#everyone else who wants to erase his actual sexuality and insist that he was bi please go away

[johndykeon]

how are there still people on the "freddie was bi" train?????? like i'm sorry but at this point it's literally just disrespectful to insist that he was bi when everyone he was close to, not to mention he himself, said he was gay. the facts are all out there, this isn't really "niche knowledge," anybody whos been at all involved in the queen fandom for any length of time has read the quotes from freddie and his friends/family and seen the posts that have gone around about this.

anyway if you're one of the people whos still claiming that freddie was bi please unfollow me right now and i'm 100% serious about that <3

[landofsomethingsomething]

your askbox seems crowded with johnroxycallie asks today. welllll sorry im going to add another one to the pile! i am intrigued! i used to ship johnroxy because it seemed real & cute but i moved to roxycallie when it was canon. but this is interesting?? sooo im interested but not sold. give me your best sales pitch for this new ot3 and adopt me into that good good 4 person fold?

Okay here’s why I like it.

To start you have to understand my salty relationship with Roxy’s bisexuality. I basically wrote my own god damn narrative for it in my own head because I am just so over homestuck’s completely unwillingness to give women arcs relating to their sexuality. Womens’ queerness is always something treated by the narrative as obvious and unworthy of commentary or exploration or any element of revelation/self-discovery or even an iota of reflection or struggle, which is especially FRUSTRATING when they’ve been shown struggling with the queerness of OTHERS. It’s that last part that gets me w Roxy -- I especially hate this with Roxy specifically because her relationship with Dirk was so very fucking fraught with her being bitter at him for being gay and thus unwilling to be with her. Roxy was aggressive about her attraction to Jake and Dirk and I would have really liked to see SOMETHING about like. The narrative there after she meets Callie, especially when Callie expressly tells Roxy that her species can’t experience human romance and blah blah blah blah there are so many things I would have loved to know more about re Roxy and her sexuality but this post is already going to be long so enough said about how mad I am about this specifically

The way I’ve settled on it for my own peace of mind is that Roxy went after Dirk and Jake most aggressively because she had the “save the human species” thing held up as the banner of like, the most important thing she could do to the exclusion of most else. Couple that with her being upset at Dirk for being gay and you get a workable explanation for her suppressing her own bisexuality and being so exuberantly performatively straight. 

So. Callie is the only person outside the other alpha kids that Roxy has had this lifelong close relationship/bond with. They have a conversation where they basically gal pal each other aggressively, with Callie saying her species can’t do redrom/human romance and Roxy being cagey about whether she’d reciprocate because Callie is basically telling her there’s no point to the thought exercise and who likes rejection?? but Roxy is the one who brings it up and is clearly fishing to see if Callie likes her likes her and blah blah blah people have been shipping RoxyCallie long before credits video because of all this, the ring, etc. The closeness of their relationship and the mutual “if only this could work it could be so good” narrative there like all right. 

Then, John. There’s an element to Roxy’s attraction to John that’s rooted in that instinctive thing she has going on that you can see on display in their first meeting, where she sees A Dude and immediately does her mental calculus to determine hey here is A Dude, he’s kind of cute, he’s maybe not gay and/or off-limits b/c my best friend has a huge messy crush on him. And it would be real easy to weigh the scales here and go full RoxyCallie if that were the sum and parts of their relationship, but like, here’s the thing -- it’s not. 

I just cannot let go of John and Roxy as the sole survivors of the Game Over timeline. Roxy is Callie’s beacon of optimistic hope, Roxy is the one who acts to save Callie and preserve her in the alpha timeline (with John’s help -- John gives Roxy the ring after all. I like that detail in the full scope of them being a Unit in the future.) But JOHN plays that role for Roxy. Roxy watches Rose die and is ready to sit down and throw in the towel. She tells John straight up that her only plan going forward after this is to accept her fate and bury her mom and wait for her miserable doomed timeline to end and take her with it. John is the one who convinces her there might be a better way, there might be hope. JOHN is the one who acts to preserve Roxy’s existence in the alpha timeline. I really love the parallel between Roxy bringing Callie back from the brink of oblivion and John bringing Roxy back from the same via the same mechanism that allows John to get the ring that allows Roxy to bring Callie back in the first place. That is a really tidy loop and I like it a lot.

So, Roxy in Earth C with a boy she likes and has a connection with that literally no one else can understand because no one else went through Game Over, no one else has this dissonant experiences that might not mesh 100% with the people they love, no one else has this potential imposter syndrome. I love the idea of Roxy and John bonding over that and have never really been willing to give it up. I love the idea of Roxy coming to understand that her infatuation with the idea of A Boy, Any Boy and the future she wanted so bad were products of trauma and really examining that and then realizing she fell for John legitimately, that she genuinely finds him charming

Simultaneously, Roxy in Earth C with the alien girl she’s had a crush on for like probably forever, and now she’s free of the burden she always assumed she had to repopulate the human race. Also her entire family is queer and she’s free to explore her own feelings with that context. Maybe to accept that her feelings for Jane were never purely platonic (and her feelings for Callie certainly never were) and half her frustration at Dirk was that he insisted on being “true” to himself while Roxy never felt she could be and imposed straightness on herself out of obligation to the human race. That could make a girl bitter, right? (I have so many god damn feelings about Roxy and Dirk reconciling post-canon)

And here’s Callie with her insistence that cherubs can’t experience redrom, too. Except now she’s living on Earth C with, for example, Karkat, a troll who absolutely experiences romantic feelings the same way humans do despite all his species lore stating Trolls Can’t Feel Like That. And now Callie has eternity to explore HER feelings -- and we know part of why Callie just accepted that she couldn’t experience flushed/human romance is because she didn’t think anyone would ever love her like that anyway, right? She thought she was hideous and unloveable. Well now she’s here on Earth C and there’s no way Roxy is going to go on letting her believe that. And without that holding her back from exploring the way she REALLY feels, you can see a path to Callie allowing herself to experience emotions she never thought she could. 

And all of these are positive things and wonderful things for these people to learn about themselves and about each other. 

Roxy caught between the boy she fell for on her journey and the girl she fell for long before her journey even started, just having this realization like, everyone is doing what they want here, this is our universe and our earth and our society and our rules, and she’s kind of unofficially dating them both for awhile but not committing labels-wise to either until eventually she’s just like fuck it??? Here’s how I feel, now how about you??? And I cannot imagine Callie protesting Roxy loving them both or someone else loving Roxy as much as she does, and John’s relationship with romance throughout Homestuck is so bemused and ???? and exploratory, I imagine he’s like well this is kinda weird is this like a troll thing and Roxy is like no this is just an us thing and they deal with it

John and Callie have already been spending tons of time with each other throughout and again, as I referenced in an earlier post, there’s some initial awkwardness that settles out into a balanced arrangement and Callie and John both love Roxy and care about each other very much.

Also like, until there actually is some kind of epilogue that does more with John’s current depression arc and ties in the Masterpiece with everything, I like this alternate reality where John has someone who understands him in a way really no one else can there for him when his shit starts to go south, I like the idea of there being an entire long ass subplot where John tries to isolate himself and Roxy is instrumental in not allowing that to happen, I like Callie’s cheer in the face of her own blisteringly unforgiving history and reality being an inspiration for John, I like a lot of things that canon as it stands doesn’t have a satisfying character-driven arc for at the moment.

And, you know, to cap all this off, I really just like JohnRoxyCallie as an acknowledgement that bisexual woman are not “less” for liking boys, that bisexual woman don’t “count” unless they are exclusively with women, and that bisexual people in real life who ship bisexual characters with people of opposite/other genders are not somehow betraying the queer community by doing so, while simultaneously not sacrificing a potential f/f romance for a m/f one.

The LGBT community’s relationship with bisexual women is MY pet issue, because obviously I’m a bi woman, and there’s obviously an element of that going on as well. It bothers me with the treatment of a lot of fandom/homestuck’s bisexual women (this frenzy by queer fandom to erase every relationship a bisexual woman ever had with a man as being not real or not valid for x, y, z reasons while Straight Fandom is over there doing the same thing, but opposite) but Roxy is by far the Homestuck Canon Bisexual Woman I personally care about the most so SHRUG that’s why you get a million words of my feelings

Anyway that’s why I like them

[axiom-of-man-blog]

Chapter one:Year 44 DE (Dawn of Eminence)

A man said to the universe: “Sir, I exist!” “However,” replied the universe, “The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation.” -Stephen Crane

I wake up to her standing over me in my bed, pale, eyes glazed over, her hair a mess and her night gown clung to her sweaty body.  She’s ghastly pale, heavy bags under her eyes. She is gaunt. “Icarus.. I.. I need to be buried..” she says at almost a whisper                I rub my eyes as I start to rise out of bed. I can hear the birds chirping outside my window. Blades of light came in, slicing up my room.  In the morning cheer, a walking corpse seemed out of place. She puts her cold, clammy hand on my shoulder; she reeks of booze and BO.                “Icarus, I need you to bury me. I’m... dead. I shouldn’t be here.”                “Mom, have you been drinking?” I say.                “Honey… Please. I need this.”                Her hand slices into the heat of mine as I bring her to the basement. My mother suffers from a delusion ever since the accident and her reincarnation. Reincarnation: a stupid flowery name for when someone dies and their backed up mind is placed into a new body that has been either donated or sold and have plastic surgeons reconstruct the face and body as close as possible -- if you are rich like us, that is. So she, in fact, isn’t wrong; she died. She should be dead. My father never had those last moments erased before the “reincarnation”.  So because my mother’s mind is more frail than most she has a depersonalization disorder. It’s what happens when, “I think therefore I am” turns into, “I think, but I am not.” So the only way she can rationalize this is to insist she is dead and demand us to bury her.  This happens once every few months.  She won’t let anyone touch her to try and erase the memories. It’s too much of an embarrassment to have her go to counseling for an important man like my father. So he found his own solution. We bury her.                She squeezes my hand as I unlock the basement door and take the steps down. The basement is lavish, large drapes covering walls to look as if they are holding out the light. A hardwood floor that reflects the candlelight and always empty pews. It was a priest short of being a church, or a killer short of being a bad horror movie. In the center of the finished basement we have a casket with a hole underneath. I help her in and as I close the lids.

“Thank you,” she sighs as she is enveloped in darkness.                I lower the casket into the hole with the automatic mechanism.  This has to be done or else she won’t eat or drink. What’s the point of a corpse eating? So we have this ritual so she doesn’t actually die. It takes a day usually and she is rejuvenated and perky. Then the cycle starts again.

               As I sit at the island in my house’s large open kitchen I rub the bumps at the base of my neck. This is where the stim implant was put into me. Usually they are put in around the age of eighteen, My father had one put in me when I was 8. Almost losing his wife he wanted to make sure his son had the same insurance. So since eight I was connected to the global network. My memories everything I am stored in a computer as well as a small chip in the implant under my skin. My life reduced to ones and zeros. It’s strange to think of life being reduced to a series of electrical synapses in our brain. A series of on and off switches that when amassed together is who we are. My thought is broken by the babble on the little TV on the kitchen counter “Jason Carway, the owner and mastermind behind Prometheus Systems, announces his plan to make his implants universal and available to everyone.  Some say he is trying to bring the classes together, others say he is trying to make humans irrelevant, while James says he is just trying to make the world a better and safer place.              “Jason Carway is pushing for mandatory installation of his implants now that most jobs require you have one. Later, is the black market body trade becoming an epidemic? More later at –“                “That’s enough of those assholes,” I thought to myself. I sat there, eating my bagel in silence. After moving from the city years ago, I thought it was way too quiet. There was always a hum of busy noise. Car horns, people yelling. It took me awhile to realize that it isn’t any quieter up here -- just a different kind of noise. Instead of insufferable noise of the human habitat, I am listening to the sounds of the natural habitat. A myriad of sounds, bugs buzzing, birds singing their songs, the occasional wolf in the night; all of them trying to assert themselves, sexually or territorially. It leaves an earthy taste in my mouth as I listen to the racket. It doesn’t mix well with my bagel.

I decide to go next door to see my uncle, Henry the local eccentric hippy prepper. It’s still cool despite being mid may. The luxury of living up in the Adirondack Mountains, some of the woods higher up there is still some remaining snow. The last of the waning corpse of winter; holding on for dear life.   I hear a “thwap” as an arrow sinks into a target and my uncle looks at me grinning.                “Hey there, Icky. I think I can finally best you and your hawk eye,” He says as I approach.                “We will see, old man,” I reply, grabbing my bow off the picnic table. It’s a light instrument resembling a recurve bow, although it’s made of an alloy that gives it more power than the compound bows of the past.                I draw, aim, and release all in one quick motion.  My three fingers moving with machine quickness, the arrow sinks in next to one of my uncles, stripping the feather off on one side.                “I’ll be damned,” he says, “What the hell kind of sorcery are you working with, man?”                This is an old tradition between us trying, trying to best each other, trick shots. It started after he read me lord of the rings as child to help me sleep at night.  I became enthralled with Legolas, the elf, and wanted to start learning to shoot bow and arrow. My mother objected, my father was indifferent, and my uncle leaped at the opportunity to teach me something.  Having no children, he projected his need to be a father on me, even though the man was near his 70’s without ever having a reincarnation. It’s rare to see anyone that age, despite the medical advances making it easy to live regularly to 100 years or more, unless they are of the pauper class and can’t afford it.                  “Your old man is still out of town?” he asks.                “Yeah, It’s been 3 weeks now.”                He examines an arrow’s feathers. “You know I don’t agree with what he does.”                “I know. I know.”                “Never liked a man who profits from war and suffering,” He comments more to himself than to me.                “I know he’s your father, I know Carol fell in love with him years ago, but he is married to his company and his vision.”

We talk about this a lot, my absent father, my broken mother, how I should feel about it. He knows that complex emotions are not tangible to me.  He is quiet for a moment, rolling the arrow back and forth in his hands.

“The Freethought Movement, they have it right. We should not let technology take our humanity away.”                I stand silently. Politics aren’t my thing. Prometheus Systems wants to standardize the singularity. They want everyone to be “connected body and mind” to their network, to live forever in a paradise that we create here. With a fee, they back up everyone’s memory so they can live in any body they want or without a body and just transmit themselves to other people who act as puppets temporarily, Echoborgs, or green eyes. When an AI or someone wants to be somewhere without leaving their home, they control them and they see through these special contacts that are standard issue. The contacts glow green when someone else is in control. Essentially people can bi-locate; they can always live forever as long as the money flows in to keep their minds backed up on a hard drive somewhere. They acquire people from agencies that hire people as their job to let someone control them for a certain amount of time. It’s a shallow job that can put you in a lot of danger. Green eyes tend to be targeted by the Free thought Project and its sympathizers as people who have betrayed their humanity. There has been a few bombings at donation centers, These centers people can go to and sell their body to be used to house someone who has died, They essentially turn the body into a puppet that is controlled by the stim implant. The person they were is effectively wiped off the earth. The poor do this because it pays well, they can set up their remaining family for years depending on the body. There is always a shortage in usable bodies. “They want to make the rich immortal and wipe out the poor.” That is how the Freethought Movement summarizes it. They see Jason Carway as a false profit promising a false salvation, while the world sees him as a messiah.                “Governor Percy has it right, He is having a protest down in Austin Texas, I am surprised that state hasn’t seceded its already like another country.” Governor Cornelius Percy  has fought technological progress since long before he gained office. Texas is one of the only states where it isn’t mandatory to have a stim implant to work. They donation centers, and any enhancements are highly taxed. “Texas is a state of humans, A state with a soul” Is Percy’s slogan that you hear everywhere.   “There’s no room in this world for a man who thinks he’s a god,” He declares as he draws back his bow. I notice his pristine shape; it always takes me by surprise. The muscles in his arms work like tight cables as he knocks his arrow and draws. His stern but friendly face focused a crooked nose, and a silver pony tail hanging to his mid back. The arrow is loosed and strikes the target, piercing a quarter he had glued there.                He grins, “Think you can hit a penny at 40 yards?”                “Of course,” I say.

               The thing about memories is that they aren’t corporeal, they are malleable. Every time you unpack a memory it changes. Like clay, it’s the same item, same memory but you leave imprints and it’s never the same. Human memory is fallible and prone to influences. It’s what makes last memories so ephemeral. The thing about last moments is you don’t realize they are the last. It’s just another day you take for granted in the obdurate gyre of your life. We want certain moments to be evocative, that’s why we taint them with happiness when we recall them. The fact is there are places you have been, people you have talked to for the last time, and their features have already faded from your mind.