GP -Vriska

Gabriel Pope
May 16, 2009

never got a chance to say
how much i hate you
every last one of you
--Quote--
Grapplejack posted:
I meant more that she's mostly used to move the story. We hardly ever see her and when we do it's usually just to move the plot along or something else; we don't see her or have her interact with the rest of the cast enough to really get a feel for her character.
I am kind of biased re: Vriska, but I believe my point on her lack of growth compared to John or Dave still stands. I still really don't see her big draw, other than that she is "the bad guy" and "is very cool." She isn't deep, or fleshed out; she's as much of a cutout as the rest of the trolls, she's just more important than the rest of the cast for some reason.
--end quote--
Again, you're describing more of what Jade was doing earlier in the comic. Since she entered the Medium she hasn't been driving the story at all and virtually all of her screentime has been interaction with other characters. Similarly, I suspect your anti-Vriska bias comes more from her original appearance and ignores the gigantic introspection dump she had with John, but I'll get to that in a bit.

Character analysis! Neither John nor Dave nor Vriska have done a lot of growing at all so far. Dave and Vriska have at least reached a point where they have fessed up to their flaws and sort of took a stab at confronting them, but haven't really gotten anywhere much.

John... doesn't really have any character flaws to round him out in the first place except maybe for general naivete, and hasn't had any opportunity to develop as a character because every time he runs into an obstacle that might challenge him or prompt him to grow someone holds his hand through it or beats it for him. The most explicit and iconic example of his pattern of non-growth was Dad's safe, which Dad set up as a test for John that Rose subsequently spoiled. You can argue that he's developed some personal strengths, such as his leaderfriendship ability and the windy thing, but these things are depicted as being effortless and natural for him. Bec Noir's 4x murder combo atop the castle represents the very first time in the entire comic that things did not just magically go John's way. Will we finally see some real character advancement as a result? Possibly! We will have to see. John is cocky young Peter Parker, having just discovered he has been given great powers; now he's watching Uncle Ben bleed out before his eyes and is about to discover that with them comes great responsibility.

On the subject of spiders, Vriska's character arc is primarily about being a slave to destiny, whether actual or perceived. Her aspect is Light, which in the story's internal symbolism is explicitly the representation of fate, and this pervades every aspect of her character. She's always been preoccupied with what she's "supposed" to do. As a child she was saddled with a particularly difficult lusus that placed great demands on her, demands that she was ill-equipped to fulfill. But then she discovered Mindfang's journal, with tools and step-by-step instructions on how to be the coolest troll ever. She became obsessed with following in her ancestor's footsteps, hoping to win her friends' admiration by proving her worth as the trolliest troll, but she only ever managed to alienate and/or kill them and never understood why. It wasn't until she killed Tavros that she realized she didn't actually want the destiny she thought she had inherited from Mindfang.

Vriska's struggle against destiny has manifested in other ways, as well. She was an instrumental part of Doc Scratch's machinations, and Scratch gloated about how easy she was to manipulate. Once the trolls finished their session and were outside Scratch's immediate grasp, she saw Bec Noir, and her first impulse upon getting a glimpse of what the future had in store was to go back and deliberately set about creating that future in the first place. She voluntarily locks herself into a self-fulfilling time loop because she sees that it is what she is supposed to do. Throughout all of this Vriska is acutely conscious that she is being steered by outside influences, almost exaggeratedly so. She desperately craves some measure of control over her life, but when things go wrong (as they frequently do) she steadfastly refuses to admit personal responsibility; she takes credit for her successes, whether or not she had anything to do with them, and attributes her failures to events outside her control.

Vriska does manage to get some control back--she picks up some of Doc Scratch's methods and tries to play puppetmaster herself, and after she enters the game she successfully resists the exiled Black Queen's commands. But things come to a head when Vriska hits the god tier, half by accident, and receives her powers as the Thief of Light. Now she has absolute command over luck and can literally manipulate fate itself. She's suddenly got everything she ever thought she wanted, and her hard-won discipline dissolves--but as she is slowly coming to learn, luck doesn't matter. Vriska sought out Noir because it was what she assumed she was supposed to do; both her ego and her sense of justice demanded it. But even when she has enough luck to survive, possibly even win, she can't force her desired destiny to be relevant.

Now, a lot of this has only really been revealed pretty recently. It's not like any of this was on the table when Vriska was first introduced, so it's quite understandable that your first impression wouldn't take any of this into account. But even quite early on Vriska was still a fascinating character--even before we really knew what all was happening with her, it was still clear that there was something going on with her. From the beginning there were cracks in her facade; if nothing else, the fact that she lies relatively often (and is pretty transparent about it) has always made her pesterlogs very rewarding, since more than most other characters they have multiple layers. In particular it is intriguing to observe how much she lies to herself (her desperate attempts to win Aradia's forgiveness are especially illuminating.) She's persistently displayed the same sense of self-delusion that has always made Dave so interesting, especially in his more recent appearances. She's finally opened up a bit, but has yet to figure out a way to actually fix things. She may not ever figure it out--that may very well be John's job, now.



Boy howdy that is like 50 minutes worth of , well done troll sir.