Meenah, Aranea, and The Way They See
MS Paint Adventures: Homestuck is a lengthy story with a large number of characters.Twelve of those characters receive very little screen time throughout the story’s run. The group of trolls commonly referred to as “The Dancestors”¹ is spearheaded by two characters who hold more “plot relevance” than the rest of them; Meenah Peixes and Aranea Serket. These two characters inform many readers’ perspective upon the rest of their friend group. The issue is that neither of them really understand their friends.
MS Paint Adventures: Homestuck is a lengthy story with a large number of characters.Twelve of those characters receive very little screen time throughout the story’s run. The group of trolls commonly referred to as “The Dancestors”¹ is spearheaded by two characters who hold more “plot relevance” than the rest of them; Meenah Peixes and Aranea Serket. These two characters inform many readers’ perspective upon the rest of their friend group. The issue is that neither of them really understand their friends.
Let us start by taking a look at Meenah. She believes herself to be the most important out of her entire group. She goes as far as to credit herself for the small amount of success the entire group has. She does not see the details that exist in other peoples’ lives. This is not something that makes her a bad person but, she has a difficult time seeing where her friends are coming from. Meenah’s perspective on her friends and their issues is reductive.² However, reductive thinking is not just about a sheer hatred of details. It can also take the form of believing that you already posses all of the details.
Aranea Serket sees herself as someone who has all the answers. She feels that she needs to categorize her friends. She goes as far as to have neat and tidy speeches explaining each Dancestor’s “deal” on hand in case anyone asks. Despite her supposed knowledge of the important details of her friends’ lives, we never see her talk to any of them besides Meenah. It is implied that She was not very good friends with them prior to their introduction to the story either. Aranea is distant from her other friends but tries her hardest to understand them in detail instead of just talking to them. Her inability to see those around her as anything but someone to tell a story about and Meenah’s lack of willingness to care about other peoples’ problems lead to a reductive and simple view of the people they are supposedly friends with.
The issue with a simplified few of Aranea and Meenah’s friends is that they are actually quite a bit more detailed than people are willing to give them credit for. Nothing in Homestuck is simple. Latula Pyrope is believed to be a “r4d1c4l g4m3r g1rl”. A one-note stereotype of a commonly mocked online subculture. What readers ignore is that Latula actively tries to dumb herself down because of her insecurity. Latula is actually an anxious teen with several personality traits resembling that of highschool students who were marked as “gifted” when they were young. Just talking about Latula, one can see that the Dancestors are more than skin deep. There are TWELVE of them. There exist twelve different versions of this paragraph I could have written. Twelve distinct stories to tell.
Seeing the story from Meenah and Aranea’s perspectives has harmed our ability to understand characters like Latula. It is unfortunate how our love for Meenah and Aranea creates a bias in which we choose to believe what they believe rather than look at canon and form our own opinions. Reducing any character in homestuck down to single traits does dangerous things to the messages it tries to convey. In the future, I hope that the community can avoid these deconstructions of what Homestuck is all about.
1: A portmanteau of “Descendant” and “Ancestor”
2: See Meenah’s interpretation of the story of her friends. (https://www.homestuck.com/story/4991)
