Tag: vriska serket

swamp-wizard:

from the top, in a new post cause the last one got too long. @ao3sburbanite @revolutionaryduelist​

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Alright, I’m noticing some discrepancies between what I think and what you’re pointing to so maybe its worth clearing those up.

which is why i described dirk as a “prime contributing factor”. it wasnt solely his fault. but hes also not blameless, which, again, is what im getting at here.

Yeah but of course Dirk is a contributing factor, he’s one of four kids and they’re all pretty much inextricably contributing. I don’t know anyone who thinks Dirk is blameless–I just know people who think he got as much as he gave, and that the bad he gave is way overstated in proportion to the other Alphas. 

an approach which dirk (at the beginning of his arc, as i specified in the op) explicitly agrees with, in his very first pesterlog!

It’s more complicated than that, and really I don’t know why you would assume what any characters say early on is the definitive statement on the feelings of any Homestuck character. Like. This is Homestuck. Come on. 

Dirk tells JANE he agrees with that approach, rattles off a number of other reasons, and then says it’d be fucked up to stop Hal and that he owed it to Hal to let the program run as long as possible. 

You could conceivably imagine Dirk growing out of the other shitty reasons he gave, but if he did, he would still feel obligated to let Hal have his way also. That’s a problem without an easy moral solution Dirk has access to, which is what he struggles with right up until he almost kills Hal.

Also by this point in the narrative Jane has also already talked to Jake, who explicitly points out that Dirk doesn’t like Hal, and wouldn’t like that Jane loves him. 

and we can infer, based on what we know “jake should be more like jane” entails, that jane is/has been on the receiving end of the auto-responders mind games.

We can’t infer any such thing, because Dirk is clearly and demonstrably not in control of Hal in the first place. That’s the entire point of Hal. Even if he was, how would Hal messing with Jane’s head make her LESS skeptical? That doesn’t make any sense?

This besides the fact that Dirk is voicing an observation that he doesn’t act upon at all, he’s also voicing an observation that is…literally correct. 

Jane’s ignorance and skepticism does great emotional damage to Roxy, who literally goes on at length about it directly to Dirk. Jake’s willful ignorance (which he frames around believing whatever is convenient to him) does enormous harm to both Jane AND PERSONALLY TO DIRK, including Jake making comments that make Dirk feel isolated and potentially judged for being GAY, not to mention romantically unreciprocated. 

That’s serious shit to do to someone even if you’re only doing it because you’re a clueless 13 year old, and it shouldn’t be disregarded as part of Dirk’s character especially since…we have evidence that stuff bothered him.  

you can chalk up the fact that we never see jane being played by the ar to bad writing (hussie admitted in one of his tumblr q&as that he struggles in writing jane, although those are now offline), or a deliberate choice – because jane says she likes the ar, shes not affected by it in the same way jake is, and so we would learn nothing important about her by seeing her reactions with it. 

but i think your theory that dirk intended it specifically as a bodyguard for jake is flawed, too. because he made jane a bodyguard – lil seb – but lil seb didnt “stalk [her]” and “strike when [her] guard is down”.

As I pointed out up there I’m pretty sure I can chalk up Jane not being played by the AR to the fact that AR playing with Jane doesn’t make any sense at all, and AR’s mind games have nothing to do with Dirk’s thoughts or goals because he doesn’t control him anyway. 

I don’t really see a reason to put anything on “bad writing” when there’s a perfectly coherent explanation that is backed up by later canon events sitting right here. 

You’re missing my point with the Brobot, too. 

1) It’s not that the Brobot wasn’t a fuckup. It was! But it was a mutual fuckup born of both Dirk and Jake’s mistakes, because…

2) The Brobot’s goal isn’t JUST to be a bodyguard, you’re right. It’s just also not to provide training, although it includes that function too. 

The Brobot is more specific. Its purpose was to set Jake up with an adventure scenario, and Jake’s quest to hunt it down is framed at one repeatedly. Adventures prior to the point it was sent were something Jake always talked about loving but never actually did, because he was too scared of the monsters. 

Dirk wasn’t trying to impose training on Jake–he was trying to help him live up to his fantasies of himself. The motivations there are significantly different.

Which again, doesn’t make it not a fuck up. It just turns out to be a relatively happy fuck up, because Jake actually likes the Brobot in the end anyway–so much so he internalizes the image of Dirk as a protector so strongly he believes in it above all else when the chips come down. 

image

As for Jake complaining about the the Brobot, he does most of that in the context of arguing with Hal and wanting to hurry along his adventure. Notice how he admits to liking it and thinking it makes his life more exciting and adventure like when he’s speaking in confidence with Jane, and actually being honest. 

The situations are parallel to Tavros and Vriska, because homestuck likes being self-refential and setting up parallels…more often than not to subvert them. There being some visual parallels–ESPECIALLY with flashes, which usually cheat to be more efficient to produce anyway–doesn’t mean there’s a 1:1 correlation between all the morals and power dynamics in a situation.

Like. Come the hell on. This:

image

Is not the same situation as this:

image

Forreal. Come on. 

ao3sburbanite:

swamp-wizard:

vriska and dirk (at the beginning of their arcs) are both people who take “the ends justify the means” to its logical extreme

theyre both people who grew up from infancy under incredibly adverse circumstances and, instead of acknowledging that that adversity traumatized them, recontextualize their coping mechanisms and survival tactics as “strength”. vriska tells herself that her lusus turning her into a child soldier and constantly dangling the threat of death over her head made her a smarter, stronger, more cunning person. dirk tells himself that growing up isolated from any human contact and being forced to fend for himself against the elements and assassination attempts by the condesce made him capable, self-sufficient, and mature.

they think that adversity made them strong – pressure makes diamonds, steel sharpens steel – and that they are their best selves. and they love their friends (yes, even vriska – look at the way she talks to aradia or terezi), and they want whats best for them. specifically, dirk and vriska want what they think is best for their friends, regardless of their friends actual wants or needs. dirk and vriska think that adversity is what made them strong, so in order to empower their friends, dirk and vriska will be that adversity.

of course this fails because dirk and vriska 1. are stupid children, and 2. lack the social graces or understanding of interpersonal relationships to know when theyre pushing someone past their limits. the only real difference is that vriska is hyper-empathetic, whereas empathy for dirk is a learned skill – vriska has explosive episodes of rage that shes immediately consumed with guilt over, and dirk hurts people because he cant really understand when theyre expressing unease or discomfort

and they both have arcs that revolve around this architecture of strained, broken relationships and inflated egos crumbling around them. all of vriskas friends turn against her. dirks emotional inaccessibility is a prime contributing factor to the trickster clusterfuck. vriska, who thinks that she can handle everything, is killed by terezi in order to prevent a doomed timeline. dirk, who thinks that he can handle everything, is functionally neutered for the entire condesce/aranea conflict when jade teleports him to the furthest reaches of space.

post-retcon homestuck has a lot of flaws (ive written about this extensively before) and one of them is that while dirks arc gets a satisfying resolution, vriskas doesnt. dirk comes face-to-face with his own worst case scenario, how his mindset and behavior has the potential to damage people irreperably, and resolves to make amends and change. (vriska), when divorced from the environment of constant stress and violence that defined her childhood and shaped her as a person, opens up, lets herself be vulnerable, acknowledges her own flaws and shortcomings and ultimately reunites with the terezi from her native timeline. vriska prime doesnt have these same revelations about herself – yes, vriska prime and (vriska) are the same character, and (vriska) exists to show vriskas true nature and potential for introspection and self-awareness, but vriska prime is still exhibiting the flaws (vriska) overcame all the way through the end of homestuck. vriska comes SO fucking close to having a satisfying resolution, swerves, and misses it. thats the fault of bad writing, though.

ultimately though theres more than enough evidence of vriskas character to make her sympathetic and forgivable – more than dirk, even, id say – it takes a certain special kind of cognitive dissonance insist that one is guilty and the other is innocent

While I agree that Vriska is a complicated, nuanced character with a lot of terrible abuse in her past, I do disagree with this point: 

“Ultimately though theres more than enough evidence of vriskas character to make her sympathetic and forgivable – more than dirk, even, id say – it takes a certain special kind of cognitive dissonance insist that one is guilty and the other is innocent“

You mention that Vriska has a lot of episodes of rage followed by remorse, but does that really excuse the things she does in these periods of rage? Yes, she had a terrible childhood, but she also inflicted a great deal of pain on others, which she never truly apologizes for. She does make an effort to apologize to Aradia, and Terezi makes it very plain that they’re cool, but Tavros? She paralyzed him and emotionally abused him throughout the entire story. Even discounting that she kills him (you could argue in self defense), she taunts him with his own severed legs while fighting him. 

Rage and mental illness do not excuse abuse of others. They can explain it, but they can’t excuse it. Yes, Vriska is a victim in a lot of ways, but she’s also a villain in the truest sense of the word – she turns other people into her victims.

Nevertheless, (Vriska) made a lot of effort to change the things about herself that led to her abusing other people. I like (Vriska) a lot. Main timeline Vriska, though, has never been forced to examine her flaws or apologize for them. It’s clear that Vriska avoids any type of introspection, and is afraid it will make her weak. To complete her arc, she’d need to learn that it’s OK.

Dirk, on the other hand…he isn’t really guilty of much besides simple miscommunication. He and Jake both fail to communicate with each other – the result is that Dirk’s insecurity over whether Jake actually likes him makes him overbearing, and Jake’s failure to communicate that, yes, he does in fact like Dirk but needs some goshdarned alone time sometimes and that doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to be with Dirk anymore means that Dirk ends up pursuing him relentlessly. His darkest deed is to almost murder a brain-clone of himself, but it’s important that he decides not to do it. If he had, then Dirk would have probably been destined for a Just death in the end, because it would have been an unjustifiable act of murdering a defenseless person (regardless of how annoying AR was to Dirk). This is why I think he gets more breaks than Vriska – he has shown himself capable of resisting the urge to do a bad thing, Vriska has not.

The trickster arc is a result of all of the Alpha’s issues – Dirk’s self-hatred, Jake’s lack of faith in himself, Jane’s resentful self-sacrifice, Roxy rightfully feeling under-appreciated for her attempts to keep them all together. I don’t really see how it’s anything to do with Dirk specifically. 

I’m pretty busy rn so I appreciate someone else writing what I wanted to so I don’t have to. This, basically.

I think Vriska is a fascinating, nuanced, compelling and deeply sympathetic character. Hell, I think she’s redeemable, if Homestuck is as good to her, (Vriska), and Ghost Tavros as I hope it will be.

There is also not a world in which she’s morally equitable to Dirk. There’s no cognitive dissonance here–just an awareness that just like Vriska and (Vriska) are different characters who went on different journeys and are at different places in the narrative, so are Dirk and Hal. 

Hal being the character who actually DOES take “The ends justify the means” approach you’re talking about. The only time Dirk even remotely does anything that seems like doing so is sending Jake the Brobot, and that has little to do with satisfying Dirk’s ends and everything to do with enabling Jake’s.

Don’t really disagree about the ways Dirk fucks up, though–just the degrees. Dirk never sets out to train a kid and make him stronger (again, if that was his motivation, why not train Jane too?) and he certainly doesn’t then break his legs and kill him when he fails to rise to his expectations. 

Hal coerces and manipulates Jake in a lot of uncomfortable ways, but Hal is Hal, and Dirk doesn’t like what he’s doing so much that Jake knows about it and Dirk talks to Hal way more angrily and viciously than he ever does to any of his friends. 

Dirk DOES need a “redemption” narrative…on about the level of every Alpha. Hal is the one who takes things to abusive extremes, and he gets a rawer deal than Vriska as his redemption because he sacrifices himself to becoming a shitty homoerotic puppet hulk asshole.

Conflating these characters’ identities to this extent is the actual cognitive dissonance if you ask me.