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I don’t understand what’s being talked about when its said that Lord English’s attempt to kill Cronus split him into multiple vessels. Does that mean that the idea of the essence of Lord English was splintered to form the other characters? It’s not literal right? At what point in time could that even have happened? Is that why he glitched the session of the alpha trolls, because he couldn’t enter it himself to kill Cronus, since the universe hadn’t ended yet? Also why is Lord English related to the hope aspect anyways? I think Eridan even mentions him being the lord of the angels prophesized at one point, idk what that’s about?

the way Aranea frames the story, English's spell on Cronus backfiring supposedly WAS the glitch that prevented him from entering Beforus, "until he could find some other cunning way to enter our universe."

of course this story comes to us through two separate layers of questionable narration; Aranea is relating to us a story that Cronus may or may not have made up about his own backstory. so we're operating well outside of the boundaries of what we could possibly look at through a "literal" lens. all we've got to really work with are vague ideas.

the relationship between Lord English and the hope aspect is exactly that the bloodline of heroes of hope are supposedly the ones destined to beat him, just as related in Aranea's story ("the legacy of defeating the evil magician would have to 8e passed on to his descendant, or if his descendant proved to be as much of a failure as he did, then perhaps on some other Hero of Hope"). it's the aspect of angels, and as a cherub Lord English is of course a kind of angel (though Eridan was actually under the mistaken impression that Jack Noir was the prophesied "lord of all angels").

it's possibly relevant that in the version of the story as WE hear it, the "defeat" Jake ultimately hands out to Caliborn is only a technical victory; he doesn't put an end to Lord English in any meaningful way, and Caliborn even goes as far as to say "THERE IS NO BODILY HARM". he just knocks the guy down in preparation for Dirk to seal him away. but hope is not an aspect that deals with the "bodily", its domain is spirits and ideas; so in the past, my assessment has been that the reason heroes of hope are such a threat to Lord English is precisely BECAUSE they have this ability to pull apart or disrupt the collection of souls that make him up. i don't know if i would still confidently hold this up as the strongest interpretation today, but i think it's worth mentioning.

did any of this "literally" happen... well, I have to emphasise again that at this level of granularity, the "literal" is no longer something we can take for granted. like, "literally", Dirk and Equius were created from slime in an ectobiology lab. but I assert that according to the rules of Paradox Space, the metaphorical "ideas" of Dirk and Equius have to have come FROM somewhere, and if those ideas eventually become constituent parts of Lord English then at some point the loop has to close and he has to be broken back down into those parts. it is worth noting that Aranea's wording - "sealing the magician's spirit away in a series of unassuming vessels" - could also pretty easily be taken as referring to the various puppets English is forced to inhabit as he emerges in universe after universe, and that if English were ever to be split back apart it could theoretically have happened in any number of those infinite lifetimes. it's the vague ideas represented by Cronus' story - the spirit of the story, that English is perpetually being foiled by being reverted to the start of his own timeline without any memory of how he failed - that matters more than whether Cronus was literally attacked by Lord English with a wand at some point in his childhood.

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wait why have i never drawn an ant smoking with their pincers

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Queebo Just Quietly Added One Of The 2000s' Most Slept-On Webcomics To Their Library

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is there a beauty standard among your ants for certain antenna length/girth etc? what constitutes a smokin conventionally attractive ant if there are evensocial conventions like that (considering potential mates are much more about genetic diversity than attraction)

lol i guess maybe a certain length of antennae could indicate the offspring came from a very genetically diverse droupling, probably heightening that sort of allure in the common beauty standards. but im making allat up 🦌

I definitely put some thought into this at one stage, but in the end I wasn't really interested in the idea of the ants having any kind of straightforward antenna hierarchy, which feels like the direction that idea inevitably leads in.

looking at how most gracilites present themselves, if anything there seems to be a tendency to try to MINIMISE the antennae's presence in their appearance. individuals who wear their antennae in front of them rather than behind them perhaps less so - but even then, there's the obvious sense that if you untied them they'd very quickly start getting in the way of things. not necessarily very sexy!

while it is true that long, flowing antennae are a big part of grazigazi cultural imagery - such as on rimiduo's Pax Piscine monument - if we think back to the obscurities of rimiduot biology...

a rimiduot's antennae stay the same length their whole life! so having disproportionately long antennae could suggest immaturity; certainly "cute", which overlaps with "attractive", but isn't necessarily the same. conversely, having naturally short antennae, or wearing them in a way that minimises their length, would be a very proper, mature look. which can also be attractive or offputting, depending.

SHAPE, on the other hand, is definitely a popular factor in attractiveness, especially since the shape of a rimiduot's antennae is taken as a clear indicator of their racial background; for a gracilite, club-endedness of the antenna-tips shows strong grazigazi genes, as opposed to the flat or pinched tips of other rimiduot ethnic groups. but of course individual taste is still a factor, and there are obvious conflicting political and gametical considerations when it comes to intermarriage.

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“and being able to accept these non-literal relationships is a key part of homestuck.” <- going off of this post, who would you say is Vriska, in the same way Equius is to Dirk? I honestly think that she and Dave have some very interesting foiling regarding what it means to be a hero and also, the role certain pressures have had on their lives - i think Bro as a role model / trainer / manipulator folds into one person what Mindfang / Spidermom / Doc Scratch are to Vriska. Or maybe Dave isnt Vriska - maybe instead Vriska is Dave? Or perhaps there is somebody Entirely Different who is Vriska. Please feel free to tear this apart and counter it if u think i got it wrong. 

there are clear parallels to be drawn between Dave and Vriska and their creepy brotheruncles, but ultimately Doc Scratch is EVERYONE'S creepy uncle so I don't think there's any value necessarily in asserting that all of his voyeurbotting victims are the same. and once you start saying "this troll = this human and therefore all trolls = a human" that's when the doppelganger stuff becomes too literal and starts to break down. but there are also reasons why Vriska in particular isn't the "troll version" of a human.

i mean the idea of "human trolls" and "troll humans" is kind of a misdirection from the start - it's far more apt to think of these characters in terms of "act 5 versions of acts 1-4 characters" - e.g. sollux as to dave - or then "act 6 versions of act 5 characters" - dirk to equius, but also in more subtle ways, via Hussie's book commentary; "In the same way that Nepeta is a proto-calliope" (Book 4, p. 151) or "Jane as a distillation of a rough idea that began [with Feferi's introduction]" (p. 332).

the reason there is no "act 6 version" of vriska the same way there's an act-6-equius is because the act 6 version of vriska IS vriska. where side-characters like nepeta and feferi die and are subsumed into the void, an "ideological incestuous slurry" into which things melt and are then recycled into new characters, vriska by her very nature persists until the story has no choice but to put her back on the field. in the sense that the recombination of dead trolls into hybrid sprites is a visual metaphor for homestuck recycling pieces of its own dead characters, this is perhaps the main reason tavrisprite was so "irreconcilable", even where other combinations like erisol and gcatavros were apparently stable; vriska simply refuses to be recycled!

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and being able to accept these non-literal relationships is a key part of homestuck. we understand that if a time traveller appeared from another timeline looking exactly like you, sharing your exact DNA, but having lived a completely different 20-year life from the moment of their birth, in the real world you would consider them to be a "different person". but homestuck asks us to consider how two people who lived two different lives, maybe even in two radically different societies, can be the "same person". so if two characters who lived totally different lives can be the same person, it's only the next logical step to consider that two characters with no DNA in common - maybe not even a species in common! - could also be the same person! you just need to break down your ingrained preconceptions about what it means to be the "same person". free yourself of individualism

i think i have said already once before that the notions of "Watsonianism" and "Doylism" were never meant to be different forms of analysis and if you ask me for one over the other i'm not going to be able to help you because i don't think homestuck is "literal" and if you ever think i'm taking something in homestuck "literally" then you have grabbed the wrong end of the stick. like if you really think i'm saying Equius is "literally" a splinter of Dirk then you are willfully misinterpreting me at that point. but something not being literal isn't the same as it not being true. this is like 5th grade literature stuff

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i think i have said already once before that the notions of "Watsonianism" and "Doylism" were never meant to be different forms of analysis and if you ask me for one over the other i'm not going to be able to help you because i don't think homestuck is "literal" and if you ever think i'm taking something in homestuck "literally" then you have grabbed the wrong end of the stick. like if you really think i'm saying Equius is "literally" a splinter of Dirk then you are willfully misinterpreting me at that point. but something not being literal isn't the same as it not being true. this is like 5th grade literature stuff

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lately i've taken to identifying what i call the "sentimentalist" school of literary analysis which is where the interpretation that makes the reader feel good is always treated as more important than the interpretation that challenges the reader. like if a character does a bad thing it's always treated as secondary and less crucial than the good or sympathetic things the character did. like eridan committing genocide is fake and gay because he said he was sad one time. or spamton manipulating little girls is fake and gay because he pretended to have been shrunk in acid for views. it's so tiresome and juvenile

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ohhhh by naming their kids "Tavros" and "Vriska" and dooming them to repeat the same fated rivalry as their forebears the parents of Earth C are unwittingly playing the same role that Doc Scratch and the Condesce did whereby a parent ensures that the next generation plays out exactly the same as the last generation did

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Sorry if a draft of this sent but: on reread I found the equius/dirk connection very unsubtle with multiple allusions and thru related characters like Lil Seb. But it somehow never occurred to me even after Davepetasprite how Nepeta and Dave would be doppelgangers? Are there as many allusions I just totally fucking missed? Or is it just logically from the circumstances of being abused by kind of the same dude.

oh it's absolutely nothing as blatant or textual as Equius-Dirk but the way i see it you have to treat Nepeta-Dave as an inevitable consequence of Equius-Dirk. to me the creation of Arquiusprite and Arquiusprite's inclusion in Lord English is the implicit acknowledgement that Equius always was a splintered piece of Dirk (Aranea's narration of Cronus' backstory compares Lord English to Lord Voldemort, his soul splintered into "a series of unassuming vessels" which would need to be reunited), and it suggests that we should read into the creation of the other Act 6 sprites in a similar way. so when Davesprite and Nepetasprite are combined into a figure who is treated as the ULTIMATE distillation of Dave, the very primordial concept of Dave given physical form, it takes that idea of "these two characters were ALWAYS one and the same" to its logical extreme

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runner up goes to the guy who posted "moirallegience could have been really special if hussie didn't inject amatonormativity(?) into homestuck by making the trolls think of it as lesser than matespritship". oh god no are you telling me andrew hussie tarnished muh queer utopia alternia...

ive been indulging in bad behaviours lately and using the search bar to look for topics i know will show me stupid discourse and obviously last night i wanted to remind myself what people think about "moirail toxic" expecting to see a lot of dumb arguments about nepeta and equius. but i forgot that one of the longest running arguments about moirallegience is whether it counts as "platonic" or not. there are literally still people arguing about this in 2024. which is crazy because the argument has nothing to do with what's actually in the comic or the canonical facts about moirallegience or anything it's literally just because people on tumblr can't agree on what the word "platonic" actually fucking means. because it doesn't actually fucking mean anything

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ive been indulging in bad behaviours lately and using the search bar to look for topics i know will show me stupid discourse and obviously last night i wanted to remind myself what people think about "moirail toxic" expecting to see a lot of dumb arguments about nepeta and equius. but i forgot that one of the longest running arguments about moirallegience is whether it counts as "platonic" or not. there are literally still people arguing about this in 2024. which is crazy because the argument has nothing to do with what's actually in the comic or the canonical facts about moirallegience or anything it's literally just because people on tumblr can't agree on what the word "platonic" actually fucking means. because it doesn't actually fucking mean anything

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there is no kismesissitude "from a Watsonian perspective" that's not how alternia works

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With the two-forces-opposed/can-never-see-other's destruction idea in mind, what do you make of Vriska Lalonde and Tavros Crocker's kismesitude in Beyond Canon, from a Watsonian perspective?

they're named after one of the most iconic toxic romances in the history of paradox space they are playing the roles of kismesissitude's "fated nemeses" basically to the letter. and they can't kill each other cus their parents would be mad

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if im reading this right nepeta as the cosmic doppelganger of dave makes equius bro. the dynamic of nepeta pacifying this violent and "uncontrollably" strong figure who is to an almost exhibitionist degree open about fetishes (milk, musclebeasts/smuppets) is. yea

does everyone think dirk's room being the exact same as equius' room was just like. i dont know. what did you all think the significance of that was supposed to be

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of course it goes without saying im hopelessly dependent on the rosemary

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the characters who ended up being part of lord english were chosen at complete random. they indicate nothing about the comic's themes. and hussie was a moron for not making act 6 about the 48 squiddle session instead of all that meta bullshit