ah christ am i writing another of these OKAY YEAH I GUESS I AM
On this page I'll be specifically dissecting how all of the Dancestor trolls match up to being "bad fanfiction parodies" of the existing trolls.
Dancestors are more obsessed with sex and relationships than the originals. This matches how the fandom was more obsessed with relationships and stuff than Hussie, who shit-talks shipping pretty regularly. (Though to be fair, this one's also kind of on him, because this is right around when a lot more elements of this started to crop up in the story anyway. Act 5 was not as full of relationship drama as many parts of Act 6 would end up, but it had its moments. Introducing the Quadrants to throw meat to the fandom helped cause this. I say this with confidence! I saw so much discussion about the damn things back in the day and sometimes still do!
You might be saying, "Wait, Delia, didn't he do this before with the pirate badfic? And the Doc Scratch Exposition?" And yes! Yes he did! These characters are mostly like seriously altered versions of the original ancestors. Primarily with some of the unsavory elements taken out (for example, Aranea is many very shitty things but she is definitely not a sexual predator) and replaced with other nonsense things that I think Hussie thought were funny and/or took appropriate jabs at people he was disdainful of.
As you can tell, these are not the first badfic parodies, but are far from the last. This is a constant, constant running theme in Homestuck and beyond. From what I've been told, the infamous bit in the postcanon where Jade impregnates someone with the dog penis she apparently has is because it was not-rare in fanfiction for her to have a dog penis due to her god tier ascension causing her to merge with her sprite as she turned into her dream self (which was part of a sprite with Becquerel, a male dog).
All of these characters are meant to be bad characters. But sometimes Hussie accidentally cooks a little.
Damara is depicted as having almost no emotions whatsoever. Aradia had her moments due to death deadening extreme emotions and making her 0kay with a lot of things, but it was probably depicted as more extreme in fanfiction.
She is shown as the servant of Lord English and willingly so, probably as a reflection and overemphasis on Aradia's "obsession with death." Aradia, of course, was more just a goth than an omnicidal maniac. As well, her ascent to godhood gave her a brighter outlook on life.
I'm not really sure why she's shown speaking shitty Japanese as related to Aradia. Is it because "Aradia Megido" is the troll name that is most easily translated into Japanese? incidentally let me pre-emptively tell you that if you want to say that her sexual persona is influenced by aradia's name including "ara" you are a cum-brained buffoon As a general theme, it's because a lot of the Homestuck fanbase were also big-time fans of anime (hence the sheer preponderance of references to it with things like the "Lost Weeaboos" instead of the Lost Boys in the Peter Pan background of Rufioh). And yes, I would 110% assume there would be some ABSOLUTELY HORRIBLE Google Translate Japanese happening, which is exactly what Huss did with Damara's dialogue.
Please. You think Hussie would intentionally make this a nod to weeb shit like Yu-Gi-Oh? ...Okay, fine. You think Hussie would own up to intentionally making this a nod to weeb shit like Yu-Gi-Oh?
Rufioh's entire character is a nod to Dante Basco; because Tavros was given a lot of Peter Pan theming, Hussie had some references to Rufio (a character from Hook played by Dante Basco). Then Dante Basco started reading the webcomic. Not only did the Huss find this funny as hell, but the fandom absolutely ran with it.
Why Tavros? Like, other than the Peter Pan references he had, is there some other reason why Hussie put the Rufio thing on Tavros? On the one hand, Hussie has been openly disdainful of Tavros throughout his author notes, but I can't tell if that's part of his "Annoying Vriska Glazer" "bit". But the fandom enjoys Tavros about as much as they enjoyed everyone else - which is to say, a lot. So perhaps he did it to throw Nitram fans a bone, or as some sort of esoteric joke. But I have a better idea. It's gonna take a sec, so bear with me here.
See, Tavros had a lot of "nice guy"-isms that I think a lot of people forget about because he was so openly pathetic that there didn't seem to be much malice in his shittiness. Rufioh calling all the girls "doll" can be interpreted that way, if you want to be mean to Dante Basco - a guy I know nothing about personally but who probably doesn't deserve that kind of shabby treatment.
Also, making him comparatively hypercompetent probably goes a long way to jab at fans making Tavros just... more competent than he actually is canonically.
Apparently "1" is intended to be the Nitram's numerological motif, but because Tavros was a failure with no self-confidence, he didn't use it at all. So Rufioh picks it up because he actually has a spine.
Mituna is much more of a riff on the Helmsman due to burning out his brain with his psychic powers. But also, this is something Sollux was worried about doing to himself.
Sollux's typing quirk is one of the most brutal in the entire series. Plenty of other characters suck to read because they have annoying typing quirks (like Sober Gamzee) or to write because they have annoying quirks (Feferi's use of a Pisces symbol - or rather )(, for a capital H), but pre-knockout Sollux is a special kind of incomprehensible to the uninitiated. He replaces S with 2 - which makes no goddamn sense to most people but apparently represents a lisp? - and doubles his i's (as well as changing "to" and "too" to "two"). iit can make hii2 diialogue hard two follow. Even writing that was hard to wrap my head around. As a result, Mituna speaks almost total nonsense. Bizarrely, it's after he has an accident that his typing goes to hell in a handbasket, where Sollux starts to become more sensible.
In particular, Mituna uses a lot of leet speak-ish substitutions. While this is more associated with Terezi, Sollux is known as a hacker and a nerd. So Mituna speaks in a way that, when he's not tripping over his spelling, is overtly nerdy, puns aside (though that happens in nerdy places, too). In particular he has a lot of 4chan stereotypes about him, but that isn't even something you have to know to see some parts of what the deal is with him.
Mituna's mood swings are more of a split personality than Sollux's and are significantly more extreme. In "angry" mode he is prone to extreme vulgarity, giving him one of the foulest mouths out of all characters on average - far more extreme than Sollux, who had his blue passages (not sure what "red" would be to be a match here, though...). He also swings in a more volatile manner, as a rule, and in place of Sollux's deep self-loathing, Mituna tends more to become meek and apologetic.
Kankri's logs are interminably long and will make your eyes glaze over with "technical" language and him being a holier-than-thou jag-off. In short, he is a very extreme version of Karkat, who takes up massive parts of logs both from his abusive carriage returns and the fact that he's just a wordy motherfucker, and also uses a lot of technical language himself - i.e. he uses a lot of "Troll terminology" in place of human words, perhaps more than anyone else.
Much like the Sufferer, he gives sermons instead of Karkat's... ranting, I guess would be the term.
Kankri uses a text gimmick that involves 6 and 9 as a reference to the Cancer sign. I don't know if there were many references to the similarity between the symbol and the weed number back when Karkat was first introduced up through the stuff about the Sufferer, but there was definitely a lot of posting about how Nice the symbol was after the Sufferer, and particularly with his rather ridiculous-looking shackles that he was fitted with.
Apparently the sweater is a common outfit fans put Karkat in...?
But of course, we need to talk about the elephant in the room: Kankri is a parody of Tumblr's culture of overkill trigger warnings. See, I get it, though; Tumblr trigger warnings can be massive overkill. Anyone remember the word "scopophobia"? And how a lot of people didn't even use it right? See, Kankri is supposed to parody very specifically the negative stereotypes of it. At times, though, that's not perfectly accomplished, because Hussie is about as subtle as an atomic bomb. However, credit where it's due; Kankri is very dismissive of Porrim's problems. Now, it's way too easy for me to joke about Porrim - a vampire Rainbow Drinker (who has consequently turned pale alabaster-white) - being a "white woman," but it's true that a lot of really mediocre social-justice folks tended to ignore some marginalized people's problems, instead focusing on their own or playing various forms of "Oppression Olympics." As if a white woman's white privilege makes the misogyny of the world fail to affect them. Also, a lot of these people were just straight up misogynistic and hateful of everyone except their one group they cared about anyway? Like, I spent a lot of time on Tumblr at this period. I knew there were a lot of misogynistic gay men! (A friend of mine whose meatspace first name is also my deadname (which is funny to me) confirmed this as well in several conversations.)
Meulin is OBSESSED with shipping. Again, this part of Nepeta's personality tends to steamroll anything else about her in most people's depictions of her.
In addition, her way of talking is meant to resemble that of fanatics on Tumblr with her discussion of "F33LS" and stuff like that.
She uh... has a friendly relationship with Horuss, much like how Nepeta has one with Equius...? Okay look, Nepeta already was an underdeveloped character, so how well do you think a character parodying her will do on this front.
Exaggerating Kanaya having a fashion sense, Porrim is designed to look very much like she's a punk girl or into alt-fashion.
On the other side, Porrim is based heavily on the sex-positive feminism that was also popular on Tumblr at the time. Her "o+" typing quirk is meant to represent the female symbol. This ties in with Porrim's overtly promiscuous character (and one of the strongest so out of any of the characters - even with Damara making sexual suggestions to everybody, it doesn't seem like she derives any joy from it and just wants to be as off-putting as possible). At the very least, I feel Hussie is not only not being weird about this - something few male authors with sexual attraction to women manage to pull off - but also that he seems a hell of a lot more respectful of Porrim's single issue than Kankri's, even though sweater crab is in a similar boat.
Porrim is grounded. She is veritably the only sane member of the Beforan squad. This kind of mirrors Kanaya's groundedness - something which bears out pretty definitively in the story and not just through all of the auspiceticeships she's claimed to be in. About the only time Kanaya loses her cool is when she awakens as a vampire sorry, I forgot, Rainbow Drinker (if she was a vampire, she'd have a shout-out to that Nicolas Cage movie - you know the one). Even then, I tend to ignore that because booting Gamzee in the nuts and slicing Eridan in half are both extremely acceptable actions. As it is later when she cuts Gamzee in half dick-first. Why didn't she do that to Eridan? He would deserve it. Ah whatever.
Speaking of which: I hadn't even thought about it until I looked on the wiki for character name meanings (I was going to draw some sort of connection here), but Kanaya might be regarded as "promiscuous" for ashen relationships because she seems to be a mediator so much. Eridan calls her this too! But I think it's just because Eridan is a shithead. It's probably stupid to consider someone who's so often a mediator, even if it's a type of "mediator" mandated by the species' weird relationship classes, "promiscuous" in any way, but here's the thing.
Okay, now that I got that out of my system, you have to remember these are explicitly "badfic parody versions" of the trolls! My limited experience around fanfic, and much less limited experience around journal RP (which is basically ranked competitive cooperative fanfic writing), suggests that a lot of writers of fan fiction tend to default to making relationships more romantic than intended, speedrunning two friends into the bedroom with ease. So I don't know offhand but I wouldn't be surprised if people wrote Kanaya as a little more fuck-inclined than she actually is, or depicted auspiceticeships as threesomes or something. Lousy stupid goddamn emotions.
Terezi had this running bit for a while where she would keep sending 80s/90s-vintage "coolkid" art to Dave with shitty MS Paint doodles on to "make it look like him" (and fail miserably). She also mentioned once how the trolls were usually much cooler than they were acting when Dave and Rose met them. For some reason, a lot of fans took this as her being "obsessed with being a cool kid." But... not really? This is one of the most severe character defilements yet on the part of the fanbase, and it inspired Latula's entire character of being centered around being a coolkid. To be honest, she feels like she's completely different from Terezi.
The one Terezi-ish thing I can attribute to her other than the obvious knockoff traits - a thing that feels like actual parody - is her having lost her sense of smell in a strange accident. Terezi's blindness doesn't seem to affect her because her other senses are amplified to levels that make almost no sense and are basically depicted as her seeing stuff anyway; losing one's sense of smell would suck, sure (smell is a large part of how food tastes, you know!) but it would not hinder one's getting around in one's day-to-day.
Latula is an over-the-top parody of "gamer girl" culture. By the time Homestuck was popular on tumblr, I'm pretty sure this was already being perceived as laughably over-the-top, but it's possible that my sense of timing is off anyway. I distinctly remember a lot of people making fun of such things on the tumblers, though. People generally regarded a lot of this as attention-seeking behavior - and maybe it is, but that accusation always feels mean. (Karkat accuses Latula of this, too.)
This is mixed up with other "coolkid" type activities, including skateboarding, to form a personality obsessed with being cool. Wait, I think I've already said this, but I decided to explain it in more details.
I hate her on principle, both for being a Serket and for making me look terse. Shut the fuck up and let me word-vomit, asshole.
Okay okay now that I've gotten that out of my system: Aranea's major trait is that she exposits. A lot. This is both a parody of Vriska's tendency to exposit, and also her tendency to talk for fucking eons at a time. Seriously, you think Vriska's logs are long, and then you get to Aranea's nonstop yammering. (Then you get to Kankri's nonstop yammering...)
I have to give it to Hussie here - he made a good joke out of this by having Aranea being so inclined toward exposition that she gets Meenah to let her exposit to her, so long as she pays Meenah. It's actually really funny!
The biggest character trait that Vriska has, though, is her extreme main character syndrome. I mentioned this elsewhere. And in fitting with this, Vriska spends a lot of time taking over large swaths of the comic - she's really a black hole character and becomes more of one later. Aranea also grinds the comic to a halt with her ungodly word vomit.
In a similar way, Aranea would basically try to hijack a large part of the plot to satisfy her Main Character Syndrome, much as Vriska tries to do by making supervillains like Bec Noir. Sure, that's probably a predestination loop, but Vriska really wanted the credit. Aranea seems to be a bit more self-serving. But much like Vriska, she schemes extensively, and does all kind of underhanded shit to people to get her way.
Ultimately, Aranea is rewarded as such a person deserves: usurped by the real main character and entirely scrubbed out of the story, made to not matter at all - and even in something that shows every other member of her group (i.e. the Beforan trolls, but I'm trying to be generic here), she is nowhere to be seen. The wannabe center of the story doesn't matter and may as well not exist. And this would ball so fucking hard if the one doing it weren't fucking Vriska.
Okay, I get it. For a while, Equius was one of those characters who seemed interesting. Super-strong but no control over his strength? It's tragic. He hinders himself a lot. He accidentally injures Aurthour a bunch, but he has such a positive relationship with his butler cow centaur thing. But ultimately, he was a nasty, racist individual whose overall character was simply not worth that much effort or energy expended in general.
Horuss pares the character down hard, to just being a jokey horse fetishist. I suspect that once you sand off the nasty parts of Equius, this is kinda what you're left with, at least to a lot of folks. In fact, Horuss is so one-note that his name is just a pun on "horse".
He does have his own tragic aspects, though, in the form of how his Void traits manifest. He's hurting himself by forcing himself to be happy, to be someone he's not.
Like actual Equius, he is a skilled engineer, but his fetishes seep in. In this case, it's more overtly alarming than with Aradiabot (even though that was pretty fucked up!); he turns Rufioh into a robot horse!
Horuss takes Equius's lack of vulgarity to an extreme, even censoring minced oaths and the like - a staple of internet comedy that would be funny here as well if he was a real character and not a weird gag.
From an evil clown to an evil mime... not much of a weird sideways step, is it?
Interestingly, Kurloz feels like he's less of a "bad fan fiction version" of Gamzee and more like... just kind of a slightly off parallel version of him, whose evilness didn't really become very apparent for a while and who didn't seem to murder as many of his friends - but he still uses his evil powers on them. Honestly, he even talks exactly like Gamzee when he starts using words.
Gamzee is infamous for having wild hair - Kurloz's is even more over-the-top.
When Gamzee sobers up, he takes on a quirk where he ALTERNATES BETWEEN ALL CAPS and all lower-case - during the murder arc I think it's implied that he's going back and forth between whispering and bellowing. Kurloz dials this up harder by switching between being mute, and using weird and off-putting large purple bone-themed text. He also releases a loud noise one time after a particularly horrible dream - a "vast honk," if you will.
While there is some confusion about the identity of who Gamzee is worshiping - mostly because he is explicitly designed to be a juggalo - there is no such ambiguity for Kurloz. He's a Lord English worshiper. No need to spend however much of eternity making that not be a spoiler.
Kurloz looks much more into the camera than a lot of the others do in his talk-sprites. Gamzee effectively became a horror villain for a while, so the idea of having Kurloz staring straight at the player was probably to emphasize this even more. To create a "the Fourth Wall will not protect you" effect, I guess.
Much like Gamzee, he gets involved in a lot of weird shit that he probably doesn't seem like he should be doing - remember how he prototyped the Alpha Kids' sprites with the troll corpses? - but in this case, it's Kurloz building Gamzee's god tier outfit. Complete with that absolutely ridiculous codpiece.
Kurloz has a bit more a straightforward stoner personality than Gamzee and it doesn't seem like it impedes his evilness any. Gamzee, of course, was stoned as shit and that was what was stopping him from turning into a villain.
While Cronus is generally seen as a dialing-up of all of Eridan's worst traits, I don't think this is a fair assessment. Eridan wanted to commit genocide against the land-dwellers, but Cronus lacks that entirely. Then again, that part of Eridan did seem to get dropped at some point (though he was still a violent nut, but more because he seemed to lose all hope and go berserk).
Cronus is a fairly one-note character, but that's about all he and Eridan deserve, sorry to say. Eridan gets some moments of trying to self-improve after his death, but until that point, he's an obnoxious fuckboy who heralded a very dark part of the plot including a lot of needless character death and, need I remind you, an extreme racist from the outset. So paring him down to an overbearing "nice guy"-style creep doesn't even make me flinch in the slightest. Also of course they gave his gross ass the codpiece god tier.
On the other hand, I'm not sure what the deal is with the "greaser" theme he has going on for his "human-sona" considering he also has Harry Potter callbacks (due to people joking about this because Eridan was a bespectacled wizard (er, scientist)). These I don't think jive with each other very well. But anyway, I don't have to tell you that Cronus is a parody of otherkin, right?
Cronus's typing quirk is really dumb because it turns Vs and Ws into "wv" and "vw" - I forget which is which, but that's also kind of the point with it. They're supposed to look similar because it turns out that increasing the amount of zigzags in the mentioned letters kinda fucks with readability. A lot. So this makes it almost impossible to tell what letter he's using at any given time. Also produces a very stupid accent.
I feel like a lot of people, in discussing character names, forget one thing about Meenah's name; it sounds like "meaner." Aside from any other meaning, it has this as a play on words. Because she is the meaner Peixes.
Most of the time, Meenah does not make for a great direct comparison to Feferi, because I presume she was designed as a separate character. But nevertheless, she adopts a lot of her quirk, but more off-and-on. Hussie explained that he hated writing Feferi's quirk. And because she was such an excitable goofball, she used it all the time. Can't like, it was often very, very hard to read. And any interest that Feferi may have had as a character - which was a fair bit, to be fair, such as her overbearing nature as a coddler and her tendency to still be grossly ableist and shitty despite her purported desire to make things more Beforan - tended to be wiped out from this.
So as a result, Meenah is like... her own character, not so much a satellite to anyone else (despite being you know literally an alt version of one of the main villains). In this case, I think Hussie was actually trying to make a good character, and not just a play off an existing character.
Meenah values money above all else. But her freedom is pretty high up there on the list. I don't think this directly mirrors anything to do with Feferi, aside from the part where she was excited about ruling, but Meenah is not, considering empress-hood another type of slavery.
This was less interesting to make than I thought it would be.
