#gamzee hate

My problem with Gamzee is that he is both murderous and one-note. 

I like murderous trolls when you can dig into the psychology of why they do what they do. Vriska is interesting because she often knows that she is doing the wrong thing and struggles to justify her behavior, or tries (and usually fails) to do better. I don’t particularly like Eridan, but even he has a somewhat relatable spurned lover backstory feeding into his murderous outburst. 

Gamzee is just... a stoner who snapped and murdered a bunch of his friends because Doc Scratch told him too. And then beat the shit out of Terezi because he wanted to. After he drops the stoner characteristic, Gamzee’s entire role within the story is to show up and facilitate bad things that are happening.

(BTW, I’m just going to say this now because I don’t want to debate the point in follow up asks, but some people consider Gamzee to be a tragic figure because circumstances made him the villain he is, but I very much don’t buy that. We are both told and shown that Gamzee refuses to die in any of the doomed timelines across paradox space. We get more details about Gamzee’s fate in one doomed timeline, and it turns out that Gamzee went on a murderous rampage too early and killed everyone else in the party. We are shown absolutely NOTHING to indicate that this is atypical. Gamzee being a murderous asshole is, by all the information provided, literally a multiversal constant.)

But hey! Just because a character is completely unsympathetic, that isn’t a total loss, right! You can still give such a character a karmic death to make it worth all of the pain they cause, right? Except no. You can’t do that with Gamzee because you can’t kill a clown because the plot says so.

So yeah. Gamzee just... does nothing for me. He shows up, makes bad things happen, and he doesn’t even have the decency to die like a good villain...

Until the Epilogues that is.

Like... seriously. There is a lot to criticize about the epilogues, but Gamzee’s death is very nearly a perfect moment.

Gamzee spends the entire Candy route proselytizing about the importance of redemption without actually making any attempt to change his behavior or show remorse for his previous actions. This pisses everybody off, both in universe and anybody reading the thing. 

And then when Vriska finally strangles him to death, against all odds it pushes her towards her own real redemption arc. When I realized what Gamzee accomplished there, it was perfect.

This was a “Joker finally gets Batman to laugh” kind of moment. (A fitting analogy, since it is popularly theorized that Batman strangled the Joker to death in this scene)

(I’m not sure if that makes Batman Vriska or me, but if you’ve followed this blog for any length of time, you know that people like to joke that Vriska IS me, so I guess it doesn’t matter.)

>:]

OTP: vrisrezi... and vriskanroserezi, by extension

NOTP: gam//rezi honestly should not exist. for pairings that aren’t just garbage i have to go with dave/rezi

BROTP: dave and terezi work like... 0% as a romantic couple but they are my favorite friendship duo in the whole comic

The ship I am ashamed to ship: umm... none really? my tz ships tend to be pretty tame