terezi-discourse:

So here’s my wholesome, inspiring, non-sadstuck explanation for why Terezi wasn’t in hanging out with the other survivors in the flashes we saw of the post-game world.

When Aradia saw the end of paradox space coming, she didn’t just sit there and watch it passively. With the help of Davepetasprite and a few others, she brought every single ghost out of the dream bubbles and into the new world, where they acquired solid flesh and a new chance to live their lives.

Only, that’s a lot of ghosts. There are only a few humans mixed in, mostly dream selves, but there’s a whole month’s worth of A2 trolls from the various timelines Aradiabot doomed, and six goddamn years worth of A1 trolls. And now they’re all alive, crammed intoa single physical plane of existence, and unlike dream bubbles, reality doesn’t react to your thoughts to help you find the people you’re looking for. Trollian and Pesterchum hardly work anymore–any doomed ghost can pester “CarcinoGeneticist” trying to find the Karkat from their timeline, but the only person who’s going to get the message is the Alpha Karkat. There’s thousands of traumatized teens out there trying to find their friends and family and lovers, and they have no way to contact each other.

And then you’ve got Terezi. She still feels out of place with the friendly, emotional humans. She still needs to be constantly working to avoid too much painful self-reflection. She still desperately seeks understanding of herself and others, understanding that can only be complete with understanding of all the timelines. She still has hundreds of timelines jangling around her head. She still wants to find Vriska.

So that’s how Terezi ends up having Davepetasprite make her a flashing ghostly booth and sitting herself down at the edge of the massive ex-ghost encampment, sorting timelines. Her booth looks a little like Aranea’s, but it’s her visitors who do all the talking. Those who want her help come to her to describe their timelines, where they went awry and what happened to everyone else in them, and Terezi listens and asks probing personal questions and tries to match them to the snatches of timelines she saw back in the game. And when they’re done, she marks them in her files and assigns them a random captcha-like code for their timeline and helps them sign up for a new Trollian or Pesterchum account with the code as their prefix. 

Jade helps out too, because a lifetime of believing she has to put the greater good over her own needs doesn’t go away just because some ghost tells her to have fun. She and Dirk and Rose design a hyper-efficient PDA that can be easily alchemized with minimal grist cost, and they pass them out by the dozen to ghosts hungry for the chance to find the people they care about. But they all have people to go back to, and no matter how many times Dave says Terezi is welcome in the new Strider man-cave, Terezi isn’t so sure.

It’s tough, slow work, and she can’t know with 100% certainty if she’s matching and categorizing them correctly, and it’s painful hearing about some of the ways those timelines came to an end. But it’s also important work, and the look on a Nepeta’s face when she immediately trolls n9Tt9G0A-centaursTesticle on Terezi’s advice and finds her Equius makes it worth it. Terezi meets the version of Rose from the timeline she doomed, still wearing her purple pajamas, and helps put her in contact with her Jade and John and Davepeta, and doesn’t make fun of her silly outfit once. She meets the Tavros who put the army together, and he tells her that she’s doing a great job and he’s glad someone’s helping these ghosts find their friends, and he’ll spread the word. 

There are thousands of ghosts and hundreds of timelines and it could be years before she finds her Vriska or the Terezi who made the retcons. But that’s not her only goal anymore. The more people she talks to and the more connections she helps make, the more she feels like she’s building a sense of what it means to be a kid and grow up. She may never feel whole, but she’s learning about the emptiness in everyone, how almost every Latula cemented her cool girl mask to her face a few years into her session and never took it off again, how some of the Feferis wants to reconnect with their friends but worry they’ll find themselves trying so hard to keep the peace that they end up back in the same old habits that made them feel so drained when they were still alive. She’s learning that even if Karkat and Kanaya seem much more redeemably human than she does, that almost every Alternian ex-ghost is struggling to adjust to a world where they’re alive but violence and death is no longer an appropriate answer to their problems.

When she finally finds the people who loom so large in her memories, Vriska won’t seem like a self-assured ball of confidence anymore, and that other Terezi won’t seem like an all-seeing goddess who handed Terezi the perfect timeline only for Terezi to screw it up. It will take time, but Terezi will learn to stop seeing herself as worse than other people. She’ll have a purpose, and she’ll have a way to learn what she wants to, and she won’t be sitting under trees or playing soccer with her fellow survivors, but that doesn’t mean she won’t eventually build her own happy ending.