The transfeminine Vriska manifesto, remastered

this is something i wrote for the MSPFA discord several years ago and it got spread around as a screenshot of my text document in obsidian. so here i am translating it to text and slightly editing it for easier reading, with additional homestuck sources.

the point of transfem vriska is about a lot of reads on her character that just dont get picked up if you take homestuck characters in the broad strokes fandom paints them with. if you are approaching vriska in the broadest terms fandom sets, 8luh 8luh huge 8itch, you will miss a lot of this read.

lets start with a premise. this premise was best put in whipping girl: a transsexual woman on sexism and the scapegoating of femininity, by julia serano, and it goes like this:

"transgender women are so routinely portrayed as deceivers so that rabid heterosexuals can turn a blind eye to the transsexual porn ads that litter the back of men's magazines, so that mainstream moviegoers can watch the crying game and act surprised to find out that the woman who performs in the drag bar happens to have a penis. deception is the scarlet letter that trans people are made to wear so that everyone else can claim innocence"

trans women are seen as deceitful backstabbers, liars, masculine and abrasive and fundamentally, men. this deceit and dishonesty is so overwhelming that any violence done to them is justified because of how deceitful they are this is still true, legally speaking. the trans panic defense for murdering people is alive and fucking well, as of writing.

now, to get into homestuck, starting where vriska's introduced. she's initially written of in terms of backstabbing and deception, she's portrayed as more deceitful than terezi, which is a contrast worth noting here, because vriska FUCKING SUCKS AT DECEPTION. her only real move to get people to do what she wants is to literally make them do so. with her psychic powers. (also all trans women have these, so note that down)

conversely, terezi excels at it- she does, genuinely, know how to get people to act against their best interests, she gets both june (/homestuck/1686) and dave (/homestuck/3094) killed outright with her timeline fuckery, and these are things that would not work if vriska tried them. very frequently, vriska fails to deceive. remembering that thing i said about trans womanhood being understood through deception, the idea of "men lying about being women" and the idea that one could willingly fall for it, while preserving ones innocence using that deceit as a cover, this paints a clear image of what vriska is: a trans woman who does not meaningfully "pass". she isn't deceitful, she isn't at all. she is often very direct with her feelings! she begs aradia for forgiveness (/homestuck/2276) and the only time she's disingenuous is when she's performing the role of deception, which not even terezi, the character best at reading vriska, buys, and you see this in the wake of terezi revisiting her memories of vriska after she died (/homestuck/4768) which is then interestingly enough, explicitly used by aranea to manipulate terezi into further distancing herself from her relationship to vriska (/homestuck/4769)

and notably, the troll session players all totally reject vriska as a meaningful kind of person who deserves to exist. this is best exemplified in past karkat: wake up (/homestuck/2792), every single interaction is fundamentally just vriska begging for someone to acknowledge her, to validate her, and getting rejected. none of her interactions in past karkat: wake up are malicious, and all of them involve being rejected. whenever someone brings up feferi just being generically nice, i have to bring it up: she is an absolute fucking monster to vriska in this context. she starts with "oh im feeling down" and understands vriska as a person capable of empathy, and considering acknowledgement of her personhood is the fundamental interaction here, she's laying out bait for her before pulling it back and belittling her for this trait. truly just some nasty shit. it's awesome, feferi sucks so bad.

it's also worth mentioning her model of womanhood. all of vriska's images of what a good woman should be are based primarily on mindfang's journals (/homestuck/3746) an image of a "good troll" one of just two lenses we're permitted to understand ancestors through, the other being doc scratch, who is telling the story of the sufferer explicitly with intent to break the young handmaid, grooming her for the role she is to fill for the rest of eternity. (/homestuck/4072) mindfang is brash, abrasive, and the only on-screen rapist in homestuck (2009 - 2016)

there's a difference between mindfang and vriska, though, and it's this: mindfang is exemplary. while it's purposefully dubious how much of this is true and how much of it is mindfang's romanticization of her own behavior, the takeaway is the same: mindfang is an ideal adult troll woman. she is cool, she is strapping, she makes the hard decisions and has her boots on the ground, even when literally speaking, there's a poor slave troll's head between the boot and the ground. (/homestuck/3507)

this is the model that vriska works off of, but she fails. she can't make amends with aradia after killing her (/homestuck/2276), she can only make tavros kiss her through physical means, she can't make tavros want to kiss her (/homestuck/2380), she doesn't even like tavros to begin with, she just wants that summonerfang kindating, because her model image of womanhood involves a lameass boyfriend. (hey, jane parallel, /homestuck/5688)

this is why the vrisjohn snow date is so good to me. you see these performances of deceit fall away, and vriska is completely authentic with john, since he's earnest, and he doesn't immediately reject her he likes her, even, even if he doesn't really understand her. but he tries to, he really does. and it's adorable! vriska's desire to be human is also worth touching on but then we'd be here forever. (/homestuck/3857, /homestuck/3906)

the way her relationship with terezi shakes out during murderstuck also reflects this, and we'd need to talk about highblood dynamics here for a moment. it's easy to forget the dynamics at play in murderstuck, and we'd have to get to what makes the dynamics strange. first off, let's draw one line: vriska and gamzee are both highbloods, but gamzee is explicitly acting in the service of his position as a highblood during murderstuck. (/homestuck/3440)

whether he genuinely believes it is up for debate but these are his stated motivations. gamzee frames vriska for these because terezi, fundamentally, already wants vriska gone. (/homestuck/3734) but notably, gamzee once again uses vriska's "innately deceitful" nature that does not meaningfully exist to claim innocence. terezi outright thinks gamzee is innocent when she confronts vriska (/homestuck/3760), and this blindspot she has for gamzee gets her killed. (/homestuck/7180)

there are other, smaller points to mention: THE NEW BURN future arachnidsGrip (/homestuck/2547), the recurrence of the "girl messes with a boy's toilet" bit with vriska and kanaya (/homestuck/2356), but those are honestly, kind of minor points to me.

there are meaningful points in act 6 throughout, but talking about act 6 is already dicy, and i don't have all day so i'm gonna call it here, the tl;dr on act 6 vriska is that it is a challenge to the readers to care about a person who has done things wrong, in your capacity to forgive, to challenge your own internal biases and how you think about ideas like "justice" and "punishment".

during [s] flip, terezi claims to not be interested in revenge, only justice, while willfully believing that vriska did a lot of things she didn't do, to justify getting rid of her once and for all. the unravelling of this lie drives terezi's depression throughout act 6.

this is only amplified and intensified by fitting trans womanhood into this. very often, people who say "vriska did nothing wrong" are not arguing "what she did to tavros was okay", it's an entirely different discussion. they are arguing "it happened, people make mistakes, do you have the capacity to forgive someone who fucked up really badly" and i think that's more potent overall.

and the tl;dr on vriska as a whole is that the way vriska is deployed throughout the narrative relies on other characters reproducing transmisogynist ideas in relation to someone who is clearly failing at performing womanhood as they expect her to. i don't want to say "this was all intentional" because at the end of the day, authorial intent only goes so far. what matters is that it is there in the text.