#native motifs

[mmmmalo]

I never thought of Equius being coded/headcannon as indigenous/

the idea of the classist, casteist, boy who submitted to his socially assigned supieor and was killed.

but it was the Saggtirus coding, he also is coded as a white/ nobility. a literal blue blood

Nobility yes, and Equius is accordingly confused by the compulsion to submit to someone he views as inferior -- he expresses this conflict in conversations with both Gamzee and Aradia. I tend to think that the noble status of rap on Alternia serves a similar purpose, offering the impression that social inferiors (from a racist POV) have achieved cultural dominance. The same goes for the nobility of archery, if you buy into the idea that the bow and arrow can be deployed in Homestuck as a stereotyped symbol of indigenous peoples (obscured though it may be by the unobjectionable motif of Sagittarius).

My strongest direct example of association between archery and Native Americans is probably this series of puns by Roxy, in conversation with Dirk. More abstract examples would involve Hussie's use of the 4th wall to depict racial tensions and the related use of the command arrow ==> for colonial motifs.

Tangentially, I'd note re: Equius white-coding that he owes his design to Nicolas Cage in Con Air -- the mullet, widows peak, and wife-beater are all very Cameron Poe. Vriska later underlines this resemblance by calling Arquius a "national fucking treasure", which is the title of another Cage flick. Hussie's deployment of racial ambiguity is still something of a mystery to me (outside of its ability to invoke anxieties about race mixing), but I'll say that stuff like the Cage-coding forms an interesting contrast to Equius's racially-charged inability to touch various feminine-coded items (milk, "bows", Karkat) without destroying them

[mmmmalo]

The Sburb spirograph kinda looks like a dream-catcher...? which would be thematically consistent with Sburb's "manifestation systems" that turn player's dreams/nightmares into game content... In addition to lining up with how early game play invokes "totems" and "kernels" (ie corn) to riff on colonial dynamics.

[mmmmalo]

Horuss minutiae...

Aranea claiming his name means "he who stalks with the musclebeasts" seems to be a Dances With Wolves reference. Perhaps reinforces horses as a native signifier, but definitely joins Avatar references in forming images of imperial agents who have Gone Native. This has a local parallel in Damara, insofar as her stilted speaking style suggests she is possessed by Lord English, in turn providing an image of a Caliborn who has Gone Native as a Japanese girl. The result is racist (in its reliance on notions of savagery), sexist (posing women as a Savage to be colonized), AND transphobic (posing trans womanhood as colonial adventurism upon the opposite sex). A triple whammy!

Horuss "dating down the spectrum" is an autism joke, hidden by the more generic abstract condescension of the hemocaste system. Or rather, facilitating that condescension -- autism functions here as a insult, asserting that your social inferiors are categorically less intelligent than you. This feeds into notions of savagery (a race of people at a stage prior to our own) and sexist conceptions of womanhood (Damara's "incoherence" becomes paradigmatic of the categorically nonsensical babble of women, even as the very fact that her discourse has content undermines this premise)

I had gathered way back that Horuss was doing the racism/homophobia tango when he talks about "getting caught with my hoof in the chocolate jar" but I'd missed that he follows the phrase with a sneaky n-word by way of "so to nicker", a play on "so to speak". Also resonates nicely with the general presentation of the discourse of underclasses as incoherent babbling

[mmmmalo]

What about reading Equius as not Indian (as in, Native American), but rather Indian, as in from India?

I think those two things are slurred together.

The arrow ==> is associated with mind control via the command prompt, but the foremost visual signifier for mind control is situated at the center of characters' foreheads, like a third eye. The emblem on Feferi's tiara is an echo of this (hence Jane's mind control tiara), and her trident (which is a rotated picture of a bow and arrow) is implied to create a third eye/puncture wound by Karkat's injunction to "perforate his bone bulge (skull) with a culling fork" -- we cut to Feferi prodding at a skeletal cephalopod after the remark. As an extra-canonical bonus, Hussie's game "Psycholonials" makes simultaneous gestures at "psychic colonialism" and "corona" (which means crown) that seem to affirm the blending. Indian meets Indian.

It's generally not accurate to say that a troll "is" this or that ethnicity, though. They're surfaces onto which a slurry of racialized qualities can be projected, and sifting through the mixture of deliberate misrepresentations for distinct dynamics becomes part of the work to understand what Alternia's Deal is. That's how I currently think about it, anyway

[mmmmalo]

Found probable confirmation of the pony/Pawnee pun in Detective Pony. From page 4550:

TT: You must be tying one the fuck on tight already. TG: mybe i am TG: like a bow of ribbone TG: on a beiuetuifiul ponny TT: Man, how can you be this much drunker than last time we talked? TT: What the hell are you even drinking? TG: ok but 2 b fair TG: *beiuetuifiul TG: was an intentional typo 4 ur benefit TG: cuz i kno you loves tha po's TT: It's a beiuet.

Though Roxy is explicitly discussing the mangling of "beautiful", "Ponny" is also a misspelling for Dirk's benefit that draws the pronunciation closer to "Pawnee". Referring to "typos" as "po's" loops the discussion back around to "ponny", the secondary referent. You will also note that the ponny has a bow. Hussie used this same technique to make a BBC joke on page 4435, having Jane bemoan the Freudian slip of saying her book will be "set fire" instead of "sent fine" as way of drawing attention to the otherwise unmentioned misspelling of "barely" as "barkley" when wondering whether [redacted] would fit, or if [redacted] was too big. Basketball superstar Charles Barkley is what the refrance

[mmmmalo]

Was mulling over a point of... racial ambiguity I guess. Much like how Equius's blatant racism collides oddly with being himself a collection of distorted stereotypes, it was struck me curious that a feature of his often emphasized in Native American race headcanons, his long dark hair, is also alluded to in-comic as a feature of Con Air's Cameron Poe, when Vriska calls Arquius a "NATIONAL fucking TREASURE" (another Nic Cage film). A couple things:

I ran a quick search on the Native American scenes in Con Air -- there's a bit where Dave Chappelle is seated next to a Native prisoner and strikes up a conversation with "Sup Cochise? HAU." When ignored, he continues "Hey man, I'm just fucking with you alright? Don't get all Wounded Knee on me and shit." Occurred to me that Equius dies with a wounded knee...

2. With the precedent of Halloween and Terminator behind me, I wondered if the racial ambiguity might have originated in Con Air itself, rather than Homestuck. The name "Cameron" seems to derive from Scottish Gaelic cam (“crooked, bent”) + sròn (“nose”) -- which led me to the Native American subsection of the Wikipedia article for AQUILINE NOSE:

The aquiline nose was deemed a distinctive feature of some Native American tribes, members of which often took their names after their own characteristic physical attributes (i.e. The Hook Nose, or Chief Henry Roman Nose). [5] In the depiction of Native Americans, for instance, an aquiline nose is one of the standard traits of the "noble warrior" type. [10] It is so important as a cultural marker, Renee Ann Cramer argued in Cash, Color, and Colonialism (2005), that tribes without such characteristics have found it difficult to receive "federal recognition"/"acknowledgement" (which are specific/significant terms) from the US government, resulting in failure to win benefits including tax-exempt status, reclamation rights, and the right to administer and profit from casinos. [11]

So if the name CAMERON POE gains a possible synonym in INDIAN GHOST, Dave Chappelle's Wounded Knee joke seems like less of a one off, and Nic Cage (and his long hair) become a vehicle for filtering images of Native Americans through a white (ergo ghostly?) body... though I'm not sure where to begin with the film's reevaluation. Larks are apparently messenger of the south-wind god Okaga in some Lakota myth, but how that would bear upon Vince Larkin isn't immediately clear to me. Pocahontas and her friend Flit came out two years prior to Con Air, so I wonder if Tricia Poe's pet name of "hummingbird" is relevant... and the matter of the movie ending before a bunch of Nevadan casinos makes me squint a bit now. Gonna need to rewatch soon

3. There's a movie about Cochise (and his friendship with American soldier Tom Jeffords) called Broken Arrow -- another potential touching point for Equius, if he's indeed filtered through Con Air

[mmmmalo]

The apparent intersection of antisemitism and misogyny explains why Vriska complains to Rose that people who can't appreciate Light players' ramblings are "philistines" -- a word for anti-intellectuals derived from opponents of the biblical israelites. Invocation via opponent. Kind of fucking me up though, in the current climate, that as a regional term "Philistine" now surfaces as "Palestine".

Inappropriately enough, the rhetorical positioning of femininity as categorically white seems to rub off on Judaism, in one use case: Arquius dismisses Erisol as "a pair of grotesque philistines blustering through the same coarse ignorance tunnel" in covert reference to Alternia's structural roots in double penetration. The "philistines" are rendered the black studs, and the coarse tunnel they share (co-arse...?) is labeled ignorant, repurposing the indictment of the philistines for an extra dash of misogyny. Again, fucking me up to have seen this sexual polarization of race put forward quite recently in service of justifying the ongoing slaughter in Gaza. The invocation of "tunnels" fucks with me too on that level, but at that point I think we've probably exceeded the text's import -- it would certainly be interesting to discover that the intersection of Native motifs and Jewish motifs (eg "pound of flesh" at once invoking Shylock and the New World cannibal) reflected Hussie's engagement with the subject of colonialism as it relates to Israel, but I'm not sure... the historical usage of "philistine" would suffice? But the modern application would certainly recolor Psycholonials featuring a burning police station with a blue hexagram...

There are 3 instances of the cherubim using "philistine" in service of their vague Jewish coding, but I think in the context of the above, the one that really gets me is in Dirk's intro: "...your work could be viewed by some as BORDERLINE PORNOGRAPHIC. And to those philistines you'll be heard wondering, what the fuck do you mean BORDERLINE?" Here is Dirk asserting his intention to cross the borderline in defiance of the "philistines" -- does that become an invocation of the settler mindset, couched in reference to porn? Which is the same basic structure as Arquius's tunnel remark? I think I'm talking myself into it...

Within Homestuck's apparent intent to wholly encompass American hate discourse, it's bothered me for a while that the figure of the Terrorist seemed absent -- the omnipresent threat of Bec Noir's warp murders (and the bombings targeting Jane) seemed to vaguely invoke the atmosphere of Living Under Terror, but that never led me to any wordplay or politically polarized structures, the sort of stuff I rely on for Slurquest. At most, you had Karkat referring to activating Sburb (and thereby destroying the world) as "letting this Earth Arabian you call a genie out of the bottle" -- suspect! But not enough to go on about... colonial motifs, though, I am somewhat better equipped to handle. I am going to try to familiarize myself with Arabic loanwords into English on the off-chance one of them is functioning as a tell, somewhere

My first thought is to reexamine John's relationship with the oil on LOWAS, to see if like, the process of resource extraction has been misrepresented as a cheery Captain Planet style effort to clean up the planet? A quick survey of references to oil isn't encouraging, but the entire game of Sburb is premised on killing bad guys to collect resources (and build up white towers...?), so that might be our colonial paradigm right there...

[mmmmalo]