#Also complete side note: it was so so fun to transcribe the whole comic in the image description

[chimchiri]

My MLP Summer Swap gift for @dragonlunar who prompted Spitdash butchxbutch competitions! My excitement took over and it ended up way bigger than initially planned.

Ultimately it ended up as a Spitdash MMA fight with some tenderness sprinkled in between. My main inspiration was pretty gruesome MMA photos and seeing some MMA woman kiss her opponent during press stand-off. Which I loved and wanted to portray!

Some notes: - I very clearly have no idea about MMA. This probably shows in various ways, so don't take this a proper representation of the sport. - Yes I know it's weird how they have separate locker rooms but share them in the end. Please ignore it for the sake of plot and kissing! - Making a comic in a short span of time makes you learn a lot, especially regulating your tendency for perfection. Can recommend for learning purposes, cannot recommend in terms of stress level management! - I'd like to formally apologize to Fluttershy lovers. I simply could not figure out a way to include her in the final shot without disliking the composition and how it all comes together. - I still hate drawing AJs hat and it's definitely something I need to practice more.

Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed!

[bladekindeyewear]

Book Commentary on Inversion Theory

Alright, as a follow-up to this post, it looks like there’s an actual full bit of Homestuck book commentary (around the pages nearing Rose’s grimdark transformation, Book 6 pg 115, HS pg 3305, thanks @ramiedersedreamer and @zandraxofnebulon) about how Inversion Theory (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) isn’t what we thought.  Quoting and reading it first (not the whole reddit post but that portion at least), then discussion under the cut:

"Rose is a Light player, but her blackout effects result from arguably the nadir of her role as such a hero--that is, when she succumbs to Scratch's manipulations and other eldritch persuasions, and goes grimdark. This truth would appear to lend credence to a line of classpect thinking known as "inversion theory," which really isn't without its merits. This note has just gone to the bother of describing one of its merits, in fact. However, it is possible to get carried away with this line of thinking and use it to evaluate everything that happens in Homestuck. For instance, you could say "Well, Karkat is a Blood hero, and here's where he stops being as Karkatty as usual, so that means he's being the opposite of his aspect. Which means he's being Breathy instead of Bloody. So that means a bunch of other stuff, ipso facto, Homestuck has been EXPLAINED." That's not really the way all this works. Aspect lore runs deep, but it isn't the Rosetta Stone to the story. When in doubt, it's better to remember this: rather than an underlying mystical logic where all classpect roads lead to Deep Answers, HS is a comprehensive nexus of many themes, and all roads lead to the basic idea that this is a tale about kids who are trapped in the universal struggle associated with growing up."

I... hm.  Dammit.  Is that all he wrote??  This slippery author is a master of giving us tantalizing and insightful details without committing to any hard yes-or-no whatsoever.  >:T

I’d been building myself up to reading this all throughout yesterday with gut-wrenching dread that at this late, late, late hour he’d finally given us a definitive “NO” on Inversion.  Instead we get this quite interesting but more vague “eh, there’s merits, but don’t go too far with it”.  Which is...... 

...about as potentially-optimistic as I put it in the previous post, if not moreso?

Andrew’s being careful to lavish odd praise on inversion theory, too.  Which some people are going to interpret as (Option 1) “Nice try, but dead wrong”, like the anon who put a snippet in my inbox initially, and others will interpret as (Option 2) “The big ones are RIGHT, nudge nudge, but stop applying it everywhere cause the fans who say every line of the comic means ‘ghosting inversion’ are looking at the story wrong and annoying everyone”.

As someone guilty of being one of those fans described in the latter half on occasion, I can CERTAINLY agree with THAT last part.  Andrew made it really clear with the ending of Homestuck proper -- “this side shit didn’t matter as much as you thought it did”.  I was so enamored with the classpect system that I thought almost everything was being shown to us through those lenses, at one point -- but even though perhaps more than the random reader might have thought is there, like he says, it ain’t supposed to be no Rosetta Stone.  Even when I WAS overapplying classpect everywhere, the people who did it too often in places I felt clearly un-merited REALLY pissed me off!  I can’t imagine how much more that might’ve been magnified in the shoes of someone who happened to apply the correct, lower amount of classpect and had to put up with me babbling and slathering it everywhere, much less the author’s shoes.

But there is still a big hole in his criticism, one he intentionally seems to have left there to me.  By saying “don’t look for it everywhere”, but ALSO that “there’s more than some merit to it”... I don’t think it’s a stretch to think the truth might not only be somewhere in between Options 1 and 2, but perhaps even closer to Option 2.

Aaaand HERE’s where if you’re someone who HUNGERED for me to admit wrongdoing by sticking with this theory for so long, you’re no doubt angry.  Looking at me as making excuses in the face of this long-awaited OBJECTIVE PROOF OF TOTAL THEORY DISMISSAL... WHY won’t the deluded bastard FINALLY succumb to REASON?  ANDREW HIMSELF spoke up on the issue, IS THIS NOT ENOUGH?!???

And, well... you’re right to be angry.  To be honest, I’m a fair bit pissed off too -- I could’ve used a solid “NO”, traumatizing as it would’ve been to me!

But that’s not what we got, because... *rolls eyes @ author* ...that’s not how Andrew works nowadays.  And as irritating as it is, I also have to respect it a bit.

Andrew has become pretty committed to not full-on table-flipping fan interpretations and fanworks, avoiding forcing one “correct” interpretation (see: central struggle of HS^2 and the villains labeling divergence from canon at all as “bad”) because both interpretations should be rewarded.  If something is REALLY wrong and hurts objective appreciation of the lessons he wanted to portray in his comic, like people plastering Classpect everywhere to the exclusion of the story’s central canon-escaping themes, he’s willing to shut them down... but when it comes to effective-sounding interpretations of the comic that he possibly never intended but “could” have been what he intended?  He’s REALLY careful not to step on them!  Or even sometimes DISTINGUISH them from the ones that he DID intend, sometimes, to keep as many fan interpretations alive in our imaginations as possible.

Which, as someone who pins Inversion’s entire existence on the assertion that “Andrew deliberately intended this and it’s our DELUSION otherwise”, really pisses me off at times like this.  This is a theory hinged on the idea that Andrew had been deliberately hiding INCREDIBLY clever evidence throughout the comic for these intense thematic moves.  All the SYMBOLISM we thought was pointing to inversion would lose an incredible amount of its meaning if it were all an accident.  What about all that cool imagery in the Breath and Blood post?  Did any of THAT really mean what we thought it was there for, like between WV and PM?  Was any of it REAL?  Will we ever even get an ANSWER?  The answer is “no, we won’t”, because Andrew persists in this method of keeping his cards close to his chest even if he has to take them to the damn grave, cause he knows we’ll have more “fun” not knowing ‘em.  That considerate son of a bitch.  >:(

I’m serious -- it really does make me more than a little angry.  I really do wish he’d said more to show us where we’re off-course.

But HS^2 has brought us Terezi telling us that Mind and Heart are indeed opposites.  He MIGHT be holding onto the info because we may get it later in canon itself...

Meh.  I’ll try not to hope too hard.  And I’d better clarify what I actually believe, here:

My TL;DR thoughts on Andrew’s commentary up above are that when it comes to Inversion Theory (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), he’s leaving room for some of the BIG events to have been right or almost right -- say, #1, maybe #2, and only POSSIBLY #3 or #4 -- while telling us to back off and cast SERIOUS DOUBT on stuff that could have more character-driven explanations, especially #5.

If there’s a seriously FUNDAMENTAL transformation in a character that isn’t fully explained by their character journey alone (as kids growing up), involves significant outside interference, and is reflected by countless visual cues, THEN we should want to see if Inversion Theory “has merit” in that sort of case -- while laying it up against other competing theories that account for external interference of a non-Inversion-related nature in their actions too.  Things like pre- and post-ascension Aradia or pre- and post-dreamdeath Jade seeming almost completely different characters?  Or Rose seemingly taken over by the Horrorterrors... only to do nothing to benefit them but throw her mainself at Jack and get killed so she’d be forced to ascend on the moon mission rather than God-tier-die?  I’d say Inversion is worth consideration and -- daresay -- worth believing in, in such cases.

And it still might all be wrong.  There are legitimate ways to read Andrew’s commentary above that would have people screaming that Inversion has been disproven, that the “merits” mentioned were just a nod of respect to the losing side that I’m completely overblowing.  But those seem to me like carefully ambiguous words from a carefully ambiguous man, and if there’s anyone to blame for their ambiguity, it’s Andrew.  Trust me; I don’t like it either.  He’s had plenty of practice saying things in a way that we CAN’T really draw many assumptions from.

Heck, even the Redditor transcribing this summarized their thoughts in a way that draws some assumptions I don’t believe are there:

Mostly I think it's just interesting that he's actually addressing Inversion Theory, and the gist is basically "it's a cool idea and has some merits, but the classpect system and story are not quite that formulaic." Sorry BKEW. At least we know Hussie has been paying attention to our wild theorizing.

--which is a rebuke drawn on the common interpretation that Inversion describes too “formulaic” a classpect system, especially with specific-class inversion like Seer <-> Witch and such.  But IS that what Andrew is saying? Andrew criticizes the overapplication of aspect theory in describing everyone’s actions page to page, but does that mean a quote-unquote “rigid” system (I’m not going to play out the old “specific-class-inversion-is-too-rigid” vs “youre missing the flexible potential a fixed system gives” arguments again) is ITSELF an overapplication of classpect to people’s actions and personalities? Is he perhaps hinting that only Aspect stuff mattered in Inversion cases and the Witchy Rose class stuff was just a separate thematic thing that fits by coincidence??  What does it mean? WE DON’T KNOW!  AND IT’S PISSING ME OFF AAAARGH

...I think I’ve said all I can think to say for now.

I mean, I’m glad Inversion Theory wasn’t outright disproven.  I think it’s neat.  I have a lot of emotional investment behind it, and being told it was all a worthless goose chase would have made me vomitously sick!  But as I struggled with at the end of Homestuck proper, constant ambiguity shows a fair bit of disregard of its own, and both ending AND epiloguing Homestuck not only without a “yes” on this but without even a clear “NO” has caused me more gutache and poor feelings across MONTHS than either answer ever would have given me.  I thought we’d earned that by getting through it, that we wouldn’t have to wait for YEARS and then STILL get cockteased like this.  And I wonder how much I’m going to regret, later, that this wasn’t just a clear, simple “NO”.

I’m being told there’s an upd8 just now and I should read it.  I’ll get on that.  Cy’all.