by marathemara

Kanaya Maryam is a badass. More so than most of her fellow Sgrub players. We see it from the very beginning, when we learn that she is the only troll in the group capable of leaving her hive during the daytime, braving blinding light and the possibility of zombie attacks to plant a garden in the middle of the desert. She’s ready for the zombies too, since she never goes anywhere without her trusty chainsaw lipstick. The chainsaw probably deserves a post of its own, given both its dual nature, as both makeup and a weapon, and the surgical precision with which she wields it against non-zombies.

On top of that, Kanaya is crazy prepared for Sburb. She lives near one of Alternia’s frog temples, and her hive, like Jade’s house, is modeled on the dream towers on the moons of Prospit and Derse. (It also contains a Wardrobifier, which by allowing her to change her clothes on a moment’s notice, makes her even more ready-for-anything.) Also like Jade, she is her session’s Space player, and is therefore the first player in her session to awaken on Prospit and start learning from Skaia’s cloud visions.

But the most important thing Kanaya has before entering the game is a walkthrough written by Rose Lalonde during the first part of the Beta Earth session. Not only does the content of the walkthrough give Kanaya a sense of what to expect from the game, but the style helps her prepare to eventually meet the human kids.

Side note: Another awesome thing about Kanaya is her sexuality. Hussie has confirmed that she is only concupiscently attracted to women, making her a lesbian in a culture which doesn’t acknowledge their existence. It doesn’t seem to be something that matters to her fellow trolls, though some of them might think it’s odd if they put two and two together, but as a human I find it admirable. And she and Rose are the most stable couple in Act 6 so far.

(This image would make a great Homestuck movie poster.)

There are a few strange things on the list of what Kanaya is prepared for upon entering the Game. Dying is one of these things, though she didn’t realize it until it happened. Before the Game, she was obsessed with novels about Rainbow Drinkers, the troll equivalent of vampires, and secretly wished she were one. Then Eridan killed her and, long story short, she became one. Or realized that she always had the potential to be one. It may be that all jade-blooded trolls are capable of becoming Rainbow Drinkers, since glowing in the dark and being able to survive on the blood of other trolls are useful skills for living in the caverns with the Mother Grub.They’re certainly skills that Kanaya shares with her Beforan counterpart Porrim (and probably with Porrim’s post-Scratch self, the Dolorosa, who John describes as a vampire). Whatever the case, Kanaya is able to pick herself up, snack on Feferi and Terezi to get her strength back, and then avenge her own murder with her trusty lipstick chainsaw.

In spite of all this, there are some things Kanaya isn’t quite prepared for, which makes her easier to relate to than if she were able to do everything right. The most important one is the caregiving role she was assigned at birth as a jade-blood. Early on, she’s her Internet friends’ go-to auspistice, but she usually accepts the job of mediating between potential kismeses for selfish reasons, like her crush on Vriska. She is often the troll who does difficult things that really need to be done, like cutting open her dying lusus to retrieve the next Matriorb or amputating Tavros’ legs so that Equius can replace them with robotic prostheses. (A lot of the things Kanaya Has To Do involve blood.) And she gets tired of it, especially of the constant pressure and lack of reward that come with being what Eridan snidely calls “the vvillage twwo wwheel devvice wwhen it comes to auspisticing”.

But she learns from experience, and she gets better at helping and taking care of people. She begins to educate Rose about the quadrants, though as of the Gigapause Rose doesn’t seem to have completely learned the lesson about when it’s appropriate to auspisticize. She’s also taken a cue from Porrim, who rebelled against her prescribed role as a teenager, but has come back to it since then, as the only surviving jade-blood from Beforus. Porrim has taken an interest both in rebuilding troll society as a whole, and in protecting Kankri, who has a bad habit of sticking his foot in his mouth. While reconstructing the Matriorb is now someone else’s job, Kanaya has followed Porrim’s example in taking care of Karkat. And as we leave her at the Gigapause, it seems that she (with her lipstick chainsaw) is the most likely person to be able to save Terezi from Gamzee. In the end, it seems you don’t have to be ready for absolutely everything to be a total badass.