#serious hs stuff

[shoegazingmonad]

The way the waist scarf wraps around the kids is interesting. There's a loop on Harry's end of it, but he's outside of it and barely clinging on, and it's juxtaposed diagonally with a loop effortlessly coiling around Tavvy. Vrissy's is curled around her waist like Vriska's, hands raised and apprehensive. And Yiffy is pretty much doing a trust fall with theirs, just barely keeping them contained whilst they flip off the reader.

Makes me think it's in relation to their roles within the narrative; Harry is the only one who has to cling to it, like he's being left behind in the same way John has left him and his role as his 'redemption arc' unfulfilled. Vrissy follows on out of desperation to not fall behind, but is left unsure whether what she's gotten herself into is what she wants. Tavvy is caught up in the repeating cycles of the story, but finds it uplifting (lol). Yiffy is going along for the ride but they sure as hell are going to spite the audience the whole way.

Also I like how "Kids: Escape from above" makes it sound like Vriska's taking them to hell, since heaven is 'above'.

[shoegazingmonad]

Miscellaneous Vrissy & Vriska notes

[shoegazingmonad]

Swiss has anxieties about being avoided by some of his schoolmates. His zeal… is perhaps a bit too much sometimes.

Couldn't talk about when it first dropped, but in the 11-2025 artist commentary they show this pic of what is presumably Swiss getting bullied by his peers before describing the intent behind his stuck-out hair curl among his slick-back as him being 'unable to get that one bit of hair to behave and being low-key kind of annoyed by it' as to say Swiss has a part of himself that sticks out despite his attempts to hold it back, and combined with the above from the writer's commentary talking about his fear of being left out because of his 'overzealous' personality I don't think there could've been any sequence of statements that could've made me recontextualise him as autistic any faster

[shoegazingmonad]

Was going through random HS convos out of boredom and I just realised the silhouette of CC at their computer shown in their intro on 862 is a recreation of Vriska's own on 2144, and that their hair bangs also replicate Vriska's original left-sided eye-covering bangs, shown on the page after. And here I thought they were gonna be subtle about the omega / delta kid ancestor / descendant relationships, lol.

VRISKA: Make mine an au8urn!

Which also reminds me: in AVRT Act 2 Vrissy goes to a stand ran by a grubmonger selling grubsicles (which are presumably just grubs / kids, based on the name) and asks for her grub / kid to be an auburn, a red-head / reddish-brown similar to AA's colour and reminiscent of the 'augury' in her chumhandle, implying that Vrissy's descendant is AA (the similarily overdramatic, headstrong and bratty one)

[shoegazingmonad]

Just as the omega kids do, the delta kids shown so far appear to have particularily inspired hair / head shapes. Ly'lac's hair is pretty clearly intended to be a headcrab, backed up by the glimpse of half-life's resonance cascade in the intermission prior, and the parasitic body-altering nature of the squiddle hair itself as implied by the caretaker's appearance. This also suggests a pattern individual of the omega's designs, which was iconography used in the original homestuck (Tavvy 8-ball, Harry sburb juju, Yiffy apple logo).

And in their case, this seems to be external media. Working with his chumhandle 'agamemnonstheory', which as the mspawiki kindly points out resembles 'a game theory' (and alludes to the way he likely views the world through a simulation, given theory means 'to percieve'), Swiss seems to draw inspiration from the protagonist of pony island.

Though this is as much an observation taken in visually as it is thematically; the game itself a metafictional pony simulator equivalent to limbo for the protagonist (a human) with the goal of taking the player's soul, ending in the escape of both them and everyone else trapped within besides the one who guides them out of it, very vaguely reminiscent of the satyr simulation stuff they've been putting down so far

[shoegazingmonad]

Interested to hear any thoughts you have on the February ‘26 upd8, specifically the menstruation of it all. It’s interesting that AA’s so preoccupied with it when, based on how she discusses Satyrical menstruation, nymphs don’t do that [similar to Dagger and pregnancy].

I know you had already found ties between menstruation and AA similar to ones between conception/pregnancy and Dagger, and that is why I write to pick your brain.

First thoughts on that were basically word-for-word with Swiss's own on the subject, it's confusing as hell. But on menstruation and prior talk of it's relevance to others, now that I'm aware blood (as the body substance) is a bit of post-canon world building that all of the characters have their own individual relations with, I'm definitely gonna need to revise AA's motifs with it in mind, so I guess my thoughts on that are on hold while I get them in order again.

But otherwise, I'm not surprised to hear the Satyrs are being implied to have some kind of routine blood-letting going on: Swiss's hive analogy for Satyr society (911) already implied they were being harvested for something, which was presumably blood, as the individually labelled character-coloured honey's reminiscence to troll blood had suggested, and now that we're introducing another implicit routine blood-letting intrinsic to Satyr society into the mix in the form of 'menstruation' it definitely seems to me that Satyr's menstruation is the blood-harvesting they were getting at earlier.

And, with that new information in mind, the alternative implication that Nymphs don't have menstruation despite the assumed biology doesn't surprise me much with my current readings on how they function (in both literal and symbolic terms) either, as it's implied that the inkstone pumping blood throughout them is an extension of the nymph / headguppy, and not something innate to the host it's attached to. Put that alongside the implication that Satyrs have built in blood-letting, and it gives the impression that there's this biological dichotomy between the two, wherein Satyrs have blood pumped out of the body and Nymphs have blood pumped into the body

[shoegazingmonad]

The hair obscuring CC's eye gives the impression they have a third eye (mind's eye) due to the upper two on the head parasite, which alongside the obvious semblance it has to their own symbol pins them as a Mind player in the same way Ly'lac and AA are pinned as Doom and Time. Their connection to the aspect is also hinted at within the general chatrooom too, though more in regards to them as a Thief of Mind. They send a (mental) link into the chat, presenting the members with a choice; however the only member shown to have opened the link is subsumed, taking away their ability to make any choices at all as a result of initially doing so.

Without including the parasite's own set they instead have monocular vision, suggesting they may have some issues with depth perception - which is ironic, considering they suppose themselves to be a person of high taste when it comes to media comprehension? Although the neglect of their own host set of eyes in place of the parasite's, of which are specifically used for the perception of depth, still suggest that to be the case in some way I'm not sure what to make of. Another interpretation of the lone eye is that they're some sort of Cyclops (metaphorically, I presume) as well, something I'd say applies fine so far with only surface level knowledge of such, given that one accepted (though debateably) translation of it is "cattle-thief" and they steal a Satyr via subsumption in the general chat.

And on that - seeing as Ly'lac's action take place in tandem with the ongoings of the chatrooms, it's likely the "buffering" they were shown going through was the active process of said subsumption, hence the horse ambiguous horse ears. Though speaking of orb panel visual ambiguities, I just noticed that the teal eyeline minus the eye itself is supposed to make their half-glasses look like a literal glass of liquid, which I find to be very cute

[shoegazingmonad]

Speaking of parallels Tavvy has to cherubs: literally almost everything he's wearing is a reference to them, somehow