by lackadaisicallexicon

Meenah Peixes. Punk, powerful, princess, pink. She’s a powerhouse of a character for someone Hussie said was intended as an apology to all the Pisces out there who had Feferi (who, despite negotiating the dream bubbles and thus enabling the entire sixth act, got little screentime and was never as thoroughly developed as many of her co-players) as a patron troll.

While she appeared before Openbound, it is the flash game that gives us our first real look at Meenah for who she is, among her own instead of strangers. She’s flippant, brash, and more than a little overbearing, shrugging off her old sins and bringing life and vibrance back to the world of the dancestors in the hopes of leading them against an unbeatable enemy, just like old times.

That vibrance is something very unique to Meenah. In a universe full of number-letter replacements and bizarre, off-beat speech patterns, Meenah uses what many readers (including myself) see instantly as AAVE (African-American Vernacular English, but more commonly known as ebonics). The racialized language of Meenah and her post-Scratch incarnation the Condesce, while certainly a little gratuitous, is a kiss of life in a world full of much blander tongues, while also playing into the reversal of human linguistic expectations of her class (elaborated on here).

One of Meenah’s most interesting traits, though, are her similarities to everyone’s problematic fave, Vriska Serket. Both Thieves who share an intense admiration of an adult troll related to them who exemplifies their ideals, strong violent tendencies toward their own team members, and a love of good old fashioned affluence.

These similarities might make it seem as though they’re similar in maturity level, but in spite of them, Meenah is capable offering Vriska meaningful support, and it isn’t just because she’s older. Meenah’s approach to quests and meeting her goals differs from Vriska’s in two key areas that make her able to advise Vriska, even as she empathizes with her troublemaker status.

First: Meenah is not always right. She knows it, and it doesn’t harm her psyche because she doesn’t equate her self-worth with her actions. Meenah knows who she is, having formed her own identity without having an ancestor diary, and so whether she loses all her money or changes her goal from attacking English to hanging out with Vriska, she never loses her balance. Vriska, on the other hand, has spent most of canon going through an identity crisis because she refused to accept that she was or could be less than perfect.

Second: when Meenah harms her comrades for the greater good, she actually knows what she’s talking about. Her idea that heightened aggression made better players was proven twelvefold by the Alternian trolls, even though her brief period of intervention was not enough to do the same for her own. Where Vriska’s attempt to salvage victory by defeating Jack Noir at the cost of her coplayers’ lives only happened in a doomed timeline and may even have resulted in her own death, Meenah’s coplayers would no longer exist in any context had she not killed them all.

This is not to say her occasionally brutal methods are excusable. In particular, Meenah’s bullying of Damara is extremely cruel, and played the largest role in causing her shift from kind girl to cruel witch, but she also attempted to kill Meulin several times, and was in general a “trou8lemaker”. Despite these incidents, though, she displays a powerful conscience, as she is deeply uncomfortable at the idea of her idol, the Condesce, abusing even an alternate version of her disabled friend Mituna.

Meenah’s everything you could possibly want in a character: thoughtful but decisive; bold but conscientious; strong-willed but humorous. She’s a burst of flavor in a session full of vanilla milkshakes, and there’s no troll I like more.