🕷️🕯️💙 Vriska Memorial Post 💙🕯️🕷️
Ah, Vriska. Born 29 June 2010, died 16 June 2011. We had you for less than a year – less than half of Homestuck’s run so far – but WHAT a year it was. Unlike Karkat, whose importance is highlighted by being the first troll introduced, or Gamzee, whose importance is explicitly stated by the narrative, Vriska never needed anyone to tell us how important she was. She stole that spotlight all on her own, through shocking words and nefarious deeds and rolls of the dice almost too lucky to be believed, but most importantly through the thousands of posts we devoted to her.
Even though she’s been with us such a short time, it’s truly, truly hard to imagine Homestuck without Vriska. Her never showing up in the first place would be one thing (although, would the fandom still have grown to the extent that it has…?) but her loss will be felt, because she holds such an extreme, outsized presence in the story that something will surely be missing now. There’s just no character who can rise up to fill her role, nobody who can walk those lines between badass pirate hero with all the levels (yeah!!!!!!!!) and selfish murderous thief with few to no limits on what she’s willing to do and actually sweet, sad and funny girl who can be so sympathetic that it causes me physical pain in my chest…. nobody else can be her, and nobody should try, and the story can only be quieter for her loss.
But though Vriska may be dead (no!!!!!!!!), Vriscourse will surely live on. Vriska’s death was declared just not because the narrative or the mysterious workings of paradox space considered it so, but because Spades Slick happened to destroy the clock of judgment at just the right moment for the just death to be declared. If he’d done this a couple seconds earlier, the death would have been heroic. And if he hadn’t done this at all…. well, the clock was coming to a stop, but it might have bounced back to the middle once more, her death neither heroic nor just as she was killed before she had a chance to take the action that would have made it one or the other. Or, even more interesting to me, a death that was both heroic and just at the same time – heroic because of her willingness to take on an enraged, destructive demon alone despite her fear, just because of her unwillingness to change her plans based on consequences she knew her friends would suffer – the combination something the clock is unable to handle, forcing it to return Vriska to life until she died a death that could ever be judged exclusively one or the other. Which, given Vriska’s status as someone whose every action is seen by many as heroic and by equally many as just, would probably be never.
Slick interfered before a formal judgment could be made, and because of that, we get to keep debating. We get to talk about Vriska forever! She doesn’t need to be present any more: she’s given us everything we need to keep the conversation going eternally, and even in death she gets exactly what she would want, which is to be important, to be on our minds, and to be memorialized as someone whose actions are incredibly significant whether they be heroic or just.
Vriska is dead, long live Vriska. <3