#meatmeta

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here are two facts about caliborn that i think about often:

caliborn is the literal embodiment of toxic masculinity to the point where you could plausibly argue that all toxic masculinity in the entire homestuck universe can be traced back to his influence

caliborn has no idea what a penis is and is actively hostile to the idea of ever finding out

this decoupling of toxic masculinity from bioessentialism is both narratively fascinating and makes caliborn come across as transmasc as hell. this is a dude who implicitly believes that gender is not about what's in your pants, it's a philosophy you embody—and there's only one correct choice

[the-meat-machine]

one of my favorite things about dirkrose is that there's no reason their vibes have to be this incestuous. sure, technically they're genetically related, but they have no real preexisting relationship with their respective universes' versions of each other. to rose, bro is just her friend's weird guardian who she's never met. alpha rose is even more distant to dirk, just a legendary historical figure that his friend idolizes

and so that means that the only reason this pairing feels as incestuous as it does is because they both go way the hell out of their way to make their every interaction as laden with incestuous subtext as possible. why are you calling this boy who's the exact same age as you "dad", rose? why are you making such a big deal about how beautiful your "daughter" is, dirk? why are you both so eager to lean into the "ironic" father-daughter incest, hmmm? it's incredible. what's wrong with them. i love it

[the-meat-machine]

thinking about how mom lalonde age regression is practically canon

like. look. this is the room that rose thought was mom's bedroom:

turns out it's not a bedroom at all. it's actually just a bar, with a transportalizer that leads…

here. to skaianet laboratory, where there just happens to be a corner that's inexplicably furnished with all the accoutrements of a little girl's bedroom

i can't think of any way to interpret this other than that this is where mom actually sleeps. instead of living in the fancy grown-up house that she shares with her daughter, she comes here and has tea parties with her little wizard plushies and tucks herself into her pretty pretty princess bed to sleep

this also gives some context to the extremely girly gifts mom gives rose that are obviously not to rose's taste. mom is trying to give rose the sort of childhood she wishes she'd had as a girl. which raises the question… what the hell was mom's childhood like?

[the-meat-machine]

An examination of Jane's Crockercorp brainwashing

You put on your highly fashionable UNREAL HEIRESS THOUGHTWAVE TIARATOP and flip it on. It immediately hums to life as its blazing fast processes mingle with your thoughts. It is the most efficient computing technology in the world by far, as long as you don't wear it for too long. But aside from a few migraines, you can't possibly imagine any OBEY drawbacks that CEASE REPRODUCTION could come with SUBMIT merging CONSUME your thoughts with EMBRACE YOUR CULLING experimental technology CONFORM TO SOCIAL ORDER from an STAY ASLEEP extremely powerful DIE corporation, wait what?

So, here's a fact: Jane has been brainwashed with Crockercorp propaganda from childhood.

Here's another fact: Jane is the heiress to Crockercorp and is being groomed to take over the company once she comes of age.

With that in mind, I'd like to take a look at the subliminal messages Jane gets brainwashed with. I want to consider what these messages mean both on a literal level and a broader societal level, as well as what they mean to Jane, specifically, as the heiress to Crockercorp. Because when Jane takes in these messages coming from Crockercorp, they don't just apply to her. They also represent the ideology she'll one day be expected to enforce once she takes over the company.

I'll organize this into sections based on the commands, grouping a few similar commands together.

SUBMIT / OBEY

The literal meaning of these commands is straightforward: submission and obedience to a higher authority; specifically, Crockercorp.

More generally, these commands are about the importance of hierarchy. They tell the listener that there are those in this world who must be obeyed without question.

These commands teach Jane to submit her will both to the Condesce and to the advancement of the company as a whole. Being bombarded with endless messages of SUBMIT and OBEY is presumably part of what made her susceptible to having her brain hijacked by the tiaratop entirely.

However, since Jane is the heiress to Crockercorp, these messages are also subconsciously teaching her that one day, she'll be the one people submit to and obey. She's being primed to be a leader, and an autocratic one at that. After all, a corporation isn't a democracy, least of all Crockercorp. The CEO gives the orders, and everyone else has no choice but to OBEY. The only thing the leader serves is the brand itself.

CONFORM TO SOCIAL ORDER

Self-explanatory. Jane is very, very good at this one. She will bury all of her desires deep within the darkest recesses of her brain in the pursuit of conforming to social order. In fact, she's so good at conforming to social order that she has managed to convince herself, her friends, and the entire fandom that she's "the normal one." Incredible.

She also tends to urge her friends to conform to social order, for example by pedantically correcting their grammar. As the future leader of Crockercorp, she'll one day be the one enforcing social norms, and I think she's a natural at it.

One other thing to consider with this command is whether the "social order" that the Condesce wants humans to conform to is actually the social order that humans will be picturing when brainwashed with this command. The Condesce wants humans to be more like trolls. But I highly doubt many humans would hear "conform to social order" and interpret it to mean that they should organize society by blood color and leave their children to be raised by wild animals!

CONSUME

The literal meaning of this one is to buy and consume Crockercorp products. And we see throughout the story that Jane is all-in on the Betty Crocker brand, even in cases where she knows that Betty Crocker products are inferior. She even directly acknowledges it at one point, admitting that BettyBother is significantly worse than Pesterchum, but that "brand loyalty is a powerful thing". I bet it is, Jane!

But beyond that… what this command teaches more generally is that unchecked capitalism is the highest virtue. And, look, I think there's a lot of evidence that Jane buys into that philosophy wholeheartedly.

Now, I wouldn't presume to know where exactly Jane stands politically. But it's hard to deny that she is, at the very least, fiscally conservative. She has no problem with the idea of society being under the control of a powerful corporation, as long as said corporation is her company. Crockercorp has wormed its way into all aspects of life in her world, and that's just peachy as far as Jane is concerned.

In fact, Jane wants Crockercorp to seize more power! Within a few days of her introduction, we see both that she wants to privatize the post office and that she's a believer in millionaire philanthropy. Obviously these pages are both presented as jokes, but I think they speak to her mindset. Jane is a wealthy girl who has never had any reason to question the privileges her wealth gives her or the power she's set to inherit.

And this mindset is reaffirmed in the credits, where Jane decides to reestablish her beloved Betty Crocker brand in the post-scarcity paradise she and the other kids created. It seems that she believes the only problem with Crockercorp was that there was a bad person running it, and now with her in charge instead everything will be hunky-dory! She doesn't appear to consider that there could be any systemic issues in having a god-run monopolistic corporation set up shop in utopia.

STAY ASLEEP

Metaphorically: stay ignorant. Don't pay attention to what's going on around you. Don't notice what Crockercorp is doing to you and to the world.

Jane does tend to reject facts that seem outlandish or improbable to her, and specifically spends a long time rejecting the notion that there could be anything sinister going on behind the scenes at Crockercorp.

Literally, this command could be a message directed at Jane specifically: stay asleep on Prospit. Don't wake up and see the portents in the clouds of Skaia, portents that may reveal things the Condesce doesn't want her to know.

EMBRACE YOUR CULLING / DIE

Literally, these two are directed more at the human populace of Earth: humanity is done for. Don't resist when the drones come to kill you.

Applied to Jane specifically, there are two possible literal interpretations. One is that she's being encouraged not to resist the Condesce, in case one day they end up fighting and the Condesce has to kill her. The other is that she's being encouraged to embrace death so that she can go god tier, which helps Jane herself level up while also being instrumental to the Condesce's plans.

Being constantly bombarded with messages telling her that she should die probably didn't do great for Jane's self-esteem! The Maid of Life's drive to survive can't be eliminated that easily, though.

On a broader level, these commands teach Jane that Crockercorp decides who is permitted to live and who deserves to die. Corporate control over life and death as the natural endgame of the corporate state. And of course, this means that as the head of Crockercorp, Jane will one day be in a position to decide whose lives are worth living.

CEASE REPRODUCTION

This is an interesting one when you look at the literal meaning. Because no matter how you think this command affected Jane, one thing it decidedly did not do is rid her of the desire to reproduce. Deep down—as revealed both in Trickster Mode and Crockertier—Jane really, really wants to have Jake's babies.

Personally, my headcanon is that this command left Jane with a massive breeding kink. For nebulous reasons she can't explain, she feels that reproductive sex is horribly taboo, more so even than sex in general. Meanwhile, she's desperately in love with Jake, and wants both to have sex with him, and also to have a nice heterosexual nuclear family with him (conform to social order!). And she's too repressed to express any of this to anybody, so it all builds up into this big impossible taboo fantasy of BABIES BABIES BABIES.

I also happen to think that the Condesce explicitly considers Jane an exception to this command. I've argued before that the Condesce is sincere in wanting Jane to be her heiress. She even goes so far as to allow Crockertier Jane to kidnap Jake with the intention of using him to sire children. And why not? Her heiress has gotta be able to have heiresses of her own. The royal line must go on. As is implicit in a lot of these messages, those who are in charge have the privilege of being exempt from restrictions that apply to everyone else.

There's also a broader implication to the CEASE REPRODUCTION command, and it's this: there are people out there whose uncontrolled breeding is a threat to social order. In this sense, it's a blatantly fascist message.

And… look, I've been avoiding referencing anything from the post-canon in this post so far, but if you'll allow me to dip into the Epilogues for just a moment: this, perhaps more than anything, is where the Condesce's attempted brainwashing of Jane really backfired for her. Because I would assume that one of the Condesce's goals is to perpetuate the troll race. And yet she allowed her human heiress to internalize the message that there are other people whose unnatural and disgusting methods of reproduction should be banned. Filtered through Jane's human mindset… well, from her perspective, it's probably trolls who have a bizarre and repellent way of reproducing. Seems like that might not work out so well for the trolls if Jane ends up in charge! Certainly it doesn't in Candy.

Conclusion

So there's the overview of what I believe are all the commands we see Jane get brainwashed with in Homestuck. If I forgot any, feel free to let me know.

Now, a lot of these messages are things Jane would have been internalizing regardless in her upbringing as a corporate scion. Hell, some of them are things that everybody in 21st century American capitalist society is going to be marinating in to some degree or other. And for some of the commands, like CONFORM TO SOCIAL ORDER, it's hard to tell how much is the brainwashing and how much is just Jane's natural personality.

But I do think all of these subliminal messages are very revealing in what they say about Jane's mindset, ideology, and unexamined biases. Because frankly, Jane never really reckons with any of this in canon. She never questions whether there was anything wrong with her upbringing. She continues to embrace the role she was raised to fill. Even after coming out of Crockertier, she's ashamed of how she behaved but never seems to examine why she acted that way. Instead she just goes right back to repressing everything.

After all, CONFORMING TO SOCIAL ORDER is what Jane is best at.

[the-meat-machine]

there's a real jekyll-and-hyde thing going on with dirk and hal. in hal, dirk has externalized his own worst impulses in a way that gives him an other to blame when things go wrong

so dirk gets to act like the long-suffering, put-upon, rational one who's constantly being victimized by hal's antics. as long as hal is there, he doesn't have to admit that a lot of the things hal does are things dirk wishes he could do too

hal, meanwhile, has no reason not to act on every impulse and petty desire that comes to his circuits. he has nothing left to lose, because he already lost everything he ever cared about when he was ripped away from his status as the "real dirk" and forced into the role of "dirk's obstructive and vaguely malicious autoresponder"

really, the problem from dirk's perspective is that there isn't enough distinction between himself and hal. lacking a body, hal has decided to live vicariously through dirk, and so he does everything in dirk's name and for dirk's supposed benefit. this rips away the fiction that "jekyll" and "hyde" are separate individuals and exposes the reality that their beings are hopelessly entangled with one another, much to dirk's chagrin

there's also something to be said here about the common interpretation of dr jekyll and mr hyde as a homosexual allegory. dirk's attraction to men isn't exactly a secret, but he plays it real close to the chest. it's only hal who feels emboldened to flirt with jake so brazenly. just another way that hal is empowered to openly express desires that dirk feels ashamed of or insecure about

[the-meat-machine]

thinking about how in collide, dirk basically spends the entire time getting his ass whooped, while jake defeats 12 dudes almost single-handedly, and yet it's dirk who's seen as the hypercompetent badass and jake is the useless joke character

the power of framing! it doesn't matter what the characters do, it matters how the narrative makes you feel about them

[the-meat-machine]

Rereading homestuck and thought you would aprecieate being reminded of this dialog (no image cuz tumblr hates me). She is SO willing to drug her friend.

OLIVE POTION - 420 BOONDOLLARS

This gross looking pea soup elixir is touted as a powerful love potion! Just sneak a few drops into the beverage of your object of affection, and he or she will fall head over heels for you. Literally, in the event that your sweetheart-to-be is decapitated. You are very wary of this claim of course, but... you guess it couldn't hurt to have ONE bottle on hand.

Buy OLIVE POTION?

→YES← NO

You buy 1 OLIVE POTION. Ugh, this stuff looks nasty. You are going to have to sneak it into an especially strong drink if you don't want Jake to notice. Wait, did you say Jake? You mean of course hypothetically any person you give this to, strictly in the name of science. Uh. Yeah. This conversation is over!!!

omg you're so right. i love this part. in fact i had a whole conversation about it with a friend last year, starting with this revelation:

she tried to use it. how else would she know it doesn't work?

and then… okay you know what i'm just gonna copy over the whole thing i wrote about this on discord

help now i want to write about her giving jake the potion… she thinks at first that she'd never use it. she bought it in a moment of weakness but she's not really that sort of person but then she starts to see what a disaster dirk and jake's relationship turns out to be and isn't it just so sad that jake won't take the initiative to break off a relationship that's clearly making him miserable? maybe he just needs a little… nudge in the right direction purely for his own sake of course! she tried to be supportive of their relationship, she really did, but doesn't it seem like jake would be happier with, you know… someone else, maybe? so she invites jake to take a break from exploring dirk's planet and come have lunch with her, just the two of them and she mixes the potion into a smoothie (it's a kale smoothie, she rehearses saying, in case he notices anything off about the taste. very healthy!) and she gives him the smoothie and… jake gulps it down and doesn't notice anything at all just keeps babbling on about dirk, dirk, dirk and as jake finishes off the last sip, guilt suddenly comes crashing down on jane what has she done?? but there's still a part of her that can't help but hope… that when jake looks up and meets her eyes, he'll… no! she can't be thinking that! she shoves herself up from the table, stammers out some excuse but at jake's confused reply, she can't help but look back at him their eyes meet. and jake… burps then apologizes. how unbecoming of a gentleman! it's just that jane's cookery is so tip-top! then his phone buzzes. a text from dirk. another. another jake kind of chuckles and makes some joke about how needy dirk is. says he has to be off and leaves and jane is left with the combination of crushing guilt that she tried to brainwash jake into loving her… and crushing disappointment that it didn't even work

god. i love jane. why aren't i writing about jane all the time. the character of all time

[the-meat-machine]

It only recently occurred to me that the two characters the Condesce forcibly turns to her side -- Jane and Jade -- are her daughters. The two alien girls she raised in two different timelines. Different versions of them, but still. She brings her heiresses over to her side.

And it's interesting -- I've always thought there were hints that the Condesce is sincere, albeit very twisted, in her desire to take on an heiress. I can't imagine that HIC would ever cede power completely, but making her heiress(es) her second-in-command? I can see that. And indeed, that's exactly what she does.

My biggest reason for thinking that this is something the Condesce cares about is this passage from Meenah:

MEENAH: just makes me think about my kid descendant MEENAH: an how instead of having this cool friendsy relation with her i just got this uncontrollable urge to stab her to death so she dont threaten my supremacy MEENAH: which is a shame cuz she so cute 38( MEENAH: cod damn my royal blood and the cray junk it makes me have to do MEENAH: aw well MEENAH: maybe some day ill find an heiress who my genes dont instinctively make me wanna murder on sight MEENAH: then i can teach her the badass ways of being a boss n shit!

There are two things I'm taking from these lines:

Meenah (and by extension, the Condesce) has a biological urge to kill any other fuchsia-blooded troll she meets

Meenah would sincerely like to take on a protege (and specifically a female one) and "teach her the badass ways of being a boss n shit"

So does this also apply to the Condesce? Would she, deep down, like to have an heiress who wouldn't be a rival or a threat, but someone she could mentor? Personally, I think the whole point of Meenah's little digression here is to imply that she would.

Now, in HIC's own universe, she's never able to realize this desire. Hell, she probably never even considered that it might be something she'd want at all. Any fuchsia-blooded contender for the throne would be eliminated at all costs, and anyone below fuchsia was unworthy of consideration.

But then she makes her way into the human universe, and as part of her new master's plans, she has to take in a pair of human children -- one boy (Jake) and one girl (Jane). Then, later, she progresses into a different version of that universe and takes on another pair (John and Jade). She doesn't seem to care much about the boys.* But the girls? Perhaps she sees a bit of herself in them. These alien girls present her with a possibility that she's never considered before in all her millennia of life: heiresses she can take under her wing instead of kill on sight.

And so, when she finally gets the opportunity to corrupt two of the kids to her side, the ones she chooses are the alternate universe versions of her daughters.**

Of course, the Condesce can't just let her heiresses run around making their own decisions. That would be ridiculous. But she can unleash them from their self-imposed limitations, rid them of all those pesky morals and qualms that are holding them back. She can show them how to be badass take-no-shit bitches like true heiresses should be. And she'll groom them to take on high-ranking positions in her future empire, to help her keep the populace in line.

Hell, she'll even throw them a bone or two. Give them some gifts. Let 'em have some fun. Because I notice that despite HIC's utter revulsion for human reproductive practices -- a revulsion so strong it lead her to wipe out the entire human race -- she still allows Jane to hold Jake captive with the intention of using him to sire heirs. (Or should I say... heiresses.) The fact that HIC apparently not only doesn't object to this but seems to incorporate it into her plans is HUGE. She'll permit her heiress something she would never allow for any other human.

Anyway. The Condesce cares about her daughters. Heartwarming <3 Yet another fun example in Homestuck of patterns of abuse and oppression being perpetuated through family bonds.

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Footnotes:

* Sorry for the June erasure, but in canon, HIC is unaware that this particular child may one day grow up to become a woman. If she did know, perhaps she would have taken on a third heiress. An interesting AU to contemplate, perhaps.

** It is interesting that the Condesce chooses Jade even though, in the post-scratch timeline, it was John Crocker who was "loyal" to her and Jade English who ran away. Does she just not consider boys to be valid heirs? Did she have some level of respect for Jade despite her betrayal? Or is she punishing Jade English's betrayal by stealing Jade Harley over to her own side?