You Are One Of The Few

1. You are one of the few of your kind who can withstand the BLISTERING ALTERNIAN SUN, and perhaps the only who enjoys the feel of its rays. As such, you are one of the few of your kind who has taken a shining to LANDSCAPING.

Broadly defined, ‘landscaping’ describes any activity taken to shape and mold the natural world. This includes, but isn’t limited to, altering plants, animals, landforms, bodies of water, biomes, lighting and weather effects, and sits at the intersection of biology, geology and artistic design.

Kanaya embodies this on both small and large scale – arguably, her acts of pruning plants and forming topiaries train her to landscape on the scale of an entire universe. Kanaya values control over physical spaces whether natural or otherwise, shown when she cleans up after Vriska and encourages her to do the same for herself (p.2360, 2204), and in how she spends extensive time decorating her own hive and its immediate area. Although Kanaya was one of the few trolls who did not initially design her hive, she appears to be the troll most interested in maintaining hers, evidenced by her ongoing work with fabric and flowers.

When we first see Kanaya in Hivebent (p.2096-9), her environment is drawn in pastels. Her hive is similarly filled with light streaming through her windows and brightly colored decorations, making her stand out against the dark color palette of both Alternia and Hivebent. The statement that she enjoys the feel of the sun’s rays prefigures her Sgrub planet, the Land of Rays and Frogs, and I’d guess that one of her biggest influences on Earth as a planet was creating a sun the right size and distance from it to be safe and pleasant to live under, and a species that primarily thrives on a day/night wake/sleep cycle. Her enjoyment of the light also links to her closer alignment with and greater trust in Prospit and Skaia than any other troll, and is the trait that led her to meet Doc Scratch – ‘A Stranger Who Dressed And Spoke In White’ (p.3320). So, it relates to her following the rules set out for her by Skaia, but it also relates to a wayward childhood of exploring when she should be sleeping, the one known problem in Kanaya’s relationship with her lusus who wasn’t able to help her sleep. It’s the biggest disconnect between her and the rest of Alternian society, as she’s awake and alone while all other trolls sleep.

Kanaya’s fascination with the bright balances on a boundary between conventional and unconventional. To readers, who are mostly human, enjoying light is not a strange or uncommon trait. However, we’ve been told it’s notable in Alternia, so we feel that disconnect between enjoying light being normal or abnormal. More generally, Kanaya is positioned on this knife’s edge where on one side she represents traditional femininity, motherhood, rule-following and destiny, and on the other side she represents queerness, blood, messiness and intentional, intelligent design. This dual nature is embodied by Kanaya’s weapon of choice for landscaping (among other things), her lipstick/chainsaw. She’s the only character with a weapon that uses the Problem Sleuth object/weapon duality, and right from her introduction she’s comfortable using this object and navigating between its forms – she’s made peace with the seemingly conflicting aspects of her personality. A chainsaw is rough, bloody, loud, and not good for fine detail work. When creating a topiary, a chainsaw can make a good start if she needs to hack off large portions of a plant, but she’ll need specific topiary shears for sharp corners and smooth edges. Her decision to use the chainsaw primarily shows that she sometimes ignores how things look in favor of letting loose, going wild, cutting people up and getting covered in blood in the process. But, keeping this in a functioning lipstick that she actively uses shows that her meticulous enjoyment of aesthetics isn’t just a cover for a hidden lack of inhibition. These two sides are equally important to who she is.

Assigned the Land of Rays and Frogs, one of Kanaya’s jobs in Sgrub is to light the forge, an event ‘Designed To Trigger Drastic Planetary Upheaval’ (p.3314) – a form of landscaping. Her larger job of frog breeding involves adventuring, exploring, interfering with the frogs she’s paradox-appearifying, and taking an active role in their development instead of staying at home with a computer terminal, again reflecting the exploration she’s done since she was young, the hard labor of gardening she’s performed and the physical impact she’s had on her local area. She’s previously shown she’s comfortable doing this with creatures, by slicing open her lusus’ corpse with a chainsaw and placing her hand inside to retrieve the Matriorb, something that would make many people squeamish or would simply feel like an inappropriate way to treat the recently deceased.

Though earlier in her timeline Kanaya has concerns about figuring out how to light the forge, she’s never concerned about the act itself or its effects. Instead, she trusts that her impact on the natural world, and the act of interfering in the first place, are positive. From a modern human perspective, anything that impacts the supposed ‘natural order’ is often highly controversial – genetically modified crops, breeding programs, zoos and scientific testing on animals, various types of medicine and vaccines, genetic testing or design of babies, abortion, environmental impacts of corporations or efforts to combat climate change, are all complex debates that have either surfaced or dramatically changed over the last few decades. Kanaya taps into all of this with her varied and broad relationship to landscaping (which includes frog ectobiology), and comes down firmly on the side that as a baseline changing the natural world is good and moral, although ‘Its Very Delicate And You Can Go Too Far’ and behaving responsibly is ‘The Most Important Thing About This Of All’ (p.3318). And since Kanaya is often linked to motherhood and reproduction, the fact that she’s taking an active role in shaping things – even when she’s following the general instructions of Skaia, she’s still the one making minute decisions and directly carrying out these actions instead of simply letting nature take its course – is extremely modern, establishing Homestuck as a creation myth for the modern, scientific age in place of a traditional, Biblical one.

Further to this, in Kanaya’s brief stint in the dream bubbles between her death and resurrection, she makes the cryptic comment that ‘It Seems To [Her] The Nature Of The Afterlife Is Probably Very Old Fashioned’ (p.3596). By resurrecting herself from the dead, Kanaya makes the statement that she doesn’t want to be part of something old fashioned, instead returning in a radically modern way, effectively landscaping her own body into the physical form she’s always wanted. Upon return, she doesn’t lose the traits that may be described as old fashioned, but the fact that she’s free to pick and choose, balancing these traits with other conflicting ones without facing social consequences is modern in itself.

Both on Alternia and the Land of Rays and Frogs, it was necessary for Kanaya to take up landscaping because these places simply weren’t made the way she needed them to be – Alternian society wasn’t made for trolls who enjoy the light, and LORAF was designed to need drastic change before it could fulfill its purpose. I do believe that Kanaya greatly enjoys landscaping and uses it as a way to exercise her love for aesthetics (see section 4), but I also believe her interest developed from necessity, and from feeling that the world wasn’t made for her to comfortably live in. Kanaya is looking for a place that fits her and if she cannot find one, she will create one. She can and will take her own hands and her own weapon, alongside the technology given to her by Skaia, and she will rip and slash and build and sculpt and meddle, sometimes destroying to allow greater creation in the long term, knowing it’s a necessary step towards allowing life to flourish – imagine how much more life she could’ve created if she’d bisected Eridan sooner. She lets both Skaia and her own belief that it is good to shape nature guide her, and she prepares to build an entire world filled with the same light and color that she’s always desired for herself.

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2. […] you indulge in your bright fascination with the grim through literature. Just before the sun goes down and you join your flora in rest, you immerse yourself in tales of RAINBOW DRINKERS and SHADOW DROPPERS and FORBIDDEN PASSION.

Although Kanaya has an adventurous, exploratory spirit, many of her early dreams are things she doesn’t yet have access to – most notably, being a rainbow drinker and Rose Lalonde, both of which she experiences through fantasy and literature. In both cases, Kanaya’s dreams become reality, and we get to witness this journey (contrasting someone like Tavros, who never actually becomes Pupa Pan or Rufio). Kanaya goes through irreversible change becoming a rainbow drinker and meeting her hero, just like the change she creates on the worlds she designs.

Kanaya’s reading of Rose’s GameFAQs with childlike awe and hero worship (p.2346-7) mirrors her youthful belief that rainbow drinker life involves secrecy, persecution, being misunderstood and most importantly romance (p.2338). She compares the hemospectrum to a wine list, though she may have never tasted wine but simply know it’s associated with refined and discerning tastes and drinking for pleasure instead of necessity – but she finds her initial taste of blood unpleasant, creating a disconnect between her initial expectations and their reality (p.2340), and it’s only much later that she begins drinking blood for enjoyment. Similarly, when the trolls first discover the humans, Kanaya finds Rose ‘Intoxicatingly Underwhelming’ (p.2792) and it takes several conversations and extensive persuading from other characters before she comes to see Rose as worthy of her time again – though not quite the same person Kanaya originally envisioned her to be.

Beyond the disconnect between expectations and reality, these represent an active learning process which to me is another throughline of Kanaya’s story. Her relationships with Rose and with being a rainbow drinker aren’t magically fixed. She actively works to grow into these roles – Kanaya and Rose’s relationship is first presented out of order from Rose’s perspective in Acts 3-4, but later recapped chronologically from Kanaya’s perspective, showcasing her struggles with getting to know Rose and gaining the upper hand in their conversations. This is the only troll-human dynamic that gets this treatment (for example, we never see John and Karkat’s full sequence from Karkat’s perspective), highlighting the importance of this relationship to Kanaya. Actions like biting Terezi and then bandaging her wound (p.3517) could indicate a similar process for being a rainbow drinker, with Kanaya struggling to balance her cravings for blood with her care for her fellows. Active learning also runs through Kanaya’s role as the Sylph of Space, and to an extent her other social dynamics.

From early on, Kanaya has imagery and lines associated with vampirism and resurrection. Her recuperacoon hangs from her ceiling, as though she’s hanging from the rafters like a bat with folded wings, evoking Earth mythology where some vampires can transform into bats. Her chainsaw/lipstick duality marries bloodsucking brutality with upper-class refinement, not unlike classic vampires such as Count Dracula. When Kanaya’s lusus dies, she thinks ‘[d]eath is pretty confusing without the finality’ (p.2329), a line that will later apply to her own death. Even within Homestuck, there’s no indication that Earth vampires actually exist, and similarly there’s no confirmation that rainbow drinkers besides Kanaya do – the ‘HEINOUS BROODS OF THE UNDEAD’ she mentions sound far more zombielike. Even on Alternia where dragons, centaurs and Pokemon are real, there’s plenty of room for fantasy, and at one point Kanaya asks Karkat if ‘Magic [Is] A Real Thing’ (p.2567). This directly relates to her infatuation with Rose, but could also link to being a rainbow drinker. Although Kanaya has greater forces she trusts in and a destiny she accepts, there’s something in her that feels like something is missing, and craves something darker and more dangerous. Kanaya understands that she’s drawn to dangerous people, and claims this is because she wants to keep an eye on them or help them (see p.2204, 3320). I don’t think she’s wrong, but I think in addition to this, she’s compelled by danger for its own sake. Early on, she finds it easiest to experience danger vicariously through literature, later she does this through her friends and especially her crushes though she continues to express nervousness about their actions, and it’s only post-resurrection that she finally feels confident being that dangerous person herself.

Kanaya coming to view Scratch as an imaginary friend (p.3320) is also part of this – some time after their interactions, she learns that he’s dangerous, but viewing him as imaginary takes away some of his power allowing her to accept the fact that he’s been a major influence on her life. In this case, the process of what was imaginary becoming real was unpleasant in a more permanent way than with Rose and rainbow drinkers. I believe that Kanaya’s enjoyment of danger in theory but initial discomfort in practice is because she struggles with uncertainty, which only matters when a danger and its potential consequences are real. This is shown through her viewing Skaia as a perfect mirror vs the horrorterrors’ obscurity and citing this as the reason the prefers the first (see section 5), it’s clear from how she socially interacts with others, taking great pains to clarify her specific meaning in conversations and wishing others would do likewise (see section 6), it’s revealed when Kanaya tells Rose she might be dangerous, Rose asks to whom and Kanaya says ‘Maybe Not Knowing That Is What Really Bothers [Her]’ (p.2729), and it’s likely why she is so upset about Rose’s blackout and keeps replaying the moment over and over, trying to understand and solve it (p.3301).

Kanaya’s relationship to both uncertainty and stories involves figuring out which story she’s in. Although she’s interested in romance, the rainbow drinker tales full of forbidden passions are ultimately not her story, evidenced by the fact that she can’t be revived with a kiss (p.3384-5) and the fact that after her actual resurrection, her former crush Vriska does fall in love with her (p.3542-5), but Kanaya has already moved on. There’s extensive foreshadowing for a relationship between Kanaya and Rose, but first and foremost Kanaya’s story is about resurrecting her own damn self and putting in the effort to take action even when the methods are handed to her – about the gap between thoughts and actions, about the fact that trite idioms like ‘knowing what to do is half the battle’ or ‘acknowledging a problem is the first step to solving it’ ignore the work involved in the other steps. Kanaya’s story is about the work and responsibility of those other steps, and that’s something she comes to realize as she moves from fantasy to reality.

Kanaya’s resurrection sequence exemplifies this, and I find it one of the most incredible, impactful moments of action in all of Homestuck. Kanaya takes a revenge that’s equal parts stylish and brutal, and deliberately tailors that revenge to each specific person she targets based on her understanding of what they’ve done wrong, her actions very conscious and controlled in this way but also wild and reckless in how she kicks Gamzee into the void and showers the meteor in Eridan’s blood while glowing, fanged and angry. It’s an extremely satisfying revenge fantasy, and a culmination of many core ideas of her character – her dream of a rainbow drinker being actualized, her disconnect between imagination and reality becoming a reality that’s every bit as good as she hoped, her fascination with danger leading to her becoming dangerous herself but in a way she has control over, and her uncertainty in her own capabilities becoming confidence to act.

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3. You are one of the few of your kind with JADE GREEN BLOOD. As such you are one of the few who could be selected and raised by a VIRGIN MOTHER GRUB, an event so rare as to elude documented precedent.

Positioned around the midpoint of the hemospectrum, Kanaya doesn’t express strong feelings about her blood color or prejudices towards other colors. She considers the future of the troll species to be very important and to be her personal responsibility, which includes all blood colors. This can make her accepting to a fault, and her willingness to indulge and remain close friends with Eridan long after he’s expressed active desires to hurt individuals and eradicate entire castes shows this. Arguably, Kanaya’s willingness to help and see the best in people who are not just nebulously ‘dangerous’ but who pose an active and immediate threat, and her sometimes helping them to the point of increasing that threat (for example, by creating a powerful tool for them to cast magic) is her biggest flaw.

As for her lusus, Kanaya’s virgin mother grub straddles a similar dichotomy to Kanaya herself. She’s the closest of any lusus to a human maternal figure – post-prototyping, her name is ‘Mothersprite’, and she’s shown comforting Kanaya after a heartbreak, deviating from the idea that a lusus acts as a ‘bodyguard […] and visceral sort of mentor’ (p.2070). Kanaya’s promise to give her lusus a direct descendant also mimics a human family dynamic more than a troll one. At the same time, mother grubs generally are monstrous and alien, combining disparate genetic material into a ‘diabolical incestuous slurry’, laying hundreds of thousands of eggs, and then leaving the trolls alone to raise themselves (p.2069). This specific mother grub choosing to raise one troll instead of birthing many is textually the most special thing about Kanaya – she’s not just ‘one of the few’, this goes so far as to ‘elude documented precedent’, and to this creature she’s worth more than hundreds of thousands of others.

Kanaya and her lusus appear to be close. In addition to Kanaya looking to her for comfort, our first glimpse of Kanaya in Hivebent shows her riding her lusus, and she later tells Karkat that last Twelfth Perigee’s Eve she stayed in and read stories to her lusus (p.2567). Vriska also thinks of her as the coolest lusus of anyone she knows (p.2204). At the same time, Kanaya was long aware that she’d see her lusus die, and reacts to these events pragmatically, focusing on her need to hold up her end of the bargain (p.2332) – perhaps mimicking other trolls’ more transactional relationships with their lusi. Since uncertainty is something Kanaya struggles with, it’s possible that she prefers knowing her lusus’ eventual fate in advance, and was able to emotionally prepare instead of being blindsided. Assuming she saw this prophecy in Skaia’s clouds, it’s another reason why she trusts and appreciates Skaia.

Kanaya’s understanding that it’s her role to protect and hatch the Matriorb to ensure that the troll species can continue in another universe is something else she likely saw in the clouds, since her lusus couldn’t speak pre-prototyping (p.2088). Kanaya’s level of comfort with this role and readiness for executing it is important to both her introduction and her death. She captchalogues the Matriorb in her chastity modus, which doesn’t allow her to retrieve the item until she’s ready to use it (p.2337). In human society, the idea of chastity typically means refraining from having sex, often specifically outside the context of marriage. When somebody gets married is often externally determined, as many societies declare a minimum legal age for marriage, and traditional practices require a man to propose marriage to a woman (not vice versa). In many cases a woman who wants to have sex before she has found a husband, or who still doesn’t want to have sex once married, may not have control over this.

However, Kanaya’s chastity modus doesn’t require external circumstances, it’s explicitly linked to when she is ready to use the item (metaphorically, have sex) – so again, Kanaya gets to be a modern representation of a very old-fashioned theme. A more direct sexual reference occurs when Kanaya watches Rose fall victim to John’s bucket prank and feels embarrassed and disgusted by it (p.2697-701) – very different to her comfort with sticking her hand into a chainsaw wound on her mother’s dead body, but it’s common for people to view sex very differently to any other topic. Kanaya’s statement that she needs some distance from that display explicitly means temporal distance, as she moves to a different point on Rose’s timeline. In this moment, she’s not ready to see Rose with a bucket, but possibly at an unknown point in the future, she will be.

Kanaya’s role as the person tasked with ensuring the troll species’ future and her role as a space player breeding a new universe are intertwined, arguably making her a Mother Grub herself, since she’s responsible for creating young on a massive scale (including billions of humans and other intelligent life within out universe). Her statement that ‘Ectobiology Is Based Entirely On [The] Inability To Appearify A Subject’ (p.3315) links a frog’s ‘destiny’ to be appearified with Kanaya’s active interference in its life, both of which are crucial to this process. Interpersonally, many of Kanaya’s friends view her as a ‘meddler’ and as someone who can’t stop herself from interfering in their lives (see section 6), and I think this tendency for meddling is best explained by her job to ensure the species’ future. The lives of the only twelve remaining trolls – or, before Sgrub, the other ones involved in ensuring the troll species can continue – very much are her business as she can’t fulfill her role without them, even if they don’t see it this way. So, Sgrub making meddling with frogs an explicit part of her role reflects this.

There’s another, sadder side to Kanaya’s chastity modus. When she eventually finds the key to unlock the Matriorb’s card (p.3307), she interprets this as paradox space or some other cosmic force telling her it’s the right time to hatch the grub. She’s overwhelmed by the idea, but she has complete trust in (her understanding of) the rules of her sylladex, so she works extremely hard to make the concept of hatching the grub at the heart of the trolls’ meteor make sense in her mind. But her sylladex is actually considering her own personal readiness – the moment where she has enough confidence in herself to hatch the grub, or is simply desperate enough to try anything. Kanaya’s longstanding trust in cosmic forces (see section 5) means she can’t comprehend that it’s now her decision. She’s personally ready, but it’s still her responsibility to synthesize all the available information and choose the right time to act, and her mistake is that she trusts too much and ignores her own agency.

I believe that even after watching Eridan brutally murder Feferi, a girl he once claimed to love, and often stating his intention to create a doomsday device that would kill all land dwellers, Kanaya did not truly think Eridan would take that final act of destroying the Matriorb. Part of that is an inability to see her friend as truly capable of terrible acts and her belief that her existing meddling would be enough to guide him, but a much greater part is the belief that the forces governing her sylladex wouldn’t give her the auxiliatrix key only to take away her opportunity to hatch the orb. In addition to shock at what Eridan has done and horror at the loss of hope for the troll species’ future, Kanaya’s anguish at watching the orb’s destruction is her realization that she was wrong to blindly trust. It’s the last feeling she experiences before she dies, and it’s the thing that prompts her to come back, to change, and to take a more active role making decisions about the future.

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4. You are one of the few of your kind whose affection for the aesthetic strongly overpowers instinctive regard for the utilitarian. As such, you are one of the few of your kind who has developed a zeal for FASHION and DESIGN and LIVELY COLORFUL PATTERNS.

Kanaya’s affinity for aesthetics is clear from her first appearance in Hivebent, with the variety of colorful, patterned banners decorating her hive demonstrating not only intentional decoration, but skill in constructing and hanging these large, sturdy yet flowing decorations. Kanaya also has a greater variety of outfits than any other troll. In addition to her black shirt and red skirt that comprise her work clothes (p.2331-2), Kanaya is seen wearing a dark red dress with black belt (p.2325), a blue wrap dress with pink belt (p.2327), a floaty green dress with a pink ribbon (p.2329) and a pink one shoulder dress tucked into a lilac skirt (p.2578) – all designs credited to Cindy of McMittens.com.

Kanaya keeps her wardrobifier on random throughout Hivebent, which could be a way she adds small, tolerable amounts of uncertainty into her life, below the threshold that makes her uncomfortable (and while knowing she can always override the random setting if she chooses to). Additionally, while it’s common for teenagers to enjoy fashion and to dress in a variety of ways, Kanaya’s clothes read to me as an adult woman’s more than a thirteen year old’s. She thinks of herself as ‘a lady with a true sense of style’ (p.2326), with ‘lady’ again primarily used for adult women. So, fashion could also link to her theme of readiness – while there are aspects of growing up that Kanaya isn’t yet ready for and ways in which she’s young, uncertain and still leaning on her mother, she uses clothes to feel confident and mature, dressing for who she wants to be until her actual feelings catch up.

The wardrobifier’s randomized cycle has a flair for the dramatic, switching Kanaya’s outfit immediately before she battles a powerful giant monster in ‘[S] Make Her Pay’, and Kanaya is similarly dramatic before her own big moments. After resurrecting and before taking revenge on the other trolls, Kanaya ties Eridan’s caps around her waist like a bigger and more dramatic version of his scarf, turning the gaping wound he made into a fashion accessory itself. After the revenge, she applies green lipstick mixed with Eridan’s purple blood as a finishing move. Aesthetics aren’t just a side hobby for Kanaya, they’re fully integrated into everything she does. For humans, clothes can have an impact on our mindset, and this definitely seems true for Kanaya even if it’s not true for trolls in general. This impact is something she’s aware of and uses to her advantage throughout her story.

Kanaya isn’t only interested in looking nice. She makes her dresses herself, and when we meet her there’s a sewing machine in her hive working on a brand new project. Her upgraded chainsaw is known as the Demonbane Ragripper (p.2792), a name suggesting it’s as useful for fabric as it is for killing underlings, further integrating this hobby into the rest of her life. Similarly, making clothes for other people is a part of Kanaya’s relationships. She expresses disappointment that other trolls are less fashion-minded than her (p.2729), and takes the first opportunity to make new clothes for Vriska, who she has a crush on at the time (p.2388), and Lil Cal, who she definitely doesn’t (p.3598). And, just like her inclusion of daylight, I think it was important to Kanaya to create a universe that she considered beautiful.

Presumably, Skaia isn’t putting visions in the clouds giving Kanaya ideas for dress designs, and this is all her. Fashion is a low stakes way for Kanaya to impact the world by her own design, because she understands that if the wings on Vriska’s fairy dress are slightly lopsided, that will ultimately impact very little – in comparison to breeding a universe, where a small mistake could have extensive impact. So like the landscaping of her hive, it’s a training ground for her future work, and one that’s easier for her to share with others. It’s possible that her decision to wear her work clothes during the trolls’ Black King fight and during her time on the meteor is because she has more confidence in herself by this point, and doesn’t feel the need to supplement it with a cool outfit.

However, Kanaya is still concerned with aesthetics when she starts trolling Rose, an area where she is still insecure. Following their first conversation where Kanaya believes she’s talking to Rose but is actually talking to John, Kanaya feels like she’s ‘fondling the short end of the antagonism stick’ (p.2695) – but once she opens the viewport and notes Rose’s lack of horns, pale skin and (in Kanaya’s view) generally boring appearance, along with the ridiculous interior design choices of the MEOW code scrawled on the walls and broken totem lathe, Kanaya is able to ‘resume [her] stance of alien complacency’ (p.2696). Once she’s been convinced to give Rose another chance, Kanaya is pleasantly surprised by Earth looking pretty in the snow, and by Rose’s stylish winter outfit (p.2709-10).

Similarly, she uses aesthetics to begin conversation and make connection with others when possible. She immediately comments on Jade’s clothes when they meet in a dream bubble, only for Jade to tell her she made the same comment later on her timeline but earlier on Jade’s (p.3597), and when she’s concerned about Rose’s actions in Sburb her first instinct is to sketch new outfits for her, unsuccessfully trying to convince her to make these instead of destroying ruins (p.2729). There’s extensive dialog involved in building and maintaining her relationships too, and it’s clear that Kanaya’s judgment of others is not exclusively based on aesthetics, but they do make an impact.

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5. You know the ruins and the hive and everything here that is not sand and rock originated from the world of your dreams. You also know that one day you will visit this world while you are awake. That day is today.

Out of all the trolls, Kanaya is among those who have most and longest anticipated their shared game of Sgrub. Although most of her actual gameplay is skipped over, she talks extensively about her relationship with Skaia, the source of her pre-session information. She’s aware that the clouds of Skaia ‘Dont Tell [Her] Everything’ (p.2328), and specifically seemed unaware that the red and blue teams would combine into one team (p.2139), even though Equius eventually connecting to Kanaya as her server player was one of the two links that combined the teams (p.2319). Kanaya also knew nothing about the Green Sun throughout her session (p.2731) and far more crucially, the clouds didn’t tell her that the trolls’ brief victory would be followed by crushing defeat. Instead, she learned this from a Karkat much later in the timeline (p.2567). This appears to be a general difference between Skaia and the horrorterrors, with Skaia giving its pre-session dreamers (Kanaya and Jade) information about the game they’ll play but nothing about the aftermath, while the horrorterrors give their pre-session players (Feferi and Aradia) some hints towards a bigger picture.

Kanaya views this limited information positively, believing Skaia ‘Only Showed [Her] What [She] Needed To See’, is ‘Sentient But Benevolent’ and doesn’t have ‘An Agenda Beyond Which It Knows To Be Manifest Already’ (p.2728). Arguably, she views Skaia as a parent – someone who only gives her knowledge they think she’s ready for, but out of a desire to raise, nurture and protect her, not out of a malicious desire to conceal truth. In this way, her belief that Skaia has no agenda feels naive, as does her black and white view of Skaia vs the horrorterrors. This reading links to Rose’s GameFAQs, which Skaia pointed her towards in the first place, and which she reads late at day in the brightness of her room, awake when she shouldn’t be and avoiding the Skaia in her dreams, flirting with the danger of someone who’s influenced by the horrorterrors and eschews Skaia’s plan while knowing that her reading material is ultimately Skaia-sanctioned.

Kanaya definitely has the tendency to make assumptions, possibly due to her discomfort with uncertainty. In addition to her trust in Skaia’s supposed lack of agenda and seemingly baseless belief that the horrorterrors oppose players’ ‘true purpose’ (p.3045) – although the horrorterrors oppose Skaia, they still assisted the trolls with winning their game in many ways, and Kanaya acknowledges that she never visited Derse or had direct interactions with them to support this opinion – she also makes several assumptions about Rose. Assuming that she’s trollike in appearance, reproduces with a Matriorb and has quadrants are mostly harmless and understandable, but assuming that Rose’s Sburb group ‘succeeded with flying colors’ (p.2346) is a far more dangerous one, since she puts a lot of trust in Rose’s instructions with no guarantee of how her session ended.

In her first chatlog in Hivebent, Kanaya tells Aradia that she ‘[Does] In Fact Have A Hand In All The Terrible Things That Are About To Happen’ (p.2139) – she has responsibility for actions she causes even if they are predestined and unchangeable. Kanaya continues to navigate this fine line between personal responsibility and unavoidability throughout her arc. Before entering her session, Kanaya is dismissive of the idea that bad luck is the cause of Vriska’s problems and that a curse Karkat caused is the reason the trolls’ lusi are all dying. Instead, their deaths are ‘A Preemptive Consequence Of The Game [The Trolls] Are About To Play’ (p.2204), not a result of Karkat’s actions. It seems that Kanaya struggles to see things from other perspectives, as in her mind at this point it’s very clear which events involve some personal responsibility and which do not, and she’s quick to criticize those with different views even though her own statements about this aren’t necessarily consistent. Pre-session Kanaya has made internal peace with following destiny while still accepting responsibility, and perhaps unfairly expects others to have reached the same peace and the same understanding.

Kanaya’s relationship to destiny changes across her story, shaped by her experience breeding Bilious Slick, living through the trolls’ post-session failure, and returning as a rainbow drinker. When breeding Bilious Slick, she successfully walks the line of facilitating without changing their destiny, and her work ultimately pays off. Her statement that the Vast Croak is ‘The Most Amazing Thing [She Has] Ever Seen’ (p.3319) shows both reverence for these greater forces and pride in the role she played assisting them, validating her existing beliefs and giving her enough confidence to later assist Jade in the process as she moves from the person who follows instructions while hesitant about her own abilities to someone with expertise in the process and mechanics of frog breeding. Through this, she retains faith in Skaia’s will, believing personally that Jade doesn’t have time to complete the frog breeding objective but acknowledging that ‘Weirder Things Have Happened’ (p.3309).

Following the trolls’ failure, Kanaya is concerned that telling Rose about the blackout she’ll soon enter will play a role in the event happening, and she’s uncomfortable with this idea (p.2729). Here she accepts personal responsibility for these potential actions just like she encourages Aradia to, but – even though she knows Rose’s blackout is a certainty – she’s reluctant to play a part in it. Perhaps the catastrophic ending to the trolls’ session recalibrated Kanaya’s comfort level with enabling the grand design. She’s not ready to resist it entirely here, but she’s visibly on that path.

Kanaya taking the science wand she made for Eridan and snapping it in two with a ‘DEBUNK’ sound effect (p.3532) is perhaps her biggest shift. This wand was created to counter Rose’s horrorterror magic and channels the magic of light, implicitly powered by Skaia. At this moment, Kanaya no longer cares if any of this wand’s actions were part of Skaia’s design. Debunking its power makes a clear statement that Kanaya is ready to actively decide what is true and shape her own ongoing destiny, motivated by her recent change in form, and paralleling how Aradia’s relationship to destiny, timelines and following orders changes as she also takes on new forms of ghost, sprite, robot and God Tier fairy.

In this way, and interestingly for a creation myth, Kanaya’s arc can be read as a crisis of faith. She reads as someone who grew up very religious (specifically Christian) and previously didn’t have cause to doubt her faith, which was an overall positive influence on her life. Her interactions with other characters show a willingness to listen, but not to meaningfully change her own worldview based on anything they may say. It’s only when she runs into problems her current faith can’t help her with that Kanaya starts to consider that it may no longer be serving her – she’s an interesting parallel with Gamzee here, who more explicitly loses his faith at a similar time.

But unlike actual religious people, Kanaya goes through the act of becoming a creator of worlds and effectively a god herself. Along this path, she failed to reach God Tier, failed to enter the universe she made and rule over it, feels she was rushed during frog breeding meaning she may be nervous about mistakes made during the process (p.3309), and made a grave mistake providing Eridan with a wand. Recognizing that she still has failings no matter what godly or supernatural powers she herself obtains helps her understand that Skaia, too, may not always be perfect or right or wise. This is an experience anyone can have with anyone or anything they idolize, whether a parent, role model or higher power, and it’s one that Kanaya exhibits on a broad scale with Skaia and in miniature with Rose.

Although Kanaya isn’t part of the FLARP group and never mentions playing video games besides Sgrub, her early relationship with Rose is defined by game mechanics. In addition to Rose’s GameFAQ itself, Kanaya’s first trolling effort is scored with the ‘Flighty Broads And Their Snarky Horseshitometer’ (p.2695). She names Rose ‘Flighty Broad’ and creates a progress bar to monitor whether she or Rose has the upper hand, interacting directly with the Homestuck game interface each time. She gamifies the whole interaction, turning it into essentially a dating sim where her job as a player is to get enough points in Rose’s romance meter that Rose will fall in love with her. It doesn’t quite work out – at the same moment that Rose blows up her first gate, Kanaya’s snarkmeter explodes. Two games break at the same time and two players stop following the rules.

It’s a big transitional moment for Kanaya, since even though she’d read about Rose blowing up the gate, she didn’t quite believe she’d actually do it (p.2721). It’s also the moment where Rose’s GameFAQs end and she’s no longer following a path Kanaya already knew of. It’s new territory for both of them – Rose breaking away from the game’s intended path, Kanaya not knowing what Rose will do going forward – right as they move into a relationship that isn’t governed by game mechanics. This reflects the moment where Kanaya returns as a rainbow drinker and stops uncritically following Skaia, another game construct, and in both cases Kanaya moves from looking up to someone to seeing each other as equals with equal right to make decisions.

Finally, to engage in some speculation. The first entry of Mindfang’s journal (p.3507) describes a nonconsensual redrom encounter where Mindfang uses mind control to coerce a slave into pleasing her sexually. One popular fan theory (unconfirmed as of June 2011) is that this slave if Kanaya’s ancestor. The gap between the slave’s volition and Mindfang’s puppeteering leading to the slave’s uncertainty over her level of control would fit extremely well with Kanaya’s complex and uncertain position between following bigger forces and making her own choices. The suggestion that if she and Mindfang continue their relationship, Kanaya’s potential ancestor ‘will never understand how thoroughly she was manipul8ted’ (p.3507) could present a contrast between Kanaya and her ancestor, because Kanaya did in time come to understand the ways she was manipulated by Scratch and Vriska, and perhaps is beginning to realize this with Skaia.

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6. Your trolltag is grimAuxiliatrix and you Tend To Enunciate Each Word You Speak Very Clearly And Carefully

In addition to clear and careful enunciation, Kanaya hedges many of her statements with phrases like ‘From What I Understand’ and ‘I Believe’, as well as immediately retracting or regretting some messages. She uses formal, unnatural and overly literal language and constructs sentences to be unnecessarily convoluted and difficult to parse, sometimes overexplaining to the point of incomprehensibility and sometimes doing the opposite by overestimating someone’s existing knowledge. In my opinion, these traits give her some of the best and most memorable turns of phrase in all of Homestuck. I believe Kanaya directs her own uncertainty outwards and isn’t comfortable being forthright when she doesn’t truly feel it, especially with important matters. She is sometimes willing to make clear statements, such as ‘The Curse Had Nothing To Do With It’ (p.2204), so her strong beliefs stick out from her more hesitant ones. Despite this, Kanaya expresses a desire for unrehearsed conversations even when she says things she regrets, such as accidentally revealing that her redrom crush is a girl (p.2567), once again allowing controlled low levels of uncertainty into her life.

Kanaya is seen talking to Aradia, Karkat, Vriska, Eridan, Feferi, Rose, Jade and John, and it’s confirmed that she talks to Tavros regularly and has trolled Dave at least once. She’s closer to the seadwellers than perhaps any other land-dwelling troll, and her friends span the entire hemospectrum, suggesting she doesn’t specifically seek friends in either direction. It’s believable to me that Kanaya regularly talks to all the trolls, since she’d want to understand everyone who will share her responsibility for the future of the trolls’ species. Again, I think this is why she’s associated with traits like meddling and auspisticism that allow her to associate with trolls she sees as dangerous without alienating them. It is true that she meddles often and sometimes has little respect for others’ agency or privacy – for example, giving Vriska details on how Karkat feels about the curse he may have caused (p.2204) or cutting off Tavros’ legs without his consent so that Equius can fit him with robo-legs (p.2119-20) – but she always believes she’s doing this for the benefit of the other person or the entire team, thereby keeping her eyes on the big picture.

Kanaya threatening to upend a load gaper over Vriska’s head if she isn’t kinder to Tavros is a moirail or auspistice move, either pacifying Vriska or diffusing tension between her and Tavros, which is necessary to maintain stability between the entire Sgrub group. Kanaya sacrifices her own feelings and the more selfish concupiscent relationship she’d prefer to have with Vriska to ensure the trolls’ overall success in the game. In her own mind, Kanaya frames her decision to fill a moirail role and keep an eye on Vriska as an inevitability, and mistakenly assumes that Feferi feels the same way about Eridan (p.2328). She later learns from this experience – when she realizes she’s falling into a similar dynamic with Rose, Kanaya says that she’d ‘Rather Not Get Stuck In That Kind Of Pattern Again’ (p.2730), once again moving from the idea of destiny to that of taking control over her relationships.

During the troll romance exposition, Kanaya is shown as the textbook auspistice mediating between Tavros and Vriska (p.2397) and Eridan reinforces this idea by calling her ‘the vvillage twwo wwheel devvice wwhen it comes to auspisticing’ (p.2343). Humans regularly mistake platonic or practical motivations for romantic ones, and this must be compounded for trolls with their four types of romance. Kanaya’s desire for group cohesion is mistaken by others for a desire to auspisticize given the romance-centric nature of troll society, but I don’t actually believe she feels a strong affinity with this quadrant. She looks visibly unhappy while talking to Eridan and is openly uncooperative with him, criticizing his ‘Megalomaniacal Derangement’ and ‘Indecent’ black solicitation (p.2343), suggesting that at least in his case keeping an eye on him is all business and no romance.

Kanaya comes across as someone who both feels and expresses strong emotions. Her criticism of Eridan shows this, as do her tears and throwing her handmade fairy dress out of her window after seeing Vriska kiss Tavros, as does her clear desperation in her early conversation with John where she knows the trolls don’t have long to live and is searching for a meaningful way to spend her final hours (p.2705). The rational part of Kanaya’s mind is trying to maintain group cohesion, but it’s fairly easy to make her angry or upset enough that she reacts with instinct and emotion. When she does, it takes her a while to move past it, evidenced by the fact that she doesn’t speak to Vriska for their entire Sgrub session and coldly asks her to leave her alone when they finally speak (p.2792).

Kanaya has a strong desire to look up to others as leaders and guides. In addition to Rose, Skaia and Doc Scratch (discussed earlier), she and Terezi are the only trolls to acknowledge Karkat as their Sgrub team leader and to directly express respect for him. Whether or not he’s earned that trust is a different question, as there’s little evidence of concrete actions he’s taken to prove himself a good leader beyond making emotional speeches and taking notes about humans (p.2694). She’s also unwilling to leave the central meteor lab to hatch the Matriorb without telling her leader where she’s going, but says that ‘[He’ll] Be Fine Without [Her]’ in response to his own hesitation (p.3321), placing significantly more confidence in him than in herself. In general, Kanaya is susceptible to following orders from anyone who expresses them with the authority she struggles to find in herself, especially in moments of uncertainty. In this same moment, when she’s scared she won’t succeed in hatching the Matriorb under these conditions, Eridan – who she does have a longstanding relationship with, despite their recent downturn – instructs her not to carry out this plan without his assistance (p.3321). Once again, it’s her desire to follow instead of lead that prompts disaster.

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Final thoughts

In my opinion, Kanaya and Aradia out of all the trolls – the all-important time and space players – are the pair who most directly engage with themes of childhood, adulthood and positions between them, themes which many fans see as absolutely central to Homestuck. And while Aradia was the first to find the code that led to Sgrub’s development, it was Kanaya who succeeded in a task of unimaginable scale, mastering the domain of ‘all physical locations’ (p.3196, see also p.2565-6 for a visual representation of the overwhelming magnitude of Kanaya’s role). It was Kanaya who brought the victory home and completed the game’s final objective. Her personal development is as backgrounded as her Sgrub gameplay, and despite her special, unique, author’s-badass-Virgo-lesbian-self-insert-OC-don’t-steal nature, despite the fact that within canon she created us, the implicitly human MSPA Reader, she’s rarely one to steal the narrative spotlight. Kanaya was killed in part by her own desire to trust, to follow, and to give way to bigger forces, but both before and after her death, I believe her defining trait is her ability and willingness to create her own hope and meaning, carving it from the universe with a chainsaw when necessary.