I hate it when that happens. It's vaguely Mary-Sue-ish, in a way: no matter what the Mary Sue does he's never to blame--it's always his victims' fault for not dropping everything to take care of his wants/needs. And if there were, as you said, extenuating circumstances you'd think the fans who really cared about Eridan would be trying to work with those, rather than throwing them out the window and blaming someone else for his problems.
And there could easily be a sexist dimension to it as well. It's enough to make one wonder what would happen if the characters' personalities and situations were exactly the same but their genders were switched around. Would people still sympathize with a female Eridan who attacks a couple of boys?
Well, that's what's actually really interesting and yet frustrating about Homestuck! It's got a large cast of mostly gender-balanced characters, so you actually get someone very similar to Eridan who's a girl, as well as having characters who are similarly victims other than the two girls. The problem is they're not exactly the same, so when is someone reacting to gender and when is it another difference? And even what's the same runs into issues of how the comic itself frames it - stuff happening front and center and often is more likely to stick in people's minds than stuff that happens once off to the side.
So the end result is that almost certainly there's sexism in play, and there's certain recurring themes that are tied to that, but it's really hard to tell what's behind everything. And an extra axis of the whole Eridan thing is that some of it's just about making things resolve in a less terrible way for the whole group, with the murdering and all.
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Date: 2013-02-11 04:31 am (UTC)And there could easily be a sexist dimension to it as well. It's enough to make one wonder what would happen if the characters' personalities and situations were exactly the same but their genders were switched around. Would people still sympathize with a female Eridan who attacks a couple of boys?
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Date: 2013-02-12 05:26 am (UTC)So the end result is that almost certainly there's sexism in play, and there's certain recurring themes that are tied to that, but it's really hard to tell what's behind everything. And an extra axis of the whole Eridan thing is that some of it's just about making things resolve in a less terrible way for the whole group, with the murdering and all.