I HATE JAKE HARLEY

[mmmmalo]

with regard to the limestone and related imps, limestone is primarily formed in marine environments, so that could tie them in to a fear of water and a planet covered in sea? the geological angle may be a bit too much tho

Huh… I guess if the story has any elements to the effect of ‘whiteness is forged by blackness’, we have a really specific analogy available? But most of the stuff about a white/black dichotomy afaik is stated in terms of interior/exterior (like notions of blackface, or Scratch’s white shell concealing a pocket of void, or going Grimdark), not much to suggest causality…

Or if there is causality would be posed in the other direction, with blackness as ‘child’ and whiteness as 'mother’ becoming a temporal metaphor. Calliope’s nightmare image of a white sun spiralling into a black hole, for example, I think theworstpersonintheworld had clocked that as child-devouring-mother imagery… which I guess turns the child into the mother, through the breezy conflation of various modes of baby-in-belly. An effect that becomes its own cause… I suppose that sounds a bit like Lord English creating the conditions for his summoning huh? But I don’t know how to turn that back into a racial metaphor, that dimension might fall apart on this level.

[mmmmalo]

I guess to reverse this, Jade’s password system that deters the upheaval of causation would align with Karkat’s accusations of racism?? This comic is stupid

[mmmmalo]

Rambling.

Turns out Caliborn calls Jake racist in the same conversation where he lays out his intent to become retroactively responsible for everything, so that’s fun. They remark on his text color too, drawing attention to his having “stolen the limelight”, in a more literal sense than Vriska’s retroactive seizures of relevance… Descriptions of Lord as a master class from that convo feel vaguely more loaded, as do the “DON’T FORGET WHO YOU’RE MEANT TO SERVE” type comments.

Honestly, given that recent ask proposing that “absent parents” is a racial trope in the context of Alternia-as-the-racist’s-nightmare and how that would implicate Grandpa (absentee father with lots of kids, including his grandchild Obama) if true… that Vriska putting Jade to sleep was her primary mode of retroactive self–insertion is strange to me. There was also an ask I got recently concerning Grandpa that dovetails with this, I’ll insert the draft here…

Anonymous asked:

jade taxidermied grandpa, grandpa taxidermied jade, taxidermy requires stuffing, as blatant an insemination symbol as you can get,. jade facilitated jakes rape, through imprisoning him with jane…. are the harleys trapped in some circuitous rape scenario!? whose idea was it to taxidermy in the first place!? the chicken or the egg!?

same anon, did grandpa rape jade, or did jade grow up consumed by the fear that he would be the one who kills her. her stuffed corrpse is just the creame of his huntimh trophy collection. and the form of heer he killed was clearly her dream self, her embodied desire for escapism

Good point wrt it being significant that Grandpa could appear to have hunted Jade’s dreamself; the idea of Grandpa destroying her dreams also seems to be one message behind the killing of the butterfly. Parsed as “hunting Jade’s dreams”, it also seems to be an underlying goal of installing a camera in Jade’s dreambot, which would have allowed Grandpa to enjoy the view, as Dave notes. And I think that message is also alluded to when Jake speaks of snatching pumpkin after pumpkin from Jade – it means he’s stealing ideas, as he does when copying Jade’s idea of gifting bunnies.

I think the idea of being hunted (and having some value extracted from you) is also abstracted into the idea of being objectified – hence the pilfered portraits of blue women being juxtaposed with game trophies. The quote from Grandpa suggesting Jade will someday join their ranks comes off as a sort of threat in that capacity (you too will be a sexy blue girl), which is why Jade calls him a “bag of wind” for that remark, the (sexualized) insertion of pneuma being an ongoing point of objection in Jade’s intro. So while there’s probably some truth to the fear of being hunted, there would still be a sexual dimension to it… and the sexual has a lethal dimension, since “blue girl” means “death”.

Re: your rape circus, in addition to the mutual stuffing you point out, it does strike me as odd that the voice of Grandpa that intimidates Jade nonetheless originates from Jade, since he is dead and silent. So in a sense Jade is herself infusing Grandpa with the pneuma that then impresses itself upon Jade – though if she is working from memory, it would still be the case that Grandpa impressed those words upon Jade prior to the reenactment. The idea that Jade is reenacting her own assault is my best account of Jade going grimbark: her transformation is triggered by the sight of Jake’s banana hammock, after which she becomes an aggressor demanding the production of babies, in sequence paralleled with Jane acting upon Jake in the same capacity.

[end of draft]

Also relevant that Rose going grimdark was a result of her getting “blacked” by a visually white figure, smothered by Doc Scratch’s surprise noodles, needled by a stream of questions. So Grandpa-as-sexual-aggressor being posed in terms of blackness would have a precedent with Scratch…? The intersection of Jade’s (racialized) rejection of circular causality and Caliborn’s discussion of how placing himself as the cornerstone of time loops is central to being a Lord makes me wonder if this is how this discussion connects to Grandpa/Jake using Jade as a Muse, snatching ideas from her dreams and letters, stealing her pumpkins, etc.

[dudesrock]

yeah you know what i'm realizing with the dreambot is that dave was double-right about it being a voyeurbot - not because JADE is watching people in her dreams (which she would do regardless of the bot) but because thanks to the bot any third party can also observe her movements and dreams, from watching her robot fly around to literally looking at the recordings that may not even be uploaded at jade's will. it wasn't built for jade to explore her dreams, it was built for her grandpa to do so.

jade doesn't even seem to use the recordings herself. apparently she organizes the information she learns with colorful finger reminders. the robot is pretty much worthless for her beyond being really cool

[dudesrock]

this also makes the dead grandpa smackdown make more sense imo. she's beating up two thieves at the same time - cd who surreptitiously stole the ring, and grandpa who surreptitiously stole her dreams. both of these taking a piece of prospit to which they are not entitled for themselves, albeit perhaps for some greater purpose on the behalf of their organization, but a pickpocket is a pickpocket and pickpockets get dead-grandpa-smackdowned.

[dudesrock]

with regards to "to what end"

i would say the most concrete example of potential usage lies in the fact that grandpa obtains jade and immediately is granted the inspiration to find and settle bec's island. how did she give this information to him? it's certainly possible that he already knew, since we know the guardians seem to be in the loop on the end of the world and some of what that entails, and that jade's arrival indicated to him that it was go-time on going to the frog temple. but i do wonder if her presence somehow gave him the information in the first place, and jadebot was an attempt to mine more information out of her! someone needs to tell this girl her awesome toy is just a bitcoin machine.

wonder how bec fits into that. if grandpa knew and was waiting for go-time, maybe jade's presence is what appeases the dog allowing people to approach. really don't know what's prognostication or space-instinct with that little beast. feel like i'm lacking information still and don't know what path forward to take with this yet

[lime-bloods]

Hussie's commentary suggests that the dreambot was built "to prevent her from sleep walking" (Book 2, p. 157)... one has to wonder how the hell a dream robot is supposed to stop someone from sleep walking, but that probably isn't really important; what it suggests is that before the dreambot was built, Jade was a sleepwalker. logically I think it follows that she could have been a sleeptalker, too, and that the dreambot was built to replace her sleeptalking with a more reliable stream of information?

[mmmmalo]

is there a convenient way to read through your posts on race in homestuck? i haven’t checked your archive so i apologize if this has been answered before. thanks for your time!

There is now?

The River Under Rose's House (2017): early attempt to link Rose's fear of drowning to motifs of race and sexual violence. Three other posts from that year work as supplements.

Commentary on pages 3296-3320 (2020): intermittent discussion of how personal ignorance is 1. racialized by conflating the absence of Light with "blackness" and 2. phallicized by way of being perceived as an unwelcome intrusion or personal attack.

Blurb on how Lil Cal associates the gaze from the 4th wall with miscegenation (2021): a blurb on how Lil Cal associates the gaze from the 4th wall with miscegenation. Another post corrals some related topics, and more recently it came up

The rest is basically from the past 3 months, highlights are as follows:

Dave throwing a ninja sword at a crow can be read as hurling the n-word at a black person, because "ninja" is a sugar free "n-word". Second half of that link was partly responding to a lime-bloods post wondering how the above might relate to Caliborn's name being treated as an obscenity.

Gamzee manifests for Karkat due to Fresh Prince induced race envy. Follow up post discusses Gamzee’s relationship with blackness a bit.

Horses can function as a euphemism for black people.

John being allergic to the scorn of the peanut gallery is probably why Lord English is partly a Snoop Dogg reference. ( Peanuts > Snoopy )

The phrase "incestuous slurry" (note the inclusion of “slur”) seemingly arises from 1. the encoding of "motherfucker" as black speech and 2. miscegenation being an underlying framework of troll sexuality. Two posts follow up on that.

And just this evening it occurred to me that the covertly obscene Damara being Japanese* might be direct consequence of “ninja” being a sugar free n-word. She is kind of a slur gijinka.

Edit: I should probably include the recent batch of Damara posts: one, two, three

[lime-bloods]

GRIEF

Certainly if humans are a race in constant strife with their parents - brought to physical mock-combat by misunderstandings about things as simple as wizards and harlequins - then it follows that trolls are a species defined by their grief. Being systematically separated from their genetic forebears and forced into the custodianship of hostile monsters by a ruler who resents the very idea that a child might know their parents, scattered into the stars as far away from their biological mother as possible by an absentee queen under the thumb of the evil stepfather Lord English, defines who they are as a people.

So where the humans' conflicts with their denizens represent the strife between themselves and their guardians, the relationship between the trolls and their denizens can represent only that same grief. It's why Karkat believes that HUGE UGLY MONSTERS ARE FOR KILLING, PERIOD, and Vriska thought it was for the best that they all be rid of them as fast as possible. The trolls' denizens are cursed to die for the same reason the lusii are; the denizen is a manifestation of the parent, and to a troll, the parent is dead.

[lime-bloods]

obviously most things on Alternia are designed in a particularly slimy, chitinous way that gives them a uniformly alien (is that oxymoronic?) look, but I'm wondering if it's more than a little conspicuous that a troll's recuperacoon is basically identical to their computer.

I've broken down the basics of Alternian computing before, but the fact that the pus used in their insectoid computers seems to be the same stuff they sleep in has never been able to properly explain itself. the official line is that "the relaxing ooze helps assuage the terrible visions of blood and carnage that plague the dark subconscious of [trollkind]"; but considering Alternia's governing class seem to have a vested interest in giving their subjects nightmares, we have to assume there is some misdirection happening here.

what has freshly occurred to me is that Jade, ostensibly the human with the most troll-like lifestyle, has a computerised bed of her own... and indeed one intended to monitor and affect the way she dreams.

it was already in the back of my mind years ago, writing what probably turned out to be my first ever proper Homestuck analysis, that there were insidious undertones to the fact that Alternia's green slime of patriarchy seeps into every crack, right down to the beds the empire's children sleep in. in Dave's words, "your grandpa was a sick fuck why would he build a voyeurbot for a little girl": it probably goes without saying that the subjugglators are kind of sick fucks for building voyeur puppets for little children too! the puppet as a voyeurbot is a well established tool in Dave's own guardian's repertoire (...I'm just now realising Dave is secretly relating to Jade with that line), and it says a lot that Dirk's ultimate voyeurbot (slash fondlebot) took on a form almost identical to that of Jade's (with Equius even trying a little bit of lowblood-puppeting of his own using another robot of the same type).

it must also be remembered that sopor slime is drugs, drugs is candy, and candy only serves to hide the grisly truth from the partaker. perhaps rather than "assuaging" the horrors of the troll's dark subconscious, being hooked up to the slime merely masks the true nature of what has been placed there...

this brings to mind Karkat's strange moment of seemingly unfounded paranoia about the Viewer, accompanied, in fact, by his own spontaneous voyeuristic fantasies about a certain little girl. the takeaway here is of course that the darkness lurking in the troll subconscious is none other than the Viewer, which is obviously true; all trollkind are merely the pawns of Lord English, the ultimate Reader-Author of their reality. but possibly also implicit is that if the Viewer lurks in the subconscious of every troll, then every troll is, themselves, deep down, a Viewer. which is also literally true! as the trolls watching the humans' game unfold from their meteor laboratory act as yet another of the comic's many audience stand-ins.

or in Persona Alchemy terms... just as the author of Homestuck imbued every character with an aspect of himself, every single troll in Lord English's domain contains a little bit of 'Lord English-ness'. in essence making them their own voyeurs, in the same way Jade is both the voyeurbot and the little girl?

[tomatograter]

This weekend i noticed the first big 10k hits on DJMK were about to hit and that’s kind just kind of crazy. This is the *longest* most viewed thing ive ever written, and i’m really glad people were able to connect to it! thank you all❣️

 Read my fanfic/collage/fanadventure here: AO3

direct shortlink at: tinyurl. com /DJMKch1 ;)

Also, to address a popular question: chapter 8 is currently on the works! but it needs a little more incubating time while i figure the art out. ch11 wraps up the first canto overall and all leading up to it is also being drafted. i’m just an one man show ;Pc ( On the meantime, i will distract you with the fact we have a playlist if you wanted something more: spotify)

[tomatograter]

How careless we are when we’re young!

(from DJMK)

[tomatograter]

Wizard fiction (every time i post them they look a little different and you just have to witness me working out the kinks realtime)

[ Howlstuck ]

[omegapausestuck]

You know what’s fucked up? How John specifically chose to skip out on the meteor clusterfuck so that Jade wouldn’t be alone. then hussie chose to retcon a timeline where Jade was circumstantially alone, again.

[homestuckhomestuckhomestuck]

The book commentary implied he did this because Jade’s ‘theme’ was loneliness, and so ig as a result the narrative had to keep making her alone, but personally the ‘loneliness’ theme in homestuck hit abstractly for me in that I didn’t catch it was supposed to be a theme to begin with dunno, did it hit for anyone else? I remember vaguely the commentary said the fact the kids kept just missing each other act 4ish was because of that theme too

[omegapausestuck]

Yeah I understand….. but Homestuck has a bad habit of introducing themes that never go anywhere. Don’t turn your back on the body? Trauma? Death of the author? I could go on, but I don’t want to. It gives the impression that he just chose to have them be lonely because it felt right to have the characters in anguish—added “drama,” if you will—They really have no sense of purpose, or agency, in their own universe; just because it’s easier to write them that way…

and that just doesn’t seem fair.

[homestuckhomestuckhomestuck]

haha still confused by ‘dont turn your back on the body.’ random analysis: Hussie even set it up in sbahj, but I think that phrase/joke(?) just peaked with murderstuck. maybe a bit too much to call that a theme but i know what u mean. (the stairs joke was basically set up the same way, it just hit better when Hussie memed it- probably worked better because they never implied it was some portent of future events, twas just a meme) 

About the loneliness theme thing- true, it was prob set up because of the drama- (tho we of cours the whole story is set up for drama) I think what u’re telling me is that the lonely theme wasn’t executed well enough that it was noticeably unnatural?- stuck out as ‘eh?’ 

out-of-story level, like if we’re discussing author sincerity, I think hussie came off as sincere when he was describing that theme, as in- looked personal in the commentary. 

In story, I don’t think this theme was done in a way I understand, because I straight up didn’t realize it was there. I’ve seen some people kind of mention it in liveblogs, though, so there were ppl who picked up that theme, but in all I think Jade could have been done better, theme or not. Think he just ran out of time or its just ‘couldve been better’ 

How to solve it tho- It would have been really chaotic if Karkat was randomly thrown in with her huh. No well- Dave might need to be imported to maintain the integrity of gay singularity. kanaya wouldn’t make sense thematically-ish, she’s more tied to karkat or rose. Rose?? Maybe that would be best, ….. (imagine endgame rose/jade hmm) WAIT- it would have been cool if she went on some epic independent journey when on her own, that would have been neat. Would have been crazy on the page count and integrating it into the rest of the ‘endgame,’ maybe. 

Wait, as for destiny freedom, I think that theme was pretty well integrated in hs, personally! Do u mean in terms of like, ending? Think they were running it like author=destiny and character will= freedom. 

Death of the author was very chaotic, and i think the intent was some kind of literal eventuality where the fans wrote the sequel, but how do u mean? (answer at your leisure, seriously, i just wanna…. talk about it with someone!)

[mmmmalo]

This is a bit upstream of the full thread, but I think as far as Jade is concerned, trauma and the death of the author and “don’t turn your back on the body” all link up pretty nicely.

The earliest instance of Jade’s free will conflict is packaged in meta jokes: there’s an interactive flash where we make Jade play the flute (poorly) and she gets so annoyed she considers throwing the flute away. This gets contrasted with a non-interactive flash where Jade plays a kickass bass solo. This 1-2 example is followed by the faux-interactive matching game Jade lets “the reader” play with her memory modus, and “the reader” fucks with her by choosing the wacky dancing fruit instead of the thing she wants. Jade gets annoyed again and takes over, doing it properly. So in Act 3, Jade’s issue with free will is partly set up along this idea of alien powers (ie everyone on this side of the fourth wall) seizing control of her and making her fail.

This leads into death of the author stuff: “another person takes control of me and makes me do/say things I wouldn’t otherwise” is not only a description of “reader”/author commands and narration, it’s a description of the cherubim. Caliborn thrashing their shared room is kind of Calliope’s shitty flute solo: why did you make me do that? The feeling is mutual, and the DOTA scene is one illustration of this: Hussie is dressed like Callie Ohpeee because for Caliborn/Lord English, killing Calliope is the same thing as killing the author, insofar as they both represent this other person that basically lives in your head and seizes control of your body.

Of course, fighting with a voice in the back of your head can make you look like a crazy person, which is what happens to Jade: after another interactive flash, she yells at dead!Grandpa, demanding he stop telling her what to do. Same bit as with the flute and the fruit, but less meta.

Another point of the flute is to associate the notion of command input with Breath. People used to talk about how John getting bossed around all the time was an Heir of Breath thing (taken to mean ‘receives directions’), and that’s basically right, classpect quibbling aside. Jade referring to Grandpa offhand as a “windbag” is one of the various tidbits associating him with all the narrative injunctions. Within this paradigm, Jade killing Grandpa (via Bec) kind of resembles the DOTA, which I think is related to how in the same scene, Jade is getting angry with Tavros’s “jokes” about overriding her will.

But Breath is also the Pneuma, the divine breath that animates otherwise dead matter. Jade singles out negative events as the result of ethereal interference, but the “interference” is the substance of her whole life, it’s all being dictated by someone else. So killing your author kind of has a suicidal dimension to it, insofar as it’s an attempt to snuff out the unwelcome Breath (of Life), like when Aradiabot ripped her heart out because Equius put a chip in it. Toddler!Jade (nearly) shooting herself becomes roughly synonymous with shooting Grandpa, the windbag.

Jade’s also haunted by lightning imagery for similar reasons: as the Short Circuit references communicate, it’s divine spark imagery, life coursing through you whether you like it or not. Jade turning down Ahab’s Crosshairs (lightning gun) gets an undertone of rejecting the gift of life, especially when Kanaya has previously (or will later?? w/e) threatened to derail Rose’s suicide mission by having Eridan blast her. I think this symbolic life-granting holds even when Eridan is literally killing people? So that when Doc Scratch comes in afterward saying “Don’t turn your back on the body” (the bodies might move?? how scary!) it comes across as a sort of ominous distortion of “don’t abandon your body”, “don’t kill yourself”, or as alt-Calliope will later put it, “live”.

I’m leaving stuff out here for brevity and taste but that’s more or less how I see it.

[omegapausestuck]

Absolutely magnificent… Quadruple m, you’ve done it again, you genius bastard.

With the benefit of this insight, though, what do you feel about the thread of Ahab’s Crosshairs immediately becoming defunct after the events of Cascade? I don’t think I’ve seen Jade use her strife specibus ever again. Her overreliance on the powers she borrowed from Becquerel—the literal manifestation of guardianship in the b1 universe—could be interpreted as a departure from this desperate bid for narrative agency. In a way, you could say that she decided to become a prisoner of the narrator INSIDE HER OWN BODY.

Now that I think of it, isn’t that a repeated visual within the epilogues(Read: handing over her own body, her flesh, and her entire force of will to the seat of narrative power named Calliope prime)? It would be incredibly fortuitous, if this turned out to be intentional.

Keep reading

[mmmmalo]

Even though Ahab’s Crosshairs get thrown by the wayside, the spark of life they represented (among other things) continues to be an issue, is the main thing. Like you said, getting possessed by alt-Calliope or mind-controlled by HIC are like hyper literal instances of the same autonomy anxieties that got expressed in the meta jokes of act 3.

An interesting thing about Bec is that he himself can represent the spark/Pneuma/etc. Like, we get a scene where Jade merges her corpse-body with a Bec-spirit, and Jadesprite almost immediately starts talking about how intrinsically miserable her existence is and how she wants to die (which visually would suggest giving up the green ghost she was just instilled with).

Another pertinent thing would be how Bec in some capacity seems to represent the 4th wall itself…? Or like

In the same way that narration can alienate characters from their own thoughts, as though their innermost feelings were dictated, the lens through which we the readers view the story can alienate characters from their own eyes, like they see themselves with our eyes, in the third person. Gamzee calling himself the most important character in Homestuck is a good example of this, it’s his subjective perspective but presented as the objective narration of someone on the other side of the 4th wall (we see Gamzee call himself God shortly afterward). This is part of why Jade’s entry sequence involves being blindfolded and only hitting her target through Bec’s intervention – in a sense, Bec is Jade’s eyes. That Jade is trying to shoot at an effigy of Bec would suggest that she wants to end that mediation and see things for herself…? Which she accomplishes via Jadesprite I guess, and gets an eyeful of Green Sun for the trouble cause it turns out the dog-shaped blinder on her vision had also protected her from things which are painful to behold.

The act of shooting itself also has some sort of place within the vision paradigm, but with eyesight conceived as more of a projector than a camera?? Like sight is a laser beam, shooting light out instead of taking it in. But I never quite got my head wrapped around that one

[mmmmalo]

@dingodad said: book commentary also offers the idea that grandpa set up a carapace community to raise the original roxy mirroring the alpha version’s life very literally

Huh... alright then.

I had a whole thing written out trying to take exception to this, but it is just perfectly situated within the realm of possibility. Forgottenhsfacts proposes Grandpa accessed the Medium from the portal beneath the frog temple (like what Jake uses in Act 6), and sure why not, maybe Grandpa discovered his future manner of entry via Jade's dream bot. Setting up a colony would necessitate doubling back with the carapacians to Roxy's arrival year (or earlier) via one of Skaia's portals, so there'd be two Grandpas wandering around on Earth during those years, but he has enough time loop discipline to march to his death, so that's no biggie... Jade's corpse would be hanging around Earth for like 20 years prior to her arrival? And Jade would have a memory of her Grandpa suddenly aging like 20 years at some point, as the looper replaces the one who goes to the Medium? But again, why not! It works!

I think the only hiccup here is that as long as we're relying on predestined loops, Grandpa could just as easily have learned of a portal below the temple from his own future self, removing any need to peek into Jade's dreams for intel in the first place... Honestly, it'd be funny if Grandpa's economic success were akin to Dave's conquest of LOHACSE, just shameless exploitation of future knowledge. The cursed lore dismisses Grandpa as an idiot and attributes his success to HIC, but whatever, we're already in fanfic mode here. Dave and Grandpa already share the distinction of willfully walking into Jade's accident bullets, why not give them some more parallels?

For real though, that Jake steals ideas was a point of emphasis when his exchanges with Jade came up in Act 6, so erasing Grandpa's reliance upon Jade's visions feel improper somehow, like thematically. I've probably overlooked a solution simpler than the time travel? But idk what

[mmmmalo]

Quick addendum: I originally linked Grandpa to Lord English by analogy, but it would be EXQUISITE if Grandpa literally went back in time on the cusp of the world's end just to exploit the hell out its doomed civilizations, exactly like LE eating universes after* they expire.

[mmmmalo]

u said once that roxys cat symbol is an infantile one can u explain? plus have you read paglias description of the cat in ancient egypt as the emobdied fusion of appolonian (sp?) grace and cythonic mystique i think you would find it very interesting

There’s a pretty good explanation of cats-as-child-symbol in my (somewhat outdated) Openbound post (x), but a shorter version would be...

1. Okay, you know how Gamzee says explanations will steal the magic from his miracles? Or how Caliborn characterizes text as a wall that bars his access to meaning? Or how Jade fantasizes about shedding language and accessing the olfactory bouquet available to wolves? We’re kind of getting at that general sentiment. One metaphorical angle on Lord ENGLISH destroying reality is that LANGUAGE itself is (characterized as) an obstacle to “authentic” experience (and the “authentic” self would otherwise feel it), trapping its speakers in a web of abstractions, with no way to reach the real -- or more insidiously, the lack of access means language has killed reality (and you). This is one reason why Jaspers gets killed by a book -- its a metaphor for the introduction of a prelingual self to language, a violent encounter whereby language devours you and entraps you in its abstract confines. (Which is why when Jaspers’ death is foreshadowed in Act 1, Sassacre’s “daunting text” rips John’s arms off and encases them in a hard-to-access sylladex)

Babies and animals are both romanticized as beings free of language, which I think is why you often see characters’ ideal selves combined with animals -- there’s a sense of having regained access to some primordial joy. (You are the eggshell within which this inner-child-self is encased, so the “birth” of the entombed spirit entails the “death” of one’s current self. Like in Fiduspawn)

2. On a more literal level, I’ve believed for a long time that Mom gave Jaspers an ostentatious burial in order to mourn a child of hers that was stillborn prior to Rose’s arrival, and that her efforts to perfect ectobiology were in part motivated by a desire to reclaim this child. The reading is kind of a patchwork. Jaspers is entombed in a child coffin, Rose calls Jaspers’ speaking style child-like... by themselves, those aren’t much. But insofar as buckets function as a womb symbol, Rose observing that Mom’s bucket is inexplicably empty becomes allegory for infertility. And insofar as the chessboard in Mom’s lab is yet another such symbol, it becomes curious that a dead Jaspers is “born” from it prior to Rose. With those incidents in mind, seeing a panel in which Roxy appears to be tossing a dead cat out a bucket (page 5087) becomes pretty jarring, even if that’s not what’s literally occurring.

Hiveswap seemed to reward this perspective, if obliquely: when Joey tries to combine batteries with the refrigerator, the player receives an anecdote of Roxy, empty liquor bottle in hand, cryptically lamenting that putting a dead battery in the fridge will not recharge it. In another universe, Her Imperious Condescension loses a battery (RIP Ψiioniic) and proceeds to repeatedly attempt to revive her lost people. Suffice it to say (because I don’t want to spend several paragraphs qualifying this with more womb symbols) that this outline of Condy’s story resembles my proposed motivation for Mom’s ectobiology: the restoration of lost children. (Which, in a certain sense, is what all the characters chasing after their crushed child-selves are also doing.) Anyway, the battery flavor-text seems to be a reference to this motif.

The art Dirk draws of Jake eating his and Roxy’s baby (and the confirmation in the credits that the doodled baby truly resembles a JakeRoxy alchemical fusion) offers the suggestion that Mom’s lost boy was fathered by her mentor at Skaianet, Grandpa Harley -- and perhaps eaten by him. Fucked up if true. But insofar as Jake (English!) might himself be considered a face of the big bad, part one of this post becomes helpful here: the JakeRoxy baby being devoured becomes a repetition of Jaspers being Sassacrushed. Another mythic account of the child-self being swallowed by language... at least that’s where I tend to situate myself now. I can never fully abandon the possibility that Grandpa literally ate dead babies, needlessly grotesque as it is, but I’ve had much more success substantiating the metaphorical dimension of Lord English eating ghost kids via the language stuff... But then I notice that Roxy is looking at the baby-eating picture maybe 5 pages before she (appears to) throw the dead cat out of the bucket and I feel on edge again.

I’m not sure where reality stops and metaphor begins here, so this is a region of the story that really tends to activate my paranoia. Sorry for that. I presume that unraveling this will require reorienting myself around a more abstract notion of reproduction for which the drama is allegory, but the task is presently beyond me

[schiachperchten]

mother blue

[mmmmalo]

Occurs, but with Roxy as Sphinx, would the two versions of her in meat and candy, should they ever somehow cross paths, serve as the Riddlegate from Never Ending Story? Well not that they would necessarily have to cross paths.

Actually taking off from the Roxy as John’s Denizen bit, that plus the whole thing with the Southern Oracle (of which Riddlegate is step one) that might fit in with eventual June Egbert? Denizen choice might be dinging off of that if in typically roundabout way?

Atreyu realized he was the reader’s avatar at the Southern Oracle, so if anything that event feels more analogous to the clues that John is hosting Lord English, since Caliborn is partly a caricature of an irate Homestuck reader. (Though since the reader/narrator can represent an alienated aspect of the character, there’s room for this motif to represent a coming-to-terms with oneself, thus June)

I am totally on board with Riddlegate!Roxy though, if only because “cat with wings” is a motif that Mom introduced at Jasper’s mausoleum.

[mmmmalo]

It was always kind of weird that Roxy sleeps in her dreams, and a lot of her snoring noises were comically absurd, but at the point where she puts a winky face in “lol snork ;D” – which taken literally suggests she had one eye open – I got this weird sense like she was sleeping ironically. It’s like Roxy knows she’s being watched, like she’s on stage or something, and decides to ham it up. Which reminds me of the way Roxy responded to her paranoid suspicion that alpha!Rose put booze in the house to test her: she overindulged in the booze. Strange little motif.

I wonder if Roxy’s… confrontational? response to the paranoid feeling of being watched has anything to do with her assertion that the Void will wonk first in a staring contest.

[mmmmalo]

It kind of a half-formed thought, but dovetailing off of the previous mention of candy!Roxy talking about her own addiction recovery through Gamzee, I kind of wonder if Roxy’s conspiratorial winks/wonks have anything to do with the motif of a harlequin with one eye missing.

There’s lines here and there in Candy suggesting that Roxy is ‘terminally capricious’, that she views herself from the other side of the 4th wall, from off-stage, with all the megalomaniacal sense of godhood that carries. To wit:

Directed at John, who thinks he’s the only real person amid the pod people. The video game analogy is straightforward, but you can also read ‘player’ in the sense of ‘actor’. Roxy is less charitable to John on their date at the restaurant, where she talks to John like an uppity marionette that’s going off-script:

Reading ‘dummy’ as ‘puppet’ allows the second quote to double as Roxy again asserting herself as a ‘player’ – as a self-determining agent who is not subject to the narrative’s whims (and if it seems as though this were so, Roxy is only pretending, dummy! She can quit any time she wants!)

The above use of ‘setting’ comes when Roxy decides not to talk about gender, and to commit to the girl presentation she’s got going on. To be clear, she clarifies that the setting she refers to is the Italian restaurant, but when re-contextualized amid other uses of stage language, its as though Roxy’s decided gender exploration doesn’t suit the current play she’s in, so she tucks it away. (This was already latent in Wizardy Herbert, but makes a more blatant appearance in Roxy’s later references to filling out a “woman checklist”)

It’s odd to me to see Roxy’s detached attitude towards reality (to regard her life as a melodrama) attached to her drinking in this way. Gamzee’s own moment of regarding himself as the most important character in Homestuck (which I more or less regard as psychosis) coincided with his withdrawal from sopor slime, rather than ongoing usage… though I guess Roxy kicked off Candy by comparing her own drug burnout to Gamzee’s, so that checks out I suppose.

Confirmation bias speaking, but the use of ‘wonked out’ in this context fits nicely with my opening comments about harlequins – having one eye on either side of the 4th wall, terminally capricious like the clown. (Though not a harlequin, Sollux is another example of this? Hearing voices from beyond is linked thematically to his heterochromia, and the eventually attainment of one-eye-blind and one-eye- seeing comes with a literal burnout that shreds his brain apart?)

But yeah, that’s where I’m at. My basic takeaway is alcohol maybe left Roxy with a rusted thinkpan, and the intimations of meta-textual awareness that surround Roxy are perhaps, on one level at least, a medium for the expression of alcohol’s residual effects on Roxy’s thoughts. Reductive probably, but it’s a start. At the very least, Roxy’s relationship with Gamzee would seem to bear relation to Roxy’s self-appraisal

[mmmmalo]

I usually avoid commenting on the authors because it can lead to the situation with Dirk in Meat, where people look straight past negative aspects of characters and ascribe their flaws to the author. Since the story structures itself around an understanding of the character’s own beliefs surrounding authorship, a good portion of my approach involves suspending belief in the author, even if (or especially when) the story is especially adamant about their existence. This has worked out pretty well for me, I think. Like azdoine was saying, this really suspends (or even undercuts) criticism of the actual author, and kind of snares you in this game of determining whether some terrible thing is being talked about or simply being spoken… so, the satire dilemma again I guess. 

Tangentially, discussion of Homestuck^2 is starting to remind me of some of SMG’s appraisals of the Star Wars prequels, especially when rhetoric about the figure of George Lucas gets involved. Some exerpts:

Keep reading

[mmmmalo]

re: someone else: it was never confirmed that g harley actually RAISED momlal tho. in hiveswap the most we ever know abt them is that he (most likely?) gave her a place to live and hired her to be a babysitter & eventually gave her a job @ skaianet. interesting actually that HS never took the time to expound on this relationship tho even in the (now non-canonical?) skaianet ARG deep lore where we got to learn abt harleyman's life In Depth and all the illegitimate kids he sired

Under a read-more so as not to sour the mood (csa cw)

Keep reading

[azdoine]

hm. wonder if/how Jade’s Iron Man suit (and Lord English’s technicolor terminator coffin) map to the whole motif of imprisonment (& genesis) within created matter

[azdoine]

iron man!jade being a human girl inside of a created metal shell is a literal symbol of the same thing that johnny five abstractly represents, basically? the spark of life simultaneously inflicted upon unliving matter (as a kind of existential violence against both) and imprisoned within that matter. iron man himself (as a literary referent) is unable to REALLY leave his suit because it serves as his life support as well as a mobile artillery platform; the same energy source that powers his armor is also how he preserves his failing body. the animating presence of the soul cannot escape from that which it animates.

(NB: the image of the human in life support exoskeleton lacks the mythic/incestuous pygmalion undertones that can crop up in these lines of thinking… but jade DID still alchemize the iron man dress out of grandpa harley’s things, so???)

otoh the technicolor sarcophagus is almost kind of an inversion of the whole motif, here: the terminator skull is perfectly fine as a time travel joke (i.e. here’s an enemy from the end of history returning to safeguard his own victory), but the actual terminator of the films is an essentially unliving and inhuman thing incarnated within a living human shell, as opposed to the other way around. only organic matter can ferry you through the time gates: you must be this human to ride.

there’s an interesting tension in the technicolor sarcophagus, then: the union, within an ark into the afterlife, of “man interred in matter for the sake of man” and “matter interred in man for the sake of matter”. but maybe I’m reading too much into it.

fun fact: did you know that “sarcophagus” means “flesh eating”? an interesting accoutrement for the man who uses it.

[mmmmalo]

I went to the part of the story where Jade wears the Iron Lass suit to see if I could contribute anything to this (its the conversation where Kanaya explains frog-breeding, just prior to Return to the Core), but had little luck. The only thing that stood out was that replacing Iron Man’s glowing nuclear heart (his spark of life) with the image of Bec seems to reinforce the notion that Bec himself represent the life imposed upon Jade (among other things) – which is part of why the Jadecorpse enlivened by Becsprite begs for death.

My reading of Kanaya as a manifestation in this part of the story was also kind of lacking (I only registered the intimations of foul play that are made more explicit in Return to the Core), so I wanted to give another shot at that. These are basically page-by-page notes for like 30 pages, so don’t feel obligated to go through all of this! It’s a lot. But I’ve bolded what I think are the main insights.

Keep reading

[azdoine]

Maybe its the BBC rape jokes surrounding Rose getting Chaos Dunked, but the combination of Kanaya laughing about “xenocultural inculcation” and Jade asking what it means for Rose to get “blacked out” strike me as more miscegenation humor.

Oh.. that’s what the Duttle’s about, isn’t it. Not-knowing isn’t conceived of as a lack, but as a pillar/tentacle of darkness that corrupts the perfect knowledge the girls presume themselves owed. The Duttle is loaded with BIG BLACK tentacles because the LACK of knowledge (of the furthest ring, of darkness) is also (at times?) conceived as a phallic intrusion – hence Doc Scratch belittling Rose by posing questions that slowly erode her sense that she knows anything. THAT was the rape – every disorienting question was a penetration of darkness.

This is likely the through-line between Kanaya and Jade needling eachother (teehee) with their coy I-Know-Something-You-Don’t-Know schtick and the racial supremacy motifs. Withholding information can be an malicious act (as Rose will accuse Scratch), and that aggression is sexualized/racialized (getting “blacked out”).

I suppose this didn’t dawn on me sooner cause it seems kind of dumb for both knowledge and ignorance to be unwelcome intrusions, but it’s making sense – to view both God’s presence and God’s /absence/ as hostile acts feels distinctly Homestuck. And it allows me to neatly account for a strong counter-argument to my accusations against Grandpa, that Jade was primarily traumatized by his /absence/. Why not both? says this

oh, that’s an interesting framing to take! but - and please forgive me if I’m just relitigating what you already think, or if my input isn’t warranted - I don’t know if these two perspectives on darkness and ignorance are mutually exclusive, or if knowledge and ignorance are both equivalent as forms of violation?

because it’s not having knowledge that is in itself a violation in Homestuck; it’s more that knowledge of a violation is violating, and knowledge of a trauma is traumatizing. in this respect HS is highly Freudian (for lack of a better word?) in its treatment of traumatic fallout: trauma manifests for the victim both by its absence from consciousness (its fundamental unintelligibility in the moment, its unwitting elision from memory) and by its presence (its unwitting sublimation into neuroses, its persistent intrusion and recreation in flashbacks).

so knowledge and ignorance are both a part of this cyclical complex, but they’re only traumatic as subsidiary manifestations of that which is “actually” traumatizing.

(NB: it feels a bit gauche to try and further this lens without doing a longer close read, but while I’m on this tack, I should mention that one of the central challenges of the trauma narrative is, shall we say, language itself! the speech act of testimony ruptures the closed cycle of amnesiac re-enactment by transforming the unintelligible horror into the narratively coherent.

(but this itself is to many people a new form of traumatic threat: by narrating the traumatic, one runs the manifold risks of understanding too much, of accepting the unacceptable, of reconciling with that which should be rejected, of giving voice to the horrifying without also being able to give voice to the horror itself - “there is an absolute obscenity in the very project of understanding.” such sentiments would, I think, shed an important light on the motif of language as an enemy, the fantasy of perfect communication, and the image of Lord English as a trauma manifestation. but I digress.)

conversely, when knowledge and ignorance are themselves contextualized as traumatic, their threat is (sexualized and) arranged in a hierarchical manner, almost as matter of strict power relations; this is established most clearly by Scratch, but also by Dirk (but I repeat myself, ba-dum tsh). while one’s own ignorance is dangerous and a potential site of trauma, it is the knowledge others hold that is so threatening and traumatizing. knowledge is agency, is power, is (sigh) the phallus; as Scratch unites omniscience with sexual threat and absolute control, knowledge is presence and control both, and ignorance is simply the lack of that power.

so the state of knowledge versus ignorance is, essentially, the differentiating factor between the puppeteer and the puppet. knowledge is the hand (and the phallic force of agency) that goes up your puppet ass when you’re a shmuck. it’s not so much that ignorance is the invasion of the big black dick of obfuscation, or even that ignorance is simply a yonic lack on one’s own part - in some sense, it’s both, because the absence of the phallus itself constitutes a kind of presence, but it would be clearer to say instead that ignorance is the situation of oneself as a manipulable puppet, as an existentially (or literally) fuckable vessel for the wills of others, as a dark pocket to be filled.

and likewise, Scratch’s predatory interactions with Rose don’t speak to a symbolic rape by darkness and ignorance, although they do constitute a sexualized trauma and an imposition of ignorance against her; rather, Scratch castrates Rose by forcing her into a position of ultimate ignorance before him, emasculating her of the phallus and abusing her as his puppet both.

[mmmmalo]

I agree with your characterizing Scratch’s questions as castrating Rose (coercing her unto intellectual submission), but I disagree with the excluding “rather”. There’s definitely precedent for their conversation from that perspective, like Eridan’s negs that attempt to delegitimize (and thereby castrate) Rose’s “ludicrous poppycock(!)” by insisting that magic isn’t real. But the Charles Barkley CHAOS DUNK stuff is also a relevant precedent, especially since grimdark!Rose is immediately subjected to a parody the SBaHJ dunking comic, accompanied by Hussie’s talk of ‘indulgent self-inserts’. I’m not sure if the sense of being puppeted is cleanly separable from the sense of sexual violation, metaphorically at least, to the extent that both are presented as states of being totally under another’s power. Though it could just be that I’m bad at separating them, since this is basically the same subject that confuses me about reading Tavros in HS^2 (x).

That said, I should note that Rose is depicted as the one /doing the dunking/ in the SBaHJ reference, and that in response to her escaping from above, the author breaks a ruler. This supports the idea of her being castrated for being uppity, burned for gazing at the sun, while also drawing a parallel between Scratch’s behavior and John policing Rose’s rise to power by anxiously role-playing a return to “normal” gender roles (x). But the subsequent use of “self-insertion” (and WV concurrently standing next to his Skaia model with the broken ruler like he’s about to put it in) again makes me think that whatever is being imposed to put Rose in her place, be it ignorance or gender roles or what have you, the act of imposition (which as you say, castrates) is being phallicized.

Slight detour: I’ve talked about how the Law is that which castrates/self-alienates/mediates (x)(x), but this thread is making me believe that the Gaze is assigned the same function – the red glow of Bro’s omnipresent webcams (Bro’s gaze) becomes the red sun, which presides over Dave’s emasculation, his Oedipal execution before the Law. The Gaze of the Law is presumed to be omniscient, I think, which is why one of our blind seers has miniature red suns for eyes – but while Terezi was burned by light, I think the Gaze operates through darkness as well. The example that comes to mind is in Problem Sleuth: the menacing eye of Fluthlu appears in a fenestrated wall and proceeds to fondle/probe Ace Dick with its tentacles. Ace Dick retreats, the experience apparently bringing back memories of shame as a fat kid. I think the point of the sequence is that Fluthlu’s literal violating tentacles are representative of its hostile gaze, with humiliation (and thereby castration) as the shared effect. I think Scratch’s omniscience grants him a disconcerting ogle that’s apprehended on similar terms, though the medium for communicating the reach of his Gaze is questions instead.

This also becomes relevant to Bec maybe, since he is simultaneously Jade’s “eyes” (her 4th wall), a force deterring her from reaching the frog temple (like AR), and an inner spirit/life that she suspects was cruelly imposed upon her? But I’m starting to confuse myself.