Hi, and welcome. Almost completely Homestuck almost all of the time! Don't be afraid to talk to me. I'm up for all kinds of conversation. There maybe snippets of fic from time to time, but don't get your hopes up.
I will never be over or stop thinking about Karkat eating birds. It was such a brief little moment. Its never explained. No one ever comments on it or sees it in canon. Just a boy and his raw unplucked hummingbirds over a roaring fire immediately after being ejected from a 3 year meteor trip.
Forget literally any other Homestuck character being feral. Karkat Vantas will see a rat, ask if anyone will eat that, and not wait for an answer. Karkat would just eat dog food if an option.
when i was 15 i was at the mall with my dad and i realized i’d missed an appointment with my therapist and cried. and then i saw someone in a full karkat cosplay despite there being no cons or meetups in the area
In celebration of making this blog for general doodles instead of just Homestuck doodles, have some more Homestuck!!
This is a long overdue thankyou to rosencrantz-minus-guildenstern for giving me this Erisol!scalemate [x] [x] IloveitsomuchI’msqueezingitrightnowGHHH<333
Nepeta is dressed up as her own OC which is a zebra that was raised by lions because why not
gamzee kills people because he is trying to spoil the show; he's going off script because he wants to be written out.
before murderstuck, gamzee has no idea that he is a clown. sure, he anoints his face with greasepaint, rides a unicycle, and juggles, but these are serious religious sacraments to him. and, sure, sometimes he trips on his giant floppy shoes and lands face first in a pie, but that's just being blessed with a miracle, because he was just thinking about pie. and, sure, sometimes his friends say things like "HEY ASSHOLE. CLOWN ASSHOLE. YOU WORSHIP A CLOWN RELIGXON. FOR CLOWNS." to him, but he's too zonked on sopor slime to extract any meaning from it.
when gamzee sees the ICP miracles video, he's too sober to dismiss it as a mere coincidence; for once, he gets the joke, and realises that he was the butt of the joke the whole time. he understands that every time he fell face first in a pie, it was the work of an unsen riddler. he grasps that he is, in a cosmic sense, a clown, and hates it.
the next time the curtain rises and hussie says "everyone look! he's about to do something stupid!" gamzee goes shithive maggots and starts mauling his friends and fondling corpses; every time hussie says "don't worry, folks, he can't hear us making fun of him! everyone point and laugh!" gamzee gets angrier. that's what the "are you next?" bit is about - gamzee is aware of, and hates, the audience.
when the murder spree is over, gamzee's beatific grin returns; no longer a look of blank ignorance, but a knowing smirk. he's successfully ruined his character forever - no one wants to see him and no one thinks he's funny. hussie seems to say: jesus you are such a shitty clown. and gamzee's impassive face seems to say: i know.
gamzee refuses to clown out of spite, and hussie refuses to remove gamzee from the story out of spite. it's a committed relationship of reciprocal, mutual antagonism. what i'm saying is that hussie and gamzee ar
Granted the possibility that Eridan, Vriska and Aradia could be friends, by extension, could Eridan have the possibility to become friends with Tavros?
Unfortunately, no 😔 and what it comes down to is this: Eridan is REALLY STRESSFUL to be around if you aren't Karkat (even for people who like him, which is why such an important quality in his platonic friend group is an ability to set and maintain hard boundaries), and Tavros is REALLY BAD at dealing with stress.
Tavros often gets mischaracterized as being really sweet and kind, and I think that's a little south of where he actually is. His main character trait is avoidance, not acceptance. When the going gets tough, Tavros gets going, either physically (leaving Vriska to bleed out, or ghosting Gamzee after being put off by his offer to make out a little, or blocking Dave after getting scared by his sexual remarks) or mentally (his reliance on his imaginary friend, and the way he turns to them for comfort while being tormented by Vriska). He doesn't actually LIKE Vriska at all, and is actually pretty vocal about DISliking her, but he's too afraid of real confrontation to actually mount a resistance until well after it's too late, resulting in his death.
He's still a lot nicer than most of the trolls, but it's a low bar. And he deserved to be treated better, but that's also all of them. Let's not forget that once he really grows a spine after being combined with Vriska for a little bit, he flips her off. Even then, however, his response to things he doesn't like is still, like. Leaving. Growing a spine just lets him actually do that, instead of meekly expressing that he would like to, and then getting bullied into not.
And Eridan is just stressful to be around. He's basically a weeping geyser of emotional sincerity and neediness 24/7. Even the people in his life that like him need to set and maintain hard boundaries with him so they don't exhaust themselves, and this is even true of his romantic interests (with the exception of Karkat). Even Roxy gets stressed by him, even if it's good stress (excitement, fun).
And the thing is, even at his absolute best, most therapized, Eridan is still going to be the team's Murder Advocate. More intimately than anybody else, he understands the connection between sacrifice, duty, and the greater good. A lot of people seem to think Eridan's ultimate character arc should lead to him refuting violence, but I disagree; there are times where violence, and even murder, are necessary (for an easy example, killing Condy, and for a very personal example, killing lusii/trolls so his species/friends could stay alive). He's the teammate that reminds the rest of the team that violence and murder are viable, and sometimes the only, option; who offers to do the dirty work himself and shoulder that burden; and who has a powerful driving force of duty, responsibility, and - that most hopeful of qualities - CONVICTION.
His character arc doesn't lead to him refuting his prior beliefs, but gaining clarity on them: exactly what he believes in and why, disentangling it from his shitty society and the expectations it placed upon him. This inevitably leads to him having a very strong personality that clashes with a lot of his teammates, even post-character development, and unfortunately, Tavros is one of them.
So if we're talking Tavros before he grows a spine - they would definitely not be friends. Eridan would be able to trap Tavros into conversation, but if Tavros already doesn't like Vriska for being an asshole with empathy problems, there's no way he'd like Eridan, who's that turned up to eleven. I mean, let's be real, do you think Eridan "refuses to have fun and is also a hipster and also phrases things in a hostile and aggressive way as a default" Ampora would not wind up 1) insulting fiduspawn, 2) insulting tinkerbull/bringing up that he kills lusii regularly and that Tavros is really lucky tinkerbull is so small because it made them not a target, and/or 3) insulting Tavros for his spinelessness in an effort to pitch flirt, or even just as a factual observation?
And if we're talking Tavros after he grows a spine, all that would change is that he'd voice outright that he doesn't really like Eridan and doesn't want to talk to him. And then leave, probably.
And that'd be a problem for Eridan, before or after his character development, because he desperately craves attention, and Tavros's whole thing is avoiding the stuff he doesn't like. This is also why he wouldn't get along particularly well with people like Sollux or Equius; they don't really give him attention, good OR bad, and either tell him to fuck off, or fuck off themselves. Let's remember how Vriska ghosting him on accident led to him having an anxiety episode where he beats himself up for being SO STUPID!!!!!!! People who don't really like him and simply withhold attention from him are the people he feels the worst interacting with.
And that's BEFORE Gamzee gets added to the mix LOL
I've been thinking about how to articulate a thought I had about a possible Watsonian/non-diegetic reading of Eridan's Trollian handle, caligulasAquarium, in response to a post of @mmmmalo's, and I think I've got it.
Ok So: the popular perception of Caligula is as a "Mad Emperor". One of the points used in this depiction is his "War on the Sea", which is taken as obvsl absurd and empty and irrational(and possibly hubristic). Eridan chooses to call himself "caligulasAquarium" and he lives in a wrecked ship(a feature commonly put in aquariums)... on the surface.
So like: maybe the title is meant to be taken by the audience as ironic. Eridan's claim to an "Aquarium" is as absurd and empty and irrational as Caligula's claim to have warred upon the sea(in the common understanding of those events; as a matter of history this seems to be a Telephone distortion, from the sources I can find).
A few more points that have occurred to me since I started writing this:
Caligula "Made War on the Sea"; Eridan wants to "Make War on the Surface" by Killing All Landwellers, carrying forward the themes of inversion btwn Alternia and Earth.
Also: "Kill All Landwellers", "Kill All Humans": he's lampshading common evil-alien-overlord tropes
...Which in itself is sort of dunking on HIM, since Eridan is nobody's overlord he's just some GUY. Like: Yes, he's "Nobility" due to blood-caste, but he has no influence, no power, no RESPECT from anyone we meet, no friendships let alone alliances with other socially powerful individuals(other than Feferi, who seems to have foresworn all that to monastically care for G'lybgolyb) that he could USE to have influence; he's just a loner with his grand-dad's gun and allot of pretension.
...which you could argue furthers his parody of USian internet white-supremacists? Like: He is THEM: a gun-humping loner who only feels comfortable talking to the people he claims to hate, with no idea how unpleasant he makes himself to interact with, and even less interest in introspection or self-awareness, fetishizing past genocides as a way to claim for himself a "Glorious Past" he had nothing to do with.
As Feferi(and possibly other characters I'm forgetting) point out, Eridan's ambition to Kill All Landwellers is more than a little absurd. He's never really DONE anything to plan or prepare for it, and aside from Fef he exclusively hangs out with and befriends Landwellers, as well as LIVING ON LAND(well: a sandbar or reef). This could be taken as furthering the Caligula "War on the Sea" parallel.
Expanding on the last: Caligula, THE EMPEROR OF ROME and Grandest of Nepo-babies, was rather notably disdainful of and hostile towards the Roman nobility and inherited wealth/rank. This connects to Eridan in two ways I can think of: 1) his avoidance of other seadwellers, and 2) his philosophical hostility to landdwellers while Being, in practice, A Landweller. Basically: both Hate things about themselves shared by others.
Reinforcing #3: the choice of Caligula, a Troll-Emperor. Again: Eridan is Just Some Guy; he does not command armies, he does not command society, he can't even command Equius, who GETS OFF ON being ordered around. This is Pretension.
...which, I guess, you could connect AGAIN back to Caligula via the popular memory of him wanting to be treated "As A God", but it should be noted that 1)everyone who wrote anything about him hated the guy and was explicitly dunking on him, so we don't know how accurate these charges are, and 2)in the Roman context, while legal apotheosis was reserved for after death, imperial Divinity was already de facto given that sacrifices and prayers to the Emperor's health and success were legally mandated civic religious duties, AND 3)that classical Greeks and Romans, contra the Abrahimic societies which would later create this popular memory, considered apotheosis a real possibility for notable individuals.
