aranea and meenah did nothing wrong

it is may 2021. for some reason i decided to read all of homestuck from start to finish (sans epilogues and sequel) in about half a month. i have Thoughts and Feelings about it (unfortunately). my inbox and askbox are open, talk 2 me about said thoughts and feelings and share yours, i think there are interesting things to be said about the homestuck archive reading experience and how it may contrast to the live serial reading fandom experience from what old discussions ive found. 🕸 random facts: i would die for the alpha kids, aranea, and meenah. vriska did nothing wrong except for the things she did wrong. i am a 23 yr old mexican and i have been on tumblr since the heyday of homestuck and idk how i escaped its grasp until a decade later. i have been listening to nothing but fuchsia ruler and time on my side for two days straight, help. 🕸 main: @pechikka

[telaraneas]

as of june 2022 this is still open btw

send me any character/ship/classpect/story element/litcherally anything you want abt homestuck and ill give my Thoughts

if i had the means to do so i would literally pay people to give me stuff to talk about. aranea had the right idea

[indigonite]

snippet of a little something something I’m working on for @striderszine

[patheticpomegranite]

karkat isn't actually the main character and there are many characters that have the same if not more significance in the story. karkat just thinks of himself as the main character and gets swallowed up by his self-pity, one that is understandable, but keeps him from being a truly great friend or leader to anyone. however he is my favorite so he's the main character to me, but we have to be honest when talking in actuality.

[redstonedust]

i always find it fascinating when a character gets headcanoned as both transmasc and transfem by different members of the fandom because it like. highlights how being closeted and stealth can look similar from the outside but are internally very different experiences. does your blorbo have a Thing (tm) about gender because they're trying to beat down the part of them that desperately wants to transition? or did they start transitioning a decade ago and view it as private information that theyre not gonna talk about casually. choose wisely because your answer may have implications.

[vedurnan-archive]

[prokopetz]

The all-guy team plus one long-suffering girl who exists mostly to remind us that these dudes are theoretically heterosexual is of course a cartoon classic, but we shouldn't forget its counterpart, the all-girl team plus one moderately autistic-coded dude who's very keen to be treated as just one of the girls.

[davepeta]

I so hate it when people treat Davesprite and Davepetasprite like completely seperate people like. Huh you really didn't get what that was all about now did you

It's legitimately "<Character transitions on screen> Okay but I liked it better when they were a guy who hated himself so I'm going to ignore that"

I've never thought about it like this and now I'm really annoyed oh my god

"but davepetasprite is more annoying" shut up mew're literally just davesprite but more authentic. you thought the bird man was hot you thought "i could fix him" ???? why don't you like him when he's better then????

i get your point tbh. seriously

[erosquartz]

I was speedrunning animal crossing for the gamecube out of boredom and while I was hunting all the 1% encounter rate fish I had a lot of time to think about stupid things

So here’s my classpect for every single special character in animal crossing for the gamecube

I did full color for the ones I’m most confident in, but I stand by all of my decisions

[telaraneas]

the leitmotifs in homestuck frustrate me so much because of how ambiguous they are sometimes, which is kinda natural given the music was a massive collaborative effort with relatively little direction etc but jus sometimes. sometimes i think about how touhou music is one of the main melodies in heir of grief and i just get the tiniest bit sad. sometimes i just wish there had been a bit more consistency to what melodies are tied to what characters and themes, because when they hit as intended its The Best Musical Moments Of Homestuck

[telaraneas]

thank you to the person who liked this post for reminding me i was right and i should put my tags in the post proper

[sorrelpaws]

LETS ALL BE FRIENDS AND WORK AS A TEAM

[bobacupcake]

out of burning curiosity i must ask. have you ever made art of Straight Up Actual Fruit Snacks

i havent !!! until Right Now. one single gusher

[nyatzsche]

some of you need to put down chat gpt and pick the magic 8ball back up

[neostellarjpg]

let's trust each other

[senatortedcruz]

[davestriderpostscratch]

ideal dave and vriska plots:

- we’re internet friends that happen to live in the same state/city/neighborhood; we find out about each others’ home lives and make plans to meet up and run away to new york/chicago/los angeles/las vegas together

- we don’t know each other beyond being coworkers at the same starbucks/walmart/taco bell/macy’s; i’ve accidentally killed someone and my life is so devoid of meaningful connection that you’re the only person i could think to call to help me hide the body

- my brother and your sister are both mathletes/members of competing debate teams/in the school band; we’ve both been dragged to one of their meets/games/concerts and end up sitting next to each other to better make fun of them together

- you’re sleeping off a wild night out in the back seat of your car in the middle of a parking lot; i’ve broken in with the intent of stealing the car, but i don’t notice you’re there until you wake up when i’m already twenty miles down the interstate

[spisyto]

i walk bcuz i was born

[telaraneas]

THE BIG VRISKA/DIRK/CHERUBS POST

The narrative axis on which all of Homestuck pivots when you boil it down to its bare essentials is this: Vriska:Caliborn = Dirk:Calliope

(i think i formatted that correctly at least?)

And it is not a coincidence that the very ending of Homestuck proper devotes half of the runtime of its final [S] to Vriska vs. Lord English as a climactic, central final showdown left in a cliffhanger… nor is it a coincidence that the epilogues IMMEDIATELY kill of Lord English and dispose of his usefulness as a big monster you have to fight, and have Vriska literally tossed to the Pointless Noncanon Dimension before the final fight even really kicks off, while Ultimate Dirk and Alt!Calliope take the reigns of a story that is beginning the final process of detaching from Hussie as auteur for good.

Notably Caliborn is defined in no small part by premature, 'incorrect' predomination; rather than absorbing and assimilating the parts of his psyche that Calliope represents and subsuming her entirely into his own dominating personality, as it is all but stated PROPER cherub predomination involves, Caliborn cheats and skips his way through that process, refusing to swallow and assimilate things he finds pointless and cringe, the artist and the thinker and the strategist and the storyteller.

And he is immediately punished by a dead session that cannot be solved normally, and thrust into a role that leads him straight down the role to supplanting authorship, which he is forced to learn to do by brute force, developing his own weird artistic and storytelling and musical methods and styles along the way, which fucking suck and make for a bad story, but he would rather brute force his way through drawing a circle made of thousands of straight lines until it actually somehow WORKS as a circle, than consider he maybe would have been better off if he HAD the part of himself that knew how to draw a fucking circle.

Similarly, Vriska is ultimately spared without any real effort or change of her own. After her death, Pre-scratch Vriska- the one that will in time become (Vriska)- spends the rest of the story clawing her way back to narrative relevance in whatever way she can, as the big hero of the dreambubbles, as part of a team with the only two alpha trolls that are actual characters, via her big pirate quest, anything and everything, only to ultimately be faced with Aranea as a reflection of herself, doing smething vriska would do, HAS tone a hundred tiems before, and for the first time she can't avoid seeing it for what it is: a doomed, desperate, dumbass move to try to claw relevance that she is not going to get. She briefly relaxes and adapts to Meenah's positive nihilism-adjacent worldview, and it works for her for a bit, but almost immediately she's faced with the reality that without her tough bad bitch constant hero drive that constantly drives her to claw and nail and the limelight without stopping, it is suddenly impossible to keep the vulnerability that has always been just under the surface at bay; by the time Post-scratch, 'classic flavor' Vriska arrives to shove her dead alt self into the (Vriska) distinction, (Vriska) has become both visually and behaviorally unrecognizable from her starting point, but every bit as crucial to understanding Vriska Serket as an overall character.

Post-scratch Vriska does not actually avoid her narrative fate. She 'is saved from dying', but her entire period among the living is fast-forwarded through in a cute animation; she is not getting a reward or an absolution at all, she exists purely for Terezi and John to fulfill the apotheosis and culmination of their own arcs which involve undoing the mistake Terezi most regrets.It has nothing to do with Vriska's own status as narratively relevant or irrelevant, and indeed she almost immediately goes right into the dreambubbles, never to return or to cross the final door into the epilogue with everyone else. But of couse, Vriska, doesn't understadn that just yet. So when she encounters (Vriska), she reacts with disgust and a complete unwillingness to accept that THEY ARE THE SAME PERSON. She reacts with more vitriol than she has shown to ANY CHARACTER IN THE ENTIRE COMIC, INCLUDING TAVROS! And shits all over (Vriska), casting her off to wander the dreambubbles alone and get her own tragic happy ending reuniting with post-scratch Terezi, the closest any version of Vriska will ever come to being truly, actually at peace.

And instead, post-scratch Vriska, without udnerstanding it, dooms herself to continued narrative irrelevance despite her nominally crucial narrative role. It's the final showdown, the biggest bad and the huge hero stopping him, but by the time Act 7's final notes fade, they really don't matter at all.

Dirk, on the other hand, ends Homestuck itself by accepting that Bro Strider is just a mirror of him, a version of himself, a splinter, just as much himself as the Autoresponder had been. This allows him the potential to become a truly better person, as the ending seems to indicate he will; by accepting the worst parts of the character as, indeed, part of him, he can truly engage with them.

Of course, the version of Dirk in the Epilogues takes his synthesis into a very different direction. As does Alt!Calliope, who not only predominated the 'proper' way and thus is capable of both Callie's storytelling but also Caliborn's ruthless narrative control, but also literally devours the corpse of Lord English during the epilogues.

There is something there. Autophagy as both the only way to truly cease to be a character playing at relevance and become a narrator, as necessary to avoid eating shit to your own myopic inability to accept your mistakes, but at the same time, you are synthesizing EVERY part of yourself, the good and the bad and all in between.

[telaraneas]

It is also no surprise that Dirk, the obvious author insert, does his full villain turn and seizes the narrative altogether, battling Calliope's less apparent but no less insidious narrative voice, and that this conflict is the foundation for postcanon homestuck content, at the same time that Hussie was beginning to walk away from Homestuck, fascinated by the question of what canon means, an experiment which the epilogues themselves present with all the aplomb of dadaism asking what is art- and similarly recieving a lot of answers that go 'the question is stupid and the art is bad'; but invoking an answer, even a negative answer, is the point of asking the question.

Regardless it is important to note that Dirk cannot actually fully complete his devouring of himself. Because he can assimilate all splinters of him down, and all splinters of him up, but he hits the ceiling of the barrier between reality and fiction. Between realizing you are now 'the version of yourself that doens't matter', and your friends might as well be toys to manipulate. The exact same impotence and incentives that fueled Lil Hal's destructive behaviors trigger Dirk's own drastic shift from remorseful self-aware man trying to do better to a guy fucking around withe verything he can fuck around with, because he has realized that nothing will ever matter now other than whatever he makes matter by himself, because he has been cut off from the 'real' himself forever.

After all, Dirk is in the end a splinter of Andrew Hussie. And Dirk may be able to absorb Doc Scratch, and Lil' Hal, and ARquius, and even the funny in-universe Andrew Hussie that exists within the comic- but the real Andrew Hussie is not, and will never be, part of Ultimate Dirk.