#I love �� gamzee markers

[scriblesandbits]

So his horns probably hurt like hell while they were growing right

(also bonus doodle)

[retros-artandstuff]

some messy-ish hs doodles cuz I can't bring myself to finish any of my wips atm jdgsjwhwjjs

[cthonicascendant]

[ID: A pen, marker, and colored pencil drawing of Karkat, Gamzee, and Eridan from Homestuck. Karkat and Eridan are sitting on a small bench with their legs intertwined, while Gamzee has his arms around both of them. Karkat and Gamzee are looking at Eridan, while Eridan is looking at the viewer.]

5o thi5 vva5 a bit of a challenge i aint neVer dravvn three character5 interactin before that i can recall

couldnt decide if i vvanted to do an erikar dravvin or miracrail5 5o i thought vvhy not both novv if i could only you knovv VVRITE i vvould ab5olutely vvrite the fic vvhere thi5 make5 5en5e

but per5onally i like eridan an karkat in a relation5hip that dont inVolVe quadrant5 but karkat i5 5till moirail5 vvith gamzee an i feel like gamzee vvould be kind a you knovv chill vvith the miraculou5 vvay5 hi5 moirail can loVe an al5o he aint really got a problem vvith eridan

take5 eridan a little bit to vvarm up to gamzee in that vvay but you knovv he aint got a problem vvith karkat bein moirail5 vvith gam 5ince i think miracrail5 vvould happen fir5t

[Translation: So this was a bit of a challenge. I ain't never drawn three characters interactin' before that I can recall.

Couldn't decide if I wanted to do an Erikar drawin' or Miracrails so I thought, "Why not both?" Now, if I could only, you know, WRITE, I would absolutely write the fic where this makes sense.

But personally I like Eridan and Karkat in a relationship that don't involve quadrants, but Karkat is still moirails with Gamzee. An' I feel like Gamzee would be kind a, you know, chill with the miraculous ways his moirail can love, an' also he ain't really got a problem with Eridan.

Takes Eridan a little bit to warm up to Gamzee in that way, but you know he ain't got a problem with Karkat bein' moirails with Gam since I think Miracrails would happen first.]

pose referenced from @adorkastock

[tomatograter]

I was wondering about your take on Lesbian Jane?

I’ve been thinking about her a lot. Jane isn’t inherently a villainous character. She was raised to take on a position of power so it’s not surprising she seek that out in adulthood. But more the that, I think about how she was born in a time when certain things were expected of women. And how she may have internalized the idealism of husband and child due to that. In HS2 it’s clear she doesn’t have any true romantic feeling for Jake. And part of me wonders if she ever really did? Or if her infatuation with Jake English as a person was due to the fact that he was a “attractive boy”. After all, in HS2 she does marry him and they do have a child. Fitting what would have been seen as a perfect family construct in her original timeline. But she openly neglects both in favor of things she actually finds important. I know Gamzee exist. But I still wonder if her performative gender roles and inherent straightness isn’t all one in the same. I.e, BS. 

I’ve always been partial to lesbian Jane. I don’t think ‘gamzee’ is much of an argument against it if you’ve ever been in contact with actual lesbians; there’s women who spend decades of their lives putting work into a straight marriage that doesn’t truly satisfy them beyond the barest needs for companionship, but it is what they’ve been taught to accept and what they believe Everyone Else Feels. The human experience doesn’t work in a tight binary where you automatically know *what* is wrong with you. Sometimes the problem makes you believe it is actually a feature, and that it’s normal, and that you should just muscle through it no matter how shit it feels like. And that’s kind of Jane’s whole thing- Jane has Girlboss disease. 

Like, “yeah, this all sucks, and it makes me feel like garbage, but I have Numbers, and i have Prizes, and I have Accomplishments, and I am a Strong Independent Woman, and that’s what everyone tells me SHOULD make me happy, so I guess this is what happiness feels like.” And she just doesn’t know when to stop. She’ll dig her own grave with a golden shovel if you leave her to it.

I think It’s interesting to note a few things when breaching this subject:

1) Nanna Egbert chose to be a single mom. It’s not that she’s a widow, is that she never pursued marriage. You can make a lot of fail arguments on this one like ‘oh but in the lore nannasprite section we learn that jane and jake had a marriage prophecy or whatever blah blah’ but Beta Jake avoids her for eternity and while Beta Jane found someone to have a son with, she didn’t make it any more than that. Instead, she built a practical jokes and pranks shop and ran it for as long as she was alive, because again, she’s a girlboss. A lot of lipservice about traditionalism on this one and very little actual effort put into fulfilling it.

2) Jane doesn’t actually “love” Jake. She’s infatuated with what he represents, which is a recurring theme in Homestuck. Be it about Terezi and her relationship with Alternian Law, or Dave and his coolguy schtick, or Jake and his flimsy adventure hero persona- characters have “expectations” and these come with a set of rules that must be fulfilled. Sometimes, these self-imposed challenges are more harmful to the character than they’re ever going to beneficial for their growth. It’s effectively like shooting themselves on the foot.

This is actually an ongoing thread during act 6, but not one that I see brought up a lot. Jane projects what she believes are desirable qualities about a man onto Jake, what she’s been taught is the norm and dreamy- but she has negative interest in who he actually is. If anything, Jane finds him tacky, annoying, weird, and unbearably boring. But she thinks she can ‘fix’ him into a model companion if she tries hard enough.

Jane “reinterprets” a lot about Jake as a person to make him more digestible. She does this deliberately, to pad out how little interest he seems to have into the whole thing, and also to depersonalize him enough that she doesn’t have to feel bad about not... actually liking him.

(worthy of note, her “two favorite dames” are married as of catnapped in HS2)

They’re friends, i’m not disputing that, but friendship doesn’t necessarily translate into “compatibility” or “romance”.

“Jake” as a concept in Jane’s glossary is interchangeable with “7th grade 1st place trophy on the national Spelling Bee championship”, and that’s where most of our issues come from. He’s an achievement to be crossed off from a checklist, on the road of becoming an Independent, Successful Businesswoman. At best he’s a status marker, at worst he’s a commodity. Jane didn’t come up with this by herself, though, these ideas are closely linked to HIC’s influence on her life and Jake’s. (It’s not for nothing that Crockertier Jane is the one to be most outspoken about it, or that Epilogues Jane is characterized as a Crockercorp-monster. None of this exists in a vacuum.) These ideals are part of her familial upbringing and corporate brainwashing, the endgoal of them being simulating the Condesce as closely as possible. 

When HIC goes undercover as a Human Woman Of Earth, the figure she picks to represent her is a housewife. The fictional Betty Crocker is the apex of Girlbossery- and how can you be a housewife, in 20′s America, without a husband?

Jane is discouraged from being an “individual” and told what she needs to be is a suitable heiress, and that’s her own tragedy. (She has failed to consider wives can have other wives.)

I have babbled about Jane before, particularly when it comes to her also being trapped by gendered expectations she doesn’t want & being gender-nonconforming (a butch, if you will) here.

[fritillary]

Reading your tags is always a delight and I mean that in the most affectionate and loving way. Yes this has something to do with the Kurloz thing. Yes this may be a subtle plea for you to let me know if your feelings for him even return. Have a wonderful day, I hope you’re doing alright.

JUST FOR YOU... I will reveal all the homestuck characters i’ve had crushes on because my homestuck phase (phase should be in scare quotes because it never *really* left but shhhh). i didn’t know what f/os were at the time but if i did they would have all been f/os

aradia. i drew her face badly on one of my pillow cases in permanent marker and slept cuddling it. i still own the pillow case and cant get it off

dave. i had a two year long WILDLY out of character demonstuck roleplay with a rando that was my main source of comfort during a rough patch at school. i woke up at 6am so i could spend an hour before catching the train roleplaying. i roleplayed from when i got home til i fell asleep, often at my laptop. i am so mad the site died and i didn’t save the logs. they were absolutely abysmal but they would have been so funny & nostalgic to look over

i also lusted for all of the dancestors. all of them. i had no taste and i have no idea why i was sexually fixated on them but i was. i was in the throws of puberty (along with some other stuff that would make this ask significantly less fun) and i just unrepentant LOL. the only romantic flame i held was towards damara, i wanted to hug her and Fix Her. i had a dancestor high school au in which i lowkey self inserted as horuss (idk why him of all people but i made my choice) and i probably still have the notebooks somewhere. you bet your ass i wrote that fanfic during the lunch hour while hiding in the library. i was a very cool 13 year old as you can tell

i considered rereading hs over quarantine but i’m so afraid of what it may awaken within me once again. near the end of my stay in the fandom i became a hardcore vriska stan and if i was to re-enter the fandom with f/o stuff in mind i’d probably make my self insert her moirail. your gamzee posting makes me so nostalgic, you’re such an absolute ray of sunshine and your ship is pure gold. i hope you’re doing well too bro!

[utopianparadoxist]

I just wanted to drop by and say that first of all, I love your theories and analyses. They're so good and I cry daily about them. Secondly I wanted to express my... I guess dissatisfaction with the lack of fan analyses about John and Dave's friendship, in particular from John's POV. They are basically the only proclaimed pair of best friends whose relationship didn't waver during the course of the whole comic, and I just wish people talked more about their influence on each other!

Ok so first of all I have to say that the idea that Dirk and Jake’s relationship seriously wavered on any level but the superficial “are we officially dating” one is, imo, inaccurate. The boys are in love, they love each other and are best friends and this is true across the board for the Alphas.

Thanks a lot for your message though, and I’ve been meaning to say something about John and Dave’s relationship for a while now so sure, I’ve got a bit to say for you. 

predictably as hell this got really long, so meet me under the cut.

But to talk about them, I’m going to have to talk about a different pair of friends who grow up together, first. One underexplored element of Homestuck that I’ve always found interesting is how Classpect seems to reflect, to a degree, how characters take influence from their societies.

I’ve written plenty about Jake and Jane in this regard, but I think John is maybe my favorite example for how nuanced it is.

A great example of what I’m talking about is Equius and Vriska’s contrasting relationships with the Hemospectrum. Namely, Equius, the Void player, values it greatly, while Vriska, a Light player, regards it as a bunch of bullshit. 

What Vriska DOES put value in is how it affects circumstance–how it makes people see Tavros, how it makes people see her, the very real burdens of responsibility and societal expectation it puts on everyone. THAT’S real. THAT matters to her. 

But the ideology itself is a bunch of baloney, and Vriska picks up on that almost instinctually. Now let’s take stock of what the Hemospectrum is in the story.  It is, simultaneously:

1) A source of STRENGTH, at least for Equius. 

2) Inherently irrelevant and unimportant to anything about any of the characters except how it makes society treat them.

3) Explicitly a lie. 

4) Most importantly for our purposes: Entirely physical. 

True to Homestucks’ Gnostic roots, unlike true ideas that the characters reason out over the course of the story, information that is unimportant, irrelevant, and built upon markers of physical identity is inherently coded with Void, as the aspect of all things false, unfortunate, unimportant and untrue. The world of the physical Yaldabaoth creates in Gnosticism is coded not just as the world of lies and physicality, but also as the world of Darkness. Hence the link.

For Homestuck, this means that that sort of information has a source. It can be traced on a timeline, just like any other objects in the story, because information like the Hemospectrum amounts to what is essentially a bad meme. 

For the Hemospectrum, that source is Equius, who first inherits that incredibly unimportant information from his society and then becomes nothing when he succumbs to its influence, allowing Gamzee to kill him. 

Now here’s the kicker: Eventually, Equius (along with Gamzee) becomes the source of the Hemospectrum himself, becoming part of Lord English and so explaining how LE got the idea to impose such a complicated system in the first place. 

In essence, once he becomes part of LE, the hemospectrum itself is Equius’ most lasting legacy on the plot, a time loop to rival Gamzee’s RIDICULOUS proliferation of clown-themed horror across the cosmos. Equius has truly become Void in this regard, a potent undercurrent for Heirs. 

Now let’s talk about Dave finally.

So like while it’s true that John and Dave’s friendship is mostly wholesome as fuck and really sturdy, I’m going to complicate that narrative a bit on both extremes. 

One of the things I’ve always found appealing about Dave is how intensely devoted he is to his friends growing up–which makes sense when you consider how unhappy he says he was in his home life. 

If Dave has a penchant for rapping ad nauseum and talking to his friends even after they leave to humorous extremes early on, well–that has at least something to do with the fact that he’s using them as an escape from his nightmarish childhood.

This devotion is more than just him being very giving and caring–he’s invested in all of the other betas emotionally, and it matters to them how they feel about him. Maybe none moreso than John, even years and lots of chilling out later.

And it plays into Davesprite’s lost sense of self in a big way. When John rejects him in favor of “Real Dave”, Davesprite is genuinely hurt and angry, and John continues to aggravate those feelings of displacement during the 3 year journey on the ship. John’s perception of him MATTERS to Dave.

And a lot of what made Dave’s childhood awful was his internalization of heroism as linked to not just Bro’s weird hypermasculine bullshit, but also explicitly to heterosexuality. 

Dave compares himself unfavorably to John as a hero, and knowing what we know about him now, it’s pretty reasonable to put Dave’s struggles with his attractions to men at the root of it. 

And given how similar Jade and John are and his obvious romantic interest in Jade, I’ve always read him as being just as interested in John–just closeted and repressed about it. 

Which means that all of those gay jokes he and John partook in had an effect on Dave far beyond what they had on John, which I think is really interesting. Also interesting, though, is how John reveals he parsed all of those things growing up:

As jokes. See, John also inherits a lot of his culture’s toxic ideology, like Equius does. But unlike Equius, John doesn’t inherit it as information to value and define himself by. 

Breath is the aspect of detachment and levity, and fittingly, John inherits these toxic masculinity-enforcing cultural memes as a series of jokes! Stuff he says, but doesn’t think about. Stuff not particularly worth “taking seriously”.

So his relationship to masculinity is a lot less fraught and intense–partly because he fits the mold more neatly than Dave, but also partly because he simply didn’t actually believe the stuff he was saying. 

Here, John is a depiction of the straight dude who makes shitty jokes and claims to be “just kidding”, except that John actually IS just kidding, and so he doesn’t really force the issue or focus on it. 

That doesn’t mean that toxic masculinity hasn’t had an effect on him–he still struggles with cultural shifts to a degree. But I like that Homestuck allows for different levels of impact of these cultural memes across individuals. This stuff doesn’t affect everyone equally, and it doesn’t affect everyone quite the same way. 

On top of that, it’s a good example of the fact that even a genuinely good person who doesn’t believe this stuff can have a negative effect on people they care about by transmitting these cultural cues. Because it’s the memes themselves that are toxic.