Triggers: violence, emotional manipulation, spiders, sexual assault, ableism
Last time on Homestuck: racism and violence make everyone’s life terrible. Vriska doesn’t believe that she’s going to die in a couple of minutes like Terezi told her but consults her Magic Cue Ball she stole from Doc Scratch. The cueball tells her to worry. Terezi tells Scratch that Vriska has one of his cue balls. The cueball warns Vriska that it is going to explode in her face before exploding in her face, and that’s how she loses her vision eight-fold. This would seem to be why Vriska has such a grudge against magic 8-balls.
Back in the future/present, Vriska’s lusus is crushed but not quite dead. She puts her spider-mom down by guillotine. Upset, Vriska goes back up to message Aradia, who is now part sprite. Vriska yells at her about her scheming and plans, assuming that Aradia has a plan that isn’t the inevitable course of events proceeding on their way. Vriska thought they were friends and wants to go back to being friends, despite not really understanding friendship. Aradia wasn’t sure they were ever friends, but doesn’t actually care. Then she reveals that Vriska is on the red team, not the blue team, and Vriska blows a gasket. I guess that’s one way to grieve.
Equius, in the Land of Caves and Silence, imposes his leadership on Aradia only to learn that she’s in a position of control over him. He’s characteristically disgusting about it. He commands Aradia to have free will as a form of role-play? If this is a metaphor for anything, I’m lost, and I don’t want to be found. On a happier note, since Aradia combined with her frog sprite, she’s started emitting random ribbits, and it’s cute. Equius suggests that she be the secret leader while he’s the official leader, and she’s like, well, that’s basically how it works anyway.
He brings over the robot body he made for her, and Aradia possesses it. It’s mostly okay, except Equius programmed the body to have romantic feelings for him. Again, I say, ew. Especially since she already has a boyfriend? She pulls out her own metal heart and smashes it before proceeding to bitchslap him. And then they kiss, which is all kinds of terrible and gross because I’m pretty sure she doesn’t actually want this. From afar, Nepeta decides that she needs to update her cave-drawn shipping charts. She is a committed shipper.
Elsewhere, Karkat recruits Vriska. She’s honest about her feelings with him, which is odd, but I guess Karkat invites that. He tells her that she can prototype her lusus, which makes her feel better about losing her. They start insulting each other in normal troll banter. Vriska has to be Tavros’ server player, which is a terrible situation. Vriska explains that she hates Tavros. Karkat explains his theory, which is that Tavros is broken in the head, which means that he can’t hate her the way she hates him. What.
Karkat also explains for us that trolls have two primary emotions, hate and pity. You have to balance out your hate with the various pity humors. He further explains that Vriska is all hate, so she burns out her emotions — which is why she is broken on the opposite side from Tavros. Her hatred comes out more like cardboard than anything genuine, which is why her relationships are terrible. None of this makes any more sense in context.
He’s met their version of Jack Noir. Noir stabbed him and Karkat accepted it as his way of saying hi, so they get along fine, and Noir’s willing to help the trolls out. The biggest issue for Karkat is the reveal of the color of his blood. This has been a Huge Mystery since trolls are ranked racially by blood color. Noir doesn’t think it’s a big deal that his blood comes out red, but Karkat freaked for a while and then hid it. Except his planet is full of red blood, so get rekt, son. Noir reveals that his blood is red too, and that’s how they become allies.
Noir and the trolls plan to take down the Black Queen together, infecting each other with the troll diseases of teamwork and friendship. There’s one outstanding piece of intel Noir provides: The Black Queen has discarded her ring. Normally, the sprite prototyping would give her the powers of everything prototyped; but, there was one prototype that prototyped too far. Her vanity could not withstand being prototyped with a detestable frog of all things. In the future, the Banished Quasiroyal would be contacted by Doc Scratch and given a mysterious mission.
Then Hussie decides to make explicit what was already said: That while the trolls divided themselves up into red and blue teams, they were all actually on the same team. Their planets evenly rotate around Skaia. I hadn’t mentioned it because it didn’t seem overly important at the time, but each of the twelve trolls is associated with a human zodiac symbol.
Elsewhere, we meet grimAuxiliatrix, otherwise known as Kanaya Maryam. She enjoys gardening, fashion, sunlight, and rainbow drinker/shadow dropper tales of forbidden passion that seem parallel to human vampire romances. Liking sunshine seems to be the troll equivalent of being a goth. She is one of the few trolls with jade green blood, which means her lusus was a Mother Grub, the creature that ensures troll propagation. She wields a chainsaw. A new troll named cuttlefishCuller (CC) messages her, talking about the game they’re all going to play before mutually deciding to say goodbye to their lusii.
Kanaya’s lusus has already died, so she operates to remove the Matriorb. Then she contacts Vriska in a conversation we’ve already seen and describes her as her moirail. This is some kind of troll romance? Vriska didn’t seem to think of her that way, though. A guy called caligulasAquarium (CA) messages Kanaya trying to get her to get Vriska to talk to him because Vriska blocked him. CA asks Kanaya to auspisticize them, which seems to her to be highly indecent. CA wants Vriska to send him a device to destroy all land dwellers. He also offers to spare Kanaya. She’s having none of it.
CA waxes on about he and Vriska will be kismesises. Kanaya cuts him off with an everyone-is-going-to-die-anyway-so-it-doesn’t-really-matter. CA leaves with a meditation on how hard it is to be a kid and how nobody understands. The biggest thing is that Kanaya doesn’t just have access to Prospit’s clouds; she has access to Rose’s FAQ. She assumes that it was written millions of sweeps ago by successful Sburb players and daydreams about their romantic drama. Kanaya is about to be delightfully disappointed.
Elsewhere, Tavros enters Sgrub as the Page of Breath in the Land of Sand and Zephyr. Vriska as his server player is a huge mistake; she builds stairs for the troll she put in a wheelchair to get up to his next portal. Tavros suggests ramps since crawling up the steps will leave him defenseless to monsters. Vriska says that crawling will make him stronger because she’s a terrible person. And then she tries to force him to apologize for being paralyzed because she’s terrible. Tavros tries to summon the power of Rufio to stop her but to no avail.
Fortunately, Kanaya, playing as Vriska’s server player, nudges her into building easier surfaces for Tavros by threatening to dump a toilet on her. Vriska capitulates. She has a better plan. She creates a rocket chair for Tavros! It’s the first nice thing she’s done all of Act 5. Congratulations, you get the “Threatened Into Doing Something Nice” award.
Next time on Homestuck: We see how this all works out.