OKAY SO I THINK I FIGURED OUT A THING

ABOUT TEREZI

MY BEAUTIFUL ASSHOLE CHILD

AND WHY THE FUCK SHE’S SUCH A TRAINWRECK

it all started with me reading an early Homestuck liveblog and thinking “yeah she’s very Chaotic” and then immediately adding my later observations that actually she’s hella Lawful (or at least, chooses to try to be)

just to remind in case someone doesn’t know, the framework I’m referring to here is DnD alignment

it looks like this

It basically classifies people according to traits they exhibit when confronted with difficult global choices and out of ordinary situations. Useful for DnD adventurers for whom that’s daily life, pretty much entirely unapplicable to most regular people.

Two axis, Good/Evil and Lawful/Chaotic. People who exhibit traits from both ends of the spectrum - which is? most of them really? - end up somewhere in the middle between the two extreme ends, which are very abstract anyway.

An important thing to note is that this system has no absolute point of reference. You can generally tell which of the two decisions in a particular situation is more Good/Evil or Chaotic/Lawful, but which decisions have more weight in determining a /person’s/ alignment and where it objectively falls relative to the middle point and the point of division between Good/Neutral or Neutral/Evil is very much arbitrary. People who know math and coordinate systems understand what I’m talking about, hopefully.

Basically, as I’m a Light player (and we are talking about Homestuck, still), I want to explain it in terms of contextual relevance. When you have, say, a hero, a villain and a meek middleman, it makes sense to define the hero as being Good, the villain as been Evil and the middleman as being Neutral, even if compared to some other villain from some other context this one looks basically like a saint. On the other hand, when you ARE comparing villains from different contexts, you might well end up defining the reference points so that the best of them are Good, because when everyone’s in the same box there’s no point to using the system at all.

A natural question is, of course, what use this system is at all, if it’s so arbitrary. The answer is, it’s very good for defining certain types of conflicts.

(I mean, you don’t really need this particular system to define Good vs Evil, but it’s probably worth noting that the system is made for that too)

One particular one that most people are probably familiar with in some form is Lawful vs Good. It’s an inner conflict of a Lawful Good person…

okay, wait, I probably need to say things about Chaotic vs Lawful here. Good vs Evil is pretty much self-explanatory, but that other one is pretty… interesting.

Chaotic keywords: new, free, arbitrary, out of the box, self-oriented, independent, unpredictable

Lawful keywords: orderly, traditional, reliable, known, obedient, structured, normal

You might note that those are not entirely antonyms. Even for those that are, naturally a person will choose some of these in some situations and others in others right? It seems pretty useless.

But a Chaotic vs Lawful conflict is actually pretty well defined, if not always embodied in two different people. Do you go the tried and true paths or try for something new? Do you do things the slightly longer way that is traditional or cut all the corners you can see being cut? Do you respect all the laws just because they are laws or only those that you can see the point of? Do you trust the authorities or do you rebel against them?

A Lawful Good person is someone who tries to do Good while following predefined paths, working within the structure. They assume that following laws, even if they can’t see the point of it in the moment, ultimately adds up to greater good. Even if you can cross the street on the red light right now, what if some child sees you and gets confused about traffic lights and gets run over by a car later? Hmm?

A Lawful vs Good conflict, then, is when the predefined paths, traditions and structures that this person is used to respecting are very obviously in conflict with their ethical values in the moment. You are given orders to not interfere with the situation, but you can save lives if you do. There is a bureaucratic procedure that must be followed, but the outcome is obvious and help it’ll end up allowing is needed Now. Your superior is being dangerously unreasonable almost to the point of being criminal but not quite…

(And then there are all the conflicts with the actual law of the land, which I’m not even going to start with because POLITICAL. It is, however, worth noting that working to change the laws to match your ethical values can be both a Chaotic Good and a Lawful Good thing, depending on whether the person views it as changing/dismantling the system or as helping it work to its intended purpose)

Another great example of a conflict that the alignment system helps single out is Lawful Good vs Chaotic Good. This is generally an interpersonal conflict, between two people who basically understand and share each other’s core values but differ dramatically on details. Sometimes they want to achieve the same goal but can’t see eye to eye on methods (generally it’s the Lawful one disapproving of the Chaotic one’s more ruthless but efficient approach, or of the risks the Chaotic one is willing to take in pursuit of the goal), other times they are explicitly working at cross purposes (destabilizing government in order to usher in a revolution vs working to stabilize and improve it).

(A key thing about such a conflict being an alignment conflict is that until you see the outcome, there’s no way to see for sure which one’s the right answer. It’s a conflict of presumptions and risks someone is willing to take, not of someone seeing further than the other and the other being unreasonably stubborn, although of course people can have alignment conflicts AND be unreasonably stubborn in them.)

So, after this lengthy aside, let’s go back to personally Terezi Pyrope.

In personality she is, generally, a Chaotic Good person. Someone might want to contest the Good part, but 1) compare her position of ‘only punish the bad guys’ to the usual alternian values of 'cull the weak’, 2) there is an interfering factor (I’ll get to it soon).

The Chaotic part comes from just how - well, just how Terezi she is. She speaks in a deliberately annoying and hard to read way, she likes befuddling people and confusing them, she sees a simple system - a coin flip! - and subverts it to do the exact opposite. She’s a free spirit, she thinks out of the box, she doesn’t easily accept authority. She loves Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff and considers her lack of sight to be a boon rather than a disadvantage.

Terezi is unique and prides herself on being unique and views it as her objectively strong point.

This is all very… ironic for someone whose thing, meanwhile, is Law - and not just any law, alternian law, which by no stretch of definition can be described as Good. At best it’s Neutral, structure for the sake of having structure; at worst it’s made to bend the population to Condesce’s whims most effectively, which is pretty much a prime example of how what’s Lawful can also be Evil.

Terezi’s natural alignment, what her personality tends towards, is Chaotic Good. Meanwhile, her chosen alignment, the mask she presents to the world and takes great pride in having crafted, the example she wants to emulate, is Lawful Neutral.

Awkward.

Generally, if a person exhibits traits of both ends of an alignment axis, it just meets in the middle and makes them Neutral. But Terezi is not mild and in the middle. She is both extremely Chaotic - I’d argue the most Chaotic character in the entire comic, and that’s contesting with fucking Gamzee - and extremely Lawful. She coats her judgements in rules and inevitability - very Lawful, and making a lot of sense for someone whose thing is Mind, - and then also makes a point of being entirely unpredictable and making her own calls without relying on any authority.

For a while, she manages to coast along without the two coming into great conflict, crafting the persona of the badass lawyer we all admire so much. Everything she does that’s Lawful is also Good, and everything that she does being Chaotic doesn’t come into explicit conflict with the rule system she’s following.

And then she crashes headlong into paradox space and inevitability and the deep unfairness of doomed timelines.

She tries to follow through with her declared position of Lawful Neutral. Testing and using the rules while disregarding whom it hurts - John and his denizen, Dave and the coin flip.

Which is where it starts to fall apart, because whatever her persona dictates, Terezi CANNOT DISREGARD WHOM IT HURTS. It’s not a thing she’s emotionally capable of, because my beautiful baby IS GOOD AFTER ALL (Shia surprise!)

That’s the first conflict, and that covers her running away in tears after watching Doomed Dave have his throat slit by Bec Noir.

But then it’s followed by an even more impressive crash.

Vriska.

By the rules that Terezi follows, Vriska must be stopped and punished. Alternian law, at least Terezi’s interpretation of it, does not allow any leeway for personal attachment (much less kindness and forgiveness), so following its judgement, there is literally no excuse to not kill Vriska, to give her any chance of redemption at all. To show (mostly herself) how ruthless she is, how good she’s at following this value system, Terezi escalates the [S] Flip situation to the breaking point, at which there are only two decisions left, one obviously Lawful and obviously correct, and the other painfully Chaotic Good (fuck logic, refuse to kill) and deadly.

In the Game Over timeline, she follows through with it, and is left to pick up the pieces. For once, she hates the path her Law has taken her… and all the justifications and explanations for WHY are anaphema to all that Chaotic Good is.

Inevitability. Doom. Unfairness of the order of the universe. Binary choice with no good outcome. Predetermined fate.

The very spirit of Chaotic Good is to challenge all of these, to dismantle and destroy them, be it via cleverness, via sheer fierceness, or via beating your head bloody against them until you are dead and they are irrelevant to you, which might as well count as a sort of victory.

This is the sentiment Terezi expresses when she says that she’d rather have spared Vriska and withered away in the doomed timeline, because clearly she has failed at applying either cleverness or brute force.

And it’s no-one’s fault other than her own. Any arguments for how it isn’t fall flat in the face of the fact that Terezi was the one to frame it like that and to escalate it like that. Terezi’s dedication to her lawyer persona is what brought her there, and the fact that Gamzee probably helped amplify the sentiment doesn’t really invalidate the truth that the sentiment was, in fact, wholly and uniquely (ha-ha) hers.

The solution that Terezi finds post-GO is, in fact, an absolute solution to her particular problem. It’s a spat in the face of inevitability, an affront to the very idea of the alpha timeline. It’s finding a rule that says any rule can be broken. It’s getting to be a wild card and apply your judgement arbitrarily without being restrained by any structure other than your own mind, AND THANK YOU VERY MUCH TEREZI WILL TAKE THE OPPORTUNITY YES.

The binary choice that she’d maneouvered herself into back then is no longer valid. She can just go back and undo it, breaking the rules even of narrative suspense and consequence, and WHO CARES ABOUT RULES (NOT THIS BEAUTIFUL AND PERFECT CHAOTIC GOOD CHILD).

And then the rules say that if she does that, it still comes at a price of forgetting. Ah, the inevitable price of breaking the rules, what a naturally Lawful thing… yeah, so Terezi goes and [S] Remembers.

She follows the rules in the spirit of breaking them, and she deeply understands the structure so she can bend and twist it better.

This is the most badass outcome of a Chaotic Good trying to be a Lawful, and I love my smol blind lawyer child more than anything else in Homestuck.