glowingtroll | Profile for Paradisa

CHARACTER NAME: Kanaya Maryam
SERIES: MSPaint Adventures/Homestuck
CANON POINT: After exiting the dream bubble in Act 6 Intermission 3
LOSS: Her ability to design clothing. This is one of the things that has always separated Kanaya from the other trolls of her session, and something that she took great pride in. She’ll still have an appreciation for fashion, she’ll just lose the ability to design new things herself.

ABOUT THE CHARACTER: Like all trolls, Kanaya hatched as a grub-like wriggler, underwent some unspecified (but apparently violent and horrible) trials, and emerged as a fully grown troll. She was born with jade green blood, which while only midrange on the hemospectrum, was almost unique. Because of this, a virgin mother grub chose to be her lusus even though she knew that being a lusus would doom her to an early death. She and Kanaya settled in a desert oasis, far from most other trolls, and subject to Alternia’s burning sun. There were many ruins nearby her hive, and Kanaya spent much of her young life exploring them. It was on one of these excursions that she met Doc Scratch a (mostly) omnipotent being who helped her awaken her dream self, giving her access to prophetic visions via the clouds on the dream moon Prospit. One of these visions lead her to a walkthrough of the beginning of Sburb, written by Rose Lalonde in the future and cast into the Furthest Ring. In reading the walkthrough, Kanaya gained a very heroic and romanticized mental image of Rose, and she longed to be able to speak to such a wise and erudite person.

Skip forward a few years, and she joined twelve other young trolls in a session of SGrub, despite her initial misgivings. Before entering the game however, her lusus died, and Kanaya retrieved from her corpse the Matriorb, which was essentially an egg that could hatch a new Mother Grub when the time was right. Kanaya put the orb in her syladex and promptly didn’t worry about it for the entirety of the game.

Few details of the troll’s session are known. Kanaya received the class and title of Sylph of Space, though little is known of how this affected her in the game itself. It is known that she, along with Karkat were responsible for frog breeding, working up to breed the Genesis Frog, which would then bring forth a new universe by speaking the Vast Croak. While she mentions that this took a long time, she also says it was faster than it should have been, and that might have been partially responsible for some of the issues they had with the end of their session. She also stoked the Forge which was used to destroy the Black Queen’s ring.

The trolls eventually ‘won’ their session, but before they could claim their prize, they were interrupted by a rift in space/time, a scratch through which came Jack Bec Noir, crossing over from a session on Earth. The trolls retreated to a hollow meteor, to figure out what had caused the rift and how to defeat Noir. Meanwhile, Noir destroyed the dream moon Prospit and killed the dream selves of most of the trolls, including Kanaya’s.

On the meteor, Kanaya amputated Tavros’s legs with her chainsaw so that Equius could replace them with robotic ones. She also really enjoyed Karkat’s ‘inspirational’ speech on how they should all troll the human kids playing the session that Noir had come from. She was wary at first however, when she realized her idol, Rose Lalonde was one of the kids to be trolled, but she decided to go ahead anyway.

Her first conversation with Rose was actually with John instead - Kanaya couldn’t get the video function on her computer to work, and John was using Rose’s computer, pretending to be her. This distressed her, as ‘Rose’ was nowhere near as awesome as Kanaya had built her up to be from the walkthrough. However, her second conversation with Rose (the real Rose this time) restored her faith in her idol, though they engaged in a lot of verbal sparing, to which Kanaya was often on the losing end, as she didn’t really understand Rose’s sarcasm. As the kids’ session continued, she expressed worry and concern regarding Rose’s growing grimdarkness, especially because she could see an upcoming point where Rose’s session would get completely blacked out. She tried to figure out what had happened, but was unable to find out anything other than that Rose had been talking to Jade at the time. This led to Kanaya having several conversations with Jade, and talking the other girl through the basics of frog-breeding.

Meanwhile, on the meteor, she was able to retrieve the Matriorb and figured that meant this was the time to hatch it, so a new Mother Grub could repopulate the troll race. However, before she could really start on that plan, she was interrupted by Eridan who knocked out Sollux and killed Feferi. This shocked Kanaya into dropping the Matriorb, which Eridan then destroyed before killing Kanaya.

Fate however did not seem to wish Kanaya to stay dead. Though she didn’t know it at the time, her death trigged a feature of her jade blood - transforming her into what she’d always read about - a rainbow drinker. She drained Feferi’s body of blood, and took some from Terezi as well, though since Terezi was still alive, she made sure to bandage the wound afterwards. She then went hunting Eridan for revenge. When she found him, he was in a three-way standoff with Vriska and Gamzee. With her new-found rainbow drinker powers she kicked Gamzee in the crotch, sending him over the edge of a nearby cliff, and punched Vriska in the face before slicing Eridan in half with her chainsaw.

She then went off to help get the now-blind Sollux to safety. By the time she rejoins everyone, Vriska had been killed by Terezi, and Gamzee was looking intent to murder everyone. She planned to auspitice between Gamzee and Karkat, but she’d misread the relationship, and Karkat was able to sooth Gamzee’s rage, as a good moirail should.

Some indeterminate time later, she met up with Rose and Dave on the meteor by the green sun. A plan was put forth to pilot the meteor in a certain direction to meet up with the current session of Sburb, and hopefully put all things right again. Kanaya was a bit uncertain regarding this plan, especially since her rainbow drinker self really liked the glow of the green sun. But Rose convinced her to come along. While traveling, they passed through a dream bubble where she met the pre-scratch version of her ancestor and learned to control her glowing as well as some more about her whole rainbow drinker ‘condition’.

Unlike almost all other trolls, Kanaya is relatively calm, cool and collected, not as a front but because that’s how she actually is. Her calm demeanor can crack sometimes, like most people, usually when she’s embarrassed or angry. Questions, especially prying ones, especially ones regarding her feelings towards others get her flustered and embarrassed, and she will engage in some rapid, pretty transparent attempts to deflect and redirect the conversation in that case. And with anger… well she is still a troll, and is likely to hunt down whoever’s pissed her off with her chainsaw. But really in general she’s very dutiful and maternal, always wanting what’s best for her friends - to the point of being a busybody about it.

Because of the way she focuses on the problems others have, she has a tendency to neglect her own needs. She's not very good at expressing herself, especially when it comes to flushed relationships. She’s the type to hint and hint, but back off immediately if confronted directly about flushed feelings. She’s much more comfortable with pale relationships - to the point the Eridan referred to her as "the vvillage twwo wwheel devvice wwhen it comes to auspisticing"
because of how often she’s meddled in other trolls’ relationships. She was also moirail to Vriska, despite having a flushcrush for the other girl, partially because Vriska needed a moirail to keep her in check (or at least someone to try to), but also partially because she didn’t know how or didn’t want to admit her flushed feelings, fearing rejection.

Some of this may come from her obsession with rainbow drinker novels, which, like vampire novels in the human world, are heavy on the SECRET PASSION and FORBIDDEN ROMANCE, which is sort of how she approaches her feelings for first Vriska and then Rose. It’s easier, and perhaps more ‘romantic’ in her mind to long after someone and never tell them rather than face the reality of making a relationship of that nature work.

Unlike most other trolls, Kanaya has an appreciation for and an interest in aesthetics, from clothing design to decorating, to landscaping. She likes bright colors and patterns, and would often design outfits for her friends. Part of what hurt her so much when she caught Vriska kissing Tavros was that Vriska was wearing one of the outfits Kanaya had sewn for her.

ABILITIES: Basic troll stuff: Besides the obvious candy-colored horns, she also has sharp teeth two of which poke out of her mouth even when it’s closed. She’s also stronger than a normal human, able to wield a large chainsaw with ease. As trolls are by nature nocturnal, she’s got better night vision as well.
Rainbow drinker stuff: The biggest thing is that she glows. She can turn it on and off at will, since her conversation with Porrim, but it does mean she’s never without a light if she needs one. She is also capable of drinking blood for nourishment, though it’s undetermined if it’s all blood or just troll blood. It’s implied that she’s still able to get nourishment from normal food though.