#damara.pdf

Sexual Assault/Harassment is deeply traumatizing to go through.

Sexual Assault/Harassment Jokes are very rarely funny*, and the normalization of them helps to normalize the action itself, as well as the belittlement of survivors of Sexual Assault/Harassment.

Damara's Sexual Harassment (and, yes, occasional Assault) of the other Alpha Trolls is not taken seriously by the narrative, and is intended to be funny. Like, this is a bit. This is comedy. The things she says are intended to be comedic.

Damara's tendencies towards Sexual Harassment has very interesting Watsonian reasoning for existing - it is a Trauma Response. Rufioh, Horuss, and Meenah were basically tag teaming her mental health the entire game. Hell, Rufioh and Horuss had been tag teaming her mental health since before the game even started, since her and Rufioh got together before the game, and Rufioh started cheating on her + gaslighting her about his cheating before the game, too. It's easy to guess that the reason she targets everyone with this rather than just Rufioh, Horuss, and Meenah is because no one tried to help her, so she sees all of them as equally culpable for her mental ruination, and therefore equally deserving of eternal torment.

Damara's Sexual Harassment bit has the obvious Doylist reasoning of "Hussie was being super racist about the fact that Damara is Japanese". Unavoidable aspect of the conversation, and if you did manage to avoid it, then you did not have the conversation in full nor did you have it successfully. East Asian women, and to my (admittedly limited!) knowledge especially Japanese women, are often portrayed as being idealistically submissive and pure, with the usual reasoning for this being that they're "Untouched by Western Feminism", so a common 'inversion' of this Racist trope is making them instead be hyper-promiscuous and sexually aggressive. This is also Racist. So.

The Watsonian reasoning plays very, very interestingly into Rufioh's recurring "Psycho Ex" bit - an age-old Misogynistic card played by shitty Ex-Boyfriends who royally fucked up in a relationship and ruined a woman's mental health, but don't wish to take any accountability for their actions, so they blame every problem on her. It's even more interesting when you pair it with the fact that he only calls her this behind her back, and he textually isn't over her. Hell, he starts creeping on an Aradiabot - a 13 year old girl! - because she's "just like the real thing", meaning she's "just like Damara". Worse is that he's saying that not about the younger, meeker Damara - that was his response to her threatening him! He's talking shit about her behind her back, calling her crazy, psycho, etc., meanwhile he's so not over her that he's willing to try and get at a fucking 13 year old girl that vaguely looks like her and acts like a version of her that he's not only already mentally ruined, but is still friends with to this day! What the fuck!

Sexual Harassment/Assault is a recurring theme in Homestuck, even within the Alpha Troll segment alone, that is almost always taken very seriously. Damara is literally the only instance of it being mostly a joke. Even then, there's interesting stuff in there, so you can't fully dismiss it.

The characters that Damara Sexually Harasses/Assaults don't eeven take the fact that she did that seriously.

*I fully understand this is a Red Flag statement on its face, though please understand the only example that was coming to mind was the It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia "Because of the Implication" bit. You can probably make any joke work, as long as you're not just punching down on the vulnerable. Most SA Jokes do not work because their punchline is the victims, not how shitty it is to commit - or imply the danger of to get what one wants - SA.

So it's like, what the fuck. The thing is, I wouldn't blame anyone for having a knee-jerk "Oh No" response to someone defending Damara - especially in this day and age, you're kind of trained to take any instance or reference of Sexual Harassment/Assault very seriously, and any indication of turning it into a joke is met with immediate hostility. It's a good response, but it's also not a very helpful one. Not for conversations where this kind of thing is actually legitimately kind of complicated.

I have no clue what this is referencing, but. Hm. Yeah, though I'm finding it difficult to take this the same level of serious as whatever Cronus, or Bro, or Doc Scratch, etc., has going on. This seems like more of a throwaway joke that's characteristic of the era than anything. Another way to put it, I think this may be more of a Hussie Moment than anything.

Damara's, uh... Sexual Harassment bit is a pretty complicated one to address and untangle, because on one hand, speaking on Watsonian terms, it's supposed to be read as a Trauma Response - this is how she lashes out at people who have previously hurt her. We know that's specifically the case, and that she isn't always like that, because we see her interact with characters that aren't the Alpha Trolls, and she's perfectly nice to them. On the other hand, the Doylist reasoning behind her Sexual Harassment bit is, bluntly, that Hussie was being Racist about the fact that she's Japanese.

So, on one hand we've got some very emotionally difficult trauma writing, and on the other we have Racial Caricature. And these things are tangled together so tightly it's difficult to speak purely about just one of these angles.

Generally, Damara's weird Sex Crime thing is supposed to be seen as funny, in an... Uncomfortable, Edgelord kind of way, rather than it being a character trait that has any degree of seriousness or commentary behind it, like Cronus. Hussie was attempting to say something with Cronus. I don't think she was trying to say anything in particular with Damara's Sex Crimes bit, other than "Isn't it funny that the East Asian girl is Aggressively Sexual, rather than submissive and shy?"

...Which could be taken as a rather uncharitable read, but it's kind of hard to see it as anything else, considering some of the stuff Damara says, and the fact that she was canonically quite meek and kind prior to Rufioh, Horuss, and Meenah tag teaming her mental health.

Damara deserves the world. World’s most out of pocket way of dealing with assholes and getting them to never want to interact with you. Rufioh can absolutely eat shit, he deserves to catch WAY more flack for the way he treated and still treats Damara than he does. No one ever really shines a spotlight on just how terrible he is and was, because they’re just too busy fawning over how supposedly attractive he is. He’s pixels. He’s literally pixels, I don’t understand how this is getting to people so bad. The Homestuck fandom would fuck an active blender if it was gray and it’s age started with a 1.

Which beta troll is most like Damara

Which beta troll would get along with Damara the best?

(Need this for a thing I'm writing)

Kinda hard to think of who she’s most similar to. That depends on the metric you’re looking for.

My first thought was Equius, due to them both having rather unhealthy relationships with their sexualities and boundaries, of which are self defense/coping mechanisms, in a sense. The main difference is the reasoning why they’re like that, and the level of which they’re deliberate about it.

For Damara, it’s a very active choice she makes, and the result of her getting completely broken and betrayed by those around her. For Equius, it’s the result of getting exposed to pornography far too early, and not quite understanding the social rules of sexuality yet. Her toying with what I call Casteplay is, to me, a method Equius uses to cope with an inherent feeling of disconnect with the Hemospectrum, the only thing she feels gives her any sense of structure or purpose in this world.

The thing about Damara that one has to keep in mind is that she’s actually really sweet to anyone that isn’t the other Alpha Trolls. We do see her interact with some of the Beta Kids privately, and she’s an absolute darling, and speaks to them entirely in English. Her extreme, overbearing sexuality and even the language barrier is completely artificial - it’s a weapon she uses to keep everyone else back so she won’t get hurt again.

Trying to find out who Damara would be closest to might be a matter of sussing out who would best help her talk about and ease out of her pain. It might be emotionally turbulent, but I feel like really venting about everything honestly and being taken seriously and finally having a support network would work wonders for her.

My personal bet is Sollux, maybe. He has just the right level and type of listening skills, empathy, wits, and open pessimism that I think she’d really connect to. Also, she’s a nerd ass, so she naturally gravitates to other nerd asses.

Like. I know ultimately they are different people but you'd think they'd at least be more sympathetic with the abuse angle considering the one we *did* follow in the comic.

Part of it is that she committed the crime of Being An Alpha Troll. 5 people have read the Openbounds and 4 of them are me. (That's a little System humor from me to you.) Most of the rest of the fandom just see any Alpha Troll and assume the worst, usually on purpose. People go brain dead and reactionary when you mention their existence.

Another part is Misogyny. We cannot overlook how often people who are Weird About Damara also think Rufioh is free of sin, or are confused when you say that he's a misogynist, because they just fully took everything he says about her as facts, or didn't even pay any mind to it. Boooooo.

The time which this anon was sent coincides with me criticizing Rufioh’s behavior towards Damara, so I think it’s only fair to read this as siding with him. With that in mind:

You’re stripping out so many miles worth of context to that incident that I don’t even know where to start.

Yes, she did do that, and she also killed Meenah. That fight was distinctly remarked upon as being a “very long and bloody duel” and was mostly fought between Damara and Meenah, and it was the result of Damara finally having had enough of how horribly she was being treated. Damara was the Alpha Troll session’s punching bag, which was Meenah’s decision. She was incredibly sweet and meek, and considering how Rufioh had been very obviously cheating on her with Horuss for god knows how long, she made an incredibly easy target for Meenah.

Meenah relentlessly harassed Damara as a method to sow discord into the Alpha Troll session. She thought it was “too chummy”, and that everyone getting along so well was going to jeopardize their game.

Meenah had been publicly abusing Damara for years, and Rufioh was blatantly using and manipulating her. No shit she snapped. Her going crazy was justified, and Rufioh of all people has zero right to constantly criticize her for this. He is the root of the issue here! It’s so obvious!

So again, yes, she did do that. She did so much more than just disable Rufioh, and even if she didn’t, he completely deserved it. So did Meenah. If you guys saw that going down in real time, you’d be rooting for her too. You’d have to be a completely compassionless sicko to not do that.

Jesus, I’ve never heard of anyone shipping Meenah <3< Damara. That’s… Oof.

Yeah, pretty sure there’s no romantic intentions behind how either of them feel about each other. Like, at all. Sometimes things aren’t able to be labeled as “Unhealthy Black Romantic Tension.” Sometimes there’s a bitterness in a dynamic that’s not appropriate to label as a Kismesis. Sometimes people just hate each other. Sometimes it’s even justified to the point where making it romantic can just be kind of… Queasy.

Damara is right for resenting Meenah- Meenah did make it her life’s goal to ruin every square inch of Damara’s life, intentionally turning that poor girl into a massive public target for her own public abuse for literally no good reason. Sure, it was under the guise of “riling everyone in the session up” because she thought that “hostility would make the team work harder,” but it backfired so hard that it resulted in not only Meenah’s brutal murder, but also their status of being trapped in absolute purgatory for the rest of eternity.

There isn’t any romance behind it. Meenah just sucks as a person, and the way she treated her resulted in Damara completely mentally shattering. She ruined her life, no strings attached, no attraction, nothing. Just abuse for the sake of abuse.

Very much so this!! Damara does have character outside of Hussie being a fucking freak, and it’s very interesting!!