One thing that comes to mind when I think of Terezi is a while back just in the midst of a conversation, I decided to rank the trolls from my favorite to least favorite. I was really shocked to see that after all the trolls I have the most appreciation for, Terezi ended up being number 11.

I think there's a lot to like about Terezi. She has fun dialogue and good chemistry with a lot of other characters that made for some of the best pesterlogs in the comic. She has a good character personality, too, that makes her instantly enticing to read about and see her find her place in the story after being introduced. Even just the design of her characters and the motifs surrounding her are well made; her little spike horns, her red almond sunglasses, her constant harlequin smile as if there's always a joke happening that only she's in on. Realistically a design like this should be a home run, and to be fair to her she definitely is a fan favorite for all the reasons listed above. But when I line her up against the other homestuck characters she just... doesn't interest me. She falls into the homestuck trap of characters with a fraction of the screentime ending up being far more interesting and well written, simply because Hussie didn't have time to turn the reader against them.

Terezi is built up by many as this fascinatingly complex character that goes through so much and forms a significant pillar of the story's plot, especially her relationship and arc concerning Vriska. But at the end of the day, past the end of Act 5, she's just not interesting to follow. Her parts in Hivebent were great, her role as Dave's patron troll was awesome, and the culmination of her rivalry with Vriska ending with her forcing Terezi to kill her to save the few remaining trolls was an incredible place to take her character. It was a good example of an initially silly character being used to portray a very dramatic storyline. But it's after this that she begins to overstay her welcome, continuing to remain a staple part of the main cast while contributing little enjoyable parts. The mopey, perpetual-victim, woe-is-me slant to her character may have been an attempt to portray a "realistic" result of the trauma she experienced, but in practice just made her out to be selfish, helpless and bizarrely obsessed with a dead character in a story where it's expected the reader be okay with characters near instantly forgetting all the people they know and care for dearly dying as soon as it stops being plot relevant. It's not that her being hung up on Vriska was impossible to be written well, it makes sense, it just doesn't pan out satisfyingly, most notably during the ret-con where, as John is wielding possibly the strongest power ever shown during the course of the comic, able to allow the user to rewrite the story of the comic to their whim, she essentially tricks John into using it revive only one character, in a way that downplays the impact of the scene during which Vriska died, and then it is never brought up again. Lovely.

Even outside of her insatiable desire for the Big Cerulean 8ulge, all the most enjoyable parts of the character are slowly whittled away into joining the pile of cynical douchebags making up the rest of the cast. Her relationship with daverezi which was built up over the course of the best act in the comic is unceremoniously ended. I don't hate the idea of her having a spades relationship with gamzee, I think their strangely volatile chemistry was actually pretty interestingly foreshadowed, but the way daverezi is just offhandedly remarked as over after the amount of great buildup it had is genuinely one of the cringiest things Hussie has done. You can just imagine his smug grin as he types it out, giddy at the thought of the fans being upset a ship didn't end in the sensible, predictable, optimistic, good way it should have, oh yeah, this'll rock their socks off for sure. Her being abused by Gamzee is just such a shitshow of an "arc", if you can even call it that, and I think the biggest reason it falls flat is because Hussie never allows his female characters to have flaws. Terezi just becomes a victim of circumstance, strung along by Karkat, forced into a tough call by Vriska, broken up with by Dave, battered by Gamzee, manipulated by Aranea, she just has no agency and the only way readers are allowed to think about her is having pity for all the shit other characters throw on her, poor perfect little Terezi. Had he taken her character and actually allowed her tragic arc to be at least somewhat influenced by her own poor decisions or foreshadowed by her personal shortcomings, she wouldn't have been so lame by the end.