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VRISKA SERKET
"Who do you think you are? Some sort of 8ad girl? Please, that's o8viously my turf."
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Canon: Homestuck: The Fucking
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral. Vriska's neither evil nor good - she wants to be The Best and have all of her freedom and cheat and do everything however the hell she wants to, but she has a sense of loyalty towards her allies and aggression towards her enemies. (And towards her allies too because she's fucked up.)
Age: Thirteen.
Gender: Female.
Species: Troll.
Aliases: arachnidsGrip, huge 8itch.
Banner Quote: --
Banner Picture: THIS. I MADE MY OWN BANNER FUCK THE POLICE. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Personality/Analysis: God damn. Where do I even start with Vriska.
Well, first of all, she's the first Homestuck character I ever fell in love with. I was totally taken with her 8ad girl image, something that every other character helped to bring attention to. Also, the fact that we weren't introduced to her until fucking Act 5 but she'd been instrumental to things starting as early as Act 1 -
damn. And then slowly unraveling her insecurities, and the fact that she started learning how to kill when she was just a fucking toddler, like--
Okay but I'm getting ahead of myself, so let's start simple.
Vriska is a huge 8itch. There's no contesting this. She's manipulative, arrogant, bossy, and a huge backstabber, pretty much always planning to double-cross someone in some way or another. Karkat says as much about her, that she's: "THE MOST VILE BACKSTABBING SOCIOPATH WHO EVER LIVED." An extreme Karkat hyperbole it may be, but there's a lot of truth to the backstabbing part. Vriska plays dirty, and cheats like fuck. If she can't get what she wants, she cheats - whether it's in forcing humans to fall asleep at critical moments, or getting into the minds of the mentally susceptible, or stealing all of the luck. There's a reason she's associated so strongly with pirates.
A lot of these tendencies can begun to be explained by her upbringing. On Alternia, there's this thing called the hemospectrum - where rustbloods are at the bottom, bluebloods the top, and purple-blooded seadwellers over all. Vriska's the beginning of the aristocracy, basically, and due to the nature of Alternia as a violent hellscape of subjugation, said aristocracy is encouraged to start killing. Often very early. Vriska's particular custodian - a gigantic spider lusus - was the sort that needed Vriska to go hunting for her - in the form of troll flesh. As a child, Vriska was learning how to murder, because those were the expectations, and if you don't meet those expectations, you're
dead.The funny thing is, Vriska often talks about how she doesn't give a shit about aristocracy or ruling over anyone or anything. The blasé way in which she approaches such subjects might seem like she's just excusing her violence and letting all the shitty things she's done roll off her back - and for the most part, that's one of the nastier Vriska-isms, including wearing different faces for different occasions. With Equius, for instance, at times she's like "hey we need to usurp this particular leader so us bluebloods can be on top!" in an attempt to get him to work with her, but then once the plan was over, she was like "haha i don't actually give a shit about all that blueblood nonsense like what the fuck ever." Everything about Vriska is so wrapped up in being disingenuous that she's super prone to lying to
herself. Unfortunately for her, to everybody else, she's quite see-through as extremely insecure about fucking everything.
For instance: she's
extremely jealous, but plays like it doesn't matter to her. Terezi is one of the people she respects the most in all of paradox space, and valued their partnership beyond reason, and yet she's jealous as
hell of how Terezi can manipulate people with only her words and no special powers, unlike Vriska. This is because she wants to be the very best, like no one ever waaaaaaaas, because that's the only way to
matter in an eat-or-be-eaten world like Alternia, because being weak is the most useless bullshit thing and she needs to be strong and powerful and in control and if she can't be -
if she can't be - what's it all for?
Vriska is also extremely melodramatic. She's always elongating her words, exclaiming things, laughing, grimacing - she's extremely expressive. She throws her all into
everything she does - FLARPing, climbing the echeladder, being the best, even her spider theme. But a lot of this melodrama, in a lot of ways, winds up being some kind of pretense, with this heightened expectation of who she
ought to be. While she'll always be wordy and talkative, she's never been as bloodthirsty as she always tries to make herself out to be. She doesn't really kill because she likes it.
Also, her pretenses can be partially explained in her heightened emphasis on the importance of her ancestor to her, almost wanting to
become her, idolizing her to the point of extreme hero worship. (If there's anything Vriska is, it's extreme - taking drastic measures to take whatever the hell she wants.) She's got a ton of fucking identity issues; she's not sure who she is or even who she
should be, and avoids thinking about why all this shit is even important to her in the first place, so she acts really big to avoid becoming anything at all. (Probably why she backstabs so consistently and easily.)
Another huge part of her attempted building of an identity are all the self-fulfilling prophecies that linger around her - like her habit of breaking 8 balls and then calling them back luck. They're only bad luck because she breaks them so fucking often and then keeps stepping on them. Everything about Vriska is
self-made, and if she acknowledges
that, then she has to start acknowledging the dirty shit she's done as wrong instead of just something that was going to happen anyway.
Okay, like, have another example: when she ascended to Thief of Light and started to be able to have aaaaaaaall the luck, she put sooo much stock in her luck that it started becoming a non-entity. Towards the end of her life, she sort of becomes self-aware of this, mentioning that if she truly
does have all the luck, then facing Jack isn't bravery at all. And that is just the tip of the iceberg of all the lies she's constructed about her identity to avoid her crippling insecurities of being not good enough, being weak, being nobody.
She wants people to
think something of her - wants to have control and wants people to NOTICE HER. She gets really fucked off when she kills Aradia and ghost!Aradia doesn't seem to
care. And more than that - she really wants people to
like her, but she has no idea how to go about being likable, so she just does whatever the hell she wants, blames it on bad luck or good luck or fate or what have you, and gets pissed when no one likes her still. She both hated and liked Tavros, doing terrible things to him but genuinely wanting him to get stronger because of it (which in no way excuses her shitty actions). She's
expected to kill him because of that blueblood aristocracy thing, so when she does finally kill him, she blames her upbringing for doing so
even though she had brushed off blueblood aristocracy later, creating this intricate web of deceit around her true intentions, even from
herself. And when she started unraveling it, and revealed she felt
awful about it and really didn't want him to be dead, she felt weak for it. This was one of the first - and last - dips we see into her insecurities before she dies. (Still, she didn't particularly give a shit about the millions of people she
wasn't friends with when she fed them to her custodian. Oh, Vriska.)
The problem is Vriska genuinely likes all of her friends. All of them. And she never really... learned how to properly give affection, or receive it.
She CONSTANTLY tries to excuse herself in various ways - like the quote I use for her banner, "You don't have to 8e a good person to 8e a hero." Maybe not, but you could at least try not to be a fucking douchebag to the people you care about. She falls back on "being herself" as a rebuttal for when people try to call her out on shit, when she doesn't even have a firm grasp on herself and it's not much more than an excuse to keep her insecurities at bay. She has soooo much "Vriska Logic," as I like to call it, and one of the most prominent instances is when she meddles an extreme amount in the humans' session, basically creating Jack, because the way she saw it, Jack was going to happen anyway, so why shouldn't she - the one who she thought was going to defeat him - be the one to create him? It's fucked up logic to excuse her actions of trying to be the Most Important Person, and forcing people to care about her.
God, I feel like there's so much more to say, but this covers a lot of the bigger things about Vriska that we see in Homestuck before Act 6, and I'm taking her from directly after she dies anyway, so whatever.
Roleplay Sample: --
History: 8^y------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Abilities: - Troll - Trolls have a lot of weird stuff going for them, all right, what with their tough skin and culture and horns and bullshit romance quadrangles. Let's just leave it at that.
- Vision 8fold - Due to her status as a God Tier, she has all eight of her eyes back. While she has one normal eye, the other has seven pupils, and she can use this as a sort of x-ray thing - seeing through solid objects if she desires, like Scratch's cueball.
- #Mindcontrol - Vriska's sliiiiightly telekinetic - she can make people do things mentally... sort of. She can only affect the weak-willed, insecure, and dimwitted. Also, she can read minds... but only a little bit at a time, though with animals or dimwitted creatures she has a better time of it. However, she can put nearly anyone to sleep, unless they've got like mental immunities to being fucked with.
- FLARP and Sburb - While not necessarily abilities, these games allowed Vriska to become quite STRONG. She's superbly athletic and a fearsome opponent, since she used to lead trolls to their death and carved a wasteland through her Sburb session AND did the most damage to the Black King, outside of Gamzee. She's really fucking tough, and proud of it, too.
- Thief of Light - Ah yes, her fairy pixie god tier. First of all: a "god tier" is sort of like a demigod, where she can only die under very specific circumstances and has a ton of strength at her disposal, as well as cool wings to fly around and stuff. Fitting with her excellent stealing prowess, wordy nature, and infatuation with luck, Vriska is the THIEF OF LIGHT. What she does with this is steal the luck of her opponents. While this doesn't seem like much - what does luck even do??? - she can steal a person's luck and the ground can just-so-happen to crumble beneath them and then they'll go falling headfirst into a chasm. What "luck" means is actually up to Vriska's interpretation, not that she acknowledges it; it's more along the lines of "cheating so the most favorable outcome for Vriska can happen." Like engineering Terezi's coin flip, across all timelines, to be a "favorable" flip for her and go off to fight Jack. This turned out to be quite unlucky indeed because she got stabbed in the back (or, in an alternate timeline, led Jack to her friends unwittingly where he slaughtered all of them). So, it's not universal luck she's really altering, though she thinks it is - it's her own perception of fate and fortune. Still - it's a tremendously powerful ability, and she's creative enough to utilize it well.
Equipment: - Fluorite Octet - Her eight eight-sided dice, functioning as her strife deck. Due to her status as a God Tier, every single time she wants to roll all eights, she does. This literally takes all chance out of the equation, but oh well. She doesn't need all eights all the time. Each combination has a different result - like 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8 causes a guillotine to appear. Effectively, because of the sheer number of results, and the fact that the order of the dice roll matter (18888888 being different than 88888881) there are a total of 16,777,216 permutations available - or 8^y (if y=8). That's a fucking high as hell number, and needless to say, Vriska's got a fuck ton of attacks at her disposal. The roll of all 8s is her best move, Ancestral Awakening - her best powerup, placing her in Mindfang's outfit and making her an extremely vicious and powerful enemy.
Weaknesses:- HEROIC/JUST - Vriska can die, even as a god tier - in fact, she has died. However - the death needs to either be heroic (like going out to martyr herself) or just (in that she's turned evil and someone needs to put her down). The definitions behind these words is a little more flimsy, in that a lot of the time it depends on what someone's perception of what "just" tends to be. All the same, she can die.
- IT'S HARD BEING A KID. IT'S HARD AND NOBODY UNDERSTANDS - Keeping in mind all her fucking psychological insecurities and fuck ups from her personality, Vriska is also thirteen years old - or six sweeps in troll terms. Baby murderer.
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