What does Feferi add?

She's a lens with which to explore dream bubbles with, which her dancestor takes on later

feferi fan #1 has joined the conversation. but i do agree with you. the story goes hussie just really didnt enjoy writing her (i dont remember the source for this but its been propagated for years now) or at the very least hated her quirk so TO ME it feels like the role she should've taken got largely taken over by both jane and meenah. like feferi makes the dreambubbles, but meenah appears and leads the ghost army into the final fight. meenah takes the life ring and joins karkat against an echo of her imperious condescension. or, conversely, jane occupies the space of someone who everyone seems as nice and loves her friends and self-sacrificial, but as a result of her inherently propaganda filled upbringing, in turn becomes a fascist. im not saying meenah nor jane shouldnt exist, i Like the roles they occupy in the story, it's just like. (kicks a rock) i feel like feferi could've really supported this story a lot more than she did.

With more than 20 major characters fighting for the spotlight, it was inevitable that some would be pushed to the sidelines. however, once the zodiac pattern was established, it was necessary for there to be a full set of 12 trolls. for that matter, what do Nepeta or Equius do to advance the plot? they were both less relevant that Feferi when they were alive. As for Feferi herself, she acted as liaison to the Horrorterrors, and she is responsible for the creation of the dream bubbles which act 6 relies on. more than that, she acts as a catalyst for Eridan and Sollux’s conflict and it was only through her existence that the Condesce was able to exist. whole the Condesce could have been created as the ancestor for a different Fuscia player, even if they were more useful otherwise it would still be their influence that allowed her to exist. Feferi, as the complement to the other 11 trolls, was certainly necessary, at least as much as any other character.

Also as @alex says, whereas Feferi is made to complete the set of 12 trolls, the other 11 dancestors were primarily made to complete the set started by Meenah, where Meenah exists as a replacement to Feferi, whom Hussie retired.

join my effort to unretire feferi. we WILL bring her back.

I mean she DID come back for a while. Like that was a thing that happened.

in my world... heh. we bring her back for real.

Feferi is undeniably an underutilized troll, largely because Hussie bit off more than he could chew when making her quirk

my truth is despite not having written for her since um 2015 i can slip into her quirk at any time. it's kind of embarrassingly ingrained in me. Put me in coach. I can do this.

i think feferi does a lot to flesh out the world of alternia, but more to flesh out beforus. it's kind of an understated thing because people don't really think about the dancestors, but feferi's caged-animal philosophy to raising trolls really shows in a lot of ways the dancestors are fucked up. it's great, it's legitimately compelling.

and it's really funny that people will say "beforus was a better place than alternia" as if beforus didn't produce some of the most fucked up people in the cast

Thanks yall, glad to see I'm not just missing something, was feelin like the ogre

One thing I like to read into Feferi is that she's a much more overt look into how Alternia treats women than a lot of the other female characters. Here she is, right at the theoretical top of the blood food chain, and aside from feeding this big fucking squid - which has its OWN lofty expectations for its daughter - her life seems totally dedicated to keeping her arranged married husband* happy so that he doesn't try to commit megagenocide. Of course the first thing she does when her old world gets destroyed is break off that relationship and try to live life on her own terms for a little bit.

As others have pointed out, she then serves as a template for other characters in Act 6, which I like to think of as an Act that is largely about remixing ideas from earlier acts: Fefeta is kind of a symbol, if nothing else, through which the comic says "hey, I'm using bits of Feferi to make new and even more compelling characters". I won't go too deep into it just now, but I think this in general is an important part of Homestuck's structure: when we first meet Dirk, we're not meant to think of him as a totally new character, but rather as an extension of someone we already knew as Dave's Bro, but also as an extension of certain recycled troll archetypes - in his case Equius. Similarly, Jane is an extension of the Nannasprite we've already met, but she's also an extension of the child heiress concept we've already been familiarised with, so knowing Feferi gives us an advantage in getting to know Jane more efficiently.

Meenah (/ the Condesce, who I think is best treated as an extension of Meenah [or vice versa]) and Jane kind of take the Feferi concept in different directions, which is one of the strengths of Homestuck's "character alchemy". The Condesce I think is really best understood when we already have that background of knowledge about Feferi's childhood; we're told explicitly in Openbound that the Condesce was never really the top dog on Alternia, but even earlier on when we hear those stories about how English was like an overbearing demonic "husband" to the Condesce we can think back to Feferi's very recognisably female problems and think wow, yeah, I can see how even having the "highest" blood on the spectrum can't save you from being a girl. Jane, meanwhile, focuses a lot more on the naive privilege than the womanhood, at least on the surface - but when we see that dark inner side of her and we discover how fixated she is on becoming a mother and creating an heir, we can tell the shadows of that characterisation are still there.

(I dispute the claim about Feferi's "caged-animal philosophy" on the grounds that Feferi very explicitly does not try very hard to keep her animals IN the cages, nor does she care that much when they get OUT - but that could be a whole other discussion for this thread that I won't start just now.)

*I know this isn't exactly an orthodox interpretation of their relationship, but like I've just been talking about in the (anti-)meowrails thread I think there are shades of heteropatriarchy basically baked-in to the moirallegience concept; so when you combine the troll fixation on romantic destiny with the cutesy reference in Eridan and Feferi's introduction to them being "MADE FOR EACH OTHER", it can come across very strongly that there are socio-cultural forces compelling them to be with each other that go largely unexamined.

She brings Sollux back to life during the troll's session.

Her history with Eridan is one of the tensions that lead to the whole "massacre on the meteor" sequence.

She saves the Mayor's life after her own death, and the Mayor is of course the most important character in Homestuck.

Her posthumous conversation with Jade is the introduction to the whole dream bubbles business which becomes important later on....

....er, and that's it. Her characterisation in "Pesterquest" seems to be not universally loved, but I really enjoyed getting an entire scene dedicated to Feferi and what she could have been. Now that I think of it, she's kind of a pre-echo of Calliope, who also does her best work after she dies.