Let's talk Gamzee

[eva00goki]

I can't believe I'm doing this but Gamzee's been stuck in my brain like a tapeworm for the past few days so let's discuss him. Is Gamzee Actually Good? Is he Bad? Is he The Worst? Does he serve as more than just a narrative device to agitate the reader? Thoughts? Opinions? Headcanons?

[calamityCons]

I can't stand how Gamzee is portrayed in Homestuck after he "snaps" from the Miracles video. Literally nothing at all lead up to it and Gamzee's personality up until then was actually extremely sweet compared to other trolls, he was emotionally perceptive and kind to others, and seemed genuinely hurt when he found out his lusus was dead.

After he snaps he has no personality or agency at all and is just a plot device to Make Sure Dumb Shit Happens for the plot to occur. He loses all of his own meat as a character and becomes whatever the fuck the writers want him to be. I haven't read the Epilogues all the way through so I won't say anything about that one, especially with its """Dubiously Canon""" status. But as a Capricorn, I'm bitter about it.

[Nep]

I can't truly hate the dude even though he's responsible for nepeta and equius. But I can say that dudes a weirdo and bards are bards, you never know what they do since I say and I quote.

"Bards are responsible for either the downfall of their session or their improbable victory."

THEY are really unpredictable as fuck and they might not even give two shits about the consequences.

[Guy-Rocketram]

I can't stand how Gamzee is portrayed in Homestuck after he "snaps" from the Miracles video. Literally nothing at all lead up to it and Gamzee's personality up until then was actually extremely sweet compared to other trolls, he was emotionally perceptive and kind to others, and seemed genuinely hurt when he found out his lusus was dead.

After he snaps he has no personality or agency at all and is just a plot device to Make Sure Dumb Shit Happens for the plot to occur. He loses all of his own meat as a character and becomes whatever the fuck the writers want him to be. I haven't read the Epilogues all the way through so I won't say anything about that one, especially with its """Dubiously Canon""" status. But as a Capricorn, I'm bitter about it.

Hey at least you don't have Feferi has your patron troll
i mean i kind of agree with you, but what makes him such a creepy plot device, is that at one point he was likable.
when you see him kill people you think about how at one point you genuinely loved this guy. as if he is a Frankenstein's monster kind of character someone who is good, but too stupid to understand the consequences of what he is doing.

also off topic, but gamzee is my favorite homestuck character to voice act for

[rubs juice]

I really like Gamzee pre-murderstuck, specially because he's just a tragic character. His drug dependence is there to control this heavy violent tendency that he could be able to control with other means, had he not been completely neglected as a child.
I mean. Goatdad sucks ass. He goes off into the sea and never takes care of Gamzee, and even then Gamzee still loves him unconditionally as a parent/lusus. If Gamzee had the right upbringing, if he wasn't brainwashed by empire propaganda or jugallo religion, if he'd been given the proper care to control his violence... He could've become a much better person. Maybe not up to great feats -- bards aren't exactly the most proactive people -- but he definitely wouldn't flip out and murder all of his friends just because.

On the Candy epilogue he's a very bittersweet character for me, he's both funny and disgusting, the kind of character you love to hate. He butts in on everything and tries to preach his message to everyone even if it doesn't make sense in context. He's the narrative's equivalent of that one weird and gross uncle in your family that everybody hates, but he's old and he's got dementia and you have to take care of him anyway.

Overall I like the funnee claun

[Ravenous Rebel]

I particularly like Gamzee as a character, even as a plot device, just due to the way he is presented as unpredictable. I think every good story needs a villain eventually and sure Caliborn WAS the bad guy but he was largely detached from everyone. Gamzee was there, had his entire religion made a joke by an alien species he and his friends CREATED. I think it’s understandable what he did especially considering he was self-diagnosing against the violent tendencies he was born with and was technically off his meds when this realization occurred. He’s a good example of how far you can push an individual before they break and I love both his kind side and the incredibly violent side of him, even if one of those sides killed sweet Nepeta. I also enjoy the clown aspect he brought to the comic, no one expects the guy who worships clowns and spends his entire days absolutely BLASTED.
Also HoNK is one of the best catchphrases I’ve ever seen

[VASKA]

I love Gamzee so much, especially the stuff regarding him that's come out in the last couple years. I know a lot of it has been controversial, like Hussie's commentary that he was a horrible person the whole time, and then pesterquest, but I think it works.

First off, sober Gamzee is terrifying, genuinely. Every time Gamzee is in a murdering mood he's portrayed so well I find him absolute nightmare fuel, even in the pages leading up to Game Over. Part of what made him terrifying in murderstuck, in my opinion, is how unexpected and unpredictable his outburst was. I don't think Hussie, at the time, intended for Gamzee to have been evil all along, because there's a lot possible "triggers" for the behavior on the meteor that you just didn't see in hivebent, but regardless this works.

And that brings me to pesterquest. Pesterquest is honestly the most Gamzee we've seen for years, and even though a lot of people disliked his route, I personally loved it. You can genuinely feel a malice lurking right underneath the surface of this juggalo. Just a rotten core to that clown apple. But even with that, in the good ending Gamzee is still "the funny guy". We do even get a little more on his thoughts about his relationship to his lusus, and if you're willing to dig for it just a little, his thoughts on Vriska (gee, pesterquest sure does come around to Vriska a lot). Pesterquest definitely gave me the Gamzee I've always wanted to see: super funny, super scary, stoned off his ass and delightfully tragicomic.

[CheerfulCholerbear]

GAMZEE GOOD. END OF STORY.

YOU'R WELCOME

[Leddy]

I can't stand how Gamzee is portrayed in Homestuck after he "snaps" from the Miracles video. Literally nothing at all lead up to it and Gamzee's personality up until then was actually extremely sweet compared to other trolls, he was emotionally perceptive and kind to others, and seemed genuinely hurt when he found out his lusus was dead.

After he snaps he has no personality or agency at all and is just a plot device to Make Sure Dumb Shit Happens for the plot to occur. He loses all of his own meat as a character and becomes whatever the fuck the writers want him to be. I haven't read the Epilogues all the way through so I won't say anything about that one, especially with its """Dubiously Canon""" status. But as a Capricorn, I'm bitter about it.

I think in part this sudden change is due to Lord English's influences wouldn't it be? He got left along with Cal and suddenly he's a super devoted person to LE and willing to kill his friends. I think it's really sad and tragic though, I really liked his character before this point! But he was apparently always written to be the villain unfortunately.

I wish they would've taken Gamzee as a more serious threat throughout the story and developed him and made him more than he was, it would've been really cool if Murderstuck had revolved more around Gamzee for instance than Gamzee and Eridan, I would've really enjoyed that as it would've opened up an opportunity to develop Gamzee more and potentailly Eridan as well as less than a one note genocidal dickall (That's a generalization of his character, but I'm really not fond of him)

Definitely one of the bigger missed out points having Gamzee be developed instead of a plot tool.

[calamityCons]

I think in part this sudden change is due to Lord English's influences wouldn't it be? He got left along with Cal and suddenly he's a super devoted person to LE and willing to kill his friends. I think it's really sad and tragic though, I really liked his character before this point! But he was apparently always written to be the villain unfortunately.

I'm afraid I STONGLY disagree that this was planned from the start. As a person who experienced Homestuck serially from its original publication year of 2009, I and a few of my friends thought that Gamzee's outrage was nonsense because it was a blatant continuity error. The Miracles video was released in 2010. The last day on Earth canonically was April 13, 2009, meaning that there was no way that video could have possibly existed. Complaints about this plot hole resulted in speculation that Hussie wrote in an explanation months later to rectify it.

That's how I experienced it and it's how I feel. Gamzee's outrage and Eridan's snapping were deliberate out of character moments introduced to prune the cast down from the bloat of the 12 trolls and minimize it to only the characters Hussie liked best. This is why Nepeta, Equius, Feferi, Eridan, Tavros, Aradia and Sollux all fuck off out of the story during this section. No matter what benefits they could have given to the story, it still seemed like a way for Hussie to jackass a way to getting rid of characters he didn't know what to do with, leaving behind... characters who wind up doing nothing at all for three years straight on the meteor.

Eurgh.

[Leddy]

I think in part this sudden change is due to Lord English's influences wouldn't it be? He got left along with Cal and suddenly he's a super devoted person to LE and willing to kill his friends. I think it's really sad and tragic though, I really liked his character before this point! But he was apparently always written to be the villain unfortunately.

I'm afraid I STONGLY disagree that this was planned from the start. As a person who experienced Homestuck serially from its original publication year of 2009, I and a few of my friends thought that Gamzee's outrage was nonsense because it was a blatant continuity error. The Miracles video was released in 2010. The last day on Earth canonically was April 13, 2009, meaning that there was no way that video could have possibly existed. Complaints about this plot hole resulted in speculation that Hussie wrote in an explanation months later to rectify it.

That's how I experienced it and it's how I feel. Gamzee's outrage and Eridan's snapping were deliberate out of character moments introduced to prune the cast down from the bloat of the 12 trolls and minimize it to only the characters Hussie liked best. This is why Nepeta, Equius, Feferi, Eridan, Tavros, Aradia and Sollux all fuck off out of the story during this section. No matter what benefits they could have given to the story, it still seemed like a way for Hussie to jackass a way to getting rid of characters he didn't know what to do with, leaving behind... characters who wind up doing nothing at all for three years straight on the meteor.

Eurgh.

Yeah... that makes sense but I was just going off of what I knew which is what Hussie said. I didn't experience it live, I binged the entire comic in like a week and a half.

It really sucks because literally all of those characters were good or had some neat traits that had a ton of potential that just went unused because Hussie didn't like them. It absolutely sucked. Like even in the retcon, John easily could've saved the rest of the trolls lives but they just BS and capture Gamzee after he's killed and do nothing about Eridan. I can say that Murderstuck was my least favorite point in the series and that it was full of plotholes.

I do however chalk Gamzee's problematic behavior so suddenly, in retrospect after binging, to having Cal and being possessed by Lord English. It was a shitty way to do it and clearly covering his ass later down the line but that's how it stands. I wish as much as the next guy that he had more development or that something different was done to him. Chopping it up to him being 'Sober and under Lord English's control felt like a really bad end to the good tale of his of drug abuse and it's consequences and shit. They could've done so much more with it.

[calamityCons]

It is undeniable that the different ways we experience a story changes it. When I have to experience it serially, one piece at a time over the course of several days, weeks, months, years of updates, the new information we get helps me to formulate an understanding of what is happening. What made Homestuck somewhat unique was that the influence of the people on the forums, their theories, their suggestions, their enthusiasm for the story? It influenced Homestuck in kickass ways. The high of learning your theory was correct, the shock at finding out the horrible truth (I got so fucking floored when it was revealed that the Tumor was what created the Green Sun rather than destroy it), the slow and insidious way things like Doc Scratch's true nature or the real threat posed by The Felt and Lord English over time...

It's so different, to have to wait slowly, watching as the story unfolds in real time, rather than reading all at once going from moment to moment as quickly as you want. No moments you have to pause and wait for an update, no scramble to make fanart or incorporate the new information into your theories and discussing it on the forums until it becomes coherent and it's revealed to be 100% understandable and Stable Time Loops and GAH. So many wonderful memories.

[Wing]

It is undeniable that the different ways we experience a story changes it. When I have to experience it serially, one piece at a time over the course of several days, weeks, months, years of updates, the new information we get helps me to formulate an understanding of what is happening. What made Homestuck somewhat unique was that the influence of the people on the forums, their theories, their suggestions, their enthusiasm for the story? It influenced Homestuck in kickass ways. The high of learning your theory was correct, the shock at finding out the horrible truth (I got so fucking floored when it was revealed that the Tumor was what created the Green Sun rather than destroy it), the slow and insidious way things like Doc Scratch's true nature or the real threat posed by The Felt and Lord English over time...

It's so different, to have to wait slowly, watching as the story unfolds in real time, rather than reading all at once going from moment to moment as quickly as you want. No moments you have to pause and wait for an update, no scramble to make fanart or incorporate the new information into your theories and discussing it on the forums until it becomes coherent and it's revealed to be 100% understandable and Stable Time Loops and GAH. So many wonderful memories.

Stuff like this does make me wish I could have been around for early Homestuck years. This kind of update culture is very specific to the medium Homestuck was created in, and the site of MSPA at the time as well. I guess I'm hoping Homestuck^2 gives us some of that again, even if it'll never be quite the same.

It definitely is interesting how archival vs serial readings of the comic also undoubtedly effect the way people view certain characters and their arcs. Murderstuck was widely talked about and Gamzee going berserk was a known plot point when I started reading, so it definitely felt less jarring.

[Leddy]

It is undeniable that the different ways we experience a story changes it. When I have to experience it serially, one piece at a time over the course of several days, weeks, months, years of updates, the new information we get helps me to formulate an understanding of what is happening. What made Homestuck somewhat unique was that the influence of the people on the forums, their theories, their suggestions, their enthusiasm for the story? It influenced Homestuck in kickass ways. The high of learning your theory was correct, the shock at finding out the horrible truth (I got so fucking floored when it was revealed that the Tumor was what created the Green Sun rather than destroy it), the slow and insidious way things like Doc Scratch's true nature or the real threat posed by The Felt and Lord English over time...

It's so different, to have to wait slowly, watching as the story unfolds in real time, rather than reading all at once going from moment to moment as quickly as you want. No moments you have to pause and wait for an update, no scramble to make fanart or incorporate the new information into your theories and discussing it on the forums until it becomes coherent and it's revealed to be 100% understandable and Stable Time Loops and GAH. So many wonderful memories.

That's true, I was only 6 when Homestuck started though and I didn't get my hands on a computer consistently till 2016, let alone find out about Homestuck and be willing to get myself knee deep in odd communities at 13 years old as an anxious wreck so I missed out on it heavily.

It's unfortunate to miss something like that, and it did heavily change my perspective on the story and how it unfolded which is true.

[calamityCons]

While it is unfortunate I absolutely don't hold anything against anybody who had that experience of binge-reading it after its completion. There's nothing that can be done about someone's age or circumstances of discovering something, so why judge them for that?

I might disagree extremely strongly with the idea that Gamzee was intended to be secretly evil all along, but that doesn't mean I'm right or anyone who does agree with that notion is wrong. It's just a difference of opinion.

[Leddy]

While it is unfortunate I absolutely don't hold anything against anybody who had that experience of binge-reading it after its completion. There's nothing that can be done about someone's age or circumstances of discovering something, so why judge them for that?

I might disagree extremely strongly with the idea that Gamzee was intended to be secretly evil all along, but that doesn't mean I'm right or anyone who does agree with that notion is wrong. It's just a difference of opinion.

Frankly I actually find it more reasonable that way, I was just again going with what Hussie said. Gamzee never seemed particularly bad until that point, and even when I began to question it I had an actual reason with LE before long so I didn't spend much time thinking on it or questioning it.

[calamityCons]

Yeah, it's extremely difficult when the moment Gamzee loses his mind and the moment we discover he was being controlled by Lord English was separated by months of time rather than by hours. Imagine watching this previously slow and sweet character fly off the handle and become a spooky monster clown being evil as fuck for like. 6 or 7 months. With no explanation beyond "he was really upset about the Miracles video that actually didn't even fucking exist to be shown to him because the world ended in 2009."

There was no explanation for months and months until we finally found out that Li'l Cal was on the Meteor. Some-fucking-how.

[pfeffer-29]

The thing that annoyed me the most about Gamzee was how he faded into the background of Act 6. This is a guy who murdered several people and, as it turns out, was responsible for the creation of Lord English. One would think he'd be at least a source of unease, but he isn't. Gamzee just...exists on the meteor, with no personality besides vaguely lecherous. Maybe it's because Hussie got tired of writing him, but in my opinion, that's a poor excuse. I feel like he could have been a good villain, around Caliborn-tier, if Hussie had kept some of his menacing qualities. Instead, Gamzee becomes a plot device. He does some truly despicable things in both timelines, but there's no reason for him to do them besides plot, because he is void of soul. He has one motivation and that's it. His goal is to bring about Lord English's birth and therefore the narrative itself, and so Hussie decided that he didn't need to be a character at all. From a meta standpoint, this makes sense. But that doesn't mean Gamzee is entertaining to read.
He's slightly better in the epilogues, as his one personality trait is expanded into a few, but he never does anything other than make Jane snap and give the writers an way to "subvert" the concept of a redemption arc.

[Sahxyel]

That's how I experienced it and it's how I feel. Gamzee's outrage and Eridan's snapping were deliberate out of character moments introduced to prune the cast down from the bloat of the 12 trolls and minimize it to only the characters Hussie liked best. This is why Nepeta, Equius, Feferi, Eridan, Tavros, Aradia and Sollux all fuck off out of the story during this section. No matter what benefits they could have given to the story, it still seemed like a way for Hussie to jackass a way to getting rid of characters he didn't know what to do with, leaving behind... characters who wind up doing nothing at all for three years straight on the meteor.

Eurgh.

While I agree that Murderstuck felt like an excuse to excise a major chunk of the trolls from the cast I don't think Gamzee snapping was ENTIRELY OOC, same with Eridan, but I explained Eridan in specific detail in his thread so let me put on my clown nose and horn to chat about Gamzee here.

Gamzee I think going off the handle because his faith was broken in it is something I can see happening since it envelops his whole worldview and it's subsequently mocked and shattered before his eyes. He's furious over his religion being false and flies into a rage, but he just...never takes it out on the people who deserve it? Dave actually occupies the same space as he does on the Meteor but we never have a moment where Gamzee appears and throws him down the stairs, like a surprise clown of hatred, despite all his blusters that he would fuck Dave up especially for his transgression to him with this heresy of heresies. His duedly confrontations are with Equius, who never would have gone looking for him if Karkat never ordered him to, and Nepeta who leapt to avenge her fallen moirail.

Honestly I think Karkat never properly internalizes how much at fault he was for their deaths. Gamzee gets the bulk of blame but Karkat is supposed to be his motherfucking moirail, he isn't supposed to send people to aggress his moirail when he's flipping out, he should be doing his damn job and perform the deed himself. We even see that it works later too with the shooshpap, which makes even less sense since by now Gamzee did objectively murder two of their friends in cold blood whereas before Gamzee didn't do anything except creep Karkat the fuck out after Karkat observed another person on the meteor fucking snap and kill two people. Why did Karkat send Equius to handle Gamzee instead of Eridan, who DID kill two of them in cold blood that Karkat witnessed and also is in the weird state of not being a highblood that Equius will respect or kowtow to thanks to that fucked up seadweller to land dweller aristocratic rivalry? I know the answer, which is he's a scared teenager who made a really stupid decision (IC) and Hussie needed Equius and Nepeta both dead (meta), but I like asking these questions anyway.

Gamzee is exposed in Murderstuck to be the recipient of a lack of faith in both his moirail and in his own method of religion which is really interesting, and then after he gets Cal and weird eye shit happens his individuality seems to vanish. I feel like after this point, when I read through, that he was possessed and even down the road I don't think I can believe that Gamzee prior to Murderstuck was entirely the edgy murder clown that he becomes, nor that he always was playing the people he knew and secretly planned this all while high as fuck to have everyone think he was harmless.

It just doesn't parse for me, the same as Hussie claiming that Eridan always intended to blow up the Matriorb. Claiming these however emboldens the argument that both characters are not particularly nuanced and are one-note bad guys which probably helps shut up arguments about how these characters are products of their situations and not inherently built to be evil. That would put them in the same zone as Vriska or the brainwashed Jane/Jade in A6 which I suppose is entirely unacceptable when we need the audience to hate them unconditionally like nastyboy Caliborn or Her Imperious Condescension.

[rookie1978]

Fun character ultimately turned into hussies 'make sure plot happens' guy.