professional snail imposter

1. matching pearls in pairs for earrings

2. msn butterfly

Me: so, like, people insist that Bro is Forever Bad and beyond redemption and no one is allowed to enjoy his character or else they’re excusing his treatment of Dave, but… why does no one say that about Mom Lalonde? who raised Rose while drunk off her ass 24/7? who raised her child in such a way that the child misinterpreted EVERYTHING she did as passive-aggressive mind games? (let’s not even talk about how Rose later tried to cope with the realization that her dead mom actually did love her by emulating her mother’s bad habits and blaming herself for being a “bad daughter.”)

Non-Homestuck friend: i’m wondering why people whose delicate feefees are hurt by people being horrible even LIKE this fucking comic!

Me: RIGHT? i love this fucked up comic and its fucked up characters but it’s about TERRIBLE PEOPLE being BROKEN AND TERRIBLE. they’re ALL Problematic Faves. but, you know, Bro’s the ONLY one we must boo and hiss at. let’s just ignore that Jade’s (senile??) grandpa let a toddler play with LOADED PISTOLS.

Friend: …the other examples. the children are girls.

Me: … … …i’d only been considering the genders of the adults.

Friend: nnnnnuuup. abuse is worse when it happens to their male fave.

So like…Rose’s drinking problem partially stems from Roxy’s drinking problem. Yet somehow in the retcon…this magically goes away? Like yeah I don’t think Rose would hold a grudge against Roxy for stuff her mom did, but the reunion wouldn’t be without its stress, especially with their respective issues.

But no, Rose and Roxy meet like it’s the next best family reunion with only minor comments about some issues Rose was having, while Dave and Dirk get this tense, emotional reunion scene dealing with their respective issues candidly? ‘Cause why, Dave’s pain matters more? Why was Rose’s development circumvented in such a way?

Anyway, I super agree with basically everything here. Rose had a complicated and angsty character arc going on, then we retconned and, poof, it’s gone because Vriska yelled at her apparently. (Did Vriska have to intervene more than once? Did she reason with Rose or just guilt trip her? Did Rose have her emotional needs met? We’ll probably never know.) There’s piles upon piles of text dedicated to carefully sifting through the Strider angst, while Rose and Roxy get… Dave butting in on their reunion. LE SIGH.

That’s just par for the course with most of the characters lately, but the female characters seem to be hit by it especially hard. Here’s a long-standing, difficult problem! Let’s just handwave it away and/or give it a simple solution instead of letting the character struggle with it.

The more I think about this, the more I realize that if I’m gonna complain that a male character is receiving extra angsty introspection while a female character has her depth casually shrugged off, I should probably point fingers at the author first. (Though there are still factions of fandom that I narrow my eyes at in a “you, at least, should know better” fashion.)