Homestuck^2: Fixing Yiffany’s Origins
So
In my reinvigoration for all things Homestuck and Homestuck adjacent, I’ve been thinking about the one most controversial thing that came out of Homesquared before it got paused, and I think pretty much everyone agrees on that:
Yiffany’s origin story is pretty awful right?
But, there ARE some things that her existence brings up, that are interesting to explore as character arcs on their own. Jade having a child is an immensely interesting story arc to explore, the reasons why she would want a child in the first place, the relationship struggles she’s been having coupled with her lonely isolated childhood leading her to think having a child would solve her continuing loneliness problems? The lengths she would go to in order to have a child that she’s 100% convinced is going to make her not lonely anymore, when frustrating biology problems come up, and the interesting experimental ways she would try to get around that? All of those are super interesting things to explore in an arc for Jade
So, how do we do that without, y’know, all that other terrible stuff that came tacked on with it?
So first, let’s fix the name please, so I don’t have to call her “Jade’s Kid” throughout all of this.
Her name is Annie Harley. She is Jade’s child and only Jade’s child, arguing that it wasn’t infidelity but still giving her Rose’s last name, things don’t work like that. Rose is in no way her parental figure or a part of her life. Also her name is something real and respectable and Annie the closest name with any dignity I could take from her, ugh, canon name, that maintains the kids 5 letter name theme. Motion Carried.
So, now let’s rewind. Why does Annie Harley exist?
So first, all of this stems from the problems Jade’s been having in the present. Where she feels lonely and left out when all her friends paired up without her, and her inexperience in actually forming and maintaining relationships because she was raised by a memory of a dead grandfather and a pet dog, and her current situation where she feels like she can’t form relationships at all no matter how she tries and worse, comparing her situation to that of DaveKat and RoseMary having such good relationships on their own. Stuck feeling somewhere halfway between jealous of them and longing for them.
Neat! Now, let’s dive into how badly that affects her emotionally! And how desperate that might make her to find some solution to that hurtful problem!
Jade decides she wants to have a child because of this, erroneously thinking it would solve her issues with loneliness, but she comes across her first hurdle: She can’t get pregnant.
BUT NOW, It doesn’t have to be because she’s part male dog, but INSTEAD because the merger simply left her dna infertile! Just like how in real life, hybrid animals like Mules and Ligers are infertile because their DNA can only produce malformed nonviable zygotes. Jade, who HAS become a hybrid between incompatible mammals, human and canine, would have the exact same problem, so her own canon doesn’t even make sense in the first place, because she SHOULDN’T have been able to get Rose pregnant regardless, human and canine dna is incompatible in the first place, it cannot pair with anything to make anything, it cannot make zygotes. Adding more human to the mix doesn’t fix that problem. Plus, Jade is only like that because of a magical gameplay mechanic merger, she wasn’t born part canine naturally. Annie being born naturally is impossible. DNA just doesn’t work like that, can’t state that enough.
Now her physical genital configuration doesn’t even matter because she’d be infertile regardless of what equipment she had. Now she could have been trans anyway in an actually tasteful manner. Because it literally wouldn’t matter either way. She could neither get pregnant herself, nor impregnate someone else. So now her being trans is no longer tied up directly in a distasteful plot about her body being the reason for relationship infidelity! What an easy fix!
So now, how DID Jade’s child come to be? And, why would Jade keep it a secret?
Maybe the reason Annie needed to be kept a major secret in the plot, wasn’t because her parent’s treated her existence like an embarrassing joke, OR because of any sort of infidelity on another character’s part.
What if, crazy thought, Annie is a desperately wanted, and genuinely loved child of Jade and has her life and personhood treated absolutely 100% seriously because of it?
What if, Annie had a different dubious origin that Jade herself alone would want to keep secret from everyone, because some part of her still recognized it was partially wrong to have a child in this method, but her desperate desire for a child that would solve all of her problems in one good stroke overrode that. She probably thought she was doing the equivalent of getting three birds with one stone sort of thing.
So Jade never told anyone about Annie’s existence. Partially because she knew it was wrong what she did to make her, and partially because she knew further it would be wrong to forcibly involve other people in her child’s life just because of her origins.
and what if it involved the technology that we know literally all of them have access if they wanted, but for some reason wasn’t considered in Homesquared: Ectobiology
Seriously, ectobiology is a thing that exists that every character has access to, why not use it here if nowhere else?? Infidelity plotlines don’t need to exist in a world where you can manufacture children with machinery.
SO.
What if Jade secretly stole pieces of dna from her different friends, Rose AND Dave, (nothing weird just hair or something), and ectobiologized herself to get pregnant from the combined dna of all three of them, but without their knowledge or consent to do so?
Jade has always been a bit of a scientist, a self-experimenter, so it makes sense she’d be willing to experiment with what was possible with her own body, dealing with the issues of how her body has changed from the dreamself merger as well. Remember how she made the robot dreamself? She’s always experimented and engineered herself in scientific ways. Struggling with the new wrench in her plans that she can't have a child the way she wants to, so it makes sense that she’d think to use the technology at her disposal to solve her own problems by herself. Since, as a loner with a lack of social ability, and from how she was raised, it makes sense she would try to fix her problems on her own. From how she specifically might be jealous of how EASY DaveKat and RoseMary get along, It makes sense that when choosing from pools of DNA to use, she’d pick Rose and Dave, people who are close to her, that she feels close to, that have relationships that she yearns for, that she maybe does unconsciously have feelings for or is just jealous of, and this is her unhealthy way of coping with those feelings.
But, she fails to see that she’s horribly ill-equipped to be a proper parent, again failing to understand that relationships take work to maintain, that love isn’t automatic, but is built. So she falls back on parenting styles that she knows and doesn’t see issues with, the good old Harley tradition of long stretches of abandonment when things get difficult with the occasional re-connection in between.
BUT, this works as a character arc that isn’t just Jade doing something bad, because there remains a genuine argument that Jade wasn’t entirely in the wrong here!
Afterall, every human being on earth C was ectobiologized from the 4 of them’s combined dna, (Roxy, Dirk, Jake and Jane all share their dna too) so this isn’t that different right? Plus, it’s not as if she singled out any one person’s to have a child from, her child has dna from multiple people, herself, Rose and Dave. The only one missing is John, so technically her child has 3/4ths of the only pool of human DNA she could have ever possibly had to begin with anyway. It’s literally as close to pressing a “random” button on their dna as she could have legitimately made it. AND she tried to handle it in a way that she believed was responsible, keep her a secret, don’t suddenly force an involvement in her child’s life upon anyone else, and don’t make it anyone else's problem or responsibility other than her own. AND, since her DNA is infertile, and uniquely incompatible with any living creature, if she wanted to make a family in the future with someone anyway, ectobiology would be her only method to do so anyway.
But in the context of Jade specifically going for Rose and Dave’s dna without their consent, and deciding to avoid John’s DNA as well, to specifically create a person to then have a familial attachment too, is where the messy uncomfortable gray area comes into view for all them, because the real life equivalent is still Jade doing something incredibly weird and invasive, and still her cherry picking the familial attachments her child might have without those people’s consent, even if just unconsciously. Like, we don’t have ectobiology, but real people in our world have definitely done fucked up things like steal people’s used condoms in order to impregnate themselves without other people’s knowledge. Jade’s just done a much less fucked up and invasive, and arguably a much more justifiable, version of that when you think about it.
Now you have a great reason for Jade to keep Annie a secret, the reveal would still be a sudden shocking twist that’s immediately understandable how and why it happened for the reader, AND the reader would immediately understand how and why revealing that secret could cause conflicts in the relationships Jade has with her friends, and cause problems inside of the relationships themselves as they disagree and argue over how to handle what Jade did, without doing anything distasteful to those character’s pre-existing relationships when Annie is suddenly revealed to everyone! And HOW she was kept secret all this time is a lot more believable because now it's only Jade who knows, who has no partner to notice what's up, and who has already been established as living her own life distant from her friends. She can quite easily just not visit as often for a bit, maybe a year or so, the easiest kept secret ever.
Now you have free reign to delve into all the conflicts and questions and theoreticals Annie’s existence would cause in their friend group with nothing distasteful happening.
It would be a genuine shocking twist that’s both in character for them all AND something the reader would both neither expect to happen, but could immediately understand how and why it would happen from Jade’s point of view.
As for how they affect the rest of the characters, it simply stems from them all being unsure of how to handle and interact with Jade’s sudden kid thats has existed for a long time already, knowing she was made partially from their DNA, but without their consent, but also cognizant that it wasn’t Annie’s fault what happened either, it’s Jade’s fault.
Rose still has emotional hang ups from her own childhood where her mother was emotionally distant from her growing up. Now, being aware of Annie and how Jade went about raising her, with Jade doing the tried and true method of loving close parent when it’s easy, emotionally distant parent when it’s hard, leaving Annie alone for long stretches of time, because that’s how her grandfather raised her (and Jade doesn’t see anything wrong with that/Hasn’t figured out her real problems yet) AND knowing that Rose and Annie share a familial relationship in their dna, does Rose feel a responsibility to be a better mother figure to this child than Jade currently is being? Or since she never knew or consented to her existence, will she feel guilty also being emotionally distant to Annie from now on? It’s not like Annie expects any of them to be familiar with them in the first either right? And Annie’s already a teen, is that an excuse for it being too late to have a relationship with her now, or is that her just looking for an easy way out of the situation? She’ll have to struggle with her own reasons for reaching out to Annie or not.
Dave has hang-ups about what it means to raise a kid too, obviously, it’s a can of worms he’s halfway opened but hasn’t fully delved into. But more likely is that he would have issues with the messy emotional relationship history between himself Jade and Karkat, would he view this as some underhanded attempt of Jade’s to insert herself into Dave and Karkat’s lives? (Even though that was obviously never her intent, she made the choice to keep her kid a secret from them all and become a mother alone specifically to avoid this) Would he feel a similar uncertainty as to how he views himself as related to the child now that the secret’s out in the open? A Father? An Uncle? Nothing to do with him?
How do Karkat and Kanaya see it? Technically, it’s very similar to how a Mother Grub takes DNA from the populace to create new grubs that the ancestors have nothing to do with, and yes they take the DNA from trolls who are in mated pairs, but in the comic it was something trolls were forced to do under threat of culling as well, so DNA donation was not always something consented to per se in their culture either, and that was somewhat normalized for them.
Definitely would view it as odd for a human to do, but I can easily see Kanaya and Karkat feeling less disturbed by what Jade did than Rose and Dave. Either way, they don’t necessarily consider a sharing of DNA to be an indication of family responsibility either. Easily leading to some realistic tension and disagreements for how each person in the relationship is either comfortable or not comfortable with this. Perhaps Rose and Karkat are the ones that feel more emotionally hung up about Jade’s kid, while Kanaya and Dave are more chill and less perturbed. The different directions you could take this are very interesting, because it’s also a clear metaphor for the differences between Human and Troll society. Because in essence, Jade is a human who procreated in a very “Troll” way.
But the true psychological mess here is with Jade, who, due to her being raised basically without a family, without a parent, and never coming to see how that was abnormal or may have adversely affected her emotional and social development, now struggles with familial relationships exactly as predicted. Which now affects how she handles relationships in the present. Not understanding that they take effort, that they don’t just automatically exist because you share blood, like her grandfather and her.
Because underneath it all, Jade still mentally struggles with this feeling of loneliness that she’s had all her life, that maybe she never really recognized until she started living together in a society full of people, all getting together, her friends getting close, and forming relationships without her. Once again leaving her isolated and alone, and not understanding why, maybe feeling jealous of Rose and Dave specifically because of the happy stable relationships they've formed with Kanaya and Karkat.
So, when she continuously fails to hold a stable romantic relationship with anyone, sees everyone drifting away from, she thinks the only solution to her problem is to have a child, because she never figured out that maybe her grandfather didn’t actually love her, and she was alone because he abandoned her, and she just thinks that what a normal loving family is like. Her lack of social ability to get close to anyone then perpetuates itself, because if she never opens up to anyone about this, how would anyone even know that was the core of her issues in the first place?
So she has a kid, thinking it will fix everything, and then she STILL doesn’t understand why she’s not getting along very well with her own kid, who isn’t being raised isolated from society like she was, but IS being raised somewhat distantly from her mother. She doesn’t understand Why it hasn’t fixed anything she thought having a child would fix.
Because Jade still hasn’t figured out how to properly handle social and relationship problems, having a kid didn’t magically fix that, so she falls back into comfortable and predictable patterns. Feeling that when things aren’t working and all they do is argue, is for them to be alone from each other for a while to cool off and come back when they feel better. But “Awhile” from Jade’s perspective is just too long for a kid’s. Leading to her kid feeling abandoned at times and Jade having unearned closeness with her at other times. Leading to an overall loving but strained relationship that they both struggle to make feel like a genuine loving mother-daughter relationship.
So then, what would I change about how it’s revealed?
As in this method, Jade raises her own daughter while keeping her a secret, of course she does, she loves her and Annie isn’t some terrible awful bad taste joke.
Except in Jane’s corporate world, nothing is a secret forever, so of course she figures out what Jade did, and how horrified and shocked and disgusted she would be by it! She is partially justified in feeling that way about Jade, because from one standpoint, Jade is neglecting her daughter by abandoning her for long stretches of time and so far is not showing that she’s a great parent for Annie. Jane obviously thinks she can do much better, and justifies herself kidnapping Annie as the right thing to do for that reason, it being for her own good. Seeing herself as basically child services rescuing a poor neglected child in this scenario. Except it’s twisted by Jane being disgusted by the circumstances of Annie’s birth. She’s not the only one to see the similarities to troll reproduction, something Jane is canonically disgusted by, and therefore views her and treats her as a kind of subhuman abomination, letting Annie and Jane retain their mutually antagonistic positions in the plot, as mostly the same as it was.
If Jake knows about Annie, then he might justify it by seeing the similarities to how his grandmother (and alternate version of Jade herself) raised and ultimately abandoned him when he was young, but he can remain ignorant of Annie to make things cleaner also. Plus I would definitely make Annie’s kidnapping by Jane a much MUCH more recent event in this new scenario. Annie has lived under Jane’s rule for like, a year at most I’d say. Jane’s in full swing of her campaign, when she discovers Jade’s secret, and shocked and appalled by the whole situation, but also desperate to keep the whole thing under wraps, kidnaps Annie to “raise her properly” while also keeping her hidden away from everyone. Jade doesn’t notice right away, because Jane happened to kidnap Annie right after one of Jade’s “yeah parenting is hard, ima peace out for a while” moments. And it’s just been a year because Annie is a teen, much more able to take care of herself than when she was a younger child, maybe they had a bigger argument than usual about freedom and independence, and time is hard to figure for immortals who’ve lived thousands of years, maybe Jade didn’t intend to have been gone that long until oops Jane reveals she’s kidnapped Annie, and has had her kidnapped for a long while, queue the tears and guilt and crying from Jade, who would feel immensely guilty, and then revealing Annie to the others in desperation to fix that problem and save Annie.
Then, her kidnapping would then actually be a sudden and emotionally devastating event for Jade when she realizes how long it took her to realize Annie had been kidnapped, and gives a length of time for Annie and Jane to form a strongly contentious enough relationship to make their interactions make sense too
It’s such a small change in the grand scheme of things, but it vastly improves almost everything about it I think.
So, thoughts?
Do you think this really fixes anything, or just more solely aims the fault on just Jade instead of spread between Rose and Jade? I certainly think it’s a much more believable route for the characters to take, especially Jade, because maybe she didn’t realize it was a fucked up thing to do, with how isolated her childhood was, that takes advantage of the fact that there’s a very easily justifiable method to do something arguably a bit fucked up that leaves things in a wonderfully messy grey area, without directly shitting over any previously established character or relationship.
This is just how I would fix this character anyway, I think it would be much more in character for the characters to do things like this, but still be in line with the plot of homesquared without derailing what they were trying to go for, and a clean way to explore the psychological mess that would allow events to happen in this way
PLUS think of the Symbolism!!
Jade Harley Witch of Space would have LITERALLY gone through a Virgin Birth with this method and once again we would have a Space Player referencing the Virgin Mary symbolism of self-procreation that was baked into sburb in the first place
The gnostic references! Jade as Sophia “improperly” reproducing to give birth to a figure that was considered wrong and strange by outsiders, Annie as brand new Demiurge, to continue the creation cycle of SBURB as one of the new players in a brand new game!
the wasted potential of it all!
Now I’m actually upset that events DIDN’T happen like this lol
