#and if homestuck.com ever gets its shit together we might have that too

[r0semultiverse]

We all have to try to live long enough for Voice Over Nexus to finish their Let’s Read Homestuck series so we can see people who have only exclusively finished Homestuck through the medium of watching it.

[autumnblogs]

Day 5: Imaginary Friends and Repressed Subconsciouses

https://homestuck.com/story/836

We open to Dave having the shit - and the softness - beaten out of him by Bro.

https://homestuck.com/story/838

These are exactly the sort of things a void player would say. This page lends itself to the interpretation that Rose is inverted and acting more like a Witch of Void than a Seer of Light, exactly the same way that Jade is acting like a Seer of Time. (Of course, Rose is either being sarcastic or placating herself. The reality is that, as she pretty much immediately demonstrates, she can’t help but pry for the true underlying meaning of what Jade is saying, grasping at information, and with it, power over her situation.)

I’ve already called attention to the dearth of conversations between these two characters - they’re not going to talk a lot between now and when Rose goes Grimdark. I think it’s just a shame. I wonder if it’s because Rose feels like Jade has her life under control, yearns for that, and in typical Rose fashion, decides that Jade is judging her for her lack of control? She is remarkably cool toward Jade, and I expect that to at least some degree, it’s because she feels inferior to her.

@volatileleporegina​ and I had a discussion on Discord where they guess that this is like, the dichotomy between Seers and Witches.

Rose probably envies the fact that Jade has her shit together. Witches are at their best and their happiest when they can go apeshit, seize control of a situation, and act completely on instinct. Seers are at their best and their happiest when they have inner peace, control of their situation, and control over their emotions.

More after the break.

https://homestuck.com/story/845

More speech patterns here. John does not use a lot of prepositions, and his language is very hesitant - he rarely asserts anything important, and has a pretty strong tendency to use phrases like “I guess, I figure, I think, I might” and so on and so on.

John also talks like he’s from the west coast of the USA, at least in a caricaturish way - he uses a lot of old school surfer slang that got co-opted into generic cool culture, like rad, although not nearly to the same extent as later parody character Latula.

https://homestuck.com/story/855

As a character who will eventually be revealed to be a Hero of Hope, Grandpa Harley dwells in the realm of fantasy. While he fills the mould of the idealized adventurer-hero - a true Pulp Fiction Macho Genius Archaeologist in the mould of Doc Savage or Indiana Jones, his relationship with other human beings is more... theoretical.

I wonder if it says anything about Hope in general that all of the Heroes of Hope in the story are practically incapable of having positive relationships in their lives? Before I tended to chalk Jake’s failure up to being a Page, and simply needing more time, but Eridan and Cronus sabotage all of their relationships as well.

Perhaps I’ll come back to this train of thought in the future. For now, Grandpa and Jake alike are characters who I consider wretches, and pitiable wretches at that. I have far less patience for Grandpa though. More of that as we go.

I should be open about the fact that, while I’ve been a bit more forgiving with Mom Lalonde, the fact is that, with the exception of Dad Egbert, I consider all four of the Beta Guardians to be abusive parents; Nanna is an exception as well if she is counted to be one of the guardians). Their conduct in raising their children is at the very least inexcusable, although if they demonstrated any repentance, it would perhaps be forgivable; in all their cases, by the end of the comic, it is too late for that (although they get another lease on life through the Alpha Kids, which if you don’t mind me showing my hand, I think is the entire point of the Alpha Kids from a storytelling perspective- reconciliation of the parents with the children.)

https://homestuck.com/story/859

One thing I have always liked about Jade is that she does not negotiate with terrorists. You go girl :)

https://homestuck.com/story/874

Rose lives in either Ontario or Upstate New York. I think someone found that the coordinates of her house are in Rainbow Falls.

It seems odd to me for no reason at all that Rose would be a Canadian when all of the other characters in the comic are ambiguously American, and there are a number of other reasons it would fit for Rose to be from upstate NY, not the least of which is that it is a part of Lovecraft Country, and the home of the principle madman from HP’s “Beyond the Wall of Sleep,” a story about a hick from Upstate New York who has insane dreams that he cannot express with his limited vocabulary. It turns out that this unassuming crazy person is actually a mortal manifestation of an extra-dimensional star-god, and he forms a friendship with the viewpoint character, an intern at the hospital where he has been institutionalized. While the magic dreams ultimately prove to be too much for the mortal frame and give him a heart attack, he contacts his friend the intern via a dream to express to him that he dearly hopes that the two of them meet again one day beyond the wall of sleep.

Another reason is that I’ve always viewed Rose as being an extremely affected person. Nobody talks the way that Rose talks - her words are all extremely deliberately chosen in a way that doesn’t fit the pattern of the other characters’ more stream-of-consciousness writing styles. Rose thinks in Prose, whereas her friends all write like they talk. I like to imagine, for this reason, that Rose has a transatlantic accent like Katharine Hepburn, which is to say, a learned accent. Back in old-timey times, actors, newscasters, the wealthy, and so on would take classes to learn how to pronounce words in a sophisticated way that nobody naturally spoke in - a bit like Received Pronunciation on the other side of the pond. It’s long since died out, but it fits the sort of affected, stuffy, faux-aristocratic manner that Rose styles herself with. It’s a blend of Manhattanite and Londoner pronunciation, and I think it suits her.

Anyway, there you go. There’s something that you just learned about my inner life and how I think way too much about tiny details like “What would Rose’s voice sound like?”

https://homestuck.com/story/876

Dave lives in Texas. For this reason, I have decided that he sounds like a cowboy. No particular cowboy, just some cowboy.

Jade lives in the Pacific Ocean, and I have a very specific head voice picked out for her - Anna Paquin, particularly young Anna Paquin who portrayed Sheeta in Castle in the Sky, although I’ve always imagined Jade to have a much broader kiwi accent.

https://homestuck.com/story/879

I wonder if Nanna’s oven works at all like Biscuits’?

https://homestuck.com/story/893

Nothing ever really came of Dr. Brinner’s mail. Law of Conservation of detail tells us that he might be one of pipefan413′s coworkers (maybe fedorafreak?) but we’ll never know.

https://homestuck.com/story/905

It’s not totally clear to me exactly what’s going on here, but I have a couple of theories.

Theory #1: This is Mom Lalonde’s childhood room from when she grew up. It makes sense to me that the Lalonde House and the Lab might be a package deal, especially since we see Roxy growing up in a similar setting, but with far more prolific modular structures.

Theory #2: As theory #1, but this is also Mom Lalonde’s current accommodation. Tea parties and tea seem to be shorthand in Homestuck for immaturity and avoidance in particular - characters like Nepeta, Mom, and Grandpa use Tea Parties to retreat into childish fantasy instead of confronting the real, hard problems they have to deal with.

https://homestuck.com/story/919

Jade’s strife with Grandpa might lend some credence to the idea that she uses imaginary friends (who are also us, the audience!) to cope with her loneliness.

https://homestuck.com/story/926

Even the extraordinary cynicism and antipathy of Rose Lalonde can’t resist adorable kittens.

https://homestuck.com/story/935

Jaspers’ secret seems to be the genetic code of a First Guardian, although whether Rose actually got it from this mysterious kitty-cat, or whether it was buried in her subconscious all along is probably a coin flip. (I would put my money on the subconscious thing.)

https://homestuck.com/story/938

For all her pretension, Rose Lalonde is a sad thirteen year old girl whose mother spends too much time sozzled to help her make sense of a confusing and chaotic world. It would be nice for her to be able to make sense of the world and get some sense of constancy, but then part of the point of Sburb is to teach its players that nothing in life is constant.

https://homestuck.com/story/949

Resolving some of the uncertainty around his Dad will allow John to consciously perceive the graffiti he’s been subconsciously scribbling around his room. You knew that already, but it doesn’t change the fact that this is a big deal for him. I’ll take a stab at why this is the case - one of the recurring motifs in Homestuck is characters avoiding uncomfortable truths through avoidance and stagnation - if they don’t want to think about something, they really really don’t think about it, to the point of not being able to perceive it at all. Here, John magically gains the ability to see some of the graffiti drawn by his dream self by being confronted with the truth about his Dad. For other characters, I think, it will be less magical.

https://homestuck.com/story/965

Calling attention to John’s lexicon again, I feel like it’s an overlooked fact that he uses turn of the decade hacker slang a lot too - just peppers his language with it.

https://homestuck.com/story/980

Jade, like John, actually has two separate Guardians - her deceased bio-parent, and this devilbeast. The terminology for these white-and-electric-green monsters, First Guardians, suggests that from a mythological perspective, they function as Ur-Parental figures, raising a civilization to adulthood so that its members can go on to play Sburb, participating in the reproductive cycle of the Universe.

https://homestuck.com/story/988

The fact that Mom Lalonde’s “Room” is full of booze supports my hypothesis that she still lives in her little girl’s lab bedroom.

Rose doesn’t make a big deal out of what’s in her Mom’s bedroom the way that John is, but I think that her exploration of the laboratory serves as effectively a long-form version of the same experience that John has just had. They’re both learning plenty about their enigmatic guardians.

Rose is a smart girl. She’s figured out what is going on, even if she hasn’t thought about it at the surface-level of the narration yet.

https://homestuck.com/story/1004

John Egbert is a young man who does not really like himself very much.

https://homestuck.com/story/1023

The very first time Rose shows genuine vulnerability to pretty much anyone in the comic. “Maybe I am just being a friend?”

https://homestuck.com/story/1028

Dreams in Homestuck are material events than can have material effects on the characters’ reality - but on the other hand, spending loads of time dreaming can prevent you from having a meaningful effect on your session.

Homestuck is a little ambivalent about dreams but I think it’s safe to say that something close to is stance would be to say that what goes on unacknowledged inside of your head is still a part of you even if you can’t perceive it. Characters who spend all of their time in dreams though, paradoxically won’t make all that much progress toward actually understanding it. Tavros and Jade both spend loads of time in their dreams on Prospit, and while Jade does it because she has Vriska-induced narcolepsy, I think we’re supposed to draw a line from one to the other.

Neither of them is in an emotional state to tough out the process of digging up what’s beneath the surface, and resolving the tension between what’s inside of them and what’s outside of them.

https://homestuck.com/story/1049

This creepy little guy is here because Gamzee sent him. I’m going to pay careful attention to the sequence of events that leads him here, because I have a hunch that John’s weird clown fixation somehow leads to Gamzee’s.

https://homestuck.com/story/1064

The fact that the Joker only has two holes in his punchcard suggests that clowns come very close to being elemental in the Homestuck universe.

That is not a surprise.

https://homestuck.com/story/1069

We’ll conclude the day with John’s alchemy session, and come back tomorrow where I’ll finally get around to stating another one of Homestuck’s major throughlines. For now though, I’ll point out that pretty much everything John has created here has some kind of Dad imagery or another (Although all the Cosby gags have aged incredibly poorly, don’t forget that at one point he was America’s Dad!)

With the possible exception of the Bunny Wizard hat which combines some Rose imagery with some John imagery! No wonder she thought it was as cool as he did.

For now, Cam signing off, something something not alone.

[autumnblogs]

Day 14: The Ultimate Reward

https://homestuck.com/story/2404

Movies are one of the main vectors that culture uses to transmit itself in the modern day, and if it sounds like I’m describing this form of cultural reproduction like a virus, you’re not wrong. The concept of the viral video has been around for about 15 years, if memory serves, and Homestuck’s self-referential format closely recalls the snowclone and advice animal type memes of the late thousands. Meme itself is a word coined by Richard Dawkins to describe the basic unit of cultural reproduction and transmission. While the lines related to memes from Metal Gear Solid have become memes themselves,

John and Karkat’s lives are both shaped by memes, transmitted to them through movies. John’s ideas about romance and family are shaped by his movies, Karkat and his ideas about romance and family are shaped by his movies.

https://homestuck.com/story/2406

The narration insists that Feferi and Eridan are made for each other, but their romance almost immediately disintegrates. The narrative is training us to be skeptical of the Troll’s preoccupation with Romantic Destiny. The idea that you have one soulmate, a person you were just destined for who it’ll work out with, is bogus.

https://homestuck.com/story/2435

Something about this sequence has inspired me to talk about Society with a capital S. Both Hobbes’ Leviathan  and Ginsberg’s Howl talk about Society with a capital S - the indistinct entity, the system which arises seemingly unbidden from the gestalt of myriad human interactions, parables about social systems.

Leviathan is a founding myth for the social contract and liberalism in general. As one of the petite bourgeoisie who benefits from Liberalism, it is of course in Hobbes’ interest to defend its existence and provide justification for the material conditions he benefits from, but Howl is considerably less charitable. Referring to the same entity as Moloch, Ginsberg describes it as an incommensurable monster, consuming the lives of the men and women who make it up to further its own agenda.

Authoritarians have always used the threat of cultural extinction in order to justify unjust material conditions and social hierarchies. Fail to fall in line, and Western Civilization is doomed. Glub Glub (who I refuse to call anything else, Feferi’s Lusus, you know who I mean) is the physical manifestation of this threat, an unbearable burden foisted upon troll society by their overlord, Lord English, to force them to participate in a system that guarantees their inability to produce ethical behavior. Their choice has always been a choice between murder and extinction.

https://homestuck.com/story/2439

Eridan is fascinating to me. I don’t know if he predicted the Incel movement, or was merely an agglomeration of school shooter, neo-fascist stereotypes, but boy is he absolutely spot-on - the fascination with military history, the emotional theatrics, the possessive and entitled attitude toward the women in his life.

https://homestuck.com/story/2441

Feferi’s a sweet girl, but she’s still one of the people who benefits from Alternian Society. The problem has never been that the Condesce is a brutal evil woman, the problem is the way that Alternian Society is structured in the first place. I’ll have more to say about this whenever we get to Openbound, since Feferi’s rule is discussed more there, and I’ll definitely have more to say about it when I eventually write the companion piece that I intend to about Hierarchy, Patriarchy, and so on and so forth. That one might be a long time coming though, because a lot of Homestuck is devoted to examining it, and I think it might end up being my longest essay. It’s the theme I think is the most directly applicable to real life, hence the import.

Feferi’s caretaking attitude and controlling predilections are also juxtaposed with Jade’s in the same way that Kanaya’s maternal instinct and green thumb are juxtaposed with Jade’s. Could it be that as the Witch of Space, Jade Harley is the ultimate mom?

https://homestuck.com/story/2448

Man, as long as I’m comparing Eridan to neo-fascists and Feferi to the political establishment, this relationship between the two of them - the way that Feferi views her enabling of Eridan as actually curtailing his worst excesses -  really smacks of the kind of unity and compromise rhetoric that liberals always seem to spout in order to justify their decision to adopt moderate right-wing policy instead of actual left-wing policy.

I’m probably reaching here, but the thought popped into my head unbidden, and I’m trying to keep this liveblog as stream of consciousness as possible.

https://homestuck.com/story/2458

People think about us way less than we think about ourselves.

https://homestuck.com/story/2467

Just as I’m not here to defend Eridan (he’s a piece of shit who knows what he did), I’m not here to attack Feferi, or to excuse her. Characters in Homestuck are frequently both abusers and victims.

Feferi’s relationship with Eridan is complicated. For starters, she isn’t really curtailing the worst of his excesses, not the way that she thinks he is. Feferi has authority, one way or the other, and by being emotionally available to Eridan, she has enabled him more than she has prevented him from doing wrong. Cutting him out of her life earlier could have sent a clear message to Eridan that his genocidal ideation is not okay, but instead, she has afforded the luxury of her presence.

The aforementioned preoccupation with Romantic Destiny probably made it so much easier for her to wait, too. As the Heiress, Feferi enjoys all the benefits of being in troll society while having to put up with almost none of the downsides. The suffering of other people - the extra pointless emotional turmoil she puts Eridan through by stringing him along, the suffering of the trolls whose lusii she has employed him to murder - their suffering is all theoretical to her. It’s not something she’s ever had to encounter herself (something she shares in common with Jane - if I remember correctly, Andrew’s commentary suggests that he picked up some of the ideas he was originally exploring with Feferi to explore with Jane).

(Some of these ideas are from a conversation with @bladekindeyewear with whom I was having a conversation on Discord while I was writing this).

https://homestuck.com/story/2475

Instead of indulging Eridan’s emotional theatrics (he continues to make other people’s suffering about himself, via his pretension of nobility) I want to call attention to the fact that, as a chemical coping mechanism, Homestuck compares Trolls’ use of Soda to humans’ use of alcohol.

I don’t know if sugary beverages have a similarly potent physiological effect on trolls as alcohol has on humans, and it doesn’t matter if it does - the parallel is being drawn nevertheless. I’m only making this point, because later on it will become important: Terezi and Rose’s respective addictions (Rose’s alcoholism and Terezi’s... sodaholism?) directly mirror each other.

https://homestuck.com/story/2516

The fact that Vriska’s narration here describes these sidequests as pointless is, I think, another clue into Vriska’s overall character. By all accounts, she and Tavros actually seem to be having a blast together. She’s not going for the gold, she’s not skipping right to the end, the two of them are just screwing around in her magical land, going on adventures. Okay, she is literally going for the gold in the sense of treasure hunting, but in a more figurative sense, the Vriska we’re more familiar with would probably be a taskmaster, using the scourge of her overbearing personality to drive the team forward to victory over the main final boss. Instead, she’s most in her element here when she’s not doing anything remotely important at all, just hanging out with someone she likes(hates? Troll friendships are complicated.)

Abusive relationships are rarely as obvious or simple as one person harassing and berating the other all the time. Tavros is clearly having a blast here too, and throughout this whole sequence.

https://homestuck.com/story/2521

The problem is that there are two Vriskas (at least), the Vriska who lives inside of her, who she’s only comfortable bringing out around people who have no expectations for her, and the Vriska that Scratch, and Spidermom, and Sn0wman are egging her on to be, the Ideal Troll who cuts through the bullshit, cuts to the chase, and becomes the most important person in the universe. Later on, they will be literally bifurcated by John’s retcon shenanigans.

Homestuck uses the language of alternate selves and ultimate selves to discuss a question that is applicable to real life as well. “Who is the definitive version of a character for whom different choices and versions of themselves are possible?” And when applied to real life, the question becomes something more like, “Could I have chosen to do something else instead of the thing that I did? Are my intentions important, or only my actions?” I don’t think it answers clearly, but just getting us to think about it might be sufficient.

https://homestuck.com/story/2531

The Black Queen is just one of the many malign influences in Terezi and Vriska’s lives, and while she’s not literally an abusive parent to both of them, by egging them on to indulge their worst excesses (Egging Terezi on to persecute people pre-emptively or overzealously, egging Vriska on to take away other people’s agencies), it’s safe to say that her voice is just one of many doing the same thing for the two of them.

https://homestuck.com/story/2543

Oh man. The memoes are some of my favorite conversations in all of Homestuck. They’re funny, but with the exception of one or two of them, I’m not sure how much useful info we’ll get out of them.

https://homestuck.com/story/2567

:)

https://homestuck.com/story/2575

Karkat and Terezi may not have literally had sex, but whatever their secret encounter was is effectively symbolic of a consummation of their relationship. She knows what color Karkat’s blood is. They have been in a pail together.

The two of them can hardly be more intimate with each other.

Too bad it doesn’t work out.

But then, it’s probably for the best - the fact that it doesn’t work out for the two of them is the retrospect we need to be able to say it was never going to work out for the two of them.

https://homestuck.com/story/2576

Something different does it for everyone.

https://homestuck.com/story/2578

What does it for Vriska is having the shit beaten out of her by Aradia.

What is Vriska’s big takeaway from this beatdown?

Maybe if we continue to read Aradia as being Vriska’s doppelganger, being savagely beaten by one of her own victims, and one who is so like her in terms of her feelings of helplessness, her feelings of being at the whim of a cosmos that is out to get her, Vriska realizes that the thing she lashes out to attack in other people - the weakness loathed by troll society - is what she hates and fears the most in herself.

https://homestuck.com/story/2587

Aradia is starting to lose her tolerance for scenarios that involve being manipulated by those very same actors that are making her feel helpless.

https://homestuck.com/story/2593

Aradia interprets Sburb as being a challenge to come between any prospective gods and the ultimate reward. Perhaps that is the case. Assigning intent to Sburb to me seems possibly flawed, since it is, after all, only the reproductive organ of a universe. But perhaps it does have some intentions of its own. Are those intentions uniquely Sburb’s? Perhaps specifically Skaia’s. Maybe they are even, more generally, the intentions of Paradox Space itself. But Sburb itself seems more ambivalent to its players than anything. The vast majority of sessions, it seems, kill their players outright, or at least produce null sessions that never give rise to universal reproduction.

https://homestuck.com/story/2625

And that is where we shall conclude for this evening.

Cam signing off, Alive and Not Alone.