In Homestuck, magic is broadly a cipher for queerness. This connection is first introduced when John gets his magic tricks from a book about a homoerotic relationship between two men:
"It's really amazing how hard it is to find a sausage-sized piece of a guy on the floor of a room that dark and smoky."
"I wanted to ask if he was sure about this, performing in broad daylight. He was used to working in dark rooms. It was usually the first thing out of his mouth when he would queer a trick."
The motif continues -- Roxy, who “loves wizards”, is attracted to John, the closeted amateur magician who retcons events, making them unhappen in the manner of a wizard, and she falls in love with Dirk, a gay man, as well as Calliope, the transgender wizard of Oz. And so on and so forth.
Naturally, more complex relationships with magic signify more complex relationships with queerness. Rose hates her mother’s apparently-performative obsession with wizards, but she also keeps and writes personal slash fiction tales about them, and she performs her own sorceries as a lesbian. Eridan, who orbits around magic without accepting it openly, is basically a misogynistic incel, but he also canonically dresses in feminine clothing in death. The continual deconstruction of magic as something unreal or conceptually incoherent, even as it clings to a tangible presence within the text, replicates and signifies the marginalization, recuperation, and erasure of queerness by homophobia and transphobia.
One magical figure in Homestuck that I want to talk about is the fairy; as a particular magical identity, and thus as a symbol for a particular queer identity, I believe it casts an important light on several character and story arcs.
Andrew Hussie is at least plausibly aware of historical marginalizations and oppressions, as evinced by the deliberate use of e.g. ‘octoroon’ terminology in Sassacre’s texts. With that in mind, how might the specific historical use of ‘fairy’ terminology inform the various fairies we see in Homestuck?
In Gay New York, George Chauncey characterizes the historical fairy as follows, placing them in the context of male homosexuality:
The determinative criterion in the identification of men as fairies was not the extent of their same-sex desire or activity (their "sexuality"). but rather the gender persona and status they assumed. It was only the men who assumed the sexual and other cultural roles ascribed to women who identified themselves -- and were identified by others -- as fairies. The fairies' sexual desire for men was not regarded as the singular characteristic that distinguished them from other men, as is generally the case for gay men today. That desire was seen as simply one aspect of a much more comprehensive gender role inversion (or reversal), which they were also expected to manifest through the adoption of effeminate dress and mannerisms; they were thus often called inverts (who had "inverted" their gender) rather than homosexuals in technical language.
With reference to Chauncey and others, Emma Heaney likewise characterizes the fairy as such in The New Woman, placing them in the context of trans femininity:
Trans feminine genders were legible and understood in the period. Fairies and girl-boys were not only viewed as “crossing” from man and woman, but as trans feminine people, whose conditions of life were set by their association with cis women... Fairies were viewed as interchangeable with cis women in sexual and domestic pairings, and their femininity established the contrasting “normalness” of their masculine partners...
This non-determining relation between genitals and sex did not lead to the breakdown of the categories “man” and “woman” or the evacuation of meaning from these terms. Rather, fairies simply occupied the social role of women during this time. This operation extended to a popular recognition of the way trans femininity conditioned the interpretation and thus the experience of cis women.
The historical fairy, then, and the conventional fairy by extension, serves as a signifier for homosexuality, gender non-conformity, crossdressing, transgender ‘gender inversion’, and/or queerness in general -- particularly in those assigned male at birth, but again, also in general.
Who are the fairies we see in Homestuck, and where do we see them?
Well, the primary fairies we see in Homestuck are the trolls, of course. In folklore, troll mythology emerged from a different culture, but trolls inhabit a similar order of mythology to the fair folk, as nature spirits and as friends or foes to humanity. In Homestuck, the trolls who achieve god tier status also obtain fairy wings; for trolls, godhood is inextricably entangled with butterfly and fairy symbolism.
Metamorphosis is clearly a significant part of troll biology, and therefore ingrained in their mythology. They've got cocoons everywhere, and are often likened to insects through biological terms. The wings have nothing (we know of) to do with troll adulthood. But have a lot to do with their perception of what ascension should be, which is the culmination of a pupation process. Which is why some may look to fairies as an ideal, or rule them out as fiction on account of the ideal they represent. Ascended trolls in this game are essentially magical fairies.
The confluence between troll feyhood and divinity, as a kind of godlike expression of metamorphosis, takes us back to the queer concept of the fairy as sexually fluid and transformed, as well as the sexual fluidity of the trolls. Through SBURB, the trolls are enabled to ascend to a distinctly queer godhood, coming to embody the same divine androgyny as the cherubs do; in particular, through an epic coming-of-age, the trolls are given the opportunity to “grow sideways” instead of growing up, quite literally developing laterally and stepping outside of the normal process of physical maturation for their species.
As Kathryn Stockton says in The Queer Child, with reference to Edelman’s No Future:
...the figure of the child as the emblem of parents’ (impossible) continuity spawns delusional visions. These are visions of the seamless reproduction of oneself, whose future is always represented by (one’s) children. Thus “the future” and “our children” are always bound together in a kind of frightening (and hermetically sealed) “reproductive futurism”: a “social consensus” that... has been made “impossible to refuse”... If in any context there is “no baby” and thus “no future,” “then the blame must fall on the fatal lure of sterile, narcissistic enjoyments understood as inherently destructive of meaning”—enjoyments dramatically laid at the door of homosexuals.
I coin the term “sideways growth” to refer to... something that locates energy, pleasure, vitality, and (e)motion in the back-and-forth of connections and extensions that are not reproductive.
Reading fairy tiering as a kind of queer apotheosis -- and thus, as a kind of deviation from the reproduction of the future -- is difficult precisely because it serves as a mechanic in a game about the reproduction of the cosmos, but I would argue that the reading is less counter-intuitive than it seems. The trolls are intrinsically queer by the human standards that center the comic: even as the trolls reproduce, their form of reproduction itself negates the reproduction of a conventional and heterosexual human future, and and it destroys the nuclear family unit.
To be clear, on Beforus and Alternia, the trolls are still entwined and bound within a kind of reproductive social matrix, and SBURB reifies this matrix, abusing childhood itself as the site of the production of the future. But god tiering -- and fairy tiering in particular -- is an entirely superfluous mechanic. It is not necessary for the completion of the game, nor does it exist as a linear extension of the echeladder that is much closer to the core of SBURB’s gameplay. It allows all ascended children to personally perpetuate their own existences beyond their inevitable deaths, rather than perpetuating the existence of the cosmos at large.
God tiering is thus a form of sideways or nonlinear character advancement that exists apart from the demands placed upon children by the game: it is a form of sideways or nonlinear growth and self-actualization that exists apart from the reproductive demands placed upon the young by society. Fairy tiering simply literalizes this metaphor, allowing the queer troll children both to grow sideways and to come to embody hyperreal symbols of queerness.
All of this is particularly evident in practice. Fairy symbolism surrounds many of the trolls, particularly insofar as they serve as “fairy godmothers” to the beta kids, but our primary and most explicit fairies are Vriska and Aradia, simply because they’re the only beta trolls to god tier in the alpha timeline:
Aradia herself is surrounded by death at all times, but her morbid obsession is shaped by her embodiment and her state of being. As a ghost, deceased herself, she is imprisoned wholly by the teleology of reproductive futurism, and thus she is hollowed out into a manifestation of SBURB’s inevitability:
Aradia’s ultimate resurrection as a fairy -- after she has already fulfilled her cosmogenic role and helped her team to complete their session -- thus constitutes her transcendence of her role in the perpetuation of existence. Her metamorphosis allows her to transcend her old role as a temporal lynchpin in SBURB’s reproductive futurism, and having so ascended, she leaves for a sempiternity in the dream bubbles; she rejects the future in favor of the alternatives of the dreaming and the dead, growing sideways on multiple levels.
Vriska likewise has a complicated relationship with SBURB, one inextricably influenced and foreshadowed by her history as an experienced FLARPer and augmented reality gamer. For Vriska, who was recruited by her caretaker and mother figure to prey upon other children, FLARP was nothing less than a way for her to fulfill those demands:
The narratives of FLARP thus constitute a fantastic representation and allegory for the more fundamental social realities of Vriska’s hellish life -- and the lives of others -- given form through augmented reality, as video games are wont to be in Homestuck. But at the same time, through FLARP, Vriska is able to attempt to recuperate some noble identity for herself:
Vriska is able to shuck off the reality of her situation as a victim and a cog in an overwhelming cycle of abuse, becoming the person she wants to be: strong, powerful, and in control of herself and her life as an adult and a glorious scoundrel. The equally-overwhelming fakeness attribute of this persona is irrelevant, because Vriska has made this persona real enough for herself, seizing strength, power, and control on every front.
It’s only natural that she also sees SBURB as another meaningless game to exploit...
...because to her, it is. It’s just another reality for her to navigate, and thus another site for her to attempt to extract something for herself. Where every other god tier we see is murdered through the will of another, and then god tiers almost incidentally or accidentally, Vriska deliberately fairy tiers with full knowledge and awareness, in an ultimate act of excess as a power gamer, abusing and mastering the system around her for her own benefit. Her fairy tiering is inextricable from her disrespect, exploitation, and subversion of the cosmogenic order for her own pleasure.
And naturally, like Aradia, Vriska dies and is laterally exiled to the dream bubbles. In the dream bubbles, we see the alpha trolls who god tiered in the alpha timeline -- Meenah, the Thief of Life who only has vitality in taking it from others, manipulating Life without really creating it anew, and Aranea in particular. Aranea is not only Vriska’s ancestor, who informs her aspirations and character; she’s also her ectodoppelganger from across the Scratch, and a true fairy archetype:
As a god tier Sylph, Aranea is an explicit fairy on multiple levels, and she aspires to ‘heal’ the timeline she occupies. Her power as a fairy is that which empowers her to divert the timeline; her fairy status is that which subverts the reproductive futurism of SBURB and the teleology of the alpha timeline, allowing the sideways growth of an offshoot to supercede the inevitable forward growth of the alpha. Aranea’s sideways development is so absolute that when she and her plans falter, a literal plot hole -- with all of the story-breaking power it allows -- is required to bring the alpha timeline back into a forward order.
Fairy tiering is implicated in sideways growth on every level, but I think I’ve said enough about that in particular -- there’s a lot more to be said, and much more interesting things to say, about fairies and queer subtext in Homestuck.
Let’s go back to the revenge cycle among the beta trolls, with an eye upon the fairy as a queer figure.
The beta revenge cycle begins with various sessions of FLARP between Aradia, Vriska, Tavros, and Terezi; at some point in these games, Vriska uses mind control to force Tavros to jump off of a cliff.
On the literal level, this is just Vriska being pissy and needlessly cruel to Tavros -- both as the descendant of the man who loved and killed Vriska’s own ancestor, and as the boy who is too pathetic sensitive for Vriska’s playstyle. But Vriska’s cruelty is preceded by a particularly interesting monologue:
Rather than simply punishing Tavros or otherwise getting on with his torment, Vriska verbally solicits fairy behavior from him. Tavros dresses like Pupa Pan -- the child in arrested development, the proto-gay child, the fairy-child, the fairy-touched child -- and Vriska compliments him on the cuteness and appeal of his fairy presentation. She asserts, or assumes, or realizes that Tavros wants to be Pupa Pan, just like she wants to be Spinneret Mindfang, and she asks him to try flying with her; she asks him to try acting like the fairy child that (she thinks) he wants to be.
On the symbolic level, Vriska is pushing Tavros to join her in flight among the fairies, and thus, to come out of the closet as some kind of queer figure, or at least, to try queer behavior with her. She hurts him in the process -- perhaps because he isn’t queer, despite the fairy symbolism he surrounds himself with and aspires to, but the question of Tavros’ implied queerness is almost incidental to the reality of his pain at Vriska’s hands. If Tavros was ever going to grow wings and fly like Rufioh and Pupa Pan, it wasn’t going to be because he jumped off of a cliff, nor was he ever going to come out of the closet just because Vriska kicked the door down and pushed herself upon him.
Not that Tavros was ever going to get overwhelming sympathy for his victimization. The fairy subtext of Vriska’s violence against him was only reiterated when he first reached out for help, and he was turned away not simply because he was unsympathetic as a male victim of (sexualized) violence at the hands of a woman, but because he was a boy who had deliberately chosen to participate in femininity:
Tavros played a stupid game with an aggressive girls, and he won a stupid prize when she victimized him, but the equally fundamental victim-blaming at play is that in ‘playing a game for girls’ -- in attempting to take flight as a fairy child, and in attempting to enter the realm of the feminine and/or queer -- he got exactly what he was asking for.
After Tavros, we come to Vriska, and she doesn’t find her place in the beta revenge cycle any more fulfilling. Aradia takes vengeance upon Vriska for her brutality towards Tavros, and Aradia does so by confronting her with the ghosts of her victims:
On the literal level, this is also a straightforward act of revenge against Vriska: Vriska is tormented by the various trolls she has killed, subjecting her to a truly ironic and karmic comeuppance (and subjecting her in equal measure to a vicious retraumatization as a fellow victim of spidermom).
But Aradia’s revenge also has a unique meaning with relation to the fairy symbolism that surrounds these characters; Aradia is forcefully reminding Vriska that she’s not the Tinkerbell to Tavros’ Pupa Pan; in fact, she’s his Captain Hook.
Aradia confronts Vriska with the apparent bleak reality of her situation: that she’s a murderer and a pirate, a not a lost boy or fairy-child. It’s only natural that she destroyed Tavros instead of straightforwardly acting as his fairy guide, because she was never actually his fairy.
It’s hard to understate how emotionally devastating this is in a queer reading -- Aradia has contextualized Vriska solely as a child predator instead of the queer child that she is, and she has symbolically misgendered Vriska by stripping her of her fairy narratives. Vriska can cling to her pirate narratives, as she does quite a lot of going forward, but she still circles her fairy fantasies with Tavros, as she does when she meets Tavros in the game:
Vriska senselessly acts her fairy fantasies out no matter how impossible it seems for her to fulfill them, and no matter how unfulfilling they’ll be as a consequence.
She tries to unite Tavros with his shadow, (her perception of) his repressed true self, but she’s basically using him as a doll, and she knows it. It’s aggressive and masturbatory, and that’s exactly what she hates about her affection, at least on some level. She’s a trans girl who has been confronted with the reality that she’s being a creepy fucking chaser and acting like a stereotypical straight guy.
This desolation, the psychic amputation of Vriska’s fairy fantasies, is what Aradia has really done to Vriska. Aradia has denied Vriska’s right to be a queer figure in Tavros’ life, let alone anyone’s life, and she has reminded Vriska of just how shitty a queer role model she would be -- Aradia has told Vriska that she’s actually just a predator, just like her spider lusus, and she has psychologically and symbolically amputated Vriska of her claims to queerness.
This is something that Vriska really can’t forgive.
Vriska’s act of revenge against Aradia is -- yet again -- straighforward enough on the literal level. Encouraged by Doc Scratch -- as a man who gives voice to Vriska’s worst desires, or as a predator who manipulates her -- she takes a sliver of control of Sollux and pushes him to inebriate himself, before having him kill Aradia.
However, this is contextualized not only as violence within a relationship...
...but also as violence through Gemini.
Aradia has been assaulted by her partner, as contrived by Vriska, and she has also been assaulted by the duality of Gemini, which stands for the duality of like mirror images before it stands for the duality of opposites; it is the male twins in conjunction with one another, not the reconciliation of opposed principles in unity, as within the divine androgyne.
More explicitly stated, Aradia has been murdered or otherwise brutalized by Sollux, who serves as the lingering specter of intimate partner violence against fairies (i.e. trans femmes) and misogynistic masc4masc bullshit in general.
And having been so brutalized, Aradia is reduced to a shell of herself; in her vulnerability, she is first co-opted by the reproductive futurism of SBURB and then preyed upon by Equius.
The deeply autoerotic quality of Equius’ fixations -- as a man who dominates but wants to be dominated; as a man attracted to a robotic body who only finds fulfillment as an AI; as a man who tries to make the target of his affections akin to his corporeal blueblooded self, before finding fulfillment as a red sprite like her -- reveals the fundamental likeness between him and Aradia, as the target of his fixations, or at least, it suggests that he sees some kind of likeness between him and her, on some level.
The transmisogynistic images that inform Equius’ mythology -- the cybernetic male-mother, the hulking brute, the autoerotic autocastrator, etc -- also thus reinforce the notion that Aradia is subject to transmisogyny as a fairy, and Equius’ literal construction of her body for his pleasure positions him as one who abuses and exploits the transgender body, holding it to the constructed mold that pleases him.
Having destroyed Aradia even more thoroughly than Tavros, the revenge cycle turns yet again against Vriska, and Terezi punishes Vriska by proxy... by telling Doc Scratch, abuser of women and children, that Vriska is in the possession of his cue ball.
Doc Scratch detonates his cue ball, but in doing so he quite deliberately ends Vriska’s prospects as a fairy, rather than simply killing her. He continues Vriska’s amputation by literally taking her eye and arm, scarring her body and reifying her life story as the Captain Hook to Tavros’ Pupa Pan. He deliberately posits her as the symbolic antithesis to the fairy, he does so through the permanent destruction of her body so as to tell her that she will always be that antithesis, and he constructs her body so as to keep her from fulfilling the fairy ideal.
That Vriska is still able to recuperate her identity and make something truly fantastic of herself as a punk pirate is incidental to the reality of her pain at Doc Scratch’s hands. That Vriska crafts her pirate persona in the splitting image of Mindfang in particular, who is herself Aranea the fairy, reveals the bleak reality that Vriska is, in fact, still approaching the fairy archetype on some level, as closely as she realistically can, in spite of being shunted into another role. Vriska is far from femme, and she’s hardly heterosexual, but she’s still a fairy girl (i.e. a trans woman) on the symbolic level.
Most of all, Vriska serves as one of many middlemen in the equation, but both Aradia and Vriska are subject to bodily destruction at Doc Scratch’s abusive will, and both of them have their bodies reconstructed through cybernetics by Equius, leaving them open to his abuse, before ultimately finding bodily integrity and greater wholeness as god tier fairies.
(Speaking of which, remember when Tavros wasn’t able to bring himself to kill Vriska in order to god tier her?
This isn’t just Tavros’ failure to give Vriska a divine power-up, and it’s not just his refusal to reciprocate some kind of black romance fling with Vriska, sexual or otherwise -- it constitutes his ultimate failure or refusal to validate Vriska as a fairy! No wonder she’s so butthurt.)
To sum it all up, the beta cycle of revenge is almost entirely about maladjusted fairies -- maladjusted trans femmes and AMAB queers -- acting out and abusing each other in a conflict that spills over to hurt others, all under the direction and oversight of Doc Scratch’s predatory inclinations. Terezi might really be in it for something like justice, to avenge her friend, but Vriska, Aradia, and Tavros are also entangled in something even more intimate, violent, and personal.
