these trolls are so sburbcel skaiapilled
(page 1589-1590)
HOMESTUCK TODAY!! UPDATE! HEY GUYS WE HAVE HOMESTUCK TODAY!!!!
After five long, silent days we are SO BACK with two troll conversations. I love seeing new combinations of characters talk because I get to see their color combinations on the page – Dave and GA’s chatlog looks like a Christmas wreath, while the purple and brown of Rose and AT’s actually look good together in an eccentric waistcoat sort of way.
These conversations are both REALLY good! They’re sequels to the ones on pages 1093 (Rose-GA) and 1099 (Dave-AT), and together form a complex network of character interactions where everybody is trying to carefully calculate their behavior while refusing to be sincere or honest, and everyone has a different idea of everyone else’s motivations.
In Rose and GA’s previous conversation, Rose impressed GA by being able to understand temporal mechanics better than the other kids, and they agreed to be friends. Today GA messages Dave, asking for insight into Rose’s feelings, mentioning ‘Human Courtship’ and their hope to extend a relationship with Rose ‘Beyond The Context Of A Short Lived And Lackluster Trolling Effort’ (p.1589). They attempt to practice ‘Human Sarcasm’, but struggle with making it clear when they are and aren’t being sarcastic.
I love how the trolls type, and have clear voices in my head for all four of them so far, but I think GA is my current favorite? I only wish I had diction this good. There’s still little to no information on why these trolls are trolling the kids, but whatever it is, GA is clearly far more interested in flirting with Rose and I get it. who doesn’t want to date an alien? I think GA’s natural demeanor, where they’re formal and sincere but their words are so alien it sometimes seems like they’re being ironic, is a much better challenge and complement to Rose than GA trying to change themself. It is pretty funny that Dave’s advice basically boils down to ‘actually, the thing you were already doing is the way to Rose’s heart’ and he is absolutely right. Rose needs someone who’s just a little antagonistic and keeps her on her toes.
Sadly I think Dave has a complete lack of social awareness, claiming that ‘i command [rose] alright i am like the pimpmaster hustledaddy of all snippy bookshrews’ and that ‘she is so in my grill’ and EVEN that he himself is ‘really smooth and inherently likeable’ (p.1589). First off, Dave sends the first message in more than half of his pesterlogs with Rose, and the only time she’s really ‘in his grill’ is when she wants to play Sburb (not flirting, literally just a gamer) – I can’t find a single message from her to Dave that reads like flirting. More broadly, I think Dave is bad at reading the room and knowing how people in his life feel about him, and has a very skewed view of his relationships with his friends and bro.
I don’t think Dave has any actual interest in Rose, shown pretty clearly when he’s willing to help GA court Rose; he’s just been raised with these macho ideals of being ‘above’ women and being so cool and detached and irresistible to them, and he recreates that uncritically. There’s an obvious question about how much Dave believes in his own coolness and how much he’s just masking insecurities, and my read is that it’s somewhere in the middle: being ‘cool’ and ‘ironic’ and a ‘bro’ isn’t something Dave actively thinks about, it’s just so ingrained in him that saying these things is a way for him to avoid introspection. If he never questions these beliefs, he doesn’t have to face the idea that he might actually be a complex person – that’s why, even after admitting to being uncomfortable with his brother’s puppets (p.419) and to getting his ass kicked by his bro (p.1071), he quickly reverts to his old ways. Which is interesting, because he clearly likes to think that his irony is a carefully constructed thing and a skill he’s developed, but I currently read Dave as acting on instinct and impulse 95% of the time.
Rose and AT’s conversation begins SO strong when she pretends to not know who Dave is. She also gives her own psychological insights on him, positioning herself as an outside observer on his behavior such as a ‘psychiatric professional’ or ‘zookeeper’, a fascinating way to deny the fact that the two of them influence each other as people through a reciprocal friendship. Right now I think Rose is more aware than Dave is that she’s putting on an affectation, but she’s just as bought into it – she just sees herself as capable of constructing her own personality and thinking on a higher level than her friends can.
The references to Dave’s metaphorical/literal goat are a fun callback to Dave’s introduction, where he ‘will however contemplate bleating like a goat for IRONICALLY HUMOROUS purposes at a later date’ (p.316), already called back to once on page 566. No deep meaning here that I can see but the idea of Dave having a sort of Schrodinger’s goat whose existence is disputed is pretty funny. He’s already dealing with those birds, and now a goat on top of that????
Like Dave’s to GA, Rose’s advice to AT is actually good, though she’s trying to make fun of them by mentioning their ‘obvious cunning with words’ (p.1590). When Rose spouted puppet poetry to Dave he did not enjoy it (p.522), and AT leaning into their ineptness at trolling and writing will probably make Dave angry that the trolling is being done ‘wrong’, pissing him off more than an actually dope rhyme. That being said, Dave and AT’s first conversation (p.1099) is one of the few Homestuck pages that I don’t enjoy – though I’ve seen people on the forums cite it as a favorite – so I am not looking forward to how this resolves. (Rose and GA, on the other hand? cannot fucking wait <3)
AT is unpleasant and misguided in the same ways Dave is – they’ve both been around people who have pressured them to act tough, but it’s not really their instinct, so they get in over their head and flounder. They’re mean and uncharismatic at the same time, which makes them seem worse than someone who is mean and charismatic (which I expect some of the trolls will be), although really they are equally harmful. Most of AT’s messages are annoying to read, intentionally obtuse and poorly phrased, but not actively cruel. It’s the end of this conversation that really makes AT looks bad, when they say ‘tHANKS FOR YOUR HELP, bUT I DON'T NEED YOUR HELP,’ and then block Rose accidentally and without cause. (Her response of mimicking their typing style is a perfect ending to the page, though).
I think the Rose-Dave-GA-AT dynamic is trying to ask ‘who is doing the trolling, and who is being trolled?’. Because Dave is a troll; he presents Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff and his blogs as sincere endeavors, despite not seeing them that way, and GA denounces the trolls’ efforts in their first conversation with Rose (p.1093). I guess that fundamentally, ‘being trolled’ is an experience, and someone is only a ‘troll’ if you only know them through their trolling. As soon as someone has any kind of interiority they stop being a troll, and become a person who sometimes trolls. And with the exception of the first Jade-CG conversation (p.859), these trolls betray way too much personality in their trolling efforts to truly be trolls.
Finally, there’s one feature in these conversations that I think is really important. GA refers to Rose as ‘The Seer’ and Dave as ‘The Knight’, and also mentions ‘The Ultimate Riddle’. AT also refers to Dave as ‘THE KNIGHT,’ despite knowing his name. In GC’s conversations with Rose (p.1524) and John (p.1579-80), they use the kids’ names but also discuss the Medium, exiles, time loops, and LOWAS. GC is trying to mess with things, but GA and AT seem fully bought into the Skaian ideology, and have perhaps been in the Medium for so long and influenced by their exile commands so much that they’ve stopped questioning anything regarding Skaia. Which feels very much like a cautionary tale and a fate to be avoided – as cool as all the fantasy lore is, the kids will lose their way if they get too caught up in it.
