#HS^2 was a bad idea overall IMO | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

deviljho · 3 years

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hs on main but

i’ve been thinking a lot about post retcon vriska and the simply epic vriska vs (vriska) confrontation...

i think that before i actually reread the comic last year, my takeaway of it from hussie’s commentary in the books and just general fan analysis online was that it’s vriska showing her whole ass re: her deep seated self loathing & inability to self actualize and move past her trauma. which is actually a defining aspect of her personality (bc as much as she likes to pretend this isn’t the case it dictates so much of what she does) lmao. in the face of a version of herself, in this case, (vriska), who has done some of the work to unpack her issues and is “happy”, vriska goes sicko mode and vents that frustration on her dead alternate self. but i think it goes even deeper than that and i can’t stop thinking about it so allow me to go off for a bit:

first off i think it’s crazy to claim (vriska) is happy or working past her childhood issues...she’s become more aware of them, sure, which lets be real is HUGE for any vriska lol but her existence as a ghost forces her to experience an inertia which prevents her from actually taking that awareness and doing anything with it. this is especially highlighted in her relationship with meenah, who is too much of a self absorbed enabler to really help her. having given up on their heroic cause, they start dating because, it’s something to do. but it becomes completely stagnant, just like (vriska) herself, because there’s literally nothing there for (vriska) to bounce off of. vriska needs more than just someone to let her talk, and feel heard to grow and change as a person imo, but i do think being given the specific environment to do so obviously has changed her, just not necessarily for “the better”.

contrast this with retcon vriska, who is for all intents and purposes now the “real” vriska (and indeed, vriska herself clings to this idea). brought back from her death by terezi for a variety of reasons, mainly that terezi personally regrets killing her and is in love with her LOL but setting aside my vrisrezi agenda for a moment, terezi’s successful use of her seer of mind powers confirms in-story that bringing her back has strategic merit, and from a meta standpoint, narratively i felt like it really worked to reveal that vriska’s presence was needed to keep the meteor crew from falling apart, not to mention her psychic powers playing an important role in protecting the whole team from jade being possessed. i know some people dislike the retcon, but i love it for this simply epic twist tbh.

anyways...this retcon vriska is someone who canonically obsessed over their plan to defeat lord english for three years and had planned it all out to the last detail, she’s clearly taken the reigns on directing the team overall, and talks multiple times about “not having time for relationships” with the exception of being moirails with terezi which lets be real, is a hard friendzoning of their messy, quadrants-transcending relationship but again i digress...

vriska was brought back with a purpose, To Be The Hero That The Story Needs, and she’s more fixated than ever with completing this task, probably because in the epic story that she larps being a part of in her mind, successfully completing this mission is to empirically prove that she was worth bringing back, despite all the harm she’s done (and pretends not to feel badly about). vriska also desperately wants her suffering to MEAN something. we see this in her pesterlogs with john before she’s about to fight jack noir; she passes off having her lusus as a task “only really strong” children are given. i think this is why seeing (vriska) enrages her; she’s being confronted with the version of herself who she perceived as making the selfish choice to fight jack, who “deserved” to die for doing so, and on top of all that this (vriska) is now just sitting around in paradox spacing doing nothing and proving nothing to anyone?? i think it honestly has a lot less to do with (vriska) and a lot more to do with vriska obsessively reassuring herself that she’s doing the right thing, that she HAS to go through with sacrificing herself in a big epic moment for the good of everyone else because anything short of that means she’s failed at redeeming herself. vriska cannot accept that there is a version of herself who is okay with just “existing”, without deriving meaning and purpose from the abuse she suffered as a child and inflicted on her friends and countless innocent bystanders.

it’s markedly different from, for example, jade’s confrontation with her dead dream self which really is her being forced to look back on a younger version of herself who is (obviously) less experienced and or/traumatized. and i think it’s different from dave & davesprite’s interactions too, the small amount of them we get to see beyond like, ironic jokes. but imo this is bc jade and dave are markedly different from vriska. dave openly rejects the notion of glory and heroism, and avoids it whenever possible. jade is continuously forced to suffer for the sake of the timeline and the narrative, but is shown passively accepting this as simply things that “needed to happen”. personally imo in jade’s case i wanna chalk that up to bad writing on hussie’s part; it kind of sucks that jade never gets to unpack that in homestuck proper.

anyways. tbh the existence of both of those dead alternate selves imo further proves my theory that (vriska) is far from happy; the experience of being a dead alternate self is obviously extremely unsettling and depersonalizing. vriska is terrified of dying; her entire childhood was defined by this terror in a lot of ways and by the end of the session she’s died multiple times, pretty gruesomely. i think her hysterical woman(tm) rant is way more about psyching herself up and her own fears of failure than it is about seeing a supposedly “happy” version of herself. i don’t even think vriska can conceive of such a thing for herself; she has no sense of normalcy or purpose after the session to return to the way john, or like, kanaya has.

also interesting to note here is meenah as a foil for both of them; immediately after this fight meenah ditches (vriska) to join up with vriska after admitting (with some regret) that she’s a bad person. meenah doesn’t struggle at all with the self image issues vriska has, and though she may feel some guilt over ditching (vriska) just like she expressed guilt to john about becoming the condescence in a different timeline because it meant that she would probably end up killing all her friends back when (vriska) was first trying to rally up a ghost army, she ultimately acts in her self interest and doesn’t really lose sleep over it. in fact she will readily admit that she’s being an asshole and still do whatever she wants. contrast this with all of vriska’s grandstanding about not caring that she comes off as annoying and overbearing, and her overcompensation for that in the form of confidently insisting that the others “need” her.

my final comment is that,...coming back to the vrisrezi of it all, it’s obvious from terezi’s final pesterlogs to vriska before [s] terezi: remem8er that there was a ton of stuff left unsaid between them and presumably between vriska and the rest of the meteor crew as well because vriska spent 90% of the time bossing them around, either about their plans for the new session or just in general in what i like to think of as her loving nagging scorpio way lol. terezi clearly feels like she’s alone in “needing” vriska because even their relationship post retcon is strained, and vriska is so wrapped up in making plans and making sure she gets it right this time, and is already planning to die again out in paradox space. and then after all of this, her fate after her big epic moment is left offscreen for us to wonder about. which in and of itself is pretty narratively tragic for a character like vriska. it makes me honestly wonder how much of this they’re going to unpack in hs2 because tbh it’s pretty juicy. i would love to see a huge confrontation between terezi and vriska about vriska’s choices post retcon...and just in general what life post-session would look like for a person like her. through the epilogues and hs^2 we’ve seen what “normal” life has been like for terezi, and she obviously can’t let go of the past (or vriska. AUGH)...so who’s to say what’s in store for them? i wish we lived in a world where we would eventually find out, and we could see them continue to be each other’s foils in unpacking that but i don’t know if i have faith that the writers will explore it in a satisfying way lmao.

anyways that’s all i have, thanks for reading this if you did read it. i love vriska

#vriska meta #thats all this is really....i have more hs thoughts since i finished rereading it in november but tbh this is the condensed core of them #the vriska of it all...#homestuck meta

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