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I need to talk about this I guess.

I'd been holding off talking about the Power Fantasy because Gillen's creator owned stuff in particular has a way of wrong-footing premature analysis, so I was waiting on a full trades' worth of storyline being available to be discussed so that I don't look like an idiot. But the specific combo of Tarot and Gillen absolutely demands my input.

As soon as you say to me "there's a bunch of characters and they have a one-one correspondence with the Major and Minor Arcana" I am busting out the whiteboards. I got like this over matching up sigils to gods in WicDiv, and emotional spectra to gods in DIE, and this has every possibility of putting me right back on my bullshit.

Except that it seems unlikely we'll end up characterising all 22 (let alone the other 56) of Jacky Magus' underlings in much depth so there wouldn't seem to be much weight to the game! But DOUBLE EXCEPT!

There's 23 Major Arcana. So one of the Arcana is for Jacky himself. But which one?

First thought best thought is clue is in the name: he's the Magus, card I is the Magician, job done right? But that seems to be the pat answer, and it's too easy, so I look for the lie.

And then Eliza here is presumably Eliza Hellbound, so she started out as a Jacky Magus underling before coming into her own power separately later. So she's gonna be The Devil, right? But again, too easy. (Also, what's going on with an apparently literal Heaven and Hell in this comic? It's going to be fun finding out.)

Gillen's said before that he doesn't want to run another long running comic with as many secret twists and reveals as WicDiv had, not least because keeping them all secret for years was stressful. So after the whammy reveal of issue 3 here I've been trying to assume Gillen's playing with a more open hand. But, well, we'll see what's in the cards.

Issue 5 hits in two days. I should spoiler cut this next bit, because I wanna speculate:

Okay here under the cut: does anyone else feel like Etienne Lux might straight up die at the end of this next issue? Or at least become heavily compromised, in some sort of Dr. Manhattan-esque character assassination and exile way?

This whole arc has been very much about showing just how much Etienne is balancing the entire world on his shoulders and it's all inches from going to hell without him at any given moment. And Magus has expressed concern he's getting more powerful and does NOT like Lux, and has already clearly been sponsoring efforts to try and at least inconvenience him. So his focus issue is a good place to reveal a real trap for him.

Plus removing Lux at least temporarily from the board clearly lights the dramatic touch paper for a fireworks second arc.

Of course a lot of effort has been expended on establishing him as a character merely to kill him now. And arguably this repeats the trick with Luci in WicDiv too much. But then speaking of: I have every faith that Etienne, who is Mr. Contingency, might survive an apparently lethal blow in some way. Which brings me to The Signal.

The Signal is some sort of psychic mind thing that Etienne was involved with in the backstory. It's mentioned a couple times, in the issue one interview and most prominently in the issue #3 timeline. And the explanation there is it's some kind of disembodied mind...

A disembodied mind, you say? A means for a mind to survive psychically outside of a body?

Hmm hmm hmm.

Oh, THE POWER FANTASY #5 is out next week, so we should lob the preview up here, right?

It's from a little after the start of the issue, as the opening spoils issue 4. Let's flash back to the late 1970s and get to know the arsehole that is Jacky Magus.

From Image comics, out Wednesday 18th December.

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Stockpile HRT now.

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We just need more genres! I am trying hard to make the below "forcefem spectrum" happen.

* nudgefemme (I want to be a girl but I've struggled to take the steps. This loving dominant force is going to help me at my request)

* autofemme (the only way to [thing X] is if I pretend to be a girl! Guess I'll do that! Oh no what are these feelings?)

* oopsfemme (accidentally you're a girl somehow! changing back might be hard tho. Maybe staying like this could be okay!)

* coaxfemme (I totally didn't want to be girl but then [coaxing force] made it sound so tempting! I shouldn't.... but I want to! Aaaaah [five pages of angst])

* dubconfemme (I don't want this! I don't want this! I... imaybewantitalittle no that's not me that's who you're turning me into aaaaah [fourteen pages of angst] )

* strict forcefemme - (they're making me be a girl, I feel sick and wrong and dysphoric and humiliated and degraded in this body, help)

* breakfemme - (you're destroying my mind to replace me with a woman who isn't me, aaaaaaaaaaaaah ceases to exist)

Please everyone start tagging your fics and shitposts accordingly

the reclamation of forcefem is understandable but has been increasingly damaging to the "force" part of that. it's forcefem not gentlesuggestionfem. we have regular feminization for that

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The fact that socialization is a specious argument became obvious to me during an exchange I had with a trans-woman-exclusionist who insisted that my being raised male was the sole reason in her mind for me to be disqualified from entering women-only spaces. So I asked her if she was open to allowing trans women who are anatomically male but who have been socialized female—something that’s not all that uncommon for MTF children these days. She admitted to having concerns about their attending. Then, I asked how she would feel about a person who was born female yet raised male against her will, and who, after a lifetime of pretending to be male in order to survive, finally reclaimed her female identity upon reaching adulthood. After being confronted with this scenario, the woman conceded that she would be inclined to let this person enter women-only space, thus demonstrating that her argument about male socialization was really an argument about biology after all. In fact, after being pressed a bit further, she admitted that the scenario of a young girl who was forced against her will into boyhood made her realize how traumatic and dehumanizing male socialization could be for someone who was female-identified. This, of course, is exactly how many trans women experience their own childhoods.

--- Julia Serano, Whipping Girl

I don’t know about anyone else, but I, as a trans woman, do not know what it is to be a man. I know what it’s like to be surrounded by men, to be picked apart by them, to have masculinity enforced on me and to have my femininity degraded. I know what it’s like to be targeted for punishment, physically and sexually, for my femininity, for a girlhood the boys and men could see in me, to be queerbashed, to have my head slammed into hard surfaces, to have my genitals fondled, to be injured in all kinds of small and repetitive ways with things like pens, compasses, and so on.

I know what it’s like to be assumed to be a man, and to be abused because I am not. I know what it’s like to be separated from my female friends as a young child because my status as a ‘boy’ meant that I needed to be placed with the other boys, the ones who degraded me and hurt me. I know what it’s like to be beaten and burned. I know what it’s like to have teachers make an example of me because I cannot conform. I know what it’s like to be made afraid of being around other people, because people means abuse.

But I don’t know what it is to be a man. Even after everything they tried, I wasn’t one.

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So yeah. In the event Trump gets re-elected he will the be 47th president of the United States. We're only up to 47 in the first place because we count Grover twice already.

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I regret that I have to be the one to say that in fact you do, b cause of the precedent with Grover Cleveland, the 22nd and 24th president of the United States. I wish I was joking, but I'm not.

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This is why fat shaming can have tragic consequences.

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Over on the Discord for The Sisters of Dorley I have been advocating that the whole forcefemme genre is actually a continuum of genres on a spectrum based on how much consent is involved

The spectrum runs, with most to least consent:

* a largely theoretical "nudgefemme" (in which a self aware trans woman submits willingly to loving authority to help them transition);

* autofemme, in which a person femmes themselves, usually because they believe they can extract some advantage or do some scheme by so doing;

* oopsfemme, the ever popular "oh no I am suddenly girl" scenario, where by whatever contrivance a person is suddenly female presenting or has to be, and changing back is at least for the moment difficult;

* coaxfemme, which is forcefemme with minimal force and the basically explicit idea that the femmed person wants this on some level;

* dubconfemme, which is forcefemme in which the amount the femmed individual wants this or not is very much up for debate and/or is interrogated/wrestled with during the text;

* traditional forcefemme, where the person does not want this at all and finds the process of being femmed humiliating;

* breakfemme, in which the femmed person essentially ceases to exist, a new personality overwriting the old.

it wouldnt even be forcefemming for some of you itd be lightsuggestingfem. gentlebreezefemming.

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Tumblr absolutely would do all of these and may yet

I discovered I can make chatgpt hallucinate tumblr memes:

This is hilarious and also I have just confirmed that GPT-4 does this too.

Bard even adds dates and user names and timelines, as well as typical usage suggestions. Its descriptions were boring and wordy so I will summarize with a timeline:

I think this one was my favorite:

Finding whatever you ask for, even if it doesn't exist, isn't ideal behavior for chatbots that people are using to retrieve and summarize information. It's like weaponized confirmation bias.

more at aiweirdness.com

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Always share this whenever it crosses my social meeds

amazing double dance by hao ruoqi ( in blue)and wang xuerou(in red)

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millennial nerd bertie wooster for some reason

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Things i learned as a child that probably no one intended to teach me

To grown-ups, being bad at stuff is a sin. Forgetting stuff is the worst sin of all, and also doesn’t exist - it is widely believed (and your behaviour will be interpreted thusly) that in some Freudian sense, it is impossible to forget things if you care about them or their consequences or the people who care about those things.

Your being happy and enjoying what you do doesn’t matter. All that matters is whether you are Fulfilling Your Potential.

Human beings do not require rest outside of sleep. Thinking that you do is called ‘being lazy’.

Who you show physical affection to is a matter of politeness and social protocol, and has nothing to do with your own desires

It is rude to inform people of your preferences, even if they seem to care about catering to them and therefore might find this useful information.

Etiquette centres around doing things in especially awkward, skilful and time-consuming ways in order to demonstrate superiority over people who aren’t able to keep up.

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Btw I was talking to Kiddo about social rules because we're both autistic and it doesn't come naturally to either of us but I have 25 years experience on them so I have some useful tips

And as proof of that: in that conversation I realised what neurotypicals mean when they say we "make everything about us"

When they're talking and we interject "fun facts" or start talking about something related to what they're saying we mean:

"I am showing interest in you and your interests by engaging with them and showing I'm listening by adding information"

From their perspective we are stomping over their turn to talk and making it our turn and therefore making it about us

Conversation example:

NT: my favourite animal is sharks

Autistic person: with some sharks species the shark pup that hatches first hunts the others and eats them while being incubated inside the mother

Autistic person perspective: I have shown interest in you by giving you information about a topic you have shown interest in

NT person's perspective: wow they made my favourite animal a time for them to show off instead of letting me talk when it was my turn

It's doesn't matter if it's "on topic" or "relevant to the person" if it's when it's their turn to be the focus of the conversation

Like I know there is a bit more to it but this is the first time in 39 years I have understood the accusation "you're making this all about yourself"

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32! Do you like HS^2?

i...genuinely do! i think sometimes there's a half-conception that based on the mere premise of my fics that i don't like postcanon all that much (omelette route was misconstrued as an epilogues fix-it fic in certain circles and pickle route is still sometimes seen as a "better version" of hs^2) even though everything i write is in direct conversation with and comes from a place of admiration for hs^2/the epilogues.

with hs^2 in particular i think it had some really electric ideas that we only got to see the very first brushstrokes of (thinking most pertinently here about whatever was going to go down on deltritus that we never saw) that, if they'd been able to get off the ground, probably would have eclipsed the epilogues as the most interesting part of homestuck. from the bits we saw the meat timeline stuff was definitely the weakest. outside of the jade/altcallie possession chapter a lot of that half of the story was fairly unsurprising character-driven extrapolation of the same angst we departed the epilogues with - and i largely agree with @hms-no-fun that some kind of timeskip here would have helped it feel a little less repetitive (although arguably there might have been? three years definitely passed with dirk et al but it was very up in the air as to how long it had been for the pursuit spaceship crew). i get why that never happened - both meat and candy were being told in tandem and candy ended on a buildup to an immediate conflict that needed to be followed in real time versus meat's meandering slingshot towards something more nebulous, so for the sake of structural symmetry that limited things a little.

i think i'm more amenable to a lot of hs^2's storytelling decisions because i wholly and entirely loved the epilogues from the getgo and it was so good to see that theme/tone be carried through to a more "traditional" mspa space, even if i wonder if the comic form damaged the story more than it helped it. i remember a lot of people getting weirdly mad whenever we'd get an extended prose scene instead of visual panels despite hs^2 being a continuation of the text-based epilogues. then again, the mainstream hs fandom as a whole fucking sucked when it came to postcanon and that's even more evident in how they've collectively memoryholed the whole thing so talking about audience reception is maybe not the most useful thing to talk about here lmao. idk i think people forget that homestuck is largely a story about people who suck and then who get better from sucking. it's just that nobody really likes it when that lens is turned inward onto the alphas/betas who outside of a small handful of exceptions in canon never really had any ethical issues that caused problems for them and others so i personally think it was very interesting and refreshing to explore how the kids' complacency wrt their baggage and trauma allowed them and their world to backslide so disastrously! roxy lalonde enabling jane's fascist ascension is fascinating storytelling actually! (side note: read through shadowed eyes)

hs^2's original characterwork is probably where the story shines the most. the fucked up dynamics between the theseus crew was super fun to read because there's honestly nothing more enjoyable than Supremely Divorced people deciding that makes them irredeemably evil now. the egbert gender stuff was really nice! i particularly enjoyed how, even though it came after the june egbert renaissance, it still managed to be its own unique take on egbert's gender arc that i think really encapsulated the originality driving the project. also forever shoutout to the candy kids my beloved candy kids my children who i will die for - for me in particular hs^2 was a fun time because i was developing my own versions of harry/vrissy/tav for pickle route in parallel to hs^2 and it was so enjoyable seeing all the overlaps and divergences with each upd8. also yiffy fucking rules on every level and even though she never got to be more than a promise she sure was one hell of a promise.

that said i do not think it's that surprising that hs^2 ultimately died before its time. the conditions of the story paired with the most demoralising and vicious iteration of the fandom meant the odds were stacked against it in a big way. you can particularly see the strain of that starting to manifest in the final ~6 months worth of upd8s where people were leaving/being pushed out of the project and every part of hs^2 was a completely hostile environment and the quality of the art and storytelling began to get a little shaky - which i can't really blame them for all things considered! it's hard to want to make the best version of a story possible when the overwhelming reception is a bunch of sanctimonious redditbrained weirdos screaming that you're evil and foul for making characters in a piece of fiction do unexpected and surprising things and also being sympathetic to trans women. there were of course issues with the production conditions of hs^2 that would have probably led to some sort of reckoning at some point, but it's very obvious that the traumatic pressure cooker of a fanbase that wanted nothing more than the death of this project and the ruination of everyone that worked on it threw this whole thing off the rails much faster. despite that, you still have to infinitely admire the team for daring to make something challenging and original in a sphere dominated by people who are content to regurgitate the same babybrained 2013 content ad infinitum - for just a brief moment, homestuck was truly allowed to be the literary masterpiece it's been all along. now people just treat it as more fandomslop to consume and that's perhaps the biggest shame of all.

in the end i think hs^2's legacy is best felt in the places haunted by its premature absence. i'm talking about the comic itself of course but also other spaces and people and projects. stuff that really engaged with the meaty thematic frameworks being thrown up in postcanon that now no longer have a mirror to talk back to - stuff like pesterquest and godfeels and the aforementioned through shadowed eyes that all massively are in conversation with the deeper artistic and philosophical principles underpinning this era of homestuck. if anything else hs^2 will continue to serve as a useful prerequisite for getting into some of the best stuff homestuck fans have ever made. we might never see what could have been, but at least the torch is still being carried by people who care.

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32

i do like homestuck^2!

it has some issues with pacing (really wish they'd invested in a timeskip or two), and some of the latter updates aren't quite up to snuff, but it absolutely does not get the credit it deserves. yiffy is a fucking icon. all the character designs in the candy timeline especially are spectacular. dirk, terezi, and rosebot on deltritus were a DELIGHT and i'm so damn mad we didn't get to see more of what they were building up to there. all the bonus stories are great. the dynamic between jade and alt!callie in the meat timeline was fantastic (the chocolate!!!). BIG BOSS KARKAT

i love john putting on his old godtier outfit and finding that it no longer fits. absolutely underrated setup for the june arc. godtier clothes are supposed to be magically perfect for you no matter what! what could this possibly mean?!?!

hs^2 was a beautiful and flawed project that, in retrospect, was almost certainly doomed to fail both from the fandom side and from the company side. but its format and setups were a big inspiration for me in continuing godfeels beyond the end of 2.3, and remain the blueprint for much of 3.2's structure to this day. the scene where vriska gets shot and kills a bunch of cops and journalists in the form of non-visual chapter of exclusively prose was stupidly controversial at the time ("THIS SHOULD BE A [S] PAGE" cried the very haters who pilloried andrew hussie for exploiting unpaid/underpaid fan labor in producing homestuck's many [S] pages), but it's the only reason at all i had the guts to make [S] saturday the centerpiece of chapter 8. if i hadn't been digesting that scene for nearly two years, probably the whole ending of 3.1 would have been completely different and likely much worse.

it's hard to recommend hs2 because it is, of course, on perpetual hiatus and very unlikely to see itself concluded. what's there is good but it's undeniably mostly setup for a story that isn't on the page yet, which is such a shame. nevertheless, it and the epilogues are essential reading if you wish to understand the postcanon era in any meaningful sense, and if absolutely nothing else they're a fantastic springboard for developing entirely different postcanon fanworks of your very own

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I am still bitter about how the fandom treated HS^2. I may never be fully over it.

Post-postmodernism in Pop Culture: Homestuck’s Revenge

I recently saw an excellent video essay titled Why Do Movies Feel So Different Now? by Thomas Flight. Though the title is opaque clickbait, the video is actually about major artistic zeitgeists, or movements, in film history. Flight describes three major movements:

Modernism, encompassing much of classic cinema, in which an earnest belief in universal truths led to straightforward narratives that unironically supported certain values (rationalism, civic duty, democracy, etc.)

Postmodernism, in which disillusionment with the values of modernism led to films that played with cinematic structure, metafiction, and the core language of film, often with more unclear narratives that lacked straightforward resolutions, and that were skeptical or even suspicious of the idea of universal truth 

Metamodernism, the current artistic zeitgeist, which takes the structural and metafictional innovations of postmodernism but uses them not to reject meaning, but point to some new kind of meaning or sincerity.

Flight associates metamodernism with the “multiverse” narratives that are popular in contemporary film, both in blockbuster superhero films and Oscar darlings like Everything Everywhere All at Once. He argues that the multiverse conceptually represents a fragmented, metafictional lack of universal truth, but that lack of truth is then subverted with a narrative that ultimately reaffirms universal truth. In short, rather than rejecting postmodernism entirely, metamodernism takes the fragmented rubble of its technique and themes and builds something new out of that fragmentation.

Longtime readers of this blog may find some of these concepts familiar. Indeed, I was talking about them many years ago in my Hymnstoke posts, even using the terms “modernism” and “postmodernism,” though what Flight calls metamodernism I tended to call “post-postmodernism” (another term used for it is New Sincerity). Years before EEAAO, years before Spider-verse, years before the current zeitgeist in pop cultural film and television, there was an avant garde work pioneering all the techniques and themes of metamodernism. A work that took the structural techniques of postmodernism–the ironic detachment, the temporal desynchronization, the metafiction–and used them not to posit a fundamental lack of universal truth but rather imbue a chaotic, maximalist world of cultural detritus with new meaning, new truth, new sincerity. That work was:

Homestuck.

That’s right! Everyone’s favorite web comic. Of course, I’m not the first person to realize the thematic and structural similarities between Homestuck and the current popular trend in film. Just take a look at this tweet someone made yesterday:

This tweet did some numbers.

As you might expect if you’re at all aware of the current cultural feeling toward Homestuck, many of the replies and quotes are incredibly vitriolic over this comparison. Here’s one of my favorites:

It’s actually quite striking how many elements of the new Spider-verse are similar to Homestuck; aspects of doomed timelines, a multiversal network that seems to demand certain structure, and even “mandatory death of parental figure as an impetus for mandated personal growth” are repeated across both works. The recycling and revitalization of ancient, seemingly useless cultural artifacts (in Homestuck’s case, films like Con Air; in Spider-verse, irrelevant gimmick Spider-men from spinoffs past) are also common thematic threads.

As this new post-postmodern or metamodern trend becomes increasingly mainstream, and as time heals all and allows people to look back at Homestuck with more objectivity, I believe there will one day be a rehabilitation of Homestuck’s image. It’ll be seen as an important and influential work, with a place inside the cultural canon. Perhaps, like Infinite Jest, it’ll continue to have some subset of commentators who cannot get past their perception of the people who read the work rather than the work itself even thirty years after its publication, but eventually it’ll be recognized for innovations that precipitated a change in the way people think about stories and their meaning.

Until that day, enjoy eating raw sewage directly from a sewer pipe.

(Side note: I think Umineko no naku koro ni, which was published around the same time as Homestuck and which deals with many similar themes and then-novel ideas, will also one day receive recognition as a masterpiece. Check it out if you haven’t already!)

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Goodness me this is both excellent and at a few points provocative. I need to do a response, but for now, pure admiration reblog.

Seeds of thought : DIE #1

Been a while, uh ? I missed you too. But before we start, we have to adress the horrible, no-good, terribly misguided elephant in the room : I am currently working on solutions to keep posting my work outside of tumblr before it pulls the carpet from under us, but nothing concrete yet. As soon as I have my new internet home, I’ll let you know. In the meantime, I’ll keep posting here. If all else fails, I’ll migrate on the Wicdiv Discord server. I’m Pom there too.

Alright ?

Alright.

Let’s do this.

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