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how strong do you think a Lord of Rage is? also i'm a Muse of Light but people seem to think Lords are way way way stronger than Muses

Muses are on par with Lords, their only difference is the Active and Passive thing, but power-wise they’re both Master Classes for a reason. A Lord of Rage, though, sounds like an incredibly Chaotic and destructive being.

I should point that, while the whole Time Shenanigans and Already Here schtick is definitely Lord of Time stuff, with half of Gamzee, AR and Equius making up LE’s Soul, he could be considered not just a Lord of Time, but also potentially a Lord of Rage, a Lord of Heart, and a Lord of Void, which in a way fits him. Self-centred, able to Command others through his Soul possessing them with Cal as an intermediary, and with a good deal of his story focused on chasing a Soul in the effective Afterlife, a Lord of Heart. Deciding what timelines are Irrelevant and cease to exist as Time falls into place to benefit him, with the Core of his Being in the Furthest Ring, and able to destroy the Horrorterrors, a Lord of Void. Chaotic, Destructive, Powerful, guided by nearly blind Rage in an eternal Rampage, a Lord of Rage.

#ohh this is also really interesting #hs #lord english #classpects

homestuckexamination

why are there no dead Kurloz's in the dreambubbles except for one? same with Gamzee and why can't Gamzee die?

Let me preface this by debunking both claims. There are NO Gamzees in the Bubbles at all, not even one, the one we saw was the Alive Gamzee. As for Kurloz, well.

There’s a bunch of him. However if you try to look for him anywhere other than the first Ghost Army and Ministrife, you won’t find him. Both Damara and Kurloz are missing from the final Army- Which makes sense because that Army wasn’t being mind-controlled, and both of them are followers of Lord English. If there IS Kurlozs or Damaras on the last Army though, eh I may have just missed it, there’s so many people.

Now, however, as to why there’s no Gamzees and why Gamzee can’t die, there’s a few different possibilities here. First of all, Gamzee cannot die because he’s a component of Lord English. As long as you’re following the Alpha Timeline, Gamzee will be alive, because ultimately, he’s a required component to end up in Lil Cal when the Masterpiece happens, so he’s got a pretty sturdy Plot Shield- Which he also abuses, fitting because of his ties to Rage, Narrative Contrivance.

But this is just the Alpha Timelines, we’ve seen at least ONE Timeline he actually died in! Game Over, and as we saw, the Game Over dead characters did become Ghosts. So… Why not Gamzee?

Well, you could argue that with his Soul stuffed into a Unique Juju like Lil Cal, he cannot pop up in the Bubbles- But we see a Ghost John, and John is stuffed in the Treasure, invalidating the Juju theory. Then you could argue maybe he’s not dead! But come on he was Bisected by Kanaya’s Chainsaw. You can talk about maybe him being the Last Man Standing in every Doomed Timeline, so he kind of fades and merges with the Alpha like Rose did in Davesprite’s Timeline- But this STILL doesn’t explain the Game Over Timeline Gamzee…

There’s really no canonical explanation that I can find other than ‘Clowns are Weird’, but even then Kurloz does have Dream Selves! So, I stick to a theory of mine, which has to do with the way Horroterrors Pick Souls.

While there’s other characters here and there, the Bubbles are visibly more packed with Trolls than they’re with Humans- This is arguably because there are more Troll Timelines because of Aradiabot’s Time Shenanigans, and similarly with the Dancestors, but even then the disparity is quite huge. And some Trolls, like Vriska, only get One Ghost- Her Alpha Self which then becomes (Vriska) before the Retcon brings her back. So there’s SOMETHING here we’re not quite seeing.

Enter Stubbornness and Choice.

My theory is, that when there’s a Timeline Split, characters don’t get simply stuffed in the Bubbles, there’s a selective process by which they’re chosen to actually inhabit the Bubbles. And only deviations from the Alpha Timeline pop up as ghosts. This makes sense, though, when you change the Alpha, you’re choosing differently from your Alpha Self, ergo, you’re a different person, so you count as a different Iteration of your ‘Self’, and you appear in the Bubbles.

Now look at Vriska. Terezi’s biggest regret is killing her- She saw no other choice, she either let her go, or she killed her. And you know why? Because Vriska is a stubborn motherfucker. It doesn’t matter what happens, what Terezi says, how much she tries, without John’s outside interference, she would ALWAYS go after Jack. In the infinite web of choices and realities and Timelines, Vriska is so determined about her convictions and ideals, so full of herself, that she would always do the same. As such there’s just two Iterations of Vriska- Her ‘Alpha’ dead self, needing to be there as it’s the End of the Road for Alpha Vriska, and the one iteration of her that is still alive and was made not by her own Choice, but by Terezi’s and John’s efforts to bring her back.

Gamzee is a similar case. He’s crazy, he’s weird, he’s a wildcard- But ultimately, his faith in Lord English is unbreakable, and he’s an unstable, murderous element. It doesn’t matter what happens to him in any Timeline, because Gamzee never changes, he doesn’t develop, his ideals, his choices, are always the exact same. And as such, only one Iteration of himself exists, his Alpha Self- Which ends up sucked into Lil Cal, thus erasing the one and only possible Ghost of him in the Bubbles.

Meenah, too, like Vriska, lacks a bigger presence in the Bubbles, and again we have someone unchangeable and determined- To the point where she begs John to take the Ring away, because she KNOWS she won’t change her ways and she WILL steal it if the opportunity arises. As such, every Iteration of the Characters in the Bubbles, represents, not one Timeline, but one Change to their Character. Development, whether positive or negative, different paths taken. The less Ghosts you have, the less Deviation to your Character, the less Change to your self. The more Ghosts you have, the more Iterations, the more Volatile your Self is. As such, the Dancestors, visibly the most abundant characters in the Bubbles? Makes sense, they’re volatile teenagers trapped for several years in a Glitched Session.

This is all Speculation though, but it’s my thoughts on it. It could simply be ‘Because Clowns’. For all we know there ARE Gamzee Ghosts but we never saw them.

#i love this take on who becomes ghosts #also noting rage as narrative contrivance is blowing my mind but i also dont know how i never realized that before #especially how well it fits for the aspect opposing hope #hs #gamzee makara #kurloz makara

anim-ttrpgs

something I don’t get about the disability metaphor is that for eureka monsters obviously it harms another person to eat them. the help a disabled person needs doesn’t actively harm or kill another person. Maybe it’s a difference in perspectives that cannot be resolved

(What I’m about to write could potentially sound very fucked up at first so I’m going to need to trust everyone to read the whole thing before forming an opinion.)

Also this message and response references these two posts.

Through a discussion with @vixensdungeon (great blog to follow for TTRPG stuff by the way) it came to our attention that some of our more jo

@dragongirlteeth We were aware from very early on that this game would attract that kind of crowd, and decided it was better to embrace it,

Eureka’s stance on disabled people is that they (including myself writing this) are, or at least can often be, burdens.

Disabled people often require more resources to live than they are able to “give back,” which, in our capitalist and artificial-scarcity-based economy, is just about the worst thing a person can do.

Anti-ableism sentiment often focuses on the idea that “disabled people aren’t burdens, that they’re just as good and capable as everyone else,” but if they were, they wouldn’t be “disabled” would they? When you say stuff like that, you’re conceding that a person’s worth is determined by how capable they are at doing work, and then having to bend over backwards to justify thinking that a person without arms is just as valuable as a person with arms. Eureka is asking you to decouple a person’s value from how much net resources they can produce.

Often times also, the resources that real disabled people consume are human resources, and those human resources are very much capable of suffering for it. Nurses are overworked, around-the-clock care is absolutely physically and mentally exhausting, people who have to care for their elderly or otherwise disabled relatives on top of their regular jobs don’t get to have social lives or hobbies, etc.

To this end, we wrote the monsters in Eureka to be unquestionably people who “cause damage” to society by literally eating up human resources, because they have to to live, they have no other choice unless they want to just die. Your friend is gone from your life because he has to spend all his free time caring for his comatose wife after a freak car accident. Your friend is gone from your life because a vampire randomly ate him. Providing a metaphor isn't all the monsters are doing, they just work well through that lens.

And then Eureka forces you to look at these people as people, and make up your mind as to whether they have value and a right to prologue their own existence. We can’t force you to agree that they do, but if you think they don’t, then you’ll have to make that argument looking at an intelligent person with a life rather than a pure hypothetical or statistics on a chart.

There are some monsters in Eureka where, if the economy or societal structures were changed, they would stop being such severe drains on resources and could exist harmlessly within society, and there are some monsters where no imaginable amount of societal change would solve the problems they cause. This is true of disabled people IRL as well. Some of them would require no further assistance with living if certain things about society changed, and others would still require a massive amount of human resources.

And even when it’s not necessarily human resources, the extra resources that disabled people need also cause huge energy expenditure and create huge amounts of plastic waste, which are things that contribute to global warming and pollution, which do have significant harmful effects on everyone’s lives. Despite this, they are still “worth it” to keep around.

As for actively causing harm, that happens too. I randomly scrolled past this post after we got this message and saved it so I could link it here.

being aware of the impact of things we can often not think about (like straws) is important if we’re to make strides on environmental preser

This person and their family had to cause a big stink in a restaurant just to get an accommodation that they needed, and to us reading it from their perspective, we’re obviously on their side, but I can assure you that the overworked staff at that restaurant didn’t see it that way. They saw the disabled person as an aggressive Karen whom they would never in a million years want to have to provide customer service to. The disabled person & family had to get aggressive, and ruin the staff’s day, to get what they needed. That’s actively causing harm - harm we all agreed was justified to cause - but harm nonetheless.

Plastic straws aren’t that big of a deal for global pollution, but even if they were, the point is that this person still would have needed a straw. It doesn’t line up one-to-one, because metaphors rarely do, but a vampire asking if they can drink someone’s blood, and being told No, may find themselves in much the same position. (And if you bring up that some people find vampires really sexy, you’re missing the point. “I would give them a straw if they had sex with me.” is not actually a great thing to announce about yourself.)

I can also come up with an example from my own life. I personally am very sensitive to noise and noise pollution. If there’s music playing at a public space, I usually can’t handle it. (Earplugs don’t work for other reasons I won’t get into - plus, if I just deafen myself to all sound, how can I socialize with anyone in this public space?)

If I want to exist in this space, I will have to actively cause harm to everyone there, or else stop existing in that space. I will have to go up to whoever is responsible and ask them to turn off the music, actively taking it away from everyone else who was enjoying it. I have to take action to ruin their good time if I want to exist in that space at all, and they might, very understandably, be pissed off at me for doing that. Because, like I said in this other post, the people that monsters eat do have a right to prevent themselves from being eaten by monsters. We aren't proposing that the solution is everyone has to line up to be mauled to death by monsters or else they're a bad person.

Who has a greater right to enjoy themselves in that space? That’s the kind of question that Eureka poses, and makes you consider both sides as human being rather than denoting one as just an ontologically evil villain to be destroyed.

We actually don't know of perfect solutions to all the problems presented by the existance of monsters in Eureka, we just know that "exterminate all people who are parasites and burdens to society" ain't it.

anim-ttrpgs

Thank you @spagettysylph 👍 great addition

#YEAH EXACTLY #i might have rbed before but i dont think it had those last tags #also THANK YOU so fucking much for pointing out the 'being a vampire is easy just go find people who will fuck you about it'#as being a horrible moral argument #as if like. needing to fuck strangers for survival isnt a deeply deranged thing to posit as a solution to anything #disability #vampires #eureka ttrpg

anim-ttrpgs

Disabilities and Monsters in Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy

Through a discussion with @vixensdungeon (great blog to follow for TTRPG stuff by the way) it came to our attention that some of our more jokey and memey posts and reblogs may have given some people a slightly skewed idea of what Eureka, and particularly the “urban fantasy” parts of Eureka are really about, and its tone. We like to joke around about it, and the “cute monster girl” angle really sells on tumblr.com, but actually playing these types of characters in Eureka is not exactly a power fantasy. They eat people, and often eat them alive. If you find that cute, funny, and/or sexy, well, Eureka is still probably just the game you’re looking for, but that isn’t the main thing. Eureka uses the fact that many of these characters necessarily subsist off the flesh and/or blood of other people as a loose metaphor for mental and physical disability.

Imagine you need something that everyone else has but you don’t. If you don’t have it regularly, you will literally start to waste away. The only way to obtain this thing is to take it from another human being, who also needs it, and others will deny that you need it, and abhor that you need it. It’s not uncommon for people, even “progressive” people, to say something along the lines of “they need to all be killed for the good of society,” even if they don’t realize that’s what they’re saying. You didn’t choose to be this way. This is the reality of monsters in Eureka, and many people in real life.

And then even when you have that thing you need, for now, there are many facets of society that you just can’t participate in because your condition makes them impossible for you, like if a vampire wanted to take a run on a sunny beach. Monsters in Eureka will be challenged by their supernatural weaknesses at every turn, while hiding their abhorrent needs from society and even the rest of the party, and asking why they have to be this way. Finding clever ways to get around and circumvent their weaknesses is a core part of the gameplay of monster PCs in Eureka. Imagine you and your friends want or need to go somewhere, but that somewhere is on the other side of a river. The river has a well maintained bridge. For everyone else but you, a vampire who can’t cross running water, getting across the river is the simplest task in the world, so much so that no one would even consider it a task, but for you, it’s a challenge, and for gameplay, it’s a puzzle.

It isn’t totally hopeless, as many of the jokes and fan comics show (those aren’t just memes, they’re only showing one side of the coin and not the other). Monsters who accept, or even embrace and celebrate their monsterhood, can and do exist canonically, alongside monsters who can’t bear to do what they do. In some cases, these may be the same monster on different days.

I’m going to conclude this post by posting two excerpts from the rules text itself.

Disabilities are Disabling

So why don’t disabilities grant any advantage? It isn’t too uncommon for RPGs to have some sort of “flaw” system, where during character creation you can give your character “flaws” or some kind of penalty, and usually get that balanced out by being able to add extra bonuses elsewhere. Sometimes, these “flaws” may take the form of disabilities.

One particular high-profile indie TTRPG takes this beyond just character creation, and makes it so that if a PC receives a “scar” in combat that reduces their physical stats, their mental stats automatically go up by an equivalent amount, and proudly imply that to make any mechanic which results in permanent consequences or makes disabilities disabling is ableist. We think you can probably tell what we think of that from this sentence alone, and we don’t need to elaborate too much.

We do think, in the abstract, “flaw” systems in character creation are not a bad idea. They allow for more varied options during character creation, while preserving game balance between the PCs.

But in real life, people aren’t balanced. The events that left me injured and disabled didn’t make me smarter or better in any way - if anything, they probably made me dumber, considering the severity of the concussion! Some things happened to me, and now I’m worse. There’s no upside, I just have to keep going, trying harder with a less efficient body, and relying more on others in situations where I am no longer capable of perfect self-sufficiency.

A disabled person is, by definition, less able to perform important daily tasks than the average person. To deny this is to deny that they need help, and to deny that they need help is to enable a refusal to help. This is the perspective from which Eureka’s Grievous Wounds mechanic was written.

When a character is reduced to 1 HP (which by design can result from a single hit from many weapons) they may become incapacitated or they may take a Grievous Wound, which is a permanent injury with no stat benefits. Grievous Wounds don’t have to result from combat, they can also be given to a character during character creation, but not as a trade-off for an extra bonus.

“But then doesn’t my character just have worse stats than the rest of the party?” Yes, haven’t you been reading this? There is no benefit, except for the opportunity to play a disabled character in an TTRPG. This character will probably have to be more reliant on the rest of the party to get by in various situations. Is that a bad thing?

Monsters Essay

All investigators in Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy are regular people. They can also be a monster, like a blood-sucking vampire or a broom-riding witch. Importantly, this works because despite their unique nature, monsters are still regular people. You can read more about this in Chapter 8, but the setting of Eureka does not have a conspiracy or “masquerade” hiding supernatural people from normal society. Though they are still largely unknown to modern science, they exist within normal society - and a lot of them eat people.

The default assumption in RPGs has been that monsters are just evil by nature, doing evil for evil’s sake. RPGs that seek to subvert this expectation often instead make monsters misunderstood and wrongfully persecuted, but harmless. Eureka takes a wholly different approach.

There are five playable types of monsters in the rulebook right now, and it’ll be seven if we hit all the stretch goals, but for simplicity’s sake this discussion of themes will just focus on the vampire. Despite them applying in different ways, the same overall themes apply to nearly every monster, so if you get the themes for the vampire, you’ll get the gist of what Eureka is doing with its playable monsters in general.

Mundane investigators have to keep themselves going by eating food and sleeping (see p.XX “Composure” for more information). Well, vampires can’t operate the same way. They don’t sleep, and normal food might be tasty for them as long as it isn’t too heavily seasoned, but it doesn’t do anything for them nutritionally. Their main way to keep themselves functioning is fresh living human blood, straight from the source. To do what mundane PCs do normally by just eating and sleeping, vampires have to take from another, whether either of them are happy with this arrangement or not. They do not, of course, literally have to, and a player is not forced to make their vampire PC drink blood, just like you reading this in real life don’t literally have to eat food. You do eat food if you want to live in any degree of comfort or happiness, and vampires do drink blood or they eventually become unable to effectively do anything.

This is numerically, mechanically incentivized and not simply a rule that says something like “this character is a vampire and therefore they must drink blood once every session,” to demonstrate that the circumstances a person faces drive their behavior. In America, there is a tendency to think of criminality and harm done to others as resulting from intrinsic evil, but people do not just wake up one day and decide “I think I’ll go down the criminal life path.” Their circumstances have barred them from the opportunities that would have given them other options.

People need food; food costs money; money requires work; work requires getting hired; but getting hired requires a nearby job opening, an education, an impressive resume, nice clothes, charisma, consistent transportation, and so on. For people without other options, crime becomes the only method left to meet their basic needs. Would you rather take what you need from other people, or go without what you need? There are people who don’t have the luxury of a third option. Failure to meet the needs of even a small number of people in a society has high potential to harm the entire society, not just those individuals whose needs are unmet.

As their basic need for blood becomes more and more difficult to ignore, a vampire is going to encounter much the same dilemma. There is really no “legal” or “harmless” way for them to get their needs met, even if they do have resources. Society just isn’t set up for that. And no, your kink is not the solution to this, trying to suggest every vampire just find willing participants who are turned on by vampires or being bitten is suggesting sex work. It’s one step removed from telling a girl she should just get an OnlyFans the minute she turns 18, or that women should just marry a rich man and be a housewife that gets their needs taken care of in exchange for sex and housekeeping. Being forced into such a dynamic isn’t ethical or harmless for the vampire or for their “clients.”

“Oh well, then the vampire should just eat bad people!” You mean those same bad people we just described above? Who gets to decide which people are “bad people?” Who gets to decide that the punishment is assault or death?

Playable monsters in Eureka are dangerous, harmful people. They were set up to be.

Society not being set up in a way that allows monsters to make ethical choices brings us to the next theme: monstrousness as disability, and monsters as “takers.”

Vampires have to take from others a valuable resource that everyone needs to live, and the extraction of which is excruciatingly painful and debilitating. No one knows what happens to blood after a vampire drinks it, it’s just gone. Vampires are open wounds through which blood pours out of the universe.

This is a special need, something they have to take but cannot give back. Their special needs make them literally a drain on society and the people around them. In the modern world, there is a tendency to feel that people must justify their right to life, that they must pay for the privilege of existing in society. This leads people to consider “takers” (people who take much more than they give back, such as disabled people) as something that needs to be pruned away for the betterment of everyone else. Even many so-called “progressives,” while they claim not to agree with pruning “useless eaters,” still hold the unexamined belief that people must justify their existence. To reconcile these two incompatible ideas, they instead simply deny that disabled people take more resources than most people, and are capable of giving back less. This sentiment is perfectly illustrated by the aforementioned game’s insistence that disabilities are never a net reduction of a character’s stats.

Vampires and other playable monsters are inarguably “takers,” but in positioning them as protagonists right alongside mundane protagonists, Eureka puts you in their shoes, and forces you to acknowledge their inner lives and reckon with their circumstances. You have to acknowledge two things: first, that they are dangerous, that they are harmful, that they take more than they give - and second, that they are people. Because they are people, Eureka asserts that they have inherent value, a right to exist, and a right to do what they need to do to exist. (We also acknowledge that their potential victims have a right to do what they need to do to exist and defend themselves, but that is a separate discussion.)

One final point to touch on is mental illness. Mental illness is a disability, one pretty comparable to physical disability in a lot of ways, so all of the above points can apply to this metaphor as well, but there are a few unique comparisons to make here.

It’s not the most efficient, but there are a couple of loopholes deliberately left in the rules that allow vampires to sometimes sporadically restore Composure (and thus their ability to function) without drinking blood. Eureka! moments and Comfort checks from fellow investigators can restore Composure.

When writing the rules, we came to a dilemma where we weren’t sure if it was thematically appropriate for monsters to be able to regain Composure in these ways (since it could lessen their reliance on causing harm), but ultimately we decided that yes, they can.

People with mental illnesses may have the potential to be harmful and dangerous, but all the information we have access to has shown that mentally ill people with robust support structures and control over their own lives are much less likely to enact harm, whether through physical violence, relational violence, or violence against the self. This is why we kept that rule in for playable monsters. Being able to accomplish their goals, and having friends who are there for them, makes that person less likely to cause unnecessary harm.

Vampires are especially great for demonstrating this because they’re immortal and they always come back when “killed.” They can’t be exterminated, they aren’t going away, there will always be problem people in society, no matter how utopian or “progressive.” Vampires are a never-ending curse, who will always be a problem whether they like it or not. The question is how you will grapple with their inevitable presence in society and how you will treat them, not how you will get rid of them.

Eureka is as much a study of the characters themselves as it is the mystery being solved by the characters. It is a game about harsh realities, but it is ultimately compassionate. It argues through its own gameplay that yes, people do have circumstances which drive their behavior, people do have special needs that are beyond their ability to reciprocate, many of those people do cause harm or inconvenience to others, and all of them are still valuable.

#YES AAAAA ive actually been wanting to write a story about like. vampirism as disability for ages but just havent worked out details #but yknow. being as disabled as i am also means that the feasibility of ever doing it is also a big question mark #but yeah just. really good approach imo #giving playable monsters buffs for less concealable traits is also a good way of like... motivating players to play the monsters still #even though disability obviously doesnt do that #and regardless of those optional traits they still have to take more than they can give to survive #thats always been the crux of tokyo ghoul to me as well for all its faults and thats why i love it #you can probably tell i was a long time vampire kid and then got concussions and debilitating chronic pain at 13 from my tastes lmao #disability #vampires #eureka ttrpg

lildurandal

Mage of Doom: The path, at a price.

Mage seems to be the more active counterpart to Seer; if Seers illuminate the path for others, then Mages walk the path themselves. More than that, a Mage is a trailblazer: a Mage forges a path, guiding through actions where a Seer might guide with instructions and plans.

(Potentially of note: during much of her session, Rose was approximating a Mage of Void.)

And Doom? The word “doom” doesn’t mean death. It means condemned to an unpleasant and unavoidable fate. Doom comes from Anglo-Saxon dom: judgement, law. You probably already knew this meaning of doom, without quite being aware of it - it’s why in Christianity, “Doomsday” and “Judgement Day” are two names for the same thing. In Homestuck, “doomed” has another special meaning - it is what characterizes every timeline save the alpha. When Doc Scratch describes a doomed timeline, there is a strange implication that some kind of judgement is involved - that doomed timelines are judged and found wanting, and accordingly condemned.

So Doom can be laws, boundaries, rules: knowledge of the full dimensions of a system, and of the best way to work within it. (This is why Sollux is an excellent hacker; he understands the system and its rules and constraints, and he is magnificent at working within them.)

It can be judgments, in any sense of the word.

Sollux says it’s his own fault he was blinded and maimed? But it’s not surprising a Mage of Doom would judge himself harshly: what happened was well within the rules of Sgrub.

But the facet of Doom most useful for understanding Sollux’s arc is one particular rule:

Everything has a price.

Keep reading

#saving cause this is a very good explanation of what doom is as an aspect and how its tied to the game itself #hs #sollux captor #god tiers

hufflpuffin

Controversial take but i’d argue Dirk is still entirely in character, and I feel like when homestuck was still updating and the alpha kids were introduced, a lot of people were kind of caught up with shipping fluff that they didn’t realize Dirk’s character has always been centered around manipulation and destruction.

That’s the caveat of being the Prince of Heart- it’s an active destruction class. It destroys relationships, souls, and hearts. Dirk was egotistical and hated himself and could never express his emotions properly, especially to Jake. He literally splintered his heart into pieces through Hal, AR, and Brain Ghost. He is also literally Bro, who was distinctly abusive and violent to Dave growing up. The reason he possibly more empathetic than Bro was because he fragmented himself like that.

And now as the Ultimate Dirk, he is all those possible selves at once. He is the manipulative but also somewhat empathetic Alpha Dirk designed by Doc Scratch. He is Bro, and every egotistical robotic version of himself that lacked humanity, morality and empathy.

Anyways idk, I don’t think Dirk has ever changed or became a better person in the original Homestuck, because I don’t think it’s possible to do that as the Prince of Heart, and on a metatextual level, it’s his characterization as a character in a “novel.” Not all characters are meant to change for the sake of a story, some are meant to serve their respective role as a narrative force in the story and I think Dirk is that kind of character.

And now the epilogues have introduced to him that he IS a character first and foremost, being manipulated by the text for the enjoyment of the reader. So he wants to change that- he doesn’t want to be manipulated or controlled. So he does what he does best once again as the Prince of Heart: ruins relationships. He is acting as the “villain” because he knows that we, as readers, will contest to him kidnapping Rose who was also becoming aware of her Ultimate Self to change the narrative. And now according to Homestuck 2, is trying to find(?) Hussie to change the narrative.

So personally I’m not surprised he’s doing the shit he’s doing in the epilogues and Homestuck 2. I feel he’s pretty much just Dirk, acting as how Dirk might if he became all the versions of himself and became aware that he was a character in a comic.

thanapo

How bad does a piece of writing have to be to turn their characters into a bunch of MBTI tropes instead of actually developing them. The idea that the title defines the character, and not the other way around makes the story… just sort of hard to care about. But Ok titles are a thing and let’s pretend they are the end all definition of a character.

In that case, wouldn’t it make more sense for ROSE to be the one to become her ultimate self and take the reigns of the story, and DIRK to be the one that nearly dies resisting it?

Rose is Seer of Light with prior experience being merged with other versions of herself with just as much potential for destruction and rebellion. Remember when her doomed self ceased to exist and merged with her alpha timeline self in her self? Remember when she decided the game wasn’t winnable and that she would break it until it bent to her will?

Having a title that doubles down on the attainment and handling of information, her brain should also be well suited to the load of information that comes from becoming her ultimate self.

Not only that, she’s also a Light player removed from canon. Trying to canon-ize earth C would be much more important to her than it would be for the others as plot significance is something that she directly connected to. The other light players in this story have already pushed themselves into the spotlight, there’s no reason she shouldn’t follow the pattern. The fact that she’s a writer- that an alternate adult version of herself was a world-famous writer- implies that as adept at narrative manipulation Dirk is, Rose would be even better at it.

Dirk is a Prince of Heart that is not just outwardly destructive, but inwardly as well. In fact I’d say he’s MOSTLY inwardly destructive. Whatever he did to his friends, he didn’t take their consciousness, stuff them into a pair of glasses, and strip them of identity by calling them a “fake” version of themselves. He did that to himself at 13 with AR.

The entire length of Homestuck, his Prince of Heart title manifested through the creation of more and more splinters. So why in the epilogues, do his instincts invert and make him suddenly accept becoming the whole sum of all of his splinters? It doesn’t just go against his character, it straight up goes against the definition of his title.

Rose shouldn’t be the one elegantly dying on a chaise, it should be DIRK. ULT!Rose should find him heaving on the floor of an Earth C Walgreens and have to fight his trembling body before forcing his soul to get in his robot.

#listen man i dont give a fuck about whats going on in hs2 but if anyone ever asks why i hate ult dirk im pulling this up #AND it ends on an nge joke. perfect #hs #rose lalonde #dirk strider

t4timekeeper

Transfeminine readings of Anthy are a good way of weeding out bioessentialists who believe a story about girlhood and patriarchy must strictly be about cis girlhood - when in reality, everything that Anthy represents can just as easily, if not more suitably be applied if she is a trans woman.

t4timekeeper

She’s able to pass as a man perfectly and no one suspects a thing. She’s held to perform femininity to impossible standards - demure, polite, submissive, never speaking up for herself. Even as she suffers because of it, her womanhood is still very important to her, and she longs to fulfill the ideal of a princess - something she can never have, because The Princess within the context of RGU is a patriarchal construct that excludes her, just as Utena cannot be a prince. She’s constantly bullied, othered and mistreated by the other women and girls in the series, like there’s something distinctly other about her. She’s abused, vilified, sexualized, adultified, and treated like an object. She’s constantly painted as the aggressor, the scapegoat, the witch. Anthy is a trans woman of colour with all that implies.

schafpudel

#she literally bears the weight of humanity's hatred #because she 'got rid of' an unachievable masculine ideal #i genuinely think you can read The Prince as an extension of *her* just as much as Akio

schafpudel

#all of this additionally intensified by her also being south asian & dark skinned

#oh i hadnt thought of this before but that does fit really well #rgu #himemiya anthy #trans

golgotha-object

Theres a lot of Shikis perspective this week... I have like five different things I wanna talk about! But let's start here:

"Ore mo bakemono ya" or, "I'm a monster too"

While this has implications regarding Yoshiki's sexuality, I want to go into that in a later post. And the way this is worded has.. potentially stranger implications.

「化物」ばけもの/bakemono, "monster"

When broken apart into the kanji that make it up, it can be interpreted very differently. 化(ka) when by itself is a suffix implying change. It's used in words like chemistry, makeup, fossils, etc. All things that "change" so to speak (from one compound to the other, changing appearance, from bone into rock) and 物(mono) is simply a catch all for a thing or object. As such, it can be read to mean "a thing that changes" but why do I bring this up? Well, we hardly ever see this word written in full kanji in hgsn. And never really in reference to Unuki.

We see it instead like this, 「バケモノ」. When speaking about Unuki, it's typically written using katakana. Fascinatingly, kana is typically reserved in the series for these names the majority of the time.

But when Yoshiki says this line, there is one key difference. He's not talking about Unuki, He's referring to himself. When katakana is used as a stylistic choice, it can imply many things, and here it sort of further alienates 'Hikaru'. By referring to Unuki and Nounuki in this way, and using the kana writing of the word, it makes the notion of *the* monster stick that much harder. It makes the ways in which Hikaru and Yoshiki are both 'monsters' fundamentally different. One being just that, a capital 'M' monster that eats people and is something awful and unknowable crawled inside a human skin, and the other is.. a young boy. One who feels choked and consumed by the world around him, reviled by the town that raised him. Ultimately, both Yoshiki and hikaru are still just things hiding in human skin. They're both monsters, things that have changed. One physically changing into something grotesque, and the other changed mentally, a deviation.

Maybe that's why they found comfort in each other.

#yesss i love how it incorporates queer alienation from humanity/identification with the monster #hgsn #tsujinaka yoshiki #yoshikaru #meta

laiostouden

hehe... it's also in the way laios trusted marcille to bring everyone back to life and save them all in the rabbits chapters just like how delgal put the safety of the entire kingdom in thistle's hands... and both instances were what finally pushed marcille and thistle respectively into interacting with the demon directly. into feeling like there's no other way to satisfy their hearts and bring an end to their suffering other than embracing the winged lion.

and it's how laios was asked to save the kingdom and bear the responsibility as "the chosen one" just as delgal inherited the same duty and had all this pressure put upon his shoulders. it's delgal who was the one to literally kick start this quest laios was on by revealing the dungeon to the outside world and laios was the one to finish delgal's last mission. but it was only yaad in delgal's body that could truly bring an end to this tragedy by letting thistle rest in peace for the first time in over a thousand years, and that happened due to laios bringing back the golden kingdom residents' hope, spurring them into action, and marcille destroying their prison and giving them the chance to escape.

it's how thistle was trying in his last moments of clarity before the demon finished him off to see delgal again, "passing on" that request to marcille, and how it backfired- seeing falin again was the catalyst for her making a pact with the winged lion.

it's marcille and laios's efforts that eventually saved the people thistle tormented and loved so dearly, and if it weren't for them and their journey, thistle wouldn't have been able to reconcile with the person he loved most, or at least believe that he did. and in the same way, laios and marcille's relationship wouldn't have been as close and fulfilling as it is by the end of their adventure, each reaching their own conclusions, if it weren't for the base of delgal and thistle's love that this entire dungeon was built upon. and now laios and marcille are keeping alive the kingdom thistle cherished, his home, their home- the place they could settle in comfortably, surrounded by their most beloved people, after years of seeking that warmth and understanding. they're all connected in a way that surpasses thistle and marcille's perception of time and eternity. a thousand years ago, today and forever on. it's a tale of the endurance of love.

#dungeon meshi #marcille donato #thistle #laios touden #delgal

ambrosiagourmet

Oh. I think I get it now.

I think I understand.

There is a little bit of infinity in her.

That's why the lion is here. Because the demon is infinite, and even if she was only part of it for a moment, they are still connected.

Though, maybe she leaves that behind when she chooses to come back the final time. It does seem fitting, given the way things have changed for the demon, and given the question it asks her. Maybe she had the chance to hold on to eternity, in death.

And she left it behind. To go eat well and be loved, if only for a little while.

#oh interesting i wondered why he was there #dungeon meshi #falin touden

cy-cyborg

Toph Beifong doesn’t hold up as disability representation - Disability in the Media

[ID: A screenshot of Toph, a twelve-year-old girl with black hair in a loose, green and tan short-sleeve shirt and shorts, cheering in an arena. Next to text written in a rough, blocky font: "Disability in Media - Toph Beifong Doesn't hold up as disability representation" /End ID]

Avatar the Last Airbender is one of my all-time favourite TV-shows, and Toph is still easily one of my favourite members of Team Avatar. I was a few years younger than Toph when the show first started airing, and being a disabled kid who was into martial arts, constantly being dismissed by my able-bodied opponents and teachers, meant that I connected very strongly with her right from the get-go.

But upon my last couple of rewatches of the series, I began to come to the realisation that my opinions on Toph as a shining example of good disability representation were... well, pretty heavily influenced by my nostalgia for the show and that many aspects of Toph's character just don't hold up today. Which, honestly is fair, the show is nearly 19 years old (if it were a person in my country, it would be old enough to drink) and I think it's pretty ridiculous to expect every part of every character from an 19 year old show to age well. So today I wanted to talk about the things I think Avatar the original Last Airbender did right with Toph, where I think they missed the mark, and what changes I think would need to be made to Toph to make her work for a modern audience.

So let's start with why I think Toph doesn't really hold up as "good disability representation" today, and the elements of her character that just haven't aged as well.

#good post op #i wasnt disabled as a kid at the time i first watched atla and toph was one of my faves and i think probably did help in like...#how i later thought about living with disabilities when they happened about 3 years later #and yeah i felt the same upon rewatches particularly re: the disabled savant trope but i also really appreciate that you go over #how like. hugely significant it was for her to be included in the main cast in 2006 despite the flaws #i feel like a lot of posts critiquing old medias handling of (insert thing here) like... dont keep any perspective on what was standard #and instead say that like... we need to cancel pjo for things in the lightning thief based on todays standards #which like. what does that do? who does that help? how is this a meaningful analysis? tell me.#i get when posts like that are made by like 13 y/os but i see it way too frequently from grown ass adults and im like ??? wow #sorry for that tangent its just frustrating jsgdja #so i really appreciate that op here both critiques and suggests changes while explaining why it was important as is for the time #atla #toph beifong #meta

rubysapphrald

^ this user is tormented by thoughts about the absolute havoc that would have been wrought on the socioeconomic landscape of galar by the events of the swsh storyline

rubysapphrald

i want to preface this with a little bit of talk about pokemon in general and swsh as a game, just so you can sort of get into the headspace i’m in when i think about this kind of stuff.

pokemon is notable for its extremely low fantasy setting. arguably it’s more sci-fi than anything—the flying cars, dimensional wormhole machines, and computers that can store living beings will attest to that—but in terms of the effect that the fantastical fauna has on the world of pokemon, it’s actually pretty negligible. most of the difference is cultural (having to do with tradition, religion, that sort of thing) rather than physical—the climates of the earth seem to be much the same, and people are still people. they still run businesses, they still play sports, the only difference is the addition of pokemon.

this sort of thing is why i enjoy thinking about a lot of stuff within the universe from more of a “real life” perspective—things like the “unsupervised ten year olds” and whatnot can easily be explained as, like, obvious tenets of that type of video game (the series is designed for children, so of course the protagonists are going to be children as well), but some things either can’t be brushed off so easily or are never actually directly touched on at all, leaving people to kind of glean the details from little things left behind during the main story. my favorite example of this is probably sea mauville in omega ruby and alpha sapphire, where you only see it after it’s been abandoned, and you’re meant to piece together everything that’s happened on your own—and the story you get is something that easily COULD happen in real life, proving once again that despite the sci-fi twinges, the pokemon world really isn’t that far away from ours.

sword and shield’s main storyline has been pretty universally recognized as being a bit weak, but i think that it’s weak in a very specific way that isn’t inherent to the actual structure of the game. the problem i’ve always perceived with X and Y is that the half-baked game lead to static, underdeveloped characters, none of which could support a story that, i believe if done correctly, could have been quite compelling. sword and shield, on the other hand, i feel has the opposite problem—the characters are absolutely fantastic, terrifically unique, but they’ve been improperly utilized in the context of a shaky, relatively contrived story. the characters are believable, but the narrative is not, and i think a huge part of this is a lack of acknowledgement of actual consequences of people’s actions, something that’s been incredibly stressed in other entries in the series (most notably RSE/ORAS and BW/2).

now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about galar as a region!

the game makes it obvious from the get-go that the gym circuit is different in galar than it is in other places. it functions more like a real-world sport, with sponsorships, a major and minor league, celebrity status awarded to the big players, all that good stuff. in many ways it makes a lot of sense, and to be honest with you it’s a type of thing i wish we’d seen more of in previous regions, but that’s neither here nor there.

the biggest difference between the galar league and the gym circuits of other regions (aside from the complete lack of an elite four) is that in most other places, each gym is incredibly self-contained. the current leader is in charge of every aspect of how the place is run, and what each gym does doesn’t particularly effect the other gyms in the region in turn. the galar league, in contrast, is run from one central point—lmacro cosmos, a corporation extremely focused on industry and the economy; that is, on money—with everything the leaders themselves have control of being in the periphery. they can do whatever they want, so long as it aligns with macro cosmos’ view of what the galar league should be.

“dystopia” is probably a strong word, but the grip that this sort of fantasy capitalism has over the gym circuit can’t be overstated—especially since, as we see, a huge portion of galar’s economy is delicately balanced on the success of the league. there’s a reason that the leaders live their lives so much in the public eye compared to the leaders of other regions, who are free to be mysterious if they choose, and it’s that celebrities (especially ones that represent cities or regions and can inspire some sort of loyalty/nationalism) are incredibly marketable.

the game never says it outright, but it’s pretty clear that the only thing keeping spikemuth afloat is piers’ music career. the strange environment macro cosmos has created within the gym circuit is one of marketability above all else, and the problem with this arises when the spikemuth gym is unable to produce the same results as the rest of the region. dynamaxing is lucrative! the fact that you can’t do it in spikemuth stadium is the number one thing keeping the city in its perpetual state of economic recession—piers’ career as a gym leader isn’t marketable, which makes it worthless in the eyes of macro cosmos.

excluding bea and allister, who are both children, most of the gym leaders are shown to have some sort of career or responsibility outside of battling—milo’s a farmer, nessa’s a model, raihan’s in charge of the hammerlocke vault, etc—but because their gyms have been deemed “successful” (i.e. work in favor of macro cosmos’ interests wrt the dynamax phenomenon), it doesn’t matter, as their loyalty to the league (and therefore macro cosmos) comes first. piers doesn’t have that—he obviously knows that the only thing keeping him from being sacked and his city from falling apart is his career as a musician, the one thing that the people in charge can make money off of from him, and it’s made him a bitter, skeptical person, particularly with regards to macro cosmos and the dynamax phenomenon as a whole.

the purpose of spikemuth in terms of the game’s story is to showcase the absolutely criminal level of control macro cosmos has over galar—how much the economy is built on top of and around them, how little they care about people they deem not worth their time, how easy it is to lose everything if you don’t do what they want. team yell as a concept i think was another case of an interesting idea not being done particularly well, but piers himself is an incredibly written character for several reasons, the biggest of which, for me, being—the fact that he is almost always right.

this is a really hard thing to execute correctly without being cheap, corny, or just plain stupid, and pokemon as a series (due to being aimed at children) is rather known for its corniness, so that’s saying something. piers is an incredibly smart, perceptive person who knows exactly what’s going wrong with the state of his corner of the galar league—the meat grinder that the entire industry has become, the pitfalls of the reliance on dynamaxing— the problems only arise when he can’t do anything about it. this is one of the reasons he’s trying so fucking hard to make marnie the champion—he trusts her to think for herself and make the right changes, changes that he doesn’t think leon ever will.

we see with bede in-game the kind of thing that arises from being under macro cosmos’ thumb for, what, two weeks? and while bede and leon are certainly very different people at their cores that being in his position since he was ten years old has altered leon’s perception of the way the region—his world—is run. the aforementioned lack of an elite four contributes to the relative instability of the entire setup, since it results in more responsibilities on the champion’s shoulders, and to be perfectly honest with you if i was in charge of all of that when i was ten i would have foisted as much of it as possible off on the nearest adult who offered to help—that being, of course, for leon, chairman rose, and by extension, macro cosmos. i don’t think it would be unreasonable to assume that a large portion of the reason macro cosmos is such a huge presence in running the galar league is because a young leon made it that way.

all this to say; there’s an implicit threat that spikemuth presents to the rest of galar, something that a lot of people (particularly the ones with a degree of power, like leon or oleana) either are ignorant of or are actively choosing to allow to persist. but the problem is that nobody ever really seemed to consider the possibility of the central load-bearing wall spectacularly crumbling. chairman rose was pretty fucking stupid for announcing his big plan on national television, because when he goes to prison and the macro cosmos conglomerate dissolves—whether through the remaining employees’ inability to run it or through important investors withdrawing due to the lack of desire to be associated with such a scandal—alongside the already significant social buzz created by the dethroning of a champion that’s reigned undefeated for at least a decade—it can only spell disaster for the rest of the region. it’s something blatantly foreshadowed by what spikemuth has become, but the correct execution of piers’ character demands he be the story’s cassandra—he’s always been right, but nobody understands to what extent until it’s too late.

tl;dr if macro cosmos goes down for good, and leon gets replaced by another young child—gloria or victor, hop, marnie, anyone else—the entire league collapses. the economy of galar is so tightly enmeshed with capitalism and greed that all it would take to tank the region’s economy is the dissolution of one corporation

#love this so much #i need to replay swsh (only played it once) but yeah i definitely agree with the characters and concept being great but just...#not being used to their full potential #i think the other problem is that the player is kept out of the Real Shit for most of the game because there are like #adults around who try to take care of things and have you go be a kid and not be responsible for that all #and that really doesnt work with yknow pokemon as a whole hdgdjd #but yeah. love the barely under the surface socioeconomic nightmare that is Galar #pokemon #galar #meta #piers #leon #chairman rose #just tagging them since theyre most key here

charlesoberonn

Unironically the Beta Trolls in Homestuck are a masterpiece of character design and writing.

12 new characters introduced fairly rapidly yet they're all memorable, distinct, 3-dimensional (some more than others, but still) and most importantly, beloved.

Honestly an inspiration and something writers and character artists should learn from.

charlesoberonn

kitstacean

I really enjoy how pretty much every Homestuck character is introduced with a particular format:

[an image of character standing in their bedroom]

You are NAME. You like ACTIVITY or ITEMS. Some OTHER RELEVANT TRAITS. Some ITEMS in the bedroom get DESCRIBED.

And I think the bedroom shots do A LOT of work in characterisation - like what do these kiddos do with a space that's wholly their own?

Like you don't even really need the blurb, just look at these two rooms side by side and draw your own conclusions:

faisdm

There are legitimately a bunch of great lessons a writer or comic creator could learn from Homestuck about how to establish a character who immediately makes a strong impression. People so often get so tied up with the memes and meta around Homestuck, they seem to forget it's like... so well-written that millions of people will happily read conversations of these characters just talking about random bullshit like rapping or bad 90s movies and even in a format that's *kind of hard to read*, simply because they're just that engaging with distinct voices (even if you take typing quirks out of the equation) and great character-based humour.

The way each character makes a really strong impression in the first pesterlog they appear in, for example, or Hussie not being afraid to give good or heroic characters traits that are awkward, annoying or a bit pathetic, or just dorky interests and hobbies. HGNH I could geek out about this shit for days!

#hussie has his faults (lmao) but you have to admit hes a phenomenal character writer when at his best #theres a lot of other absolute bullshit and insane creativity and shitposting that went into why hs had such a chokehold on us in the 2010s #but the characters are really the most key captivating part #hs

chronicoverthinker

I’m so scared of what might happen to yoshiki in the story. Mokmoklen still hasn’t given us enough information but I noticed a pattern.

So, we know that for some kind of reason hikaru’s ancestor actually met lord brainsnatcher and after that encounter we can presume that some kind of pact was made (or something happened that deeply affected the brainsnatcher)

But what worries me the most is the importance heads have been having. Hikaru’s ancestor was carrying a head , and we can presume that it was from yoshiki’s ancestors as well because of the long lashes and the hair (everyone is always telling him off because of this damn hair 😭)

And we know that this person’s head became the protecting amulet of hikaru’s family since it was in their posses

Now this is where I’m theorizing, but I believe that this person might be hichi-san and they were some kind of sacrifice for the great brainsnatcher. “We must return hichi-san to the mountain”that’s what hikaru’s grandpa said, and what if that’s the reason why hikaru’s ancestor brought the head of his beloved with him? Distraught after the ritual he escapes with their head and miraculously meets with this mysterious entity (“Hikaru”) and from that moment on the brainsnatcher swore it would never hurt the people that were protected by the indou’s family.

And I believe this might be yoshiki’s faith in the near future. Notice how mokmoklen always draws attention to yoshiki’s neck in most official arts (and we know that their drawings have deep symbolism and foreshadowing in them)

His head here is literally cut off (he’s also missing an eye and the person’s head at the beginning had that side of their face covered so we can’t really say if that’s the case as well for them but yk)

Now something important we know is that yoshiki’s soul is very pure? Beautiful? However you wanna put it, and “Hikaru” stated multiple times that spirits are attracted to him because of that. (We also know from asako’s granny that the line that separates the human world with the world of the undead is significantly getting thinner and more blurred)

So what if a human sacrifice was needed ? A human with a soul so beautiful that would lure all the spirits back to their original place?

#this + the reply pointing out that 'hikaru' has also had official art drawing attention to the neck... fear #i noticed this but i feel like i dont have enough info yet to really have a theory i believe in about why the head was taken #hgsn #meta #the other theory ive seen is that yoshikis ancestor was killed because he and hikarus were gay in a dominantly christian area #which isnt necessarily incompatible with this theory too

entertext

I noticed that in your translation you refer to “Nounuki-sama” when others I’ve read call it “The great brain-snatcher.” Do you know why this nickname has been interpreted differently? Does it have to do with the meaning behind the name?

So, in Japanese, Matsuura and most of the other villagers call it ノウヌキ様 (nounuki-sama) starting from Ch. 2.

If you're familiar with Japanese media, you've probably already heard of the honorific suffix -sama. Nounuki-sama is addressed this way because its a deity or a similar type of being.

The name Nounuki is only in katakana, but there's a fairly obvious interpretation, given that we're introduced to it as the thing that's stolen Hikaru's body in Ch. 1.

脳抜き (nou - nuki) = something which pulls out the brain

So "the great brain-snatcher" is a reasonable translation of this name.

But there's a reason why I don't go with this translation.

#rbing this too as a reminder to myself what the details were of the name usages #since these chapters are now not online for free #hgsn #meta

entertext

Honestly i thought nounuki is some kind of variation spelling for unuki, like it would result from the strong accent/manner of speech, but it would be interesting to see if the 2 are actually divergent

Hm, I think it would be extremely unlikely for it to just be due to the accent. There's no reason for the accent to differ between the Matsuuras and Indous, for one thing. If it was an accent thing, I'd expect there to be other words or names given the same treatment in Japanese, but I think we also don't really see that. A lot of the recent lore reveals have made the difference feel pretty intentional to me.

Anyway, I think it's pretty likely that Unuki was the original name of the entity and Nounuki (and the brain-snatcher meaning) only got added to it after it became a tatarigami. It's possible the "No" could have been added due to misreading the grammatical particle.

#oh this theory about the no unuki -> nounuki is really neat #hgsn #meta

kudouusagi

More short hair Reki

PS: still blame my cat for the hair ;_;

#sk8 #kyan reki #concept art

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