Homesuck: Vriska Rising

[Solid Snake]

WALL OF TEXT INCOMING

Originally Posted by NonCon

I mean, he's always been a total fuckwad who was, in case you forgot, trying to kill all the surface dwellers.

He's a total fuckwad who "was trying to kill all surface dwellers" but who deliberately exempted Kanaya from said threats even before she went out of her way to make him that nice wand, and who he profusely and (in my interpretation) honestly thanked for believing in him mere moments before he provoked her and killed her.

Now, I have no fundamental issue with Eridan deciding that his role as the Prince of Hope really was about hopelessness. I have no problem with the conceptualization of Eridan plotting to destroy the matriorb and deceiving Kanaya to garner her trust so she'd make him his weapon of mass destruction.

The problem is everything we've been told about Eridan up until that point suggested exactly the opposite about him. He is not Vriska. He is not Terezi. He is not a brilliant genius. He is awkward socially, and incapable of deceiving just about anyone. He is a lonely, desperate troll who is eager to please even the "land-dwellers" he's presumably so interested in killing. If there were additional layers to him, we needed to see that as readers in some way before Eridan became the character he is now.

That's part of my problem with Eridan's development in a nutshell: it's difficult for me to believe that Hussie really thought through the ramifications of the character when he created someone who's arguably even more bipolar than Sollux and even more schizophrenic than Gamzee. I think Andrew's goal was something akin to "I want to really flesh out Eridan so he's not just a generic villain, and so that readers are legitimately shocked when he goes apeshit bananas," but the problem is his most recent development completely contradicts what we know about him, and does so in a way that cheapens the resulting deaths and destruction. Eridan "hates all surface dwellers" and yet he's desperate to start relationships with them: he is a powerful murderous jackass but he's so very lonely. And heck, you can't even rely on a genocidal justification for Eridan's motivations because the first thing he kills is the one other sea-dweller present.

Despite this, Feferi's death wasn't a huge issue for me because it makes sense, from Eridan's perspective. The two have a long history, Feferi rejected Eridan's advances and ultimately his friendship, and while all kinds of anti-feminist bullshit is indirectly enforced through a writer's decision to have a spurned dude enact some dorky loser male's revenge fantasy (not exactly the best message to send to Hussie's target audience, I'd argue), at least the author hasn't provided any half-assed "justifications" for Eridan's actions.

(Nonetheless, as a brief aside, going back to earlier arguments, I think one of Andrew's critical mistakes was refusing to settle for either fully fleshing Eridan into a sympathetic, lonely shades-of-grey douchebag, or just making him totally despicable and irredeemable from the get-go. By toning down Eridan's genocidal interests and making him so laughably pathetic early on, Andrew had to completely drop that line of development and redirect Eridan to ensure he went on this recent murder spree in a way that was jarring to readers, and also increased the possibility that readers could actually sympathize with the bastard. I think it's a case of the author trying to have his cake and eat it too; it's very difficult to write a character this despicable and also give him depth. It might have been easier to swallow if Eridan was always far more brazenly hostile to and dismissive of all the land-dwellers, including Karkat and Kanaya. At least that would enable a more consistent characterization.)

Kanaya's death was just completely out-of-left field for me though precisely because Andrew apparently deceived me into believing that Eridan, despite being a complete douchebag, was still a douchebag with some layer of depth. Past updates built up the notion that he viewed Kanaya as a friend and the one troll who "actually believed in him." If Eridan was being snarky and sarcastic, we weren't given any indication that he was really playing a role of master manipulator. And given Eridan's personality, why would he possibly want to kill the one person left in the universe he holds some respect towards? What does he actually gain in killing off Kanaya? If he's willing to kill Kanaya why wouldn't he finish off Sollux while Karkat is standing there twaddling his thumbs, given that he really hated Sollux and he actually liked Kanaya?

(The mental image that pops into my head is one of the Columbine shooters killing the one teacher who befriended them and helped them train in paintball or lasertag or something, while sparing the bully who made their lives particularly miserable. Even in the context of characters we assume have lost their marbles and dived into sociopathy, it doesn't make much sense.)

And if he's willing to kill off Kanaya, why not kill off Karkat too? In other words, if Andrew's really redefining Eridan into a sociopathic spree murderer who wants to murder all the land-dwellers indiscriminately...why does he spare one?

The only explanation that makes sense is that Eridan killed Kanaya but spared Karkat and Sollux because Andrew's plot demanded it. In other words, for reasons unrelated to Eridan's actual contextual motivations, Andrew had predetermined that he needed Karkat and Sollux "alive" to conduct future plot shenanigans while Kanaya was "expendable." Her death was chosen for the sole reason to shock the readers and prove that "anyone can die" without actually killing someone on the level of Karkat or Vriska.

What's unfortunate is even presuming that Andrew needed Sollux and Karkat to live and needed Kanaya to die, there are multiple alternative ways Andrew could have written that sequence of events so Eridan's actions would be far more believable and a consistent character portrait of him would emerge. I've already spelled out a few possibilities in earlier posts in this thread and this Wall of Text is going to be long enough, so I won't go there again.

Additionally, even assuming Kanaya had to die, there are ultimately other ways Andrew could have written her death sequence so as to avoid trivializing her passing in the manner that he did. For starters, scrap the Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff reference, that was just silly. If the character's really being permanently offed, give her some measure of finality before she passes on. That doesn't mean giving her a "happily ever after ending", but it does mean ensuring that the readers can't view her death as completely pointless or arbitrary.

Hell, even if Kanaya is simply defending Karkat or Sollux in that scene, or even if Kanaya had a last conversation (however ambiguous) with Rose, or even if Eridan and Kanaya simply had a dialogue before their battle in which Eridan attempted to spare her (he blows up the matriorb, then attempts to justify his action to the one troll who he appreciates, and tells her she should just abscond, and Kanaya is infuriated, so she refuses)...there's just so many simple, unobtrusive ways that the quality of the narrative could have been preserved, and ways that Kanaya's death would actually feel adequately foreshadowed and required by the plot, as opposed to dictated on an arbitrary whim.

I haven't even gotten into why I feel Kanaya's death (however inadvertently) feeds into hetero-normative assumptions in storytelling, but an attempt to start that conversation in the MSPA forums resulted in hordes of folks there claiming I was accusing Andrew of being "biased against gays" (I wasn't) or "requiring Kanaya to live because you defined her as a lesbian" (That wasn't the case either.) So maybe I shouldn't touch that subject.

TLDR: Gamzee and Eridan were once intriguing, well-developed and consistently portrayed characters who I was sincerely interested in. They've been since reduced into one-note, two-dimensional villains.

Vriska was once a complex, multifaceted and well-developed character (who I always personally disliked, but who I at least once appreciated) who has been reduced into an omnipresent Mary Sue.

Kanaya was a complex, multi-facted and well-developed character whose relevance to the plot has now been undone by her death. Either she stays dead, in which every moment we invested in her was essentially worthless as she ultimately did nothing of value in the trolls' session to merit her development, or she comes back to life in a way that cheapens her dying and reduces her "death" into a fake-out designed to simply shock the readers.

Tavros wasn't really complex, but I did kind of hope his character would have a purpose of some sort...and he really didn't, aside from just serving as the luckless chump in Vriska's constant "success stories."

Feferi's dead too, but yeah, I won't pretend to have cared about Feferi.

Still, we went from a storyline in Hivebent that seemed to have twelve really phenomenal characters...to finding out that about half of those characters did not have the shades-of-grey depth that they could have had. I don't doubt that a character as significant as Karkat will either die heroically or live on in a way that resonates with readers and validates his participation in Hivebent, but I'd compare it to investing in watching LOST (the TV show) only to find out that the show you thought was about a massive, diverse, multi-dimensional cast was really all about Jack Shepard and every other character was essentially merely a tool utilized by the writers to ensure that Jack's single-character epic journey was fulfilled.

And holy shit did I just ramble on incoherently there. Solid Snake Walls of Text are back in style.

[Marc v4.0]

Originally Posted by Solid Snake

WALL OF TEXT INCOMING



He's a total fuckwad who "was trying to kill all surface dwellers" but who deliberately exempted Kanaya from said threats even before she went out of her way to make him that nice wand, and who he profusely and (in my interpretation) honestly thanked for believing in him mere moments before he provoked her and killed her.

Now, I have no fundamental issue with Eridan deciding that his role as the Prince of Hope really was about hopelessness. I have no problem with the conceptualization of Eridan plotting to destroy the matriorb and deceiving Kanaya to garner her trust so she'd make him his weapon of mass destruction.

The problem is everything we've been told about Eridan up until that point suggested exactly the opposite about him. He is not Vriska. He is not Terezi. He is not a brilliant genius. He is awkward socially, and incapable of deceiving just about anyone. He is a lonely, desperate troll who is eager to please even the "land-dwellers" he's presumably so interested in killing. If there were additional layers to him, we needed to see that as readers in some way before Eridan became the character he is now.

That's part of my problem with Eridan's development in a nutshell: it's difficult for me to believe that Hussie really thought through the ramifications of the character when he created someone who's arguably even more bipolar than Sollux and even more schizophrenic than Gamzee. I think Andrew's goal was something akin to "I want to really flesh out Eridan so he's not just a generic villain, and so that readers are legitimately shocked when he goes apeshit bananas," but the problem is his most recent development completely contradicts what we know about him, and does so in a way that cheapens the resulting deaths and destruction. Eridan "hates all surface dwellers" and yet he's desperate to start relationships with them: he is a powerful murderous jackass but he's so very lonely. And heck, you can't even rely on a genocidal justification for Eridan's motivations because the first thing he kills is the one other sea-dweller present.

Despite this, Feferi's death wasn't a huge issue for me because it makes sense, from Eridan's perspective. The two have a long history, Feferi rejected Eridan's advances and ultimately his friendship, and while all kinds of anti-feminist bullshit is indirectly enforced through a writer's decision to have a spurned dude enact some dorky loser male's revenge fantasy (not exactly the best message to send to Hussie's target audience, I'd argue), at least the author hasn't provided any half-assed "justifications" for Eridan's actions.

(Nonetheless, as a brief aside, going back to earlier arguments, I think one of Andrew's critical mistakes was refusing to settle for either fully fleshing Eridan into a sympathetic, lonely shades-of-grey douchebag, or just making him totally despicable and irredeemable from the get-go. By toning down Eridan's genocidal interests and making him so laughably pathetic early on, Andrew had to completely drop that line of development and redirect Eridan to ensure he went on this recent murder spree in a way that was jarring to readers, and also increased the possibility that readers could actually sympathize with the bastard. I think it's a case of the author trying to have his cake and eat it too; it's very difficult to write a character this despicable and also give him depth. It might have been easier to swallow if Eridan was always far more brazenly hostile to and dismissive of all the land-dwellers, including Karkat and Kanaya. At least that would enable a more consistent characterization.)

Kanaya's death was just completely out-of-left field for me though precisely because Andrew apparently deceived me into believing that Eridan, despite being a complete douchebag, was still a douchebag with some layer of depth. Past updates built up the notion that he viewed Kanaya as a friend and the one troll who "actually believed in him." If Eridan was being snarky and sarcastic, we weren't given any indication that he was really playing a role of master manipulator. And given Eridan's personality, why would he possibly want to kill the one person left in the universe he holds some respect towards? What does he actually gain in killing off Kanaya? If he's willing to kill Kanaya why wouldn't he finish off Sollux while Karkat is standing there twaddling his thumbs, given that he really hated Sollux and he actually liked Kanaya?

(The mental image that pops into my head is one of the Columbine shooters killing the one teacher who befriended them and helped them train in paintball or lasertag or something, while sparing the bully who made their lives particularly miserable. Even in the context of characters we assume have lost their marbles and dived into sociopathy, it doesn't make much sense.)

And if he's willing to kill off Kanaya, why not kill off Karkat too? In other words, if Andrew's really redefining Eridan into a sociopathic spree murderer who wants to murder all the land-dwellers indiscriminately...why does he spare one?

The only explanation that makes sense is that Eridan killed Kanaya but spared Karkat and Sollux because Andrew's plot demanded it. In other words, for reasons unrelated to Eridan's actual contextual motivations, Andrew had predetermined that he needed Karkat and Sollux "alive" to conduct future plot shenanigans while Kanaya was "expendable." Her death was chosen for the sole reason to shock the readers and prove that "anyone can die" without actually killing someone on the level of Karkat or Vriska.

What's unfortunate is even presuming that Andrew needed Sollux and Karkat to live and needed Kanaya to die, there are multiple alternative ways Andrew could have written that sequence of events so Eridan's actions would be far more believable and a consistent character portrait of him would emerge. I've already spelled out a few possibilities in earlier posts in this thread and this Wall of Text is going to be long enough, so I won't go there again.

Additionally, even assuming Kanaya had to die, there are ultimately other ways Andrew could have written her death sequence so as to avoid trivializing her passing in the manner that he did. For starters, scrap the Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff reference, that was just silly. If the character's really being permanently offed, give her some measure of finality before she passes on. That doesn't mean giving her a "happily ever after ending", but it does mean ensuring that the readers can't view her death as completely pointless or arbitrary.

Hell, even if Kanaya is simply defending Karkat or Sollux in that scene, or even if Kanaya had a last conversation (however ambiguous) with Rose, or even if Eridan and Kanaya simply had a dialogue before their battle in which Eridan attempted to spare her (he blows up the matriorb, then attempts to justify his action to the one troll who he appreciates, and tells her she should just abscond, and Kanaya is infuriated, so she refuses)...there's just so many simple, unobtrusive ways that the quality of the narrative could have been preserved, and ways that Kanaya's death would actually feel adequately foreshadowed and required by the plot, as opposed to dictated on an arbitrary whim.

I haven't even gotten into why I feel Kanaya's death (however inadvertently) feeds into hetero-normative assumptions in storytelling, but an attempt to start that conversation in the MSPA forums resulted in hordes of folks there claiming I was accusing Andrew of being "biased against gays" (I wasn't) or "requiring Kanaya to live because you defined her as a lesbian" (That wasn't the case either.) So maybe I shouldn't touch that subject.

TLDR: Gamzee and Eridan were once intriguing, well-developed and consistently portrayed characters who I was sincerely interested in. They've been since reduced into one-note, two-dimensional villains.

Vriska was once a complex, multifaceted and well-developed character (who I always personally disliked, but who I at least once appreciated) who has been reduced into an omnipresent Mary Sue.

Kanaya was a complex, multi-facted and well-developed character whose relevance to the plot has now been undone by her death. Either she stays dead, in which every moment we invested in her was essentially worthless as she ultimately did nothing of value in the trolls' session to merit her development, or she comes back to life in a way that cheapens her dying and reduces her "death" into a fake-out designed to simply shock the readers.

Tavros wasn't really complex, but I did kind of hope his character would have a purpose of some sort...and he really didn't, aside from just serving as the luckless chump in Vriska's constant "success stories."

Feferi's dead too, but yeah, I won't pretend to have cared about Feferi.

Still, we went from a storyline in Hivebent that seemed to have twelve really phenomenal characters...to finding out that about half of those characters did not have the shades-of-grey depth that they could have had. I don't doubt that a character Karkat will either die heroically or live on in a way that resonates with readers and validates his participation in Homestuck, but I'd compare it to investing in watching LOST (the TV show) only to find out that the show you thought was about a massive, diverse, multi-dimensional cast was really all about Jack Shepard and every other character was essentially merely a tool utilized by the writers to ensure that Jack's single-character epic journey was fulfilled.

And holy shit did I just ramble on incoherently there. Solid Snake Walls of Text are back in style.

This was pretty much my entire point, but much better

[Loyal]

Originally Posted by Solid Snake

WALL OF TEXT INCOMING

[Fifthfiend]

Originally Posted by Karesh

I'm still holding out hope Vriska might turn out to somehow not be horrendously evil and whatnot, since I think she and John are pretty cute together.

He's just so likeable and charming.

[POS Industries]

Snake, I pretty much see where you're coming from for the most part and agree with you to a certain degree, especially since I'm fearing that the deaths are going to fall into an unfortunate pattern of "pair up or die" to clean up any characters that don't fall nicely into pre-arranged romantic pairings, which is some bullshit-tier writing and I've come to expect better from this comic.

But I have to stop you here:

Originally Posted by Solid Snake

Gamzee and Eridan were once intriguing, well-developed and consistently portrayed characters who I was sincerely interested in. They've been since reduced into one-note, two-dimensional villains.

All that happened was that Gamzee and Eridan went from one-note, two-dimensional comic relief characters to one-note, two-dimensional villains, but I have found the shift to be entertaining nonetheless.

The SBaHJ gag during Kanaya's death was uncalled for, though, unless we really are getting vampire!Kanaya out of this somehow.

Originally Posted by Karesh

Also, just to sort of interject this here:
I'm still holding out hope Vriska might turn out to somehow not be horrendously evil and whatnot, since I think she and John are pretty cute together.
That is all.

HERESY.

[BitVyper]

I think Vriska's already not horrendously evil.

since I'm fearing that the deaths are going to fall into an unfortunate pattern of "pair up or die" to clean up any characters that don't fall nicely into pre-arranged romantic pairings

Vriska is really the only troll who does that right now. Terezi/Dave interferes with Terezi/Karkat, and Terezi/Karkat interferes with anything for Karkat at the moment. Sollux, and Aradia seem to have been Just Friends, but even if Aradia being alive again changes that, it will still be anything but neat when you account for Sollux's Matesprit dying, and add Equius into the equation. Kanaya was really the only one besides Vriska who could have had a tidy pair-up, so I don't see this happening.

Edit: Which isn't to say there won't be romances, or even that there won't be romances that work out with no real drama to interfere, but just because the characters who do survive pair off doesn't mean the others all died for that. It's just nature taking its course. Without turning it into The Are the Trolls of Our Lives, there's only so much that can be done in the relationship drama department.

[Karrrrrrrrrrrresche]

Originally Posted by POS Industries

HERESY.

[POS Industries]

Originally Posted by BitVyper

Vriska is really the only troll who does that right now. Terezi/Dave interferes with Terezi/Karkat, and Terezi/Karkat interferes with anything for Karkat at the moment. Sollux, and Aradia seem to have been Just Friends, but even if Aradia being alive again changes that, it will still be anything but neat when you account for Sollux's Matesprit dying, and add Equius into the equation. Kanaya was really the only one besides Vriska who could have had a tidy pair-up, so I don't see this happening.

You see how there's all these options going on here with complications and interferences and characters potentially being left out in the cold because the other two people in their respective love triangles ended up working out?

Characters dying purely to simplify these issues is specifically what I'm afraid of.

Edit: Which isn't to say there won't be romances, or even that there won't be romances that work out with no real drama to interfere, but just because the characters who do survive pair off doesn't mean the others all died for that. It's just nature taking its course. Without turning it into The Are the Trolls of Our Lives, there's only so much that can be done in the relationship drama department.

If you honestly believe that the trolls' story hasn't been Trolls of Our Lives, you haven't been reading this comic right.

[Kim]

Terezi dies.

Karkat x John forevs.

[Solid Snake]

Originally Posted by POS Industries

Snake, I pretty much see where you're coming from for the most part and agree with you to a certain degree, especially since I'm fearing that the deaths are going to fall into an unfortunate pattern of "pair up or die" to clean up any characters that don't fall nicely into pre-arranged romantic pairings, which is some bullshit-tier writing and I've come to expect better from this comic.

...You're really tempting me to go on that hetero-normativity rant, but yeah, I do agree with your sinking suspicion that we're headed in either that direction or in an alternative "all the trolls die" direction, which would arguably be just as bad because we'd have wasted so much time in Hivebent with characters who'd ultimately only minimally influence the kids' journeys.

All that happened was that Gamzee and Eridan went from one-note, two-dimensional comic relief characters to one-note, two-dimensional villains, but I have found the shift to be entertaining nonetheless.

...With Gamzee? Sure (although I think he had a couple moments), but I'll actually go into the minority and say I felt Eridan was fairly well-developed and nuanced earlier, or at least apparently I interpreted him as such.

Oh, he was always a rather pathetic douchebag, but watching him struggle to be loved (or hated) didn't feel like a purely comedic exercise, and there were moments of dialogue (predominantly between him and Karkat and him and Kanaya) where I felt the presence of deeper nuances.

I won't actually bother with any research to validate my claims because it's really not worth arguing the merit of Eridan at the end of the day, particularly given who he's become, and I never really cared much for the character in the first place.

But perhaps the better way to phrase that sentence you objected to is that Eridan and Gamzee both had the potential buried deep within their one-note comedic relief presentations to become deeper and more meaningful characters, and by turning them instead into one-dimensional villains, Andrew has permanently nixed those opportunities and chose to go in a fundamentally different direction than one I'd prefer.

...On that note I'll briefly add that it's strange to read Andrew frequently defend his creative decisions on the grounds that Homestuck was always a zany, off-the-wall, anything-goes comedy of outrageous proportions, akin to Problem Sleuth.

Maybe that's what some people like about Homestuck? I always appreciated the pesterlogs and the memos far more: I enjoyed the dramatic nuances of character interaction and maturation far more than all the fourth-wall gags or the Sweet Bro shenanigans. That's why it worries me when Andrew tries to diffuse formspring questions by reminding everyone that it's "just a comedy." I suppose my feelings are somewhat akin to attending a theater to watch a Shakespearian tragedy and then hearing that the director intends his rendition of the work to be compared to a Ren and Stimpy episode.

EDIT: Not that Andrew deserves by any stretch of the imagination to actually be compared to Shakespeare (he's not nearly that good,) but I was just trying to be clever with the comparison.