I have no idea if this went through the first time or if my wifi ate it. Please disregard one of the former.
Question: if you were the ones writing Homestuck, how would you (if you had to) make one of the human Kids a villainous Player like Eridan/Gamzee/Aranea/Caliborn?
This is an interesting query that was posed to me while I was talking about Jane's turn to evil; that in the original comic, only aliens were allowed to be evil, says the commenter. My reply was, I think, the best counterpoint:
A Kid, by necessity, has a minimum of 5 people (discounting aliens, which fluctuate based on the Kid) who would mourn them: two children or parents, and three characters they are introduced alongside, must have a functional enough relationship with to be introduced in a set and having dynamics with, and who would have to be betrayed by their tuen to evil. That's a lot of distinct character growth/grappling to have to fit into the comic *after* the betrayal.
So, this would clearly be a difficult task. But, if you *had* to make a Kid turn heel permanently as part of the original plot of Homestuck:
Why would they do it, and when?
How would their friends cope with it?
Who would defeat them, and how?
And most importantly, how do post submissions work, and should this have been one?
I've been on this site for over a decade and I'm still not clear on how submissions work. Sometimes they make it look like the receiving blog made the post which is just confusing.
I don't know the details of what's going on in the epilogues/HS2 and please don't enlighten me, but my understanding is they have done this with Jane and Dirk, right? And those two do make the most logical sense. Jane is introduced with a lot of tensions around privilege, entitlement, and resentment. Dirk's carrying Bro's narrative ghost around with him (although having him succumb to that frustrates me as someone who emphasized treating different iterations as distinct people). They have the personalities that you would most expect to twist out of true, so I think they're the obvious pulls, even if I didn't like how the epilogue handled it.
But I disdain easy answers. Every once in a while I chase the thrill of taking the unexpected option and making everybody mad at me. So, I propose, why not Roxy?
The Beta kids are too tight knit; I can't see a heel turn within the main comic. (Frankly I would not blame Davesprite if he snapped but I do not think he would.) Dirk and Jane as I said are too easy. Jake is too busy getting buffeted around by everyone else's expectations; even if he had a heel turn I feel like it would somehow be inflicted by someone else. But Roxy, who increasingly became the narrative's golden girl? Roxy, who feels neglected and unloved and does not behave very well early on, leaving omissions and sly comments and pushing conversations other people are uncomfortable with, even if it's fucked up and she knows it?
To be clear, I don't think any of this behavior is evil. She's a teenager dealing with a level of isolation that would probably be considered cruel and unusual punishment, and she's struggling with an addiction to boot. I'm glad she overcomes these things. But there's an interesting and I think largely unexpected thread you could pull, if you wanted to push her in a different direction. After she kicks her habit, to be clear, I don't want this to be interpreted as a commentary on addicts.
What would that look like, exactly? IDK. Maybe she and John don't run into each other post-Game Over, and after she survives the retcon by catching a ride on LOWAS she starts using her powers to selectively edit what people remember and forget in an effort to make things go smoother but also cast herself as central to their narratives. As part of solidifying her hold on the main timeline she has to arrange the death of the other Roxy but justifies it because she's the one who knows what's going on. I feel like this is kind of an Aranea rehash, though.
I was never the Alpha kid expert, but I think Dirk would decide this was his fault somehow and his responsibility, but when he confronts her he can't bear to do anything and submits to being rewritten, because things have gone so catastrophically wrong twice with him as he is, so clearly he's not up to the task. Maybe John ends up using his abilities to send Roxy back to the doomed timeline, leaving a Void in the team and the timeline. Rose would not take any of this well.
But, to be clear, this is not a direction that would interest me personally. One of the reasons I took up TLC was I wanted to give these kids endings I found personally satisfying. Also I'm an adult and while some of these kids are pretty annoying sometimes, they are also 13/16 and I'm not invested in saying they're irredeemably evil villains who need to be struck down. I'd rather put them through suspiciously personally targeted ordeals that make them face up to their flaws. That's my narrative catnip.
