#za theorizing

[zenosanalytic]

Mass Times Velocity

I have a theory about why John couldn’t in-universe(the obvs Doylist reason is cuz then there’d be no story) kill the trillionaires. It’s pretty simple: they were in space and, as we’ve known since Gideon the Ninth, necromancy doesn’t work in space. Doesn’t matter how much Necromancy you have, even enough to be god, you can’t kill a person with Necromancy if they’re in space(unless you have some gravedirt around).

but Why? And why does the dirt help? Simple: Earth gave him the Necromancy. Necromancy is a product of planets, drawn from planets, so it only works on things influenced by planets.

But that raises a question: the Sun’s in space, the other planets are in space, so why could he affect those but not the ships? Here’s my guess: Gravity!

Necromancy is a influence of planets. Gravity is also an influence of planets(and stars and anything with mass), and gravity is two-way. The Sun’s gravity acts on Earth, but Earth’s gravity also acts on the Sun, which means John’s Necromancy can act on the Sun. And once he has, well, the Sun’s gravity works on all the planets in the Solar system, so as he necrovores Them he can necromantically influence anything in their gravity wells as well.

But wait: the ships were still in the solar system, right? So why not “eat” them first. Well there’s the point John brings up of how incoherent and irrational he was at the time to consider, but I think it’s also constructive here to think about how Gravity works. The further two object are from one another, the weaker their gravity upon one another, and the less massive an object is the weaker it’s gravity is upon the more massive. John tells us that at the time he “didn’t know how to look, you see, only touch” He’s not physically touching anything so what he means is Feel, and what I think he specifically means is “feel through gravity”. From the Sun’s perspective, the gravity of some distant spaceship on it is so insignificant it might as well not be there. He describes “eating” the planets in the same sentence he describes eating “every satellite and craft”; it’s possible “eating” the planets let him feel through their gravity, making it easier to “feel” the gravity of structures in their gravity wells acting upon them. So why couldn’t he find and “eat” the Fleet faster?

Cuz it wasn’t in any of their gravity wells or even in the Solar system proper; it was in the Kuiper belt.

The Kuiper belt is a cloud of debris surrounding the Solar system, and TLT treats it as sort of its “boundary”(larger transKuiper clouds are theorized, but they’re theories and it’s possible TLT is using “Kuiper” as a catchall for all of them anyway). It’s far from the Sun, meaning the Sun’s gravity is weak there. John says that once some of the tugs “launched through the Kuiper” he couldn’t “reach” them anymore. So my guess is, given the vastness of the Belt and the tininess of the ships, and the fact that he was working from the Sun’s gravity, it was really difficult to “feel” the ships, and by the time he did it was, as he says, too late.

[zenosanalytic]

Rainbows, Vampires, and Tooth Fairies

Something just occurred to me(and Im definitely not the first person to have this thought so there’s prob some similar headcanonry out there), but Jades being nearly as rare as Tyrians, AND being diurnal when all other Trolls are nocturnal&crepuscular: I feel like it’s VERY likely there are tooth-fairy-esque myths&legends about Jades. Which... puts a very interesting spin on Jades ALSO being susceptible to a vampirism-mutation :>

Tho: part of what The Game does is give its players the chance to manifest their desires&”dreams”/“Become the person they WANT to be”, and Kanaya dreamed of being a Rainbow-drinker, so I think it’s just as likely(as in: either theory could be true) that she and Porrim are the *only* Rainbowdrinkers, facilitated by The Game, and “rainbowdrinkers” are just as legendary on Alternia as vampires on Earth. This would make Kanaya’s “turning” similar to Jade’s transformation, Rose becoming a cool-ass warlock, Sollux losing the lisp&doom-prophesies he hates so much, Aradia’s resurrection, etc etc etc, that we see throughout Homestuck.

[zenosanalytic]

Unknown Knowns

So, while I was just taking my1 Walk2 just now I was thinking about This3, and in particular, whether Vriska’s final confrontation with Terezi constitutes another one of these failed attempt to ‘fix’ her relationships by flipping the committer and receiver of violence, and I think it is.

Vriska wants to ‘fix’ her relationship with Terezi but, as we know from their first dialogue, her idea of ‘fixing’ it is making things Like They Used to Be, rather than building something new. As always, her myopic desire to have things her way, rather than meet them on their terms, helps to cause(she’s not the only one with agency here obvsl) the failure of her larger goal of making Terezi a part of her life again(and also it kills her). Beyond being an example of the themes I discussed earlier, the whole thing is ALSO an example of another of Homestuck’s major themes, Irony, and specifically Dramatic Irony, and I have helpfully arranged those examples into an unnumbered series of discrete paragraphs u_u u_u

Vriska sees Terezi in her old FLARPing getup and thinks she’s cosplaying. Thinking this expresses a desire to return to their old relationship, she responds in kind by putting on her old FLARPing persona to match. That’s not what’s going on. Or it is, Terezi IS Cosplaying, but she’s Cosplaying Seriously(which is ANOTHER irony, and also another example of “Becoming Who you Want to Be”, but it’s Nested, so I wont paragraph it seperately u_u), not as a peacefrond wiggled tenuously towards the face of making things Like They Used to Be, so what Vriska’s actually doing is encouraging Terezi to kill her, which is the opposite of what Vriska wants.

Vriska doesn’t really know anything about Terezi’s Mind abilities, which bolsters this misinterpretation, while Terezi and the audience do know about them.

Vriska thinks she’s offering Terezi a Choice when, from Terezi and the audience’s perspective, she isn’t, since both actions Terezi sees WILL be taken and only stabbing her is part of the Alpha Timeline.

Terezi thinks there’s only two possibilities when the Audience knows she, and possibly Gamzee, are constraining her perspective to what fits her desired conclusion.

Terezi THINKS she's gathering evidence to make a decision, when actually she’s justifying a decision she already made before she even started. As we know from her convo with Dave about it, Terezi’s feelings for Vriska are ambiguous and conflicted. While she cares about her, she also finds their relationship Exhausting, Vriska’s constant Behavior(ie Murders) Dangerous&Counter-Productive, and fundamentally wants their relationship and what you could call “The Problem of Vriska” to be Resolved and Settled, for it to be Finally DONE, by any means. And she feels it is her ‘Duty’ to make it ‘Done’. While she tells herself she’s making it for the sake of Justice and Causality, it’s this desire for resolution which really shapes her perspective, and thus limits her to a ‘kill, dont kill’ mindset.

Just as Vriska feels the values of her society demand she kill Tavros(and immediately regrets it), Terezi feels the values of her society demand she kill Vriska(and immediately regrets it). Vriska completely misunderstands the situation, but her conclusions about their similarities and Terezi’s inability to live with killing her are correct(she knows because she can’t live with having killed her friends either&that conclusion flows from their ‘sameness’). Terezi correctly conceives of the particulars of her situation in their totality, but because her perspective on it is constrained by her inability to be honest about her feelings(and, Gamzee’s influence in this regard), her conclusions are wrong. And for this final irony she condemns herself to three years of self-punishment via the troll-equivalent of alcoholism and an abusive relationship with her manipulator(unfortunately, she has a Type X| X|).

The Management wishes to inform Our Dear, Sweet Readers that this walk was a Team Endeavor, Endeavored in its physical aspects mostly by The Management -The Management ↩ ↩︎

Our Staff’s Ride -The Management ↩ ↩︎

The Author: Our Staff wishes to inform Our Dear, Sweet, Dear-Dear SWEET Dear-Dear, Sweet, Dear Readers that I wrote that, All By My Self, with Nobodyelse’s Help: spcl not the EDITING entirely metaphorical tonguestick to No Monumental Persons In Particular |p |p |p ↩ ↩︎

[zenosanalytic]

Three Men and a Maybe

HHHHHCHOkay,

SO:

As I revealed in This Post, I have life-longedly loved GamesWorkshop’s(idk WHY my tag for them is separated; I should prob fix that |:T) settings, tho I wouldn’t say I’ve really been a *PART* of its fandom cuz I was at most a lurker in EVERY fandom before Homestuck, but An Idea occurred to me today about some VERY obscure parts of the Imperium’s backstory which would make ALLOT OF THREADS snap NEATLY INTO PLACE, and I’m going to write this theory down(with no idea how unviable their novelizations make it cuz No I Am Not Reading Those Things) even though it will probably be of zero interest to most of my Dear, Dear Sweet Readers u_u u_u

ANYWAY(and under a cut to Spare You All):

All Imperial history is DEEPLY falsified, OBSESSIVELY Censored and Redacted, propaganda; and pre-imperial human history -SPCL the bits from before the birth of Sla’anesh(Yes: I REFUSE to abandon the old spelling; i LIKE that glottal stop there and Im PRESERVING It unu unu unu) wrecked EVERYONE’S shit Thoroughly and Comprehensively- are All Of THAT applied to incomplete -NEVER intentionally preserved- archaeological data, but one thing that this ENTIRELY SUSPECT ~Record~ is clear on(mostly because it’s a central tenet of the Martian Steampunk Techfetishist Cult who builds and maintains, but never Innovates cuz that’d be HERESY!, their equipment) is that back in the Bad Old Days(read: Communist Space-Utopia) Humanity had three classes of “Abominable Intelligences”(AI, get it?) -the Men of Stone, the Men of Iron and the Men of Gold- upon whose labor that Communist Space-Utopia existed, until the Men of Iron rebelled.

From what I’ve read in wikis and what minimal discussion I’ve seen in the fandom the general theories on this tend to be that the Men of Stone were maybe an older class of robots or laborbots, the Men of Iron militarybots, and there’s really no firm idea on who the Men of Gold were(the most popular theories seem to be they were either governmental machine intelligences or some sort of mechanical psyker), but here’s the thing: Why do we think they were all Mechanical?

The recent League of Votann material makes it clear that they’re a clone subspecies derived from genomes specifically engineered for mining work in harsh and non-atmosphere conditions. It also makes clear that ‘the Men of Iron’ were NOT exclusively military bots because the Leaguers STILL HAVE THEM AROUND. THEY DIDNT DESTROY THEM AND RECORD NO CONFLICT WITH THEM(which sort of undermines the whole ‘Oh our Robots went Beserk for No Reason and tried to Genocide all biological life!’ line). They’re citizens like everybody else; self-directed people who just happen to be built rather than decanted out of a clone-vat.

The Humans of what the Imperium calls “The Dark Age of Technology” had the technology to do whatever they liked with the human genome, as ‘abhumans’ like the Leaguers well attest. What if their idea of what constituted an “Artificial Intelligence” included biological constructs? ‘Artificial’ just means ‘Made; Product of Artifice’. What if the Leaguers(scifi takes on Dwarves I remind you) **ARE** the “Men of Stone”, pursuing their own fates independent of the long-dead Federation of “Real” humans which made them to be slaves, just like the Men of Iron living beside them?

But: I haven’t addressed the question of “The Men of Gold”. While it’s just one internet-snake’s fantheory I feel pretty confident about the above, but this next one’s a BIT of a stretch. However: I have what I THINK is a very eloquent way to illustrate it:

That’s The Emperor.

Well: before he was mortally wounded, bound to a giant soul-eating chair, and turned into a demiliche-cum-navigation-beacon by the genocidal fanatics he created to Kill All Nonhumans.

What he’s wearing is called Auric, technically auric-adamantium(auric means golden) armor, and it’s a technology from the ‘Bad Old Days’. He didn’t have much of it and he’d hand it out to his favorites among the Primarchs(those genocidal fanatics who turned him into a psychic lighthouse so they could keep going to breathtaking new places and killing exciting new people).

What if The Emperor is the last ‘Man of Gold’?

I’ve laid out my theory for the Leaguers being ‘The Men of Stone’, and what if something similar, but taken in a RADICALLY different direction, is going on here? What if ‘The Men of Gold’ were artificial biological constructs engineered to Govern the same way Leaguers are engineered to mine and survive? The “Solution” to politics humans have dreamed of for so long: beings incapable of pursuing anything less than the ‘Ultimate Utilitarian Good’(lots of wiggleroom there I’ll warn you!), perfectly logical, utterly dedicated to the survival of humanity(no matter the costs or crimes), peerless in strategy, faultless in rhetoric, infinitely charismatic, Impossible to kill, INCAPABLE of nepotism(or personal loyalty of any kind beyond the expedient, for that matter), and -oh!- also psychics who can know what you want -and how to convince you that their way will get it- before you do, AND project their awarenesses literally across the galaxy at-whim.

What if, taking a page from Voltaire, the humans of “The Dark Age of Technology” made the gods that didn’t exist, and made them In Their Image?

And then those gods, somehow, all died?

All but One.

[zenosanalytic]

The Furthest REM

A few weeks ago I had a discussion with someone(cant remember who X|) in the comments of, I think?, a @mmmmalo reblog over how it would be Really Convenient, Homestuck analysis and theorywise, if Eridan had more direct interactions with Dreams in canon(I also forget WHY they said this, but Im assuming it had something to do with the Hope Aspect).

My initial response was to suggest some ways in which Eridan destroyed Dreams symbolically or via secondary metaphorical uses of the word, but I was thinking about it again today and something much more concrete occurred to me: When you die without a Dreamself, you are literally transformed into “The Dreaming Dead” :|

He literally “Destroys”(his class action under Calliope’s system) people INTO their “Dreams”(a facet of the Hope Aspect) :| :|

It’s a bit sideways, and idk how satisfying other ppl might find it, but I think this interpretation is a good example of how ‘hyperflexible’ the Homestuck Role system can be. Like: not just “destroying X” or “causing to be destroyed THROUGH X” but also what you might call “destroying in SERVICE OF X”; Classes furthering their Aspect-as-concept, and as an aspect of other ppl’s lives, through their class-action.

P.S. There’s also probably something to be said here, it just occurred to me, about how Feferi’s death ensured Trolls would finally be free of Tyrian domination as there’d no longer be any Tyrians left to carry a full-expression of the hemocaste into the next generation, and how ending that domination was one of Feferi’s goals, but that’s getting back into those metaphorical definitions again. 

P.S.S. And I suppose, going off the theory in the 2nd para of This Post, you could argue he does the same thing with Kanaya: “helping” her become the Rainbowdrinker she Dreams of being by killing her :| :| :|

[zenosanalytic]

BMO Sings the Norns

Ok so I just came across something really neat :>

I was watching This Video by Professor Jackson Crawford on the Norns, and in it he explains the NAMES of the Norns, which is something I’ve never encountered before. You can watch the video obvsl but tl;dr:

Skuld: “Should, Debt, Ought to Happen”

Verdandi: “Happening, Becoming”

Urdr: “Has Happened, Has Become”

idk the rest of the content of the vid cuz when I heard this I stopped to write this post IMMEDIATELY

ANYWAY: Why is this Really Neat?

THE FINALE SONG FROM ADVENTURE TIME: WILL HAPPEN, HAPPENING, HAPPENED!!!

THAT’S THE FUCKING NAMES OF FATE!!! Intentional or no, this wonderful songweapon from the last episode of an excellent series weaves friendship and love into the concept of Mythic Fate down to its very wordbones -encompassing and crystalizing in the process the persistent tonal themes of the show itself- and I think that’s very Mathematical of it uvu uvu uvu