re: hussie obsessed with vriska joke

the joke wasn't "oh pedophilia is funny", and putting doc scratch along "jokes about pedophilia you find distasteful" is very strange considering doc scratch is explicitly a villain and him grooming these kids is very much a bad thing and a variation on the theme of caliborn's misogyny. like, in a webcomic largely based around a group of kids with unrestricted internet it makes perfect sense to address the elephant in the room when it comes to being a kid (especially a girl) with unrestricted internet access, i.e. online grooming. reducing his role in the story to "jesting about grooming" is just a gross misrepresentation of what the comic actually does with him.

as for the hussie vriska joke, i personally also find it kind of distasteful and not a very good choice in terms of execution, but like, the joke is clearly a criticism of the people who were saying hussie was obsessed with vriska. "you're so obsessed with her you might as well marry her!" is a common line to just throw out light-heartedly, and so the best way to demonstrate what's actually wrong with it is to just literally put it in the comic and make it obvious how actually creepy this concept is, and why it's incredibly weird to say "the grown author is just in love with their thirteen year old character because they keep putting her into focus".

and it's just not true that nobody said this, it's easy to look at the comic nowadays and objectively see that plenty of other characters are given a lot of focus too, but that's largely because vriscourse died down and she's nowhere near the controversial character she was. back in the day people would froth at the mouth saying hussie gives vriska way too much slack and it's because of favoritism. hell, even now if you look for people who argue that vriska is a terrible person who got off too easy in the comic you'll find the take that vriska tormenting tavros was in the comic because "hussie has a fetish for seeing women tormenting weak men".

this is why i personally find the joke a bad choice within the story, because with context it's already uncomfortable, and without context of the culture around vriska as a character at the time it reads HORRIBLY. but saying that hussie put that joke in because she truly is a weird pervert is just disingenuous.