I’ve talked about this before but I’m thinking about how the same way SGRUB tried to prepare the players for the Scratched troll session (Alternia’s session) is the way that Bro tried to prepare Dave, and Vriska and Meenah tried to strengthen their friends.
I’m talking about this through the lens of Kankri, because Kankri is written explicitly to be a massive disappointment (regarding the Signless, and what fans wanted)—
But Homestuck fans of ALL kinds and character preferences, hear me out.
I’m just thinking about how specifically for Kankri, in each universe, he was rebelling against something. In each universe, part of that rebellion was (whatever you headcanon) at LEAST ostensibly for other people, and part of that rebellion was for him.
In each universe, the part of Kankri’s rebellion that is for him is against the ways he is threatened and made small. Against the ways that people want to do away with him or his voice, and what hemophobia and spectrabound society do to him. Against violence on Alternia, and against coddling and shushing on Beforus.
On Alternia, the part of Kankri’s rebellion as it applies to himself is “I deserve to be alive, I deserve not to be threatened, I deserve to exist as I am, and I deserve kindness. When I am kind, I deserve for that, too, to not be a risk. We all deserve to be kind and soft to each other and we all deserve kindness and softness.”
On Beforus, Kankri’s rebellion is “I am enough by myself. I have a brain, I have as valuable a perspective as anyone anywhere on the spectrum, and I deserve to do my own thinking and take my own risks, without being told to quiet down for the sake of my blood pressure or your worries that someone’s going to look at me the wrong way.”
Signless’s rebellion as it pertains to himself is “I deserve to live, I deserve the help and kindness I accept to that end, and I deserve to be loved,” and Kankri’s is “I don’t need anyone.”
I’m talking about this because it’s a difference that’s caused by the same forces that make Kankri—I don’t talk about people like this, but as a shorthand—“the worse one.” I’m talking about this because it’s something I’m sad about the quickest possible way to get across how Beforus hurt and ruined Kankri. Not how extensively, but just how.
And what we could come away with, at a cursory glance, is the Bro Strider mentality. We could come away from the dreambubbles and their shallow, bad commentary on SJW culture with “Beforus ruined Kankri with its softness.”
He hasn’t been through any real pain. So he hasn’t built character. He’s sheltered and doesn’t know what the real world is like, which is what made him so shitty; pain is what made the Signless grow his empathy.
No. You know what canonically made the Signless grow at least a part of his fucking empathy?
Visions of a world where people were not killed and enslaved just for being as they are.
Knowing that kindness is possible, because it was shown to him, because he unlike everyone else on Alternia can sometimes briefly remember a time when he was unafraid—at least unafraid in the way that he’s afraid now.
I also think that Signless’s mother, and friends, and some of the unique circumstances of his upbringing and life experience, and some of just who he is at his soul (who you are and what makes you that way and what soul is in Homestuck is DEFINITELY a topic for another post).
But it’s NEVER, in the Alternian portion of his story, implied to be the pain.
Pain in Signless’s story is most referenced as something that makes hope feel distant and heavy and impossible for him—as something that (fuck I am sad) makes him lose it at the end.
But during Openbound, oh no, we’re given this framing that Beforus’s softness, like all sheltered safe spaces, is what ruined Kankri.
I always spent my time during Homestuck’s run expecting Beforus and all of the things we were handed like that—actually foolishly expecting Kankri specifically—to be subverted. We subverted Aranea. I expected the text to way more overtly go back, bring us around, and do a little more hand-holding through subverting the rest of Beforus, because as of right now I can’t tell you where the text stands.
I can talk about this, though. And I can definitely lie on the floor weeping about it, and opine about how
Beforus’s softness isn’t what ruined Kankri.
Its refusal to listen to him, its marginalization of any healthy guiding voice, its treatment of him as incapable and incompetent and other things that forced him to turn toward logic instead of emotion and to tone police and justify himself at every turn (and to turn those things outward), its hemophobia andbigotryandempire are.
Beforus’s oppression took a form that targeted his softnesses in a very different way from Signless’s upbringing. Even though the kind of fear Signless lived under was not better, and in fact, very tangibly worse.
The Scratch’s addition of pain and the character development that took the Signless in a direction that prompted him to be more compassionate and kind are separate. And I wish canon had gone back and explicitly decided to say that.
