by marathemara​

Aradia Megido is, in some ways, the most fun of all the trolls. Maybe it comes from her position at the bottom of the hemospectrum. She has nothing, and there’s no way to improve her lot, so she can do what she likes without regard for social pressures. And what she likes is amateur archaeology and FLARPing with Tavros.

But FLARPing goes sour on her when Vriska attacks Tavros. To get revenge, she shows off an impressive psionic ability to summon and control ghosts, sending other trolls killed by Vriska to haunt her. Vriska, of course, retaliates by mind-controlling Sollux, who was Aradia’s matesprit at the time, to fly to her hive and kill her with his eye lasers.

But death, as we have seen many times in Homestuck, is not the end, especially not for a girl who can talk to ghosts. She becomes one herself and returns to her old haunts (pun very much intended) in the impact craters and ancient ruins near her hive.



Aradia is a Time player; her Aspect is associated with death and entropy. So it makes sense for her to be interested in dead things, and kind of apropos that she can pursue her (former) interests while dead. And she never loses her sense of humor about it, from terrible puns about being made/Maid of Time to wild-eyed excitement about watching Lord English destroy dreambubbles.



She’s got a great understanding of life too, and couples this with her experience of death and lack of social inhibitions to become a powerful force in the trolls’ session. Her prototyping of a stone frog provides her fellow players with a big leg up because of the Black Queen’s hatred of frogs. When Aradia speaks, people listen, with the exception of Equius, who continues to pursue concupiscent romance with her after she rips out the robot heart he made for her in an attempt to reject him. Her Time powers and psionics are probably the most useful of all the trolls’ abilities in fighting the Black King: during the battle, she summons an army of her doomed selves which successfully suppresses the Vast Glub which the Black King is able to produce because Feferi prototyped her lusus. She uses powers from the bottom of the hemospectrum to counter powers from the top, and it probably helped that she didn’t care about the hemospectrum to begin with.

Through the Game, Aradia works her way up a hierarchy of living things, from ghost to sprite to robot to God Tier. By this time she’s had experience of both life and death and decided that she very much wants to stay alive. So, after helping her fellow players navigate the Furthest Ring, she removes herself from the action, watching from the top of Meenah’s tower so that she can no longer die heroically by accident.

(See her up in the top corner?)

In the New Alpha, Sollux stays out in the Furthest Ring with her. I think that’s cute, and I’m glad Vriska’s manipulation of both of them didn’t destroy their relationship.

Aradia is a troll who knows what she wants and does what she wants, and unlike some trolls, what Aradia wants to do never hurts anyone sympathetic (depending on how much you sympathize with Equius). I wish I could not give a shit the way she doesn’t give a shit.