beta kids spaceship au: john is the captain who hardly ever tells anyone what to do and spends most of his time fucking around making star trek references and hanging out on the hull. rose is the first mate and navigator who actually runs the spaceship, but she has a weekly existential crisis and jade has to take over for her. dave is the communications officer who dicks around at the comms station playing mid-2000s hip hop on the frequency that’s supposed to be reserved for first contact. jade is the medical officer who keeps the whole place together by sheer willpower and fixes everything when it all goes to shit.
alpha kids spaceship au: they all die in the first week because an emergency happens and none of them talk to each other about it
Jade is obviously the engineer because interstellar physics are honestly not that hard guys why do I have to be the engineering officer I just wanted to be the doctor and our crew keeps fucking everything up
although i don’t like vriska much, i do like that she’s a female character who’s allowed to be irredeemably awful in genuine ways. she’s a villain, not because she’s killed so many people (terezi has too), but because she is horrible to her friends in ways that people relate to and take real offense at. she’s interesting to me as a polarizing character and i kind of love that so many people love vriska for being this horrible, messy person who fucks up. that’s a type of character love that is usually the domain of bland white guy characters, so i like seeing it, even though she’s not my personal favorite.
and another thing i love is that vriska sets the boundaries for troll culture. if everything she’s doing should be acceptable under alternian culture, why do people feel so uncomfortable with it? why are the trolls so unanimously agreed that vriska has crossed a line (or several)? it throws an early light on the fact that alternian culture is the result of false manipulation, and not just trolls being biologically ruthless. this is then highlighted more explicitly by terezi discovering that it’s difficult for her to kill vriska, even though culturally it shouldn’t be. vriska causes everyone to confront their boundaries and question what behavior they are actually comfortable with.
and she’s still doing that, not just to the characters but to the readers. although there were complaints (which i agreed with) that vriska’s dreambubble return made her death less poignant, her closing speech about ~being herself~ caused lots of debate among the readership about whether we were meant to take that sincerely, or whether it was a sign that vriska still hadn’t changed. it forced us to choose a side regarding how much of this behavior we could really accept, even in the service of “the ends justify the means.” vriska prevents the characters from reacting passively to the situations they’re in, and she prevents the fandom from reading passively, without pausing to examine our own reactions. she is a universal antagonist in all directions. she is a really great character.
concept: lil hal can copy ANYONES voice so one day to get back at dirk for some bs he pulled he follows him around narrating everything he does in morgan freemans voice but he makes EVERYTHING an innuendo
Cheloneuniverse 