thene | WANK, CONT:

fireholly99 8:27 am

okay, just to put into perspective how reprehensible the handling of River's character is, I am going to recount the saga of River and The Doctor using Karkat and John respectively.
When John first meets Karkat, Karkat knows everything about him and is desperately in love with John. John finds this confusing and slightly disturbing. During their adventure Karkat makes a heroic sacrifice in John's arms and whispers that it explains why John loves him so much, because the first day they met was the day Karkat died.
John then puts Karkat into a dream bubble where he lives in a creepy simulation of real life in which he has a couple of wrigglers to raise. This is presented as paradise.
While Karkat and John are now both time travelling in opposite order, Karkat is now dressing in sexualised clothing, making enormous double-entendres, AND continuing to harass an equally confused John. Karkat also gets points where he gets to murder people with a sickle just because we know he has a sickle. In fact, at one point, he has a standoff with Bec Noir and Bec sees how scary he is and begs him for mercy.
Time goes on. They start kissing.
Then it is revealed that Karkat is the child of Dave and Jade, with magic powers, and was raised from birth to be John's personal kismesis, at one point murdering him with a kiss. But John says it's okay, because he's Karkat, and he didn't mean it. Also, they are in love.
however, all of Karkat's interests are because they make him a better fit for John. Whenever John is out of the plot, he is constantly initiating pesterlogs that go 'where's John'. He has no existence outside of John and being The Perfect Kismesis For John. And this is considered romantic.
PUT LIKE THAT YOU CAN SEE HOW BAD FANFICTION IT IS
(oh yes, this is misleading, because River's personality is a lot like Vriska's, only without the parts where she actually has personality. Just all the 'I am the 8est and no-one has more irons in the fire than me!!!!!!!!' stuff without any of the issues or moral ambiguity. in fact, while she commits criminal, sociopathic and stupid acts on a regular basis, she's always presented wholly correct in doing them because she's HER.)

For those who are not au fait with the other side of this analogy; the core of it is in this panel. It's the first time Karkat IMs John, but [timey-wimey stuff] the most recent time John IMs Karkat (thus far. John's is the default chronology, so). Uh, the other things you need to know are that trolls have no concept of monosexuality, and that they are equally inclined to base deep romantic/sexual relationships on hate ('kismesis') as love. (not that I have a thing for fandoms where all the characters are bisexual sadomasochists or anything).

I had seen bits of this conversation quoted so often that it was cliché to me long before I got to the point of reading it, and yet it still totally melted me. So romantic and tragic and hilarious that I still grin helplessly whenever the line 'or i guess hates, in this case' crosses my mind.

(My favourite bit of timeywimeyness is the Schrödinger's Dave Sequence, which begins here and goes on for another 10 panels, until the coin lands on panel 4998, and concerns the fact that sometimes you have to die in order to level up around here. It is your basic time travel paradox miniplot but so well done and, hey, favourite canon het pairing in ages ever. I feel like there's something very Dirk Gently about Homestuck's time travel use.)