ZEROTH POINT: if you are here I have obviously succeeded in CLICK BAITING you with the title. In my view it's pointless to look for "Good Guys" or People in this story (or even in the real world in general?!?) and far more conducive to intelligent conversation to look at the nuanced ways in which a character impacts the people around them and interacts with themselves. (I tend to think of this as the more agreeable prerequisite to my next few points, but I have been surprised to find that I will sometimes get pushback on even such popular claims as "there is no such thing as good or evil". So. I guess you never know.) When analysing fictional characters with concepts like self-actualisation and the "character arc" in mind, it's common for readers to see it as a self-evident inevitability that the character will come to rest in a sort of happy medium where their most self-affirming characteristics will also be the characteristics which are most harmonious with the world around them. BUT I think it's this exact kind of reverence for the hypothetical "Perfect Self" (and more broadly the very concept of that which is Platonically Good) that holds these kinds of conversations back, not half because this is the exact kind of logic Homestuck has spent all these years trying to deconstruct! WHICH LEADS ME TO MY FIRST REAL POINT.
FIRST POINT: Candy's revolutionary leader Karkat does not represent Karkat at his healthiest state. The assertion I've most commonly come across seems to be that because he is participating in political action which we-the-reader (are assumed to) find agreeable then by necessity Karkat is a better-adjusted adult than the rest of his friends, who are invariably going through divorces, affairs, and the various consequences of their neo-liberal-to-neo-fascist political leanings. But I think to equate this political turn in Karkat's life to psychological self-actualisation is to bulldoze all context specific to Karkat's life.
We understand that the Knight struggles with manhood by design. How this manifests for the Knights of Time and of Blood is obviously different: Dave's masculine facade was never all that convincing, and it's now widely understood that the expectation of masculinity was only ever something traumatically thrust upon him from on high; Karkat, meanwhile, removed from that kind of human familial bond, has always sought out masculinity on his own terms, fantasising about becoming the classical warrior revered by his Alternian culture. But in neither case was surrendering to manhood the 'solution' to their arcs; in their relationship together toward the end of the comic, both Knights find vulnerability and comfort outside of any such lofty expectations. So when one Dave decides suddenly to cut himself off from this relationship, to become simultaneously a cold, emotionless robot and a literal Knight in shining armour whose only purpose in life is to slay the villainous dragon, it's easy for most readers to identify that this is a toxic turn in Dave's life and a rejection of safety in favour of fulfilling some vague prophesied glory.
The same thinking ought to be applied to the Karkat from the same timeline, who, deprived of his relationship with Dave, has taken up exactly the toxic masculinity he aspired to on Alternia; not just as a macho sickle-wielding warrior, but as a warrior fighting alongside Meenah Peixes, the very same woman he aspired to fight for as a child, and who encouraged his bellicose aspirations in a probably-age-inappropriate flirtatious relationship in his teen years. The fact that the cause he's fighting for is now socially progressive in the context of Earth C geopolitics doesn't change the fact that everything about this is regression for Karkat, any more than the need to put an end to Dirk's abuses makes Davebot a worthy sacrifice for the Greater Good. In the interests of the Good, there ought to be a way to put an end to what Jane and Dirk are doing that doesn't involve turning the wheel again and making both of the Knights into the darkest possible iterations of themselves.
POINT TWO: Homestuck the first already had its own strong example of a character who aspired to greatness and glory in her teen years and then grew up to live out those fantasies in a way that was deeply psychologically damaging to her. A character who fought for the future of the troll race against oppressive odds, but in such a way that her self-centred motivations never stopped being clear. And that character's name was Meenah Peixes!
Her case, of course, is a mote more chronologically challenging, but tracing Meenah's arc thru the metaphysical ethers of the Ultimate Self one will find that it forms a remarkably similar shape to Karkat's. For a time she did, genuinely, admire the power and wealth the Condesce acquired in adulthood, and aspired to have that for herself in much the same way Karkat looked to the jackbooted alien-slaying threshecutioners of his pop culture as role models. But the grown Condesce as we come to know her does have a more complex relationship to that power fantasy. By the end of Act 6 she's fighting to remove shackles of her own, and with that comes a genuine quest to preserve the reproductive future of the troll race (a concern I'd argue we can trace back to the young Meenah, too, given her contribution to ensuring the survival of her friends' ghosts after the scratch).
To make this comparison is not to claim that the Condesce's exercises in empire-building are universally analogous to Karkat's fight for the liberation of his people. It serves merely to point out that, if we can recognise that the Condesce's selfish motivations do not preclude her from caring genuinely for her people, then surely recognising that Karkat may well do the latter does not at all preclude one from recognising he is also in possession of the former? And in my personal experience the lines along which many readers are willing to recognise some of these characteristics and ignore the others falls squarely along gendered lines.
POINT THE THIRD: I have devilishly elected to title this post after an ambiguous "St. Vantas" so that I might use this last point to express another long-held agenda, which is that... we have basically no reason to believe the Signless was a "Good Guy" either? Understanding what the point of Act 6 is - to introduce teenaged versions of the adult characters in order for us to better understand their interior dimensions - it seems exceedingly clear that the selfishly-motivated "social justice" that drives Kankri Vantas as a character should also tell us something about what motivated the Alternian Signless beyond macrocosmic political forces (something to do with a distrust toward female authority figures, perhaps?). But while Karkat gets a pass for being aesthetically modelled after socialist revolutionaries, Kankri is shielded from these same criticisms by a cultural bias that I would argue is far more reactionary: the overwhelming opinion seems to be that he's surely well-intentioned because he's Jesus?
When I'm trying to discuss a comic which:
1) is largely about discovering the internal dimensions that motivate the otherwise mysterious and difficult to understand adult figures in our lives;
2) specifically uses Gods and figures of religious worship as metaphors for these parental and adult figures;
it does honestly boggle the mind that I somehow still have to contend with this preconception that the guy who founded an alien version of Christianity must necessarily be a "Good Guy". My point here is functionally the same as above. In almost all of my recent conversations about the Signless I've heard his political good-deeds brought up almost as a means of thought-terminating any comparisons to Kankri, proving by assertion that there is some fundamental difference between the two that makes the Signless "Good" where Kankri isn't. But I simply cannot believe that external good-doing - within the fictional space of Homestuck specifically - should be taken as antithetical to or contradictory of internally selfish motivations; and I certainly don't think it leads to interesting character analysis to equate "Good Politics" with having found self-actualisation or inner peace. Perhaps a character can come to a righteous cause for an unrighteous reason!
4TH POINT: when the hell did we start giving Men credit for anything
