Guest post by lordturkish​

Things are about to get personal.

Real personal.

Like, shit, so deep down the rabbit hole because being a kid and growing up is hard and nobody understands.

First time I read through Homestuck, I hated this fishstick’s guts, and with good reason. He’s clingy, desperate, starved for attention, bitter, flaunts a roaring superiority/inferiority complex, and most of all has the social intelligence of a piece of driftwood. Also he kills people, and generally it’s a good idea to steer clear of people who commit homicide. When he was cut into pieces, I cheered with everyone else and promptly forgot about him as the narrative progressed.

Fuck you, fuck you ALL I’m relevant as FUCK.

Then the second time.

Second time reading, naturally I got to invest more of my thought power into themes and characters since I was no longer blindly scrambling to figure out what the fuck was going on. I could dwell on their relationships and do the ever-so-fun “ah here is where I relate to them and here is where I do not” thing when it came to the favs.

With this in mind, I was met with an unwelcome surprise when I was re-introduced to Eridan. I still hated his fucking guts, but in a different way. It felt less like I was angry at a fictional character and more like what I felt when I tore myself down. Because, back the fuck up, this is a fictional character we’re talking about here, not me. For one thing, I’m not a royal prick, and when I IM my friends I write in full sentences with at least some regard to grammar. So me being me, I decided to analyze the fuck out of these emotions and why I was responding so negatively to a fictional character.

I’ll save you guys some time and tell you outright: Eridan’s basically an alien fish version of how I was when I was thirteen.

I was a shitty kid. If you don’t believe me, go and look at the notes I got from parent teacher conferences. I’ve always been emotionally and socially behind the times, a late bloomer if you will, and puberty only amplified that. I had very few friends and none of which you could consider close, I was some unholy offspring of emo and hipster, and I often projected my own emotional turmoil onto others. Looking back, I could attribute this to a lot of things: growing up trans queer in a violently religious community, struggling with the then-unidentified phantasms known as generalized anxiety disorder and major depression and, hell, who knows what else because I’m still figuring it out, and all-in-all the general angst of being a new teenager trying to figure out my place in the world.

TL:DR: Being a kid and growing up is hard and nobody understands.

Granted, I didn’t kill anybody. I had my anger fantasies of just “AHAHA FUCK EVERYONE I HOPE THEY ALL GENERALLY DIE FUCK YOU AND YOU AND YOU AND ALSO ME WE ALL GO DOWN TOGETHER”, but as with most kids I thankfully didn’t even begin to attempt to realize those fantasies. I would also like to think I wasn’t as racist or classist, but fuck I was a stupid kid so I probably had some unspoken bullshit and ignorance stewing around in my brain. But these differences didn’t stop me from empathizing with the fucker and knowing what exactly pushed him across that despair event horizon.

[Source: 31.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_loabofCAMM1qbvzu9o1_400.gif]

Eridan holds a close second to Karkat when it comes to uneeded angst. Also I would talk about how much I love Eridan and Karkat’s friendship but I believe that deserves an entire post to itself.

Realizing this, I begun to understand Eridan’s role in the story as a whole better too. He’s the Prince of Hope, after all. The destroyer of positive potential. The destroyer of ideals, of others, of himself. Eridan, as a character, had a lot of potential. His entire team had a lot of potential. But thanks to his toxic stew of uncertainty, anxiety, depression and general groundlessness he shot all that down to hell.

Suddenly I stopped viewing Eridan as this pain in the ass side character with no point other than to fuck things up. I stopped viewing him as this reigning trashlord going out of his way to cut others down.

I started viewing him as a tragic figure.

Like… a brattier no-face.

[Source: http://thattherepaul.com/features/margaret-hayao-3.html] Just make sure he doesn’t eat your friends and you’re good.

When I started thinking of him in that way, his little nuances began to make sense. How he came across as so damn pitiable and vocalized this–because no filter Eridan, he will literally just say whatever the fuck pops into his head despite how shitty it might be. Which is why I’d argue that, unlike Cronus, his self depreciation is genuine. He believes everything he says. It’s not some sort of attempt at manipulation on his part (let’s be honest guys, Eridan’s too oblivious for that shit) he’s just that shit at forming social connections because he flat out does not have the experience… similar to Dirk.

Actually I’d say that Eridan and Dirk have a fuckton in common, but I’ll save that for another post.

Digressing, digressing. Let’s get back to the point.

That was when I started loving Eridan for all his nasty little flaws. Because now I could see how well he could grow out of that. God, he sure has a plethora of emotional capacity–if only he knew how to manage it. Jesus he’s a good marksman–if only he’d learn to trust his friends enough to play as a team. Holy ghost he’s committed as fuck–now if only he knew to dial it down enough not to stifle his quadrantmates.

Holy trinity he’s so hopeful–if only he’d learn not to abandon it.

I’m aware that some of this might stretch beyond what we know of Eridan, because we don’t know much about him to start. He has so little screen time, we never got to see him fully develop into anything and true he could just end up to be an actual threat, the opposite is equally as true. In all honesty if Vriska could grow and learn from her mistakes Eridan sure as fuck could. Might be in a different way, a crookeder way, but hell different strokes for different folks.

Long story short Eridan’s a wonderful bundle of spitfire emotionally complexity and untapped potential, and that is why I like–nay, love–the sad bastard.