about Karkat Vantas

stormsbourne:

it seems to be that time of year again where the “Karkat is canonically abusive I don’t make the rules” posts start up (yet another homestuck wank you could set your watch by) so I wrote a lot of words about why this is in canon demonstrated not to be true.

let’s begin! this post is mainly about the idea that karkat is prone to anger fits, yells a lot, and attacks other people.

so to start, literally all of karkat’s friends, every single one of the trolls, sees his “anger fits and yelling a lot” as amusing and harmless, and (correctly) perceive it as a defense mechanism to cover up how much he cares about you. karkat may have been angry and yelling a lot at the kids early on in his trolling the humans, but we literally witness him grow out of it. we literally see him stop throughout act 5.2. once again, in act 5.1, we already saw ALL of the following trolls treat his “anger fits” like cute diversions because they knew he was just fronting:

• nepeta, who takes no offense to his rolling-eyes level “attempt” at roleplaying
• sollux, whom he ends his first conversation with with “are we still cool, are you mad at me, did I take this too far”
• feferi, who tells jade karkat is “pretty harmless”
• tavros
• kanaya
• terezi, who is on record as finding it cute
• aradia
• gamzee
• vriska, who tries to encourage the angry shit because she likes the attention, but outright tells john that karkat is too nice and is “bad” at being a troll
• equius
• even fucking eridan

we only see karkat and tavros interact with the “stop playing games for girls” gag (which I don’t feel you can take as an indication of karkat’s character, since it’s a callback meme) and the memo where tavros asks for advice w/r/t vriska, which is pretty tame (tavros doesn’t seem insulted at all by karkat saying “why do you assholes keep bothering me with romantic problems”). we also barely see karkat and equius interact at all outside of the log where karkat asks him to deal with gamzee. but notably, both of them have interactions in alterniabound which are fairly nice, and neither acts like karkat is a naturally angry person. it’s notable that at this point aradia is an emotionless dead robot and she still sees karkat’s shit as a front. people tend to bring up how “mean” he was in his first conversation with gamzee all the time, and yet, gamzee doesn’t care. gamzee finds it endearing. gamzee acts like this is just a cute quirk of how karkat is. karkat is outright mean to eridan at one point late in 5.2, on account of eridan just having fucking murdered kanaya and feferi and having attempted to murder sollux. and yet, eridan still thinks it’s just karkat being karkat. in fact, other people commenting on karkat telling eridan off, namely feferi, also think it’s just karkat shouting as a front for something and that this is how karkat plays jokes. 

and again, even his actual anger toward the humans in late act 4 and early 5.2 is something we fucking watch him grow out of to the point of being actually embarrassed by. penis ouija is also something people like to give as proof of how “abusive” karkat is but the dude had just spent something like 20 minutes literally shouting at himself from both sides of a conversation. if there’s anyone karkat is abusive to, it’s himself. it’s one moment in time on a long 3 year journey, and in the retcon timeline, it’s replaced by, quoth rose, him and dave drawing dicks in her book while giggling furiously.

besides that, his original actions in penis ouija aren’t endorsed, but even then they’re treated like absurd desperation, not as abuse. since this time the wank is about dave: dave’s reaction to him is not “this shit is triggering me,” which, if karkat was actually being vicious, might be understandable. his reaction isn’t even “I want out of this situation because I’m uncomfortable with karkat yelling.” his reaction is “look at this fucking tool, get him out of my face.” and despite that moment where neither of them technically likes each other, they still go on to become friends by year 2, and actual bffs by year 3 of the retconned version of the meteor journey. and that’s in the version of the timeline that got erased. in the new version of the timeline, they’re already best friends (and possibly even already together) by that point on year 1. 

for real, I can’t get past this: we literally watch him grow to the point that he is embarrassed by how mean he was to the humans. that happens onscreen. by the end of 5.2 he is being downright cordial to both jade and to john, who are the only ones he really speaks to in act 5 outside of that one memo with dave in it. and even if you want to talk about penis ouija, we see him disown how he was behaving then, too, in a conversation with terezi in openbound. he’s embarrassed by it. he knows it wasn’t cool. we see him grow out of that behavior, too. we even see him grow out of blaming “past me” for everything as though he’s a separate individual, and start to own up to his own behavior as mistakes he made. 

karkat vantas is not presented in canon as an abusive individual. I want to stress that if his behavior bothers or triggers you, that’s fine and of course nobody should tell you not to be bothered. but if you’re making posts about how the rest of fandom isn’t reading him right because they don’t see him as abusive, or that you know how icky davekatters just want karkat to be happy or don’t care about dave (and boy could I write a whole separate post about that behavior), you’re being an asshole. especially if you shove it in ship tags and then expect people not to reply to you, or to disagree.