The Vriska Thing

So. The Vriska thing. How did I find out I was Vriska. This… this is a long, painful story. Honestly, as long and painful as the Ken thing, and I haven’t had as long to deal with it. But let’s talk about it.

Let’s start with a story. Let’s talk about 15 years ago, when I was a freshman in highschool, and Homestuck was lucky if it was even a glimmer in Hussie’s eye. I (afab), was forced into an all girls school by my father a couple of years earlier. And there was this girl. Let’s call her Nina. She was superficial, girly, obsessed with looks and posturing, and the kind of italian who could have stepped off the Jersey Shore. She had creamy dark skin, and bleached hair, and a kind of awkwardly mid-pubescent body shape that was somewhere between hourglass and fat. She was pretty much my exact opposite, and we both knew it. Nina had been an official pain in my ass since I started school there. She seemed to have made it her mission to bully me.

Except there was one thing. Nina wasn’t bright, and she was really terrible at being a bully. Her idea of bullying was, for example, seeing I was wearing an “uncool” pokemon shirt to gym class, and chanting the then-relevant “poke-mon-mon-mon” at me from the Pokemon the First Movie commercial. Or repeating things I said in a valley girlish voice and rolling her eyes. Criticizing things I wore or liked.

She was so annoying. I hated her. It was delightful. Unlike the other people who were assholes to me (and there were plenty) something about Nina’s constant attempts just tickled me pink. They made me want to get back at her and perpetuate the cycle. I declared her my Official Nemesis and I set about to mildly ruin her life like a Strawberry Shortcake villain. One time I decided to wear opera gloves to school (I was that kind of kid) and Nina was like “what are *those* dumb things about?” (eyeroll)

I told her I had a contagious skin disease, and I waved my hands at her. She literally leapt out of her chair to get away from me. I laughed my ass off. It was amazing. Every time she passed me in the hall for weeks I’d yell *DISSSEEEASE* and she’d shrink away from me.

It got to the point where I wrote her into a fanfiction I was writing. I had a mary sue self insert character who was a demon, and I made a heavy-handed and obvious Nina insert the demon’s ridiculous rival. There was a scene where the two were at a standoff, snarking back and forth. In order to get on Nina-demon’s nerves, my character leaned in and made out with her, before biting off and swallowing a small chunk of her lip.

I spent the rest of highschool in a low grade pissing competition with Nina. As far as I’m aware she never knew about the mix of somewhat revolted attraction I had for her, even as I wanted to push her down in the mud and just make her *stop talking* because every word that came out of her mouth was stupid. I missed her for years after we graduated. I eventually found her on facebook. We’re facebook friends. She’s somehow gotten even stupider.

That story is a lot of build up I realize, but I want you to understand that I mean it when I say I’ve been feeling the idea of kismesis my whole life without having a word for it. For me that was the very nucleus of realizing I was Vriksa.

I read Problem Sleuth while Homestuck was starting. After PS, it took me…. quite a while to get into Homestuck. It felt different. I kept trying to read it and then wandering away. I think the furthest I got was to Rose, before deciding I didn’t have the effort to care.

And then one day I went back to the mspa homepage, and this was the update on the front. http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=005030 Something about it caught me. I gave the comic another try. This was when the fandom was really starting to gear up, and I was hearing about trolls all over the place. What I heard made me curious, very curious.

I pushed through homestuck. It was confusing. I liked it it well enough by the time I got through the first Intermission, which was probably the first thing I really enjoyed. The whole story gave me a strange itchy feeling. And then I got to the trolls. I don’t know if I can adequately express the feelings I had when reading about troll culture, and the various douchebag characters introduced. Hussie makes jokes about going on and on about troll romance, but I wanted him to say more, not less. I was *fascinated*. Gripped.

And the we meet Vriska. And I shit you not. My entire experience of reading about Vriksa for the whole time was this wide, cringing grin/grimace, and my exact thought was ‘holy shit, she’s me’. It was almost bizarre the degree to which we seemed to be the exact same person.

By the time I was reading Homestuck I had been fictionkin for five years. The thought crossed my mind repeatedly- I was her. But I kept combatting it. I couldn’t be Vriska, I already knew my kintype. It was just a coincidence. We were just the same sort of person. I even told a couple of friends verbatim “If homestuck had been out when I was in highschool I’d probably say I was Vriska kin.”

Reading about Vriska and the trolls had the same kind of satisfying, thrilling, repelling, vaguely nauseating feeling that kin stuff always has for me. But I kept denying it.

I did, however, join a roleplay community for the first time in years, just because I wanted someone to RP kismesis with. I can’t explain to you how much I craved that kind of connection. How amazed and gratified I was to have a word for that feeling.

I never really did find a good kismesis through homestuck RP. But I did meet my fiancee through the Pesterchum program, by complete ‘coincidence’. (My fiancee who later turned out to be Meenah).

I kept on denying being Vriska, while still getting those feelings, for years. Four years. Then, last year, something in the comic happened, and it just broke me. It broke all my barriers. I was completely unprepared for it.

I’d been having a troubling relationship with Homestuck for months before it happened. Everything felt wrong. Like Hussie had lose the thread of the story, and simultaneously, like something terrible I knew was coming. I had claimed that I stopped reading the comic. I kept reading it, sneakily, when I couldn’t help myself.

Vriska essentially reached her lowest point. After madness, and death, and finally starting to understand who she really was, and what she had been doing wrong the whole time, finally starting to be at peace with herself, she’s visited by another ‘superior’ version of herself, with none of that character growth, who cuts her down at the knees, metaphorically. And then her girlfriend leaves her.

I confess I couldn’t even read the scene word for word. I skimmed. And it just… left me broken in a way that nothing had since the end of the Kaiser episodes of digimon. I cried for hours. I had nightmares. You’re not supposed to have reactions to fiction like that.

After I put myself back together, over the next few days and weeks, I realized there was a lot of other stuff pointing to me being Vriska too.

• Waking up thinking I was blind in one eye a lot
• phantom horns/fangs/claws
• wanting pale blue/grey skin
• crush on Nic Cage when I was 12
• flashes of memory of a sky with two moons
• preferring a nocturnal wake/sleep cycle
• phantom butterfly wings
• pirate/captain hook obsession
• roleplaying obsession
• manipulative/nosey
• etc, etc

I could probably go on. It settled in over days and weeks. Realizing I couldn’t deny it any more. The more it settled, the more I had flashes and flows of memory. And the less I could see why I’d ever denied it.

And that’s… basically the story of discovering I was Vriska. I’m still not comfortable with it, but it’s not something that I can get rid of, or pretend will go away on its own. It’s just there. Its me. Vriska.