#arajohn

I actually - hear me out here - think that Aradia's path to getting her full personhood back would start with John. In the last essay, I already mentioned how he seems to be set up to be in pitch with her. I think the reason why it has to start with John is because of Rage - more specifically, Aradia's lack of it.

We know from the fact that Kurloz is sabotaging his team's blackrom, an expression of being a Prince of Rage, that hatred and blackrom are actually a Rage domain. Furthermore, we know from the fact that Kurloz felt the need to destroy his team's blackroms in order to lock them into the worst possible timeline that hatred, anger, and shame are all vital, motivating forces. We also know from the fact that Eridan (Prince = excess of aspect) has too much conviction, and that Jake (Page = deficit of aspect) is wishy-washy, that conviction is a Hope trait; it stands to reason, then, that doubt and self-consciousness is a Rage trait, which ties in with how Rage is associated with nihilism, which explicitly questions reality and knowledge itself:

Different forms of nihilism reject distinct aspects of existence, such as a higher meaning, morality, and knowledge.[1]

Basically, while Rage and its associations are unpleasant, dangerous, and volatile, Rage (and by association, hatred and blackrom) is also a fundamental, core component to questioning one's beliefs, and changing for the better.

I'm also going to mention something I didn't mention in the last essay: we know that Aradia in the bubbles is at her Belly of the Whale/plot low point because she is displaying SPACE traits, the same as how every character resembles their opposite aspect when they're at their lowest: she's very distractible, she's too focused on the big picture to care about details, and she's incredibly passive and permissive.

We know from Caliborn, who can be seen as one of the purest expressions of Time, that Time traits are the opposite: persistence, being goal-oriented, attention to detail, being active agents. Aradia does, in fact, possess all these traits up until her death, regains them as a robot, but slowly loses all hope as everyone around her fails to heed her warnings, before finally she accepts that failure is inevitable and there's no point even trying. She LOSES her Rage, and with it, any desire to fight back against the shitty hand she's been dealt.

This is where John comes in.

We see from their brief extant conversation that he's pretty invested in understanding her point of view, given that he asks her five times for her opinion. He's also basically the only guy post-God Tier that's able to make her drop her cheery demeanor.

John's Thing is of being privileged, this upper middle class boy from american suburbia, with a penchant for chivalry and heroics (characters are constantly calling him out for leaping to do heroic stuff). This makes him clash naturally with Aradia, whose personality is naturally morbid, whose interests are dark and creepy, and whose arc is defined by oppression and enslavement. I want to trap them in a situation together; I want John to find her so freaky and crazy that she (deservedly) flips out on him.

And I think this needs to be her first step because she SHOULD be mad. She should be pissed as fucking hell. She should be mad about being oppressed as a lowblood, mad about being used as a slave, mad about being shit on by this rich boy, and mad at herself for just lying down and taking it.

Because what's really interesting about John being in her quads is that he's BREATH - freedom, independence, free will, and choices. For Aradia's arc of being trapped in abject servitude, John is pretty literally a breath of fresh air.

When Karkat describes kismesistude, he describes that the two locked in one must still fundamentally find something within each other that they respect, some quality about their nemesis that they covet. Time is the aspect of minutiae and detail, and Maids are shadow leaders, team managers; John is constantly lamenting that he doesn't know what to do or what's really going on, and Aradia is exactly the person to ALWAYS know this. Meanwhile, Aradia's arc comprises entirely of fetters, but John will always be free.

And once she has her latent rage reawakened, then I think Aradia would be receptive to Jake's idiotic charm in pale. Once she starts caring about stuff again, she's going to need someone to help her channel her anger and hatred into productiveness, and that's going to be Jake. Now, Jake has his own issues he kind of needs to work through, but we're just going to assume that he does for now. And what Jake brings to the table is pretty simple: he and Aradia have shared interests. They both consider the exact same things to be a terribly fun time, and their personalities compliment each other perfectly - Jake is deferential and would readily respect Aradia and take her advice; Aradia is blunt and straightforward in such a way that Jake's stupid ass would actually understand what she's saying.

I imagine that, still fuming with incontinent rage from her encounter with John, she happens upon Jake bumbling around some ruins, and in true Jake form, he completely fails to read the room and ends up roping her into some stupid adventure. And it's by doing this that Aradia reawakens to all the things she cared about before she died, the interests she discarded, the dreams she used to have, the life she wanted to live before they were all beaten out of her. What I'm saying is that Jake is her manic pixie dream girl.

Now, while all this is happening, Sollux is having his own situation. His belly of the whale moment was actually just prior to reuniting with Aradia, where he spends his time freshly-blinded acting optimistic, like he's some sort of Life player or something. We actually see him sort of regaining his liveliness throughout the comic already, where Aradia doesn't, as Erisolsprite finds some catharsis in being combined with Eridan and being able to talk to Fefeta, and also there's Jake provoking Sollux's aggro.

Moreover, Feferi is his moirail, and he's been hanging out with her. One of her character traits is relentless optimism; as soon as murmurings start going around the team that some chance at regaining life is on the table, I think she'd be all over that, and would nudge Sollux in that direction. Aradia in his red quad recovering her desire to live and anger at her circumstances would probably be enough to drag Sollux with them, kicking and screaming; he's the kind of guy who needs to be dragged anywhere, but who's secretly pretty ok with being dragged along. He pretty much only stays in the bubbles to be with his two girlfriends; if they say they want to live, then he'll go with them even if he whines the whole way.