#curse you calware

[qhiq]

i was planning some art project and just realized what this was reminding me of....

[calware]

dear calware, I'm not sure how much you know on the topic of Doc Scratch, but I was wondering, why is the common consensus around him that he's like a creepy pedophile? after rereading his messages with Rose, he seems more tone deaf and weird than a fully on creep. is there something I'm missing?

scratch isn't "literally" a pedophile (or a hebephile, which is the accurate term for this situation) which we know because of this

but at the same time, that is still the Way he's written

(i'm sorry if this following explanation is confusing.... i really do not have the right wording to describe it) it's almost like a metaphorical representation. he's a child predator in every way but the actual sexual attraction. the way he's written references the behavior of actual child predators and is meant to signal to the audience that this is the Kind Of Character he is. it's a literary tool(?)to tell the audience that he is literally taking advantage of characters in various ways (as well as straight up abusing damara) while at the time comparing it to child sexual abuse

but if you do want literal actions on his part, he does Literally groom young girls and they are his targets for manipulation

also, directly from the author commentary (which. is not 100% serious at times. but i do think it sometimes offers some actual insight):

I know I just said a bunch of stuff about [DD] maybe being a creep. But look, this is just my OPINION here. I don't think he's actually being creepy about this. I think he has a genuinely parental attitude toward Aradia and wants to see her succeed in her violent and underhanded schemes. See how he wants them to conduct their business with efficiency? He's way too professional to go Full Doc on these girls.

Another peek at Rose suggests she's still at it with her creepy uncle, Doc Scratch.

Then you have a few beats of conversation which bring Equius to mind, such as the creep-factor

[Dirk and Equius] have this creepy-guy streak running through them, with strange or offputting interests, and seem to get a quiet kick out of making others uncomfortable through demonstrations of these fascinations. [...] I'd say these self-examined qualities are just drawn out, isolated, and inflated both for dramatic effect, and also as critical write-up of those qualities existing within many human beings in general, which I would like to think is grounded in a creative process involving a certain degree of humility about some of this bullshit. I like all these characters here, but that doesn't mean I think their unpleasant qualities are good. It just means I am harnessing and heightening those qualities for creating strong villainous portraits.

We start getting the sense that the entire purpose of this conversation, from Doc's vantage point, is just to passive-aggressively manipulate Rose into peering directly into one of his cursed testicles. Wait, my youth pastor is literally barking like a dog right now for some reason. Probably because I put him on a leash and tied him to a post in the backyard. I guess I fucked up again? I mean one of Doc's seeds.

Maybe it's fair to say I have a higher than average tolerance troubling content. But even I have to admit to shuddering a little when I read Doc's creepy lines toward Rose. I think Doc's creep factor toward girls is most likely channeling part of Caliborn's personality, which almost seems to revolve around his horrid attitude toward women. For Caliborn, this weird combination of wrathful misogyny, yet fixation and obsession with certain girls, is obviously central to the type of real-world profile he's meant to portray. But when his personality is more muted among the collective in Doc's head, those qualities come across as more "restrained," "polite," and "flattering," which arguably just makes it all creepier. The result is a creepy dude profile that also exists in the real world, sort of adjacent to the Full Caliborns out there. There seem to be many stripes of this kind of unfortunate male behavior, which all exists in a broader family of sub-Caliborns. The Docs, the Eridans, the Cronuses… They're all sketchy in different ways.

Doc sitting back just to "watch" is another creepy Equiusism. Remember that was a thing with him.

I wonder what Jade would think if she knew she had in her possession since childhood one of Doc's testicORACLES!!! Oracles. The word I meant to say was oracles, not anything else. Anyway, like I was saying, how would Jade react if she realized every time she played with one of her beloved toys, she was actually fondling this weirdo's plump, juicy oracle. I know you think my youth pastor may have something to do with this peculiar outburst, but you're wrong. I "dismissed" him recently, because he told me with great pride that I learned everything he had to teach me. I don't need anyone to keep me from shoving my foot in my mouth anymore, I'm sure you'll be pleased to know. Now let's watch this grieving teen receive a demonic message from an evil puppet's big fat nut.

bonus commentary from book 6 that has nothing to do with the post:

We're reaching a specific kind of story partition. Not the end of an act, but the end of a year. Also an end of "disc," which is a kind of meta-partitioning I just made up for the purpose of closing the book on two years of content, as well as being a good meta-device for introducing the Doc sequence we're about to get into in the next book.

"next book"...... sad

[crappy-homestuck-confessions]

The context is that on calware's confession blog, each year at this date I would remind people that tagging systems suck. And it wasn't hyperbole that I came back each year. So now due to that blog closing, you guys are carrying my curse.

.