by lackadaisicallexicon

“Cigarette ashes burn red

but they fall like snow,

and I hear the wind a callin’ my name

and this world’s got to end someday soon…”

—Your Universe

The writers of the I Like Homestuck Project have a definite love of SBURB’s non-player characters, from Mayor to Mendicant, but there’s a certain flavor to the ones we’ve expressed our love of thus far: virtuous, heroic carapacians have been our favored subjects up until this point. I’d like to break pattern today, though, and talk about the trolls’ Black Queen, known to us as the Felt’s enigmatic eight-ball: Snowman.

She sticks out as representative of certain tropes; in a mafia-themed cast of characters, there is often a token female character. Snowman fits snugly into this niche, as the only female in the ongoing war between the Felt and the Midnight Crew when they’re first introduced, and even the exile that took her crown and kingdom was the result of a short, angry man. What’s more, she’s untouchable. The discomfort of (predominantly male) writers with writing women as people giving and receiving violence on par with men often places mob women outside the action, and at first glance, Snowman seems to exemplify this.

Until she doesn’t.

Snowman’s immunity doesn’t just mean the Midnight Crew can’t attack her. It also means they can’t retaliate against her when she commits seemingly meaningless acts of grievous violence against them, a decidedly unfeminine action according to the tropes she’s based on. Her name is Snowman, a masculine term, and she’s taller, stronger, and smarter than her significant other. Even her “immunity” is less from the discomfort of the Midnight Crew with killing women (discomfort which, I might add, doesn’t exist), and more from the fact that she’s a walking suicide bomb: if she dies, so does the universe.

In appearance and reality, she physically dominates Slick and is even drawn more realistically than he is. Snowman is the only person in their relationship who even wears pants; she’s is power personified, in a form traditionally denied it. She makes a Faustian deal with the diabolic Doc Scratch (she was given god-like powers of teleportation and bound to the life of the universe, but had to die when he said and in the method of his choosing), and is not deceived about the nature of her condition. Rather than run in horror from her end, she taunts Spades Slick with her demise.

The sheer amount of agency she has is incredible. Snowman is in control of her life, her fate, and her relationship, self-satisfied and manipulative in a way that makes Terezi getting revenge on Vriska look like baby’s first chess game. She orchestrated Spade Slick’s undoing so completely that even his eventual murder of her seems more her victory than his. In the end, he sank the eight ball, and still ended up losing to a woman scorned. He took her crown and queendom, but she took his universe on her own terms and closed her life on the note desolation plays.