sburb battle royale @universefrog - Tumblr Blog

another old piece that i still really like. not exactly in my 'style', i rarely do clean lineart now. plus, my headcanons for aradia changed quite a bit. anyway, here they are

#art #aradia #sollux

tentacle-therapissed

Dave’s arc regarding Bro is about an abused child coming to terms with the fact that his guardian was abusive even if he wasn’t 100% a piece of shit all the time, while Rose’s arc regarding Mom Lalonde is about an abused child coming to terms with the fact that her guardian wasn’t 100% a piece of shit all the time even if she was abusive. But a lot of yall have trouble comprehending such nuanced portrayals of abuse and instead interpret these arcs to mean that Bro was the literal devil incarnate who couldn’t have possibly have cared about Dave in any capacity whereas Mom Lalonde was just a sweet lady trying her best and Rose was a problem child who was too harsh on her

charalysis

The comic initially presents Bro and Mom as incredibly two dimensional, and intentionally paints them like that; it makes us initially view these characters through the characterization of their charges and as goofy stereotypes of Edge Lord Older Brother and Drunk but Well-meaning Housewife. I believe that two things happened.

One: The series did very well depicting children of abuse, as much as Hussie is a suck writer at times, they did that very correctly and I can't fault them for it. Rose and Dave's reactions to their abuse are fairly real all things considered, especially for the types of abuse they suffered.

Two: The fandom fundamentally mischaracterized Dave and Rose both. Rose more specifically and intentionally misunderstood her behavior. Mom Lalonde is not the worst parent one could have, however she's an absentee mother. She's not there physically and barely there mentally. Even if her love of the vacuum she bronzed and wizards is legitimate, it's hard to fault Rose for thinking it's performative at best, mockery at worst. Rose doesn't actually know her mom outside the performance she does at home when she's not blackout drunk somewhere.

Rose threatening suicide during their strife comes off as dramatic, and maybe it is to an extent, but it's because she's seeking attention from her mother. She's so alone, so isolated both physically and emotionally, that she's seeking anything she can get. Her emotions are actually very poorly regulated because she's actually not secure. She's not certain her life is stable, despite being in a luxurious house. Her mom is a drunk who doesn't care for her and their only interactions are strifes and seemingly passive aggressive fridge interactions. Mom Lalonde didn't bother trying to help Rose become an emotionally functional person and actually left Rose worse off. Rose has no real idea how to talk to people or understand them so she defaults to psychological analysis and pseudo-intellectualism because it's what she's had access to to learn human interactions.

Mom Lalonde comes off, at least to me, as the type of woman who makes wine drinking her personality and jokes about it with other moms her age. The type to forget about her daughter's events because she wasn't capable of composing herself long enough. She comes off like the type to wave a hand and scoff, saying Rose's childhood wasn't bad because Rose had everything physically she could ever want. A woman who buys things for Rose after upsetting her, as if that fixes the damage.

Mom Lalonde seems to be the kind of mom that believes pandering to her daughter's perceived emotions and gift giving is what it takes to raise a child, which is why she seems so unresponsive to Rose's threats of self harm. She probably thinks Rose is just being dramatic. And maybe she is, but it's clearly something any good parent would, and should, be immediately concerned about.

I think for the fandom, Dave's abuse is taken for what it is, but twisted how it is, because his abuse type is more common and relatable to many. And, tragically, for many their own abuse was worse, yet similar enough to Dave's that they latch on and expand significantly on it to the point of losing the plot as it were.

Dave is less neglected emotionally, as much as people like to claim Bro did nothing but starve and beat him. Dave isn't the most mature, but he's actually a pretty average 13-16 year old boy emotionally. He's goofy and rambly and likes annoying his friends. That's not to say Bro's actions didn't impact him, because they certainly did, but Dave's emotional regulation is actually okay? Not great but, better than Rose.

Bro in some ways is Mom Lalonde's opposite. He's physically present way more and as emotionally available as someone like him can be (not nearly as much as he should be). He doesn't just care about Dave, he actually shows it by taking interest in Dave's hobbies and interests, helping him set up his makeshift dark room, helping him get his webcomic online and uploaded, and clearly giving him the only bedroom in the apartment. Bro bought Dave his sylladex, specifically getting him the modus type that suited Dave best but was still within Bro's standards of "best".

Dave's trauma largely comes from a combination of food scarcity, exposure to sexual content early in life (that is NOT to say that Bro did something to Dave or even posted content of Dave), physical abuse, and a lack of emotional stability.

Dave's comfortable enough in the house and with Bro to use Bro's Xbox, computer, and generally fuck with anything in the house with seemingly no fear of consequences. Because Bro didn't just haul off on him for everything. Bro was doing exactly what we see Dirk doing later on, trying to help reach an end goal by going as hard and as stupid as possible. Bro has always struck me as knowing what he's doing, but fundamentally lacking the understanding that what he was doing was a problem because it was, "to make Dave stronger". Bro's own shit emotional expression and his actions to make Dave a better fighter absolutely made Dave feel like Bro hated him.

Bro also seemingly either intentionally didn't buy food, or forgot. I'm gonna say forgot personally because Bro has never struck me as all there. However, I do also personally think it's likely both Dave and Rose struggle with food security because I also think Mom Lalonde drunkenly forgot to a, buy food and b, teach Rose how to make anything outside of a new tiny self explanatory basics.

Both Mom and Bro are abusive, but they aren't abusive in the same ways. Bro is physically abusive and seems to not care about what the exposure to certain content might do to Dave. Whereas Mom is emotionally abusive and neglectful all around, unresponsive to Rose's needs.

Sorry I have a lot of feelings about the beta kids experiences with their parents, but these guys specifically.

#analysis #abuse #rose #dave

t00thpasteface

eyewitness sketch of that time i explained homestuck troll romance/biology/reproduction to some of my friends

datsalmon

#beta kids #art

unkiin

dave strider tidal memory exo

#BANGER???#love that album #dave #art

mcsiggy

Post I'm referencing under the read more

#yea #dave #comic

neostellarjpg

hey bro lets defy gender together bro. lets share a consciousness bro. bro lets bond through our opposite but symmetrical traumas. bro lets create our own definition of happiness together bro

#davepeta #art

prokopetz

I have no dog in the race re: the Homestuck animated pilot, but it is very entertaining seeing all these folks posting long-winded responses to criticisms I haven't seen arguing that the critics clearly don't understand Homestuck, and in the process demonstrating that they don't understand Homestuck either.

paprus-teutonic-knight

any particular examples? (you can paraphrase and avoid giving users)

prokopetz

One of the most frequently recurring ones I've bumped into is arguments about whether or not the particulars of Homestuck's cultural framing as a product of its time are essential to its narrative, and whether the pilot mis-steps in updating that framing to be more contemporary, in which seemingly nobody involved in the conversation is aware that Homestuck isn't Like That simply as a product of its time; i.e., that it was a deliberate period piece even when it was new.

gumbamasta

I doubt any of the kids reading it back then where old enough to remember Johnny 5 is alive or Mac and Me. Fuck, I can barely remember it, aside from Steve Guttenberg being in one.

prokopetz

It ain't about the pop culture references; a lot of them are contemporary with the comic's publication, anyway. (e.g., the Barack Obama jokes, for one.) I'm talking more about the era of online culture the comic is consciously evoking.

While Homestuck's text ranges pretty widely, one of the central themes it keeps returning to is the experience of being a socially isolated teenager with unmonitored Internet access, as part of the first generation for whom that experience was possible – i.e., of being a bunch of unsupervised children trying to construct a society from first principles because there simply wasn't anyone to hand it down to them. The recurring Peter Pan shit may be a bit, but it's not only a bit, if you take my meaning.

Though the pop culture references are all over the map, in terms of its sense of time and place, the comic is pretty firmly situated in the mid to late 1990s; in fact, it's so precisely situated that you can map the beta kids and Alternian trolls to two distinct cohorts of that first generation of unsupervised children on the Internet, to an accuracy of plus or minus just a couple of years. A big part of why it can be hard to pin down exactly when the comic is meant to be taking place is because for all intents and purposes it's simultaneously 2009 and 1997.

prokopetz

#oh so you mean it feels like both: when it was written & when hussie(+peers) were last that age? 😉 (via @ramenheim)

Not quite, interestingly. The beta kids reflect my own cohort of unsupervised children on the Internet, but not Hussie's; Hussie was born in 1979, and thus was already pushing 20 in the late 1990s. The beta kids aren't written from the perspective of the ICQ Generation so much as they are from the perspective of an observer who just barely missed the boat on being part of that cohort themselves.

Of course, remember when I said that the different characters relate to the Internet in ways that are very precisely locatable in time?

Hussie's cohort of unsupervised children on the Internet is represented not by the beta kids, but by the (Alternian) trolls. The trolls are the IRC Generation to the beta kids' ICQ generation; this is reflected in everything from the palpable ghost of pre-World Wide Web BBS culture that informs their understanding of their analogue of the Internet, to the fact that they still think leetspeak is cool, while the beta kids find it quaint, and it's particularly apparent in the differences in how they use chat software compared to the beta kids.

prokopetz

(I have a suspicion that Karkat's faintly absurd penchant for indulging in curmudgeonly kids-these-days grumping toward the beta kids in spite of the fact that he's barely older than they are is one of the few places where Hussie allowed their own voice to really authentically come through, far moreso than any of the direct self-insert shit.)

prokopetz

#the way that Coding is a much bigger part of the troll's stuff stands out to me #and that karkat and sollux are specifically specialized in /malicious code/. (via @luesmainblog)

Yeah, you could write a whole analysis just based on how the Alternian trolls inhabit a milieu where some level of coding knowledge is part of the basic buy-in to be permitted to exist in online spaces at all, while the beta kids regard it as esoteric wizard shit, and how that directly reflects one of the least bridgeable generation gaps between mid 1990s versus late 1990s online youth culture.

🧡✨icon✨💚

My contribution for the 2026 Homestuck calendar!! Theme this year was acts 1 to 5 and it was a blast to illustrate the chaos that is Jade: Enter.

Please check it out here!!!! This years line up is crazy good. Thanks to @joyfulldreams for the invite <:

(close ups under the cut)

#art #:O

mangoconruedas

baby’s first homestuck doodle

mangoconruedas

CAN YALL BELIEVE A WHOLE MONTH OF DAVEKATING HAS ALREADY PASSED???

#lol.#art #davekat

vedajuno

it’s crazy to me that Homestuck has apparently influenced every single piece of media to come out of the mid 2010s and yet I have somehow never played an indie game that attempts to lift any of this sylladex shit for its inventory. there should be 10,000 games out there by now with inventory management systems even HALF as fucked up and evil as “items can only be stored in inventory slots equivalent to their name’s Scrabble score”

atalana

for the people in the notes who haven't read homestuck - this is one way inventory works, it is not the entire way

see, homestuck eventually becomes this massive narrative heavy emotional epic, but it didn't start that way

it started as a medium for jokes about computer programming

so characters' inventories, at the start, come from data structures, literally how computers store and retrieve data

stack modus means you have to pull your items out of your inventory one at a time from the most recent to the least recent, like a stack. queue works the other way, the accessible item is whatever was put into the queue first

tree if you wanna make life difficult for yourself, or you really like organising. hash table, as op said, assigns numerical values to each item (there are multiple settings on that one as to how each item is assigned a number), and you can only put items in slots that match their number

(array would work like a normal inventory but the characters find that boring so no one uses it)

it should also be noted that if you ever attempt to put an item in your inventory that won't fit, it will fire out any conflicting items at high speed, and weaponising your inventory is also a big thing in homestuck

and then as the plot goes on it becomes less focused on data structures and more on gimmicks. good at memory games? this one splits all your items into 2 cards and then hides them in a deck, find where the two cards are hidden to pull an item out. can talk to ghosts? try the oujia modus! how about one where you have a max physical space in your inventory and you have to tetris shuffle things around to fit? here's one where you can only put items in your inventory next to other items if they rhyme, so you have to figure out creative ways to name whatever you pick up. better at drawing than typing? just draw your item and let the pictionary modus figure out what item you want to retrieve! (results not perfect)

(here for a full list if you're interested)

it's also made clear in homestuck that you can pick up items without putting them into your inventory, but it's difficult and requires a fair amount of focus. the reason some characters choose not to put items in their inventory? their modus is really inconvenient to retrieve items from (or in the case of karkat's first one, it locks every item into a lockbox and then drops the lockbox in front of you. trying to put it back in your inventory just puts the box in a bigger box. eventually this broke a hole through his bedroom floor)

and yeah op's right, i would love to see the absolutely bullshit character specific inventories other things could come up with

#<3

floralmarsupial

“What would you say if you could talk?” “Let me out” “Let me go.” “What’s it like to touch space?”“Being shot in a tin missile up into the sky?” “It’s noisy, frightening and very dangerous.” “Let me go.”

-Laika

Sometimes you have to think about how Jade being alone for that three years trip was a necessity for the retcon to happen and hurt, ya’know.

#jade #art

sproutlingart

heyyy I turned the Beta Kids’ handwriting into useable fonts!

these are very basic 60 character fonts! I will probably expand these into full fonts with numbers and special characters later (need to buy font software first). I am aware @taehyunglesbian did this in like 2012, but their fonts are no longer available for download. @rubysapphrald also did this in 2021 with all the kids and some trolls (theirs is still available for download). I wanted to try my hand at it too! Fair warning: these are somewhat anachronistic since we don’t see all the necessary letters from every kid— hence my choice of the word “reconstruction.” I will be working on Alpha Kids’ handwriting next! I haven’t found a sample from Jane, however, so pls send one to me if you find :o

you can download the fonts here !!

#beta kids #neat!