#east mapping

[mmmmalo]

Very much liked the Phoenician Scheme.

Visuals were great as usual but predictably I'm mainly latching onto the rhyme between the small Egyptian funerary urns and the many hand grenades being passed around -- between this implicit association of THE ORIENT and DEADLY EXPLOSIONS, the plane bombings, the revolutionary militia, and the symbolic destruction of a public works project by Benedict Cumberbatch and his "Biblical" beard, I'm gathering that the phrase "Phoenician Scheme" is probably a cheeky euphemism for "Terrorist Plot" on some level. Feels like a return to the political intrigue of Isle of Dogs, where Anderson was messing around with media distortion (e.g. the reporter's blond afro echoes the yellow bead of wasabi poison that kills Science) and vaccine paranoia (e.g. a brief joke about the dog flu vaccine doubling as forced sterilization)...

Zsa Zsa's numerous fiery flight-based deaths/rebirths also lend themselves to reading "Phoenician" as "Phoenix-like", but I think that adds to the above: his ultimate decision to forego his personal stake in the (earthly) utopian project in order to ensure its success strikes me as a sympathetic depiction of the logic of a suicide attack. Which would give another edge to Zsa Zsa's increasingly urgent reflections on the possibility of afterlife... the suicide attack was also an implicit motif in Isle of Dogs (e.g. Spots' false-tooth missiles being an aggressive variation on a cyanide capsule concealed in one's mouth), so the motif wouldn't be new to Anderson's work.

A while back I had hit a wall wrt misrepresentations of the middle east in Homestuck, so it was a pleasant surprise that the Phoenician Scheme seemed to be conceived on a similar basis. Ideally Anderson's methods will make it easier to discern Hussie's.

[mmmmalo]

did you ever analyze spades slick's terrier fetish, and how that might make the bec noir transformation kind of auto-erotic? i guess that's just more death = sex stuff but maybe there's more to it than that

I think it's been mentioned in passing, but it hasn't been a point of focus. The last time Terrier Fancy came up was when I suggested that HB's heart fetish (drooling over humps and tails) disguised a camel fetish -- Slick's open bestiality gave more credence to the idea of secret, as-of-yet-unknown bestialities, I thought.

On a pun level I guess I'm somewhat interested in the proximity of "terrier" to "terror" -- when Homestuck's interest in American hate speech made me start looking for rhetoric owed to the war on terror, Bec Noir's teleportation murders were the first thing that came to mind as a possible representation of the fear of sudden, random violence that seized the country. Bombing Jane's tower with the explicit intent of sending a message of fear to Prospit also screams TERROR ATTACK. But even with that in mind, I haven't found like, a general linkage between dogs and terrorism motifs that might lead me to resolutely regard the terrier/terror thing as deliberate -- at most I might start privately referring to Bec Noir as a terrierist.

[mmmmalo]

Learned from a Japanese novel I'm reading that a dew drop hanging from a blade of grass, ready to fall at any moment, is a popular metaphor for life in all its transience within Buddhist thought -- or at least it was at the time of the Gempei wars. This probably accounts for why the Life player Feferi got situated in the Land of Dew and Glass, fudging the L/R distinction in the last word. The Buddhist iconography is consistent with Feferi weilding a vajra (her double trident) and her tiara's invocation of the 3rd eye -- she is swimming in the Eastern spiritualities

[mmmmalo]

You talk about mummies quite a bit and I don’t feel as though I’ve read enough of your east-mapping stuff to get whatever points are being made here so I bring you these:

 On page 695, Tavvy leaves a bag of trail mix for Vrissy and Harry and tells them not to pick the raisins out because they’re healthy. I’m pretty sure this is supposed to be a mummy joke; since raisins are the preserved dehydrated remains of grapes, and his claim that they’re healthy seems like a reference to Europeans eating mummies for “health benefits”. The next page has Harry chewing, so he’s (presumably) eating the mummy. My first thought was that this was about Alt Callie eating LE's corpse but I don't know if LE counts as a mummy or not

And I've no clue if you've considered this already but I think ‘hook up’ / ‘off the hook’ is sometimes used as a mummy joke via reference to the brain being hooked out from the nose. On 4488 Roxy says “its not like im lobbyin for you to hook me up with a whole mess of fuckin babbies”, like she’s lobbyin for him to make her a mummy. It gets brought up alongside sweet stuff too sometimes e.g. “your gooberish ways are gonna land you in a jam and i know im going to have to get you off the hook” on 1662 and Vrissy’s “I TOLD you my moms were going to Hook Me The Fuck Up with a sweet milit8ry commission!” in Candy 34

I'm not really persuaded by the hook reading -- focusing on the word hook and teasing out subtleties of its usage seems potentially worthwhile, but would want a more direct reference to brain removal before I accepted the mummification angle... but the raisin thing kind of makes sense to me, even if I can't tell what it would say about Tavvy. It resonates with the mummy stuff I've picked up on:

1. Lord English is definitely a mummy -- the sarcophagus ("flesh eater") that he travels in is called the Cairo Overcoat, and Jake's wall has two posters for the Mummy films next to the Incredible Hulk poster to get the images nice and mingled. I also suspect the cherub diet of meat and candy is itself a reference to mellification, the process of embalming corpses with honey: Jake calls himself a "mellifluous old chap" in the Epilogues and says his gyrations awaken people's hunger like "pouring butter on bacon", invoking candied meat to outline his desirability.

2. Lord English's first words "GIRL. YOU THERE, GIRL." are an echo of WV's first words "BOY. YOU THERE BOY." They have several parallel but the pertinent one here is that WV is the story's first mummy, visually speaking. The exiles wander the desert in bandage-like shrouds: mummy imagery. By my reckoning, mummies are here acting as an Orientalist symbol of the Middle East, giving us an early hint that the apocalypse is politicized along racial lines, much like WV's chess game where Black mates White (causing Brown to erupt from a Pink can). The American suburb is bombed and replaced by Arabian dunes.

3. Back to mellified flesh: ectoslime seems to basically be the same thing. Rose travels through the mummified Jaspers' crypt to reach Mom's lab, whereupon a. she is able to boil her beloved cat down to a candy green essence and b. a mutant cat arisen from that essence emerged from a teapot (the same teapot that Death used in Problem Sleuth). This abstracted suggestion of liquid cat being poured out a teapot points us back to the mummy WV, who straight up ate the ectoslime. "Vodka Mutini" was implicated as a drink before he was named, and Roxy bottling cat slime much later just returns us to an established image of consuming the candied flesh of the dead.

The suggestion that Mom might've been imbibing cat slime could lead to several conclusions. Maybe Nepeta (who gets a planet of teapots and sugarcubes) pursuing the Fountain of Cute with her cat was a tipoff, and Mom is drinking dead kittens in a bid to preserve her youth? This would resonate with the "health benefits" of raisin/mummy consumption and further connect Mom to her life-extending doppelganger HIC. Metaphorically, it might be taken as a extreme example of Mom being Tipsy on Gnostalgia, drunk on an artifact of a lost past, mourning what is gone and trying desperately to unite with it again. Maybe since Ghostbusters is called manbro bukkake theater all this ominous hoohaw around slime consumption amounts to elaborate cocksucking jokes. The possibilities dazzle

[mmmmalo]

Ayy Homestuck website reopens tomorrows it seems like

[mmmmalo]

Occured to me that people have probably studied Saw in relation to terrorism. Ran a search and was promptly rewarded with a journal article on the topic that I will read later, but the abstract alone is pretty juicy: "The article analyses the reasons for the popularity of the Saw films in a post-9/11 context, concentrating in particular on the perverse pleasure American audiences derive from the franchise's suggestion that terror is a self-imposed punishment that takes place in highly scripted situations designed to reveal moral strength, rather than a threatening force imposed from the outside, seemingly at random and with no warning."

[mmmmalo]

Muslim engagement with Buddhism, however, was not limited to theological and historical works. Islamic architecture derived inspiration from and appropriated localized Buddhist forms across Asia. And in opposition to Islam's well-known iconoclasm, an extensive Muslim trade in Buddhist icons flourished through the tenth century. Indeed, over time the term bot (idol, presumably deriving from Buddha) lost its religious significance and became a clichéd metaphor of idealized beauty in Persian poetry.

[mmmmalo]