#and we do love a totally hapless alpha

[ikemenomegas]

Having a resurgence in anime rewatches after nearly six years of watching k-dramas instead (blame bungou stray dogs, they haven't had a full season update since 2016 and until jjk I didn't see anything come out I wanted to watch) has been a trip. It's like being thrown full bodied through the looking glass to have a conversation with my thirteen year old self haha. Seeing as what I consider "old classics" includes Ouran Host Club, Hakuoki, Vampire Knight, Brave 10... maybe it's not such a mystery why we are here today... ^^'

[ckret2]

Alright let’s talk GVK spoilers!!!

My reactions as best I can remember them!

- love how Kong is humanized from the very first scene, like every time he shows up he’s humanized so much more than other titans are. If that was at the expense of other titans being made likable I wouldn’t enjoy it so much, but like, Godzilla is made pretty lovable over the course of Monsterverse, Mothra is too, and all the titans featured for long are given recognizable emotions that let us see them as more intelligent and feeling than “just” animals; so all of them are made understandable/likable/sympathetic. But of them all, Kong is the only one really humanized. Which makes sense, because like, big monkey! Basically our distant cousin!

- And they kept playing, like, normal songs for him, which cracked me up.

- I really appreciated how you could SEE the titans in this movie. After all the weather effects to hide the titans in KOTM, there was such a clear difference in this one from the very start. Kong in the daylight! Godzilla makes his first attack at night, and even then you can see him much more clearly than you can for most of KOTM! Nice!

- after the Iwi were portrayed as silent stoic witnesses in Skull Island, I really appreciated that they took an Iwi character, made her a main character, and gave her dialogue and a real role to play in the story while also keeping her deaf/mute. I think that was a good way to improve on the way that the Iwi got got sidelined in the last movie while still maintaining the worldbuilding!

- I didn’t appreciate so much that, y’know, they murdered the rest of her people off-screen in order to do it. Couldn’t they have gone “her parents died so she got adopted by a Monarch agent that was close to her family, but like, the rest of her tribe is fine”? Or at the very least “their island got fucked up so they had to be evacuated but like they’re settling in somewhere else”? “They’re living under this island dome with Kong and they know what’s up and Monarch’s keeping them in the loop and they decided they’re chill with their new dome home, but this one girl likes to go on adventures with Monarch”? Something? Did we have to kill them all off? Y’all make up an entire fictional indigenous culture and then murder them off-screen when you don’t need them? Just let them live.

- a few minutes in I was like “hold on, we’ve got two characters that speak sign language, we’ve got a giant gorilla, gorillas learn sign language, is there any reason they can’t teach Kong?” and then later I was like “OOOOOH!!” Humans and titans learning how to communicate with each other has been one of my favorite themes to explore in Monsterverse fanfic so I was absolutely tickled to see it getting explored in canon, too.

- That said I think it’s hilarious that the girl managed to teach Kong to sign without, like... anybody seeing. Kong’s hands are above the tree line and there are cameras everywhere, how did NOBODY with Monarch see him signing.

- Bernie’s weaponized being an annoying coworker to such a degree it can only be called an art, and I really appreciated it.

- Godzilla’s extra chonky in this movie and I dig it. Roomie noted he was extra crocodilian and I dig that too.

- “There’s been no confirmed titan sightings in three years” I don’t buy that for a minute. They’re BIG. Rodan NESTS IN VOLCANOES. They found a MOTHRA EGG. Humans have A SCARILY WELL-FUNDED ORGANIZATION DEDICATED SOLELY TO FOLLOWING TITANS AROUND. Like, most of the lore in GVK that I don’t personally like, I can be like “eh... I can tweak it just a little bit with headcanons to make it work for me...” but NO confirmed titan sightings? You expect me to believe ALL of them moved underground when we’d previously seen them all prefer to live above ground? You expect me to believe that now that they’re all AWAKE, they learned how to HIDE?? Uh-uh. And at the end of KOTM there was stuff in the credits about using titan droppings as biofuel, obviously they’re still walking around up top! Can’t take that from me. Nope.

- Who the FUCK is Ren Serizawa and how is he related to Ishiro Serizawa? IS he related? Maybe they just dropped the surname as another “yeah this is a Godzilla movie for Godzilla fans” easter egg but I have a hard time believing that he can’t be somehow related to the other character with the Very Important Last Name who was so important in the last two Godzilla movies. If he is related I’m sure it’s been explained in a tie-in comic or the novelization or something, I’ll look it up later.

- I had to look up how much weight huge battleships can carry while writing a KOTM fic where Ghidorah hitches a ride on one, and y’all, I had to pull weird gravity-negating magic to get him to ride on that boat. Godzilla and Kong woulda sunk that boat like a rock. All I could think during that scene is “this wouldn’t work and I know that because I DID THE RESEARCH and I wasn’t even getting PAID.” I’ll choose to believe that Monarch gets special heavy duty ships designed to carry titans but nobody mentioned it because it wasn’t relevant to Kong’s journey.

- The bit where they could see where Godzilla was swimming because he’d got half a ship hooked to him that was bobbing around on the surface, didn’t Jaws do something like that with a buoy? It’s been ages since I’ve seen Jaws. Anyway good reference.

- Insert “they’re gonna need a bigger boat” joke

- I LOVED the part where they shut down all the ships to get Godzilla to leave. Both because, one, it’s a spectacular callback to KOTM’s “turn off all the guns so he knows we’re not a threat” that makes it seem like now that’s just what Monarch knows what to do to get G to chill out, and two... we know that Godzilla backs off either when he’s killed his enemy or when his enemy has yielded to him. At the end of KOTM—and the end of GVK—the act of yielding is presented as very ceremonial and uniform across species: everyone lowers anything they’ve got that could be dangerous (claws, fangs, beaks, axes) and bows to show Godzilla they’re not gonna fight. Battleships, obviously, can’t bow, but even without being inducted into whatever secret titan cultural intricacies might be going on, humans have figured out their own way to “bow” to Godzilla: cut all the power, so their ships can’t move and can’t use weapons. I know the movie presented it as “playing dead,” but c’mon, if Godzilla could hear MechaG power up from halfway around the planet then he could hear that Kong’s heart was still beating, and he’s been around enough boats to know humans can turn them off and on when they want. The humans bowed to Godzilla. He accepted that they yielded and left.

- Mark Russell looked like such a dad in this movie, like he’s retired 100% from being a rugged action hero and now he’s just Pure Dad. I like him better when he’s a dad, it’s a good development for him. He got like 3 lines and I’m like “I appreciate this character development.”

- Despite all my qualms about how conspiracy theories and extremist groups are handled in Monsterverse (and WHICH conspiracy theories they decide to reference), I really love Madison and Bernie’s dynamic. The adult man who’s the excitable wide-eyed believer in every BS conspiracy you can possibly imagine; and then the serious, severe Teenage Girl On A Mission who’s hypercompetent because she was raised for five years by a friggin doomsday cult militia; and despite having wildly different personalities they’re just, in total agreement about everything. Handled just a BIT differently (like, leaving out the more gross IRL conspiracies) they would be a wildly fun comedic duo—especially with Josh the Only Sane Man coming along as the hapless sidekick. And they all play off of each other so well! Both in a comedic sense, and in more serious moments—when Bernie talked about his wife, there was a real moment of empathy between him and Madison with very little said. I’d watch an entire movie just about the three of them. I’d watch a TV show.

- On the one hand I wasn’t too much of a fan of KOTM’s “all titans... are inherently In Tune With Nature... nature has a Balance, because that’s a Real Thing and not an anthropocentric concept to describe how we like nature to act, and they automatically restore it... because they’re like, some kinda borderline divinities or something... we should probably be worshipping them...” thing; but, now that it was totally absent in GVK, I sorta miss it. Like I feel like there needs to be a balance, a few humans who are like “i lowkey worship these dudes?” and a few others who are like “they’re cool but like, that’s a lil extreme” and that neither side be presented as Right in how they regard titans’ relationship with nature.

- “All titans come from THE HOLLOW EARTH” nah I don’t buy that it’s silly. Basically, what I object to is the idea that all titans have some sort of intrinsic similarity (they all come from the same hitherto-unknown location; they all are part of the same pack that has the same alpha; they all are fueled/fed by the same energy source; etc) rather than letting them be SEPARATE species whose only unifying traits are “they’re all big enough to fuck everything up everywhere they go” and “they’re big enough that the typically-insurmountable barriers between different biomes (mountain ranges, valleys, long distances with terrible weather) aren’t insurmountable for them, so even if they’re specialized in different environments they still all have to deal with each other pretty often.” I’ll make some exceptions for convergent evolution (i.e., claiming multiple titans developed similar traits that are relatively easy to spontaneously evolve and a prerequisite for a creature to survive at such a large size). But I can’t buy “this big gorilla has more biologically in common with this big crocodile-iguana than he does with, say, gorillas,” or most of the other “all these titans have THIS IN COMMON” claims that Monsterverse makes, including “everyone’s from hollow earth.” So I’m tossing that out the window and substituting my own headcanons. Some might’ve evolved there but some evolved on the surface. Maybe a majority of them like ducking in and out of the hollow earth like some kind of titan shortcut system. Kong’s species, I can buy, IS native to hollow earth, considering that they built a whole-ass society down there with tools and architecture.

- I’m SO curious about the little underground Kong home, the Godzilla motif in the floor, and the axe that appeared to be made with a Godzilla scute. What’s the story there??? We know Godzilla’s species and Kong’s species are ancient rivals. Is it because Kong’s species hunted Godzilla’s to steal their scutes to make weapons, seeing them as a valuable resource the way, like, early humans considered woolly mammoths a valuable resource—thus making that Godzilla on the floor equivalent to cave art of mammoths made by people who hunted them—until the Godzillas got pissed and started fighting back en masse? Or were Godzillas and Kongs already enemies when Kongs decided to start making weapons out of their corpses? Did they use to be allies, fighting together, with Godzillas voluntarily offering shed scutes and/or bones of their deceased members to Kongs, and that place used to be a shared home until they started fighting?

- What about that power source, is it something that was already there that both Kongs and Godzillas started to deliberately harvest for technology/atomic breath? Or did Godzillas automatically channel that stuff and Kongs exploited/borrowed/traded with Godzillas to utilize it too? Or is the power from Godzillas who collaboratively poured a bunch of power into the place thus that Kongs were able to use it too? I doubt Godzilla’s species CREATED all that weird energy but the question remains of whether, like, they channel it FROM underground, or naturally produce the same thing in their own bodies, or what.

- Godzilla using his atomic breath to dig a hole STRAIGHT TO KONG just to KICK HIS ASS is hilarious. How lucky that Hong Kong just HAPPENS to be straight over Kong’s house! Were all the tunnels to the hollow earth made by pissed off Godzillas who wanted to kick monkey ass??

- I loved the aesthetic of the battle scene in Hong Kong, with the brightly colored neon building outlines, VERY cool look. The choreography of the battle scene was great too, especially

- we literally broke into applause when Kong shoved the axe handle in Godzilla’s mouth. Love it, perfect callback, that was the ONE thing from the original King Kong Vs Godzilla I was hoping to see referenced and there it was.

- You could really see a difference in how Kong and Godzilla fought—Kong doing a better job at using tools and the environment, Godzilla fighting more like a reptile. They seemed to emphasize Godzilla’s more animalistic behaviors in this movie to accomplish that contrast—he was down on all fours and moving like a crocodile more often, he was clawing at Kong’s chest—but even though it seemed a bit different of a combat technique it also didn’t seem out of place compared to how he fought in prior movies. And we’ve already seen that if Godzilla’s involved in a fight and one of the combatants knows how to use the environment, it’s typically not gonna be Godzilla. (See: Ghidorah using the reflection in a building’s windows to see what’s behind him, and recognizing a nearby power source and biting it to juice himself up.)

- So many of Godzilla’s enemies seem to have specialized in negating his atomic breath in order to combat him! The MUTOs directly suppress his ability to use it—and it makes sense that that’s an inborn ability they have, since they evolved to use Godzilla’s species as prey. Kong has a weapon that both acts as a shield to absorb the breath and turn it back against Godzilla’s species—they didn’t evolve to counter Godzilla, but they developed tools once a rivalry happened. Ghidorah’s the exception—which makes sense, since he came from space—but even at that we see him using tactics specifically to take into account Godzilla’s most powerful weapon (such as keeping one head on lookout for when he starts glowing so that they know when they need to dodge).

- LOVED the reveal that MechaG was based off of Ghidorah’s brain, it has vibes of both the Kiryu Saga and the way that Heisei MechaG is based off of Mecha-King Ghidorah. Not the most surprising plot twist, since we’d theorized that they might use San to make MechaG, but I wasn’t 100% sure they were gonna go with it until they finally did. Even when I was going “huh, the mecha pilot’s chamber looks weirdly organic” I didn’t make the connection to WHY until the reveal, lol.

- “Ghidorah’s necks are so long that the heads have to communicate with each other telepathically” that’s COMPLETELY WILD but I love it, it follows very well from their prior portrayal as telepathic empaths in Heisei, it lines up with their emphasis on electricity (because BRAINWAVES AND ELECTRICITY, hey ho movie monster pseudo science!), and it very much compliments my own private headcanon that they’ve got some psychic/mind control abilities.

- The movie ended with both “Godzilla won, technically” but also “since they teamed up as equals, the ending doesn’t FEEL like ‘Godzilla wins, Kong loses’ but rather ‘they both won against a common foe’” and since I’m on both Team Godzilla and Team They Should Be Friends, I’m happy with this outcome. Plus since the last time they fought, the Japanese movie company graciously let the American monster win, so it’s only polite that the American movie company graciously let the Japanese monster win.

- There were just a few too many humans in this movie. I was intrigued by Ren but we didn’t get much out of him, but like I guess somebody had to be in the pilot’s seat other than the Apex CEO. Didn’t care for the author of the hollow earth book, I feel like his role was superfluous. Didn’t need the Apex CEO’s daughter there at all, coulda done without her. How about this, combine all three roles. Instead of having a whole-ass author who knows about the hollow earth, just casually reference that Rick from KOTM wrote a book about it since he was the expert, and (since he wasn’t in this movie) say that he tragically died going to explore the hollow earth himself, and that way we’ve got the book with the “titans are from there” theory AND an excuse to share the “humans die when they go underground” info. Now, have Ren be working for Apex as a pilot for Mechagodzilla, but have him be MechaG’s pilot because he’s also a good pilot in general, and can fly those HEAV things. Have Apex send him to Monarch to be like “hey, you guys trust me right, since I’m Ishiro Serizawa’s relative? We at Apex have heard all about your failed hollow earth expedition, and due to Ishiro I’ve got some past ties to Monarch so I’ve got high clearance with y’all, so I could bring over this useful Apex tech that’d let you go underground and use what I know about hollow earth from my past time at Monarch to help guide things.” Once they’ve got the little chunk of energy stuff and go topside, he hustles it straight to Apex and straps into his seat to run MechaG. Bam, you’ve combined “person who knows enough about hollow earth to help the expedition,” “person who represents Apex’s interests and gets the energy,” and “person who pilots MechaG” into one character, in a way that takes three flat/underdeveloped characters and turns them into a single interesting character with a lot going on and some intriguing ties to the rest of the cast.

I think that’s everything?? Hoo.

[sorensfw]

Hello!! I hope you are doing well, wonderful person! I was wondering if I could have a tarot reading? I wanted to ask the cards what obstacles are in my way and how can I overcome them? Also, can I ask the cards where should I look to continue to find strength and resilience? Thank you so much!!! Sending you lots of love.

Aww! Thank you. Having these readings really picked me up today, so...I’m doing well now. On to your reading, which kind of got big.

Deep Images[1], what obstacles are in Imisterk's way, and how can she remove them?

Deck: Silicon Dawn

This is going to be interesting, because the SD is the most Occult Magick X-Filezzz Mysterious deck I have. I keep expecting it to tell me where the aliens are landing and how to help them dethrone the reptilons embedded in the secret one world government. Adjust your tinfoil hat psychoacoustic filters accordingly. I recommend setting Alpha-six point Gamma on the flourenstein scale[2]. It's also capable of rendering serious doom and gloom readings, which is probably why it was right for reading obstacles.

Obstacles (first row, in order):

1. Fleeing ghosts of the past is leading to doing something Foolish--but this might be Foolish in the tarot sense (the physical version of this card has reflective overprinting that catches the light at the right angle and shows phantom butterfly wings on the Fool and ghostly tentacles chasing them), because it is a Fool card (this deck has four Fools).

2. A fight that just wont end, but would if you could just talk things out. Probably with someone close to you--think seventh house relationships in the astrology sense (enemies are 'close' because why bother being enemies with someone you can just forget about).

3. (Shadowed, incomplete reading here) Something about masks over your uniqueness rubbing it out (The physical version of the card looks completely black unless seen from the right angle). You're special and unusual, and this is an obstacle against having a face that isn't just the mask you wear to fit in at the party. Something I can't read for, which could be shrouded by something really powerful, or could be that I'm running into reading someone's private thoughts who isn't consenting, which is something I specifically intend my readings not to do.

4. (Shadowed again) There's a place inside you that's always watching a lightless black sun go down over the edge of a dying world where even the swords made of rusted shards of Before The Fall the last survivors have been using to squabble over the dregs of lost joy are played out. It's making everything feel as apocalyptic as that vision looks, and it's sapping a precious bodily fluid spiritual resource in a way that's not obvious, because this whole drama is happening in darkness where you don't see it going on.

Solution (second row, read left to right): Don't do complicated magic or call for help. Small actions will accumulate into world-shattering consequences if you trust and fall with it and don't make a big deal of things or try to rekindle stuff whose time is past.

This a surprisingly un-Silicon-Dawn answer, so take that into account.

Phew. Onward:

Deep Images, where should Imisterk look to continue to find strength and resilience?

Deck: Mystic Manga

...when it didn't come up Silicon Dawn again I was going to say we were back to the real world, but with the Mystic Manga it's more like we're off to read right-to-left about about the hapless Fool not noticing that all sixteen court cards have a crush on his bishie ass and are vying for his hand in mawwiage--but it's also off to a colorful happy fantasy land where everyone including you is suave and sexy and omigod those outfits right?

The reading is a mini-love-story spread, but that can mean self-love, too. Left to right the cards go:

1. Your role

2. Your work

3. Happily Ever After

4. Their work

5. Their role

It's read from the edges in.

Because of my other-people rule this usually means both partners are the querent, but that might be false if you have someone I don't know about who wouldn't mind contributing to this reading, so I'm going to read that aspect ambiguously and let you decide which you think it is.

Your role: R. 5 Wands. Something's happening. Whatever it is, don't fight it, even if the fighting-it doesn't seem that serious or is like a game. If and only if that feels fucking wrong, instead it's the other extreme: go nuclear and fight for your life--but I really doubt that for such a happy-cuddly deck.

Your work: 5 Cups. Things look kind of wrecked, and feeling better feels as far away as that castle, so the work is to see where they're not wrecked. It might seem like only two small little cups out of the many you had before, but there's enough water there to throw a party like the star is throwing in the next card. It may or may not be necessary to doff that wonderfully melancholy cape-and-buckles grief-chic ensemble, but I notice the Star's going for a more minimal look fashion-wise.

Their role: R. 6 Cups. Nostalgia, however much old times might look good, they're not a kid anymore and it's time to grow up.

Their work: High Priestess. Take a critical look at things, and don't hide your disgust (she's clearly editing her Abridged List of Things She Hates), but remember to look to your intuition, not what logically makes sense, or you'll end up just as Scroogy as she looks. Traditionally, there's a body of water peeking through the High Priestess' veil, and I read that as present here, too.

Happily Ever After: Star. Clothes have been a huge theme in this reading, and we weren’t even the doing anime-standard Deep Cleavage, when suddenly--! Both work cards have unhappy people in super-restrictive clothing and a distant body of water, and now here we are having a relaxing bath in the magical flowery lagoon of innocence with an expression that says to me “why yes I did suplex the angel with a flaming sword that turns every which way to get in here, and I’d do it again and still not give any fucks at all”. This is what happens when you and whoever it is move beyond your respective challenges and leave the armor behind. Maybe it means being vulnerable together, maybe it means sexy sex, or maybe it literally means busting out the bath bombs and essential oil diffuser and giving yourself a spa night every so often. The concrete advice depends on who's involved and whether you're in a position to figuratively or literally get naked wth them--but if you can, it will be like drinking the nectar of the gods for you both. Whatever it is, you may need to throw down a manifestation of patriarchal or religious shame or guilt or two to get at it, so don’t be afraid to rush the gatekeeper if they look like a republican senator. This would be that nuclear option from before, actually.

Good luck, and I hope this helps, and if you’re totally weirded out I hope you at least laughed along the way.

[1] It’s what I call the collective-unconscious imagery galaxies that underly the tarot archetypes and many other visual oracles. Past life thing, long story.

[2] I'm reasonably sure none of that is a real thing, but you never know.

[spread images created using BlackMirror]

[betweengenesisfrogs]

OFF THE CUFF HOMESTUCK THOUGHTS #3: THE SELF PILE DOESN’T STOP FROM GETTING TALLER OR: THE PROBLEM OF DEAD MARIOS

DISCLAIMER

IMPORTANT THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

[CHECK THE TAG FOR MORE THOUGHTS]

So, a long-ass time ago, Rose and Dave had a conversation like this:

TT: After you go, what do you think will happen to me? TT: Will I just cease to exist? TG: i dont know TG: i mean your whole timeline will TG: maybe TT: Maybe? TT: Is there a chance it'll continue to exist, and I'll just be here alone forever? TT: I'm not sure which outcome is more unsettling. TG: the thing with time travel is TG: you cant overthink it TG: just roll with it and see what happens TG: and above all try not to do anything retarded TT: What do you think I should do? TG: try going to sleep TG: our dream selves kind of operate outside the normal time continuum i think TG: so if part of you from this timelines going to persist thats probably the way to make it happen TT: Ok. TG: and hey you might even be able to help your past dream self wake up sooner without all that fuss you went through TT: I think the true purpose of this game is to see how many qualifiers we can get to precede the word "self" and still understand what we're talking about.

This is the most important sentence in Homestuck.

I am dead serious.

Well, OK, I mean, it’s pretty important for understanding some major Homestuck themes and shit or something like that.

Also, I totally should have said: Pre-Retcon Doomed Timeline Non-Dreamself Rose but ultimately about to become Dreamself Rose who semi-merged with Pre-Retcon Alpha Timeline Rose and Doomed Timeline Dave aka Davesprite AKA future Davepetasprite^2 or as we all call them around the office, Davepeta, had that conversation.

Maybe you begin to see what I’m going to talk about here.

One of the major frustrations a lot of people had with the retcon was that the characters we ended up with at the end weren’t the ones we’d come to love and know throughout the story. Was it even worth it, to lose the characters we loved to the tyranny of Game Over? The victorious kids, with the exception of John and Roxy, were other people, with other histories, other goals, and other choices.

Allow me to submit that that may be the whole point.

SBURB is cruel. We’ve known that for a long time. It’s cruel not as Caliborn is cruel, but as the cosmos is cruel, as a supernova is cruel. It wants what it wants, and doesn’t care about how that intersects with the needs of humanity. It wants to make universes through a complex game-playing method, and drags hapless, vulnerable adolescents along for the ride. And most of the time it doesn’t even succeed, leaving its champions to rot in a doomed timeline or similar! Skaia’s victory is an amoral creation myth where individual human beings are just the carved pieces on the chessboard. (I mean, the other ones. Not the carapacians.)

Again, let’s consider the theme of VIDEO GAMES vs. REAL LIFE.

Homestuck, let’s be real, is basically some postmodern horror timey-wimey Jumanji. For a generation way more familiar with pixels than cute little tokens It’s easy for teenagers and in fact, basically everyone, to fantasize about escaping their life and slipping into some game world forever, where they get to do awesome things and be a heroic person.

Homestuck makes that literal. Congratulations, everything you ever knew is dead. You will never see it again, except your internet friends, who turn out also to be your family and other important people. I mean, from a distance, SBURB sounds like an awesome game, right? You figure out who you are and get to wear a cool costume displaying that identity. You get to make anything you want and enjoy this hyperflexible mythology tailored to YOUR CHOICES. HS fans talk all the time about how cool it would be to play a real version of SBURB. That’s a big part of the appeal of SBURB fan adventures. They put you and your friends in the story. Or your favorite characters! It sounds like a fantasy come true.

The thing is, as fantastical as it is, it’s also really fucked up, and ultimately you and your friends are being used. By a giant frog to let it have its babies. By the universe. By a smug blue cloud thing that doesn’t care about you at all.

SBURB does not care about you at all.

The funny thing, SBURB features a mythology with so many layers and nuances and seemingly human motifs about growth and self that you might search for some grand ultimate meaning behind it, but it’s not even human enough to have a personality, to be something you can argue with or fight. It just is. It’s all the cruelty and power of a god without any of the dazzling personality. It’s empty. It just wants to make universes all day long, or fail trying. It is a great, weird tadpole-making machine that eats children.

One of the big ways it doesn’t care about you is its attitude toward the self. Humans and trolls and whatnot prefer not to be relentlessly duplicated. SBURB says, oh yeah, let’s make tons of copies of the player characters and use them for a lot of different purposes.

There’s the dreamself, an essential bifurcation of identity (you are now and were always the dream moon princex) that sometimes gets merged into god tier but sometimes doesn’t. There’s doomed timeline selves, who exist ultimately to augment an Alpha timeline whose Alphaness is decided very arbitrarily and frequently by Lord English. There’s the you who exists before a scratched session and the you who exists afterward, who are two different people but started as one baby in an act of ectobaby meteor duplication, your player self and your guardian self. Dead timeline yous fill up the dreambubbles made by the horrorterrors and get endlessly confused with each other. Any one of these could be the you experience being at any given moment, and which one it is entirely arbitrary. Don’t like being Dead Nepeta #47? Tough hoofbeast leavings, kiddo.

To top it all off, in Terezi: Remember, we learn that every single time we thought someone changed from one self to another, was resurrected or something like that, it was another act of duplication. For every time someone’s died, there’s another version of them waiting in the Dream Bubbles, surprised that they’re not the main character anymore. And we have no way of knowing which is which. Even John, good old everyman John, may or may not be the person who died three or four times. It’s really impossible to say whether we’ve been following the same person throughout our story, or just the illusion of the same person, like a horrifying cosmic flipbook.

The retcon is a return to this same theme. Ultimately, there’s very little new in the changes John makes to reality except that they drive the point home.

John’s friends all died. John and his friends won the game. These things are both true at the same time, except those things may not have happened to the same people. There was a happy ending. Hooray! For, um, some folks who may or may not be the ones we care about. In fact, it’s very confusing, because from Rose’s perspective, Roxy is dead but came back to life, and from Roxy’s perspective Rose is dead but came back to life, except also she came back to life as a weird tentacle catgirl of pure id and self –indulgence. So there’s that. Um. Which Rose are we rooting for again?

Or wait: is it none of them, because the first Rose died in a doomed timeline, hundreds of panels and a number of years ago?

There’s a tension here which one experiences between saying it’s okay because it’s still the same people, and saying it’s not okay, because it’s not the same people at all. This tension is exactly what we’re meant to wrestle with. To put it another way, Homestuck asks if identity can work in aggregate. Are all Johns John, all Roses Rose, and do they all share in what they accomplish? Or are the final victors only accidents created by the whims and needs of the frog baby machine?

What I’m saying, basically, is that the retcon, in the sense that it pointed out our confused relationship with these characters, was already here.

In interviews and questions put to him over the years, Hussie constantly compares HS and SBURB to other video games, particularly Mario, which he frequently returns to as a baseline of comparison that most of his readers will know. One answer, from a recent Hiveswap interview, is particularly revelatory. To the question of “Why do you kill off all your characters?” Hussie replies:

[…]HS is supposedly a story that is also a game. In games, the characters die all the time. How many times did you let Mario fall in the pit before he saved the princess? Who weeps for these Marios. In games your characters die, but you keep trying and trying and rebooting and resetting until finally they make it. When you play a game this process is all very impersonal. Once you finally win, when all is said and done those deaths didn’t “count”, only the linear path of the final victorious version of the character is considered “real”. Mario never actually died, did he? Except the omniscient player knows better. HS seems to combine all the meaningless deaths of a trial-and-error game journey with the way death is treated dramatically in other media, where unlike our oblivious Mario, the characters are aware and afraid of the many deaths they must experience before finally winning the game.

The big man hass the answer.

Homestuck is the story of those dead Marios.

Other works, like Undertale, have engaged with this topic as well. But one of the major differences between Undertale and Homestuck is that in Undertale, between “lives,” one’s consciousness is preserved. In Homestuck, it’s discontinuous, and the value of the overall trial-error process is called into question by the fact that you, the player, may not even get to experience the victory. What meaning does victory hold if that is the case?

So, to put it in a nice thesis format:

One of the central themes of Homestuck is the challenge of reconciling an arbitrary and destructive pattern of growth and victory with the death and suffering you experienced along the way. Homestuck asks: is victory worthwhile if you’re not you anymore? And would you be able to know?

What even is the self? Is there such a thing?

If you were left feeling somewhat disconcerted by our heroes’ tidy victory and departure to their cosmic prize, or by how which Rose gets the spotlight is so deeply, deeply arbitrary, there’s a good reason for that. You’re supposed to be.

The philosophical problem of Wacky Cat Rose is insignificant next to the bullshit of SBURB.

And don’t forget—John and Roxy’s denizens helped them achieve the retcon. Ultimately, the victory they achieved was mediated by the same amoral system of SBURB, and was a victory over an enemy, Caliborn, whose power was created, perpetuated, and ended by that same system.

Okay, so here’s where it gets contentious. There’s an argument to be made, which I’m not sure how I feel about, that some of the character development that could have been in post-retcon Act 6 was left out precisely to push this feeling and play up this tension. Note that this is not the same thing as saying that they were deliberately badly written, but that they’re deliberately written to make us uneasy.That Hussie deliberately played with the balance between making these retconned characters feel familiar and making them feel eerily different to leave us feeling uneasy with the result.

I’m not sure I like that idea. It smacks a little too much of that “everything is perfect” thinking that comes sometimes from the far Metastuck camp. Some of the differences may also be the result of flawed writing. (See: Jane and Jake’s character arcs, which I might talk about later.) And I want to be able to critique those flaws. Ultimately, I think we still needed more time and development to figure out who these new people were—even if our goal was ultimately to compare them to their earlier selves. And again, more conscious acknowledgement of the problem from our heroes—especially John, the linchpin in this last and biggest act of duplication—might have helped drive this theme home.

Still, I think the Problem of Dead Marios is one of the most fundamental questions of Homestuck, maybe THE biggest question. It’s essential to understand it to understand what Hussie’s doing—or attempting to do— in the retcon and the ending.

I don’t know that Homestuck offers us a clear answer to that question. There are some confusions around the issue, too. Where do merged selves fit in, exactly? Clearly they’re a big part of the discussion, because Hussie spends some time in Act 6, especially near the end bringing the identity-merging powers of the Sprites to the forefront. (See also: the identity-merged nightmare that is Lord English.)  Can we even come up with a clear answer to what it means when a dead Mario returns to life grotesquely fused with Toad? How does he beat the game? Does he tell himself that the princess is in another castle? Or what if he merges with Peach? Are they their own princess? How do they know if they’re in the right castle?

Um. Anyway—

Interestingly, it’s not all grotesque—spritesplosions suggest that personalities that are too different don’t stay together long, so a fusion might rely on some inherent compatibility between the two players. Erisol’s self-loathing, sure, but also Fefeta’s cheerfulness. Davepeta seems to be a way of bringing out the best in their players, a way of getting Davesprite past his angst and Nepeta past her fear. Honestly, I know a lot of people don’t like Davepeta as the ending of these two characters’ arcs, but I can’t help but love it. They’re the ultimate coolkid. Cool enough to know they don’t have to be cool. Regular Dave got there, too, of course. But was his retcon assist from John ultimately any different?

Then, of course, we come to Davepeta’s speech to Jade in one of the last few updates before Collide. Davepeta suggests that there is such a thing as an ultimate self beyond the many different selves one piles up throughout the cosmos. A set of principles that describes who you are that’s larger than any individual instance of you. Your inherent Mariohood. (Maybe this is comparable to your Classpect identity, which attempts to describe who you are?) Davepeta even tells Jade, strikingly, that one might learn to see beyond the barriers between selves. Be the ur-self, in practice, rather than theory. This would be incredible news for Jade, who wrestles with the issue of different selves perhaps more than any other character. (There’s a lot to say about Jade.)

Honestly, I wish this ur-self idea had been developed more, and I honestly expected it to be. It doesn’t fully come to fruition, I feel. (Same goes for Davepeta’s character. Ohhhh, ZING!) I’m not sure it entirely makes philosophical sense, especially with fusion—I mean, doesn’t Davepeta themself disprove it? Or at least complicate it? Like, are they part of the ur-Dave or the ur-Nepeta? They seem to imply they’re BOTH? Does that even work? Does that mean that Marieach is all the Peaches and Marios at once?

(In fact, Bowser/Peach/Mario are but the three manifestations of one eternal principle. Also, Bowser/Peach are the true power couple. Read my fanfiction plz.)

And what, say, of Dirk, who ultimately ends up rejecting aspects of his other selves? It feels like there’s a lot more you could say here, and I wonder if Hussie would have said more, if he’d had time. What’s weird is, none of our victorious kids never reach an ur-self (though to their descendants, they become archetypal to some degree), which one might have expected. They’re just individual selves who happened to get lucky. Does that make them representative of the whole? It feels like something’s missing here, or like something got dropped at the last minute.

Same goes for the idea of the Ultimate Riddle. You’d be forgiven for missing it, but there’s been this riddle in the background lore of SBURB that seems to have something to do with personal agency in this overwhelming, overarching system. Karkat called it predestination, saying something like “ANY HOPE YOU HAD OF DOING THINGS OTHERWISE WAS JUST A RUSE.” But others have interpreted it more positively. My favorite interpretation, from bladekindeyewear: the answer to the Riddle is that YOU shape the timeline through your existence, personality, and choices, even when it looks like it’s all predestination. Ultimately it’s your predestination, your set of events, based deeply on your nature, that you are creating. Someone like Caliborn can use his innate personality to achieve power; someone like John might be able to use it to achieve freedom.

I definitely expected something like that to be expressed more explicitly. Like, a big ah-ha moment that helps John or Jade or whoever understand how to escape Caliborn’s system. Something like that would have been very helpful for a lot of our heroes, actually, who’ve been pushed around by Skaia and SBURB together, in finding a cathartic ending.  Once again, I wonder if something was dropped or rushed because there wasn’t time to put it all in. There’s places where you can see hints of that Answer being implied, maybe? But it’s kind of ambiguous.

You can see how the Answer to the Ultimate Riddle ties into some of Davepeta’s ideas. If your personality, the rules of your behavior are a fundamental archetype that goes beyond each individual self, then the answer to whether it matters if one self of yours makes it through to victory is an emphatic YES. You are all of those people, and by winning one round with Skaia, you’ve won the whole game, despite all the arbitrary challenges and deaths it heaps upon you along the way.

This may strike some as too positive for Skaia’s brutality, or again, some way of excusing flaws in many characters’ arcs, or unfair things that happen to them. To be fair, I don’t know that Davepeta’s necessarily meant to be taken as authoritative or the voice of Hussie. They may simply be offering a purrspective.

Hussie not choosing to come right out and engage with the Ultimate Riddle leaves the question of Dead Marios and what they mean for the victorious versions of our cast very open. I like that in some ways—let the reader decide—but I can’t help but wish we had more to work with in making that decision. Plus, it might have brought the thematic messages of Homestuck all the way home to tie them more closely to our characters and their experiences—character development being one of the things most people found most lacking in the ending.

NEXT TIME: All that wacky gnostic stuff probably

[wheredidhiseyebrowsgo]

Do you know of any fics where Stiles is a werewolf while Derek is a human? I haven't had much luck while searching.

AND

Anonymous said:Do you guys have any role reversal? Where the script is flipped because someone else is the born werewolf, or where someone else gets bitten?

Yup! For anon and @imjustanawkwardgoth! - Anastasia

Do You Even Lift? by smokesforsterek

(1/1 I 818 I General)

As for a prompt ... Maybe some Sterek where Stiles is the werewolf and Derek is that adorable human being? If not, let me know and I'll think up something else.

So, I had to think about this one a little, my initial idea was filthy smut but after thinking it over, I wanted to do something a little different? So here is Derek and Stiles having a weight lifting competition.

Remember That I Love You by DerekHaleGirl97

(3/? I 3,819 I Mature)

What happens when the person you care about suddenly doesn't exist anymore? If all of your memories of them were taken away to the point where they never existed? If you couldn't recall how you meet them, who they were, or why they were ever important to you in the first place?

Would they still be important?

Stiles feels that something is missing. He can feel it in his heart. In his soul. Stiles can't recall ever losing anything, but maybe that's the problem? Maybe something is keeping him from remembering, and he has no idea what it could be.

What is Stiles missing?

Why is he missing it?

And why does he feel so empty without it?

The Five Stages of Sexing Derek Hale by FionaRex (orphan_account)

(3/5 I 3,828 I Explicit)

Derek Hale is the creative writing teacher at Beacon Hills High School. Derek Hale lives in a town full of asshole alphas. Derek Hale is a human emissary for Talia Hale. Derek Hale is going into heat soon. Derek Hale will not look at or talk to Stiles when he does. He MUST NOT talk to Stiles. Well, considering Gerard wants him for unknown reasons and Scott's pack is working with Talia's pack, that seems pretty impossible. Well, damn.

I'm Hunting on the Night (We're Playing for the Fights) by PaddyWack

(1/1 I 6,137 I Teen)

Stiles is the unfortunate wolf that gets into some trouble during his moon cycle. Derek is the hapless hunter that finds him.

Or, the one where Stiles steps in a bear trap and has to be rescued.

Trust me, I'm a werewolf. by spac3bar7end3r

(4/? I 6,118 I Teen)

Stiles rolls his eyes at Scott because ten years as a best friend and he hasn’t changed. Even an alpha bite can’t do anything to his friend’s brain at all.“Dude! Spiderman is a fictional character!”“Werewolf used to be one too until you mentioned it!”“Duh. Just because you’ve never seen it doesn’t mean it’s not real. “ Stiles sighs. His voice is pitch higher than usual when he tries to win an argument.“Prove it, “ Scott says with seriousness. He still doesn’t really believe it though.“Scott, trust me, I’m a werewolf.”

who's gonna run this town tonight by callunavulgari

(1/1 I 6,880 I Mature)

“So,” Derek says, after they break free of the preserve. They’re maybe ten minutes away from the station. “Who is it? The John Doe?”

“Should you really be asking me that, Deputy Hale?” Stiles mutters into his knees, voice strangely weak for someone who spent the last thirty minutes mouthing off to the people arresting him. “I’m not afraid of you,” Derek says before he can stop himself, glancing quickly at the road before returning the majority of his attention to the rear-view.

“Maybe you should be,” Stiles whispers, and Derek jolts like he’s been hit. He returns his attention to the road, ignoring Stiles slumping back into his seat, so he almost misses the quiet voice from behind him. “Scott McCall. Someone killed my brother and I mean to find out who the fuck did it. Nobody’s going to stop me, not even you.”

To Be Alive by funkmetalalchemist

(8/8 I 7,193 I Mature)

Derek is a human. One night, he meets a werewolf named Stiles who begins to insert himself into Derek's life bit by bit.

Broken Lines by lilithduvare

(2/? I 7,799 I Explicit)

Stiles looked at the woman who used to be his mother dead in the eyes, his blood sitting frozen in his veins from terror and heartbreak. She was still beautiful, even with her husband’s blood covering her mouth and fingers, matching the color of her glowing, inhuman irises, but she wasn’t Stiles’ mother. This monster, who wore that achingly familiar smile, crouching over the mangled and barely recognizable body of Stiles’ father could never be his mother.

--Stiles is turned into a werewolf by his own supposedly dead mother and has to spend the next three years being tortured and terrorized under the Alpha Pack's tender care. But he doesn't break and in the end he makes his escape. Only to get recruited by the American Alpha Council which eventually leads him to cross path with the Hales' only human child, Derek in more ways than one.

The man I'm supposed to be by Narya

(2/? I 8,471 I Mature)

Derek just couldn't understand Stiles at all. For a werewolf he was too loud, talked too much, and smiled too widely. He couldn't take him seriously, no matter how much he scared him sometimes. But Derek was just a human, and he couldn't resist temptation for too long.

little life-giver by The Byger (Byacolate)

(5/5 I 9,039 I General)

It looked like Stiles. Mostly. But there was hair growing out the sides of his face, and his teeth were sharp, and when he reached over to grip at the side of the stall, his hands had become claws. And Derek had to cover his mouth before he screamed because never, never in his wildest dreams had he ever thought he’d actually meet a fairytale monster.

Bonds of Power by Miya_Morana

(2/2 I 18,313 I Teen)

When Stiles suddenly wakes up as an Alpha werewolf and finds out that Derek has become human, he reluctantly accepts Derek’s pack as his while they attempt to find out what exactly happened and how to reverse it. But as they all try to adjust to the situation, the Alpha Pack is breathing down their neck, and they’re going to need all the help they can get to face that threat.

Vise Versa by thedarknovak

(7/28 I 19,868 I Mature)

Once upon a time long before the events of teen wolf began, a butterfly was killed and skewed the events of reality in the universe. This resulted in the Stilinski and McCall family being werewolves, and the Hale family being human. Reality in the Teen Wolf universe is not the same because of this. A cascade of differences are now a reality. Stiles and Scott lose their entire family to a fire.

Or Derek Hale was just a normal human teenager until he gets dragged by his best friend Erica into the forest and she gets herself bit by a rogue werewolf. They also encounter a 23 year old Stiles Stilinski who they thought had long since left the town. Derek’s life spirals into a barrage of supernatural occurrences and a complicated relationship with the lanky werewolf named Stiles.

Or In which some roles are reversed, but also some totally messed up and rearranged. The events of teen wolf happen, but things aren’t the same, things are changed, and characters go through the events in their respective personalities. See chapter notes for a more in depth explanation of my train of thought about this fics inner workings.

tested and pained, blessed and sustained by The Byger (Byacolate)

(4/? I 36,952 I Explicit)

“We spent four days camping in the Rockies just for you to prove it was possible to ‘live off the land’ and ‘get back to your wolfy roots’,” Derek said, bringing up his free hand for those sassy airquotes, “and by the fourth day, you'd snuck into the nearby village before I’d woken up to buy yourself magazines and a skinny latte.”

“I think the point you’re missing here is that I was a true man of the wild for four whole days, Derek. You can’t scoff at that.”

The New Kid by princessmandablackleg

(4/? I 40,091 I Mature)

Derek and his sisters move back to Beacon Hills to start a new life away from New York. However he wasn't expecting Stiles Stilinski and his group of odd friends and their furry secret. Not to mention some secrets from his own family's past to add to the complications.

Ruin me, Alpha. by Lizamineliy

(17/35 I 64,388 I Explicit)

Stiles was bitten when he was 18 years old and since has been an Alpha. He happens to also be the lead singer of "The Pack," a world-famous rock band that his best friends and he started during a time of chaos to spread werewolf awareness.

Derek needs a new job after working as a Personal Assistant (PA) to asshole Jackson Whittemore. Derek happens to land the job as a new PA for "The Pack."

Can he handle the new job and all the work he's cut out for?

Or better yet, can he handle Stiles, the young, hot, Alpha who threatens to turn Derek's moral compass all the way around.

Will he step into the darkness with Alpha Stilinksi or bring him to the light?