by lackadaisicallexicon

Homestuck’s format is a deeply templatized one. In appearance and characteristics, each character has everything distinctive scrubbed down to a base and then given traits in a fashion reminiscent of a classic tabletop RPG character sheet: eye color, message client handle, weapon of choice. Characters are a collection of colors, tropes, and stereotypes stretched around the same blank canvas—and no character illustrates the real effects of those tropes and stereotypes better than Damara Megido.

The first we see of Damara is that Meenah doesn’t like her; and as the reader going through Openbound from Meenah’s perspective, we are encouraged not to like her either. That Meenah might not be the most reliable narrator doesn’t particularly occur to the reader, as that tangential reference is at the very beginning of Openbound, and Damara appears just before the end.

Upon meeting her, there seems to be no cause to doubt the poor endorsements of her character offered by people like Meenah, Rufioh, and Latula. While the reader doesn’t understand her words, her cruel facial expressions, combined with the fragmented translations Rufioh gives us, more than communicate that she’s as unfriendly as Meenah says she is.

What we don’t get until Aranea’s exposition stand reveals more of us to her is Damara’s side of the story. That Meenah’s rivalry with Damara was one-sided conveniently escapes mention until then, and more exploration of the surrounding characters draws a picture of Damara rarely touched on.

Damara is a foreign presence among the Alpha trolls; she doesn’t speak English (or its Beforan analogue) very well and no one makes an effort to break the language barrier. The only person who can even understand her is Rufioh Nitram…who is the leader of a group called “The Lost Weeaboos”. For those unfamiliar, a “weeaboo” or “weeb” is a person, typically American, who idealizes and fetishizes Japanese culture due to their exposure to anime and the stereotypes therein.

From here, we enter the realm of pure speculation—canon isn’t very explicit about the nitty-gritty details of Rufioh and Damara’s relationship. But we do know that prior to Rufioh and Meenah, Damara was a very sweet girl. This, combined with her sailor-style outfit, makes her the perfect stereotypical Japanese schoolgirl. And anyone with an experience with real-life “weeaboos” knows how they fetishize East Asian people, schoolgirls especially. While there’s no explicit canonical support for the idea that Rufioh fetishized Damara, I think it’s quite likely, and goes a long way towards explaining why he so easily disregarded her.

Meenah’s idea that more aggressive players are better at playing SBURB defined how she lead the players of her session, but she was much harder on Damara than the others, perhaps perceiving her as even more passive than the others due to the stereotypes she’d internalized about the delicacy of “East Beforan” girls. And so Damara was twisted from her personality as a sweet girl to a cruel witch, which completes her transition from symbolic Madonna to Whore.

Pre-abuse Damara is the perfect image of the sweet, innocent virgin; post-abuse Damara is a hypersexual, cruel, and cynical young woman capable of extreme violence. And it’s quite likely, due to how rampantly girls like her are fetishized, that stereotypes were to blame. The same thing is reflected by Damaras post-Scratch incarnation, who is forced to dress like a schoolgirl for use by Lord English, who himself learned to draw from a manga artbook.

Hussie tends to avoid racial coding; in this case, to make a point about stereotypes, he gave us a deeply racial character, in order to illustrate the harm discrimination can wreak, both on the victim and the perpetrator—for of course, Damara got revenge on her abusers in the end. And that’s why I like her. She’s a cautionary tale and a rather validating character study of racial stereotyping in a story that could honestly use both.