terezi-discourse:

Like it still makes me a little sick to think that people actually believe Aranea was controlling Gamzee to make him abuse Terezi. Aranea is pretty objectively terrible but she’s not just some kind of blank slate of a villain. You can’t just pin any bad thing your fave did on her just because she has an over inflated sense of her own importance and doesn’t care about other people’s lives by the end of her arc. 

1. Aranea Serket has a specific MO focused around using other people as tools to advance her “greater good mission” and even that was something that developed pretty late in her arc. Prior to that, she was all about the self-determination and consent, and using Gamzee to manipulative Terezi into taking her up on the eye-healing offer doesn’t fit at all with the way she initially offered it as an optional gift. Aranea sees herself as a good guy, and mind controlling someone into abusing his girlfriend is very hard to justify as “good guy” tactics.
2. Aranea uses people as blunt tools. She has a lot of firepower with her enhanced mind control, but is even worse than Vriska at effectively getting people to want to do things. She solves her problems by mind controlling armies of psychic ghosts to move boats and planets, for god’s sake. When she doesn’t need Gamzee for any particular task, she just has him stand there. Mind-controlling a proxy into emotionally destroying someone who wasn’t her enemy until late in the game? That’s not her style.
3. Aranea went through negative character development over the course of Act 6, and the things she was willing to do at the end of her arc don’t correspond with the things she was willing to do by the end of her arc. Over the course of her journey with Vriska, she becomes more and more willing to use her powers to control people, and by year 3 she even thanks Vriska for helping her finally understand the virtue in “rationalizing questiona8le decisions, and 8ehaving unscrupulously for the gr8ter good.” Those were not things she was willing to do when she started out, so it’s hard to see how she would have been willing to control Gamzee to ruin Terezi’s life from year 2 of the meteor trip onward.
4. Aranea doesn’t even particularly want to hurt Terezi? Like she tries to offer her advice when they first meet during Year 1, she converses with her like an equal during the big strategy meeting in Year 2, and it’s not until Terezi is actively trying to kill Aranea that Aranea has her stab herself. Most notably, if she wanted to have Gamzee hurt Terezi, she could have had Gamzee fight back when Terezi first attacked him. But in reality, Gamzee didn’t start trying to kill Terezi until Aranea’s control over him was broken. That doesn’t fit so well with a thesis of “every bad thing Gamzee has done to Terezi has been because of Aranea controlling him.”

tldr Aranea has done a lot of terrible things but even a cursory analysis of her character arc shows that getting Gamzee to abuse Terezi is not one of them, so I’m not sure why I still occasionally see this argument being tossed around.