Tag: i’m out of ideas for a queue tag. this is it btw

roxilalonde:

th4nkyoub3n:

roxilalonde:

doc scratch is different from every other villain in homestuck. i read the condesce’s dialogue and, yes, she’s a villain! no doubt. but she’s fun to read, she cracks jokes, she’s entertaining as a concept, and she’s intimidating without being personally frightening. she’s a threat to the characters, not to you. lord english is just fucking funny as a concept even if he is powerful, and he’s not even there for most of the comic, so you’re not afraid of him as a character so much as you’re afraid of the concept of him. the narrative treats him like a force of nature. but doc scratch is deeply, chillingly scary not because he poses a physical threat to the characters, or their journey, not because he’s dangerous in a tangible way to them, but because he’s meant to trigger the audience’s danger sense. odds are, you’ve had a conversation with someone like doc scratch before. you might not have realized it at the time, and you still might not realize it, but for those who do, the way he (an adult) speaks to rose, vriska, and terezi (children, and in particular teenage girls) sets off alarm bells fucking immediately. it’s scary because it’s familiar, and because it’s real. he doesn’t deal in fantastical life-or-death fate-of-the-universe stakes. child predators exist. they’re real. and that’s why doc scratch is so scary.

How come Eridan doesn’t also come off as threatening even though neonazis are also real?

a) eridan is distinct from doc scratch in that reading him as a 1-to-1 allegory for a neonazi is more interpretive than reading doc scratch as a predator. eridan’s ideology is based around fictional bigotry. that makes him less threatening per se because the threat he poses is limited by the fiction of his universe; if eridan were a person, he’d probably be a racist/neonazi/what have you, but he’s not. he’s an alien. so we don’t necessarily think about his bigotry as something pertaining to us. doc scratch, on the other hand, is a child predator. that is a literal description for what he does. he preys on children.

b) eridan is a child. that doesn’t make what he does okay, or make his beliefs any less fucked up, or make the reading of him as a neonazi any less accurate. but it does change the power dynamic between him and the people around him. he has neither the agency nor authority that an adult does, and he spends most of the plot being outnumbered by more competent, more powerful, and less bigoted people. overall, he’s just not presented as a threat to the people around him, until, that is, the very end – by which point it doesn’t matter, since he’s killed immediately afterward.