by @marathemara

You probably remember Tavros Nitram as “that guy with the huge horns,” or “the one with no personality,” or “that troll in the wheelchair.” The beautiful thing about Tavros, though, is that all these descriptions are incomplete, and the second one is just plain wrong. I like Tavros Nitram because he is not his disability–but I feel sorry for him too, because he doesn’t realize for a very long time that he is not his disability.



First and foremost among the things I like about Tavros: he’s a huge nerd. He loves fairytales and he can talk to animals. He spends his time playing Fiduspawn, the troll equivalent of Pokémon breeding; or going on FLARP adventures with Aradia, Terezi, and Vriska; or rapping with Gamzee; or watching his favorite Pupa Pan movies over and over. He is so nerdy that he named his lusus Tinkerbull after Pan’s, not even realizing that Pan’s adventures, which he tries to emulate in his FLARPing, are based on the life of his ancestor the Summoner. Tavros is also a powerfully nice person, but we’ll talk about that later because nerdy and nice are not a combination that gets much respect on Alternia.

Tavros’ quiet, nerdy life starts to go wrong when Vriska enters the picture. Vriska is trying much more intentionally to emulate her ancestor, and Mindfang’s journal helps her identify Tavros as the descendant of the Summoner, who loved and later murdered Mindfang. (Incidentally, Mindfang is the Alternian movie equivalent of Captain Hook.) And so she gets it into her head that Tavros should be part of her own grand life. At first she tries to “train” him by dropping him into FLARP scenarios that are beyond his ability. When he tries to stand up for himself, she mind-controls him into jumping off a cliff, leaving his legs paralyzed.



The longer Tavros is confined to a wheelchair, the more he builds his self-image around being stuck in a wheelchair. He’s patient with himself, but he stops associating his happiness with his hobbies and his friends, and starts thinking of happiness and confidence as things that come with freedom of movement. (It doesn’t help that Vriska, as his server player, builds stairs all over his hive and then tries to make him apologize for the pain she’s inflicted on him.) During the Game, he’s happiest in his rocket chair, because he can fly and doesn’t have to worry about not being able to walk, and he can commune with the local consorts and underlings to get their help solving the puzzles hidden in his planet’s ancient ruins.

Before this, Tavros had become, not only to himself but to his teammates and the reader, “that quiet guy in the wheelchair.” Now that he has legs, he’s determined to prove us all wrong by challenging Vriska and righting all the wrongs she’s done to him. But it’s not about proving himself, or about freeing himself from his abuser. If it were, he might have waited until he was in full control of his new legs. Instead, it’s the legs, and the faith he puts in them, that drive him forward. It’s that faith that blinds him to the fact that he’s not emotionally ready to stand up to Vriska, and to charge ahead recklessly until she turns the tables on him and murders him with his own lance.





In death, Tavros has legs and can fly, so you’d think that would make him able to move on a little and build his identity around something else. Well…it’s a slow process. In the New Alpha, he gets no farther than “I am Vriska’s lackey”–she’s sort of undone his murder by prototyping him in Jane’s kernelsprite, and he feels beholden to her for that, though not so beholden that he won’t subvert her wishes a little by being nice to Jake.

Ironically, since John’s retcon powers were supposed to make everything better, it’s Old Alpha Tavros who succeeds in becoming something other than “the disabled kid” or “Vriska’s lackey.” We’re not entirely sure what finally inspired him to complain aloud about Vriska’s treatment of him, or to actually get up and strike out on his own, but it might have to do with the fact that he and Vriska were, very briefly, prototyped together in a kernelsprite. Their personalities may have rubbed off on each other, giving Tavros a sense of what it really means to be confident and believe that you are good and right and worthy.

This is where Tavros’ perseverance and niceness pay off. Tavros brings together a whole army of ghosts just by being nice to them. Where Vriska and Aranea mind-controlled, Tavros says please, and thousands of ghosts say yes. And with his army at his back, living (afterliving?) proof that he can get things done just by being himself, this Tavros is finally able to stick it to (New Alpha) Vriska by doing something she never thought he could do.

But this Tavros is also wiser than he was before, and wiser than New Alpha Tavros currently is: he’s figured out his limitations. He knows he’s no Summoner, and he’ll never be an effective leader of an army. And he’s better at figuring out who has authority and can use it well. So he gives control of the army to Meenah, not to Vriska; and Meenah rewards him by fulfilling his childhood dream of becoming an imperial Cavalreaper.



So, at least in one timeline, Tavros has moved beyond equating himself with his disability, and no longer lets himself be defined by what Vriska has done to him. He’s overcome the effects of her abuse, gained the respect of a whole army, and gotten his dream job, all by being his wonderful nice nerdy self. I hope New Alpha Tavros gets a similarly happy ending, but we’ll have to wait to find out.







