terezi-discourse:

terezi-discourse:

I guess it kind of bothers me that every time I make a post
analyzing Vriska and (Vriska) someone comes out of the woodwork to tell me that
they thought (Vriska) was nice, but that her behavior wasn’t healthy/there is
such a thing as being too passive/(Vriska) was unhealthily dependent on Meenah.
Like yes, I know? That’s not subtext, that’s literal text, coming out of
Vriska’s mouth and Meenah’s mouth and clearly stated for the reader. “Being
like Vriska is bad, but being like (Vriska) isn’t good either.“ We’ve
established that (Vriska) wasn’t in a good place.

But like, people’s “character development” and personal
change aren’t linear and final, and what we saw with (Vriska) was someone who
was wildly oscillating between ideals of who she should be and was trying
something new out and got burned, badly. That doesn’t mean that the way she
looked when Meenah left her was like, the end point of her character. It wasn’t
the end of her road, and I mean that both in the literal sense of “she later
ran into Terezi on a road of gray and red squares and they hugged and it was
gr8” and the metaphorical sense of “she was still a person who was changing and
adapting and developing.” Just because we got to see (Vriska) in one of the
worst moments of her life having a total breakdown doesn’t actually mean that the
new feelings she was starting to have, of admitting vulnerability and allowing
herself to be interdependent and opening herself up to others, were some kind
of fault.

Tl;dr I think people extrapolate way too much about the way
that (Vriska)’s story outside of Remem8er ended and come to this almost
Vriska-like conclusion that (Vriska) was too fragile for this world and her arc
should serve as a cautionary tale about how being too nice can be bad. And imo,
I think a better way of thinking of it is that personal change involves a lot
of switchbacks and shifts and low points and vulnerability, which makes it very
easy for other people to fuck you up, but that doesn’t actually mean that there’s
something wrong with moving through those stages of vulnerability or exploring
new parts of yourself. (Vriska) was still growing, you guys. The last stages of
her relationship with Meenah wasn’t her DBZ-esque final form, and since it’s
been a literal year since we last saw her I feel like maybe we as a fandom can
stop beating a dead horse to remind each other that having your self-worth be
dependent on someone else after going through a crisis of faith and personality
is a Bad Thing.

I was gonna make another post saying “be nice to (Vriska)
2k16” but then I remembered that she literally killed thousands of ghosts and
about five people would probably remind me of that immediately after I posted, so how about
this: “be nice about (Vriska) and stop using her lowest point as indicative of
some kind of inherent character flaw.”