#bro and dirk are the same ouroboros

[poltergrease]

what a villain complex and a dash of self loathing can do 💀

[knights-unwelcommentary]

These are my notes about the movies we've seen so far

Con air

Dad gets taken to jail (Dad Crocker and Dad Egbert?)

Heartfelt letters that are at the same time lacking some emotion and too verbose for a little kids (All the letters between the human players)

The stuffed bunny

Squeal like a pig

Dumb explosions

A murderer that's very murder-happy (Jack?)

Bunny back in the box

Needing to piss at a bad time (Dave?)

Flying car gone wrong

Failure to launch

Mysteriously violent animals

Rogue feathery asshole

Awful friend group sticks together anyway

Way too many meddling people spying on their friends through a computer

Saw

Puppets, among them one controlled by the bad guy

Spirals on the cheeks (the cherubs?)

Want to play a game (Bro Strider?)

Weird traps

Generous amounts of blood

Not very smart law enforcement

Dark room for photos

Two people chained to keep the opposite ends of the room unreachable (the cherubs?)

The story skips back and forth in time every other scene (homestuck's flashbacks, future snapshots and whatnot)

One of the two people trapped is a dick and also cuts off his leg to escape (Caliborn?)

The previous bad guy was a cover for the real bad guy (Doc Scratch?)

Game Over

Hook

Grandma was the heroine of her own story but then decided to retire to start a family (Nanna Egbert?)

Animal Nanny (part of the deal with lusus and trolls and Jade with Bec)

Tinkerbell/fairies

Hey listen (WV?)

Clock room (and vicious clock destruction)

Pirates

Stupid goons (the Felt?)

Kissing as a plot device

Crowd of longevous orphans (all the players and ghosts?)

Rufioh (as Rufioh)

The villain tries to brainwash a little girl, unsuccessfully

Creative insults

We're doing it

Neverending story

Mounted wolf head

Protagonist's kind of a friendless loser with a disconnect with his parental figure (John?)

Fascination for horses, and it being presented as weird (the author, Equius and Dirk?)

A story about a story about stories that blends with reality

Snake and ouroboros symbolism

Something's obiterating existence and killing everything on its path

Giant creature posses an existential quandary to the hero, tempting them to make a selfish choice (denizen)

Werewolf in pursuit of the hero to kill him (Bec Noir)

The one reading the story can give commands to the hero

Giving names to the characters as a rite of passage

Reality breaking down as the unstoppable force spreads

I failed. (Game Over Dirk?)

Ivory tower with a sphere contains a girl's bedroom (Jade and Kanaya)

The reader is a character in the first narrative layer, and is the one the quest was all about

Falcor makes the bullies pay (exact same thing happens in homestuck as a non sequitur bit from the author)

Hitch

Beloved pet kidnapping

The guy's too intense to keep a relationship going for long

He starts coaching others on romance and has better results than with his own love life (Karkat?)

There's a heiress involved and she's dating a "loser" (the narrative presents him as a loser because of his appearance)

Attempting to drag a woman into a committed relationship and going way overboard

Guy gets into slapstick and awkward situations mostly because of poor foresight and a bit of bad luck (yeah Hitch sounds a lot like Karkat)

Making it happen

Silly dance moves

Food allergies as a plot device

50 first dates

Eridan's pants

Check out this dude's muscles (Actually this dude's the story's joke character and has a lot of traits from the troll guys and a lot of bigotry's directed at him)

Memory shenanigans, the girl has to be reminded of her life since an accident a year before every signgle day (dream bubbles?)

Egg head portrait (Doc Scratch?)

Weekend at bernie's

Skulls

Falling down stairs

Necrophilia as a shock value joke???

Dead guy's a puppet

Hog tying the murderer (Gamzee)

Zany rich guy keeps getting into trouble after death (Grandpa Harley and Poppopos Crocker)

Serendipity

Absurd coincidences and predestination

Romance theory of fated partners

Papping

Bromance but with feelings jams (moirallegiance?)

Indiana jones

Complete disregard for preserving ancient artifacts (Grandpa Harley)

unconventional uses for a whip

Baddass archeology

Ancient magical artefacts

Mysterious ruins

Stupid gun deaths

Angels are dangerous light thingies (homestuck angels?)

Good luck chuck

The stoner's morally bankrupt

A guy gets a curse laid on him through ludicrous circumstances

Goths are actual witches

A girl has some supernaturally shitty luck

Vodoo pin doll

Tomb raider

Double pistols and skimpy outfits to the point of being impractical (Jake?)

Fighting some overpowered training robot (brobot?)

Evil corporation's behind the death of the beloved parental figure (Grandma Harley?)

Robotics guy/tech expert (Dirk?)

Complete disregard for preserving ancient artifacts (Jake)

Dumb triangle conspiracy (the illuminate joke with Hal and AR?)

The explorer has a dangerous fall from pretty high (Jake)

Dangerous creepy guy tries to manipulate a young lady and leverages his knowledge for it (Doc Scratch?)

Dangerous giant gears (LOHAC?)

My best friend's girl

One character has a front of emotionally detached douchebag dudebro type

He's roomates with a romance obsessed guy that's very serious about his girlfriend

The girlfriend cuts things off with her boyfriend cause he's too much and has no chill (karezi?)

The other guy offers to wing man for his roomate but ends up taking things too far (reminds me of the Hal, Dirk and Jake situation)

The other guy starts fooling around with the chick and somewhere along the line starts a serious relationship with her (daverezi)

The ex boyfriend's desperate to get back together and starts doing stupid shit

Regular love to hate love (quadrant vacillation?)

Avatar

Conscription in space

High ranking crew can do whatever the hell it wants

Imperialism in space

The disabled character prefers his dream self to his waking self (Tavros?)

Blue lady on a big fucking tree (Aranea?)

Big monsters with a visceral and symbiotic relationship with the aliens (partially what troll and lusii have going on)

Dragons

Bomb cube made of cans (shaving cream bomb that killed Jade?)

[badshipshitblog]

@dinnerdog:

does cal fetishize incest? his rejection of callie is exactly what makes their sburb session “infertile”, robbing it of any genetic diversity (sburb players are parents to a new universe, and cal’s dead session is masturbatory.) incest attraction is core to his species’ reproduction too, and he rejects his feelings for her. the messaging seems like a balanced non-destructive fanbase = brosis affection. perchance.

really really good point, thank you! i now have further thoughts (note that i read consumption & murder as sexual)

caliborn kills calliope but he doesn't absorb/predominate/incorperate her. he then spends the rest of his life chasing her ghost. LE sustains himself by continuously reproducing the societal conditions that lead to his existence

caliborn enters the game having killed calliope--a violent act of incest/self destruction. not the incest or rejection but the violence that causes infertility?

trolls reproduce incestuously, with everyone fucking their mom. simultaneously they have a female ruler. mother/son incest as the societal model. (also: empire is sustained via fucking the motherland)

the dancestors' session was unwinnable, but the beta trolls' session wasn't. the beta trolls enter the game by starting as 2 opposing teams that then resolve into the same thing (ouroboros)

the beta trolls are unable to win (leave the narrative) due to bec noir, an agent of Narrative/LE from the session they created. the beta trolls lived in a society shaped by LE. this is likened to the tumor inherent to the beta session

the beta kids' session is fertile but has a tumor (LE's influence). in-universe, LE asserts direct control via bro@dave, scratch@rose, and less directly via condy@nana and gpa)

the alpha kids' session is infertile as a continuation of their themes involving miscommunication/unfruitfulness/etc. similar disconnect between dirk & roxy w their respective ancestors?

alpha session can only be won via combining with beta session--breaking game structures to do so. involves dirk/dave & rose/roxy reconcilliations--dissolutions of previous power gaps & misunderstandings

john's retcon powers operate outside the established narrative structure. the point of the retcon is to revive vriska and reunite her with terezi (scourge sisters). LE is destroyed by reuniting with calliope

escaping the narrative/society involves breaking existing structures that cause power imbalance & being able to reconcile with your sibling/reabsorb self

so LE embodies parent/child incest as a societal force alongside misogyny, empire, racism, etc--abusive unequal power structures. but sibling incest/selfcest is placed in opposition to that. twincest is the only ethical relationship (no age gap)

caliborn fetishizes incest

caliborn is representative of certain types of homestuck readers, namely hateful misogynists who want homestuck to cater to them personally. more broadly, we can say he's representative of certain cultural trends

lord english is less of a person and more of a force that propels the narrative via those cultural trends. becoming a cog in the narrative machine is inherently dehumanizing (dehuman = puppet)

calliope is representative of other homestuck readers who are nicer (lol). both caliborn & calliope engage in transformative & curatorial fandom

calliope & caliborn are the same entity. they are also attracted to each other. homestuck blurs the line between siblings and different versions of the self. fandom cannot actually be easily separated into "types"

we can use "masturbatory" and "incestuous" as synonyms

fanfiction as incestuous in that it's regurgitating existent stories. rearranging the same gene pool

becoming the ultimate self involves a collapse of identity/consumption of alt versions = incestuous

the narrative that the kids exist within wants self-perpetuation. sburb reproduces itself (asexual/incestuous reproduction). LE as a parasite intrinsic to sburb (gendered violence intrinsic to our society, which is based on constant reproduction of the family within itself and within society)

incest as a narrative force. closer to incest = closer to narrative control

narrative = society = family writ large

[madam-melon-meow]

Gender in Homestuck is a Ouroboros. Which is to say it’s all Caliborn’s fault.

1. Cherubs are canonically, not working with the same sexual dimorphism humans are, seeing as opposite “sexes” of cherubs are based on a good/evil alignment and share the same Body as their binary opposite in childhood, and in adulthood both types are capable of “dominating” vs being “forced” to carry the egg.

2. Calliope and Caliborn both spend their whole lives watching humanity, and specifically the alpha kids. they both take on the trappings of self-identifying with a human gender (and use human terminology to describe their relationship) based upon their observations. Caliborn is especially impressed by Dirk’s masculinity.

3. Caliborn as Doc Scratch and Lord English create post-scratch Alternia and mold the society to their liking. Trolls, despite all being the same Sex, namely, hermaphaditic (two trolls in any configuration produce viable material for Mother Grub, who appears to be their Other Sex), inherent male and female genders based upon Caliborn’s influence. of course, you have to look at troll gender, and the troll cast system together, as acceptable expressions of each gender change, depending on your place on the Hemospectrum. The Thresh Prince, an olive blood, is a cool badass heroic masculine ideal for Karkat. Aradia is supposed to submit to her betters. Sollux is supposed to submit to being de-personed entirely, which results in a null-gender for a null-person as his physical form is reduced to the motherboard/battery via which a warship’s system AI and engine run… okay this could be its own post , moving on.

4. The trolls create Beta Earth in sgrub, and echos of them exist in humans (karkat gave us all equal red blood, their signs are written in our stars), and this may include human gender.

5. Even if it doesnt, Bro Strider’s masculinity is specifically influenced (as all of his identity is) by his best bro, Lil Cal, which is of course part of Caliborn’s journey to Lord English

6. Dave Strider grows up trying to impress his Bro by being a man / being a hero

7. Earth gets scratched, and despite not remembering his Bro, Alpha Dave Strider grows up with very cool / manly / heroic expressions of gender.

8. Dirk Strider learns all he can about his long dead ancestor, and models himself off him, being a cool badass heroic man

9. Caliborn takes an interest in Dirk Strider….

every week i think abt making a post abt queerness in the context of the quadrant system and then i think abt how first i would have to address the fact that binary gender apparently exists in a culture in which that is completely irrelevant on a reproductive level and yet somehow like. troll society has gender roles that are functionally analogous to our human gender roles despite the fact that the society has no (or exclusively aesthetic) sexual dimorphism and also has been ruled by a female dictator for 5,000 years and then i get soooo tired

[dukeofriven]

Guys you may not be aware just how exactly accurate you are being with Dirk/Bro being Hussie’s real self-insert. I’ve been doing a deep, deep, deeeeeep dive into his early work, including trying to compile his 2005-2006 TSO blog into some kind of master document because the day a court injunction shutters the Wayback machine - foom! Dirk/Bro was Andrew Hussie in that era: layers of nested ‘irony’ that masked a lot of heinous shit labeled as “comedy.” You make a shitty joke, the a joke about it being a joke, and then a joke that joking about it being the joke itself a joke,  and then a joke being the joke about that being the joke - but really it’s just cruelty buried under a mountain of eye winks. “Funny” racism, “funny” misogyny, “funny” homophobia, “funny” neuro-atypical jokes etc. Hell, I would be lying if I said that my disapproving quotation marks mean that I never laughed - of course I laughed. Hussie is a funny guy even when he’s being shitty. But just because it got a response out of me doesn’t make it a good joke. Which, natch, is the point - the ouroboros of ‘ironic’ heinous humour that makes trying to find the sincerity in Dirk Strider so exhausting. With Hussie it’s all part and parcel of the “everything goes” fever dream of ‘practiced edgelord insouciance’ that dominated mid-aughts internet culture. Which is why it’s all the more jarring  when right in the middle of it all he drops the most cogent, righteously furious take-down of white privilege and white-media journalism that was so ahead of its time it almost reads like it was written today. Not only does he predict the rise of unhinged right-wing rage, it accurately predicts the trends of next fifteen years of white fragility, demographic pearl-clutching, and the rebirth of yellow journalism.  You get the sense of just how aware he is that the tower of ‘irony’ that he built is leaning precariously. Like a hyper-vigilant episode he is almost frighteningly aware of the performance he is putting on. an actor playing the part of an actor playing the part of an edgelord playing the part of an edge king. Like the proverbial man who leapt upon the tiger’s back, however, he is trapped by the exigencies of his own choices, imprisoned in his own acting persona and the momentum that imparts. I do not exaggerate when I say that you can see that two paths that lay before Hussie in those 05/06 years on TSO. He faced two different futures shaped by the two warring factions of his psyche. One faction is his incredible depth of empathy; something almost totally suppressed in his S_O persona but not quite extinguished. The other path was his mastery of mockery, cruelty, and the cutting word - the path of the villain. There’s at least one iteration of reality where MSPA never happened and Team Special Olympics just got darker and more cynical until, like Glenn Beck, the line between personal belief and performed belief disappeared. The  “ironic” barbarism would have lost the last vestiges of irony, the self-aggrandizing would have ceased to be countered by the self-deprecation, and the performer would become the performance. There is at least one future where Andrew Hussie washed-up on the same shore as Jordan Peterson and all the other alt-right pseudo-intellectuals, people with a certain raw intelligence warped by self-absorption and grievance at the universe, whatever good they might have done in a better life eaten by bitterness, rage, supremacy doctrine, and a history of ex cathedra pronouncements of unshakable belief. Divorced from reality, they live in a world where no fact or logical argument has any meaning save that which they choose to give it. That really could have been Andrew Hussie. He could have been Dirk “Bro” Strider, only with less puppet fucking and more ‘ironic’ calls for hate crimes. This sounds hyperbolic, I am sure, but I mean it honestly: it’s all there on the page. The man had a gift for being incredibly shitty and yet really funny at the same time, the exact combination you need to develop a ‘he tells it like it is’ following among the disaffected and the self-oppressed: coating shit in the candy-coating of a joke makes swallowing it so much easier, until before long you’re writing a shit-eating diet book wittily advocating the benefits of an all-shit diet. (Man I am scatalogical today). But something happened when Hussie made the decision to make a dumb little forum thread the basis for a new website - it put him in a position to shape content with his fans in a very intimate way. Jailbreak and Bardquest merely laid-out the rules and form that his next artistic project would take: they’re mostly a host of fellow mid-aughts internet edgelords throwing scat and gore at the wall to see what stuck - hey there’s no rules on the internet so let’s get a guy to pee on a corpse to try and escape prison. Man, comedy gold! Jailbreak and Bardquest are fun, sort of, but forgettable. The meaningful change began when Problem Sleuth started to take-off: fans began to care about the characters. They wanted good things to happen to them. They wanted a victory that was both meaningful and satisfying. That meant Andrew couldn’t just drop the story mid-way and start over like he had with the first two stories - there was a demand to see the arc to conclusion. On the way to the PS finale Hussie and his growing fan base created a curious hybrid of edgelord boundary-pushing and genuine empathy. The same story that starts with the protagonist sticking his wang through a painting to pee in a hated enemy’s office, the same story with Hunk Rump and a sword crafted of gay pornography that makes elves cry, is also a story that contains moment of genuine pathos. Ace Dick and the Game of Life, Bathearst’s escape from the land of death, the continued safety of candy corn, the recovery of the Snoop Dog Bust. These things were irreverent, yes - but they were not irrelevant. (This is a common mistake for new readers, and some old ones too.) They had meaning, real emotional import imbued by fans as intoxicated by the heady combination as the youth of the sixties were by the counter-culture of their own day. [There’s almost nothing in mainstream culture that quite manages that balancing act of transgression, absurdity and empathy like Problem Sleuth. I think certain properties try - Deadpool, Rick and Morty, and South Park jump immediately to mind, but they all fall flat on their faces. There are but reflections in a mirror darkly, their attempts stymied by demands of studios that require marketability, a lack of writing talent, or an innate cynicism that ends-up drowning the empathy in a bathtub full of nihilistic tears. I think only Bojack Horseman quite manages the feat, though I don’t know if I’d call it a ‘mainstream’ work. Despite rave reviews and a strong cult following it remains somewhat niche, loved by critics but - like Hussie’s œuvre - not universally recognized. That is to say that Mike McSchwhite and his suburban friends and family in the sprawl outside of Houston all went to see Deadpool, bought a Rick Funko, grew-up with South Park, and definitely think Cards Against Humanity is funny - but if they know anything at all of Bojack it’s “that horse cartoon” they watched one episode of, didn’t understand it, and never went back.] So in the villainous timeline Hussie remained safely ensconced in the bubble of TSO, making grotesque comics, writing increasingly vitriolic blog posts, and hanging-out with fellow edgelords in dank forums until one day they crowned him King of Irony because he made just the funniest comic about... I don’t know, a mob of camp gay Mexican bakers lynching Denzel Washington’s talking severed phallus. Dude if you don’t think it’s funny it’s because you don’t understand irony, idiot. The dark timeline starts to get a little hazy after that, but I can say that it’s a short step from being crowned a king by trolls to wanting to be a troll emperor and subsequently leading an army to conqueror the non-ironic places of the internet under the banner Imperiales Languidæ Mentulæ Contra Mundi. But that didn’t happen. Instead Problem Sleuth begat Homestuck, which is the triumph of Hussie’s better angels over his own demons. Andrew Hussie’s favourite character is Jade Harley. He loves Jade so much he kind of frequently screws-up her storylines because he is an over-protective  helicopter parent who gets sudden authorial anxiety attacks, feels like he’s being a bad writer in keeping Jade so safe, and then over-corrects by dropping a house on her (At which point he feels so guilty that the moment she’s resurrected he goes right back to confining her to her room so she can’t get hurt again - see Cascade, her entire plotline post-retcon, and Adult Jade’s Sextacular Adventures Off-Camera Safely Away From All These Emotionally Disturbed Maniacs in the Epilogues Who Might Hurt Sweet Precious Harley). Obviously I am using hyperbole here - most of the time Andrew never shies away as an author from subjecting his characters to meaningful change out of some parental instinct to treat them like real, fragile babies instead of characters. But he does love Jade - loves her so much it come across in every line of commentary he writes about her in the books. {Warning: Wild Speculation About A Private Person’s Private Life Ahead] The Beta Kids can be though-of as a quaternary division of Andrew’s Hussie psyche. John is who I think he saw himself to be at thirteen: striving to be cool, a total dork, instantly smitten by heroes, a loser who is maybe actually secretly pretty great because he hasn’t yet abandoned giving a shit. Dave is who he tried to become - a suave, disinterested, shit-talking cool-kid who doesn’t care about nothing (but is also pretty sad when viewed objectively, talking aloud to himself in a room for fifteen minutes unaware everyone else has left.) Rose is the intellectual pretensions he adopted as armour in high-school: if you can’t fit-in with the popular crowd then being the smartest, snarkiest son-of-bitch in the student body - someone who can safely feel superior to everyone else because they have an immane and prodigious vocabulary - will have to do.(Rose being someone who absolutely acts like they’ve read every classic in the library and can quote all sort of heavy-sounding shit, and who never lets on that she mostly just re-reads Lord of the Rings to worship Gandalf even though wizards are stupid with their dumb beards and their dumb robes and their dumb stupid cool magic.) And Jane? Jane is his sense of delight. The part of him untouched by cynicism and irony - the part he most wants to protect. I mention all this because Homestuck on a meta level can best be thought of as the triumph of Jade over Dirk. Hussie chose the better road, one that let him tell a story that mattered to him. The guy who said:

and

is one who is morally opposed to Dirk Strider. Dirk is a villain not just because he’s a asshole, but because he rejects the values of teamwork and friendship in favour of singular control: of not listening to other people, of not learning from the, of not working together with us except as one who commands and those who obey. It’s no different from Caliborn or Lord English. And it’s no coincidence that the traits of this villain are the traits Hussie sees as being opposed to the above values: the traits he used to have in 2005/2006,  the person he used to be, the person he wrote a million words about rejecting as terrible, shitty person. AltCalliope isn’t fighting Dirk Strider [well, Doc Scratch, technically] while dressed in a Jade suit just because there was a spare Jade cadaver lying around. AltCalliope is fighting a villain while cosplaying of the embodiment of all that is good and virtuous in the world.

Anti-Authors and Authorial “Barriers”, part 4 of 4