by marathemara, who got Page of Light on her most recent God Tier personality test



Warning: A monster gets stabbed in the eyes.

Rose Lalonde is the first female character to be introduced in Homestuck. She’s also the reason I fell in love with Homestuck. On my second day of reading, I was already planning a Rose cosplay. When I introduce people to Homestuck and find them unimpressed by John’s sylladex antics, I tell them to stick with it until Rose shows up.



Why? What’s the appeal of this weird little girl who lives alone with her alcoholic mother in a mansion in the middle of a forest?

For me, it’s that I saw a lot of myself in Rose early on. I felt alienated from my peers as a child. I felt I was smarter than everyone around me. I spent most of my childhood and teen years reading–and later on, trying to write the next Harry Potter. I have a complicated relationship with my mother that, for a long time, involved me not understanding that she was acting in my best interests. And it’s only been quite recently that I’ve found myself a small group of true friends (including one sibling) with whom I can share my huge vocabulary and my wacky ideas.

I don’t share Rose’s fascination with the Void and the tentacled monsters that inhabit it. But I do share her desire to know everything I possibly can about the world around me, and to act only when I feel I have enough knowledge to do the right thing, or in pursuit of even more knowledge. And when Rose’s love of dark things combines with her love of knowledge to bring her not only under the control of the Horrorterrors, but also within “I told you so” range of Doc Scratch, I really felt scared for her, because I could see myself listening to the wrong people and making bad choices on what sounded like good advice.

Not necessarily the kind of bad choices that led to Rose ignoring her friends, being possessed by the Horrorterrors, tearing up her planet, and then getting killed by Jack Noir in her attempt to avenge his murder of her mother, but bad choices that are no less terrifying in their consequences.

On to something happier: The other reason I love Rose is that she knits obsessively. Like, more obsessively than I do. At the beginning of Homestuck, Rose has only been knitting since John gave her yarn and needles four and a half months earlier, but she’s already able to make complicated shapes like the squidlike head of the Eldritch Princess doll. After four months of knitting, I’d completed two Doctor Who scarves and was just starting to learn about purling. Rose is so comfortable with her needles already that she makes them her Strife Specibus and makes a habit of stabbing monsters in the eyes with them.

The knitting brings me back around to Rose’s gender. As the first female character in Homestuck, she kind of represents what femininity is in Homestuck. She does typically girly things like knitting and writing down her daydreams, but she does them in ways that are powerful and empowering. Her knitting needles are both destructive weapons like the Thorns of Oglogoth and instruments of creation which tie her both to her friends and to the Game through the things she knits. Her poorly edited journal grows up post-Scratch to become a challenge to the Condesce’s rule of Earth; pre-Scratch, Rose moves on from writing about wizards to become the main collector of knowledge about the Game, alchemy, and troll romance. Rose is a complex combination of traditionally feminine and nonfeminine traits, and she sets the template on which all female Homestuck characters vary: Jade, the naive gardener who plays fetch by shooting at her dog; Kanaya, who makes clothes for her friends, faithfully plays auspistice, but also performs surgery with a chainsaw; Nepeta, for whom the word “adorabloodthirsty” was created; and even, at the far end of the spectrum, Terezi, who plays house courtblock with her stuffed animals and then murders them because she can.

It’s a good template to have. It makes Homestuck’s female characters feel more realistic and easier to identify with. And it all started with the amazing Rose Lalonde and her thirst for knowledge.