I like vriska perfectly well but it's an important, compelling and good element of her character that she's from the aristocracy. Her character is useful to comment on people that experience both privilege and marginalization and how they struggle with those frictions.

Sometimes you are not perfect because you have been compelled from birth to operate as an aggressor in a system that consumes other people's lives. Her loot is off the corpses of lowbloods her caste gives her the power to control. The metaphor is pretty clear.

It's also how you can see that she's *not* evil because this system and her place in it clearly make her miserable. She tries and tries but she isn't Mindfang, and replicating this structure only ever makes her feel worse.

We also can't dismiss that her struggle is often more destructive to the people around her than to herself (bc she is still insulated by the system she hates--) aradia and tavros, the lowest on the spectrum, actually die.

Even until the end she judges others for not taking on strategies that only benefit her because of her advantages. Until she can unpack this stuff correctly she's still trapped in it. Stuck, if you will.

These advantages are textual (in worldbuilding) as well as metatextual (narrative) and we know that bc her classpect "thief of light" is literally a joke abt class privilege extending to narrative privilege, and the system that doles out those privileges being bad (ct)

bc in homestuck narrative is a metaphor (sometimes intentional, sometimes unintentional) for western imperialism, end of thread i gotta eat this pie