The selflessness of Vriska Serket

When Vriska Serket was young, far younger than her still very young age when we first encounter her, she faced a choice of monumental proportions, at an age so young many would not ascribe her any agency, any responsibility for her actions. Perhaps we might even call it a Choice, for it is similar in nature to the ultimatums presented by the Denizens.

The Choice was this: A: Start killing people, innocent or not, on an enormous, serial killer kind of scale. Dye your hands in blood for all futures to come. B: Die before you’ve ever had a chance to live.

The Vriska we encounter chose A. Obviously she did. If she hadn’t, we would never have met her because she would be dead. This is the reponsibility of Vriska Serket, that to even exist in the story, she had to be a person who chose A.

And that makes her evil. I mean that in a sense that to choose and to continue to choose your own life over that of countless innocent strangers is a horrible (albeit somewhat understandable) decision, but I also mean it in the sense that Vriska herself perceives and understands herself as a bad person.

She makes excuses for herself, certainly. She justifies her actions using troll morality, tries to pretend she doesn’t care, clings to arbitrary standards of “fairness”. None of it works, of course. Aranea makes that much clear, in that key conversation of hers with Terezi. It never works.

And with her repeated failures to find absolution, with guilt gnawing at her every step of the way, here is Vriska’s grand mistake, that she desires to be Good, more than she desires to be Well.

In this world I would be surprised to hear of anyone who does not know the consequences of prioritizing accomplishment over health.

And so Vriska makes her plans, plots her designs, never quite understanding that in acting out of repressed guilt and pain, and in operating with a brain wired to kill and kill and kill and to endlessly justify the endless killing, she is perverting both her means and her ends, until it is quite difficult to say if she’s doing any good at all.

This is the selflessness of Vriska Serket. It is a poisoned selflessness, a broken selflessness, indeed a selfish selflessness. And she chooses it. Again, and again.

She chooses to force her idea of nobility and power on Tavros, who is even less equipped to handle it than she is, and wounds him deeply in the process. She chooses to create Bec Noir, and so take all the world’s evils into herself. Against Terezi’s pleas, she chooses to fly off and fight Noir, to try and become his end and beginning both. She chooses to sacrifice countless ghosts, because her poisoned mind sees no better way to oppose English, and to not oppose English is entirely contrary to the purposes of good. She knows she is bad. She knows she is hurting countless people with her methods. But she tries, tries endlessly, because she can’t stop. Because to stop would be to admit that maybe her methods don’t work, or if they work, that they might not be worth it. That she’s sacrificed all that she has, that she’s worked this long with this poisoned brain, and it’s not working.

She does, of course, recognize it eventually. When Aranea falls in love with Vriska’s self-aggrandizing narrative and decides to try it out for herself, when Vriska sees herself from the outside for the first time, she’s horrified, and abandons her plans in favor of solitude and a romance that, while it ultimately peters out, still brings her greater happiness than the Good ever did.

It’s quite amazing then, that that is what Terezi sacrifices in the final Choice, creating a new Vriska who did not know that path and so is locked on the false path of Good.

And then when the new Vriska steals away Meenah for Collide, Terezi sneaks in and nabs the enlightened Vriska for herself.

How supremely selfish of her. >;]