MSPA Poll

[Xindaris]

So, I haven't been too active around here lately, and from what I can tell Iwaku has just gotten ridiculously popular all of a sudden (Seems that way to my eyes, anyway). So I'm curious, how many MSPA fans do we have around here nowadays, anyway?

This may or may not be a leading question, depending on the answer to it.

Now for those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, MSPA stands for "MS Paint Adventures", a kind of comic which as far as I can tell was invented by one Andrew Hussie; after trying a few formats that fell flat and never saw an ending, he successfully completed an entire story based on user suggestions in a single year; this is Problem Sleuth, and it is amazing. It's in a vaguely prohibition-era setting, involves three sleuths working together to solve puzzles and ultimately open the door to their office building. Throughout the story just about everything from old-school adventure games to theoretical physics is parodied, and you just have to be there to understand. But with how long it is, it'd take a while to read all of it. And after the conclusion of Problem Sleuth, he decided to tell a story about four kids playing a game, which quickly degenerated (or evolved, or mutated, or whatever you want to call it) into a story about a multiverse of insanity that I could not possibly hope to summarize in under five paragraphs. This would take even longer to catch up on, but it, too, is amazing, and ongoing. It's here.


That out of the way, I suppose we might discuss the comic here if anyone's so inclined. So, what do you think?

 

[Vay]

beep beep meow

 

[Xindaris]

Hm...would like to have some kind of discussion around here. Maybe I should invoke Sollux's law.

Opinions on Vriska, anyone?

 

[Vay]

I lovehate her. Shes a scheming manipulative bitch who causes death an mayhem... but ....

 

[Astaroth]

I am the spider-eyed 8itch. It's me.

Good troll. Best character.

 

[Xindaris]

Personally, I'm just kind of neutral about it. Yeah, she's there. Yeah, she does terrible things. Yeah, she does some good things. I'm just not the sort of person who gets emotionally involved with characters either way though, I mean they're fictional people and my feelings about them aren't generally going to affect anything, so why bother getting all uppity about it?

I did think it was pretty ridiculous when people over on the MSPA fora got upset because her death was declared "Just". Honestly, she killed thousands of people and no matter which way you look at it she also murdered Tavros. Then, of course, if the whole "troll morality" thing complete with culling and castes was all DS's fault in the first place, well, it follows that there was never enough justification for mass murder in the first place. Meh.

 

[Astaroth]

Oh, serious answer time. *Puts on serious face*

I've always been drawn to morally ambiguous and/or complicated characters. So, it's no surprise that Vriska is one of my favorite characters from Homestuck. She's one of the most developed characters in the series, really, and fleshed-out characters are another thing that I really appreciate.

Yeah, she's a bitch. Yeah, she's basically a sociopath and killed a lot of people. And yet, she has this idea that everything she's doing is for the greater good, that she's going to be the hero and save her friends. She's got almost an innocence to her. The concept of the innocent young female murderer is a very common one in media, but it usually comes with a deceptive cuteness and very feminine, childlike appearance that Vriska defies. She's a tomboy. She's rude. She has an unlikable demeanor that alienates her from even the most aloof, assholish members of her peer group. It all makes for an interesting, dualistic character.

She is also not entirely impossible to sympathize with. Kid never really had a chance NOT to be a sociopath. Troll society doesn't make for the healthiest of individuals to begin with, but she was also burdened for as long as she could remember with a ravenous monster lusus that she had little choice but to feed. Is it really any surprise that she has trouble relating to people or putting value on life? That shit fucks you up. Nor is she totally irredeemable, as we can see from her conflicted feelings on occasion. Yeah, she usually ignores it, but she has a conscience.

And then, on top of that, we're reminded every step of the way that she's really just a kid. She has girlish crushes on Tavros and John. She treats everything like a game. She plays make-believe with Eridan up until just before the Sgrub session starts. And she writes lurid self-insert pirate fiction in her diary. At the end of the day, she's just a really fucked up thirteen-year-old-equivalent girl.

I'm not going into whether or not her death is "just" because yeah, getting uptight over a fictional character is silly, and because that's a completely different topic related to morality as a whole and not exclusively to fandom as concerns the comic.