homestuck gradually exaggerating and pushing against gender roles, especially in the nuclear family, is such a fun joke within the comic but also speaks a lot to the kids' struggles.
dad and mom form the groundwork for it. their designs are so archetypically "male and female" it's like looking at a bathroom sign. and then you're like oh, mom has a bronzed vacuum, that's pretty weird. oh, dad has an account on an app entirely dedicated to fatherly figures whose main interests include pipes and fedoras and formalwear and shaving, that's a pretty funny exaggeration of manhood. then you get to bro, who is basically an experiment to see how far you can push the "messy and irresponsible prankster" archetype of the big brother until the audience actually recognizes his actions as abuse and not sibling banter (you can push this incredibly far, it turns out). then you get to the trolls' parents, who are literal animals and monsters. and by the time you reach the alpha kids, 3/4 of them don't even have monster parents around and, for the most part, grew up completely alone. and then there's the whole meteor and ectobiology thing, where none of these characters technically had parents in the first place but still, in a weird way, have relatives...
homestuck gradually warps of the idea of family to the point where it is barely recognizable to the viewer, and even then, you can feel how important family is to these deeply lonely children. in the case of trolls, "true" family (notably, defined by genetic relation) is basically understood by their culture as a fairy tale. despite this, they cling desperately to the razor-thin connections they have to their ancestors, even if those connections lead them down a path of suffering and self-hatred. and even when these kids are completely isolated from "birth", they still manage to repeat the sins of their guardians in a twisted infinite time loop of causality and generational trauma, across timelines and across universes.
amandla
pixelskylines
2087
turnnoffyourmind
gracieabrams
yousharknotpass
tangentwithtanner
