by @marathemara​

Warning: Life on Alternia is life on Alternia. This post contains mentions of child abuse, bullying, a child-eating monster, and at least two stabbings.



Vriska is…complicated. She doesn’t have the sort of clean character arc or clearly stated goals that other Homestuck characters have. Because of this, she’s attracted the kind of controversy that we I Like Homestuck writers have been reluctant to wade into–if we took one side or another, we wouldn’t be describing her character completely. She’s too hard to pin down.

Then I realized that all this dithering was missing the point. I like Vriska because she’s complicated, and because she invites such controversy. Hussie has put more work into her backstory and motivations than almost any other character’s, and so when some people love her and some hate her, it’s not a case of misplaced sympathy or misplaced apathy. It’s because she’s complex like a real person, and I love it.



Here’s what we know about Vriska, and some of the big questions that fans disagree on about her. I’m not gonna try to answer these questions; for me, asking them is the fun part.

Vriska grew up with an abusive guardian. Her lusus, a giant spider that eats young trolls, quickly grew too big to leave her cave, leaving Vriska to find ways to feed her without becoming lunch herself. With help from her pen pal Terezi, she quickly became what we on Earth would consider a serial killer, luring unsuspecting wigglers into unwinnable FLARP scenarios and then dragging them back home to Spidermom. From the cruelly Social Darwinist perspective of Alternian society, this is totally justified: if you die before you reproduce, you didn’t deserve to reproduce anyway. But we humans agree this is a terrible thing, especially a terrible thing to make a child do, and we start to wonder what Vriska herself thinks of it all: does she manipulate and kill her peers so that she doesn’t die herself, or because society expects her to, or because it’s all she knows how to do? Or has she begun to enjoy it?



Vriska is horribly abusive to the other Beta trolls, especially Tavros. She claims to be toughening him up to help him achieve his potential both as a Page and as the descendant of the Summoner, but doesn’t seem to care–or even, sometimes, to see–that his reaction to her physical abuse and constant verbal belittling has been to become timid and resentful. Does she abuse Tavros because she enjoys making him feel bad, because that’s the only way she knows how to interact with people, or because she really thinks she can make him fulfill his destiny this way? In the end, she murders Tavros, and then blames him for provoking her. Is she so hard-hearted as to believe he brought it on himself, or is she just a child trying to avoid taking the blame for her own actions?

Vriska is constantly searching for an identity. For most of the time we’ve known her, she’s modeled herself after the way her ancestor, Marquise Spinneret Mindfang, depicted herself in her journal. Vriska does everything the way she thinks Mindfang would: her treasure-hunting FLARPs, her relationships with Eridan and Tavros, her rivalry with Terezi, even her use of Doc Scratch’s magic cue ball. But in the Old Alpha timeline, modeling herself after Mindfang gets her dead by Terezi’s hand.

After that, she spends some time drifting around dreambubbles thinking about her life, and she expresses what seems like regret about killing Tavros. She briefly reasserts her Mindfang persona during the hunt for Lord English’s legendary weapon, but it all starts to fall apart when Tavros grows a spine out of nowhere and stops obeying her. She finally settles on Meenah as her new role model, adopting elements of her speech and clothing style and mellowing out quite a bit. With Meenah, Vriska is happy, in the nice, easygoing way you might hope a child of her age would be happy. But is that really Vriska? Is Mindfang or Meenah the better role model? And will this new Vriska be a better match, whether platonically or romantically, for her timeline’s Terezi?

The split between Old Alpha and New Alpha happens when John interrupts Terezi’s execution of Vriska, knocking Vriska out so she can’t fly off to fight Bec Noir and keeping her on the meteor with the rest of the surviving trolls. During the three years she spends on the meteor on the way to Alpha Earth’s session, Vriska seems to assert herself over nearly everybody: keeping Gamzee restrained, forcing Rose to stay sober, and pulling Terezi into a pale relationship that keeps her away from Gamzee, Dave, and Karkat. By all accounts, these three years on the meteor are much happier and more peaceful than the Old Alpha’s three years on the meteor. But most people’s respect for Vriska as leader is grudging at best, and even Terezi claims to have worries she was unable to confide in even her moirail. Is New Alpha Vriska nicer, or better, or less mean than the pre-Cascade Mindfangy Vriska? Is she a better Vriska than the Vriska who models herself after Meenah? Is her moirallegiance with Terezi a healthy one? And if not, is it Vriska or Terezi (or both) who deserves better?



Feel free to decide the answers to these on your own, or to consult the reams of online Vriskanalysis that draw their own conclusions. I find the best ones are those that take Vriska’s own perspective into account. EnigmaRequiem on Reddit has done a couple of posts I particularly like examining the differences between Live Vriska and Dead Vriska’s personalities and beliefs. They are glorious and complicated. Just like Vriska herself.