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Jazu posted:There's an interesting sort of parallel. When she was bleeding to death, when it was really important, Tavros couldn't kill Vriska. And when everyone's lives depended on it, Vriska couldn't NOT kill Jack. You get to see it, and Vriska pulls this poo poo-eating grin right after every other troll gets killed off, just because she has a fancy suit and a sword. And the narration almost takes her side, weirdly. Scratch brings up whether or not she'd win. Like it matters. Also Terezi didn't do her whole "wooo i'm a seer i know alllll wooooOOOOoo" case much good when she started the conversation with a bunch of real dumb wrong dumb accusations. e. Thirdly its hard to view Vriska as having a hubristic fall when as far as she's concerned her only mistake was thinking that Terezi didn't have the stones to kill someone herself. If you want real, harmatia-style selfownage, Vriska in the beta timeline got heaps of that. paranoid randroid fucked around with this message at 10:44 on Dec 7, 2011 |
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Dec 7, 2011 10:37
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Seoinin posted:
You sure about that? One of the things about mistakes causing downfalls is that the person making them doesn't realize it until they're too late. Vriska doesn't realize the damage her motives and actions are doing, doesn't realize what jetting off to fight Bec Noir will do, and is in general just a little too self-assured. Her introspection with John is commendable, and she does make private admission of her own uncertainties to him, but ultimately she does embrace her mistakes and they lead to her downfall. If she'd stepped back, acknowledged she'd been wrong or at least admitted her personal desires to 'set things right' as she saw fit... well, Terezi probably wouldn't have killed her (for the same reason they're not killing Gamzee, too powerful and not actively hostile right this moment). It was hubris that kept her from doing that, so it was hubris that made her fall - where by fall we mean get shanked. edit: Worth noting that Terezi as a Seer being possibly unreliable from Vriska's perspective isn't really a counter-argument that it was hubris that had her chase Bec Noir. It's just part of an overall sense of "hey maybe impulsive, arbitrary actions on your part have been the cause of all your problems and you should try some sober second thoughts and introspection with others for once?" Dolash fucked around with this message at 11:13 on Dec 7, 2011 |
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Dec 7, 2011 11:08
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Seoinin posted:yeah that's a poo poo eating grin right there all right She made the exact same mistake in both timelines - the crime is committed, as it were, Terezi just prevents it from having consequences in the Alpha. The act of hubris is leaving to fight Jack despite the seer's warnings. It's an interesting reimagination of the hubristic arc that we see the loud, clamorous denouement in all array, then the villain's undoing quietly taking place on a basis of perfect apprehension, but it's still the classic hubristic arc. A kinder one, even, since the only one who has to suffer is the one at fault - but it manages to retain the tragedy and drama of the old plays by showing us the gory spectacle of a would-be untying in its full and deserving detail. Best of both worlds, perhaps, although if it weren't for the constant theme in the story of time looping around on itself and being equally true regardless of the viewer's "point" on the timeline, I daresay it would feel very weak. As it is, I think it's a pretty inspired move!
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Dec 7, 2011 11:10
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Except that revelation is an important aspect of the classical conceptualization of harmatia. Saying that you can have a hubristic arc without the character realizing the significance of events is like saying you can have classical Greek culture without rampant misogyny and atavism. And Terezi's far from the objective arbiter that people seem to be wanting to read her as. paranoid randroid fucked around with this message at 11:27 on Dec 7, 2011 |
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Dec 7, 2011 11:18
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Seoinin posted:Except that revelation is an important aspect of the classical conceptualization of harmatia. Saying that you can have a hubristic arc without the character realizing the significance of events is like saying you can have classical Greek culture without rampant misogyny and atavism. That's what I'm saying: Beta Vriska realises the significance of events, and then we loop back to Alpha Vriska being punished. We don't need to see her realisation, because we've already seen it - and that neat subversion of a highly traditional narrative arc actually lends to the strength and credibility of the supernatural elements at work in the story, timelines and mind powers and etc. Terezi doesn't just see the future in the vague, Tiresian way, she sees it so hard she can actually reverse the arc's chronology for the reader. Timelines aren't just what-if alternate realities, they're integrated into the plot to such a degree that happenings in them can echo onto the "central" narrative just by virtue of the audience perceiving them. Circumstantial simultaneity seems like a relevant idea, so it's interesting that Scratch was chatting about it around the same time all this was going on. Hamartia is for the benefit of the audience, largely - it's a form of dramatic irony. It's still present in its entirety, as you note, when we see Vriska react to all of her friends dying because of her. That's all that's really needed! What the audience sees is her realisation, then her punishment, and that's sufficient to fulfil the spirit of the hubristic arc, I think. They're functionally the same Vriska, and they made the same mistake - that she dies before she realises, and yet we know she realises and how she realises, is just a subversion performed by a story that deals as confusingly and imaginatively as it can with time travel.
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Dec 7, 2011 11:39
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Maybe we're using different understandings of harmatia, which is likely because Artistotle changes the definition of words frequently and largely without warning as fancy strikes him, but I... don't think you can say harmatia is just for the audience's benefit. It's a central, defining flaw for a character. Its just not very satisfying, to me at least, to cash in this fatal flaw and then immediately negate everything while handwaving it off. Which is incidentally why I think that beta-timeline Vriska has a role to play in the story.
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Dec 7, 2011 11:49
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Seoinin posted:Maybe we're using different understandings of harmatia, which is likely because Artistotle changes the definition of words frequently and largely without warning as fancy strikes him, but I... don't think you can say harmatia is just for the audience's benefit. It's a central, defining flaw for a character. Its just not very satisfying, to me at least, to cash in this fatal flaw and then immediately negate everything while handwaving it off. That is likely, actually - looking it up, it's supposed to have a fair few definitions. In my own understanding, hamartia is, as the dramatic process of doing wrong through misapprehension, an extrinsic expression of a character's intrinsic flaw - whether that be foolishness, hubris, or simply poor luck - but I see it's also been typified as the flaw in itself. Anyway! I personally don't really see it as a negation. I mean, Vriska is straight up dead when she's killed (and in this story, that's not even a tautology, jeez). From a narrative perspective she's dead as a result of the denouement we saw Beta Vriska embroiled in, which is in turn a result of her original crime of hubris. It's not the case that she fails to heed Terezi's warning and Terezi says, okay then, sucks to be you, DEAD, it's that she fails to heed Terezi's warning and then the gory denoument occurs - actually in the narrative flow, and in potentia but with perfect accuracy in Terezi's mind's eye - and then she is punished. It would be different, and would be a negation I think, if instead Vriska heeded Terezi's warning after we saw the denouement. As is it's just a completion of the arc that happens to take place a few moments back in time from its penultimacy. It's not handwaved or unnecessary at all: it's entirely necessary that we see what would unfailingly occur, because that's the reason Terezi has for killing Vriska and indeed the reason that Vriska on a narrative basis requires punishment. e: it's also super characteristic of Vriska and kind of hilarious that the beta timeline thing means we get to see dreambubble Vriska pop up and immediately be like "man! I guess Terezi killed me or something. Oh well, bad br8k, bad br8k. I probably didn't do anything wrong, she just tricked me somehow!" Android Blues fucked around with this message at 12:18 on Dec 7, 2011 |
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Dec 7, 2011 12:14
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Android Blues posted:Vriska on a narrative basis requires punishment.
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Dec 7, 2011 12:18
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Seoinin posted:whoa whoa whoa, check your premises mang. You seem to be trying to inject moralizing into a thing that the author was very clearly not intending to be moralistic. That's not moralisation, that's narrative structure. It's the tragic arc - flaw (usually hubris) into evil action into tragic denouement into punishment. Punishment is at the end of the arc! e: imagine if Macbeth ended with all the other thanes saying "well, have you learned your lesson, Macbeth?", and Macbeth nods happily and says "yes, I can't wait to be a thane again!". It would ring sour.
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Dec 7, 2011 12:25
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While I agree that many (not all, but many) narrative forms call for a character to be humbled, punished, proven wrong, or in some other way put down, be careful with the words you use and the way you express it. Just for starters, it begins to sound like... comeuppance...
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Dec 7, 2011 12:32
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Hey man, I said "on a narrative basis". I think I was pretty clear, really!
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Dec 7, 2011 12:35
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Downfall is not a one-to-one match with punishment. There's only real 100% correlation if you subscribe to some weird Greco-roman belief system where fortune is a Real Person That Exists and lives on a mountain in the balkans. But now I'm just doing semantic bickering to cover for the fact that its 3:30 and I can hardly think straight. Lemme just leave off by saying a think a lot of your reasoning depends on Vriska being definitely "evil" and Terezi being unambiguously objective and "good", both being things we've been shown as untrue.
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Dec 7, 2011 12:42
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Seoinin posted:Downfall is not a one-to-one match with punishment. There's only real 100% correlation if you subscribe to some weird Greco-roman belief system where fortune is a Real Person That Exists and lives on a mountain in the balkans. But now I'm just doing semantic bickering to cover for the fact that its 3:30 and I can hardly think straight. Not exactly. Oedipus isn't an outright evil character, but the fact that he commits patricide and incest is enough to lock him on a punishment trajectory. The tragic arc, at its core, is brought on by the fatal flaw - which implies a character otherwise occupied with non-damning traits. Certainly there are quite, quite evil characters who follow the tragic arc - Richard III is one good example - but a lot of them are simply amoral or even notionally good characters who suffer from one instanchable defect. Othello, for example, who is an otherwise good and heroic man who suffers from and is eventually brought low by his raging jealousy. I wouldn't peg either Terezi or Vriska as being flat-out evil or flat-out good: they're both nuanced characters with fairly complex morality. The important thing is that Vriska commits an evil act as a result of her fatal flaw, and that Terezi is someone with perfect foreknowledge who warns her in very explicit terms that if she continues on this path it will end poorly for everyone. On this point, it's made pretty clear to the audience that we can trust Terezi's objectivity: it's not a matter of her being good so much as it's a matter of her being right.
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Dec 7, 2011 13:01
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Oh okay. It just occurred to me that the real problem here is that I'm bad at parsing tonight, because I think I might be really resolutely trying to convince you of something you're already saying. "being evil" and "doing evil" mean different things, ahurr. Although, because I can't stop loving posting, I'd argue while we're talking about tragic flaws here, that the coinflip debacle was as much an outgrowth of Terezi's flaws as Vriska's. e. haha I'm putting seriously thought into cartoon thirteen year olds. truly the owned one was me all along. paranoid randroid fucked around with this message at 13:19 on Dec 7, 2011 |
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Dec 7, 2011 13:14
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We're both owned, buddy. It's okay.
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Dec 7, 2011 13:27
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Hearing conversations like this, I cannot decide whether Homestuck is the most brilliant work ever, or completly idiotic.
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Dec 7, 2011 13:30
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In conclusion, Vriska Serket can be compared and contrasted.
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Dec 7, 2011 13:35
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In other news, Tinkerbulls! 
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Dec 7, 2011 15:27
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waggles posted:In other news, Tinkerbulls! How much you wanna bet that Capra Demon devours at least 90% of them within the next update?
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Dec 7, 2011 15:45
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Seoinin posted:Although, because I can't stop loving posting, I'd argue while we're talking about tragic flaws here, that the coinflip debacle was as much an outgrowth of Terezi's flaws as Vriska's. Yeah, that's the thing. Narratively, Vriska's death scene works. It is tragic, yes, but also satisfying in a huge way; Andrew clearly put a lot of effort into constructing every angle. And Terezi's flaws fit into that. This outcome is not super happy funtime for Terezi; she clearly grieves the loss of her old friend and regrets her own role in taking Vriska down. Arguing that she arrived at this sad juncture through absolutely no fault of her own capriciously casts her as a helpless victim in this scenario. It turns the entire "investigation" sequence and showdown into a silly diversion that ends in an anticlimax. Its relevance to the plot and characters is limited to being a rote callback to ancestor stuff. To be fair, this is actually a thing that happens in Homestuck. But when we are beaten over the head with Terezi's core flaw as she blunders through her investigation leaping to one mistaken conclusion after another, it really seems much more satisfying to view this sequence as a trial that Terezi fails and consequently suffers for. Vriska fucks up and loses her life; Terezi fucks up to a lesser degree and loses her friend. All it takes is Karkat arriving to survey the aftermath of his failures in leadership to create an elegant 3X DOWNFALL COMBO.
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Dec 7, 2011 15:46
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Truly, that is some frightening fauna.
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Dec 7, 2011 16:08
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Rasamune posted:How much you wanna bet that Capra Demon devours at least 90% of them within the next update? The tinkerbulls are going to fly away.  Besides I think a bigger beast is going to take care of the capra demon, like spidermom for instance.
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Dec 7, 2011 16:12
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waggles posted:The tinkerbulls are going to fly away. It will be squashed by the only giant tinkerbull in existence (which is being ridden by a smaller tinkerbull) dropping out of the sky on to its head. It will then shamble off somewhere never to be seen again.
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Dec 7, 2011 16:58
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Krinkle posted:jesus look at it
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Dec 7, 2011 17:58
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Krinkle posted:jesus look at it It is the same clock Doc Scratch had been using to illustrate the story he has crafted, it had been changing color and picture all throughout the Scratch interlude and continued to do so afterward. quote:Why would it zoom in on her judgment being neither just nor heroic right before he crowbarred it, otherwise? It didn't.
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Dec 7, 2011 18:29
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I thought Vriska's death was considered Just, due to the fact that her actions would result in the death in all the trolls. Is that not true?
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Dec 7, 2011 18:52
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JAssassin posted:I thought Vriska's death was considered Just, due to the fact that her actions would result in the death in all the trolls. Is that not true? I thought it was just for all the poo poo she'd done.
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Dec 7, 2011 18:53
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JAssassin posted:I thought Vriska's death was considered Just, due to the fact that her actions would result in the death in all the trolls. Is that not true? Also the clock was almost certainly symbolic, and had no real "power" over deciding the fate of a given god tier player.
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Dec 7, 2011 18:54
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Plom Bar posted:Watch it again; you'll see that it ticks over to Just for an instant before Slick bashes it. I was pretty sure it stopped right in the middle so readers would have to decide for themselves whether it was a just or heroic death
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Dec 7, 2011 19:18
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Cyrai posted:I was pretty sure it stopped right in the middle so readers would have to decide for themselves whether it was a just or heroic death I think Andrew mentioned on his old Formspring that he had Slick destroy the clock in order to let the reader decide whether her death was just or because the clock was destroyed before she could come back.
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Dec 7, 2011 19:24
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Hussie left the exact reasons for Vriska's perma-death intentionally ambiguous, so pretty much everything that's been mentioned here is a plausible interpretation! Here's what he had to say about it on his (now-deleted) formspring:Hussie posted:The story provides no conclusive answer to this, and I personally cannot provide the scoop either. Not that I am withholding it to be coy, but to take my word for it one way or another would be missing the point. The destruction of the clock is another element among many for you to weigh when considering these events.
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Dec 7, 2011 19:26
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Exactly. Vriska's death is supposed to be ambiguous. I don't believe that there's any moral code by which her death could be considered Just, and so I attribute the permanence of her death to Slick smashing the clock. This was one of the views Hussie intended for the audience to take, and it's the one I prefer. If others feel her death was Just and the clock had no significance, that's fair too. It's just not my view on the matter.
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Dec 7, 2011 19:37
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I don't like considering the clock to be particularly special other than an outside indicator because not only has it been crowbarred into insignificance timeline-wise, but the very universe it resides in was destroyed. So, then, what of our remaining god tiers? Will they now simply die because they no longer have this clock protecting them? Or the inverse, they can't die now no matter what? Why in the world does the First Guardian of an entirely separate universe have a device that apparently decides the fate of all god tiers? I definitely believe this the case: "If not, then the destruction of the clock becomes more a violent gesture of punctuation to accompany this "divine ruling", like nails being driven into a coffin. Or, like a tolling bell. It's jarring, sudden, and carries finality." E: Also how in the hell would Slick know it was deciding Vriska's fate? And that he was going to kill her with it??? That's a pretty big reach, even for Hussie. Nate RFB fucked around with this message at 19:47 on Dec 7, 2011 |
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Dec 7, 2011 19:45
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Nate RFB posted:So, then, what of our remaining god tiers? Will they now simply die because they no longer have this clock protecting them? Or the inverse, they can't die now no matter what? Clearly, the clock is irrelevant because there's going to be a dreambubble breakout and death will be about as meaningful as it was in Problem Sleuth. 
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Dec 7, 2011 19:48
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Nate RFB posted:Why in the world does the First Guardian of an entirely separate universe have a device that apparently decides the fate of all god tiers? Well Scratch was about to tell us exactly that, until Hussie's self-insert ruined it for us.  Nate RFB posted:E: Also how in the hell would Slick know it was deciding Vriska's fate? And that he was going to kill her with it??? That's a pretty big reach, even for Hussie. He didn't know, that's why Hussie called it "circumstantial serendipity."
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Dec 7, 2011 19:50
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I'd personally like to think that the actions and the clock's indication are utterly inseparable. Vriska died a just death because the clock got stuck on Just. Slick hit the clock at the right time and got it stuck on Just because Vriska died a just death. e: oh god why did Bro program it to do that YF-23 fucked around with this message at 20:08 on Dec 7, 2011 |
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Dec 7, 2011 19:57
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Man, Kidbro can build the hell out of some robots!
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Dec 7, 2011 20:08
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Brobot ironically bleating like a goat is a callback to Dave's intro pages.
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Dec 7, 2011 20:12
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YF-23 posted:I'd personally like to think that the actions and the clock's indication are utterly inseparable. Vriska died a just death because the clock got stuck on Just. Slick hit the clock at the right time and got it stuck on Just because Vriska died a just death. Ah, like the nature of Terezi's doom clock thing- http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=004031 also that is some crazy ironic bleating there still hope Dave does it just to show that uppity Bro how its done
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Dec 7, 2011 20:12
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If only Dave could have seen that.
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Dec 7, 2011 20:12
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