#I put Aranea there because I actually do like her character

[nekropsii]

ALPHA TROLLS RANKED BY HOW WRONG THE FANDOM AT LARGE IS ABOUT THEM:

This is a personal challenge, based entirely on my own experience and perspective, and also ranked from Most to Least Correct. I was bored, and thought this might be fun.

Putting this under a cut, because it's long as hell.

MEULIN LEIJON

People get her mostly correct, from what I’ve seen… Most of the time, fan content of Meulin is absolutely recognizable as Meulin, but her pride in her deafness + joy of learning new ways to interact with the world through/due to her disability is always removed, and I do not often see people tackle the Toxic Positivity aspect of her character. That seems less like character assassination, though, and more like a combination of people not actually playing through the Openbounds, people not being able to fathom disabled people (especially those who gained a disability later in life rather than being born disabled) being happy, and general fandom distaste for the idea of touching anything uncomfortable, especially when that uncomfortable topic is highly mundane, normalized, and potentially applicable to them or their loved ones. Meulin’s toxic positivity was, of course, commentary on Tumblr’s ecosystem at the time, so… It was much harder to touch back then.

ARANEA SERKET

People tend to get her general, broad strokes personality right, but unfortunately she gets treated pretty roughly for the crime of Being A Serket. People refuse to understand her motivations, and she often gets demonized for what she was doing around/during [S] Game Over, even though that was something she’d gotten pushed to and also was cool as fuck to watch. God forbid a woman do anything.

DAMARA MEGIDO

People are right about the racism, 100%. It is completely despicable, hard to look at, and extremely blatant. She does, however, have character outside of that. No, it isn’t “whore”, it’s more like “angry, dysfunctional abuse victim”, and she’s genuinely a very interesting and tragic character. But, again, people are right about the racism, so she gets to be placed way up here.

MEENAH PEIXES

She is such a chaotic little bastard. I love her. I really do. Please understand that she genuinely does not understand the concept of consequences. This girl didn’t have a Lusus, she didn’t have parents, it was functionally illegal to tell her “No, you can’t do that.” That would fuck up literally anyone’s moral compass. That’s not me hand waving away all the fucked up and bad shit she’s done, we all know what she did, but people tend to forget this aspect of her character and it pains me deeply, because it is a very genuinely interesting concept that I want to see more of. She’s capable of regret, we’ve seen her feel it, I just don’t think foresight is her forte. No one raised her to consider consequences, or help her experience them in a healthy way, because nobody raised her period.

Also, her ass is not butch, she is the girliest girl in the entire comic. She is about hot pink and glitter and kiss marks and unicorns and cute little puns and you will respect that. She is not masculine. Her ass is not masculine nor is she butch. Let her be her hyper-feminine self.

LATULA PYROPE

Please for the love of god there is more to her character than “Gamer Girl” and “Mituna’s Girlfriend”. You are falling for her fucking ruse. Please. Please. Please recognize that her entire character is about internalized misogyny, and being forced to overcompensate for misogyny in gaming circles as a gamer who happens to be a woman. Please. I’m begging.

KURLOZ MAKARA

His character is not that deep, it’s mostly just a string of events he is mysteriously, inexplicably involved with. The Makaras are extremely Function Over Form- their characters practically do not exist, they're mostly just plot devices that exist to push the story along. I'm sorry to Makara fans. You just invented a guy in your mind and decided he was real. He is also not that soft, though, and his relationships with both Meulin AND Mituna are not healthy. Hard to stop people from ascribing cutesy squishy lovey dynamics to random men who happened to have looked at each other once, though. Some people truly haven't graduated from 2012.

HORUSS ZAHHAK

I am begging people to consider that maybe the biggest issue here is not that he is “Bad Otherkin/Therian Representation” and is in fact maybe the fact that Hussie was actually making fun of Systems when he was writing Horuss. Because Horuss is canonically a system. He uses the word system. He uses the word switching. He uses the word host. He literally talks about his Plurality at length in extremely upfront, plain terms. I don’t know how him being “Bad Otherkin Representation” was and still is the main discourse about him. It makes me insane. That is a commentary that truly writes itself. Talk about having your priorities out of wack, honestly...

PORRIM MARYAM

No, she is not a MRA, she’s just a regular feminist who happens to live on a different planet with different politics and social hierarchies from Our Real World Earth’s USA. Whatever argument you’re about to pull out of your ass to say that she sucks is bad. She already explained what she meant by that, in more detail, very clearly, and she was right. Half the time she’s literally just giving you factual information about what Beforus was like, and literal plot synopses. She isn’t saying anything insane. She’s literally normal. I don’t know why people cannot handle or process this. Porrim has not ever said anything controversial. If you disagree with this you’re either misconstruing her on purpose or you fell for Kankri’s bait, and that’s just fucking sad at that point.

Also, she’s more than a sex object, and her tits are not huge. Honestly, half the shit she was saying was just “I am more than my sex life”, and so many people took that and made her main character trait her sex life. Just pathetic.

RUFIOH NITRAM

This man is a fucking war criminal and I will stop at nothing until he is behind bars for his crimes against Damara. Raging misogynist. Total fucking cunt. Just the worst. If I talk any more about this, this part will be 1,000 paragraphs long. But also, I’m begging people to recognize his relationship with disability, too. He was similar to Meulin in the sense that he didn’t mind his disability, and his biggest gripe with it was the way that Horuss tried to “fix” it… Which is an interesting way to expand upon how Beforus’s culling system is not only very explicitly ableist, but mimicking real world systemic ableism. I also want people to recognize that Hussie is actively having a conversation about the reclamation of slurs with Rufioh’s character, and how not letting people reclaim such language is doing nothing but giving the word power against them while stripping away their own personal agency. Rufioh’s a complicated guy, and he’s interesting and also the worst, and I am really tired of how he gets watered down to nothing but “Pretty Boy Victim Of His Inexplicably Psycho Ex”.

MITUNA CAPTOR

Holy Fucking Shit, You Guys Are Ableist.

KANKRI VANTAS

To this day I see people saying he was just Hussie making fun of SJWs. To this day. To this day people think Hussie was trying to make Every Tumblr Leftist look bad, and that he hates them Because They Are Leftists. When will people recognize him as a bootlicker to the oppressive class and the violently bigoted. When will people recognize that. When will people recognize that this is more of a commentary on the legitimate real flaws of Tumblr’s politics at the time. When. When.

When will people stop portraying him as a lovey-dovey Catholic Whore. I’m going to stab my fucking eyes out and then kill everyone in this building. Me when it's based and cool to ship an aroace character with a sexual predator. I GUESS.

CRONUS AMPORA

I say this with every ounce of sincerity I can possibly muster as a person: What the literal actual fuck.

[zan0tix]

Pleaseeee tell me more about that homescryption au

A little something between you and me and everyone else who happens to look at this post. Im working on a lineup for the four scrybes :D

Roxys design is subject to change and you guys have already seen D1rk. Jane and Jake are in progress!!! (Also D1rk and Harley are the names for dirk and jake but weve been struggling to come up with appropriately fantasical/magical names for Jane and Roxy that align with magnificus and grimora😞 Harley feels old-manish enough that it fits in well… im sure well get there but if anybody has ideas feel free to comment ✌️)

But yes i can tell you more!!! ILL PUT IT ALL UNDER THE CUT THIS POST IS GOING TO BE LONG o7

Working with cyrus repliiku to flesh it out x3 he was the one who got me into the game and im CRAZY NOW!!!!

The four alpha scrybes methods of inscribing cards are that Harley uses his magic blunderbuss and the things he shoots become cards, Roxys cards are the fantasical characters she creates in her stories, Jane will be a detective of death, uncovering how cards die and writing up a casefile in her detective agency about them (might give her a magic magnifying glass. Well see), and D1rk were trying to figure out something with Sburbs captcha card + ghost captcha system like how Po3’s cards are printed from real robots

The students/the scrybes underlings are going to be other homestuck characters or splinters!

D1rks will be the robots (aradiabot, arquius (wanted him to me more unique than just brobot + hal so he gets to be a robot) and jadebot.

Harleys will be jake-ish splinters rather than new characters. Thered be the Adventurer (prospector), the Hunter (trapper/trader), the Sailor (angler), the Ectobiologist (mycologists), and the Actor (woodcarver) and his campaigns would be more Action packed like jakes action movies type stuff hehe

Janes will be the dead trolls, nepeta, equius and feferi. Not much to say besides them being dead lol 😭

And roxys were still figuring out but nerm. Viceroy/Casey, Rose (maybe goobert but they are actually nice and kind to her) and Eridan….(lonely wizard he was banished to the shadow realm for being annoying 😁👍)

Luke Carter is going to be Calliope and Satan in the greater scheme of the daniel mullins-verse will be Caliborn/Lord English because i think itd be very funny for him to just. Be making video games and thats his evil plot. LOL and Sado would be Gamzee. (Will not expand to pony island or the hex this is just clearing up the ending of inscryption)

Kaycee would probably be Aranea but like just some normal girl. Not all that sure abt the OLD_DATA tho ??? Maybe just all the wrong doings Lord English has committed and influenced culminated into the files or the code that brought him into the universe I DUNNO.

Retconning the drawing i did when i first scribbled this AU, i believe when harley turns the other scrybes into preexisting cards d1rk would become a seagull (kingfisher replacement) roxy would become a jaguar (wolf replacement) and jane would become a jackalope (pronghorn replacement) 😁

And the way harley would be defeated would be using his blunderbuss on him with a special bullet instead of film. Po3’s decapitation fulfilled the Dirk prophecy too LOL

I think that of the gameplay/card gimmicks themselves would work basically the same but i might try and come up with more creative homestucky twists on them

Im planning on finishing the designs and making sprites and more mockup screenshots :3

I might write up or draw a comprehensive ref sheet for this au someday but for now heres what weve jotted down 👍

[nemo-in-wonderland]

Today I kinda decided to start another BG3 playthrough, and do to a re-do with Aranea, and when the moment of creating the Dream Guardian (Halim, once again), I had to stop myself, because I actually realized that I never drew Halim properly, and I had to.

I had to draw the man for whom Aranea would sell her soul to avenge him, even centuries after his demise.

I had to draw the man that made her heart rush with blood and life, the man for whom she she would burn an entire city down.

He is such an important character in Aranea's life and story that I had to properly give him a face (while I adore the CC one from BG3, you know me. I need to put my own personal touch lolol).

So, I went into a deep dive today and just quickly design both him and Aranea (though here she is still Halim's Zil) during their Zakharan Nights. While for Aranea I went for a mix of Ancient Egyptian and Fantasy, for Halim I went straight to Old Babylonia and Assiria. I like to imagine that, while Zakhara is directly inspired by the Middle East, all the different regions within the Lands of Fate have specific regional garments that are inspired by our IRL counterpart of the Ancient Civilizations.

But, ohmy poor heart. It was like in a wrench while I drew Aranea so young and hopeful and innocent, devoid of any sufference, with her beloved husband still by her side...before everything went south.

I don't think she ever smiled so serenely and so happily after losing Halim. She had a good time in Cania with Mephistopheles, but her whole persona is always almost surrounded by melancholy.

And I have to say, I love Halim as I created him.

He is a kind man, level-headed, soft, kind but just. A man of exceptional intelligence and eloquence, with unweavering moral strength, a Sha'ir whose word would always be heeded, and the most loving of husbands to Aranea.

The satin shawls that Aranea is donning in this artwork is actually an enchanted artefact that Halim has imbued with powerful Nocturnal Magic that allows Aranea to walk outside during the scorching heat of the Zakharan sun (despite her having lived in Zakhara all her life up until that point, Aranea is still very much a Drow).

Also, do not let the differene of height in the artwork fool you. Aranea is still very much 183 cm tall here; It's just that Halim is 210 cm tall, since he has Desert Giant blood in his vein, and that render him much taller than a normal human. Let's just say he towers over everyone, whenever he walks around Huzuz.

Well, I hope you will like this!

--Nemo

[nemo-of-house-hamartia]

I have to be honest, and this post is going to be without my buffoonery or tomfoolery.

I am entertaining the idea of getting back into writing a bit more, because my eyes really can use a bit of rest from the long hours I spend artworking.

But , and I am not exaggerating when I tell you this, the idea literally make me paralyzed with anxiety.

Yesterday night I managed to write those 400+ words for the artwork because I felt like "the main protagonist of the post is going to be the drawing anyway, so even if I fumble, it's going to be ok".

Also, while I am just a hobbyist, I am still a seasoned artist that has been working on her skill for more than 23 years. So, in a way, I feel, if not entirely confident in my skills, at the very least competent enough to know that I can create something pleasant to look at; but even then, I have always my anxiety hanging on my back like a freaking monke that has nothing better to do but bother me.

But with writing, I just become paralyzed with what I assume is fear.

Of what, I am still figuring out.

Because I feel this specific fear and block when it comes to writing an original character with a canon character (specifically, this was caused by my resurgence for Ardyn and Luscinia).

For example, when I was brainstorming for Aranea, even if my knowledge of the setting was limited to BG3 and before I started to actually deep dive into Forgotten Realms, I felt I was going like a breeze, with no fear, no uncertitude, just the brain never stopping talking and branching out by itself (which made my work immensely easier to be honest).

With Luscinia and Ardyn (but it can be even extended to Jacob and Dorothea, if one wants to talk about OC/Canon pairing), the same doesn't happen.

There is a block, a literal wall of nothingness that prevents me from writing and entertaining myself, despite all my willingness and WANT to just dive right into it, and allowing myself to have fun, and it's HORRIBLE. It feels like a freaking bubble in my chest that doesn't leave enough space for my lungs to breathe.

And while yesterday I was too tired to actually do some self-analyses of what the reason might be, this morning, after a good dose of coffee, I think I found one possible reason.

With canon characters there are limits that sometimes cannot be crossed, lest one goes OOC with them.

They are pre-made characters, with set personalities that one must respect in order to write them, and that, I found, put a crapton of pressure over me that only fan and fuel my anxiety, and this without even considering the high standards that I set for myself EACH and EVERY time.

Also, take in consideration that when it comes to creating and imagining, the only limits I like are the one I set for myself, not the one set by others (as it had happened with Dottie and Jacob, something that has partially ruined the fun I had with them), and that do WONDERS (*sarcasm*) for my ADHD.

On top of that, add the fact that if I see someone else with even a remotely similar idea as mine, I have the tendency of not pursuing it anymore because then my inner saboteur starts doing numbers.

Sometimes I am extremely good at ignoring the voices and doubt in my head that just mock me and ridicule me and fuel my anxiety, but sometimes they are just there to stay, like unpleasant roommates that cannot keep the kitchen clean and party at all times of the night😂

All this to say that I am basically a ball of anxiety in my little corner, rocking back and forth until this too shall pass, because I want to pick up the pen again for Ardyn and Luscinia, and I am utterly terrified by the idea.

But I so want to get back on track and write. I miss that so much.

[yanderes-galore]

Hey, I wasn't able to request a thing, may I request some hcs for yandere aranea with a human darling on the meteor?

Sure! I'm not going to mention 'GAME OVER' in this so this will just be her during the Dream Bubbles. I'm rusty with her so I hope I got her character right :( (I tried, I'm sorry-)

If anyone has tips on how to write her I'd love to hear them!

Yandere! Aranea Serket with Human! Darling

Pairing: Matesprit ❤️

Possible Trigger Warnings: Gender-Neutral Darling, Obsession, Manipulation, Mind control mention, Stalking, Thoughts of murder/Attempted murder, Violence, Jealousy, Possessive behavior, Forced relationship/Matespritship.

Aranea truly means well in her actions.

She's a Light player which leads her into long winded rants about information before eventually talking about herself.

She doesn't even mean to rant at times and many of her group aren't on the best of terms with her.

Meenah has been the closest troll she could call a friend.

Aranea serves as a guide like most Light players.

She's described to be a "nicer Vriska" by Terezi.

However she has shown she's more powerful in psychic abilities than Vriska.

Both Serkets have also been able to obtain God-Tier.

Aranea has potential to be dangerous yet she's very gentle, nice, and considerate.

Issues start to arise when she gives up morals to obtain her goals.

Aranea actually wouldn't be too bad if her darling was a human.

Despite her strength I don't believe she can use her mind control powers to control humans from what I remember.

She can control trolls but can only put humans to sleep.

She can still use this to her advantage.

You most likely met Aranea first in your dreams.

You're a human who has achieved God Tier similarly to your friends.

Which has allowed you to reside on the meteor with the surviving trolls.

When you could get rest you recall seeing Aranea.

When she speaks to you she's rather calm and nice.

As you speak with her through Dreams/Dream Bubbles she appears as a friend to you.

Honestly, Aranea most likely knows you longer than you do her.

A lot longer, actually.

Maybe she's yearned to befriend you for awhile now? Or maybe she's even felt a bit flushed for this human?

Either way, Aranea feels happy to speak and ramble to you while you visit the Bubbles.

Although her obsession doesn't entirely start until the meteor itself passes through the Dream Bubbles.

This way you can't blip out when you wake up as you're already awake.

Aranea finds it a shame she's contained to these Dream Bubbles and can't follow you around on your journey most of the time.

Aranea feels connected to you because you actually bother to listen to her lore dumping.

This may be because you're used to Rose and Kanaya explaining certain info to you.

Although you do make it known if she begins rambling too off topic.

Aranea is at least happy you look to her for info.

She wants to help you and the others take on Lord English.

That and she really does wonder if she feels some sort of attraction to you.

She's aware that Jake, another human, has flushed feelings for her.

Yet she isn't really interested in him in that way (other than manipulation potential).

She would rather try such a thing with you.

The biggest glaring issue is the fact she's dead and you aren't.

It's a thought that nags at her while she speaks with you.

Aranea's red flags are well hidden.

She never tells you more than she wants to let on.

She simply tries to play the role of "Dream Bubble Guide" and friend to you as you roam the confusing Dream Bubbles.

Yet what you don't know is she's stalking you... carefully seeing how to manipulate your friends into her goals and have you as her red love.

Aranea acts very curious about you.

She may already know a lot about you yet she loves to hear you talk about human culture.

Plus, if she wants you as her Matesprit, she needs to know how to treat you.

While she mostly acts as a guide for you to follow, she's also protective.

Aranea can heal as a Sylph, so she'll be sure you're always in a healthy condition.

Aranea may be irritated when you speak to others as I imagine she'd be jealous.

She doesn't want others being so close to you as she doesn't have many to talk to anyways.

Meenah most likely teases Aranea about her red love towards you.

Meanwhile Aranea is defensive because you're a human she has a crush on.

In terms of how she could keep you all to herself, I thought of three ways.

One is after her resurrection as she feels she can finally be with you since you'd both be alive.

Another is her putting you to sleep and dragging you deeper into the bubbles with her, since she can't mind control you.

Then there's the significantly darker one of... having you killed.

You can't leave her if you're a ghost!

Aranea is a yandere who doesn't show she is on until it's too late.

Although the fact you're God Tier makes it harder.

She seems like her love language would be ranting about her obsession.

She tells you thoughts and ideas she's had in long winded rants once she has you.

Meenah would actually be surprised Aranea had it in her to take what she wants, let alone a human Matesprit.

Perhaps she's rubbed off on her...

Or maybe Aranea was always secretly like this.

By the time you realize Aranea is bad news, she's already caught you in her web.

She tries to tell you she wasn't manipulating you!

She's just been... so lonely out here.

You'll get used to her, she's sure of it!

Just relax... and she'll find a way to be happy with you, even if you're a living human and she's a dead troll.

Just... don't think about leaving her.

She may need to put you to sleep again if you try to fight the plans she has in store for you and your friends.

[the-elder-polls]

Ok, so Esper Ironhand started out as the character I did actually get to play for a while in the same messy dnd campaign as the Healer who became Leitav. Esper was originally a Cisco woman, before sliding into gender ambiguity, and I gave that poor gal the saddest backstory like it was a competition (it kinda was, we were all seeing who could make the dm cry)

In Skyrim, Esper keeps a good bit of that backstory in that the story begins in a literal underground forced fighting ring at a very young age, with no memory of life before the Pit. Esper was adopted by a slightly older Argonian kid, who did her best to at least keep Esper alive and fighting, and in the end Esper did the same for a Khajiit kid a little younger.

The fighters in the Pits were all the so-called beast races, at least according to the Racial Philiogeny and The Pig Children crowd, Khajiit and Argonians and Orcs (maybe like a Lamia or two? Goblins?)

The three were nearly full grown (Esper was over six foot) when they became eligible to be put in the tournament for Champion, which supposedly leads to freedom (they take you out of the Pits anyway, though what it actually leads to, even I don't know). Esper was put up against the Khajiit, Stoneclaw, and tried to pull punches and let him win, even though it was a fight to the death. The consequences of holding back like you are a real person who gets to make actual choices were...bad. Stoneclaw died, and Esper nearly did. So after recovering and getting put back in, Esper didn't hesitate again when put against the Argonian of the trio, Hope-in-Darkness. Hope may have, but she was always a little more dexterous and sneaky, so it didn't show.

And after that, after Esper became Champion, but Champion alone, there was no point to going free by the Master's way, so Esper waited until it was almost over and broke his neck, then ran for the river running through the caverns that they used to dispose of bodies. It turned out to lead to freedom rather than back to Stoneclaw and Hope, so Esper became a wandering sellsword, but without the sword part, refusing to use any weapons after having been chained to a blade for so long.

If you know the story Inigo tells about how he betrayed and tried to murder his partner while addicted to skooma? Yeah that was actually Esper, who fled the scene before he could come back, and wound up taking a ship all the way to Dawnstar and wandering the snowfields still kid of out of it from the head injury until being attacked by bandits and left for dead (Alternate Start Live Another Life mod). Since it put me at Alftand for that, I made my way up to the Shrine of Azura where Aranea helped me and called me Champion(?!), and so the adventure begins.

Esper had to head to Winterhold and then Solitude on foot, and taking the dock gate into Solitude on a day when it was sleeting lead to finding Sofie actually frozen to the pavement and instantly becoming a parent, even if finding an actual house took longer. Then a carriage ride to Whiterun (and finding a hideout on the city outskirts because I have the Dragons Den house mod) brought Lucia into the family too, and then taking another carriage down to Falkreath to strike out north for Illinata's Deep (must pay back the debt to Aranea, daedra prince nonsense or no) lead to Gore, and the family begins to take shape.

Esper is an absolute unit of an Orc, and I have had unnecessary amounts of fun playing with size tweaks and comparison shots

Lore for your enjoyment, anyway

i am doing this to esper

[davekat-sucks]

I actually liked Marvus as a character but his route sucked. Why would they approve this? It's embarrassing. Hussie did it all the time in Homestuck, inserting his fetishes, an example was the multiple times he made a girl force herself onto someone else. It ruined characters, particularly with drunk Rose and Aranea, Jane was being mind controlled to harass Jake, and trickster Roxy forcefully made out with Dirk. Vriska and Snowman also come to mind. It happened so often, god damn dude could you make your femdom thing anymore obvious? Can the writers pleeeeaase learn to keep their fetishes somewhere else? Pleeeasee?? It interferes with the story in the worst ways.

If it's to highlight or show how bad certain actions can go too far, most of the fandom didn't pick up on or it gets interpret it as something else. Like whatever Vriska does is seen as girlboss. Her horrible actions would be fine if we keep in mind she is a troll that's an alien race that has them do awful things 24/7, but if apply for human standards, it would be frowned upon. Next would be ones people forget because either it has been a long time since anybody (re)reads the series or nobody thought too deep about it. Like how Mindfang basically waited 100+ for The Summoner to hatch and grow up before she could fuck him. Since ceruleanbloods live long, the age gap between them would be larger than 99 years. Same Mindfang forced the Dolorosa to make out with her and refers to her as a slave.

Then there's ones who victim blame people like Jade who got mind controlled by the Condesce. They accuse Jade of being the bitch and acting rude towards Dave. They forget the bigger bad that's doing the mind control. People see Roxhy's drinking habits as a quirk since Mom Lalonde also drinks, but they forget the reason Mom Lalonde was alcoholic was because she knew the world was going to end and was using drinks to drown her sorrows. Roxy does the same to hide her loneliness and desperation for love. Her desperation also gets a pass because she is a girl. If it was someone like Eridan, they will hate him. I don't mind too much for questionable stuff like this get put into it. But the last thing I wanna hear is fandom acting like puritans to say these same heavy topics can't be said in other mediums despite said subjects are also shown in the things they love. They bitch if mind control happens in anime, but gives Vriska a pass? Hypocrites and double standards is what they all are.

[morihaus]

Aranea...

My first impression

I don't think I knew Aranea existed before I played Skyrim in like 2020 or 2021 or something, whenever I started being active on this blog. Given the fact I was kinda using the playthrough to develop Vivynne I'm sure my first response was LOL of course my Dunmeri immigrant bumbles her way into some stupid quest like this almost immediately after arriving in Skyrim, ON THE WAY to the College of Winterhold (my actual goal.) But oh well if a woman tells me to do something what am I to do but go on this stupid sidequest...

My impression now

Once I'd settled on continuing the tried and true tradition of pairing TES protags with random insignificant unromanceable NPCs, I began to put a LOT more thought into Aranea and her life. How kind of fucked it is to consider on a timeline, how she's two centuries old living on a frozen mountain top and virtually abandoned by her goddess as soon as she fulfills her purpose. it's really fucked up and I realized that Viv would think it's fucked up and there'd be interesting ideas to explore there... Aranea is an incredibly steadfast and faithful person to hold out for so long up there, and it's definitely tragic the extent to which she seems disposable in the grander scheme of Azura's prophecy. But then she doesn't really view it as tragic because she repaid Azura for her mercy in leading her followers away from the Red Year, played an important role in the retrieval of her artifact, and when all was said and done she found her Champion to be charming company. She very much has faith that Azura planned everything that was going to happen to her and knew just what she was doing. It might seem fucked up from one lens but she has her own thoughts about it... like i said interesting to write about

Favorite thing about that character

Um the thing I just described, her EXTREME belief in fate and all things coming to their proper conclusion in the end. I wrote a really really good piece for Tesfest22 (i think it was that year) where Aranea lays out her life as she views it and gives her side of the story on why she still venerates Azura even as she's been "abandoned"... she's very sentimental, i think this manifests in her relationship to dunmer communities in Skyrim as well, she and the other priests who used to live up there were like a lifeline for them, especially in Winterhold before the collapse.

Least favorite thing

Is there really enough about her to have a least favorite thing?? i guess it's too bad she can't be like, brought away from the horrid frigid mountaintop shrine after the end of the quest. you can have her as a companion but it's not like you can say "quit your job. move in with me"

Favorite line/scene

The ones at the end of the questline and after it are so :( "While you were in the Star, Azura gave me a vision. Her last, she said. I have never been without Azura's foresight since escaping Morrowind. I don't know what to do" "She said my part was over. That my fate had moved beyond the Twilight, and I was on my own. I will tend Azura's shrine when you do not need me. I still have my duties, but for the first time I feel… alone."

Favorite interaction that character has with another

In my beautiful world Viv takes her to the College of Winterhold and Savos chokes on a loaf of bread when he sees her because she knew him as a child growing up in pre-collapse Winterhold. I just think it would be funny to see your student walking around with like, a childhood mentor of yours

A character that I wish that character would interact with more

I'm just going to take this opportunity to say I once read a fic where she traveled all the way to Windhelm to provide religious services to the gray quarter there and that was so sweet and I definitely believe in this

Favorite picture

The other questions I had nothing for so here is a mod that changes Aranea to give her a more distinct appearance... I love the scarification sooo much this is just how she looks to me now (i prefer the version without all the ENB shader whozits on because they lighten her skin so much)

[nekropsii]

…I swear to God, why have like half the Beforan players tried to bone someone significantly younger than them??? Probably because the author’s a creep who got a kick out of it, but still, between what was just discussed with Rufioh, Aranea trying to hit on Jake, Cronus trying to bone his dancestor (jesus fuck) and Meenah dating a physically 13-year-old Vriska… that’s a THIRD of the dancestors? And those are just the four I’m aware of, I would be very disappointed but not at all surprised if there was a fifth.

Honestly, adults having inappropriate relationships with children is just a heavily recurring theme in Homestuck... It's not really all that surprising when you take a step back. Doc Scratch, Hussie's own self insert, Bro Strider... They're all much older than the Alpha Trolls are, and are creepy towards the Betas in some way.

Further discussion going under the cut.

Content Warning: Discussion of Sexual Assault, Harassment, and Pedophilia.

... Man, I'm having to write about this topic a lot lately, aren't I? This isn't even close to the only ask left in my inbox about something adjacent to this. It's kind of... Flattering, in the weirdest way possible? I don't know, I'm often approached for my opinions on some of the much more serious and dark aspects of Homestuck. Things that people don't really know, or talk about, or address- like the racism issues, Dave's CSA, et cetera. It's not really prestigious, I don't think, but it does require a level of trust in maturity and literacy. I appreciate it.

Anyways, this is mostly going to be me adding to and even debunking your ask here. I think this subject both deserves and requires specificity. It's an extremely emotionally charged topic, so peoples imaginations tend to get a little... Carried away, when they don't know the full extent to what's happening. Considering how it's not easy to term search things said by most of the Alpha Trolls, and some people really just do not want to/cannot interact with things relating to Child Harm and Abuse... There's bound to be both a lack of information and an excess of misinformation. It's understandable, but... Deeply annoying for me in particular. Lol.

Let's do this.

---

The inclusion of Rufioh in this is both correct and based on some of my own posting on the matter. Rufioh was hitting on Aradiabot, who is 13, because she reminded him of Damara... Specifically remarking upon how she's "just like the real thing". Charming...

Here's where I'm going to supply a debunk: Aranea did not try to hit on Jake, and he is not significantly younger than her. That's a pretty ugly misconception. She's 19, and he is 16. She had zero romantic or sexual feelings towards Jake. Yes, she tried to kiss him once... Because she knew that he was attracted to her and assumed he'd appreciate her making a move on him. This was part of her little scheme to make him Hope-splode. She never did actually kiss him, and there was genuinely no consent violations involved in the situation- he told her to stop before she could, and she did. It was just a misunderstanding. It happens. If you're still put off by that age gap, that's fair and entirely respectable, but that's not "significantly younger", and the situation wasn't really objectively creepy.

... Cronus is... Fucking gross. His whole gimmick is that he is "The Worst Character in Homestuck", and boy does he succeed at it. He won that title. Earned it. Absolutely flying colors. He tried to "get with" Karkat, Tavros, and Eridan. By which I mean he stalked Karkat all the way to his house and then tried to break into it, got really handsy with Tavros in the middle of a crowd, and... Sexually assaulted Eridan- his own flesh and blood!- also in the middle of a crowd. All of these kids are 13 years old, and his main character trait is "Sexual Assault + Harassment". No one's free. Not even literal children! Cronus counts as a full-blown Pedophile, by the way!! There's your fun fact for the day.

Then there's Meenah, who had her whole thing with (Vriska), who was 13. Not just physically, but mentally, too. She was just 13. That was a whole arc, so it doesn't really need much elaborating upon, I hope.

---

That's... Just about it, I think? That's all I remember, anyway, as far as the Alpha Troll Age Gap Weirdness goes. So... Only 3 of them are really problems in that respect, which is 1/4th of the cast. Still an upsetting amount, but not... As bad as 1/3rd, as far as optics goes.

In full honesty, it's kind of funny to me how the Alpha Trolls who have overtly sexual theming are... Pretty normal about kids. Damara's nice to them and nobody else, we've got zero reason to suspect Mituna of anything, and Porrim's just chilling. It's accurate, if anything.

Hopefully this has been fun and/or informative. Have a lovely day.

[pandoratheprocrasticreator]

Homestuck Poll Round 1 Results:

Beta Kids: 226 votes

Dave Strider: 31% - Winner

Jade Harley: 27%

Rose Lalonde: 22%

John Egbert: 20%

Lowblood Trolls: 275 votes

Aradia Megido: 41% - Winner

Karkat Vantas: 30%

Sollux Captor: 15%

Tavros Nitram: 14%

Midblood Trolls: 356 votes

Nepeta Leijon: 31% - Winner

Terezi Pyrope: 28%

Kanaya Maryam: 23%

Vriska Serket: 18%

Highblood Trolls: 314 votes

Feferi Peixes: 40% - Winner

Gamzee Makara: 24%

Eridan Ampora: 22%

Equius Zahhak: 14%

Alpha Kids: 655 votes

Roxy Lalonde: 51% - Winner

Dirk Strider: 28%

Jake English: 13%

Jane Crocker: 8%

Miscellaneous Characters Pt. 1: 171 votes

Calliope: 42% - Winner

Meenah Peixes: 24%

Caliborn: 23%

Aranea Serket: 11%

Miscellaneous Characters Pt. 2: 164 votes

Davesprite/Davepetasprite: 46% - Winner

Mayor (WV): 30%

Dad Egbert/Dad Crocker: 30%

Doc Scratch: 9%

Cursed Characters: 35 votes (I forgot to tag this one)

Lil Cal: 37% - Winner

Sweet Bro: 26%

Hella Jeff: 20%

Andrew Hussie: 17%

Villains: 164 votes

Spades Slick: 45% - Winner

The Condesce: 25%

Bec Noir: 24%

Lord English: 6%

Comments:

The kids and trolls got a lot more votes than the miscellaneous characters. That makes sense. We spend more time with all the kids and a lot of the trolls compared to the miscellaneous ones so I guess more people searched up their name in the Tumblr tags

That being said a sample size of only a few hundred is WAY too small. Especially for a fandom as big as Homestuck. I'll go off of this in the next poll ofc but to get a good idea of who the fandom ACTUALLY likes I need like at least a few thousand votes. Maybe more idk how big the Homestuck fandom is now. I know @abraxas-calibrator is planning to make a comprehensive poll with every single character in HS someday and they a) have more followers than me probably so more people will see the poll, b) is more of a "Homestuck blog" than me so more people will know what they're talking about, and c) will probably organize this poll better than I did so. Check out their poll when they do it I guess.

The alpha kids got a LOT of votes. From the tags it seems people have been trying to get their followers to vote for Jane and Jake who were less popular. Didn't work, as you can tell. I love Jane but I don't think her reputation in the fandom ever recovered after HS2 unfortunately. Also I guess ppl just didn't pay attention to her before HS2 either.

The midbloods had a lot of people voting and a relatively close race between Nepeta and Terezi. In the tags of the poll I said Terezi was my favorite but I didn't expect her to win. I expected Vriska to win. Vriska made waves a few days ago bc ppl were APPALLED that she was having such a tough race against Katya Goncharov. Can't believe she's one of THE Tumblr Sexywomen but she came in last in a poll against characters from her own comic. I mean I voted for Katya in that poll bc Vriska sucks (affectionate) but still. She deserved to win that one and I'm surprised she didn't win this one.

That being said for both the midblood and the highblood polls I get the feeling that people assumed that more Tumblr Sexyman characters like Vriska and Gamzee would get all the votes so they voted for the least controversial characters to compensate? Like I have no doubt in my mind that people ACTUALLY like Aradia and liked her enough to beat out Karkat. But. Do people actually like Nepeta and Feferi more. Actually maybe they do. Maybe I'm just cynical. I like characters that are a little problematic bc they're more interesting that way. I guess a lot of people don't see it that way and like the characters that they would genuinely want to be friends with. That's valid tbh.

Some of these brackets weren't well done tbh. The midblood bracket had all popular characters and there were several miscellaneous brackets with characters that aren't most people's favorites. But because I put them together in one poll it forced people to choose their favorite out of the selection. The winners of different polls will be going into the next round but it doesn't really reflect the actual popularity in the fandom. Maybe doing them in batches of 2 would have been better than 4. Ah well. I'll do that for the Tumblr Sexywoman poll I'll eventually put on. I don't have the energy to do all that for this one. Same with the Danganronpa one I want to do later they're still going into batches of 4.

Roxy is literally the only character who won the majority vote. And that's only by 1%. The other polls all have votes split more evenly 3- or 4- ways between the characters. Again, I wonder if any characters would have come out on top if I did a 1v1 poll for them?

Yall really like girls. 5/9 winners of the polls are girls, and 4/5 of the kids/trolls polls had girls win. And for a bunch of the polls where a girl didn't win a girl was the runner-up if there was one in the group. In conclusion wamen I guess.

I have homework so round 2 of polls will be up tomorrow. There are 9 winners in round 1 so for round 2 I'll put them in batches of 3. And the final round will also be in batches of 3. I tried to make 8 batches last time bc it was the Vriska number but also bc then I could do 1v1s but I thought of more characters in the last second. Ah well, I'll refine my methodology for other polls. Peace.

Pandora

[nemo-in-wonderland]

I find absolutely hilarious that Aranea looked *exactly* like her BG3 version in a period of time that preceeded the events of the game by more than 200 years.

I know it always seems that I put great emphasis on the appearance of my characters in general (and Aranea in particular), but having a real clear idea of how she looked like in a certain period of time truly helps me visualize her growth.

Like, in the artwork that I shared yesterday, she looks *exactly* like the base Warlock Tav in the Character Creation section of the game, because in my brain, between 1269 DR and 1295 DR, Aranea was precisely that: a Warlock under pact with Mephistopheles, with no emotional connection to him (Mephisto was already playing his game, but Aranea was not having it. Yet.) while doing his bidding around Faerûn.

Even the hairstyle reflect that: Aranea is still in mourning, despite having taken her heart out already, and she is still keeping her hair short to reflect that. She would not start to grow her hair out until Mephisto actually shared half his heart with her (as I mentioned in a previous ask reply), because only at that point she would truly start to feel feelings again, and only at that point she actually starts somewhat to heal (with huge emphasis on the "somewhat". She still would never let go of her grief, and instead of trying to process ALL that happened to her in an healthy way - what Halsin tried to help her with, invain I'd say- she fed into that grief until it consumed all that Zil was and until only Aranea remained).

All this to say that, if you see me working a lot on Aranea's appearance, it's because I am working through all the different stages of her life 😅😅

Anyway, enough of my early morning blabbering, I got a cup of coffee to get now!

--Nemo

[greatwyrmgold]

There's a lot of interesting analysis in this post and the reblogs, but I kinda got stuck on one detail. Fitting Mother of Learning into the same mold as progression fantasies and HPMoR. (Which I think is an awkward mold, but that's a less important artument.)

I won't say that comparison is unwarranted. Zorian is focused on improving his abilities in the time loop, and I literally used MoL as one of my rational fic archetypes in that post where I articulated a definition of the genre. But reducing the story to just those elements is like reducing Lord of the Rings to a road trip to make a bad man go away. It's not strictly wrong, but it kinda misses the point. Two points, actually.

The first point is, in my opinion, the central theme of Mother of Learning, the thing that binds everything together: Zorian learning to trust other people.

Yeah, he does magic practice, but that's not where most of his power comes from, and certainly not how he accomplishes the tasks needed to get out of the time loop. He does that by meeting new people, asking them for help, trusting them.

The annoying girl he used to have a crush on, the extroverted rich kid in his class, his aggravating mentor, the crazy witch in the woods, the psychic spiders living under the city, the neighbor family, the ancient lich, even his frustrating older brother.

And for the most part, it's not as transactional as that sounds. (The lich and witch are, but they're exceptions.) To pick an extreme example: Zorian deciding to take his sister to Cyoria one loop was done entirely because he pitied her situation and wanted to do something nice for her. That set a series of events in motion which coincidentally lead to him living next to one of the victims of the villains' plot, which let him figure out what they were planning.

This is significant, because Zorian at the start of the story is a distrustful, lonely prick. He only has one or two friends, and he considers both of them nuisances as much as anything. He resents all of his siblings—the oldest brother who his parents can't stop comparing him to, the other brother who keeps trying to mooch off Zorian's hard work and effort, the little sister who is a little sister. This is a problem, both in that it's an unhealthy headspace to be in, and that it's physically dangerous due to the narrative constructed around Zorian and his flaw. Fuck, in the original version of the timeline, Zorian dies because he stayed in his dormitory instead of going to a party! (...it makes sense in context.)

And that's not the only overt nod to this central theme. Zorian's biggest asset—more than his experience, or the mana pool he develops, or the golems and such he constructs—is his mind magic. In its final form it's telepathy and mind control, but its initial form is heightened empathy. His talent for it is literally called empathy. (By most human characters, anyways; the aranea have their own terminology, which Zorian adopts.)

And Zorian is initially reluctant to embrace this power, because he sees empathy (the magical kind) as a soft, girly kind of magic, which has obvious parallels to how the kind of lonely dude Zorian is often thinks of positive social relationships. It's also worth pointing out that Zorian's discomfort with social situations is due in part to his untrained empathy; that's arguably the biggest barrier between him and other people, and it boils down to a combination of social pressure against weird magic (generational trauma on his mother's side, I don't have time to get into it) and Zorian's reluctance to be the kind of person who relies on his connections with other people.

It is not a subtle theme, or a subtle character arc. I don't know how anyone could miss it, unless they got so hung up on the "progression fantasy" tree that they missed the whole rest of the forest.

...oh yeah. The second point is worldbuilding. A lot of the basic mechanics of the world are pretty generic, but nobody103 put a lot of thought into other aspects of the setting, like the political situation and various monsters and so forth. A good world alone isn't enough to support a good story, but I spent a lot of words talking about the character side of things.

so back in the day i read HPMOR, right? like many people. and as it went on (& yudkowsky kept talking about his writing process on tumblr) it became more and more clear that this was fiction approached from an angle i had never really considered before. i had been vaguely aware of places like the spacebattles forum or the dark lord potter forum, where apparently people wrote stories that were mostly just a long-form way to debate “would the USS Enterprise win against a star trek star destroyer”, or whatever. yudkowsky kept saying wild things like “the point of this scene is to vicariously enjoy somebody solving a problem” or “all characters should always do smart things so the reader doesn’t get frustrated with them” or “i wanted to add a short arc where this character doesn’t instantly solve all his problems but i was worried it would alienate the reader”. (see also.) just like, expressing this conceptualization that the point of fiction was to… write a character stomping through a little fake world going from victory to victory so that the reader could enjoy the vicarious glow of having a hard problem presented to them and then immediately resolved. how smart you are for following the line of thought of the main character, who did this smart thing!!

so that was very weird, but it was mostly a singular kind of weirdness. another weird, out-of-touch artifact from the rationalists, like roko’s basilisk but harry potter fanfiction instead.

anyway a while back i stumbled across “Mother of Learning”, and i think my initial response to it was ‘this is less a story with a plot and more a series of obstacles that are presented to the main character to be sequentially overcome’. there was a furry webcomic years ago that was a calvin & hobbes knockoff – small child, stuffed animal companion who became alive when they were alone, whimsy, etc – only where calvin & hobbes left the premise unstated, this comic, roughly 30 strips in, had a whole plot explaining: okay so these are a special kind of magical creature that bonds with children. in this metaphor susie’s mr. bun is also a magical creature. eventually they start going on adventures together. my overall thought was like, oh i guess i was assuming this was a narrative framing device structured around the themes of the work, but actually this was all meant to be fully diagetic and fully explained as part of the work’s “worldbuilding”.

anyway mother of learning is like that but for groundhog day. the time loop isn’t an unexplained device used to inspect a character through a lens, it’s a dragon ball-style training chamber. there are “plot developments” as more information is revealed, but all of that takes a back seat to extensively and exhaustively describing every ability and technique that the main character learns and how they use them to be more powerful. mother of learning is 800,000 words long. the time loop is because they’re actually duplicates of the ‘real people’, in a pocket universe constructed inside of an eldrich monstrosity that was designed to be used every x years by some kind of fated hero to keep it sealed. the main character has to escape partly to make sure some evil cultists don’t unseal some stuff, but mostly so he doesn’t lose all his experience gains.

anyway so reading that brought me to royal road. (i’ve always found the name very funny since my main familiarity with the term is the phrase “there is no royal road to geometry - euclid”, aka there is no shortcut to learning something; you always have to put in the hard struggle of comprehension. it’s actually named after… something from a light novel or something? it used to be a fan forum for a specific work before branching out into a publishing platform.) anyway it’s a place to post stuff, like fanfiction.net or fictionpress or whatever. there is a strong genre constraint: they mostly want to hear about their protagonists getting endlessly more and more powerful, and sometimes collecting a harem of sexy women. it’s for that kind of fiction. reading a few stories there was very illuminating, in that finally i could place HPMOR in a genre: that of the ‘progression fantasy’, a profoundly self-indulgent and formulaic genre that’s mostly just an action story with a lot of the bits stripped away so they can describe how much more powerful the protagonist is getting. a subgenre of this is the ‘litrpg’, which are stories with a diagetic video-game-mechanics layer. people are checking their stats and getting experience from killing monsters and leveling up and all that. a lot of them read like text LPs of videogames that don’t exist. where the author is, of course, executing a min-maxed run.

(there’s a lot of overlap here between progression fantasies and like, xianxia stories? cultivation stories are generally all progression fantasies, and so there’s a lot of overlap thematically.)

anyway so that was kind of a grim awareness of a dark corner of the literary world. this stuff is popular. royal road is pretty aggressively farmed by publishers wanting to license stuff so they can make ebooks or w/e; there are author patreons there that make like, thousands of dollars a month for writing chapter 1394 of “my character with a cool spear levels up more”. i’ve read a bunch of progression fantasies but i wouldn’t say i really enjoyed any of them, partly because a lot of them are really bad at like… constructing a narrative with any kind of stakes. it’s all gonna be jettisoned away in favor of talking more about level ups. it is actually almost exactly the experience of grinding for levels in an RPG: it’s not really fun, but it can be engaging in the moment, and also you get to see a number go up, so that’s like a reward.

(i started writing one of my own as a writing exercise b/c i wanted to try some short-paced serial work that wasn’t porn, and it shot up to uh #40 top-rated on the entire site. it was in the top 10 for a few days. i have some complicated feelings about that.)

recently, i’ve been reading a lot of, uh, gay incest teenage mutant ninja turtles fanfiction. a lot of it is incredibly overwrought. 200k words of characters pining guiltily over each other! soap opera antics with miscommunications and secrets! genre cliches piled up in a big heap and remixed! and like, fanfic as a genre can be real formulaic too, right? a lot of people who read&write fanfic don’t read much else, and there’s absolutely a 'house style’ for most fanfic. but when i read fanfic i get the sense that the authors are, you know, aware of some literary conventions, of the various aspects that make up a story, and they’re struggling to convey concepts and themes. apparently i’m responsible for inspiring somebody to write what i think is the only sincere donkey/shrek porn fanfic in existence, and personally i think that porn fanfic has a million times the literary and artistic merit as chapter 1400 of randitly fucking ghosthound, because porn, overwrought incest soap opera dramas, is at least saying something about the nature of human desire, whereas most progression fantasy stuff is an utterly self-absorbed thesis on “writing somebody cool and powerful is escapism so i can feel cool & powerful”, stretched out to a million words.

like i guess 'i want to feel powerful’ is an expression of human desire but it’s a particularly flat one. i think a lot about that bit in dead zones of the imagination:

Violence’s capacity to allow arbitrary decisions, and thus to avoid the kind of debate, clarification, and renegotiation typical of more egalitarian social relations, is obviously what allows its victims to see procedures created on the basis of violence as stupid or unreasonable. One might say, those relying on the fear of force are not obliged to engage in a lot of interpretative labor, and thus, generally speaking, do not.

[…]

To be more precise: violence may well be the only form of human action by which it is possible to have relatively predictable effects on the actions of a person about whom you understand nothing. Pretty much any other way one might try to influence another’s actions, one at least has to have some idea who they think they are, who they think you are, what they might want out of the situation, and what their aversions and proclivities are. Hit them over the head hard enough and all of this becomes irrelevant.

a fantasy of having power is, i think, fundamentally a fantasy of never having to know anything you don’t want to, of never having to deal with the consequences of your actions. i feel it’s a particularly grim thing to enshrine into a millon-word epic.

anyway, hi, i’m back on tumblr, i guess. who can say if this will last. i’m still not happy about the porn ban! for reasons hopefully partially explained by the whole bit about porn above. also the increasing sidelining of custom layouts in favor of a uniform interface. sadly even with that it seems like tumblr is basically the only well-travelled social media site that’s not a total algorithmic nightmare, although the first thing i did when i remade this account was to go into the settings and turn off like a dozen algorithmic switches that were all defaulted to 'yes’.

i ended up moving cross-country during the peak of covid b/c my former housemate started having screaming panic attacks literally any time somebody stepped outside the house (literally literally, not emphatically literally). i would not recommend it. now i live somewhere where 'fire’ is a season, which is introducing new complications to my life. we’ll see how things go from here.

oh yeah, also my icon has more points now. i leveled up V:

[nightvindicta]

ROLEPLAYING HISTORY

The rules are simple! Post ten characters you’d like to role play as, have role played as, and might bring back. Then tag ten people to do the same (if you can’t think of ten characters, just write down however many you can and tag the same amount of people). Aside from that, please repost instead of reblogging!

CURRENTLY PLAYING

Lightning Farron - Final Fantasy XIII Saeko Busujima - Highschool of The Dead Esdeath - Akame Ga Kill Velvet Crowe - Tales of Berseria

WANT TO PLAY

Mahiru Hiragi - Seraph of The End Kamui - Fire Emblem Camilla - Fire Emblem Leanne - Resonance of Fate Aranea Highwind - Final Fantasy XV Zero - Drakengard 3  Seri Awashima - K Project Victor Kresnik - Tales of Xillia 2 Saya Kisaragi - Blood C Four - Drakengard 3

HAVE PLAYED

Chloe Valens - Tales of Legendia Legretta The Quick - Tales of The Abyss Fayt Leingod - Star Ocean 3 Lenalee Lee - D.Gray Man Lelouch vi Britannia - Code Geass Anya Alstreim - Code Geass Soifon - Bleach Ryfia - Arc Rise Fantasia Stella Nox Fleuret - Final Fantasy Versus XIII (XV) Atoli - .Hack//GU Helena Harper - Resident Evil Jin Kisaragi - Blazblue Zephyr - Resonance of Fate Three - Drakengard 3 Mikaela Hyakuya - Seraph of The End

WILL/WOULD PLAY AGAIN:

Three Zephyr Helena Mikaela Jin

TAGGED BY: @queen-yggdrasil

Tagging: @einsofaur , @niakheran , @chosenbychronos , and anyone else who wishes to.

[scalematez]

What about latula? I've actually always found her ultra interesting but i never really got it.

Sorry this took so long! This is a bit of a wall.

Latula Pyrope, Knight of Mind, introduced to us Homestuck Act 6 Intermission 3, page 5263. 

I’ve seen her character get flattened down to just “gamer girl, but like a 90’s gamer girl” on more than one occasion. Taking “Radglare” as the whole. One of the first things you need to know about knights is that if you buy into their most surface-level persona and don’t read beyond it, then you fell for it. 

They are often, in some way or another, hiding behind a wet papier-mâché wall, maybe even a caricature of their own making (intentionally or not). This applies to Dave, this applies to Karkat. It isn’t hard for the people around them to see behind, but they fall prey to their own personal sense of failure. 

Latula, as is the case with all the other Beforan trolls sans Meenah and Aranea, only really has substantial interactions with 3 characters total. In her case, this is Meenah (inevitably), Porrim, and Kankri. Within this short amount of time though, the finest cuts of her character come from her interactions with Porrim in particular. 

Beginning in her interactions with Meenah, we see Latula put on a display so cartoonish that it becomes overbearing. The constant high-fives and the spewing of nonsense lingo that would’ve gotten her weird looks in an actual 90’s-style arcade don’t take very long to get on Meenah’s nerves. 

With Porrim however her behavior plainly gets called out for what it is; a routine. 

Porrim actually gives us some interesting and comprehensive insight into why and how misogyny still exists in Beforan troll society (a take that those who compare Porrim to a men’s rights activist must have either sorely missed or straight up ignored, but my serious salt about that can wait for another day), and this comes to us because she’s making an observation about Latula that is essential to understanding her character; the way she acts is, in some part, a response to internalized misogyny. 

It’s no secret that misogyny was (and still is, to some extent) a problem in many gaming circles, and in the sentiments expressed among or around them. Some girls, in order to adapt to this, took on an “I’m not like other girls”-esque persona, often to a degree that was a bit obnoxious (I’m saying this with experience). This is what Latula is a satire of, largely. 

Latula actually is competent, at least as a mind player. She has a lot more going on under the surface than is immediately obvious. Her conversations with Meenah (for example, where she mentions having pieced together why Meenah killed them all immediately before the scratch) imply that she spends some fair amount of time mulling things over and piecing them together. 

In her conversation with Porrim about the cosmic state of relationships between the Serket and Pyrope families she also alludes to having an intrinsic understanding of karma, implying that it’s something she as a mind player is specifically suited to understand, and then redirects the conversation the moment she’s asked to elaborate. 

She has a bit of an incapability to be genuine even in the one setting she’s most comfortable doing so. While her conversations with Porrim are the most genuine we've seen her, she still defaults at moments to brushing things aside, or perhaps playing dumb in some cases. 

It’s worth noting Latula has some kind of anxiety disorder, and she’s supposed to be medicated for it. She calls her own behavior “neurotic” at one point, though it’s not clarified whether that’s a genuine diagnosis or she meant it in a misused figurative sense (personally I like to believe she is, though it’s still not canonly specified). 

All in all, Latula is kind of a deeply troubled person. Her exaggerated, somewhat obnoxious demeanor isn’t just the punch of a joke, but a special hell of her own creation. What was an unhealthy defense mechanism has now eaten her sense of self (or lack thereof) as she’s mostly stuck with the same other 11 people for, as far as she’s aware, the rest of eternity. The fact that she’s kept the act up for this long speaks to… something. I don’t know what, but it speaks to something for sure. 

Aranea doesn’t give us much backstory on her, beyond there being a non-specified “tragic accident” that left her nasally impaired (which raises a lot of alarming questions of its own), and of the information granted to us it’s hard to draw the precise line where she’s just fucking with Meenah and where she’s not. Because of this, we don’t know too much about her role in the session when alive. We can only really theorize about what happened to her in-session. 

For example, for her to have entirely and permanently lost her sense of smell in a single “incident” of some kind (as opposed to long-term damage, acquired illnesses or things like epilepsy or stroke), she would have had to experience something on the level of chemical burns inside her nose, or a flat out brain injury of her own, which is actually the theory I find the most interesting for narrative reasons. Knights are proposed by some to have a self-perceived inherent flaw with their own aspect, which is supported by canon texts. A self-perceived inherent flaw with mind? While that could certainly apply even without brain injury, it’s interesting in the context of it. It would also add a new layer of framing to her relationship with Mituna, and her protectiveness over him, beyond the general fact that knights just tend to be protective in some way or other. But that's just my brainstorming there!

Anyhow sorry this is so lengthy! To end off on a high note, have this really nice little piece of interaction:

[callmearcturus]

#homestuck#archival reader and kind of. when the troll dancestors were introduced is when it started falling apart for me (via @unfortunatelyvisive

Okay I have an observation from this. I think one of the most important skills to understanding HS is knowing when shit matters and when it does not. Which, I may have lucked out because I always guessed correctly on this.

Of the Dancestors, like... only Meenah (the POV character) and Aranea (the one who talks the most and is a Light player so you should KNOW to keep an eye on her) actually fucking matter. The rest of the crew are just building the scope of the Dreambubbles and having some dialogic fun with new characters. But none of them fucking matter except those two. If you don't cotton onto that, yeah, jfc, having to keep all that in your head is tough.

But it was the same with the Ancestor Trolls? Which I think was conveyed well through how fucking over the top and erudite and annoying Doc Scratch was. Do you need to know about early Alternia and the Signless and everyone? Nah, it's flavor. We only ever meet The Empress directly and she's not even in the picture as a true antagonistic force until much later.

I also remember seeing people say "don't skip the Midnight Crew intermission, it's important later!" but it's honestly not. And I say this as someone who really likes that intermission and thinks it's funny and very well-written. That intermission is a huge flex of writing on Hussie's part that's delightful to read, but you don't need any of the info there. It's super sad if you miss the lore tidbit of "When Snowman dies, the Universe will end," but it retold to you pretty dramatically in The Critical Moment. If you skipped that intermission, when you see Slick shoot her in the heart, see the starry explosions erupt, and see the zoom out to the Troll Universe-- that does the work to re-convey that information.

Again, I say this a lot but while I have gripes with Hussie on various topics, I ain't got shit to say about the actual craft when they put in the effort. Except now: if you don't catch the signposting of what is and isn't important.... yeah, I think THAT makes it a lot harder to follow.

Homestuck is a maximalist story, and you gotta know how to parse that kind of thing.

[thebigcj]

Like, okay, so

I’m a Mage of Heart. Very super Heart-Pilled. So naturally the idea of conjuring a whole other person is very interesting to me.

And you know what, that’s a concept that’s been heavy on my mind for a hot sec—the connection between Hope and Heart. So I’m a plural system; I’ve sort of danced around the topic on the blog but this is something about myself that I’m very certain of. If you know me irl and are stalking my tumblr, this is your explicit confirmation. Msg me or screenshot this for the group chat. Whatever. Here’s the go-ahead. (you can go follow one of my headmates @alli-bby if you wanna , she gets her desire for attention from me /pos)

Anyway, the concept got me thinking about the Self and especially how that manifests as Brain Ghost Dirk. Dirk (as a Prince of Heart) has always been about splintering himself into many pieces. That’s his whole schtick. Now, the way he does it, is he makes copies of himself, where they’re different characters but ultimately (pun intended) the same person (one of my favorite tropes ever). Jake’s Hopeitude manifests seemingly another of these splinters, that lives in Jake’s head.

The main difference between myself and Dirk in terms of multiplicity is that his splinters are unequivocally still Dirk. They are just that—splinters from a whole. My deal is that I’ve got several entirely separate peeps to manage that are explicitly not me.

But that’s the thing. How much of Brain Ghost Dirk is a splinter with that direct connection to “real” Dirk, and how much of BGD is a Hope construct? BGD states that he isn’t real and is just a reflection of Jake’s brain, but that totally seems like something Ult!Dirk would pull just to get Jake working as a pawn for him again. And to further that idea, how much separation of identity would a Hope construct have from their host (by which I mean their Hoper; their Esperanto, if you will)?

Brain Ghost Dirk is not Jake, from an identity standpoint. but Brain Ghost Dirk also kinda is Dirk. Not even kinda, actually. When Jake was doing a Hopey Thing from Aranea's BS, his fakeness went out the window and then he was Real Dirk who was Really There. On top of that, he had access to the full Prince of Heart godtier power arsenal, as he used the Soul-Ripping flamboyant pink spell as Real Real Dirk did on Caliborn.

Brings to mind the Ship of Theseus. What I think is the most fascinating thing about the Ship of Theseus here is the material constitution and how that relates to BGD. Say that they took all the old parts they removed from the ship after it was all fresh wood in the museum, and they rebuilt the ship out of those original parts in a different location: which is the real ship now? A Mind player might argue that the old-parts ship is the real ship, because taking it apart and putting it back together in a different place is just a translation of location, and the assembly of the new-parts ship was just that--the assembly of a new ship that just happened to take place in the same location as the disassembly of the old ship. A Heart player tho might argue (speaking from experience) that the new-parts ship is the real ship, because the essence of the ship--that which carries the legacy and memories of the voyages--is still with the ship as the parts are getting switched out, much like the Wizard of Oz's tin man (who got Ship of Thesused into being an automaton basically, but was gradual enough to still retain his humanity). What I think really applies this to BGD is what a Hope player might say. A Hope player might argue that while the new-parts ship and old-parts ship are not the same ship, that they are both irrevocably the Ship of Theseus. This is because Hope has to deal with belief, and if the people who walk through the museum believe that which they see in the display to be the ship they've heard stories about, they are going to attribute those accomplishments and those ideals to the new-parts ship. But if the curator who spent all those years collecting the old parts, keeping them safe in hopes of maintaining that which made the ship great, believes that the ship he rebuilt was the ship, then that would also carry with it the ideals of the Ship of Theseus all the same as the new-parts ship has in the museum.

The Hope player's ability to recognize both as the Ship of Thesus is exactly why both Brain Ghost Dirk and Dirk are both Dirk. During the Hopey Thing, they even exist simultaneously, with Dirk being way out in the Medium and Brain no-longer-Ghost Dirk being in the fight with Aranea.

Now, my peeps upstairs are not splinters of me in the way that BGD is with Dirk, but instead have their own desires and qualities separate from my own, even though we all came from the same psyche using the same brain hardware. It begs the question of how real are they? (which is a line of reasoning that ranges from frowned-upon to actively disrespectful depending on who I accidently think it around, but I'm alone rn and it's to prove a point)

Following BGD logic, one might argue that my headmates are not real in the way that Dirk is real, but they do have a sense of identity and agency while having some degree of Fakeness as seen with Brain Ghost Dirk. Now, in the real world, Fakeness is not a tangible thing as it is within Homestuck (see also: Roxy removing the nonexistence from stuff, and Jake being... Jake), so its a little different. But I think the very fact that I genuinely believe they exist gives them Identity in the same way that the museum curator gives the loose planks removed from the display the ideal of the Ship of Thesus.

BGD and Dirk exist simultaneously to each other, and each have their own free will. Me and my weird psychic roommates exist simultaneously to each other, and we each have our own free will. And sure, they're in my head, but I am also in my head, and asthma is also in my lungs, and BGD is also in Jake's head, and Hal is also in Dirk's Shades, and Dirk's essence is also in Brobot, and Dirk is also in

Thinking hard about Brain Ghost Dirk