#Could he make it more obvious he's part Equius

[shoegazingmonad]

Why is there a dent in the robots head here. That isn't a sword mark is he seriously beating the shit out of his robots bare-handed in his spare time

[thewertsearch]

The High8loods surely intended to make a spectacle of my conviction. They filled the court8lock with peasants ravenous for the comeuppance of a 8lue 8lood. I wasn't a8out to deny them what they came for.

It was kind of the authorities to supply me with phalanx of such impressiona8le spect8ors. […] It was simple enough to nudge the hostility of the low8loods from one aristocrat to another. The su8juggl8ors could not have 8een pleased, 8ut nor could they have 8een altogether unamused, I would expect. I wonder if this was part of their unfathoma8le game? I'll never understand their riddles.

Certainly smells like a set-up to me. I wouldn't put it past Gamzee Senior to arrange this on purpose, in order to neutralize a dangerous dragonrider who was getting a little too big for her britches.

Much like his descendant, the Grand Highblood is proving to be a lot more cunning than you'd expect. Gamzee's currently employing similar manipulation tactics, so I wouldn't be surprised if he, too, was following his ancestor's advice.

Had my escape not necessit8ed her demise, she would have made a lovely rival. If she'd only discarded her childish preoccup8tion with justice, we might have made a striking scourge. Had we inched 8lacker we'd have torn red miles across the land and sea. Unfortun8ly, the only miles to 8e found through her 8ureaucratic calling were those of red tape. When so ensnared, one is eventually 8ound to 8e choked.

This girl's writing continues to be more flowery than Rose's literal purple prose. Could you imagine Mindfang giving Homestuck's next recap?

With the court8lock cleared, all that remained to o8struct my freedom was His Honora8le Tyranny himself.

And who the hell is this?

Is this what a highblood looks like, after living for untold millennia? Perhaps this is the emperor of trollkind, Her Imperious Condescension's consort. Their titles do seem to match....

Though I was free, I had no fleet. No matter. With the gam8lignants decim8ed, I'd em8raced the turn in fortune and pledged to put my seagrifting ways 8ehind me. […] 8ut first, I was in need of temporary refuge. I sought it with the expatri8. He owed me for the sweeps of protection I provided after his 8razen defiance of the High8loods. It was perhaps the only such courageous stand ever taken against a superior 8y one of his supercilious pedigree, and I'd not have 8othered sticking my neck out for another. […] I wonder if he still 8elieves she was worth it?

Here comes Equius Senior - who, it seems, actually had the guts to defy his superiors. 'She' is guaranteed to be another Player ancestor, and Leijon seems like she'd be the obvious choice.

Now, this is interesting, because it means Equius, who didn't raise a hand to protect Nepeta, hasn't been following the example set by his ancestor. Was he aware of his predecessor's small rebellion?

The Expatriate's design goes hard. I may be stating the obvious, but Hussie was really bringing his A-game for these Ancestor portraits. We're finally getting to see some adult trolls, and they really deliver.

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

James had a “fan page” of himself on a popular social media website. He would sometimes hide pictures he had posted, but then his mood would change and he would put them back up. This behavior, and the fact that he had a fan page at all, is why James is a goomba.

The way I wrote that line made me think that James was secretly the one doing the posting, and the idea of him as a sort of puppet of the Homestuck narrative -- a literal Homestuck avatar -- seemed like a way to justify this. (That is the sort of idea I would expect to appear in some later work, like an epilogue or something, since this is very much about the story in the story.)

(I still don't know if I'd actually do the puppet thing, though. Just because I like the way the idea of James as avatar connects to the ideas of the story in a coherent way -- he's less like the character in this story, and more like its avatar.)

This was one of the threads that got me thinking about James as Avatar. The fact that he "changed his mind" all the time suggests to me that a lot of his behavior, and the way Hussie wrote him, was meant to function as a kind of meta commentary about how to take the text at face value.

One of the things that has made me really angry about Homestuck is how much Hussie's stated intended interpretation of the text, even if he believes it's true, contradicts with all the other things about the text that I actually find compelling.

Here are some examples:

1. It has the "canon" structure of being "a story that happened to be about other things" but in the same manner that, say, The Silmarillion is a story that happened to be about Lord of the Rings.

As a child I felt like I was being baited into finding out more about this "universe." I'm not sure I ever did, but I think part of that was the feeling that if I just figured things out and accepted the canon, it would make more sense.

But even once I started reading it, it seemed obvious that, like, Homestuck isn't an allegorical story of the Silmarillion. The Silmarillion is a book about Tolkien's world. Homestuck is a story about Hussie's world.

Now, I don't know if this is true. Maybe one could imagine an allegory in which both of the main "characters," Caliborn and Calliope, are allegories of Tolkien's two main characters, Frodo and Sam. And of course Caliborn is also an allegory for Tolkien.

But the way that story actually went, in terms of the "characters," it was Frodo and Eridan.

2. It features characters from a series I liked, namely The Sandman.

I'm not saying it was done to me. But Hussie clearly had it in mind that Homestuck would be "about" The Sandman, like it was about Lord of the Rings. "Homestuck" itself is, in part, a story about the relationship of Homestuck characters to this universe. And Hussie is clearly very invested in how his universe relates to The Sandman.

So in the same way that the Lord of the Rings universe has an "Empire of the Dead" and a "Shadow Over Middle-earth," the Homestuck universe has one -- the eponymous "Sburb." And the narrative contains a lot of thematic parallels to The Sandman, especially in the first part, the part that tells the story of the creation of Sburb (and in which Cronus is a key figure).

What I'm saying is, one of the reasons I like The Sandman is that it's a story about the themes of "what if someone made a version of a mythos that's just very, very, very strange?" It's not a story about Lord of the Rings.

So Hussie is, in this case, doing Homestuck about something I already found appealing in The Sandman.

3. It features two kinds of characters whom I found especially appealing, namely calm, emotionally restrained protagonists who have something they need to prove to the world, and manic, crazy characters who aren't fully human and who have to act like a human to get their point across.

Calliope and Caliborn have something they need to prove to each other.

Eridan, Equius, and Arquius have something they need to prove to him.

Caliborn and Equius can't communicate their problems without pretending to be a human while being more like a non-human than a human, and he doesn't seem to be trying to act like a non-human to communicate his problems.

Eridan says he's a demon, and he "acts" like one, but that's kind of just a mask. He gets things done anyway. This is the point where he starts seeming like a more complete version of Caliborn, as the more-human of the two "calm, restrained protagonists who have something to prove."

These are the two kinds of character who I feel like Homestuck has a special place for, and who are often not featured in things like Lord of the Rings.

Caliborn isn't a fully-formed character because he has the same problems as characters in Lord of the Rings: a sense of alienation from the world around him, and the need to know what to do. (But I find both of those elements of Homestuck very compelling, while I feel like the latter element is not present in Lord of the Rings -- in my memory, characters tend to act "like humans," which is a type of behavior that feels strange to me in the context of Tolkien-based fiction, but if I'd read Homestuck then I might have taken the characters' behavior more as a sign of their alienation from society.)

Calliope isn't a fully-formed character because of a sense of alienation that is somehow opposite from the problem that Eridan has, i.e. a sense of self-loathing about her identity and the kind of person she is, which is the kind of thing a "calm, restrained protagonist" is meant to escape from. (I feel like Caliborn might be a less-distressing version of Calliope in this respect. He has a more limited life, but he's not in this state of constant self-questioning about his identity -- he's clearly not an entity who cares much about it, or he would have stopped caring at some point, and his state is at least somewhat stable -- while Calliope, who has a much more complete life, has a lot of things she cares about and questions and is struggling with.)

The idea that Calliope is really Eridan but a version of Caliborn who's better at pretending not to be a demon, or Calliope is really Cal

[acearadiamegido]

the big arajade post

Here it is, my masterpost of why AraJade is simply poetic cinema

TL;DR: it’s all about the comparing and contrasting

Let’s get the obvious shit out of the way.

- Space vs Time aspects: Creation vs Destruction, Genesis vs Entropy, opposite but inextricably linked to one another

- Jade is her session’s resident frog hunter. Aradia was literally a frog. Do the math, my friend.

- They both have robot selves which I think is neat.

- Jade’s dream self was secretly dead from the beginning of the story, taxidermied in her grandpa’s attic. Aradia’s was secretly alive, comatose at the center of Derse.

- For that matter, Jade’s dream self was the first in her session to wake up, and Aradia’s was the last.

- Both of them self-prototyped their sprites and took on the features of their dream selves when they god tiered.

- Jade spent much of her adventure asleep, dreaming on Prospit. Aradia’s dream self couldn’t [s] wake until hers was over.

All of that is very cool, I think. But then when you actually get into their respective personalities? Even cooler.

- They both have arcs that center a lot around loneliness and agency.

Jade’s story is pretty obvious. She grows up alone on a completely isolated island, and when she finally meets her friends and starts to think that maybe things can start to be different, her friends on the ship with her just... randomly die, and she has to spend another 3 years waiting to reunite with a version of her sibling that doesn’t even come from the same timeline.

Aradia, of course, isn’t as physically isolated. But after she dies the only thing we really hear her friends say about her is that she’s creepy, and talking to her kind of sucks nowadays, aside from Vriska and Equius who clearly have ulterior motives. Sollux is another exception, but pre-retcon eventually even he and Tavros dip out on her, leaving her to third-wheel for Meenah and (Vriska) who leave to do their own thing pretty quickly, too. So she spends a lot of time roaming around the void on her own.

While Jade will take any opportunity she can get to escape her loneliness, avoiding it whenever possible, Aradia seems completely calm and content being on her own.

Jade’s agency is taken from her again and again throughout the story. From Vriska putting her to sleep throughout her life, to HIC mind-controlling her into Grimbarkness, to John’s alt-timeline deal that left her to spend 3 years alone and grieving on the ship to the new session. Even alt. Calliope tries to assert that that’s simply her lot in life, to just sort of... Wait around impotently, regardless of how hypothetically powerful she could be. 

Aradia also faces a lot of attempts on her agency. From the first time we see her, she has voices in her head telling her what the timeline has in store for her, and what she has to do to make everything happen the correct way. And for a while she goes along with it relatively complacently, seemingly in a sort of depression. But the more she breaks out of that depression, the more she meets any attempt on her agency kicking and screaming. Equius tries to take the decision away from her about how she should feel about him? She rips her heart out and starts smacking him around. Droog tries to give input as her exile? She tells him to fuck off. Even her desire to break things post-death seems like an attempt to exert literally just any influence whatsoever on her environment, because as a ghost she’s invisible and intangible. This isn’t even getting into the whole “being at the absolute bottom of the hemospectrum her whole life” thing.  She has a whole conversation with Rose apparently in crisis over whether she is in control of herself, or simply being puppeted by the alpha timeline and the voices of the dead. 

- As a result of All Of That, they approach things pretty differently. Jade sees things happening around her, and puts it on herself to take responsibility for them. If she has to experience trauma alone, and go through hardship, well, maybe that’s just her cross to bear. Everybody has an important job to do, and maybe that’s hers. She cares deeply about everything that goes on around her and wants to be a part of it, possibly because her opportunities to act are constantly taken away by forces outside her control.

On the flipside, Aradia operates at a safe distance from everything. She asserts again and again that she’s just an observer. She’s sick of playing a role in the story and has renounced responsibility for any of it. 

- And even though they’re on opposite sides of that coin, they both represent themselves very similarly, through these veneers of cheerfulness and friendliness. Not that they aren’t genuinely both cheerful and friendly people, but there’s just a lot more TO them that they don’t tend to project outwardly. Neither of them ever really lets themself be upset about their lot in life aside from the occasional outburst when somebody manages to REALLY get under their skin. At which point everybody else needs to watch the fuck out.

ANYWAY. I simply think they are Neat™

[crappy-homestuck-confessions]

Headcanon Anon here with the kids' individual senses of humor!

John-Zany, prank-filled, with slapstick! Not out to hurt anyone's feelings, just mildly annoy/confuse strangers and friends and family.

Rose-Snark, dark humor, casually intrusive wordplay. Has a hidden goofy side that only friends know about but likes to present herself as a Rule 63 Cigarette Smoking Man from X-Files with an even worse sense of humor.

Dave-Anti-humor with rambling monologues and left-fielders galore. Probably went to sleep watching Tim & Eric and would get along great with Neil Hamburger.

Jade-Loves math humor and feghoots; actually likes to work for her laughs, the poor soul (Remember, she is canonically able to make Kanaya laugh so make of that what you will.)

Terezi-Sick, distressing, prank-filled sense of humor that's a dark mirror of John's. Basically swears by the healing power of schadenfreude. Could take Eric Andre's desk in a heartbeat.

Kanaya-Morbid, literalist sense of humor. So dry that most people don't tend to know if she's joking or not.

Tavros-Self-deprecating, surprisingly dark at times sense of humor. Casually mocks any unfortunate events that befall him, regardless of the seriousness.

Karkat-Wants to come off as serious but likes it when people show dedication to a joke, like H Jon Benjamin's jazz piano album.

Sollux-Loves snarking and loves being snarked at. Is also partial to particularly negative reviews of things as long as it doesn't rely on shouting and obvious bias.

Feferi-Very juvenile sense of humor with a love of puns, toilet humor and bring up sexual topics in non-sexual situations. Giggles everytime at the "hide under there/under where?" gag.

Eridan-Not really a laugher but does chuckle at hearing a good pun every once in a while.

Nepeta-Loves her puns and her small pranks like hiding kills in friend's pillows. Thinks pushing cups off tables is the height of comedy.

Equius-Enjoys gentlemanly Oscar Wilde-esque snark; also enjoys his share of puns.

Meenah-Loves puns, pain, people being in pain, breaking stuff, and Aranea's long-winded shaggy dog stories. She'll kill you if you tell anyone the last part though.

Vriska-No sense of humor. Does funny things, says funny stuff but has no timing, can't tell a joke to save her life and hates comedies.

Jane-Loves sitcoms, one-liners from detective dramas and verbal bathos.

Jake-Loves one-liners and pratfalls. As well as the good ribbing from any of his friends.

Roxy-Loves pranks, flirtations (even more than Rose, believe it or not) and coding humor.

Dirk-Very dark sense of humor and loves to keep people in the dark about how serious he is about any given topic; he likes it even more when even he doesn't know (re: his MLP obsession)

Aradia-Twisted sense of humor almost as dark as Dirk's; believes nothing's off the table and will only stop when her target audience tells her to, nothing more, nothing less.

Gamzee-Loves bad jokes and stupid sounds; will probably laugh at a joke without you having to finish it.

Damara-Sexual humor is her main weapon and everything is looking like a target; will do anything outside of actual battery to make her target uncomfortable.

Rufioh-Has a wide range of humor but seems to prefer observational comedy.

.

[stuckonscenarios]

How would you think all the beta troll boys would act around their crush, would they be the first to confess to their crush ?

❤️ unless karkat feels very very strongly for you, then i don’t think he would outright confess. however, that doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be totally obvious that he’s flushed for you. karkat is not a subtle guy, haha. i think he’d probably try to act tough around you in an effort to make you admire him more. karkat would also monopolize your time; he wants your attention like, a lot. he’ll probably message/want to hang out with you all the time. 

🧡 despite his self esteem issues, tavros would confess to you first. he probably works himself into an ultra-confident and cocky headspace like he did when talking to jade. but i don’t think he’d keep it up. as soon as you explain that you like him for who he is and not some macho front, tavros would be quick to drop it. i also think tavros would be very enthusiastic about learning what your interests are, as well as sharing his own. 

💛 i don’t think sollux would confess first, tbh. he’d be very conflicted on whether or not to say anything, but ultimately he’d choose to keep the crush to himself. the thought of you rejecting him is too nerve-racking for sollux, so he lets you come to him first. out of all the beta boys, sollux would be the most tight-lipped about his crushes. it’ll be very hard to tell that he likes you unless you know what you’re looking for (complaining wayyy less than he would with anyone else when you ask him to do things, being softer around you in general, and lots of game recs are things to look out for). 

💙 equius... oh boy. i love him dearly, but he just does not know how to act around a flush crush. he’s so terribly awkward around you and likely second guesses everything he says to you (which is fair, because he’ll probably say some pretty weird stuff at points). equius will wait a good while before saying anything about his crush on you. part of this time is spent working up the courage, while the other part is spent hoping you might confess first. eventually, though, i think he would bring up the fact that he likes you. 

💜 i think gamzee might also wait a long time to say anything about liking you. the only difference between his and equius’ reasons for keeping quiet is that i don’t think gamzee would need to hype himself up very much. he feels very comfortable around you, and honesty comes easy when he talks to you. after gamzee’s grown tired of waiting for you to make the first move, i think he’d throw out a very haphazard confession. like, you two would be talking about something random and he’d throw in an “oh by the way i have a huge crush on you” in the middle of the conversation. 

💜 it’s hard to say with eridan. on one hand, it’s easy to see eridan being the first to confess. but on the other hand, he’s very predisposed to just letting himself pine for months and months. so, unless you say something first, i think eventually eridan would break and tell you. i headcanon eridan as being very tactile with people he’s red for, so prepare for a lot of hand holding and innocent stuff like that. things he could reasonably explain away, but still let him feel close to you. 

-mod lux (for future reference, please limit your requests to four characters! i’m cleaning out the inbox now, but future requests wont be filled out :/ )

[autumnblogs]

Day 44: Preoccupied about the same things as Trolls, revisited

Welcome back y’all! Before we get into this, I want to talk about the Condesce/Meenah as a parallel character to Mom Lalonde/Roxy. You can read a bit about @mmmmalo​‘s takes on Openbound, and why they think that Meenah is symbolically Roxy’s Doppelganger here.

I want to call attention to some specific similarities between them, and while I think it’s a bit of a stretch, Homestuck draws parallels between characters all the time.

Both the Condesce and Mom Lalonde are matriarch figures estranged from their potential offspring by dire circumstances and servitude to a patriarchal authority and his time-spanning plan - for the Condesce, that’s English obviously, but for Mom Lalonde, that’s Grandpa Harley - servitude to his design renders her a wreck of an alcoholic forced to endure the end of days with no means to stop them from happening, living with a daughter who wants nothing to do her.

Both Meenah and Roxy are rebels against a repressive order, inclined to shirk their assigned Role in service to someone else’s master plan, but ultimately, through some roundabout means or another, give service to it anyway (for Meenah, scratching the game, and ultimately ending up English’s glorified slave for eons in the end; for Roxy, at first refusing to play Sburb in hopes of spiting the Batterwitch, but ultimately ending up playing into her schemes anyway).

They are both rebellious spirits who are repeatedly forced to participate in Paradox Space’s Alpha Timeline all but against their will by hegemonic forces, slaves to a system that they exist in perpetual rebellion against, and by the end of the comic, they both get to help strike a decisive blow against the ultimate foe. Unfortunately, unlike Roxy, Meenah is ultimately the kind of person who chooses at practically every occasion to continue cycles of abuse instead of breaking them. There is ultimately no possibility of reconciliation between these estranged sisters.

So, I see a lot of the Alpha Kids in the four Alpha Trolls who appear in this flash. As the Faux Heroic Himbo, the parallel between Rufioh and Jake is obvious. I don’t think that it’s fair to characterize Jake’s relationship with Dirk as being “cheating on Jane,” though that’s probably how Jane feels about the whole situation; I’ve always gotten the impression she feels entitled to him.

More after the break.

The imagery here is an obvious parallel between Jake and Dirk’s big damn kiss, and Rufioh and Horuss’s - but between Rufioh’s bravado and general obliviousness, and Horuss’s clear triangular parallel with Dirk and Equius, we should expect that the situation is switched here - Dirk = Horuss, Rufioh = Jake.

While it could easily just be a bit of extraneous characterization, I’m inclined to regard Rufioh’s characterization of the women in his life as “Dolls” especially because of his symbolic proximity to Lord English. (He is at best one degree of separation from him, as Jake English’s Alpha Troll Doppelganger) - and the fact that Puppets and Dolls are pretty much synonymous with each other in terms of the way that English interacts with them.

More extremely obvious parallels.

Both of the Zahhaks have hangups about dating down the Hemospectrum, and as long as we’re examining Dirk through the lens of the Zahhaks, allow me to speculate; I think that part of the reason Dirk chooses not to directly identify with the label of gay is less aloofly progressive futurism, and more that he is uncomfortable with his own sexuality.

As a guy who repeatedly appeals to reactionary ideals and rhetorical devices like “Western Civilization,” “Reason,” “Logic,” maybe there is a degree to which we can read Horuss and Equius’ self-repression through the haemospectrum into Dirk suffering from internalized Homophobia.

This is a real long shot, but I’ve always gotten the impression that Dirk is a bit of a bottom. Maybe his desire in building up Jake into a powerful counterpart, like English’s desire to transform Jake into a powerful rival, is built out of a desire to be Oedipally usurped by a former pupil - to have his Eromenos turn the tables, and become the Erastes in turn, in power-dynamic terms.

In Classical Civilization, homosexual relations weren’t unheard of, and were pretty reasonably common, but it was seen as shameful to bottom, especially for someone of a lower social standing than you were (Julius Caesar was mocked as the Queen of Bithynia when it was rumored that he bottomed for Nicomedes IV, which was a serious attack on his political career).

Wild speculative tangent over.

Now this is interesting; Meenah is unwittingly drawing a parralel between Damara and Vriska. The main commonality between them is that, like Vriska (and also like Rose, and also like Jane - who is the fourth and final character in this particular set) her spite and resentment is used as the vector for English’s manipulation of their setting.

Like Vriska, Damara deliberately sabotages the ability of her session members to win, helping to create a powerful foe who forces a session to be scratched.

Like Rose, Damara descends into nihilistic substance abuse to cope with feelings of emptiness.

Like Jane, Damara’s actual feelings of emptiness come about as a result of feelings of rejection in relation to betrayal from within her close friendship circle.

Ironically, while Damara’s reaction is far worse than Jane’s, her anger is actually probably far more understandable - Jane is not entitled to Jake.

The situation between Horuss and Rufioh is also similar to what will resolve between Jake and Dirk shortly - they are just basically incompatible, or at least they will be until both parties do some work on themselves, but a combination of an oblivious party who can’t stop talking about himself, and social timidity on the part of the other prevents the situation from resolving amicably.

“As Long As I Know That I Am Free”

Sometimes, encountering our ancestors doesn’t have to be a source of tension, anxiety, expectation, and fear. Porrim models parental love for Kanaya in a way that, unusually for ancestors in Homestuck, is purely beneficial for her younger counterpart.

It’s okay to identify with roles and identities that have been corrupted or hegemonized by our culture. There’s nothing intrinsically bad about being a man, or about being a woman, as long as our embodiment of those roles is emancipatory to us.

Kanaya can still be a Mom, if that’s what she wants to be. Violence and money aren’t the only form that power can take.

Sometimes, learning the right lessons is just a matter of pausing for a second and being critical of all narratives; deciding for ourselves what we want to be. It’s the lesson that Porrim has to teach Kanaya.

This is just objectively true.

Aranea positions Rufioh as both a foil to Cronus, and to herself, further strengthening the Jake as Rufioh parallels.

What I think is really interesting about all this, is if we want to read the other three trolls as Jake, Dirk, and Jane, that makes Meenah the Roxy of this group! And while Roxy has never been vicious or deliberately cruel, there’s a certain resonance between her persistent hassling of Jane, her meddling in the Jake English Sweepstakes, and the disaster that it provokes, and Meenah’s bullying - I even early on in my first readthrough took a disliking to Roxy because of what I viewed as exactly that - bullying her counterparts, assertively trying to get them to behave the way she wanted.

https://homestuck.com/story/5401

Oh man, where to even begin with Karkat riding off into the Penis Sunset. Like, the Sun in relation to Dave is persistently an icon of Bro’s surveillance of him, and then there’s his burgeoning affection for Karkat (he mentions story time with Karkat in the third Openbound suggesting that he actually took Karkat up on his offer to read through trashy Troll Romance).

Like, there’s probably something in Dave’s troubled psyche that’s on display here but damn if I know what it is. Maybe he’s ruminating on the fact that Bro would probably not be too accepting of his relationship with Karkat, hence the juxtaposition of the symbol of Bro’s hostility with the imagery of Karkat riding a dick?

https://homestuck.com/story/5404

I don’t really need to explicate much on what Rose is trying to say, I think but just in case, here’s a little rundown of what she’s trying to explain.

The apple is a symbol of an irreducible idea. Many ideas are reducible - as molecules are reducible to atoms, and atoms are reducible to quarks and stuff, so are ideas reducible to increasingly more abstracted and basic units.

The closer to notionally irreducible a thing becomes, the more difficult it becomes to express an idea, until at last, that which is truly irreducible resolves, and reveals to us the true, intrinsic nature of reality. For every complex idea, we can refer to more fundamental ideas, until at last, we arrive at an idea, which when probed, responds back simply, “It just does that.”

This, I think, is that to which we ought to give the name of God; that force so fundamental that it truly does just do that.

In the world of Homestuck, Symbols, and with them, Rituals - stories! Are manifestations of the primeval and irreducible ideas. Everything else is a universe in orbit around the Divine - the Aspects themselves, perhaps, or something more fundamental than the Aspects even.

What makes reducing these stories to the irreducible principles that they allude to so difficult is that you’re effectively trying to explain the electromagnetic force by comparing it to rubber bands, when in fact, the electromagnetic force is what makes the rubber bands behave that way in the first place.

As a Ritual, Rose’s drinking is pretty similar to John’s Dad roleplaying - an attempt at unity with Her Mom. Another empty signifier.

https://homestuck.com/story/5405

Dave is already really embracing his new role as the actually most sincere and straightforward member of the party. Lovin’ it.

It’s kind of nice that Aradia and Vriska are getting along now. That’s gratifying for personal reasons.

Ah yeah, I forgot that was ever addressed officially.

https://homestuck.com/story/5435

The man

HASS the ring.

https://homestuck.com/story/5440

And with the depressingly empty Void session established via a single flash, we shall conclude for the evening.

Tomorrow, we’ll get to know our little villain.

For now, it’s Cam signing off, Alive, and a little Annoyed that I wasted a couple hours playing the Outriders Demo this afternoon. Seriously, what an aesthetically bleak and kind of mediocre-looking class-based cover shooter.

[classpect-crew]

Class and Purpose

I’ve heard a lot of people theorize about the purpose of each Class in any particular session. As you can probably imagine, I have a few thoughts about that. Let’s get into it, shall we? (Edit: this took me nearly two hours to write. It’s almost 7am. I need to sleep.)

First, we ought to start with the Witch and Heir. Now, all the Witches we’ve seen in canon seem to have a very similar beginning. They start off fairly passive (lowercase “p” this time) and have quite a lengthy maturation arc, not unlike Pages. However, once they hit a certain breaking point when they come into their powers, there’s a sort of “oh, shit” moment when everyone else is forced to reckon with one of their most unassuming players swiftly transforming into a powerhouse. With this much power at their disposal in such a short period of time, you may be wondering what they’re going to do with it. Well, historically speaking, they’re going to massively fuck things up for the session, whether intentionally or not. If the game determines that a brick shithouse of a player is required for some ultimate endgame, that means things are going to go very, very wrong. Ironically, the Witch may very well be the one to save the team from total catastrophe. It will usually work out in the end. Usually.

Now, the Heir is a bit of a different story. As one whose Aspect coddles and protects them in desperate times, the Heir is destined to become their Aspect in one way or another, for better or worse. After all, when a sullen, hungry Aspect like Void was influencing Equius, he ended up vanishing into irrelevance. Even his blood was used to obscure information in Rose’s tome. A similar fate befell Mituna, and he became the embodiment of sacrifice—of Doom. Heirs are doorways for their Aspects to affect the universe. They are the closest any living being can get to a distilled, pure form of an Aspect. If your session has an Heir, pay very close attention to the implications of their Aspect, because this will almost always determine how they’ll be used most effectively. An Heir of Blood, for example, is going to be your hard-working people-person, and you’ll want them in the center of your team, keeping everyone grounded and focused on the task at hand. Take heed: the appearance of an Heir is a sign that one Aspect in particular is going to have a strong influence on the session.

Next, we’ll discuss the Mage and Seer. A Mage’s role in a session is to unravel the mysteries of their Aspect, which means they’ll take on an advisory role. Their appearance marks a significant need for in-depth understanding of some kind. Every session has its riddles and puzzles, but those which possess a Mage need the mind of a scientist in order to parse out the most convoluted secrets. Perhaps the session is filled with difficult or confusing Aspect-related mysteries that must be taken apart and examined for an endgame victory to be possible. Unfortunately, we just don’t know enough about Mages in canon to speculate a whole lot more about what their presence in a session might mean.

The Seer has a similar purpose as the Heir, though to a lesser extent. While the Heir embodies their Aspect, a Seer is guided by theirs in subtle ways. The appearance of a Seer as an adviser ensures that the ultimate path to success will be either helped or hindered by their Aspect, and it’s up to them to figure out the extent and purpose of their Aspect’s sway in their session. This Passive Class tends to be assigned to otherwise active players who wish to exert their will over the universe, but must learn to step back and take on the role of a guide. Many will balk at this, but most will eventually realize that their true strength comes from trusting others to take their advice and push the team forward.

Now, onto the Maid and Sylph. The Maid, as I’ve discussed previously, begins their journey at the mercy of their Aspect’s most negative qualities. As you can imagine, a Maid’s purpose is to gain control of their Aspect in a way that allows them to “tidy it up” and maintain its integrity. The appearance of a Maid in a session almost guarantees that their Aspect is going to be fraying and torn, in need of their mending expertise. You can certainly expect a lot of difficulties to arise in the realm of their Aspect at the beginning, since they’ll lack the ability to smooth out those bumps for quite some time. Once the Maid realizes their potential, however, stand back and allow them to do their work. Chances are, they know what needs to be done to succeed, and you don’t want to stand in the way of a Maid and a stitch to be fixed.

Ah, the Sylph. As one myself, it’s fairly easy to imagine what my purpose in a session would be. Similar to the Maid, a Sylph’s job is one of restoration and healing, though they tend to start out with much more confidence toward their Aspect than the Maid. The presence of a Sylph in a session is a handy sign that their Aspect is likely going to be lost or broken at any given point, and therefore in need of restoration. This could be metaphorical, or quite literal, depending on the situation. As a Sylph of Time myself, it’s easy to imagine bringing back an amnesiac’s memories by “restoring” the time they lost, or healing a wound by speeding up time around it. Beware, however, as a Sylph’s energy isn’t limitless, and even the most dedicated healers need time to recuperate, or else they risk overexerting themselves and burning out. (Trust me, “Sylph Burnout” is a very real thing.)

Well, the first half is over, so now it’s time to talk about the Prince and Bard. As destroyer Classes, one might wonder what these might mean for their Aspects. That’s quite simple: both indicate an overabundance of their Aspect that must be pruned away. The Prince, in particular, is infamous for destroying their Aspect within themselves before turning their crusade outward. Too much of one Aspect upsets the balance, after all, so it must be purged to allow its opposite to rush in to fill that gap. If your session has a Prince, buckle up tight, because any semblance of their Aspect that exists is going to be an irresistible target for their princely purge. Although this is probably a good thing overall for the session, it’s going to be rather painful at the onset. Princes may “get the tumors out,” so to speak, but they’re likely to leave the patient bleeding on the operating table afterwards.

Having a Bard in your party is a little bit like inviting a chimpanzee to a D&D session: it’s exciting and unpredictable at first, but after a while, shit really starts to hit the fan and you’re left wondering “who invited this guy in the first place?” Truthfully, though, the Bard can be both a game-changing player and the one who dooms the entire session. In rare cases, they’re both simultaneously. Their Passive nature makes it difficult to predict what they’ll do next, since they act based on the whims of both their Aspect and its opposite, but it’s fairly certain your session will be rife with discord and conflict, due in part to the Bard. It’s sort of the universe’s way of throwing a curveball in the form of a player to challenge the team even further. A Bard is both a buff and a nerf to your team. Use them wisely, and never, ever turn your back on the Bard.

Well, well, it’s about time we talked about the Knight and Page. A Knight’s appearance has a very obvious consequence: whatever their Aspect is, that’s what your session will be lacking. Dave’s session was very, very short on time, Karkat’s had virtually no natural cohesion, and Latula’s was filled with big personalities with no regard for the consequences of their actions. This is because the Knight’s job is to use whatever they can get of their Aspect and exploit the hell out of it. Give them an inch, and they’ll turn it into a mile without breaking a sweat. This is especially handy when there’s precious little of their Aspect to go around.

Now, having a Page in your session may sound like a recipe for dead weight, but that would be an incredibly unfair assumption. Rather, a Page has access to a great deal of exploitative power as they reach the climax of their development. The presence of a Page is a very good sign indeed, as long as the team is willing to put up with their very slow and steep maturation arc. Their Aspect is one that will be opened up to be used by their teammates in game-breaking ways, provided they’re patient and encouraging toward the Page. Good things come to those who wait, and wasting the potential of a fully realized Page is not a mistake you want to make.

Last but certainly not least, we have the Thief and Rogue. Thieves get a bit of a bad rap in canon, but it’s safe to say that the Thief will become a powerful player in any given session. Their appearance signifies great conflict and strife, which they’ll almost certainly cause in the first place. Thieves begin much like Pages in the sense that they lack their Aspect and seek to obtain it. For the Thief, this Aspect-shaped hole is too much to bear, and their schemes to take it at any cost will likely be the source of the session’s woe. This isn’t necessarily all bad, however, as knowing your Thief well enough can help you predict the nature of this unavoidable conflict, allowing you to prepare well in advance. Remember, the Thief can make an incredible ally, but their interests won’t always fully align with those of the party.

Finally, we have the Rogue. Ultimately, the Rogue is in charge of balancing their Aspect by redistributing it from areas of abundance to those of scarcity. Too much of one Aspect upsets the universal balance, and as we’ve covered previously, there are quite a few Classes whose purpose involves tipping the scales back where they’re supposed to be. The Rogue is the most intricately tied to this delicate dance between their Aspect and its opposite, since the presence of one necessarily negates the other. Their job is to facilitate this natural order, ensuring that their Aspect doesn’t become too concentrated in one form or another, ultimately supporting a natural sense of order over chaos.

If you’ve read all the way to the end, congratulations! You’ve officially read through nearly two hours of my creative process. I’m actually really impressed.

[maybe-homestuck-now-or-something]

interesting observation: in homestuck, a lot of people will notice that the exiles for the human kids (WV, PM, AR, etc) all have interests in things that would make a good foundation for a society. for WV it's city planning, for PM it's the postal service, for AR it's law enforcement/military defense... but in a way, all characters who are involved with a session of SBURB are tasked with bringing something to the table in terms of influencing the development of whatever society the new universe contains.

the most obvious example of this continuing trend is with the trolls. on Alternia, each blood color has some sort of associated role or job that they will be expected to fulfill. jade bloods tend to the mother grub, teal bloods are lawyers, rust bloods have jobs as public or private servants, gold bloods are utilized for their psiioniic abilities to power ships for interstellar travel... and with the trolls that we're introduced to, every blood color is accounted for, including a mutant blood color to speak for the individuals that this society casts out, vilifies, or neglects to serve.

I just think this is notable, because there are a lot of reasons why the original 12 trolls were an interesting group for this game. for example, one could suggest that having one troll of each rigidly divided social class should've produced a lot more conflict within their session, due to systemic tension, personal grudges, and the initial competitiveness between the red and blue teams that they were divided into in the beginning. specifically, this could've been advantageous by providing their team with more opportunities to physically harm each other, laying the groundwork for some to potentially die on their quest beds and achieve god tier. this was even the case for the two trolls in their party who did go god tier.

but things didn't exactly go in a typical direction for any of them... a lot of our specific group of troll characters are actually subversions of what would be expected of their caste. as a couple examples: Tavros is supposed to be a servant, but his disability means that he actually requires more aid than he provides. Terezi is meant to become a cog in the Alternian legal system, but she grows up in the woods, away from other trolls, and actually cares about right and wrong, which is not what the Alternian legal system actually does. Equius is supposed to be an authoritative aristocrat, but his physical abilities and constant perspiration make him ill suited to look the part of aristocracy, and he's completely ineffectual when he tries to assert authority over others as well. Kanaya was raised by a virgin mother grub, which was incredibly rare, and she grew up away from the brooding caverns because of this... so instead of caring for a mother grub, a mother grub cared for her, and was arguably more of a mother for it. Karkat, who wasn't even supposed to be alive at all, is the loudest, most in-your-face person on their whole team, and is way more of a leader than, say, Feferi... who is supposed to want to rule Alternia with an iron fist, but has a far softer personality and outlook. even in terms of Aradia and Vriska's respective god tier deaths, Vriska only killed Aradia by proxy, and as a way of retaliating against her for sending ghosts to haunt her... which Alternian society would count as gross insubordination on Aradia's part. whereas later, Aradia killed Vriska in a very physical and direct confrontation, which Vriska lost very badly.

and what I guess I'm saying is that, on paper, the trolls should've been the perfect ingredients for Alternian society to be replicated in the universe they created, exactly as it used to be. but because each troll is an atypical example of their caste, this would never have worked. and I wonder if the human universe turned out so different from the troll universe, in part, because the trolls who created it didn't fit within their society the way that they were intended to. and even if the trolls weren't able to physically enter the universe they made and affect how it turned out directly, some part of their subversive theme might've rubbed off on it anyway. which might be why the human characters are all so much harder to classify in terms of their utility to a society. instead, the kids are more clearly identifiable as having a lot of creative hobbies. writing, music, visual art, an appreciation for film... the kids don't have a particular relationship with a strict system of societal expectations the way the trolls do, so their skills feel less like utilitarian abilities, and more like tools of individual expression.

idk, maybe this is too broad of a thing to extrapolate... I mainly wanted to point out the thing about each caste having an associated job that is viewed as an essential pillar of their society, and how having one troll for each blood color means that all of those positions are filled in this one group. it kind of goes hand in hand with the idea that the game uses the players' identities in a session of SBURB, as the cultural ingredients for the new universe that they're trying to make.

[ardenttheories]

To add another to the BS tally of HS2: what’s with all the political matters all of the sudden? ACAB Vriska (I don’t know how that happened and I don’t wanna know), facist Jane, rebellions... HS did have those political matters, sure, but it wasn’t scrubbed against your poor face with Equius levels of strength. Yet I swear the Epilogues and HS2 are half politics half misc fuckery. Whatever happened with playing a godly game and random shenanigans? Oh wait HS2 also has that! Badly done! Bluh.

I don’t think including political matters into fiction is an inherently bad concept; it can be one of the best ways to immortalise current events and to encourage discussion about them, and Homestuck has never really shied away from political discourse (such as Caliborn’s rampant misogyny, the facist dictatorship of HIC, both on Alternia and on Earth Alpha, and the entirety of the hemospectrum being an anaolgy for real life racism and classism, as well as the multiple rebellions against HIC in Alternian history). 

However, it was often handled a lot better, and wasn’t so fucking heavy-handed. Hussie incorporated these issues a little more naturally, explained them in much better and much more subtle terms. The hemospectrum is definitely something we can relate to our own world, but it’s also just a cool piece of lore for the trolls that makes them a completely unique species. Caliborn’s rampant misogyny is a fun prod at the type of men you find on the internet who are just... like that, and making him a villain was both fitting and making him childish about it was a good way to belittle the point of view he was presenting. And the rebellions on Alternia? Things like Feferi wanting to make things better, but also being morally grey about it herself? It was naturally integrated into the lore of Alternia and into Feferi’s personality as a whole.

Overall, it was just more palpatable because it flowed with the tone of Homestuck. It was presented as part of the lore, as part of the characters, in such a way that it won’t seem like Homestuck has a lot of politics in it unless you pick up on the IRL parallels. But the parallels are there, are intentional, and are firm - and it’s an amazing point of discussion in and of itself, really, when you dive into it. 

The Homestuck^2 team have... a lot less tact about it. They’re going less for natural progression and more for what will shock and horrify. They want it to be as much of a slog to get through as possible, as blunt and brutal as they can make it, which is okay, I guess, and gets the point across, but being so outright about it isn’t... the best way to do it. It doesn’t fit in with the rest of the themes of Homestuck; it’s clearly something that isn’t meant to fit in; it’s clearly something that has been crowbared in from our own world. This, admittedly, is just really bad storycrafting. It ruins the immersion of the text, which is why it’s now so obvious that it’s a “political text”; Homestuck has always had moments like this, but never so out of place. 

And, in general, while it’s good to include politics into media and to appeal more widely to an audience with genuine real life issues, giving them more traction and showing your solidarity with a point of view, you do still have to remember that, like... people read fiction to get AWAY from the world. Sometimes, shoving in harsh and clearly abrasive reminders of what’s going on in the world around your readers isn’t going to go down very well, and can come across as extremely tone deaf (especially since at least Kate seems to be focused more on ACAB as a statement and a non-race-related protest rather than part of the Black Lives Matter movement, which deeply diminishes the fact that ACAB because of the violence they commit especially towards people of colour). 

On top of this, in Homestuck, any negative political commentary wasn’t done with the villains being characters we loved. 

Like, there’s an inherent difference between recognising that HIC is, for lack of a better analogy, like Trump - someone who has always had power, was always born into power, and who got power and went too fucking far off the deep end because they were corrupt to begin with - and watching Jane just... go so violently against everything that we as fans love - which, while not perfect, would be a bit like if Obama suddenly turned around during his presidency and said “close off the boarders, get rid of health care, let the poor die”. It’s not shocking and deeply expected from someone like HIC. It’s deeply shocking and disturbing from someone like Jane. 

It also lessens the point you’re trying to make with ruined character development. People are so lost and confused over Jane suddenly being a fascist that anything they could be trying to say ABOUT facism is being talked over by fandom feelings of betrayal. The joke they made out of Karkat being a Solid Snake ripoff gives no credit towards anything they’re trying to make out of the rebellion. 

In fiction, it’s almost always better to parallel real life issues with clearly defined traits; a villain and a hero. HIC is a villain. Jane is a hero. You can add in morally grey characters, of course, especially those in positions of power, because things aren’t always so well defined - but for something like politics, we’re well aware that there are Good Guys and Bad Guys, or at least Bad Guys and Even Fucking Worse Guys. And we know, for instance, that these people are almost always RAISED to be racist, to be xenophobic, homophobic, transphobic, abelist, classist, murderers - it’s in every ounce of their blood to continue white supremacy because it benefits them most. 

So the fact that Jane is now suddenly a villain, for no actual reason - without a full character arc, without any real justification, she just takes over and all of a sudden she’s paranoid about trolls and being incredibly xenophobic from the start - is what people are going to focus on most. They’ve upheaved so fucking much, it’s almost impossible not to look at the upheaval and to make that the point focus of attention. Like, how much clearer could it be that they’re making Jane a portrayal of white people in power despite the characters supposedly being aracial? And where the fuck did any of this come from? Why are such important and VERY close-to-home topics being thrust onto a character that we used to associate with? Why are they putting Jane up onto the rung of fucking Trump, when they could have chosen a completely new character for this to have been and actually gotten their point across away from the hurt fury of “what the fuck did you do to Jane?”

When you do something like this, you seriously run the risk of detracting away from the point you’re trying to make - which is exactly what’s happened. 

Unless, of course, there’s no fucking point at all. A lot of HS^2′s writing focuses on the “nitty gritty of being an adult”, so there’s a fairly big potential that this... isn’t meant to reflect on anything in specific. It might just be what the writers think are “adult issues”, which, again, almost completely discredits the entire fucking point they’re trying to make. They might be doing this just to be shocking, to be upsetting, because they know ruining Jane will piss a lot of people off - and how much does that undermine the very real issue of facism when a lot of what’s going on in HS^2 is happening in our world right now? 

This isn’t the sort of climate where you just turn someone into a fascist to be shocking. Not when real world fascism is on the rise and becoming more violent. That goes beyond shocking - it’s upsetting and tone deaf and horrifying, actually.

But, yeah. Homestuck has always has politics involved at its very core, like you said. It’s just that it was handled a damn slight better than whatever the fuck’s happening in HS^2 now.

[the-hs-etaverse]

Aspect Groupings, IMO

Hi, first off, huge shoutout to @communistvriska who makes brilliant classpecting posts (they’re walls of text but it’s good text). But she made this fantastic analysis of the relationships between aspects and how they’re related to their positions on the aspect wheel (link).

So, I know, like, the post above is considerably more canon, but it made me remember that I think of the aspects in groups, too. It’s definitely a different system, and it doesn’t make quite as much sense w.r.t. the aspect wheel, but it’s my take (albeit a tepid one). And honestly, screw canon.

Please, take these with a grain of salt, because I am most definitely not writing these all out feverishly at 2 am. (No Keep Reading tag we you die like men)

Space-Time-Void: The World Aspects

These are the three aspects that are intrinsically connected to the fabric of reality. Yes, I’m excluding Light in this definition because of its alternate meaning, which is the one that seems more often used metaphysically in Sburb. But yeah, you have Space and Time, which are opposites in a sense (Space is the tangible reality and Time is the intangible but still real liminality), but then Void, which is absence, is basically the opposite of them both.

These are the most meta aspects, in a certain sense, because physics is based upon them. But they’re also the most tangible ones. They’re the ones with the most concretely singular definitions. They’re the ones that affect the dimensions that we can pass through (if Time counts as a dimension).

Going off of more symbolic representations of them, Space is creation, Time is revision (it’s basically the big fix-it tool of the cosmos), and Void is... well, it’s not really destruction; that’s Rage’s purview. It’s more of uncertainty. You’d think that would fit best with the Next aspects because they’re all about what’s going to happen next, but ACTUALLY MEGAN it doesn't quite fit there. Those aspects know where they’re going or where they might go. Void doesn’t know. Heck, it doesn’t even know the past sometimes (re: Equius’s Pesterquest route). But Void still fits the whole building metaphor because it’s like when you’re working on a Minecraft castle and you have no idea what to do next. Wondering about that sort of thing, and just waiting and walking around the building you’ve built, is rather important to the creative process, imo.

Mind-Heart-Blood: The Self Aspects

These are the three aspects that are intrinsically connected to one’s sense of self: body (Blood), mind (Mind), and soul (Heart). (Insert Vriska (Vriska) joke here (and another one about missing close-parentheses in Python (if you can’t tell, this was mostly written while sleep-deprived)).) But Blood is significantly more abstract than that: it’s also about one’s relationships with others, but in a different sense than Heart is. Blood is about bonds, and Heart is about emotions. And Mind is about logic, which, you could say, is an opposite of both of them.

You could even go so far as to compare Mind, Blood, and Heart to the Modes of Persuasion - logos, ethos, and pathos (respectively). Again, they’re representative of different aspects of a person’s psyche. But, like, I have no idea how you might apply that.

Okay, I have an idea with how that’s kind of being applied. Terezi’s the big Mind (translation: galaxy brain) player, and she’s all about lawyering and rules and logic. There’s your logos. Dirk’s the most developed Heart player, and he’s all about convincing through appeals to emotion, and that’s for the most part how he manipulates the narrative in the Epilogues and the ^2. There’s your pathos. And Karkat, the Blood player, uh, most of his leader stuff is in a sort of Cincinnatus-type of way; he’s not being the trolls session leader or the presidential candidate cuz he wants to, he’s doing it because somebody’s gotta step up and do it and he wants to do the right thing. There’s your ethos.

Breath-Light-Doom: The Next Aspects

These aspects being grouped together is why I made these groupings in the first place. Because, when taken deeper than face level, they all refer to one’s future. Breath is destiny (this is kind of a stretch, but “Winds of destiny, change!”), Light is chance, and Doom is fate. Yes, those are all synonyms, but they also refer to different aspects of one’s future. Destiny is about the biggest picture, where you fit in to the grand scheme of things; but it’s also about where the wind takes you here and now. It’s an extrapolation of your current path. Fate is about the fixed waypoints and endpoints, where the path will bottleneck, where you will go no matter what. And chance is about how much the path can divert along the way, and how much leeway the bottlenecks hold, and what you need to do to modify the biggest picture.

The more literal definitions of these aspects are Breath as wind; Light as, well, light (insert another Vriska (Vriska) joke here); and Doom as... uh, death.

I, uh, I really don’t have much else to say here. Uh, you guys take this one.

Hope-Rage-Life: The Now Aspects

This grouping, for me, is the most confusing (partly because they’re the aspects left over once the obvious ones are grouped together). Because Hope and Rage being tied together makes sense, obviously, but what does that all have to do with Life?

Well, I think they’re all mental attitudes, in a way, how we act now and how we choose to look at existence. Hope is optimism, Rage is pessimism, and Life is idealism. Take note: none of these are realism, not even Life. They’re all coloured lenses: When you look with Hope, you see the best version of the future. When you look with Rage, you see the worst version of the future. When you look with Life, you see your desired version of the future. But none of these are the real version of the future. Sure, they’re all beneficial in their own way, but sometimes you have to take those lenses off. I feel like Hope, Rage, and Life players have the hardest time taking off their own lenses.

Then there’s more literal definitions of the aspects: Hope is belief, Rage is destruction, and Life is growth. Very loosely speaking, these are the actions that you’d take in order to fulfill the respective mindsets. Like, I’m optimistic about Vrisrezi Real HS^2 Endgame (this optimism might be misplaced), so I’m believing super hard in that coming to pass. I’m pessimistic about Order of the Stick ending on any note other than the Snarl winning (but tbh this pessimism could also be misplaced), so I’m like “okay heck with it let it get wrecked big-time”. I’m idealistic about how I can eventually get not depressed (I pray that it’s not misplaced), so I’m working on growing in the not-depression area.

In like the grand scale, with reference to all of them

I’m not looking at these aspects in their relationship to a session. I’m more looking at them based on what they are, by definition. All these aspects are interconnected, they’re all related in different ways, especially in terms of definition, so you could absolutely make different groupings based on their definitions. This is just my take.

One thing I noticed about the Aspect Wheel is that it’s a cycle, the cycle of being. Space is about creation and birth, so you start there. You aren’t yet anything more than a substance, but then comes in your Mind, and you’re administered Hope, that you will yet be something more. And then you take your first Breath, and there begins your Life. You learn and are enLightened, and Time passes. You grow up. You learn to manage your Heart, and you have to fight against Rage, and then you form bonds of Blood. Your Blood spills out after long, and ultimately you have to face your Doom. You enter the Void. And there it ends, but there it also begins.

Wow, that got pretentious.

I have to wonder how religion would work in a setting like Sburb, if at all. The classpect system is pretty irreligious. But I’ll save that for a later post. Maybe.

[fantroll-purgatory]

@itoshiki​

hello! im submitting my sort-of-trollsona-but-not-really. I made him I guess more Alternian and he’s highly personal 2 me but that shouldn’t discourage you! I’m stuck at some parts because I just recently got back into homestuck and I’d like advice from someone who knows their stuff. IT’S SO LONG IM SO SORRY… Thank you so much if you do review it tho!

Hey no worries. Thanks for your patience!

Hell yeah hell yeah ceruleanbloods with Eye Stuff.

World: Alternia, maybe an AU? I’m unsure. But he’s Alternian.

Name: Sancti Serpus

“Sancti” comes from “Saint” and his belief that he can do no wrong, as well as how he believes that his experiments benefit troll society. “Serpus” comes from “Serpent” and his personality being sly and manipulative, could be described as a snake by others in the way he is first nice to his friends but backstabs them later, as well as his lusus being a two-headed Titanoboa (prehistoric Boa).

I understand the reasoning behind the first name! If you want something that plays a little more into the archetypal Mad Scientist “I will become a GOD AHAHAHAHA” vibe then I suggest Apoteu from the Greek apotheoun, meaning “to make a god of.” Still fits his beliefs about himself and how he benefits society…but there is such a thing a vengeful, malevolent god.

I like the serpent theme, especially given the Rod of Asclepius/Caduceus confusion, given that the former is about medicine and the latter about commerce. Plus snake oil salesman as duplicitous people claiming they have a cure when they’re really just selling you whatever they could dig up. Serpus is a little too obvious as a snake troll though, so maybe we abstract that a bit. A slightly silly one would be Davdav, since the longest-living two-headed snake is named Double Dave after its discoverer.

Apoteu Davdav. It has the opposite of a nice ring to it, but I like it because it sounds kind of mad sciencey.

Age: 7.5 Sweeps (16 Human Years)

Theme/Story: His theme is sort of Mad Scientist vibes. He dabbles in forensic pathology, chemistry (even though he often explodes things), troll biology/genes and psychology. Those are his main 5 branches because he’s not very good at math so his knowledge of physics is limited.

fugidghiuuaehiu Bad At Math Science Gang RISE UP

He was hatched and went through The Brooding Caverns. He decided to settle on a Hive in the outskirts of a city, in a suburban area with only a few highblooded neighbors. However, his lusus was very, very hard to feed for the two heads would often argue with and attack each other. His lusus would feed on anyone who visited or came too close, by asphyxiating them. It also neglected him and didn’t pay attention to him for it was too busy fighting with itself. He eventually learned to sedate his lusus through aromatherapy, with chemicals he himself created in his lab. He lives on a huge castle-like hive near a forest where he gets the material for his experiments and corpses to analyze. He has a bunch of body parts in flasks and bottles.

He is a very strange troll, but he doesn’t want to be. Due to his upbringing and his lusus eating whoever came over. He often saw culling, death and destruction near him, which caused him to have a morbid fixation on death and a desire to better troll society through science, influenced by his ancestor Discordi Discipla (he’s a WIP). However, he has fallen victim to his own mental deterioration and apathy as he spent more time around the dead (and undead). This mental deterioration was exacerbated when a presumed dead corpse came to life in his lab and attacked him, causing him blindness in his right eye. He’s somewhat afraid of being culled for his blindness, but knows that it’s not likely, due to his highblood status.

This is pretty good and comprehensive!

Due to his childhood where he didn’t have control over what his lusus did, he now wants to have control over everything in his life. This makes him a very controlling and manipulative person, bent on doing anything to get his way even if it means experimenting on his lowblooded friends. He doesn’t necessarily like hurting others and doesn’t mean to, Alternian society and his own visions of violence has just made him apathetic. This apathy as well as his low self-worth stemming from his neglect has made him have tons of unhealthy relationships, as well as has made him a perfectionist and narcissist. Despite his supposed belief that the end justifies the means and he’s going to make troll society better, he doubts himself and has an inferiority complex.

His mental deterioration has made him a very unstable troll to be around. He’s still a good troll at heart, however the odds are in disfavor due to his blood color causing him to look down on others lower on the hemospectrum and his own childhood. He does things mainly on impulse and suffers from strange hallucinations and visions of the future ever since he was blinded on his right eye. He’s learned to cope with them and they don’t necessarily harm him, but they do cause him significant distress.

He also has a lot of scars from laboratory incidents, and his neighbors hate him.

fjiodshfuo yeah if my neighbor kept making ungodly noises and murdering people with abandon I may also have a beef with them.

Review Goals: General Overview please! Strife Specibus:

Chemicalkind. He carries around various noxious chemicals to use as he pleases, but sometimes they irritate his eyes when he uses them. He can handle it almost all of the time though. He throws them in bottles and that’s how he fights.

I know I *just* suggested this for my most recent review but bottlekind fits here too because if he runs out of chemicals he can just break a bottle off on a nearby surface and stab someone with the broken glass it’s fun it’s easy it’s free.

Fetch Modus:  I kind of took the idea from a mspa fetch modus entry, since I’m bad at coming up with fetch moduses. It’s unoriginal I know, but I genuinely couldn’t think of anything.

Periodic Table Modus.

It requires Sancti to remember his elements, as he needs to remember them for when he’s working and therefore it helps him but also inconveniences him as he can forget them.

This is how it works:

When an item is captchalogued, a quick calculation is checked to see the size of that item. If it is lower than 190x190, the size of the item is totalled and placed on a slot on the fetch modus that corresponds to the periodic table number. 

For example, an item that is 4 in by 2 in would total to 6, and be in the position of Carbon on the table.

Sancti would then have to open the periodic table modus, which would open as an actual metaphysical table, and retrieve the item.

It is blank, with 118 spaces.

This fetch modus is a little confusing to me as well, and your poor math challenged troll likely also finds it difficult.

…but I think I have an idea that keeps with the spirit *and* the confusion while generating some good old Modus Shenanigans. What about an ORBITAL MODUS, with items filling in in each new category as an electron shell would? All items in the outermost shell would be immediately accessible, with deeply nested items remaining inaccessible until the outer shells were emptied.

Like this. Which is perfect for your chemist troll.

Blood Color: Ceruleanblood/Cobaltblood.

Lunar Sway: Derse, because he is dissatisfied with himself.

Derse and Prospit assignations don’t necessarily have to do with how one feelings about *themselves!* Karkat is Prospit and Nepeta is Derse, which reflects the fact that Karkat has accepted the hemospectrum as the way things have to be despite the horrors it inflicts on him, while Nepeta is extremely happy to be herself, but constantly snipes Equius for kowtowing to the hemospectrum. Even Equius is a Dersite, since he doesn’t agree with the hemospectrum so much as develop a really disturbing fixation over the following and subversion of it.

Given that your troll actively uses the hemospectrum to his advantage and delights in doing so, I’d argue he’s a Prospitan!  Title: I’m unsure if I want to make them a sylph of light or a sylph of space, I’m actually not sure at all what they should be.

Between forensic pathology and genetics and chemistry and being attacked by a zombie and feeling he knows best he’s actually coming off VERY much as a Life player to me. Since you’re bouncing between two Sylph classpects I’m happy to keep that title as long as we acknowledge he’s not currently very good at it :P.

Symbol and Meaning: The symbol for purification by burning. He’s my first troll in the session I want to make. It kind of has the meaning of spiritual cleansing or purifying something that is not pure. In this case I think it relates to Sancti’s personal growth that will happen through the session, reflecting how he has to better himself through painful events.

If we go by the EZ, his sign would be Scorsci, Sign of the Fixer. Which is certainly what he sees himself as! I’ll see if I can play with the symbol you gave him and incorporate the Scorpio M into it.

Handle: gravesideAnopsia

Anopsia is a defect in the visual field or blindness, and graveside refers to how he got his blindness.

We definitely see trolls with retroactively foreshadowy trolltags, but I can’t think of a reason for him to have picked Anopsia before his blinding. What about gravesideConjunct, since he sees himself as the connective tissue between the dead and the living? Which can become retroactively ironic when his eye putrifies after it comes into contact with necrotic tissue, which is basically an extreme version of conjunctivitis.

Quirk: ~~( he types…. zzz….. taking… his time…. with words… and….types in caps when he…..wants to zzz…. ASSERT HIS POINT….)~~

Love this quirk he’s a sleeby boy.

He either keysmashes to laugh as “eoeoeoe” “sksksks” or simply laughs like “haha” or “hehe”. He also uses the following emoji    :)-< and (－‸ლ)

Special Abilities: None, unless you count his visions of the future. But he wasn’t born with psychic abilities.

Idk that he even needs visions of the future tbh. Injury does not always confer abilities in troll society.

Lusus/Guardian: A 2-headed Titanoboa (think of a huuuuuge prehistoric Boa, even bigger than an Anaconda). He considers himself to have two dads as the two heads have separate brains. He calls them “my snake dads”. Him and his lusus have a better relationship now that his lusus is sedated, and he often cuddles with his lusus in between their two heads and feeds them the corpses after he’s done analyzing them. However, their relationship used to be negative and neglectful, as explained above.

Omg yes I love his dads.

Interests: Apart from the sciences listed on his theme, he also enjoys the arts and painting with blood of the corpses he studies, as well as making artistic murals outside to the annoyance of his neighbors. He likes cosmic horror books, doomsday devices and machinery, bodily modification, philosophers, and in his spare game he will play puzzle and roleplaying games (but not FLARPing, he’s bad at it). He thinks about hunting the undead sometimes, and likes horror movies, making friends regardless of their dead or alive status, scaring his neighbors, horror movies, and mindless antics.

Appearance: His hair is very straight, but it tends to get messy. Also the string on one of his horns is a string that got stuck on his horn and it’s hard to remove now.

usghiuserg good. I’m gonna see what I can do to his sprite to convey the “straight but messy” vibe more.

Personality: 

He’s VERY creative, more than analytical, which is an oddity for a scientist, others may think of him as a “creative genius” but he rejects the title of being a mad scientist. He wants to be positively known. He also always tries to finish things and has a general curious personality. He’s always seeking knowledge, and often tires himself out from working too much on his experiments, which causes him to enter a cycle of all nighters vs heavy sleeping. He’s a very heavy sleeper, often taking naps throughout the day. He procrastinates on mundane tasks that don’t relate to his interests or experiments. However, he drinks a lot of caffeinated beverages when he needs to work in order to keep himself awake essentially starting an all nighter cycle.

Depending on the circumstances, he can be very friendly and charming, or quite the opposite. It all depends. He likes to crack morbid jokes that make nobody laugh, and is quite disorganized as well as silly. He cares for his moirail (wip) and matesprit (wip) the most, and even though he sometimes snaps at them, he never wants to lose them.

Land: Land of Dreams and Angels, but depending on the classpect you assign him I will change it.

*Hopes and Dreams plays in the background*

What if he’s Land of Regrowth and Thaw, with the grass being fed by the remains of former consorts and the rest slowly unfreezing from ice as his journey continues? Works with his work with dead bodies and also gives us the vegetation associated with Life.

I also have his introduction written out but idk if I should include it. Here it is:

Your name is SANCTI SERPUS and you’d rather be sleeping, or dead.

You love everything relating to THE SCIENCES, but you are not very good at MATH, or keeping organized. However, you are still considered a “CREATIVE GENIUS”. You love anything that STIMULATES YOUR GRUBBY BRAIN -  such as PSYCHOLOGY, FORENSICS and TROLL BIOLOGY. You do many EXPERIMENTS, most of which involve using troll parts in jars, to create true ABOMINATIONS; and one which sadly took your right eye’s vision and has had you in fear of being CULLED. However, you reject the idea of being a “MAD SCIENTIST”.

In a weird fashion, you also highly enjoy THE ARTS, and paint the walls of your GINORMOUS HIVE and other places with objectively “pretty good” PICTURES made from the BLOOD of the corpses you work with, to the annoyance of your neighbors. You also have a slight interest in BODILY MODIFICATION, in an effort to withdraw attention from your accident, as well as an interest in COSMIC HORROR BOOKS, as any good scientist should have. Another interest of yours is VIDEO GAMES, especially ROLE PLAYING and PUZZLE games, and when you’re not working, you spend your time playing them. You’ve even attempted to CODE your own game, and FAILED.  However, you are not a very good FLARPER.

Despite this, all your work leaves you tired, which means you are a HEAVY SLEEPER and tend to procrastinate even the most MUNDANE TASKS that are not related to your interests. On the days that you are energized from drinking CAFFEINATED BEVERAGES, you like to go outside at night and collect all sorts of RANDOM KNICK-KNACKS, which may include CORPSES and FOSSILS to analyze. This has attracted the attention of your neighbors and BEST FRIENDS, who call you an UNHINGED TOTAL MANIAC. You don’t understand why, until you take off your lab coat to reveal an alarming amount of new scars from LABORATORY INCIDENTS. You really are kind of an ODDBALL. 

This is such a frickin MOOD. Let’s go to the redesign, though I don’t have much!

Horns - you said he got string tangled in his horns but those horns are shaped in a way that makes it pretty easy to untangle stuff! I gave him horns that are Klein-bottle inspired, though it’s obviously impossible for horns to actually grow into a Klein bottle shape. Now THAT’S a mess I wouldn’t wanna tangle with!

Hair - I absolutely ripped a fan-troll template to shreds and put it back together again for this hair, but I think this conveys “basically straight but mussed up” with a little more shape than the original.

Face - I adjusted the proportions and replaced the eyebrows with just the piercings because it was looking a little busy.

Shirt - Again it looked a little busy with the jacket with symbols on both flaps and the pendant in the middle, so I gave him a mad scientist jacket edited from John’s.

Symbol - I tried to find a happy medium between the radial symmetry of the original symbol and the Scorsci M with the arrows.

That’s pretty much it! Hope this helped!

-TR

[lettersofsky]

GamTav Week Day Seven: Free Day

OK LISTEN I really like this asethetic for these two. It’s my favourite. And this one’s actually shippy right now, even if only pre-dating it’s the best one.

~

It takes them a while, more than a while, to drift back into each other’s spheres of existence.

They’d both been doing different things with their lives; becoming trolls that they could be happy with without the attachment of flushed or pitched quadrants. That didn’t mean that they didn’t date though, Gamzee knew that he’d dated a number of individuals, troll and human alike, just to get the taste of what he’d wanted in a partner down, to learn to enjoy sharing himself without someone that wanted to know him for however long they lasted.

And he knew from the grapevine that Tavros had been doing the same.

There’s nothing really special that draws them back towards each other in the matter of quadrants.

Karkat had been convinced into throwing a party by his boyfriend Dave and Dave’s girlfriend Jade for some event or another and they’d all been invited, Gamzee had spent most of the night making small talk with those that weren’t outwardly hostile towards him and avoiding near everyone else. All and all it’d been a fun night.

He didn’t know who approached who first, if either of them had or if they’d just gravitated together like magnets that recognized the other’s charge as opposing to their own.

That hardly mattered in the end though, not when Tavros was standing in front of him, looking like he’d finally grown into the proud, imposing length of his horns, not to mention into the size of them, towering over Gamzee in both height and the breadth of his shoulders, a feat only one other troll had a claim to.

“Yo,” Gamzee decided to be the first to speak, ending their silent inspection of each other; instinct to check out the competition left over from their days on Alternia he was sure.

“Hey,” there wasn’t even a beat of hesitation to the answer, to Tavros’ willingness to talk to him. It reminded Gamzee keenly of their younger sweeps, back when they’d both been innocent and largely unmarred by the world around them. It was nice in the way that old memories were once they stopped hurting you. “I didn’t know you uh, you were drinking.”

“I’m not,” Gamzee couldn’t help but snort, remembering the support meetings and life coaching sessions he still attended on a regular basis to stop himself from sliding back into the addiction that had been ingrained in his very image of himself since before he could remember. “S’apple juice. Strider specialty.”

“Oh, that uh, that explains it.” Tavros looked a little flustered at that, a soft bloom of bronze on his cheeks, but easily laughed off as conversation continued. “What have you been doing since we uh, since we last…”

“Since we was speakin last?” The offered words were taken with a small self-conscious smile, acknowledged without needing to be said as such. “Been good, workin’, makin a routine for myself and bein all productive like ya’know?”

“Yeah I uh, heard from Equius that you opened your own place?”

A painted brow rose. “You two been talkin ‘bout me, have ya? S’a weird topic a pillowtalk.”

“What?!” That has him, colour spreading deep and bright over Tavros’ nose and the top of his cheeks, the spread of it to his ears obvious with the way the other troll cut his hair. “N-no! No not like that at all! I, I mean—”

“Chill bro, s’all good,” he chuckled, Tavros deflating from his flurry of justification and explaining with a sigh. “I ain’t real carin how and what other motherfuckers say ‘bout me, s’all cool.”

They lapse into quiet, Tavros focusing down on the glass of something definitely alcoholic in his own hand while Gamzee turned his head to inspect one of the nearby food platters, debating if he was hungry enough to try one of the oddly coloured creations.

“It wasn’t that though,” Tavros broke the quiet as Gamzee decided to just go for it, a piece of cracker with something on it in his claw.

“Hmm?”

“It wasn’t uh, wasn’t pillowtalk. He and I were just catching up the other day and he uh… told me about when he ran into you.”

“He does that a lot,” Gamzee hummed, playing at being more focused on what was in his hand than the troll in front of him. “Ya think for a troll that big he’d been more cautious a where he’s going but nah. Trolls fallin all over under his motherfuckin hooves, yeah?”

“He said you were seeing someone.”

“I’m always seeing some motherfucker,” he pointed one, returning his gaze to Tavros as he tilted his head just so the pretty pale pink diamond stud in his ear could be seen, the violet gem inlaid in it glinting in the light of the room. “Believe you me everyone else is gonna know when Eribro’s tired a me ‘fore I do.”

“No,” the word was accompanied by a rough shake of Tavros’ head, brow furrowing deep. There’s frustration in his voice now, not too uncommon an occurrence for anyone talking with Gamzee for more than a few minutes. “You know for someone that doesn’t like being lied to you sure do a lot of it.”

“You’re the motherfucker beatin’ ‘round the bush like it all up and kicked ya lusus,” Gamzee shot back, surprising Tavros enough for his face to go slack with it. “Iffin ya wanna ask me ‘bout the motherfuckers I was seein, quad or nah, just come out and motherfuckin say it. We’re bein adults now, yeah?”

A pause. A beat. Gamzee’s ready to call this experiment a failure when Tavros spoke up again.

“…Are you seeing anyone now? Flushed-wise I mean?”

“Solbro and I vacillate on an’ off but ain’t got nobody permanent in there nah..”

Tavros nods and Gamzee goes back to inspecting the morsel in his claws, stepping forward into the other troll’s face as he opens his mouth to speak again, lifting it until it was resting just before the other’s mouth, claws near brushing warm lips as they parted.

“Try this for me?” Gamzee offered, cocking his head and staring up at Tavros, watching and waiting to see exactly what the bronze would do with the offering.

Tavros reacted exactly as he should have, colour on his cheeks as he leaned forward ever so slightly to take the piece of food into his mouth between his teeth, lips brushing over Gamzee’s fingers as he took the bite.

“How’s it tastin?” Gamzee asked after watching Tavros chew the morsel he’d bitten off, blinking as the other troll nodded down at him.

“It’s uh… it’s good.” He said, all the answer Gamzee needed, humming and popping the rest of the piece into his mouth, more than aware of Tavros staring at him in return.

“It is,” he agreed, dragging his tongue purposefully over his own claws, fully aware of Tavros watching him. “Mayhaps ya should try some more for me yeah? There’s supposed ta be some new restaurant openin near my hive, ya should come and try it out with me yeah?”

“… Ye… yeah!” Tavros nodded, wide smile back on his face, bronze spreading across his cheeks. “Yeah I’d uh… I’d really like that.”

“Cool,” he purred. “We can be chattin at each other later ta be deciding times, yeah?”

[dafukdidiwatch]

Part 335 End/Videos Analysis

So that was a lot of videos, but it explains so much.

First: FUCKING RIGHT ABOUT CAL! Like, 100%. Knew I was right not to trust the puppet. Like, in the beginning first Act stuff I was like “yeah puppets are creepy, got to hate the puppet ha ha pick the lesser evil here jokey joke” but the more he lived and survived in convoluted ways the more my hatred grew.

Let’s try to tackle this in order of that should have/could have happened to keep things in line.

So the whole point to Caliborn’s part, was to tell us exactly what SHOULD have happened.

John uses his new powers to zap all the humans together to fight Caliborn. Caliborn absorbed the Beta-Gang into the house to be found by John later. During the blast Dirk used his soul power to trap Equius, Hal, Gamzee, and Caliborn into Lil’ Cal. Which was punted into space to be found/collected later on.

Gamzee (having his soul inside Cal) cursed Dave to dream of the puppet, which moved the puppet into the real world by John’s baby making. The Beta Cal version went with Dave, did space shenanigans, got fused with a crystal ball to become Scratch and then hatched out like the freaky muscle bound turtle man he is. (having Scratch saying “human uncle” because he is part Hal makes technical sense but is still creepy)

While Alpha-Cal went to Dirk, eventually made it’s way to Caliborn, only for his soul to be trapped in there to start the process again eventually.

That’s the story of Cal what a ride. Do you think Hussie had this planned the entire time, or was figured it out along the way?

But let’s focus on the more important part: John and the Juju.

So the house Juju contains all the Beta-Kids. Which held John, which past!John touch to get those powers and started zapping around. But because of Terezi, he zapped to change the past to keep Vriska alive.

Vriska being alive is literally what changed everything, which is unbelievable how deep that change went to.

Because Vriska was alive, things had to be retconned further than John’s intentional power usage, so his other past self was killed off (along with Dave Sprite :(  ). So the Jade and Jane that we way talking to Callie is the new canon Jade and Jane. And I don’t think that Vriska was ever supposed to be alive. Jade said she saw someone she didn’t expect to see. But she didn’t know which trolls were alive on the meteor, meaning it was like a space/time thing of knowing that she shouldn’t be there.

Instead of continuing the circle/cycle of Caliborn’s existence, Vriska made the path veer hard right to a different way.

And, wow this changes a LOT. More than I expected even.

Vriska rekindled her friendship with Terezi to be the Scourge Sisters yet again.

With Vriska around, Karkat started to hang out with Dave more to be better friends/maybe couple? (given how I missed the blatantly obvious of Meenah/Vriska until the last minute, I am going to tag that in just in case). I mean, Karkat was helping with Dave’s music instead of trying to pine after Vriska, and Dave cuddled against him while falling asleep to romance movies, so it’s possible.

While Vriska doesn’t have a romance with Kanaya, she still cares for her. So she makes sure that Rose doesn’t drink.

Vriska is able to control Gamzee to not do creepy shit, as well as be the balance Terezi needs to not be sucked into the abusive Spades spiral.

Confident Terezi didn’t go further into a depression spiral after meeting the ancestors. (I like the part where it looks like Gamzee is telling Kurloz that he couldn’t help create their dark leader because Vriska keeps him in check, and Kurloz just looks like he is so done)

And the OG Vriska still exists and still dates Meenah. That makes me happy to hear/see. Still have questions like does that Meenah remember talking to the meteor party without Vriska there or what, but it’s all good.

And instead of Gamzee being the one to make the sprites, Vriska does. And she revives Tavros for Jane! Without them blowing up, Tavros would probably help Jane out with her problems/confidence. And Dirk cringing at the thought of having Equius as his sprite, yeah that is so fair and hilarious to think about.

(does this mean that there is the OG Tavros who dated Vriska somewhere here too? Did she double stack the other sprites too, like Erisol and Fefeta?)

And finally, with Vriska alive, she put Jade to sleep (which yay she’s alive). She banded them together as a pirate captain to pull a rescue mission to save Roxy and fight Jane.

Meaning that when John and Roxy come back, it will probably be at that moment.

Which means that was the condition John and Roxy agreed too. They had to make everyone else feel sad about their deaths which had already happened.

The Prodigal Teens return.

(I’m still salty that Dave Sprite is now dead, I really liked him.)

[dahniwitchoflight]

Candy 12-14

Even Jake’s having his proverbial love triangle troubles

It’s clear he genuinely cares for both Jane and Dirk, but if he’s being honest with himself, the one he romantically loves would be Dirk, the one he would prefer to be with, who he’d choose if they were equal options, would be Dirk

But he’s also right that it’s not like Jane’s a bad choice either, sure it’s not his preference if he’s being honest, but he’s also not about to look the gift horse in the mouth if it falls right into his lap

13 is where we start start to see the unraveling happen I suppose though

Again, everyone is acting so drugged up in Candy

Jane and Jake getting literally inebriated and Dave acting like he’s going through Dirk withdrawal

Then Gamzee being the weird ugly poster child of both drugs and candy, honestly it really did make sense to shove him into this timeline in a weird and uncomfortable ham fisted way, it gets that “are you fucking high right now” feeling across really well

Gamzee really being the cloud cuckoolander here though

hold on let me un-gamzee-ify it just reading his text quirk makes me feel like im on drugs

Gamzee: you don’t got any need to go and concern yourself with his mortal flesh body out here in this candycane whirlpool beyond the infinite black wink of the wicked singularity, my ninja.

Gamzee: a sack of meat and bones in one life or the next is only a means to the final totality that will damn and raise us all in brilliant apotheosis.

Gamzee seems clearly meta aware of the situation he’s in which is interesting, This is indeed a candy swirled timeline hidden inside an infinite black hole singularity

the second line seems to be describing the meat timeline in a way though too

a sack of meat sounds worthless, but it is apparently only a means to a truer end, it has to happen for something else to happen

Essential, but irrelevant, again

funnily enough he’s also seems to be referencing gnostic concepts, not that i’m surprised really at this point

one sack of meat, or, one body in one life or the next

so reincarnation

is only a means to an end that both damns and raises a person into apotheosis, or their “zenith” their highest point

which, i mean, yeah, you live life again and again, differently each time, becoming closer to ascension, and ultimate consumation of every version of you is the basic tenet of the reincarnation gnosticisms

Also, a lot of text was put into describing Gamzee haphazardly crashing into things and setting off rube goldberg machines, which I guess sort of describes his escapades through Homestuck lol

“cinder block, crusty puppet, and Japanese sword in a tornado’s radius off balance and avalanching them catastrophically onto the hapless clown’s torso. “

So the Sword is Dirk (or AR) the crusty puppet is Caliborn (because Lil Cal) which I guess leaves the cinder block as Equius? He’s built like a brick shithouse? eh only problem sleuth stuff comes up so 2/3 ain’t bad

Speaking of Equius, oh look, A feminine half finished robot in Dirk’s basement

the uncomfortable Equius vibes ping once again though I don’t think this is robo-Aradia, but likely something meant to serve a similar purpose and almost DEFINITELY Rose related if reading meat wasn’t already obvious and if the skull for an inner head thing wasn’t immediately referring to the headaches Rose was known to have

though it’s also uncomfortably a symbol of her Doom

---14---

“A flip of the cosmic coin has rendered your entire life completely inessential.”

yup what did I just say, Meat is representing the essential bits of the story, candy is decidedly, not

hm, Dirk’s going to kill himself for the supposed greater good of his own making again

not unsurprising, but a guy like him always like to make an escape rather than give up, is he thinking death will unlock this part of his conciousness and send the memories back to the ultimate self? probably

“and one final act of relevance that can bequeath your meager energies to the cosmic well from whence they came.”

yup!

Though as much as he keeps saying none of this matters he did leave an explanatory note specifically for his friends to find, so there’s still something in him that cares

Don’t like how the bigger blacker text is basically instructing this version of Dirk to kill himself though, that again implies there’s part of Dirk that are subservient to other parts, so again it’s a question of if his ultimate self got tainted through the connecting pieces of Arquisprite > Lord English > Doc Scratch, then who’s actually pulling the strings in Dirk’s Ultimate Self and directing the behaviour of “Dirk” in general

Is it Dirk Strider? Or Doc Scratch? and does that even matter anymore since it’s all DS all the same anyway?

“In a certain sense, you’ve never felt so free.

> Kill yourself.”

That’s hilariously also a JailBreak reference, I think, but definitely played for the morbs instead of as a joke lol

https://www.homestuck.com/jailbreak/109

Literally this MC kills himself when his friend dies and he’s now alone in a vast cosmic emptiness and the text is:

“Yes! Finally! Free at last!

Though the victory is bitersweet. Your friend has died of blood loss.

This is no victory. The feeling is vast emptiness. You are no longer bound by bars or concrete, but you feel more incarcerated than ever. You come to the heartwrenching conclusion that the only true prison... is loneliness.

There is only one thing left to do.

> Continue”

and it just resets him back to the first panel but this time he makes choices differently

ironic that Dirk does literal the exact same thing but comes to exactly zero of the same conclusions

“Just as your epiphany occured at sunset, your death must occur at sunrise to complete the ouroboros of symbological harmonic resonance that is your personal arc. It is the very last moment of narratively consequential action that will happen in this whole, barren world.”

I wonder what about this death makes it so narratively significant? just because it passes along the knowledge of what not to do back to the Ultimate Self so he can avoid it? Probably nothing more than that

“but there really are no words that can adequately express the sound someone makes when they die. It’s a phenomenon that happens on two levels. First, there is the literal termination of organic processes, which is to say, the destruction of the meat. Then follows the dissolution of the ego. And you have quite the ego to dissolve, one that has flown so high above the forest that not only can it no longer see the trees, it cannot even conceive of the trees as material substance with objective meaning.”

funny it mentions a forest which is also where that happened in JailBreak

Basically describes how death in general works in Homestuck, the body dies but can leave a ghost/ego behind, but eventually that dissolves as well

Again though, making a compariosn between the Meat and the Body/Flesh and the Candy and the Spirit or Ghost

or another pun between Candy and Drugs if you take Spirit to mean alcoholic spirits

Candy seems ironically and symbolically the place where Breath Meets Void, no wonder John and Roxy hook up here lol

Does that make Meat then the place where Blood and Light meet? I have before put significance into the crossover of those symbolisms in Homestuck before, but couldn’t really conceptulize it as a solid symbolic thing and the Meat and epilogues in general did a really good job of conjoining them into the idea of the story what with the Narrative having importance but also Veins and the idea of Karkat as being reliable narrator etc etc

Meat’s as good a symbol as any for that I suppose

“ When you think so little of yourself as a moral character, any act of self-termination will result in a death that is Just. “

so this line seems to imply that Dirk’s death was permanent and Just here because he thought so little of his own moral character aka deep down he knew he was terrible person, amount of remorse felt over that not applicable, and because of that perception of his, the clock tick tocked over on to Just

Again reinforcing that the Clock is less of an ultimate moral judgment from down on high and much more like an influenceable moral compass, given form by the person affecting it at the moment

I actually kinda like the new spin on that it gives Vriska’s original just death, since that slow ticking of the clock was not just a decision, but a battle of wills between herself and Terezi, it could have easily gone either way depending on how each saw Vriska

neat!

[abundantchewtoys]

Homestuck Candy p33-36: War, Clowns, Spiders, and Frozen Pizza

So, we kind of already started reading page 33 before quitting, previously. So I'm psyched for John's awkward greeting of Vriska Lalonde after just having seen her dancestor roll of into the underbrush, heheh.

Also, I'm getting the feeling that the Postscriptum could end up being the Candy path's intermidquel. In that it could very much take place, here, as Lord English arrives. Well, it depends on how many pages are going to be spent on his arrival and Calliope's fight to dispose of him, of course.

But it would be funny if the Candy path had its own Postscriptum that's an intermidquel for the Meat path!

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Page 33

... Wow.

Vriska L. was happier to see John than I would have thought! Hahah, she thought she wouldn't have to deal with her parents when war came 'round. Keep dreaming, girl!

Rose was wearing an Alternian military armour! That's a cool visual.

But most importantly... It turns out Rose actually DOES remember that fateful morning - 16 years ago, apparently, so they're around 39 now. That was a very special exchange. Rose remembers (or has started remembering again, after one of John's outburts), but she has kind of stopped CARING. She's no longer concerned with an alpha timelines and shoulds and coulds, and even states she believes this timeline's events are not really that important. (Which is still weird to hear, given how invested she is in the cause.) Still, it's good to know John has someone who shares his feelings in this regard!

I guess knowledge really can be a burden, and we saw how it ate up Meat Rose. So I understand how a "veil" like this can help Rose. It's the better variant of being too drunk, with too much of a migraine, to focus on her powers, like in the Game Over timeline. It kind of feels as if this timeline is shielded by something, Voiding out canon influences. :P

What she says, how these events do not have to fit a narrative, is probably also a stab at readers being at a loss at how events are unfolding in the Candy path. MST3K mantra and all. It's not canon, so don't throw such a fit. :P Guess the sweetness that comes with Candy came in a few unexpected shapes!

As for John... When he talked about finality and such, I thought two things can happen now. One is... This page ending with THE END. (Which it didn't.) The other is... John deciding to let go of his fears and misgivings about this timeline, about relevance. He might go make up with Roxy and Harry Anderson, and fall into the role of a father as if no time has passed at all.

I'm seriously doubting he's going to end up fighting Lord English when he arrives. Don't get me wrong, it would be awesome. Candy John finishing what Meat John started, even though he chose to stay instead of go. Lord English being his final boss battle in both timelines, an inescapable foe to the end. But this talk about finality being up to him, seems more to imply he's going to give up on some of the things he worried about.

Granted, I still would like him to free Tavros from Jane's influence, I just hope it isn't a lost cause.

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Page 34

Bwahahaahahahahahah!

First, Harry Anderson and Vriska blasé calling each other to comment on the boring parts of the war front proceedings they're on opposite sides of? Perfection. Just, perfect rendition of the teen spirit.

Okay, secondly, I guess it's quite heartbreaking to see Harry Anderson & John's relationship has dropped to a low point here, but alas, living up to the high standards set for him by Dad Egbert was never in the cards for John. It's the Jake genes, he has potential for horrible weak, sobbing overreactions. Also, parental neglectfulness, apparently. :( Even though it's mostly unwilling from John's end.

But thirdly? Yeah. Vriska L.'s oversized ego was in need of a quick deflation, lest it grow to Serket proportions. What better way then to have an image branded into your thinking pan of possibly the worst romantic pairup in the history of Paradox Space? :Page

Also the fact that their shrieks echo Vriska being sucked into a black hole and also irrelevance. Circumstantial simultaneousness never felt so karmic.

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Page 35

I.

Wuh.

Okay, first, yeah, it was pretty obvious to me Gamzee was deliberately hate-flirting with (Vriska) there.

But.

Wow.

Well. I guess if anyone could keep down the clown, they must have had ALL THE LUCK, in the end. Though... That would mean this Gamzee never finds Calliope and Caliborn, which seems like an unexpected turn of events.

So... In keeping with the strings of random events that seem to happen in this timeline a lot... I think chances are high that Jane finds Gamzee's body at some point in the future, and revives him?

Gamzee's end was certainly karmic when you consider what he did to Equius. And he's been a fairly awful person for all his live, even if he never crossed some lines in this timeline vs. the Game Over timeline.

Still, poor (Vriska). She can't keep the lid on this, not outside of canon anyway. WE know - the fandom will have discussed this in depth.

At least now it is time for the meeting we've all been waiting for. I want to see how (Vriska) handles being on the non-alpha side of a conversation between Vriska's, now. They're near the same age, aren't they? (Vriska) was nearing 8 sweeps as well, she mentioned it to Meenah before the army was assembled.

But they're even more different than the old (Vriska) was different to her. And current (Vriska) has just had the bedrock of her personality drilled into, she admitted as much.

Props to whoever decided their first exchange should mirror Dave and Davesprite's.

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Page 36

...

Wow.

Okay, THAT was unexpected.

For one, go Jake! Finally got the nerve to just stand Jane up and leave that abusive relationship. That's something I don't see him work the courage up to do in any other universe, any time soon, unfortunately. As for Tavros... Eesh, I wonder just how similar, genetically, he and John are. They're probably closer than him and Harry Anderson, seeing how John mentioned it, courtesy of Roxy's genes.

It was wonderful to see John and Jake have a healthy heart-to-heart. It reminded me of their conversation on the endgame platform! Jake was very right in defending himself, since John wasn't in the situation he was in, he was an onlooker. A well-meaning one, that extended a hand, but Jake was just lacking the strength at the time to take it.

And okay, it's true, Jake might have switched into hopeful mode a bit too quick, courtesy of the low truthful stat of this timeline. But who cares?! He's silly, he's hopeful, and he might go on to be a better man!

As for John... I think what he needed most was someone to tell him, really LET HIM KNOW and FEEL, to his face, that he personally shouldn't feel like he has to have the weight of the world on his shoulders. But also, that he should keep his eyes on what he values most. Lest the dread for the bigger picture rob him of all the little wonders, the small hours, that matter most in a life.

For John, that means he should reconcile with Roxy and Harry Anderson, regardless of how "real" they all are. Because that's his legacy. Trying to be the best dad he can be, faulty as he still is, as a normal human being.

It's the best thing that could happen, it seems, John and Jake meeting up. The best for both of them! ... Guess I'm shipping John <> Jake now.