homestuckfanfictionhelp:

Hey, doll—so you want some help writing that pretty dope Rufioh guy, yeah? Seems like that’s something I can do! And we’ve got a lot to work with, because everyone’s favorite winged weeaboo likes to talk about himself. Here’s a preview of what’s to come:

• Rufioh’s Personality
• A Quick Recap of the Soap Opera That Is Rufioh’s Love Life
• Two Things People Forget About Rufioh Nitram
• How Rufioh Talks

Let’s get started, then! 

Rufioh’s Personality

Contrary to the way Tavros’s version of “Rufio” acts, this pre-scratch version of the Summoner is, to put it bluntly, a coward. Self-esteem issues aside (I’ll get to those in a bit), Rufioh hates confrontation, and avoids it at (almost) all costs.

Generally, he’s a pretty chill dude—his attitude about pretty much everything that happens is consistently mellow, and it’s stated more than once that he is totally incapable of holding a grudge against anyone. He freaks out a few times when Horuss and Damara say or do something off-kilter or crude, but it’s more of a “whoa, man—chill out,” kind of thing than any real anger, frustration, etc. etc. Pretty much everything drastic rolls off his back like water on a duck, but he does have the tendency to get uncomfortable easily. 

When Meenah asks him if he ever got the chance to go god-tier, he admits that the idea of killing himself is scary and that he could never go through with it, and almost half of the interactions we see him partake in revolve around his inability to tell Horuss he’d like to break off their relationship simply because he doesn’t want to deal with the emotional aftermath. 

He also goes out of his way to censor any language or terms that might “summon” Kankri for a lecture, as well as any curse words. (See “How Rufioh Talks” for a complete list of his censored words.)

Rufioh’s self-esteem problem isn’t as bad as he makes it out to be, quite honestly—he’s just super passive. When he was a young troll, he didn’t actively try to hide his mutation, despite how uncomfortable other trolls’ reactions made him feel. When his lusus brought him to the Lost Weeaboos, he didn’t learn self-confidence. Instead, he learned to distract himself by communing with people who didn’t care about much other than troll anime. Most of his self-inflicted “confidence” issues stem from how highly everyone else in his session apparently thinks of him, but this is less because he can’t actually live up to his expectations and more because he just doesn’t want to upset anyone by potentially not doing so. It’s not an internal thing, it’s an external thing. He doesn’t want the responsibility of being the one everyone looks up to, so he uses his self-esteem as an excuse, a cop-out. 

There are a few notable exceptions to the “anti-conflict” nature he’s so adamant about, though, the biggest of which being that he cheated on Damara with Horuss.

While researching for this guide, I saw a few things floating around about how Horuss initially pressured Rufioh into their relationship, but I’m going to put a stop to that right here and now. Yes, when Horuss and Rufioh started “meeting in the woods”, Horuss was still rage-filled and violent. In fact, that’s how he was throughout both the dancestor’s entire session and most of their early time spent in the dream bubbles. It wasn’t until he met Nepeta and Equius (before Equius was brought back to life as Arquiusprite) in the afterlife that he and Meulin began their moiraillegiance and he became freakingly positive. But I digress.

The point is that Rufioh was a willing participant in their little trysts, and even admits so on several occasions. It was Horuss’s original personality that drew them together, because he didn’t put Rufioh on the “badass mofo who can do anything” pedestal most of the other trolls did. 

For Rufioh, one of the most appealing parts about the relationship was that Horuss didn’t want anyone to know that they were a “thing”. This is probably half of the reason he didn’t break up with Damara to be with Horuss, in the first place. He liked the fact that someone didn’t want anyone to know they were together, because no one had ever treated him that way before.

Whether intentional or not, Rufioh is actually pretty clueless and insensitive. He isn’t shy about his life story. The only person he doesn’t seem willing to talk over is Horuss; even when Meenah asks him to stop, he keeps rambling on about his childhood. He whines about his relationship problems with everyone he comes across, and even goes to Damara for advice, despite their history. Rather than addressing their problems or apologizing, he forges ahead and brings the conversation back to himself and his issues when they start to focus on Damara for even a second. 

In general, his attitude toward Damara is pretty tactless. From what we see, he and Damara are still pretty close, but whenever she’s mentioned in conversations with other people he’s quick to call her crazy, psycho, etc. etc. to go along with what they (most notably Meenah) think about her. When speaking with Damara, he tells her to tone down her “crazy talk” about wanting to follow Lord English, because he doesn’t want her and Meenah to start fighting again. Because very few other people can understand her, he takes it upon himself to keep her inclination a secret—but doing so is less about protecting her and more about preventing more violence. 

She listens to his problems and is willing to help from the beginning—

[Why is?]

[Yes, of course. I am your friend.]

—even though the methods she proposes later on in the conversation aren’t really what he wants to hear. (She offers to start a black romance with Horuss so Rufioh can leave their red quadrant and auspisticize for the two of them, instead). But Rufioh still writes her off as the unjustifiably-jealous ex without taking responsibility for his actions and realizing that he was the one originally at fault for her personality change. He even goes to far as to ask if Damara would “do it for him” in reference to removing the iceberg from Meenah’s way.

While we can’t ignore the fact that Damara does enjoy torturing him (she steals his lusus and locks it in an air-tight chest to “die”), she doesn’t hold all the blame for the way their relationship ended. 

That’s a pretty good segue into the Romantic Drama Recap, so we’ll end this ramble right here. 

TL;DR:

• Rufioh is painfully passive and refuses to deal with the consequences of/take responsibility for his actions. 
• He doesn’t actually have Tavros-grade “low self-esteem”.
• He’s pretty insensitive and selfish.
• Overall, he’s a generally mellow guy who doesn’t get angry about much of anything. Ever. 

The Dramatic Troll Soap Opera That Is Rufioh Nitram’s Love Life

We’ve pretty much covered the basics so far, but here’s an objective overview of how shit went down:

Pre-Sgrub, Rufioh and Damara met in the forest and began a red relationship. Damara was part of the Lost Weeaboos tribe, and was apparently a pretty upbeat, happy chick who loved troll anime and was genuinely fun to be around. They made friends both inside and outside the tribe, which was how the two of them met the ten other trolls who would later be part of their session. 

Horuss, back then, was a pretty angry dude. As mentioned previously, he was aggressive, violent, and hated lowbloods to an extreme that was even greater than the general dislike Equius has/had for them. Somewhere around that time, most of the dancestors started flush-crushing on Rufioh because he was supposedly “cool”, and he became the Jake English of their friend group. Horuss, however, hated him.

Despite that, though, Horuss demanded that the two of them start hanging out in secret. They would go off into the forest together and “mack on” each other—among other things—as part of what Horuss calls a “private e%ploration.. with a BUOY”. Over time, however, these implied black feeings became mutually-reciprocated red feelings, and the two began an illicit red romance behind everyone’s back. 

When the trolls entered their Sgrub session, Damara started to catch on to the fact that something is up between the two of them, and she did her own investigating. Rufioh says that she “started going a l1ttle more nuts everyday”, and was jealous at the fact that Rufioh and Horuss hung out so much. 

That is, she attacked the two of them and eventually broke Rufioh’s neck, paralyzing him from the waist down. It’s also implied that she killed Horuss later on, but he was somehow brought back to life. Meenah, one of Rufioh’s best friends, stepped in because Rufioh refused to fight for himself, and was killed (this led to her god tier status). After that, Horuss built Rufioh his robot horse body, and the trolls finished out their doomed session, at some point during which Rufioh was killed again. Horuss brought him back to life in much the same way Jake brought Dirk back to life—that is, by kissing his severed head—and Rufioh had his whole body again until he died for the last time and ended up in the dream bubbles. Horuss and Rufioh became “official” matesprits amid all of that drama, and stayed that way long after both of them had double-died. 

When Meulin and Horuss became moirails, though, she convinced Horuss to adopt a more “positive” outlook on life, which led to a complete personality flip that Rufioh wasn’t/isn’t exactly fond of. This, as well as the monotony of their zillion-sweep romance, is the reason that Rufioh wants to break up with him, but he can’t bring himself to do so. 

Which brings us back to the events of Meenahquest, Part III. 

Two Things People Forget About Rufioh Nitram

• He’s looks feminine.

In their second conversation, when Rufioh mistakes Meenah’s question to join her in fighting Lord English, he reminds her that everyone hits on him all of the time and he doesn’t know why. She responds…

So for one thing, we know that Rufioh looks “bishounen”. I’ll include a brief definition in case you don’t know what that means:

“the Bishōnen, or “beautiful boy”, is a male character that possesses androgynous or ‘feminine’ physical traits. He is usually tall, slender with almost no fat, little to no muscle, and no body or facial hair. Large, expressive eyes are almost a given, though Tsurime Eyes are also common in more serious examples. In anime, many bishōnen have female voice actors… It is not uncommon for those at the more feminine end to be mistaken for women by other characters, or for savvier examples of the type to take advantage of such an assumption.” ( x )

(I won’t add in the definition of “bishoujo” here, but it’s basically the opposite—that is, a female character with boyish qualities.)

In addition, he’s something of a fashionista. This is the first of two times he mentions his mowhawk-dying technique, and several more references are made to his “dope” sense of style. The dude knows how to look good, and works hard at it—a traditionally feminine trait.

•  Rufioh isn’t actually a weakling. 

Yeah, he may be non-confrontational, but he does know how to fight. He explicitly says that Horuss taught him how to do so when describing their escapades in the forest:

And Aranea, in her explanation of the Lost Weeaboos, says:

So not only to we know that Rufioh knows how to hold his own in scrums  (a fistkind specibus, perhaps?), but we can also infer that he may have once served as a leader of the Lost Weeaboos (evidence for a lancekind specibus there, as well) via an uprising in the tribe’s political structure. (This is a consistent parallel with the Summoner’s history, in that the Summoner rose from being a member of the Cavalreaper army to its leader before leading a rebellion against Her Imperious Condescension.) Although this is inconsistent with what we know about Rufioh’s personality—that is, he probably wouldn’t have the guts to “throw down a daggerlance to challenge the guild’s high seme for dominance”, it’s a point to consider. 

How Rufioh Speaks

Rufioh’s typing quirk is one of the easiest, because—surprise!!—it’s based off how someone would, you know, actually type. In case you didn’t know, Rufioh talks like Dante Basco (the actor who portrayed Rufio in the movie Hook and voiced Zuko in the popular Nickelodeon cartoon Avatar: The Last Airbender) writes. 

Rufioh uses no capitalization with the exception of a few EMPHASIZED words, and he has pretty decent punctuation. Almost every letter i, capitalized or not, is replaced with the number 1, with a few notable exceptions. 

As I mentioned before, Rufioh tries to censor himself in an effort to avoid conflicts with Kankri (and possibly Horuss, who dislikes vulgar language). He replaces letters in potentially “triggering” words (and their conjugations) with asterisks. Here’s a complete list:

• shit —> sh*t
• bullshit —> bs
• fuck —> f***
• ass —> *ss
• badass —> bad*ss
• damn —> d*mn
• cripple —> cr*pple
• mutant —> m*tant

He also has a pretty mellow vocabulary, and uses “doll” as a pet-name for any female character he comes across. Other trademark phrases include:

• bangarang
• dope
• my boy
• i dig that / i can dig that
• chill (verb) / chilly (adj)
• gansta (adj)
• heavy
• a lotta

Never once does he say “hella”, “rad”, “wicked”, “sick” or any other words usually associated with Dave and/or Latula. 

So that’s pretty much it! Whether you read through the whole thing or just skimmed through it, I hope this helped! This is probably way more than you ever wanted to know about Rufioh Nitram, but with minor characters it’s hard to find a balance between too much and too little information. Again, this is mostly just my interpretation of his character backed up with canon facts, so if you have any comments, questions, or concerns feel free to drop them in the inbox. 

Happy writing, friends!