vriska quarantine thread

to be clear this is not an attack on you and i enjoy your work. you dont even have to answer this if its too rude or presumptuous in your opinion. but i think its funny seeing your "definitively, if its the source material, they would fucking say that" post while knowing how you feel about the weaker parts of homestuck and also the uh. the epilogues. again this isnt supposed to be an epic own gotcha moment i think everyone is allowed to contain multitudes and shit. im just also a bit mischievous and part of me wants to be the little wondershowzen puppet going "But can we discuss the contradiction"

ah too bad you wanted to be a silly little gotcha puppet but i was thinking about this too! hold my hair back im forming this idea in real time so im about to start just vomiting the fuck up a bunch of half-formed ideas. (this is the second time today ive used this analogy)

the thing is that while i dont like the homestuck epilogues at all, there's no denying that it is largely, in-character, in broad strokes. it's a story which relies on every character being their worst possible self, sure. it is, in a lot of ways, a very public, very messy relapse. it gets at some really ugly parts of what the characters are, and that's just not what i want from homestuck.

it's part of a larger trend of hussie trying really hard to Make Dramatic Art and Tell Stories With A Point that i think really plays against what theyre good at, like. you see this with psycholonials too, just this idea of storytelling where nothing good ever happens and every character is not just flawed, but unbearably, noxiously toxic. and yknow, that's fine too, its literally not an invalid goal for a story to have.

its just not what i really like about homestuck and to a lesser extent problem sleuth. like, as messy as my feelings are about psycholonials, i still think fondly of zhen as a character even if she is the worst person to ever exist.

its like they took "dave being abused by bro came out of nowhere, the rooftop strifes dont really feel textually different from the other guardian strifes" all the way to heart and way overcorrected.

but all that to say, the worst possible self-hood apple hasnt fallen too far from the tree. and that's not strictly an invalid thing to tell a story about. it's just not what i want out of homestuck. and the tangible difference there, imo, is that puts the onus of not liking it on me, rather than hussie, cephiedvariable and ctset. they set out to do something, i didn't like what they did, i had an extended mental breakdown about it that i am still feeling the ramifications of even now, but at some point, the world continued to turn.

i hope you can kind of sense this feeling in bdth - while they aren't really in the running to be main characters or anything, rosebot, pesterquest rose, and candy rose are all real in burning down the house. i may be taking jane in a different direction, but that different direction is still in terms of hs2 jane. hell, tavros crocker gets a cameo in the walkaround

and yeah, this is to emphasize the contrast bdth jane against post-canon jane, but in order for that contrast to mean anything, those parts of the character have to have meaning enough to be rejected, which is the real point im getting at. it sort of drives home that i'm not just *really fucking up* at writing jane, too, which is actually more important than youd think.

ignoring the textual parts of a character you dont like because it conflicts with what you want the character to be (an image that you construct and maintain on your own, unintentionally) is a great way to wind up doing bad characterization of that character.

and yknow, sometimes that's fine! if your reach never gets beyond making an incorrect quotes blog, that doesnt matter. who give a shit. besides me, historys most notorious hater, who will seethe about a bad character take for weeks on end. (but i am the exception, not the rule)

if you're really swinging for the fences as i tend to do, at all times, even when i would be best suited not to, it just doesnt sit right to me to drop bits of a character you dont like just because you dont like it. when youre writing, its there specifically to be played with. and again, "playing with it" here still encompasses rejecting it and doing something different.

and yeah, different authors are going to focus on different parts of a character, but then youre getting out of the scope of this post tbh. but i think its worth remembering that nobody ever wants to make something bad on purpose. even intentionally making something bad on purpose is something you would want to succeed at, you dont want to fail at making something bad on purpose, etc. etc. this is stupid.

tl;dr its not actually that contradictory imo