that it was her responsibility alone to Atone for having complicated feelings about her mom, and that it was correct for her to conclude that she was being overdramatic and constructing something out of a problem that didn’t exist. so that’s fun and cute
sarcastic theory shitpost: post-retcon HS’s increasingly disturbing treatment of harassment and consent was not in fact the result of the author getting lazier and/or scuzzier but was in fact a representation of how, by hewing to the alpha timeline and Skaia’s will, the characters objectified themselves
It was always scuzzy. Vriska sexually assaulted Tavros and no one cared. Plus, I’m sad to say, there’s Equius and his treatment of Aradia.
There’s a reason I said scuzzier.
There’s at least like, an attempt occasionally with earlier stuff to indicate that it’s a problem. Tavros, Dirk, and Aradia are not happy about their treatment by Vriska, Roxy, and Equius, for example. (Although Roboradia then goes ahead and kisses him anyway, so ymmv.) HIC’s treatment of the Helmsman is pretty clearly fucked up, and Mindfang and the Dolorosa is romanticized because Mindfang’s writing it. Far be it from me to defend many of AH’s sketchier choices, but there at least, it was trending differently than it trends later.
Now, obviously I’m not saying every narrative has to have a footnote saying “this behavior is bad”. That’s… not how fiction works. But I do think especially post-retcon harassment and assault is played way more as positive, funny, and excusable. Jasprose catcalling Jane (someone who’s already been shown to be uncomfortable with her body) is played off with comical 😮 reactions and set up as more ‘lol that quirky catgirl’. D/avepeta kissing Jade is fine because ‘she didn’t mind’ and besides part of them dated a version of her, and that means they can kiss her whenever they want, right? And then of course there’s the unnecessary crotch shots for Jake. The shift seems to be that in post-retcon, there’s absolutely no indication the author thinks this is a problem at all, and it is instead used as a joke or a positive thing. It’s just… unsettling.
There’s consent issues or themes of control in other places as well but in terms of the sexual harassment, that’s the stuff that sticks out most to me.
Then there’s Porrim touching Kankri without his permission and Kankri’s supposed to be a brat for getting angry
Never thought of the Davepeta problem before. Good point.
I don’t recall that but then I started skimming over a bunch of Kankri logs after they started mocking different orientations.
Someday I’d like a compendium of Shit Sburb Does So Kid-Gods Die Young. In the first place, targeting kids who want to play a game for a huge responsibility. Separating them from their guardians, wanting the new world to have no godly help growing or knowingly preparing for the next session, the God Tier system of dying encouraging players to stay out of significantly interfering when they don’t have to…
SERIOUSLY. I hope you don’t mind me answering this publicly (I’ve stripped off the username) but I was meaning to make a post about this sometime anyway.
I don’t know if Hussie meant it this way, but it doesn’t take much effort to view Skaia/SBURB as grooming kids to fulfill its aims and then disposing of them.
just moving along like everyone else 