Given the success that my previous poem-related analysis had, I thought I might try another based on my latest poem. I’m not planning on making this a regular thing, since I want to keep this blog completely about the sonnets, but I might consider making a separate blog for my English-major-y rambles if enough people are interested. Thoughts?

A few months ago, I wrote this poem in which I compared Karkat to Hamlet, and I wrote this little thing explaining the comparison and mentioning that I saw Eridan as more of a Hamlet parallel, with Karkat more like Laertes, since Karkat is “full of sound and fury / Signifying nothing” (Macbeth, 5.5.27-28), while Eridan, is “very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in” (Hamlet, 3.1.125-128). While planning out my latest poem, I re-read Hamlet (here’s a link to the text of the play for reference) with Eridan in mind, and made a few observations that I think might be interesting. I’m not going to try to force Homestuck into Hamlet (“…and so Feferi obviously is Ophelia, and Kanaya is Gertrude, and…”) since that would be the job of a fanfic, and I’m certainly not claiming that any of these parallels were intentional (although there is at least one explicit Hamlet reference in Homestuck). I’m just trying to shine a light on Eridan from an unusual angle and see if anything is illuminated.

Let’s start with something that seems pretty irrelevant and insignificant first. One of the things that struck me when re-reading the play was how popular Hamlet apparently is. It’s mentioned several times that the public of Denmark loves Hamlet (for example, 4.7.21-25), and Horatio, Marcellus, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern all consider him a friend. But Hamlet doesn’t reciprocate: he doesn’t really have anything nice to say about Denmark (it’s “one o’ the worst” prisons (2.2.230)), and the way he treats Rosencrantz and Guildenstern shows a complete disregard for them (and he uses their inability to tell when they’re being mocked as fodder to make fun of them even more, since “a knavish speech sleeps in a foolish ear (4.2.18)). And let’s not forget Hamlet’s ultimate reward for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s friendship: a swift execution in England. Only Horatio is shown respect, but Hamlet won’t trust even him with the details of his plan, and he forces Horatio to swear on his sword that he won’t tell anyone about the ghost (1.5.161-169), implying that Horatio’s promise alone isn’t trustworthy. In general, Hamlet’s pretty dickish. But he has friends.

Now consider Eridan. His lack of friends is a running joke. He’s royalty, like Hamlet, but gets practically zero respect for it, much less friendship. Even Equius, who’s obsessed with social castes, is “at odds” with Eridan because he’s a sea dweller. And I get the feeling that if you asked other trolls who lived in the same area as Eridan what they thought of him, you wouldn’t get very favorable answers (and it’s quite likely that he killed their lusus). Kanaya seems to at least put up with him in their first conversation, but later, she uses him to play a complex joke on Rose, with absolutely no regard for him as a person (or, rather, troll). Kanaya treats Eridan almost exactly the same way Hamlet treats Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Like Eridan under Kanaya’s hand, they become nothing more than living chess pieces, manipulated for Hamlet’s amusement. But to get back to the point: Eridan has no friends because, like Hamlet, he treats others as objects (either a means to a specific end, lowwblood scum, or potential romantic conquests), but unlike Hamlet, he wants friends. To use the words of the player king: “And hitherto doth love on fortune tend; / For who not needs shall never lack a friend, / And who in want a hollow friend doth try, / Directly seasons him his enemy” (3.2.154-157).

Another aspect of the two characters that came to mind was their similar attitudes towards death. Overall, Hamlet is surprisingly flippant about death. Until, that is, it is beneficial for him to treat it seriously. In our first encounter with Hamlet, he’s aggressively mourning his father (1.2.80-90), and even suggests that he still isn’t mourning enough (see, for example, the Hecuba speech (2.2.381-440)). This is the death that seems to affect him most strongly, but at times, it seems that he is merely using his grief as an excuse to justify his desire to kill Claudius and berate his mother for remarrying. When Hamlet kills Polonius, he barely reacts at all. Upon discovering it was Polonius instead of Claudius behind the tapestry, all he says is, “thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell!” (3.4.39), and then he returns to his confrontation with his mother. The body lies in the room for the rest of the scene, but Hamlet ignores it completely until the the final few lines. Then, he says “For this same lord, / I do repent: but heaven hath pleased it so, / To punish me with this and this with me, / That I must be their scourge and minister. / I will bestow him, and will answer well / The death I gave him” (3.4.192-197), but he doesn’t seem to take these words to heart. After this speech, he discusses other matters, then ends the scene by saying, “Indeed this counsellor / Is now most still, most secret and most grave, / Who was in life a foolish prating knave. / Come, sir, to draw toward an end with you” (3.4.235-238). The corpse is nothing more than a joke. In Act IV Scene I, Polonius’ body is essentially a comic prop: Hamlet jokes about it, and its location is the subject of humorous banter. Later, Hamlet describes the costs of a potential war as “two thousand souls and twenty thousand ducats” (4.4.29), treating men and money alike as merely material resources. Then, of course, we have Act V Scene I in the graveyard. In it, Hamlet laments the lack of respect with which the gravedigger treats the skeletons, and yet he treats them casually as well (referring to one as “Lady Worm’s” (5.1.38)), and then he engages in some comic back-and-forth with the gravedigger. He is momentarily affected by the discovery of Yorick’s skull, but soon returns to his flippancy. When the funeral procession comes by, he seems surprised when he finds that it is Ophelia’s, but shows no deeper emotion until Laertes leaps into the grave (5.1.132). Now Hamlet suddenly claims he loved Ophelia more than any other, but it seems that this emotion is only a tool in his competition with Laertes. And, of course, Hamlet literally signs Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s death warrant and they are “not near my conscience” because “‘Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes / Between the pass and fell incensed points / Of mighty opposites” (5.2.64-68). Despite his preoccupation with death (or perhaps because of it), Hamlet treats the death of actual people quite casually.

Now compare this to Eridan. Even in a culture where death is treated very casually (“When a troll comes of age, you 8etter 8elieve it means they’re going to start killing. It’s what we do as a race”), Eridan stands out as particularly unfeeling. Of course, there’s the fact that he has a “penchant for mass murder,” what with the whole genocide complex thing. But on an individual level, he also seems quite unfeeling. While other trolls (Vriska, Terezi) are all right with killing the faceless masses but become uncomfortable when it comes to killing their friends, Eridan makes no distinction. Obviously, he kills two of them, tries to kill a third, and destroys the Matriorb. But we see his attitude even earlier. When Gamzee tells him that Sollux is dead, he reacts with what at first seems like shock and grief: “oh fuck oh god fuck.” But he follows with, “noww i feel like an asshole.” He wasn’t really upset about Sollux, just concerned that the death made him look insensitive. The death itself isn’t important, just the way it affects Eridan. When he thinks Feferi might have died, he “wwas just really wworried and stressed out,” but once she breaks up with him, this compassion practically vanishes. He does offer her the chance to leave with him when he goes to join Jack, but when she says no, he quickly dismisses her, and when she tries to intervene between him and Sollux… well, we all know how that ended. And then there’s the matriorb. When he finds out that Kanaya is going to put it in the core, he seems resentful of her: “if theres goin to be any hope for our race as the prince of hope i demand to be invvolvved so dont go anywwhere wwithout me.” When he destroys it soon after, he seems to be doing it just to spite Kanaya. He’s dooming the trolls to extinction, both by his literal destruction of the matriorb and figuratively by the murder of the Witch of Life, and he’s doing it all for personal, selfish reasons. But unlike Hamlet, he doesn’t even seem to get satisfaction from his callous killings. Hamlet stabs Claudius with a poisoned blade, and then, for good measure, forces the king to drink the poisoned wine (“Here, thou incestuous, murderous, damned Dane, / Drink off this potion. Is thy union here? / Follow my mother” (5.2.265-267)) before dying himself. The murder is hot and passionate. But Eridan’s murders are cold and unrewarding; when they’re done, he simply leaves. No final words, no heroic speeches. And nothing gained. As Doc Scratch puts it, he’s just “a vengeful boy on a path of nihilism.”

So after these points, here’s the central question I wanted to address in this post: why is Hamlet a hero and Eridan a villain? (Regardless of your personal feelings towards him, I think most people would agree that he’s treated as a villain within the comic.) I think one of the major reasons is that we get to see into Hamlet’s head while Eridan remains mostly opaque to us. This is quite ironic, given the mediums the two works are in: it’s much harder to show a character’s internal monologue in a play than in a written work. But we’re able to have this inversion because Hamlet is willing to gush about his feelings to everybody and Shakespeare is willing to use asides and soliloquies liberally, but Hussie’s pesterlogs keep Eridan from talking to the reader directly, other than the “you think this, you feel this” of his introduction page. And the times he tries to talk about his feelings, he gets cut off or is ignored. The only person who really discusses his feelings with him is Kanaya (although even she can’t resist some hurtful sarcasm), and although Feferi is willing to (“You know, I’m not sure w)(y we never talk about our romantic aspirations. We s)(ould more often.”), he has trouble opening up to her (which is one of the reasons why she breaks up with him). This lack of openness is a significant obstacle if we try to get inside his mind. I searched for a pesterlog in which he explains why he wants to join Jack, but all I found was the one inside [S] Kanaya: Return to the core. Yes, the reason he gives (“as the prince of hope im uniquely qualified to recognize wwhen all hope is lost and im tellin you there is no hope not evven a little bit only thing left to do is servve him and hope he spares us”) is completely ridiculous, but if we had seen how he came to this conclusion, we would have been at least a little more sympathetic.

Compare this to the scene where Hamlet sees Claudius praying but doesn’t kill him because he doesn’t want Claudius to go to heaven (Act III Scene III). Now imagine what we would have thought if we’d seen Hamlet walk down a hallway, see Claudius kneeling and defenseless, pause, and then walk away. We would have thought he was a coward (“coward,” incidentally, is exactly what Feferi calls Eridan in “Return to the core”). But instead of this, we get Hamlet speaking his mind for 23 lines (3.3.80-103). In this speech, Hamlet considers the action, recounts Claudius’ crimes, weighs the pros and cons of killing him, makes his decision, and explains how he will kill Claudius in the future. What if we had seen Eridan reflecting in so much detail when deciding to join Jack? Would we still have dismissed him as a deranged villain?

Another factor is our initial perception of Eridan as a “joke character.” In his first pesterlog, he flaunts a Holden Caufield-esque level of teen angst: “its hard being a kid and growwing up its hard and nobody understands.” But we see this as just “exaggerated emotional theatrics” rather than something to be taken seriously. We start to view him as a one-dimensional character, which hides his motives even more from us. Even the results of his breakup are played for laughs. It’s funny to see Eridan hit himself in the head (especially when it’s a callback to the hilarious “reunite with your loving wife and daughter” scene). But the humor makes us gloss over the fact that this troll who has “an overpowering GENOCIDE COMPLEX” has just had his heart broken by the one troll he felt a real connection with. If this had happened to Vriska, say, or even Terezi, red lights might have started going off in my head: “Oh shit, this unstable character was just pushed over the edge; something might be about to go down.” But since it was Eridan, I just laughed. So when Eridan eventually went into murder mode, it was a complete shock. Not only did we not see a clear explanation of the murders from his perspective, we never even saw them coming. If this had been Hamlet, we would have had at least half dozen soliloquies leading up to the fatal moment. We might have had a bit of sympathy for the murderer because we would have been expecting his actions, as unjustified as they may have been. But instead, we have the equivalent of Rosencrantz suddenly snapping and murdering Claudius and Ophelia. Any sympathy we had towards this character for being the undeserving butt of so many jokes suddenly evaporates when he becomes a legitimate threat, seemingly out of the blue. (And, of course, Eridan’s rampage was even more of a shock for serial readers, who had spent months seeing Eridan as just a joke.) One of the key elements of a tragic hero is that we know his flaw and see his fall coming. With Eridan, we see neither of these, so he cannot be a hero to us.

So Hamlet’s a man with little regard for his friends and a casual attitude towards death. And so is Eridan. But because we know Hamlet better, he can be a hero, while Eridan is doomed to be a villain because he lives on the edges of the story, where we never see him unless he is being pathetic or murderous. To conclude, let’s look at two more quotes. When lamenting his inaction in his “o what a rogue and peasant slave am I” speech, Hamlet rhetorically asks, “Am I a coward? / Who calls me villain? … who does me this? / Ha! ‘swounds, I should take it” (2.2.404-410). Hamlet calls himself a villain, but we do not take his judgment as anything but hyperbolic self-deprecation. He is certainly not a villain in the same way Claudius is. Now, look at what Eridan says while talking to Rose: “wwell fine you dont havve to behavve vvillainous if youre bent up on actin against the grain a your nobility or somesuch [but] i can play that role its not like i evver didnt get my gils dirty before.” When Hamlet dies, it is a noble heart that cracks. But when Eridan is killed, his heart is that of a vvillain.