by @marathemara

Today we continue the intermittent series of Characters I’d Like to Hug with the character I most often imagine myself hugging: Karkat Vantas, Alternian mutant misfit, onetime leader of SGRUB Red Team, and constant arguer with himself. This essay is about some of the reasons I think he deserves those hugs.

First, I identify with his anxiety. Karkat is constantly worried that people will discover that he’s not as good or capable as they think he is. Or, relatedly, that they will discover his blood color, though he’s much more afraid of being seen as a failure than he is of being culled. Karkat deals with his anxiety in two ways, neither particularly healthy from a human perspective. First, he makes himself big and angry and shouty so that he can compete with highbloods for authority, and so that once he has some authority, no one will ever question it.

The emotional walls he builds around himself through constant anger interfere with his second strategy, which is to constantly seek external validation. Romantically, platonically, and as the leader of his team, he’s desperate for someone to tell him he’s worth it; and when someone does–and quite a few people do–he disbelieves it, because they have to be lying to make him feel better.



Karkat’s anxiety gets in the way of everything he tries to do. Even though all the evidence we have suggests that he was a good leader, he gives the role up immediately after the Scratch because he can’t believe he’s worthy. He also sabotages himself romantically–even though he spent so much of his childhood learning how to pursue and manage relationships, he won’t let the people he cares most about get close enough to him to test his theoretical knowledge lest he crash and burn. He won’t talk about his feelings for Terezi with Terezi–instead, he sends her mixed signals, then retreats, letting her start a matespritship with Dave, and then decides to fix everything by going over her head. And then he retreats again, leaving her to fall apart and fall under Gamzee’s influence. His fear of failure causes him to fail.

It’s really a shame that Karkat hates himself so much, because nobody else hates him. The worst anyone feels about him is simply not caring about him. Sure, plenty of other characters hate his prickly facade, but those who get to know him, even judgmental Meenah Peixes, usually end up liking him.



Karkat’s despair and anxiety and anger at himself all miss the point in ways I find painfully familiar. I felt the same desire to be approved of and suspicion that any approval I did get was false, almost constantly throughout high school and college, and even now, as a graduate student with real friends and a significant other who has decided it’s his job to constantly remind me how awesome I am, I sometimes wonder. In wanting to comfort Karkat, I comfort my past self, and to some degree my present self.