by marathemara

GC: 1F YOU S33 WH4TS 1N YOUR M1ND CL34RLY 4ND UND3RST4ND TH3 POW3R YOUR THOUGHTS H4V3

GC: TH3N YOU UND3RST4ND R34L1TY WH1L3 3V3RYON3 3LS3 1S RUNN1NG 4ROUND CONFUS3D 4ND 4NGRY 4ND UPS3T

GC: B3C4US3 TH3Y TH1NK R34L1TY 1S SOM3TH1NG H4PP3N1NG TO TH3M

GC: R4TH3R TH4N SOM3TH1NG TH3Y 4R3 M4K1NG 3V3RY MOM3NT W1TH 3V3RY THOUGHT

(http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=004997)

Terezi Pyrope is among the coolest of the beta trolls. Not only is she clever, and has a wicked sense of humor, and can smell colors, but she also has near-total control of her life and her personal narrative. Even better, we get to see how her understanding of control changes as she matures, as well as her understanding of her other cardinal value, justice.

When we first meet Terezi, before the start of SGRUB, her understanding of control is kind of superficial: I know the rules of the game and can manipulate them so that I always come out on top. We see her act on this in her introductory scene, the trial of Senator Lemonsnout, in which Terezi plays prosecutor. She tortures her stuffed animal defendant, accuses him of the murder of a witness, and finally gives him false hope of acquittal through a coin flip whose outcome she can make irrelevant by being blind.

Lemonsnout hangs, alongside a crowd of other slowly decaying scalemates outside Terezi’s treehouse which shows her commitment to being the one who wins. This seems to simply be a child acting childishly, but over the course of Act 5 it is revealed that the Alternian legal system also uses these simplistic concepts, with the foundation of the “justice” that Terezi claims to pursue being simply “the goal is to stay alive, and those with control over others outlive those without.”

These concepts of justice and control follow Terezi into her interactions with other characters, particularly Vriska. Technically, Terezi “wins” the perpetual back-and-forth of vengeance between her and Vriska, or at least she scores more points. She is able to contact Doc Scratch directly with Sollux’s help, while Vriska usually waits for him to contact her. Terezi is able to goad Doc Scratch into destroying Vriska’s magic cue ball, grievously wounding Vriska in the process. After Vriska, still bleeding, blinds Terezi through a complex sequence of mind control, Terezi is able to pick up the pieces and learn from her lusus how to see through smell. And finally, much later, Terezi kills Vriska to punish her and to stop her from endangering the remaining trolls.

The game deems Vriska’s death just, but Terezi is haunted by it nonetheless, because by now her interaction with humans has begun to change her understanding of control. As Seer of Mind, she has the power to influence other people’s choices. Sometimes she does this to help the alpha timeline, such as when she convinced John to meet his denizen early, making it obvious to Rose and Dave that their timeline was doomed and forcing Dave to travel back in time to prototype himself and create Davesprite. At this point, though, she mostly influences people to mess with them or to score points on them. She does this with Dave, giving him the chance to kill one of his doomed selves to show him the cost of going God Tier; and she does it with Vriska, limiting her options to dying on the one hand and dooming everyone else on the other.

But Dave’s rejection of the non-choice she’s given him upsets her, and after that her simple concepts of justice and control begin to fall apart around her. Her investigation of Tavros’ death may or may not be colored by Gamzee’s chucklevoodoos, leading her to oversimplify the situation even further than she might anyway and blame deaths caused by Eridan and Gamzee on Vriska as well.

Gamzee has begun to chip away at Terezi’s control of her own life, and at her sense that she is always right and will always come out on top, but things get even worse after Terezi starts meeting the alpha trolls. She is intimidated by Latula’s RADGIRL persona, but it’s Aranea who notices and takes advantage of her. Not only does Aranea talk Terezi into regretting her earlier choices even more, but she also begins to manipulate Terezi through her control over Gamzee, pushing her into an abusive kismesissitude with him which pulls Terezi’s self-esteem lower and lower until she falls apart completely. Aranea then takes advantage of Terezi’s weakness to “cure” Terezi’s blindness, which up to this point had been an important part of Terezi’s identity.

Terezi’s childhood belief that she could win every time has been destroyed. She feels like every part of her up to this point was somehow wrong. Having hit rock bottom in this way, it takes her a little while to start picking up the pieces and taking control over her life again. But the control she starts to take back is a more complicated and mature kind of control. It comes in pieces: the first thing she does is blindfold herself, to control her senses and retake that part of her identity.

The second thing is to find her abusive kismesis and serve Alternian-style justice on him. This goes less well: once Aranea’s hold over Gamzee is broken, he attacks her of his own accord, and during [S] Game Over, Aranea adds insult to injury by stabbing Terezi with her own blade. Justice is not so easy to carry out when the defendant has some power.

Ironically enough, after [S] Game Over, which seemed to be rock bottom for the Homestuck cast as a whole, Terezi is on her way back up. She’s mortally wounded, but she realizes that she’s the only person left who can fix the things that have gone horrible wrong. She flies after John, finds him in despair, and intimidates him into going to his denizen and learning to control his retcon powers.

By helping John to repair their ruined timeline, Terezi shows that she’s ready to use her Seer powers for completely unselfish purposes. But she’s not done taking her life back. For her last trick, Terezi Pyrope takes back her death.

The chalk outline is symbolic of Terezi’s courtroom dramas, outlining the body of the victim in the place and position in which they died. Terezi has been victimized by Gamzee, by Aranea, and perhaps even by Vriska, but in accepting her victimhood she sets her own terms for it. She may not be the victorious prosecutor anymore, but she has accepted that she doesn’t have to be. Not only has Terezi matured, she has matured enough to make decisions that might sacrifice all this wonderful character development for the sake of the whole rest of the universe. I can only hope this sacrifice does not go unrewarded.

TEREZI: GOOD LUCK, 3GB3RT >:]

TEREZI: NOT TH4T YOU’LL N33D 1T

JOHN: why not?

TEREZI: B3C4US3 W3 M4K3 OUR OWN LUCK

TEREZI: 4ND YOU'R3 4BOUT TO PROV3 TH4T

(http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=009082)

Edit: This post was written several weeks ago. It now looks like the changes John is making are geared toward enhancing and speeding up Terezi’s character development and making her less susceptible to Gamzee’s influence. To which I can only say hooray.