2024-01-18 13:22:22 ¶ ●

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Do you have anything on the nature of doc scratch as a groomer in the context of kanaya’s rather positive description of his influence in her life vs the way he treated vriska? Sorry if this sounds vague idk what im looking for specifically

old ask because i was thinking on it for a little bit so i apologise, but i guess i don’t think there is necessarily this contrast between a positive experience on Kanaya’s part and a negative experience on Vriska’s part. if Kanaya does have a neutral or even positive memory of Scratch’s influence on her early life, that’s at least partially down to Kanaya’s more passive demeanor and in least one big part down to the fact that she probably just does not remember what it was that he did.

both girls were groomed, certainly, but Scratch is telling a characteristic truth when he insists upon his own asexuality, because he does not groom for pleasure but of course for a purpose, and Kanaya and Vriska were simply made for different purposes. which, of course, in turn reflects on their differing demeanors - after all a storyteller has no ability to alter the truth about someone’s personality, only to twist how that personality is portrayed. from Hussie’s commentary: “[Scratch is] always there at the right moment to nudge people in the direction of doing the nasty thing that, deep down, they already know they want to do.”

i guess i might argue that it’s unlikely any feelings Vriska and Kanaya might or might not have toward their old mentor are really about Scratch as “a person” or what he specifically did at all, for two related reasons. firstly that I don’t think anyone really “remembers” what it is Scratch “did” to them because he’s, really, almost beyond “doing” things to people; he acts in the nudging and rearranging of ideas, which live solely in the subconscious and in the genes (as kind of discussed or vaguely mused about here) and not in living memory.

in this sense, in this specific context, i’m often reluctant to even refer to Scratch with titles like “character” because he essentially asserts himself as an inevitable narrative force whose motives can no more be analysed than the motives of the sun or the night sky. the effects of Scratch’s manipulations are ultimately not so much things he has “done” as they are the things he has caused others to do; which is really the crux of my second reason, that to have feelings about “what Scratch did” is really just to have feelings about where your life has taken you - railing against the narrator is just railing at God, and railing at God is for all intents and purposes railing at your own life. for Vriska, the path God sent her down led to destruction in her own life and in the lives of everybody around her, while in Kanaya’s case the manipulations were so subtle that it is still not entirely clear to us what they involved; she was awoken to Skaia’s light and seemingly grew to be a vampire as a result. if there weren’t so much suspicious mystery surrounding what Scratch would have even done to cause this awakening in the first place, one might even be tempted to think of these manipulations as “benign”, in comparison to Vriska’s, if it weren’t that there simply can be no benign act of God in Homestuck.

but ultimately Scratch as a storyteller understands that his story needs good girls and bad girls, passive and active players, and while we’re all intimately aware of the heavy load of baggage Homestuck’s chosen heroes are saddled with - a part in which Kanaya’s burden of motherhood no doubt plays - the fact that Vriska spent so much of her life convinced that she had been given the good girl hat probably contributed no small amount to the psychological knock-on effects of being groomed into the bad girl.