lucyreadshs:

Caliborn, in fact, is an exercise in how to make an Actually Unsympathetic Villain.

Like, Hussie puts so much work into everyone’s emotional arcs and motivations. Everyone in the enormous cast is flawed. Like, do y’all realize how big this cast is? You chould argue the principle cast of Homestuck is… /counts on fingers. 12 would be the SMALLEST number I would go with. And then you have literally dozens more than that, villains and heroes and ambiguous entities and teenagers and kids and grandmas. There are so many people to juggle, and yet Hussie gives a startling number of them rich character development. It’s staggering to me.

And Caliborn is all of Hussie’s attention and talent and narrative tricks focused to make a character who is pretty much wholly unsympathetic while still making sense. The things Caliborn does all make sense with his character. There isn’t any slipping back into “he does it for the evil shits and giggles,” there is motivation there.

And uniquely, Caliborn is unable to experience character growth. That is a huge part of his pathos. For Andrew “I Wrote Probably Thirty Pages Of Backstory And Development For A Bunch Of Characters You’ll Never Need To Really Read About” Hussie to create someone like Caliborn is a fucking fascinating, wild decision. It is, to me, what makes him so fucking insufferable and gross, because I have more hope of Vriska Fucking Sekret growing as a person than Caliborn.

That Hussie’s Big Bad for the entire story is a gross, misogynistic, homophobic little monster who is violent and creepy and spiteful, a character that will never grow, is incredible. Because as much as I yawned through some of the backstory and worldbuilding for Caliborn’s existence, it was just as necessary as all the rest of Homestuck’s narrative.

If after so fucking long in the comic, Hussie wants to sell the audience on a villain like this, he has to put all the cards on the table and show us how in a universe of nuanced and constantly evolving characters, there is ONE who breaks the mold, and in their stagnation they represent the greatest evil the narrative has ever known.

Like. Shit. Bra-fucking-vo.