#because they've been taught to be ashamed of anything they like about themselves

[problemnyatic]

Look, I get it, okay? Yeah, the ignorance of my generation is damaging, it is exhausting to deal with. We don't know shit about fuck, and it is our responsibility to educate ourselves about the world. But I wish there was more sympathy for the fact that it's not our fucking fault. We have been catastrophically failed by our education systems in a way that takes genuine time, effort, and nontrivial work to counteract.

It's necessary work. We have to. It's unacceptable to pass on these damages to others, to the rest of the world. But it's not straightforward. It's not simple, it's not "a quick google" anymore. It involves knowing where to start, and when the problem is "everything you know is suspect and most information you have about anything that matters is incomplete," the task is fucking daunting, and where to start isn't so fucking clear.

I cannot begrudge exhaustion, exasperation with this shit. It's exhausting having to explain the same, often basic, shit over and over again to people who grieve the pain of how they've been failed every goddamn time. But this is a systemic failure, and it's going to take widespread, large scale work to fix, not fucking snipping at people who are themselves victims of this systemic failure. We didn't ask for our schools to be useless institutions of propaganda and obfuscation of the truth.

We were barely taught how to be citizens of our own country, how our own governments work on a local level, on how to affect and change the circumstances that put us in these positions in the first place. We were taught to be ashamed of not knowing anything anyone expected us to know, for that shame to be reason enough to stop being ignorant, to just, not be ignorant in the first place, whether or not we had any hand in whether we even knew there was something to know.

It's not a moral failing to be uneducated. Willful ignorance is, sure! Avoiding the chance to learn, to be made to face one's ignorance only exacerbates the issue, and that's a problem. But not knowing something is the default state of literally everyone, knowing only happens when that default has been changed. Fostering one's curiosity is crucial, because that's the only way out of this information deficit, but there's a curiosity debt to work against too, taught to us by the very schools that fucked our education in the first place.

We're taught to be incurious, that if we need information, it will be given to us by authority, and that bringing foreign information in from outside authority's plans is an act of insubordination and will be punished. That expressing something that those around us don't agree with or already know will be ridiculed and shamed.

I could keep going, but I don't know if I'd ever stop, or reach a conclusion, so I'll just create one now and call it here.

We need help. We need to help each other, and we need to foster a cultural atmosphere where ignorance isn't shameful, but an opportunity. Where the opportunity to learn is celebrated, and the need to is not a moral failing. Where there's no shame in correction, where asking questions is a contribution, and doesn't feel like putting a target on your own back saying "look at what an idiot I am."

Bluh.

stupid fucking american, just do your research, it's not like it's hard. You were supposed to check your shit before just spouting whatever bullshit you thought you knew, idiot. Nevermind that research itself has become an agonizing slog of fighting the dense, rancid spectre of the internet's rotting, bloated, still-living corpse along the uphill battle against a cavalcade of mental illnesses that make the act of sifting through visually identical information and picking through it for vague, far from self-evident signs of low information integrity agonizing as hell, just fucking pick up the slack of two decades of life that were wasted being failed by a national institution more interested in turning you into a factory floor soldier than setting you up for success, idiot lol

[deqdyke]

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[rosemary-is-in-pesterquest]

ooh! I have thoughts on Eridan!

okay so, to me, Eridan ties into this thing that homestuck has going on with a lot of its more morally grey characters... the question of how responsible young people are for their negative qualities and actions, and where the age threshold for personal responsibility is.

the characters in homestuck all straddle this line between being young enough to consider them victims of the forces that influence them, while also old enough to understand what they're doing and how it affects others... especially because a lot of these kids come off as really smart for their age, and very precocious. we've all been through phases in our lives that make us cringe, not because we're ashamed of something harmless, but because we recognize that we had absorbed something harmful, and took longer than we wish we had to unlearn it. it could be as simple as being kind of a jerk in a misguided attempt to seem cool, or as dramatic as actually hurting someone in an attempt to remedy one's own insecurities by putting down others to seem better by comparison... but how far can you push that before people aren't willing to forgive? before people abandon the notion that better guidance and more appropriate role models could reform someone? and it's especially interesting when you consider how old homestuck's core audience might've been when they first encountered this story, and how it affected their perception of the characters if they saw them as peers, rather than as children from an adult's perspective.

so to talk about Eridan, I wanna frame this in terms of his classpect, because it actually goes a long way towards contextualizing his behavior. Eridan is a prince of hope, meaning that he destroys hope or uses hope to destroy... and this can be seen in practically every conversation he has. if Eridan is contacting someone, it is because he expects something of them. advice, or consolation, or a solution to a problem he's having... it's always something. when he contacts Kanaya, he wants her to auspistize between him and Vriska. when he contacts Feferi, he wants her to give him encouragement, and maybe date him when he asks. and in every case, the way he demands these things by being rude, whiny, or self pitying, makes people reluctant or unwilling to give him what he expects. he destroys what he hopes to obtain.

it goes deeper than that though. Eridan has absorbed this ideology of sea dweller superiority from living on Alternia... and he actually takes it way farther than it even makes sense to. the aristocracy on Alternia use the lower class for all sorts of menial work that they feel entitled not to have to do themselves. they might have the ability to freely cull individual low bloods for any reason, but eradicating all land dwelling trolls would leave a lot of unpleasant yet necessary tasks with no one to do them. I don't think Eridan actually wants to live in a reality where sea dwellers have to pick up the slack of doing things like sanitation work, or construction or something... but another concept that is heavily tied to the hope aspect is delusion. Eridan is exaggerating. he's trying to agree with Alternia's ruthless class structure so hard that it's actually kind of absurd. but Feferi calls him on that... she says she thinks that he self sabotages on purpose. because he knows, at least in some capacity, that the consequences of getting what he "wants" would actually be really uncomfortable to live with.

so not only is Eridan's goal to destroy... it is also a false goal that he constantly undermines. and all of his waffling between grandstanding and self pity destroys his romantic prospects, which are what he actually seems to want the most.

if you look at the way Eridan pursues relationships, he actually makes a lot of logical sense, but not a lot of emotional sense. he's idealized the act of perfectly filling the relationship requirements of each quadrant. he wants Feferi to be his matesprit, which is purely based on the fact that she's high enough on the hemospectrum to be an appropriate match in terms of status. he wants Vriska to be his kismesis, and Kanaya to be their auspistice, and there are hints that Karkat might've been someone he was considering for moiraillegience, though it wasn't emphasized as much. and there you go! his goal is specific, but it's based more on ideals than on the actual needs and feelings of the people involved, and it's totally self centered... he always wants them to cater to his own needs. the reason why he gets as nihilistic as he does on the meteor, is because all of his endeavors to achieve these relationships are falling through. he feels like he has no hope of mending his existing connections, because he still only sees them in terms of people either giving him, or not giving him, what he wants. but the rest of their race is dead. as the last twelve trolls in existence, they only have each other as romantic options. and as Eridan gets more and more desperate, he gets more and more demanding, which is the exact quality that drives everyone away from him to begin with, and it culminates in him having a "if I can't have what I want then nobody can have any of their hopes either" meltdown.

to backtrack a bit, I wanna reconsider questions such as, when is a kid old enough to be held responsible for their own negative qualities? like... when are you comfortable with ceasing to blame environmental factors? when are they just a bad person? is it after they've refused a certain number of chances to make better choices? when do they reach an age, or level of bad behavior, that makes you think they can't be helped to reform from these negative qualities? where does an adult lose their patience for the idea that a kid is just a victim of their upbringing?

obviously Feferi is Eridan's peer, but these are basically the questions she grapples with when she talks to Eridan. it's like growing up next door to a kid whose parents have some aggressively wrong-headed political stances. as you grow, that kid might mirror their parents' way of thinking... and by the time the two of you are in your teens, it's hard to ignore how much of a jerk that kid is becoming. but you've seen them at every step of their development. you know where it comes from. maybe theirs is the dominant political belief in the community, even if your own parents aren't like that. maybe you wonder if you would've agreed with them if you grew up under their circumstances. you've felt the pressure, but you haven't lived in it like they have, and maybe if they just had the chance to grow up under different conditions, they wouldn't be this way. and you are aware that you could be an influence on them... maybe they need you to help them see another perspective. you always got along so well as kids. when did things even change? and that's kind of where I imagine Feferi is at when we're introduced to her and Eridan. it's a crossroads between believing that you might still matter enough to them to change their outlook, and the persistence of their ingrained beliefs. it's tiring to do that kind of work, over a long period of time, to minimal results. when is the appropriate time to give up? in this way, Feferi's own hopes for Eridan fade over time. she says at one point that she was mainly acting as his moirail so he wouldn't try to underfeed her lusus and kill the land dwellers that way. she's not sure how serious he is, and she can't take that risk. deep down, I'm pretty sure Eridan knew he was never actually going to commit a genocide... but his need to grandstand, and legitimate belief in his caste superiority, had convinced Feferi enough that she still felt obligated to manage him as though he was a real threat.

these characters are thirteen years old. they're right at the edge of childhood and adolescence... right at the age where children aren't quite so innocent. they want to assert themselves. they aren't mature, so there's a lot of responsibility that they still shouldn't be trusted with yet, but they've become aware enough to feel like that's demeaning, and to want to be taken seriously. in an effort to make people acknowledge them without looking down on them, they'll try just about anything. they don't have the experience to know what they're doing yet, so it doesn't always work in their favor, and that's frustrating. you can see bits and pieces of this in homestuck's characters. like with the way they try to paint themselves as an authority on something, or shit talk each other in order to emphasize their own strengths. it's a really interesting theme, because homestuck pushes some of these young characters really far in terms of how bad the things they've done can be, or how much their lived experiences have taught them that what they're doing is acceptable. they can be really self aware in some ways, and come off as really childish in others. it's hard to know what you'd do about them in real life... and your answer changes depending on your own age and perspective. it's a really cool gray area to poke around in, and homestuck is excellent at it.

wtf I like Eridan now