magpiebridge:

revolutionaryduelist:

magpiebridge:

I’m really… not a fan of this idea for two reasons.  One, it’s making some really uncomfortable suggestions that someone who has been coded as a victim in a number of ways is, at heart, responsible for/complicit in the behavior and choices of the person who is mistreating them. 

Two, yet again it’s treating Rage players as automatically ‘bad’ or ‘negative’ or ‘destructive’.  Neither of these things are, I think, true or helpful assumptions, and they’re assumptions I see bandied about a lot within the fandom, in regards to both victims of assorted horrific mistreatment and Rage players, in ways that tend to try to pivot the axis around until the people making terrible choices and doing terrible things are absolved of all responsibility for their behavior. 

I think this tendency is one of the reasons I disagree so strongly with certain reads of the Page role, that imply they unknowingly (or knowingly) encourage all of this mistreatment to “benefit” themselves. 

This is an important point, that I agree with. I’m sorry if it’s seemed otherwise.
I’m happy Xefros is a Rage player precisely because it’s such a positive depiction of the Aspect in Act 1. Xefros makes Joey feel by turns confused, frustrated, and protectively furious in the span of a couple of hours, causing her to champion on his behalf. 

And I don’t think Xefros CAUSES Dammek to be overly aggressive and controlling of him. That’s ultimately Dammek’s choice, and a fuck up on his end. But I’m just not interested in this “Dammek’s mean to Xefros because he’s BAD and CRUEL and A BAD PERSON” narrative. It’s just not very interesting?

You can be interested in characters that are bad people. It’s fine. And taking the time to understand their nuances leads to a better understanding of the text, and of the character’s dynamics. 

Here’s the thing about Pages: I regard their tendency to end up in abusive relationships as one of the like…potential dangers of the Class. This isn’t to say it’s their fault, any more than it’s Maids faults that they end up conscripted to their Aspect, or other seemingly Class-related challenges.

See, Pages are simply friendly and likable, and that’s kind of their superpower. They’re incredibly good at getting people to like them in some way, and so want to protect or empower them. But they can’t really control the people that get invested in them, and what someone else thinks is best isn’t always right for you.

Part of a Pages’ arc is about coming to face their reality and, in some cases, the imposed roles and identities others enforced on them. They reach their full potential when they come to be aware and honest about their true feelings and desires, and assert themselves bravely. That’s the basic Page arc, as far as I can tell. 

So I consider them active not because they manipulate people into abusing them or w.e, but because their fundamental story is about attracting the protective and sometimes dangerous wills of others to their lives and learning how to stand up for their own. 

But this toxic behavior always seems to be rooted in a genuine care for the Page. Vriska was cruel and awful to Tavros, yes. It’s also inarguable that she perceived herself as trying to help Tavros, and that the desire to make him stronger drove her behavior to some extent. She says so herself.

Dirk was outright in LOVE with Jake, and wasn’t a FRACTION as cold feeling towards him as people commonly think. All of the actual conflict and abuse came from AR/Hal, who was in an unimaginably toxic situation himself and was p much also abusing Dirk.

And Jake DID contribute significantly to his actual romantic problems with Dirk. Jake decides to lie to Jane (Roxy had told him explicitly Jane had feelings for him TWICE before that conversation) and decides to believe her when she lies about liking him. All of this because he had already chosen Dirk. 

Despite this, and despite KNOWING that his jokes about sexuality and Dirk being a girl probably hurt Dirk’s feelings/made Dirk think he was straight early in life (which turns out to be a major part of why Dirk is so tense and uncomfortable while they’re dating), he doesn’t talk to Dirk about it, because that would require conflict or admitting he did something wrong, and Jake is kind of a coward about that stuff! 

He’s non-confrontational to a fault, so Jake deals with problems by denying they exist or, at his worst, indulging escapism and outright running away from them. It’s exactly what Grandpa did to Joey and Jude, and the same potential for toxic behavior shows up in Jake, though he learns to grow out of it through his friends.

This is a HUGE THEME in Homestuck! Pretty much EVERY character has some potential for toxic/abusive behavior, and it’s only by connecting to each other and understanding the world though friendships that they rise above those inherent personal weaknesses. 

And it doesn’t mean Jake deserved his abuse but, once again:
Dirk didn’t abuse him. So their actual relationship was troubled because of AR’s influence, AND more sensible ways they were both fucking up. This is Jake’s side.

What I’m saying is, there’s room here to both understand Dammek as someone who is toxic to Xefros and understand him as having warm and even positive feelings about Xefros. Dammek might genuinely not realize anything is wrong, because he is a Prospit dreamer and  Xefros’ whole problem is being unable to see Dammek’s treatment as a problem, let alone communicate it. (Denial is a recurring motif for Pages, btw.)

None of this is necessarily what’s going on. And even if it is, Dammek could turn out to be considerably judgmental and critical of Xefros. All of this nuance might be true and Dammek would still be an asshole. 

Because people are nuanced, and assholery and abuse are behaviors regular people might come to engage in in all sorts of ambiguous ways. And Xefros and Dammek are both shaped by a society literally designed to make them as self-destructive and hateful as possible. 

I have noooo idea how Dammek’s character actually works, or how the story is going to handle them. All I’m saying is there’s room for nuance here, and I’m interested in exploring it.

I think I would disagree that the toxic behavior/abuse is necessarily rooted in any desire for the Page’s wellbeing, at all.  With Dirk and Jake? Maybe. I don’t have any opinion on them, beyond agreeing that AR was pulling a lot of the strings there.  With Dammek and Xefros?  We haven’t seen Dammek’s side of the story yet at all, to know what he actually thinks or feels, beyond sounding very very much like Vriska from the outside.  But with Vriska and Tavros?  She wasn’t looking out for him, regardless of what she said.  She had little to no ‘warm’ or ‘positive’ feelings about him–she was a manipulative bully, who saw him as a toy to play with, and to discard when she got bored with him.  She was the kind of person who would rather break a toy she wasn’t interested in, anymore, than let someone else handle it.  Her excuses were shallower than a coat of paint… she can’t have been completely out of touch with reality enough to believe that forcing him to jump off a cliff and break his back would somehow make him stronger.  It was a child’s petty act of aggression against someone who defied her will. She goes on to assault and mistreat him in more ways than one, repeatedly, in ways that demonstrably worsen his health and well-being, and the excuses she tosses out are primarily to keep him compliant/too discouraged to resist and to keep other people off her back. She presents the same kind of excuses any time anyone challenges her on her bad behavior.

I agree completely that reducing characters who do bad things to ‘oh, they did it because they’re Bad and Evil and Terrible’ is reductionist and unhelpful thinking.  But I think that painting characters and people who do bad things with the brush of ‘oh, well they meant well all along because they said so, so it must be true’ is also a rather damaging thing to imply, speaking from the standpoint of a survivor.  People are nuanced and complex creatures.  Relationships are also nuanced and complex–even relationships that turn toxic and absolutely harmful to one or both parties. Being able to say ‘this behavior, this mindset, this habitual treatment was abusive and unhealthy’ is still a helpful statement.  A lot of abusers will swear themselves hoarse that everything they’re doing is for the benefit of their victim. They may even have convinced themselves it’s true.  ‘This person said they were doing ___ for my own good, but they were lying’ can absolutely be a true statement. It doesn’t matter whether that person was lying to themselves, lying to the victim, or just lying to hear themselves lie.  And it doesn’t mean that the character can’t be explored, or discussed, or empathized with, or rehabilitated to grow into someone healthier.

My read on Pages is still that Knights are active and Pages are passive, primarily because I see them both as quite near the center of the active-passive scale, and I think that a lot of their journey is about traveling to the side they ‘belong’ on.  Knights start out constantly worried about what other people think of them, always trying to put others first in a very ineffective way while thinking of themselves very poorly, but in the end, I think they function more successfully and happily when they learn to focus more of that energy on themselves.  It gives them the boost to actually extend that protection to others as well, as a secondary effect.  Pages start out rather self-absorbed and oblivious, in many ways, but have the potential to learn to consider other people, and empower other people.  That empowerment can end up spilling back over to give them some secondary protection, as well.  I think a very strong trait of both Knights and Pages is endurance/persistence in the face of obstacles, though.

Mostly, I don’t like the idea of associating Pages with that abuse as a key tendency or danger of their class.  They’re hardly the only characters we see subjected to blatant on-screen (or implied off-screen) long-term, deliberate, and patterned abuse.  At various points in their lives and in different iterations: Dave, a Knight. Damara, a Witch. Mituna, an Heir. Gamzee, a Bard. Terezi, a Seer, and more. All of these characters are subjected to clear and recognizable abuse, in one form or another. It doesn’t make abuse a key risk of their classes… it might just mean that Hussie has a habit of writing about abuse dynamics, frequently in ways that get little to no satisfying resolution.

It seems we’re at fundamentally different readings of the comic in some ways, which is entirely fair. I don’t have much to say about your reading of Vriska, except that I agree wholeheartedly with this statement:

“A lot of abusers will swear themselves hoarse that everything they’re doing is for the benefit of their victim. They may even have convinced themselves it’s true.  ‘This person said they were doing ___ for my own good, but they were lying’ can absolutely be a true statement. It doesn’t matter whether that person was lying to themselves, lying to the victim, or just lying to hear themselves lie.”

Vriska is unambiguously an abuser. As is AR, as is Eridan, as is Gamzee, as is Equius–all to different degrees of severity and shaped by contextual nuance.
Tavros is fully in his rights to regard her words as lies–because the things she told him about himself were outright untrue, as were the things she said about herself.

revolutionaryduelist:

Maybe to some extent. I do think Dammek is in an unhealthy state of mind, for sure. We won’t be able to say for sure where he’s involved until Hauntswitch lets us get into his head, though, I think. 

Her excuses were shallower than a coat of paint… she can’t have been completely out of touch with reality enough to believe that forcing him to jump off a cliff and break his back would somehow make him stronger.

That said, I don’t think this is true, and I don’t think it logically follows from believing Tavros has a right to regard her as a liar/abuser. More, I think it’s canonical in the text that Vriska is indeed that self-deluded. 

She’s a thirteen year old girl that was raised in a fascist society built on racist in-fighting that systematically deludes its children. Vriska is a traumatized kid who dissasociates from her true feelings from birth in order to feed a giant spider? Her entire relationship with Tavros was based on her copying Mindfang, a Sylph, and she constantly tries to mimic a Sylph’s behavior by attempting to make Tavros stronger. 

And yes, that level of disassociation and desensitized brutality makes her a monster to Tavros, and pretty much everyone for most of her life. A good half of the Beta trolls are kind of fucking monsters, because they were raised by a fascist society. 

That was literally the deal the Alphas made with Echidna, who is literally The Mother Of Monsters. The new Trolls are powerful enough to win, but at the cost of becoming a kind of monster, making their game that much harder to win ideologically/philosophically–they can barely even understand it.

Vriska’s entire problem as a person pretty much boils down to being UNABLE to actually introspect and honestly understand herself! Look what happens when (Vriska) is made to think about how she truly comes off and pulls away from her imagined responsibilities! 

Meanwhile, Still Pretty Toxic Retcon Vriska is imagining herself as Responsible and Selfless the entire way to LE. She tears into (Vriska) for being selfish explicitly, in the text! That dissociative tension between Vriska’s true self and her mental self-image is part of the text, as far as my reading goes. 

RE: Pages and Knights, I think that’s the most compelling reading for Active Knights and Passive pages i’ve seen yet. I am genuinely unsure if the narrative actually goes that way, and I’m interested in finding out, so it’s cool to feel uncertain about that again.

I think I still disagree, though. I think the nuance is that I perceive Passive/Active behavior as intrinsic to these classes, and as mostly complicated by their self-image. 

Dave seems to behave very Actively in that he’s take-charge and exploiting Time during the Beta session, but he’s also roleplaying a Prince and not having a good time. He seems to be a lot happier when he invites/allows it, choosing not to deal in Time Travel himself. 

And he’s still focused on others for most of that time–he either falls apart psychologically with no outlet for his tension with Bro pre-retcon or finds better self-understanding by entering a relationship with Karkat.

Also, I don’t like what passive Page implies about Tavros. His last plot beat then becomes “he hands Vriska and army and fulfills his character arc by…becoming aware enough of her and others’ needs and being helpful!” which just doesn’t work for me. The “he ideologically slam dunks her and never thinks about her again” angle just feels more satisfying to me, so long as the canon ambiguity is still extended to us. 

also, I do think all the classes have toxic/abusive relationships. It seems to me there’s different recurring patterns and struggles going on for each class, not just Pages, and I think all of them are meaningfully and satisfyingly resolved. So I don’t agree with the “Homestuck doesn’t deliver” angle either.