- For the post-scratch version of this character, see Marquise Spinneret Mindfang.
Aranea Serket is one of the pre-scratch trolls. She wears red shoes, white pointed glasses, and a blue longsleeved dress with a white Scorpio symbol. She has her hair at shoulder length and wears a necklace with the Signless' symbol. It appears that she is also older than the other troll players, having "lived" in the dream bubbles for so long that time has lost meaning to her.
Biography
Aranea's first appearance
Within the A1 iteration of Sgrub, Aranea's role was the Sylph of Light. She is shown to have reached god tier, and has some kind of healing powers, to the extent that it's possible for her to restore Terezi's sight. Aranea spent three sweeps in a failed session, only to seek out Echidna for a way to reset the session, prompting Damara Megido to initiate the scratch. Aranea was then killed by Meenah Peixes, in order to not be completely rewritten by the scratch, and entered the dream bubbles that Meenah's A2 descendant created.
She initially appears
in a black void, waving and smiling at Jake after he blacked out. Jake later describes her as both “some sort of spidery vampire” and “the girl of my dreams”; the latter is based on his fondness of blue ladies and spider girls.
Aranea talking to Terezi
Later, she introduces herself by name to Terezi after greeting her in a dream bubble posing as Vriska, and reveals that she is a version of Vriska's ancestor, Mindfang. She states that she is also Terezi's ancestor, though not quite in the way Terezi was picturing (alluding to the fact that she is one of the A1 ancestors, and therefore a predecessor of all the current trolls, though not their ancestor by troll definition). Aranea claims to have preceded Terezi's entire civilization by billions of solar sweeps – a metaphorical way of explaining she lived in the previous, pre-scratch universe, and has been watching the post-scratch universe from the afterlife.
Aranea as a fully realized Sylph of Light
Later, Aranea stops by Jake's dead dream self's house after he is knocked out. She explains to him the nature of her psychic powers, and how she has spent very little time studying Universe B2, because the gods have given her little access to it. Aranea attempts to be considerate towards Jake, and, as she can get a vague sense of humans' feelings, knows he has a “flushed attraction” towards her. This causes Aranea to go back to the subject of her psychic abilities, and how the highbloods on pre-scratch Alternia were kind and just to the lower classes. They enter a dream bubble containing the Wayward Vagabond, Dave, Rose, Kanaya and Karkat aggressing (or being aggressed by) Meenah. Aranea is put out with Meenah's antics, and exasperatedly relates the story of the Ancestors, much more briefly than she would like. Jake, confused, assumes that Meenah is the Condesce, proceeding to attack her, and prompting Aranea to wake him up, reminiscent of Vriska. Dirk's splinterself appears in the bubble, and he absconds with Roxy, but is unable to escape the bubble as she can. Aranea uses her psychic abilities to wake him instead. This allows Dirk to bring the B2 players together and enter the Medium.
After Lord English begins destroying dream bubbles, Aranea has the idea to find the ghost of Calliope, who she suspects is the secret to defeating the Lord of Time. She relates this plan to Meenah, who has a plan to confront English with a militia. After skeptically wishing Meenah luck, Aranea sets up an exposition booth in Karkat's private dream bubble, paying anyone who will listen to her long winded explanations. She again crosses paths with Meenah, and performs her service thusly.
Aranea's psychic powers
Sometime later, Aranea joins forces with her dancestor, Vriska Serket, and begins sailing aboard a pirate ship with Meenah, Tavros, Aradia and a completely blind but completely alive Sollux. During their adventure, Vriska and Aranea strike up quite a companionship. Aranea believes their time together helped her open her eyes to certain capabilities she had been hiding from. Vriska concurs on this notion, noting that she is “THE 8EST”. Vriska convinces Aranea to help her mind control an army of ghosts to help attract English's attention, so that he can do more damage to the ring and fill in the rest of their maps. Aranea was not in favor of the idea at first, but Vriska made a strong case for her involvement. Later it's revealed that Vriska was being facetious about her admiration for Aranea and most likely used it to halt Aranea's constant storytelling.
Resurrection and B2 Session
Aranea is later shown to be controlling Gamzee, using him to steal the Ring of Life from John. She then has him go to sleep and give the ring to her, resurrecting her. She then pulls herself into the B2 session by waking him up. Upon entering, Meenah contacts her by Shellphone, and they discuss the fact that Aranea is not supposed to be there in the alpha timeline. Aranea reveals that she plans to take over the session, and make sure it never creates the universe English was born in. Although she admits this will create a doomed timeline, she claims that her powers as a Sylph of Light, refined over millions of sweeps, will be enough to turn the doomed timeline into the alpha one. She also begins requesting that she be called Mindfang, like her post-scratch self. After Jade Harley was KO'd by Jake's Hope Field, Aranea realized that Jade would just become possessed again once she woke up. She then toppled Jade's house upon Jade's body, and Jade died a just death.
Later, she was confronted by Roxy, who wished to take the ring from her to revive Calliope. Aranea puts Roxy to sleep using her powers and is then confronted by Brain Ghost Dirk, who is angry because he thinks that she kissed Jake. Aranea is healed by the ring of life after Brain Ghost Dirk attacks her, but soon after, he proceeds to nearly rip the soul out of her body using his powers as the Prince of Heart. After Brain Ghost Dirk disappears due to Jake dying, she is attacked by Jane, whom Aranea puts to sleep. Afterwards, Jane begins choking Aranea while still asleep. This may be because of the Condesce's control or the tiaratop itself. She began to levitate BG Dirk's katana, pointing it to herself and Aranea. Then the Condesce comes, angry, and Aranea looks up in shock.
She shakes Jane off her back and attempts to kill her by throwing Brain Ghost Dirk's katana using her powers. Jake blocks the attack and dies a Heroic death. She then throws Jake's body at Jane, impaling her with the exposed end of the sword, resulting in a Just death. The Condesce unleashes a psionic blast over LOFAF's surface, destroying most of Jade's house and killing Kanaya in the process, which Aranea barely manages to dodge.
JOHN: what the fuck happened here?
Enraged, Aranea projects LOLAR towards LOFAF and destroys the Condesce's ship. When this fails to kill the Condesce, who dodged out of the way, she projects LOCAH towards the impacted planets, but the Condesce intercepts the attack with LOHAC. Terezi attempts to attack Aranea from behind, but Aranea notices this, forces Terezi to stab herself, and throws her into the ground. The Condesce grabs hold of Aranea by the throat and pulls the Ring of Life off her finger, immediately before snapping her neck. Aranea is thrown into a nearby wall of fire, where she dies a Just death.
Aranea's death, and resurrection in the first place, was likely retconned by John in his changes in the alpha timeline (in particular, taking the Ring of Life before she could acquire it), but confirmation of this is yet to be seen.
Personality and Traits
Aranea appears to be a nice and considerate person, interested in helping others around her. She however admits that she has a tendency to talk too much, and to bring conversations back around to herself. In this way she is very similar to Vriska, yet different because of her more gentle nature. Terezi even goes as far as to call her “4 N1C3 VR1SK4”. This mirrors the relation between Feferi and Meenah, as Meenah is quite rude and mean, while sharing Feferi's bubbly nature and tendency to get excited.
The Cancer necklace she wears suggests she is a follower of The Sufferer. This seems at odds with her being pre-scratch Mindfang, since the tale of the Sufferer did not happen in the pre-scratch universe of the trolls. However, it was revealed that she acquired this necklace after death and that she learned a lot about the history of the post-scratch universe after her death. Note that Mindfang called the Sufferer's tale compelling, suggesting she was at least sympathetic to his teachings. It is also possible that she just wears it as a sign of appreciation for Kankri Vantas, though this latter possibility is unlikely, as the Sufferer and his sign only seem to annoy the Insufferable. Of course, that also might be her intention.
Like her dancester, Vriska, Aranea posseses the ability to exert influence or outright conrol over the minds of others. Due to her eons of experience and possibly her Beforan upbringing, her ability is both more powerful and extensive. She is shown being able to control vast multitudes of trolls and, through this control, use their abilities by proxy (as shown by her manipulation of various incarnations of Damara Megido whilst she was in an entirely different plane of reality). As shown on this page, her powers include waking people up (mirroring Vriska's ability to put people to sleep and wake them up). Note that she was waking up a dream bubble projection of Dirk, suggesting that she was actually putting the projection to sleep, waking Dirk up on Derse.
Interestingly enough, she also shares personality traits with Kanaya, including her tendency to ramble, her helpfulness, and her affection towards the Thief in her group's session (though whether Aranea's feelings towards Meenah are flushed or not has yet to be made evident). This may be significant given her shared role with Kanaya as the Sylphs of their sessions. Aranea could also be Kanaya's genetic descendant, given the "twelve extra wigglers" Karkat created on the Trolls' meteor, the fact that after the human scratch, the first and second generations of ectobabies arrived in the opposite order, and Aranea having already implied that she is the genetic descendant of Terezi as well as Vriska.
Later on, possibly due to Vriska's influence and Meenah's positive feedback, Aranea started showing a more sinister side where she started to manipulate ghosts into suicide missions and even went as far as killing a person, that she knew was good at heart but in the way of her plans, though it was all for the greater good in her eyes.
Relationships
Aranea says she was not particularly popular among her group of players, referring to Meenah as the only one she would have called a true friend. Terezi says she thinks she and her would have been good friends.
In the first part of Openbound, Aranea confesses to Meenah that she and Porrim have shared a redrom relationship. She waves it off as a “red fling”, and the subject is visibly upsetting to her. She states that it lasted about half a sweep.
Trivia
- Aranea was one of two players in her session who sought to consult Echidna, along with Porrim Maryam, helping her with the task in some unknown way.
- When the suggestion box for Vriska's name was open, "Aranea" was one of the suggested names, given by Radiation.
- "Aranea" is Latin for spider, pronounced a-RAH-neh-a, "Araneae" serves as the name for the entire Order of spiders which separates them from other Arachnids. Derivatives of it are used for numerous taxonomic ranks from Suborder down to Genus.
- Aranea used Vriska's trolltag abbreviation (AG), when talking to Terezi. At first she was impersonating Vriska. However, once she revealed herself her trolltag did not change like it did for John from here
to here. This implies Aranea's trolltag can be shortened to AG as well. - Aranea's wings when she reached god tier are exactly like Vriska's. Being genetically identical to Mindfang, she also has a seven-pupiled eye while alive.
- Her title, as the Sylph of Light, is part of a progression. Whereas the pre-scratch titles are Witch of Time, Maid of Space, “Sylph of Light”, and Thief of Life, the post-scratch titles are Maid of Time, Sylph of Space, Thief of Light, and Witch of Life.
- As of A6A6I4, Aranea is the only Sburb player* who has never been a "playable" character in Homestuck – i.e. she has never been controllable in a walkaround, and has never had a command issued to her by the reader.
- Aradia, while alive, stated that Vriska is unable to control her, despite attempting to do so. By contrast, Aranea mind-controls several instances of Damara, at considerable distance, without apparent difficulty. Whether this is because Aranea is more powerful, Damara is more susceptible, or the Damaras are dead, is unknown.
