revolutionarygays:

my ten cents about vriska serket’s “abilities” as a “manipulator”:

i think a lot of the reason people are flabbergasted to see the words “vriska isn’t manipulative” is because first of all, there is a big misunderstanding about the nuance of abuse and abusive situatuations and which harmful aspects of abuse (manipulation, gaslighting, battery, etc) are at play in which instances of abuse. abuse isn’t black and white and not all abuse has the same exact hallmarks – someone can be abusive without being manipulative.

the other big issue i’m seeing is that so much of the fandom has a really poor understanding of vriska’s character.

there are a lot of people in this fandom who believe that vriska is cruel for the sake of cruel, mean because she wants to be, and a master manipulator who destroys the lives of everyone around her and laughs at the wreckage.

in ACTUALITY… vriska is a mess. a lot of the things she does are stupid, impulsive things she later very vocally regrets. she doesn’t actually strive for complete chaos – sadly, she’s very often actually trying to help, but she has poor social skills, no friends who trust her, and a hair trigger temper that often sends her into tantrums. she’s extremely emotional and impulsive.

and it’s not to say vriska can’t be clever – she is a smart girl who sometimes actually does execute plans that work (it happened once!) and the whole situation with jade and prototyping bec (i can’t remember the details exactly) was certainly a time when vriska cleverly executed something she was attempting. it completely fucking failed and blew up in everyone’s faces! but she is clever enough to come up with elaborate schemes in a pinch. they just don’t usually… work, and in most situations she uses brute force or has a meltdown instead of doing anything actually clever

vriska isn’t ACTUALLY a one note villain. that’s why people like her. her motivations are far from one dimensional cartoon villain – in fact, sadly, her motivation for her shitty behavior is either “abused child with no outlet and poor social skills trying to cope” or “my poor temperament flared and now all my friends hate me even more and i have to fix it”

vriska wanting to be a hero is hilarious in the context of the comic, especially when hussie first introduced her and she was absolutely insufferably annoying and pointlessly cruel. but as hussie elaborated on her character she became much deeper and more complex – her wanting to be a hero isn’t just because she’s a glory hound. it’s also because her life circumstances made her a child soldier who could not afford to have friends and whose social skills were too poor for her to ask for help or reach out to others. vriska wants people to respect her for a lot of reasons, but one big one is that she’s an abuse survivor who was starved of positive attention her entire fucking life

of course she wants to be a hero because of mindfang and because she’s a glory hound and etc, but it also boils down to the fact that vriska is literally too. fucking weird to understand “being nice to people” = friends, and probably feels like she’s too far gone for “being nice” to get her anywhere, so she HAS to be the big damn hero. THEN she will have made up for all of her wrongdoings. THEN her friends will truly forgive her. THEN people will like and respect her genuinely instead of hating her and mocking her to her face.