Ok well now I'm 3/4 of the way through Candy, really got sucked in, I suppose it helped that I didn't feel much obligation to be doing anything else today since the main objective was to just avoid breathing in outside air. Air quality's allegedly gotten up to 303 "Hazardous" around here and it's expected that tomorrow will be bad too; I really wish I'd gone to the grocery store yesterday when I had the chance.
Anyway, I think I like Candy? Like, it's engaging at least. It's hard to know whether I think it's "good" or not, that's a really complicated question and one I even struggled to answer about original Homestuck when I first read it. I suppose right now I'm just really resonating with how depressing it is. And like, the prose is good. It's a book, I've missed books. I really don't have it in me to be mad about things that I may or may not later perceive as character assassination, because I already used up all my mad feelings thinking that the retcon caused character assassination (and I've since partially turned around on it). So like, I already was not attached to the setting of Earth C and didn't see it as a viable place for the characters to have a happy or thematically satisfying ending, so why not burn it all down?
Terezi's good in this. Like I can't say I think any of this is anything she wouldn't do, and I think I felt that about the event of Meat as well, but I do have to revisit. Like it's miserable and I hate seeing her like that, but that is not a new thing to think about Terezi that I didn't already think in the later parts of Act 6. I'll probably make a separate post about the daverezi crumbs I noticed because I have to be in a more conspiratorial mood to properly be excited about something like that :p I will say I guess that though following John here has been alright and not too frustrating, there are a lot of plot beats here that would be so very interesting if they were Dave's responsibility instead. Which has kinda always been a thing though, hasn't it? That Dave's supposed to be the protagonist but he side-stepped it somehow. That's how I feel at least.
Tavros (human one, I know in BC he gets called Tavvy) probably intrigues me the most of the kids. Plausibly deniable sexual abuse and all that, you all know what I like to think about that. Something for me to latch onto now that Dave is boring. This was also something I was thinking back when I was reading Meat, but I think he's actually somewhat more interesting here. Once again I am not entirely convinced that all his issues are just that he's gay and not attracted to Jade even though that is basically what he's saying in a literal sense. He's still acting molested, he is so molested, so much so he's minimizing his own responsibility for minor violations against Jake, that's great. He sucks. Like don't think I didn't notice the innuendo around him trying to go to Dirk for advice (not to mention I know who co-wrote this). I wish it was more out in the open though.
I am going off on a tangent though, because I had planned to say something about how I have barely seen discussions of the actual plot shit in here when I see discussions of the Epilogues, but there I was just going back to interpersonal drama stuff to justify how I personally feels about ships. But it is connected to things like Jade and Dirk and how I noticed that in both timelines, Dave and Karkat are forced to kiss by either Jade or Dirk. And then Alt Calliope has Jade's body, and I unfortunately don't remember enough of Meat to try and figure out what that is actually supposed to mean. Because it feels like it should mean something, but currently Jade's body just literally seems to be Meat for AC to pilot around and it doesn't matter that it's Jade specifically. But if it does matter, then Candy Jade being framed as an invasive fujoshi-like character probably means something.
That's another thing I was surprised to see. I had seen so much discussion of how Jade and Dave got married in the Candy timeline, unfairly ripping Dave away from his one true love Karkat, and obviously I'd already read Meat where Jade tries to get them all to date each other but they push her away. But I'd never seen anyone mention that they all do date each other for years in Candy while Dave and Karkat continue to play miserable gay chicken with each other. That's interesting. Because the way it's framed, especially at the beginning, makes Jade pretty explicitly into a Shipper Of Davekat. Just like Dirk in Meat, just like Terezi with the retcon, just like Caliborn in homosuck, and presumably even like Calliope, who is a shipper in general even if I don't think she ever explicitly references davekat. It's just that she generally had functioned as a commentary on the more shippy side of the fandom, so when I see another character trying to literally force a ship, I have to draw parallels. And of course there's the stuff about Calliope being the one to allow John to make the Meat or Candy choice in the first place, and being the one to tell him to go get Gamzee. How much of all this can we presume to be literally Gamzee's fault vs like, nebulous cosmic forces shifting due to John deciding to stay behind and then Dirk killing himself.
It feels weird speculating on this, knowing that it's not going to really come to many conclusions once I reach the "end." And it's even more weird that what I have to look forward to after is a few hundred pages of an infamously poorly structured comic that was allegedly going to try and reach a conclusion more in line with what the epilogues where trying to do, and then an ongoing comic people say is good but from my distant vantage point looks like it's trying to shed the epilogues as much as it's comfortably allowed to and doing some OC stuff.
There's a lot more I could say, but I might as well wait until I finish it to make another post, as it probably won't take long.
I was about to post this saying that I can't tell if this is a mistake or not since Kanaya never godtiered, but I guess since she's a rainbow drinker that might imply immortality. Anyway while I'm here I guess I will note the obvious sarcasm of Candy so far, not exactly with Rose and Kanaya yet, but with everyone else. How do I examine Calliope's desire to bring back Gamzee on a character level? Why is it important that Dirk noticed it specifically when he was hugging Dave? It's interesting that John was told he would get a choice whether to reenter canon or not, but once he chose to stay behind, he was still told to go back in there to get Gamzee. Why is that different? He's still technically done something to the plot, the Gamzee fridge was in Collide so if you think of it in technical terms he's already altered the text of original Homestuck since now the fridge won't be there. And actually maybe that's the continuity mistake, and not the Kanaya thing. We shall see.
Finally trying to get back to the epilogues and read Candy. Decided to reread the general prologue to the epilogues and I wanted to note how quickly it attempts to polarize the reader with that excessively florid description of John's dream. When he wakes up the more normal narration even calls it pretentious. And I am now remembering several times in the past few months when I opened up the prologue to try and read it, but get immediately fatigued by the first couple of sentences and went and did something else, forgetting that I had read this shit before and that the verbose difficulty really doesn't last that long (unless you consider Rose getting philosophical about what is or isn't canon to be difficult, which I sort of do, but not on the same level).
Anyway it is very Homestuck to do this, it's yet another instance of the story trying to shake off parts of the readership who can't or don't want to deal with complexity or difficulty. I'm trying to approach this all neutrally and pretend that I haven't already absorbed a million other people's opinions and interpretations about the epilogues, and even pretend that I haven't read Meat yet. That was so many months ago anyway that I am probably going to read it again once I finish Candy before I move on to reading Beyond Canon.
One more smaller note: John hangs around the Salamander Village and has been for years, watching the salamanders perform a pantomime of the kind of life he used to have with his father, right down to the father salamander wearing a business suit to go off to some job that John is not even sure of the economic necessity of. Similarly, Roxy stays in the carapacian kingdom since it's similar to where she grew up. These are both really obvious things to note about the themes of stagnation and all that, it's not subtle, but I can't remember if I took much not of it when I read it the first time.
Also there's the stuff I remember being confused about last time with Void being something that makes Roxy hard to understand or connect with. This is also something I didn't really understand in actual Homestuck though. Gonna try to pay more attention to that in general.
or: luka's big beautiful dirkjake dump as a nuanced jakeliker (warning LONG POST with CORRECT GRAMMAR)
A few disclaimers:
I’m not trying to stake my claim on any “correct” interpretation. It has been a bit since I finished my reread, and the quotes here are mainly out of pesterlogs whose context I recall only from memory, so I’m sure it won’t all be by-the-books accurate. That aside, I’m just here because I’m fucking crazy and really want to talk about my DirkJake thoughts.
A lot of my opinions are amalgamations of other deconstructions I’ve read (borzoilover, optimisticDuelist, Casey Jarmes etc), to which I’d like to doubly emphasize the above point—if it seems familiar, that’s probably cuz it is! I'm not original!!
THE REAL SHIT
ON DIRK AND JAKE: BRIEFLY
First, I will establish in brief my readings of their characters. This'll be reiterated in a bit more detail under the cut.
In my eyes, DIRK is a deeply self-loathing, conflicted trans boy who relied on media to learn about personhood while in isolation. Though first appearing as a cutting control freak (and let's be real, he is), Dirk is not as good a manipulator as he believes himself to be. The Prince of Heart destroys Heart — soul, identity, desire, impulse — in others, yes, but also destroys through an overabundance of Heart. He is a fifteen year old who believes he is evil and tends to serve his heart beating on a platter to all his friends. Wants to be a useful asset. Clingy; starved for contact in a way that has him never feeling full. Acutely aware of roles within the group, eg who is or is not acting as 'leader'. His attitudes towards romance/sex are borne from the internet and anime.
Meanwhile, JAKE is a "cis" "boy" who projects the persona of, and orients his expectations around, the movie heroes he grew up watching. He is not dumb, but tends to lean on plausible deniability + social expectations in order to affirm his ideas of what the world should be. The Page of Hope must learn to stop relying on others for, and eventually harness, their own Hope — manifestation, idealized future, what could be — to grow as a person. He wants to be admired, loved, and important. It’s just that, right now, to be admired and loved and important is to be A Man, something he feels he is not. So instead, he relies on others to construct opportunities for him, which feeds into his already non-confrontational nature. His attitudes towards romance/sex are borne from popular movies (often those with machismo).
They both want control over each other, whole.
Jake wants to affect Dirk — to see that his actions are substantial, that even the facade is working, to be genuinely acknowledged by others.
Dirk wants Jake's affections — we already know he’s clingy. He villainizes himself so much that it loops back around, weirdly, and makes him even more dependent on whatever love he might receive. He wants Jake to be available for him and act as a sort of center, lest he be stranded.
...with all of the above acknowledging that they're just misled, socially stunted teenagers.
Something I particularly enjoy about their dynamic is how their respective posturing and ideas of romance/masculinity interact. Let’s just get it out of the way: it goes badly.
Here’s the way I see it.
Both Dirk and Jake want to be idolized. Dirk gets this from Jake by building him the Brobot, impressing him with sheer knowledge and control and coolness; Jake gets this by capitalizing on Dirk's obvious crush on him; and both espouse conventional standards of masculinity in completely different directions, which are, to the other, the impossible ideal.
Masculinity is crucial to talk about here, particularly in Jake’s case. See, here’s my take on Jake and romance. He is enthused by the idea of silver-screen relationships, but finds himself falling very short when it’s time to actually participate in one; if anything, I read him as having a relatively flippant/apathetic attitude about the concept of love itself. Based on the short bit in the Jane conversation, I imagine he doesn’t really care all that much about gender in the romantic/sexual context (I would actually argue much less so than Dirk does).
GT: But then...
GT: Later i started thinking.
GT: Maybe i was being kind of unfair to him in the first place?
GT: I mean by saying we would be a good match only if he was a girl.
GT: Like is that last condition there really all THAT important?
If anything, his constant assumptions of romantic interest are less genuine yearning and more another facet of his movie-star-hero aspirations. Having babes off the arms is a movie trope, a status symbol, but not necessarily capital-L Love. This isn’t me saying that he can’t romantically love—my personal headcanon is that he’s demisexual, or at least on the aroace spectrum—but that he is initially more interested in the fantasy of it, a sentiment I have seen echoed by sex-favorable asexuals. Crucially, a hypothetical fantasy, without any real “you” in the mix. He’s down with the idea of being pined after at the surface level not because he’s genuinely interested in romance, but moreso because it checks off another box on the Real Man List—the Real Man who is notably not him.
In terms of affection and vulnerability, both are starving; the difference is that Dirk is never satiated, ravenously hungry (and self-hating for it), while Jake suffers from a kind of metaphorical refeeding syndrome, quick to overwhelm and scare. Interestingly, I find this reflected in their respective projected selves: Jake’s bravado and adventurous dreams are inherently individual, the one male Hero and distant admirable figure, while Dirk’s focus on leadership is actually more community-oriented, controlling and protective—though misled.
I feel this also comes into play with how these personas are reaffirmed or threatened.
Jake has a tendency to ‘cast’ people in roles and quietly, through passiveness, leading questions, and faux-obliviousness (or otherwise plausible deniability), set up certain interactions to go whichever way would be most comfortable while upkeeping his adventurer image. I am thinking particularly of the Jane confession here, by the way.
(The above is a pasted image that I couldn't be arsed to get out of my notes and actually transcribe in a smart sounding way. alt text available. yay)
All that to say, Jake relies on his friends as sounding boards that can bounce back the image of the man he thinks he should be. His posturing is not for the sake of his friends as much as it is for himself—it affirms that he is (or is at least convincingly appearing to be) the brave renegade, and lets him occasionally sidestep the complicated gray areas of friendship.
On the other hand, Dirk keeps up a tightly-wound demeanor as a means to have a sense of control, yes, but also because I deeply believe he sees himself as a predator. Something to be stifled and limited, overflowing with manipulative, desperate wants, that cannot be ‘let off the leash’ or else someone will be terribly hurt. He does not trust his own motivations; there’s always the chance that they’re deeper, darker, and so well-hidden that he, in the throes of cold-heartedness, barely noticed to begin with. I read Princes as people that are tormented by an overabundance of their Aspect, and therefore destroy it/destroy through it… this is mainly because of Dirk. He is positively drowning in himself, his identity, his desires, his trajectory as a person, all of which are ill-intentioned; therefore, he uses the persona to try and ‘save’ his friends and tighten himself up such that none of the ugliness inside can ooze out. There is still an element of thinking he does know better, for the record, at least in those early logs referring to how he comments on Jane and Jake. He does use his friends and assumed position as leader as ways to reaffirm his own sense of control—but, in the bigger picture, these are mostly efforts to protect the others, rather than himself.
Now, this probably sounds like me demonizing Jake and advocating for Dirk’s innocence. What a subversive spin on the popular Dirk-bully and Jake-stupid-victim narrative! NO!!!!!!!!!!!!! not at all. I think that both are terrible for each other, but just as inevitable, and capable of growing into more stable people. There is no “good” or “bad” party. Just fucked up, undersocialized, unstable kids with communication issues.
In particular, Jake often operates largely off his emotional whims. If one big emotion blows his way, he’ll take it and go, “yup, this is what I am now.” This, of course, leads to a lot of end-of-comic self loathing, but also to an extent begets his hollow, unyielding faith in things. A faith, a belief, that is very convenient in not rocking the boat, not questioning his manly persona, and not lingering on the decisions he makes (or at least trying not to).
Remember the above when I say: he is an incredibly vulnerable, insecure, and sensitive person who is so easily taken advantage of and belittled. It is SO easy for him to lose hope in himself. And by the end of Homestuck, it would make sense for him to never believe in anyone again.
The end of his arc is a wet, infected wound, ending on the conclusion that he cannot believe in or love others, much less himself. He has played his prescribed role in other peoples' lives, and made others play a role for him, passively watching on and trying to tip the scales in his own favor, always to his own eventual ruin.
Ultimately, he is scared of people finding out that he is not the man he promised.
But Dirk knows this.
THAT is where this all comes together, in my view. The core of Dirkjake’s relationship, past being good buds, is an unspoken dancing-around, and mutual knowledge, of the other’s insincerity. Something that is as special as it is raw and dangerous.
When I say dangerous, I am talking about how their very senses of self are balanced by neither person ‘breaking the bit’ and saying exactly what they know the other to be. I would consider this aspect of their relationship as based on a sort of play, a mutual knowing that both are aware of but neither acknowledge.
I don’t think there’s too much overt evidence for this in-text, but it’s how I choose to interpret bits like the below given Jake’s well-demonstrated awareness and flirtation towards Dirk.
GT: Hehe. You nerd.
GT: Hes got your slick japanese spectacles and everything.
GT: Why is this a metal man before me or is it none other than dirk strider himself in my room??
TT: One thing at a time, bro. I haven't quite figured out a way to get myself there yet.
GT: It almost sounds like this is something youve given some thought...
Their exchanges are catty and tongue-in-cheek. They both know what’s up with the other’s persona, they do the same thing, but it is entirely unspoken, only jabbed at in subtext. In this case, however, it is just TEXT:
TT: I thought you liked to manicure the image of a dude who shits his pants over a good adventure.
GT: I do!
GT: I mean i wouldnt put it in a way like that or come out against a solid policy of clean trousers. But yes adventure is awesome.
GT: I just prefer the idea of adventures which i can actually win.
“Manicure the image.” It’s not shit your pants over a good adventure, no; he is acutely aware about the persona-crafting going on here.
Admittedly, it comes from the maw of AR, but I still find it applicable to Dirk’s character and therefore knowledge of Jake considering that AR is modelled on his brain.
Here are a few other snippets that I read as being tongue-in-cheek:
GT: The last thing i need on my bday is another installment of and i quote manbro bukkake theater.
TT: You still don't actually know what that means, do you.
GT: Not really? Its your friggin figure of speech man. I gathered it just meant getting slimed like in ghost busters or somesuch.
TT: Kind of. I told you to look it up.
GT: Yeah yeah. Im a busy fella dirk!
GT: Wikipedia is a lot of letters to type in a thing for a man of action on the go.
GT: Im always doing adventures remember?
^ this REEKS to me of the exact coyness I’m describing — he knows that Dirk knows that it’s an overblown charade, and pokes fun at it. To anyone else, he might seem genuine. But “Im always doing adventures remember?” seems more like a sly jab at insider knowledge.
GT: Nor am i a quaint man of the past. Pardon me but do i SOUND like some trollycar bellwether toiling in the heart of the mustache belt from the ruff n tumble year of nineteen aught nine???
TT: ...
TT: He said unironically.
GT: Give me some credit man and some to yourself as well. You are too modest about all this robotics noise.
^ can you see it under this lens? How playful it is? The tonal switch on Jake’s part? I love reading this as both of them being in-the-know to an extent, and dancing around it; pretending that Jake was saying such a thing unironically. Maybe I’m delusional, but what I see is beautiful.
What of Jake’s knowledge of Dirk, however?
Well, for obvious starters, he has knowledge enough to create a “startlingly close approximation to the real” Dirk in BGD. We know this.
I also find this exchange to be an interesting moment of lucid acknowledgement:
GT: Just a big poof of smoke where it was standing. So i lived alone in the jungle ever since.
TT: Huh. I've wondered about all that.
GT: Well you never asked!
TT: Oh I know. I would have. But asking about your past would have just been inviting you to do the same. You know how it goes.
GT: Indeed.
Indeed, he is aware of how both he and Dirk feel better off never discussing their own pasts.
GT: And his responder which i guess is really a part of his personality even if he doesnt like to say so...
GT: It kind of lets on a lot more than dirk ever would. Its almost like its this weird clone of himself playing passive aggressive matchmaker between me and his real self.
He knows that Dirk, like him, obfuscates large parts of himself.
Jake liked that he could see Dirk. Jake liked that Dirk could see him, and like what he saw. He liked that he could affect Dirk and knock him off kilter a bit—that he could best Dirk—or at the very least enjoys the prospect.
In Dirk, Jake has a tangible effect on the world, an observed impact on someone who is deeply closed off. His image is working. He has some semblance of agency, not playing by the whims of loneliness, fear, bloodthirsty monsters, and objectifying figures.
On the other side, Jake is so passive and non-confrontational that it makes Dirk believe that any direct pass he makes at him is too overbearing, presumptuous, and predatory. Jake, being a sort of in-the-moment feeler and thinker, tends to assume that people will just kinda catch on to whatever he’s doing, whether it be self-isolating or being frustratingly vague.
This isn’t true all the time, however. Jake vocally struggles with Dirk’s cryptic nature, especially in the face of his splinters. SO, yeah. We’re there. The lack of communication.
Practically every early pesterlog featuring Jake has him asking about how to reach Dirk. He’s aware of Dirk’s cryptic conversational chess moves, and how they might extend into other actions he takes, eg Brobot or leaving AR on. This bit here is especially poignant, where Jake wonders outright whether Dirk is “testing” him:
GT: I hope the far fetched scenario i have described has adequately communicated the severity of my robotic buttwhoopin!
GT: Does this mean i passed the test or whatever the fuck.
GT: Can your robot drop the bullshit and give me the uranium now or what?
(Small aside that’s more about Jake’s character than anything: can you see the insane switch-flip in Jake’s attitude and typing style here, when his charm/image alone doesn’t get him what he wants?)
Jake likes to please and placate people, especially someone he admires like Dirk, and gets frustrated when they can’t just have a “simple”* (read: Jake’s definition of simple) relationship without the subtext, implications, and blind turns.
In the midst of these frustrations, I believe, is fear. If Jake worries that everything is a test or otherwise game with Dirk, that very assumption could be proven by Dirk’s clinginess when Jake doesn’t respond. He thinks Dirk is overly sensitive and likely feels like he’s stepping on eggshells around him, worried that he’s going to “fail the test”, whatever that means.
And on Dirk’s end, as I've mentioned, he sees everything he's wanted relationship-wise in jake, but feels like he must starve himself as to not meddle and ruin everything. He thinks that Jake is not gay, that Jane has a better chance, but tortures himself over the possibility that Jake dangles in front of him.
Thus, a lot of tiptoeing around and frankly bizarre mental gymnastics ensue, where Dirk is interested in Jake, and may want to send those signals, but doesn’t want to ruin what he already has. For that reason, I feel that, at least in the alpha session stage of their relationship, Dirk could also be very hot and cold! I just think he was far more demanding than Jake—not necessarily in a bad way, maybe in an over-reliant way, but ultimately in a quite incompatible way. It’s understandable. For someone who hates themselves so thoroughly, how could he not cling on to the one person who believes in him, who admires him, who gets it?
TT: But you believe me, right?
GT: Oh yeah every word of it!
TT: Wow.
GT: Why shouldnt i? You are my friend and i trust you.
TT: I still just think it's impressive, is all. Even after all this time. You are pretty much a one of a kind dude.
GT: Heh not really i just like believing stuff and believing in people.
But Jake really, really just misses his best friend. I write this like the two of them are Machiavellian puppetmasters—but, again, I’d like to emphasize that they’re just teenage boys with communication and gender issues that feel beholden to a certain set of expectations. The MAJORITY of what I'm headcanoning here is subconscious, or otherwise mentally shoved in the "let's not address that" box. Jake just wants to talk to the real Dirk again, without the mind games and diversions!
A really striking moment in terms of their relationship is when Jake says that Dirk holds himself “accountable”, unlike the rest of his splinters. He wants that humility, that even playing ground, even past his own personal ambitions and self-image; he just wants his friend back. Be Dirk and Jake again, and not whatever mess this has all turned into.
GT: Like har har i have the same basic personality as dirk but without any accountability or anything so let me just be kind of flippant and mess with this jake fellas head!
And Dirk is both pulling off a lot of his aloof theatrics in order to protect Jake or his showing off a needy soft underbelly in order to quell his own self-doubt, ultimately because he wants to keep Jake around. He doesn’t want to scare him off or leave him unprepared in the face of danger.
…
So, of course, neither of them talk about it. That’s the Alpha Kid patented thing.
TT: You do realize he's coming for you.
TT: Dirk. In the real world. The man has his designs.
GT: Yes. I know.
TT: Wanna talk about it?
GT: With you? No!! Thats like...
GT: Thats like talking to him about it which is like really jumping the gun i think.
They both have personal stakes on the line that could be threatened by trying to confide in the other in a genuine way. (Though I do have to give Dirk some credit here. He did express that he felt Jake was being inconsiderate.)
In conclusion, I would say a certain exchange from Peep Show season 3 episode 5 sums up their whole deal pretty well:
“Have you told her you love her?”
“Are you kidding? That’s like firing first in a duel… if you miss, you’re fucked!”
But remember... once, they were both kids growing up completely alone.
I like to think both leaned on the idea of one day meeting each other.
* Now. When I say Jake’s idea of a “simple” relationship, I am speaking of his specific perspective on romance. I also know that what Dirk is doing and all the ways Jake has been misled is genuinely not a simple relationship! All in all: Jake generally likes things straightforward, playing out as they ought to be, like a movie scene. He enjoys the freedom of being able to disappear on a whim, being unconstrained, because he doesn’t necessarily seek out romance of his own accord. I think he’s definitely into Dirk, for the record (and have a sneaking suspicion based on the dreambubble log that he may have been the first to develop feelings, but that’s neither here nor there), but he’s put himself into a predicament. By engaging with the relationship as seriously as Dirk is, he’s opening himself up to deconstruction and commitment and staring consequences in the face. This isn’t easy to sidestep via plausible deniability anymore. In general, as a stupid, 16 year old boy, I think he just wants to have his cake and eat it too: he wants Dirk as a best friend and romantic partner, and all the admiration and affirmation he would receive from such an arrangement, but doesn’t want to get caught up in all the “unnecessary”, sticky, complicated implications that come up in that kind of dynamic. He wants to still be able to brush things off as he can with, say, Jane or Roxy.
My Homestuck transgenderism takes. Don't take any of these too seriously because I could change my mind on any of them. My most controversial take is I almost put Vriska in "Cis" because I think she is cisgender, but also I think she is trans-human. Which is like a metaphor for being transgender but is diagetically a different thing. I simply find this more interesting. Argue with me about any of this (politely), I'm bored.
Karkat and Terezi are only "friends next door" (not literally, but rather the trope that some people in the fandom associate with them) on the surface. Beneath it is the dark underbelly of the inevitable reckoning when they realize that due to circumstances beyond their control, neither will be "good enough" for the fascist empire they live under. In adulthood, one or both are gonna face death or worse. In adulthood, they're gonna have to make extremely difficult decisions about the kinds of lives they want to live.
And the thing is! While much of Karezi's dynamic does kinda play with the lessons adults teach children, the punchline is that they're doomed to never meet these expectations because Alternia's culture is rigged against them to begin with. So really, Karezi explores the question of what happens after your "friend next door" results in the shit getting beaten out of you and probably dying, all because you dared to care about them. It's the crucial question of when the future you've been ignoring comes to pass That's TRAGEDY man, that's MEAT, that's SAUCE!!! I'M TIRED OF EVERYONE PRETENDING OTHERWISE.......!!!!!
Terezi Pyrope and Jade Harley as like Ethical Manipulators (tm). Manipulating for the sake of others. For what they perceive to be a higher good/purpose. For specific results. For the sake of protecting others and ensuring the game gets played so they may survive. Even if they sacrifice parts of themselves in the process.
Homestuck Analysis: Aspects and the Circle of Fifths
I've had this theory brewing for a bit and I've been trying to work out the details of it to some extent, but I'm kind of hitting a wall in terms of my analysis thus far, so I'm presenting what I do have as a somewhat incomplete theory that I'm welcoming additional input on to kind of crowdsource thoughts to maybe string something together. (this was also inspired in part by @plaidos' theory about the Rings of Life and Void and trying to find a connection between their relative aspects.) Kind of a long post so I'm putting it under a read more just in case.
So for starters: music is obviously an important part of the makeup of Homestuck, right? Not just in the sense that Homestuck is a work that has a robust original soundtrack with hundreds of tracks made by a team of extremely talented musicians, but also in that it's an important part of the narrative as well. All four of the beta kids have some kind of experience with music (John plays piano, Rose plays violin, Dave has his turntables, and Jade plays bass); fraymotifs are an important part of the gameplay of Sburb with the ones which we know of all being named after musical concepts; and both John and Rose are given quests for their respective planets that involve a musical element of some kind (John having to play the organ to rid LOWAS of oil, and Rose being told to "play the rain"). Additionally the first two acts of Homestuck have titles that are musically themed ("The Note Desolation Plays" and "The Raise of the Conductor's Baton"), and the story is bookended with both those and the animation for Act 7, which starts out with the alternate Calliope on a stage, wielding her wand as though it were a conductor's baton.
So considering how concepts of music and musical composition are as much a key part of the narrative structure of Homestuck as computer coding and video game mechanics, you might think that maybe there's some more ways that music theory ties into the narrative structure. I'm not sure if this is intentional or not, but I think i've found a pattern that might tie the two concepts together.
Let's start by looking at what I started with: the aspects.
There are 12 aspects that make up the basic foundation of paradox space in Homestuck, and each player of the game is assigned an aspect along with a class representing their relationship to said aspect. The wheel here has each aspect positioned directly across from the aspect that's considered its "opposite", or at least, an aspect that represents something that can be considered in opposition to itself. For instance, Time and Space are opposing aspects, both important to the basic foundation of a session, as Space players tend to be the ones in charge of the Genesis Frog breeding (or at least, in the sessions we've seen they have been). Each pair of opposing aspects has a similar relationship. The question is though... what relationship do the other aspects have with each other? After all, they are all interconnected building blocks of paradox space, so surely there must be some kind of connection between the other aspects as well. The fact that there are 12 aspects, and that they're all presented in a wheel like this is pretty reminiscent of a few different things, a clock being the most obvious. But to bring it back to the music analogy, let me bring up another image:
This is the chromatic scale presented in the form of a wheel, which is fitting as outside of different octaves, the notes in the chromatic scale loop through the twelve different tones before going back to where they started. So already there's a visual similarity between the chromatic scale (presented in this form) and the aspect wheel. There's also a relationship between the notes on opposite sides of the circle; if you're familiar with tritones (which you might have also heard referred to as "the devil's chord" [even though the stories about why that term came about are really more of a folk etymology]), those are notes that are generally seen as being highly dissonant with each other -- opposing each other, even -- though they do have some harmonic usage with each other in some cases. Tritones aren't the only relationship between different notes that can be represented on this graph though: in fact, this diagram is more often used to draw a different relationship between the notes in the chromatic scale. If you were to draw lines between the different notes on the graph making a 12 pointed star on the inside of the circle, you would get this diagram:
This version of the diagram is referred to as the circle of fifths. Each line between two notes represents a relationship of a perfect fifth between two notes. A perfect fifth is the fifth note in any note's relative major scale, and it's often said to be the most perfect harmonic relationship between two notes outside of just a simple octave. So since you can draw a relationship between perfect fifths over this diagram, and since the diagram of aspects is laid out pretty much the exact same way, I wanted to see what the relationship between the aspects and their "perfect fifths" would look like, and what I found was genuinely pretty interesting.
As you can see, each aspect has two others that correspond with it as its "perfect fifth", and some of the pairings that are formed are a bit unusual. However, if you think about some of the other pairings formed, and which characters are heroes of that aspect, it's easy to see that some of them reflect some pretty strong pairings in the comic. For instance, the pairing that I started this theory about: Life and Void.
The most obvious connection between the aspects of Life and Void is with the rings (or perhaps ring, singular?) and how not just their powers but also their existences are oddly linked with each other, however, this isn't the only connection between Life and Void; the more important relationship we see between the two aspects is actually between two characters -- namely, Jane and Roxy.
Jane and Roxy are pretty much an inseparable pair, and on the rare occasions where they ARE split up, it typically doesn't result in positive consequences (such as Jane being put under the control of Her Imperious Condescension). Obviously, not all the team's failures are just due to the status of the pair's relationship, but it is important to the team structure. Interestingly enough, the other two alpha kids, Dirk and Jake, also fall into one of these pairings, with their respective aspects being Heart and Hope.
Some of the other pairs in this pattern are Time/Mind, Light/Space, and Life/Blood, each of which can also be linked to a pair of two characters that has a strong partnership in the story: Dave and Terezi, Rose and Kanaya (or Jade), and Meenah and Karkat.
What's also interesting is that some of these pairings seem to pair up to characters who had a more antagonistic relationship to each other that was still ultimately majorly important to the story. Void and Time are paired up, as are Mind and Rage, and both of these mirror two relationships we see in the comic which also end up being both crucially important to the narrative and toxic for the parties involved -- those being Equius and Aradia, and Terezi and Gamzee.
Most interestingly however, is that one of the pairs represented here is Heart and Space. As it so happens, those are the aspects we see represented by the two conflicting narrators of the Meat side of the Epilogues and of the same timeline in Beyond Canon: Dirk and alt Calliope. And as we know, their relationship to each other is quite antagonistic, though ultimately their end goals and the means by which they try to achieve them are not too dissimilar from each other.
Now I will admit that this analysis is a bit lacking, not least because there are still four pairs of "fifths" that I didn't even mention in this post, those being Breath/Rage, Blood/Hope, and both pairings with Doom, those being Light and Breath. I will admit that thee are probably where this analysis is at is weakest. You could maybe say that John's relationship to Gamzee in the Candy epilogue and how he is unsettled by Gamzee's actions fall under the more "antagonistic" side of things? I guess for Blood/Hope you could point to Kankri and Cronus as an example, but they're honestly not all that critical to the sequence of events. And as far as the last two pairs, I don't really think that Sollux has had a significant enough interaction with either John or Tavros for the Breath pairing to relate to one of those two, nor with Rose or Vriska. Same with Mituna and Rufioh or Aranea.
However, I *do* feel like one or more of these may come up in the new game we're building up to in Beyond Canon. I still don't know for sure what classpect every player in the new game we've seen so far is going to be, but I do have some general ideas for how I feel about them. I really feel like Yiffy is going to be a Rage player, and I'm also pretty convinced that Tavvy will be a Doom player. The other two Earth C kids are a bit harder for me to pin down -- I think it could be likely that they'd fill the remaining two slots of aspects that were never covered in the original alpha and beta kids' sessions (those being Blood and Mind; i could honestly see a strong argument being made for either Harry or Vrissy being one or the other), but I don't want to just confidently say that. (I may make a post on this at some point.) I've seen good arguments being made for the Deltritus kids being one of these four aspects as well. Additionally, I'm not sure if there actually will be any new aspects like we've heard rumors of or not. I think it's equally likely those could be a misdirect, or just not come up with any of the Deltritus and Earth-C kids. Either way, I'll definitely be looking out for what aspects the new kids end up being assigned and how well they may fit into this pattern. There may also be something I missed with the relationships between characters, or just the aspects themselves and what they represent, so I will gladly accept any input on that as I go back and look to see if there's anything that I missed.
