#a6i3

[cellberry]

Best costume party ever!

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I’ve been thinking about Limebloods again, and it occurs to me that the limeblood genocide occurs only in the universe where Lord English has influence. It may be that, rather than being wiped out for being particularly powerful, they were wiped out because Caliborn didn’t like the fact that there were trolls running around with his sister’s blood color. 

It’s sort of implied that Karkat and Kankri are mutant limebloods, what with their symbol (cancer) coming between gemini and leo, and the fact they appear among the 12 trolls instead of a limeblood, which suggests that maybe their mutation could have been at the influence of caliborn somehow, replacing lime with red like he did when he killed his sister.

[acearadiamegido]

THERE SHE IS MY PERFECT GIRL

[onebillionghosts]

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

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[A6I3] Kankri 3

As we’ve gone on, Kankri has often closed his eyes while speaking, and it is here, as his speech expands into unreadable text, that we see a little character thing that has stuck in my brain since I saw it, this frame where he opens one eye to make sure that you’re still paying attention before resuming his lecture. It’s such a fascinating bit of body language because it says so much about him.

By closing his eyes, he is essentially preventing himself from taking in any input from his conversation partner. He is not listening, he is not reading Karkat’s body language, he is in fact preventing himself from doing so. And yet he wants an audience. He wants Karkat to listen to him, even though he doesn’t want to listen to Karkat.

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[A6I3] Latula 2

girl got hands, huh...

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[A6I3] Kankri 2

I fell into anti-SJW tumblr in 2012. It’s a long ugly story I won’t go into, but I bring it up because I remember what parodies of SJWs looked like, and this lacked an element which the parodies I saw near-universally had: baselessness. The core emotional center of hatred of SJWs was a complete denial that complaints about race, gender, and sexuality issues could possibly be legitimate. These libs are whining about nothing. That sort of shit. And so when Kankri brings up some facts about Beforan society which are legitimately problems, the power dynamics of centuries old elites and short lived lowbloods, the slurification of low status identities, the troll equivalent of racial microaggressions, it does not strike me as a straightforward mean spirited parody.

But of course, we see that Kankri is not a good social justice advocate, or at least a naive one. He is very interested in his own ideas about activism, to the point where he cannot engage with the Sufferer’s direct action and political violence. This is where a lot of people probably tune out though.

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[A6I3] Kankri Vantas 1

earlier in this flash, Kankri Vantas has been mentioned. So far, Meenah seems to have a poor opinion of him, calling him ‘that glubbin nerd’, and Dave’s dialog suggests that he’s a wordy sort of person.

Kankri is not what he appears to be. At the start, he seems like a caricature of a tumblr social justice warrior, as they were derisively called at the time (woke had yet to become a ubiquitous word). A lot of people started encountering this sort of thing for the first time back in 2012, and the backlash ranged from the occasional potshot to the sort of vitriolic hatred that was so massively overblown that it was weird even to a lot of people who dismissed SJWs. At the time, I bet a lot of folk would have seen this guy that way, and either laugh ‘along’ with Hussie, or feel as though Hussie was mischaracterizing online social justice.

But Kankri is not really just a caricature of this phenomenon, as we will see. I admit I kind of didn’t engage with Kankri much the first time I read this, and so reading it now, I find him a lot more interesting than I did.