All right I guess I’m going to try to somehow articulate my thoughts about Vriska and her arc and her ending. Overall I would say that I’m feeling much more positive about the ending than I was last night, and I just rewatched Act 7 and in and of itself, it is just one of the most beautiful and achy perfect things I have ever seen. And all the parts involving Vriska are just so insanely epic and cool!
And like, here’s the thing: the point of Vriska was always to turn narrative expectations on their head. With a character like Vriska (I mean, there has never really been a character quite like Vriska, but just stick with me here), you’re expecting to see them get their comeuppance, you’re expecting them to eventually run up against their limits and get taken down either by an underdog or their own hubris. But the infuriating and fantastic thing about Vriska is that her plans had a tendency to work out, her ego just kept getting bigger because she was just that good, and she easily killed the underdog character who tried to stand up to her. The one time she was taken by surprise and killed, it turned out that her death was so disastrous for the whole narrative that a huge chunk of the story had to be retconned just to ensure that she didn’t get that comeuppance after all.
And so part of me finds it very fitting that this was how Vriska’s arc ended, too. The plan she orchestrated more-or-less worked out without a hitch (I mean, as that one post went around showed, there were definitely differences between what she’d predicted and how things actually went down, but her plan still worked), she was obviously planning to sacrifice herself in a big hero gesture all along, and she did, and that was it. In the end, Vriska got exactly what she wanted, which was to be the most important person in Homestuck. I don’t think what she did was a huge sacrifice from her point of view. I don’t think it was particularly hard for her, because she’s always cared more about glory than like, continuing her life. Can you imagine Vriska living and joining the others in the happy new universe? I certainly can’t, and she probably couldn’t imagine that, either.
So–on the one hand, my gut-level response of “but that’s not FAIR” when I think about Vriska getting to die as the biggest hero in homestuck actually feels right to me, because that’s the reaction Vriska instilled in me all along. But on the other hand–
Vriska’s arc was absolutely one of the most important arcs in the comic, so much time was devoted just to her and what she struggled with and what she didn’t struggle with, Hussie obviously cared so much about this character that he turned his own affection for her into a running joke. So for all that struggle to climax in what was, essentially, just more of the same narrative that we’ve always seen for Vriska, feels cheap to me. Vriska choosing to sacrifice herself and be the big hero is her taking the easy way out , and on a meta level it feels like the narrative taking the easy way out, too. I don’t think we’re supposed to take Vriska’s big hero gesture to mean that this character is now redeemed or was right all along in her approach to things, but like, how are we supposed to take it?
“Vriska’s plan works and saves the day and she sacrifices herself to defeat the Big Bad, which she had planned to do all along” is just… it’s so simple. It’s a simple and easy ending for the hardest and least simple character in the comic. There was SO much emphasis on retcon Vriska doing and saying terrible things, and it feels like all that foreshadowing for some kind of character growth just got tossed to the side.
I think I could have been okay with Vriska saving the day and making a big heroic sacrifice if it had been more… I don’t know, unpredictable maybe? (I do wish that the whole ending had had more unpredictable elements to it, but I digress.) Or if anything had happened contrary to what she had planned for, or if she’d sacrificed herself in a way that was less grand but not less necessary. I don’t know! I have no idea how I would have ended her arc if it had been up to me, and maybe there is no right thing to do when you have a character like Vriska. But still, I do wish we had gotten something a little more complicated than what we got.
