#heattth

[pochapal]

Hi, sorry if it is an annoying question, but how are you liking Beyond Canon? I fell off back when it was still called Homestuck² for no reason in particular, even though I really liked the Epilogues. But I am having the Homestuck brainworms recently and I am contemplating going back to it.

i'm gonna be honest and say i've only kinda dipped in and out of certain beyond canon upd8s that my most trusted post-homestuck mutuals make noise about. this was initially because pickle route is explicitly about homestuck^2 and so i didn't want knowledge of beyond canon affecting my creative process in any way, and then after i got sick i was very photosensitive for several months and looking at the mspa format was giving me migraines and then the vriska therapyhole arc began and i fell off hard.

i think from what i've seen your enjoyment of beyond canon will depend on how you engaged with initial postcanon homestuck and what you thought of it all. beyond canon definitely has more of the classic homestuck flavor than the epilogues and hs^2 did and functionally feels more like "homestuck act 9" than it does a whole separate thing like early postcanon did. that good old fashioned homestuck high is there, but playing in the old playground of the epilogues.

i think if you liked postcanon for the disruptive challenge it screamed out as, then i'm not sure if you'll get the same out of it. hsbc's storycrafting, while very good, is not attempting to ignite those same creative sparks in its audience as original postcanon did. the best way to describe the difference is that where the epilogues and hs^2 inspired the existence of a story like godfeels or beyond shadowed eyes, beyond canon itself feels more like it's on a parallel with those post-2019 fan imaginations. homestuck beyond canon is talking back to the epilogues, same as all the classics you know and love, but much more explicitly using the language and systems of homestuck.

in short, it's very good, but i have a different relationship with it than most on account of the fact i'm literally writing my own permutation of this story, and some of the decisions i've made and taken to heart go very heavily against this newly emerging postcanon! it's worth reading, but if you're big on stuff like godfeels or omelette route, i don't know that it'll supersede them as much as it will accompany them.

[specterthief]

If you don't mind me asking, do you know if when Falin called Marcille 恩師 it is implied she meant the later was literally a teacher at the school? I assumed she meant as someone she had learned from, not as an official position. But my Japanese is far from perfect, so I don't know how weird it would be to call a senpai or such 恩師.

you are correct that it doesn't have to mean a specific position at the school, yes! though with the fact that marcille was a professor's assistant she definitely could have been doing some actual teaching work in some capacity. (assistants in real graduate programs like what marcille is described as being in will still be involved with teaching, just not teaching alone - i.e. they might help students in practical labs or prepare assignments. but we don't really know much about what the program marcille was in is like compared to a real life non-magic grad school, so it's not clear if she ever did that kind of teaching assistance, let alone for falin's class specifically.)

to my understanding from a lot of reading before posting about that (as japanese is also not my native language, i'm doing my best) it does suggest a somewhat delineated teacher-student/mentor-mentee relationship, since even the strict dictionary definition describes it as a word to use for a 先生, but it doesn't mean that was necessarily an official position in the school. 恩師 can refer to unofficial teachers/mentors who were very influential on you as well, like older relatives, but it's not something that applies to a relationship between peers like a close senpai

so yeah, there isn't any indication one way or another if marcille's duties as a researcher/teacher's assistant ever involved any more structured teaching or if falin would have been one of the people she could have taught. 恩師 can mean both, and while it referring to a literal teacher appears to be by far the most common in a modern context, it could also just mean that that's how falin sees and respects marcille and what their relationship was like to her.

sorry for this kind of being a non-answer! i tried to do more research as i was writing this but it's just a complicated word - some people use it for all their school teachers whether they feel strongly about them as a mentor or not and there's some confusion about whether that's appropriate or not, searching for information got a lot of "am i supposed to use 恩師 like this?" questions even from native speakers 😭

TL;DR it does refer to a teacher/mentor relationship but doesn't necessarily imply a specific official job position at the school (nor does it rule it out)

edit: and all this is with the fact that she does also call her her friend alongside it, so whatever specific meaning of 恩師 falin is using here she does obviously also see marcille as a personal friend and not solely as her teacher

[rose-reads-visualnovels]

Battler may not like it, bless him, but he is a privileged kid. The type of rich kid that doesn't think of himself as rich because he knows people who are richer than him. Except those people are his actual family

Battler is what happens when someone picks up a baby shark, halfway domesticates it while putting it in a small tank so it doesn’t grow, and then throws it back into a group of adult or healthily maturing sharks like it’s nothing.

He has the instincts, but they’re all scrambled by human emotionality so it’s like a human lens is cast upon sharks’ shark-like behavior to make them understandable. This is why he’s incapable of discerning motives from literally anyone around him. He’s looking at things the wrong way

- Rose, the Revolutionary Witch

[kassandra-the-witch]

So, apparently this is happening because your blog is hidden. If you click on settings (top right cog) and select your blog in the blogs section (should be at the bottom) there is a "Hide heattth from people without an account" option that makes so you don't have a proper url and is locked to dashboard only (and I guess can only be seen if someone has a tumblr account).

That seems an odd way to do things but that is how it works, apparently.

That is already turned off for me in those settings! You don't have to have an account to see my stuff (I think?). Maybe I need a custom theme? Can anyone recommend me a good custom theme?

[itsclydebitches]

Hello, I found you through the Anime Slushie discord and I am loving reading your metas, thanks for writing them!

Anon: Introducing me to Anime Slushie

Me: Introducing my readers to Anime Slushie

The Anime Slushie discord, apparently: Introducing you to my nonsense 

In all seriousness though welcome and I’m glad you’re enjoying them! 💜

[whentheychirp]

Hey, I finally catch up with this blog and I am loving it, thanks for writing it. <3 Btw, you mentioned discord at some point. Do you have a server or is it unrelated to the blog?

oh, thank you for reading it! this blog doesn’t have many readers so I always appreciate it

it’s an umineko server belonging to a friend

[canmom]

Hi. Just for reference, what did you think of the other new Star Wars movies?

Hey! Since you asked, I’ll bite.

Readmore because, this is one of those neverending capitalist entertainment franchises that just demands people talk about it by virtue of having a shitton of money invested into it, and if you’ve managed to avoid the whole affair I hardly want to spoil that.

tl;dr:

I like Rogue One a lot but I’m a sucker for tragedy

I think The Last Jedi was promising but flawed and I respect what it tried to do even if it didn’t quite pull it off, and the way they treated it after the right-wing backlash is just embarassing

The Force Awakens was, eh. What promise it had was entirely squandered, but there was some. It still exhibited all the bad signs very early on

Rebels starts off slow but it becomes a whole lot of fun when it’s functioning as a direct The Clone Wars sequel, and still remains pretty solid after Ahsoka leaves the scene

I haven’t seen Solo or The Mandalorianbut I don’t expect I’m missing much.

John Boyega and Kelly Marie Tran deserved much better.

So as has been lamented endlessly to precisely no effect, the current trend in the capitalist entertainment industry is

these huge zombie action franchises with elaborate multi-movie plots, designed to provoke recaps and plot speculation and a very shallow analysis of Representation rather than any serious engagement.

bringing back ‘classic’ films from the 80s for questionable sequels and remakes - something the industry has been doing for ages but seems to have unusually huge budgets thrown at it at the moment.

Of course, Disney Star Wars is kind of the epitome of both trends, and by discussing it at length, I’m just contributing to the machine. Promise I’ll next review something that doesn’t have a budget of… $300 million apparently.

Mind you, Star Wars has always been a machine to drive merchandising sales - it was one of the first big franchises to realise the potential of an ‘expanded universe’ in creating an entire subculture of people to catalogue what happens in it, it leaned on ‘reveals’ like ‘I am your father’, so I don’t want to act like the sacred Star Wars has been sullied by the capitalistic machinations of the Mouse. Nothing about this is surprising.

What I liked about Star Wars was not so much the plot or anything (though the animated series have their moments!), but the visual design. As I understand it, they got a bunch of French concept artists in the milieu of people like Mobius, people who had been working on the cancelled Dune project, and they all moved on to making Star Wars and that’s why it looked so striking and stylish. The prequels, for all their flaws, at least managed to uphold some of this like, design creativity, whereas Disney star wars has just insisted on devotedly recreating the aesthetic of the original trilogy with a much larger CGI budget.

That insistence on treating the originals as some sacred artefact to revere is like, one of the more fundamental problems with Disney Star Wars. But certainly not the only problem lmao.

The Force Awakens

I was actually quite positive about this when it came out. Whether I would be on a rewatch is questionable.

The whole problem is of course that it’s just trying to directly recreate the original trilogy, but with flashier special effects. It has its promising parts: the idea of Storm Trooper defection for example, the scavenger planet covered in ruined spaceships, a villain who’s kind of ineffectually larping Darth Vader. Most of this potential got completely wasted!

There was far too much Abrams-style “oh, what is the answer to this mystery? I certainly don’t know!” in it, which inevitably found no satisfying answer. Star Wars’s obsession with wizard bloodlines not as a preoccupation of the fascists but as like, nearly everyone who matters is part of this same family has been one of the worst parts, and like who gives a shit who Rey’s parents are etc. etc.

The actually interesting gaps in the older Star Wars, like “what sort of political system will be built by the survivors of this horrifying period of empire”, are left completely unaddressed! There’s a New Republic, somewhere, I guess, and it gets blown up and nobody seems all that bothered by it. Somehow the First Order seem to have no less manufacturing capabilities or materiel than the original Empire, possibly more, because that’s how it was in the original trilogy right?

The First Order of course has a rally in the middle that’s ripped straight out of a Nazi propaganda film (which is perhaps a little better than ripping the ‘congratulations heroes’ medal-giving scene from Triumph of the Will, like A New Hope did, but only slightly). Does this mean it has anything to say about fascism? Nah, it just wants us to associate its villains with Known Bad Thing.

Still, John Boyega and Oscar Isaacs were good in it. I’m not surprised Disney didn’t bother to commit to the Finn/Poe thing because they are obviously cowards, but those two are good together. The scene where Kylo kills Han actually had a little guts, which of course it throws away later, but still. Like… it was fine. It’s a competent action film, the special effects are solid. And that’s just all it is.

The Last Jedi

So if I am sick of the formula and wanted them to try something new, I should have loved TLJ right? Well, kinda. It went for it, to its credit. But it didn’t really stick the landing.

I respect what it was trying to do with the Luke-as-Kreia thing (for the uninitiated into nerdy genre bullshit, Kreia is the companion/ultimate antagonist of Obsidian’s RPG Knights of the Old Republic 2, who had a similar attitude of trying to dismantle the mythology of Light Side, Dark Side etc.) The series was pretty ripe for someone to say ‘hey actually our warrior caste is not that great actually, maybe we should try for a political system that isn’t prone to bouts of nightmare wizard fascism’. sadly they deleted some of the scenes of Luke’s ‘lessons’ to Rey, so it ends up feeling a little disjointed.

Considering the rest of the franchise’s devotion to trying to like, Recreate Star Wars in the most tedious way possible, the infamously memable ‘sacred texts’ scene was actually pretty on the nose.

The milking scene and the scene very late-on with the ground skimmer things on a white ground with red dust underneath were by far the most memorable images of that movie. The latter could have had more impact, alas it came so late in the film and we didn’t get much sense of the place beyond it being very aesthetique.

I can also see what it was trying to do with the whole, “going on a thrilling Star Wars adventure does not inevitably save the day” plotline, but it fell rather flat. worse, it seemed that the line between ‘ruining everything, you shouldn’t have even tried’ and ‘gets a satisfying arc’ was entirely down to whether the character was white, which is not a good look. As it was, it seemed like the entire subplot of Finn and Rose going to the Planet of the War Profiteers was entirely pointless, which was a shame because like - yeah, let’s get into that whole political economy angle on a level beyond ‘the villains in this movie are the space bankers’.

The other big problem was that Poe had his character destroyed - the first film gave us no reason to think he was a reckless asshole who would get people killed for minor military gains, so his narrative punishment for this trait seemed like it came out of nowhere. Spaceships dropping bombs on other spaceships was a pretty funny extension of the ‘space war is basically World War II’ motif, so it sucks that it was wasted like that. It was very frustrating that the whole plot could have been forestalled if Admiral Pink Hair had taken Poe aside and been like, chill, I’m not just stalling, we do actually have a real plan.

As it was, they introduced Rose but kind of left Finn and Rose with an irrelevant side story, and that was a great disservice to Kelly Marie Tran and John Boyega - though not nearly as cruel to Tran as the next film in the series.

I’ve only seen one other film by Rian Johnson, which was this year’s Knives Out, and that was excellent. And like, TLJ had genuine potential - I feel like with a different edit and some changes to make Finn, Rose and Poe’s arcs more satisfying, The Last Jedi could have been the best film in the series. Sadly, it wasn’t, and a huge right-wing backlash means it’s been disavowed in the most embarassing, craven way possible.

The worst part of this film though is that, in imposing weight loss on Carrie Fisher, it probably contributed to her early death. That’s unforgiveable, honestly. (Although I’m sure it’s not the only case of these films contributing to health problems and early deaths for the thousands of people involved in their creation, because capitalism ho!) Knowing this made the clunky insertion of her recorded ghost into Rise of Skywalker, saying platitudes that barely fit the scene, all the more unpleasant. (I don’t think there’s a better way they could have handled it, at least they didn’t try to resurrect her with CGI like Tarkin in Rogue One, but even so…)

Rogue One

The ‘side story’ model lets Disney get away with releasing a Star Wars film every year, and honestly most of these films are ‘unnecessary’ in that the allusions left in the previous films probably didn’t need filling in. (It’s not as bad for that as the old EU, mind!) So, egh. Enough already lol.

Despite this, I actually really like Rogue One, it’s probably my favourite of the Disney starwarses. I got a lot from the desperate tone, of seeing the Empire as a genuine threat and source of misery rather than a cartoon shooting gallery. The crew, although we had precious little time to get to know them, were largely compelling. By building up all these stories about the Death Star’s creation, and various desperate attempts to stop it, they give it a whole lot more narrative weight than the parade of ‘yeah we have this now’ superweapons in Abrams’s films. Of all the ‘superweapon blows something up’ shots in this franchise, I think the one in Rogue One is actually one of the most compelling.

Saw Gerrera occupies an unfortunate position: he’s very much the awful stock ‘scary non-respectable Black rebel who just can’t resist doing war crimes’ archetype, but I still enjoyed seeing him fighting a proper guerilla war against the successor state to his former allies in Clone Wars. I wish they’d done more with him than ‘this man just loves the war crimes’ in nearly his every appearance.

Anyway, Rogue One had a lot of good scenes which made me feel something, which is more than a lot of the Star Warses can say.

Rebels

Dave Filoni’s animated series take a little while to find their groove, and the first season of Rebels is kind of meh. Once Ahsoka arrives on the scene, it properly hits its stride though. It does a good job of pulling off the ‘found family in space’ narrative, and generally develops in a pretty satisfying way. Star Wars is at its best when it’s not telling grandiose stories of wizards with destinies but like, keeps things a little smaller, and largely this works.

It’s kind of interesting to note how it manages to keep up a shuffle of villains who must, inevitably, fail to catch the rebels, and keep them somewhat threatening. Partly it does this by allowing them significant victories occasionally, and partly by shuffling off the villains who have failed to many times into death or Redemption Arc. With the amount of time an animated series has compared to a film, they have enough time to actually develop both protagonists and villains as characters.

I have not read the Thrawn novels, so I can’t tell you whether his animated incarnation lives up to Zahn’s novels. He was a compelling villain in Rebels, which they mostly accomplished by having the losses fall on his underlings, while he folds it all into his grand master plan.

The last season after Ahsoka leaves is like, fine. But mostly I was in it for Ahsoka, and she steals every scene she’s in. (I’m actually kind of excited, despite myself, for the upcoming revival of Clone Wars).

Solo and The Mandalorian

I haven’t watched these. I’m told Solo is roughly a mid-season Clone Wars episode, and The Mandalorian is basically a series of videogame cutscenes with a totally flat protagonist, so I don’t think I missed out too much. I’ll watch them at some point when I’m feeling depressed and need a distraction, probably.

Disney’s run with Star Wars as a whole

It’s pretty much what you’d expect, isn’t it? And in theory we’re finally done with this! But honestly, they’re going to keep pumping these out, seizing on every tenuous throwaway line and plot thread they can milk (like that beastie in TLJ) for nostalgia dollars and remixing the same set of images with occasional new additions (“what if yoda, but neotenous”) until the industry runs out of steam, the bloody things stop being profitable, and we have another big collapse. Sadly, this does not seem to be set to happen any time soon.

And I’ve already said this, but the way they handled the Last Jedi scandal is just embarassing. I’m glad Rian Johnson himself seems to have escaped relatively unscathed and get back to making movies not tied to a big franchise - if his other movies stand up as well as Knives Out, I’m looking forward to seeing them a lot. But I feel really bad for Kelly Marie Tran, who got basically thrown to the wolves and sidelined in a total capitulation to a bunch of online reactionary bastards because, I guess, they figure it’s more profitable to be a coward. I hope this is the last time someone gives JJ Abrams 300 million dollars to make a really shite film, but I’m quite sure it won’t be.

[theroguefeminist]

Hello, do you still watch anime? A new Chihayafuru season just go released. Sorry to bother you if you just don't care about it anymore

Yeah! That’s so cool! Thanks for letting me know!

For those who don’t know, Chihayafuru is a really, really positive show that I highly recommend. It’s got excellent writing and characterization, and really positive representation for girls. There IS a resident nice guy unfortunately (TaichicoughTaichi) so it isn’t perfect, but I still strongly recommend it. People are sleeping on this anime

[momestuck]

Man, comparing Dave to Kankri and Zebruh hurt in the soul but, yeah, it is an apt comparison. And it highlight how it is not always awful to be "like that", if you are actually being sincere about your attempts of improving, instead of being a disingenuous fuck.

to be clear I was contrasting dave with Kankri and Zebruh :p

i do not think they are at all similar characters - just that, they touch on the ideal of being ‘woke’, but from opposite directions.

like it’s good to be conscious of the existence of social forces such as gender white supremacy and capital which shape our lives. Kankri embodies one very maladaptive response to that, which might be called an exaggerated stereotype of ‘vulgar identity politics’, which views every possible interaction first through the lens of a list of identity markers, and judging what is ‘problematic’ according to a list of rules of ‘forbiddens’, rather than relating to ones’ friends as actual people who one can personally know and form meaningful connections with.

among other things, this approach forestalls any serious reflection and understanding of interpersonal relations and social forces, and turns the process of like “learning to relate to each other in a less cruel way” into a particularly warped game of jockeying for status by learning the rules, and spectacular ‘punishment’ of people who can be presented to have transgressed regardless of whether it’s actually a good resolution to the situation. what it does not lead to is a substantive material change in these social relations.

homestuck doesn’t manage really get into like, the conditions under which this pattern formed in the first place, and why it’s ultimately a self-defeating strategy if our aim is genuine liberation - it just contrasts ‘annoying sjw kankri’ against ‘good liberal feminist porrim’! but that imo is what kankri is ‘about’, in a positive reading.

kankri never got the time to become anything else because SGrub happened, but in time, at best he’d have learned how to separate bullshit from the shit that actually matters and some better interpersonal skills, to internalise not-easily-spoken principles rather than lists of problematic things; at worst he’d be lurking on some anon meme talking about he’s ‘ex social justice’. or he’d get caught up in some horrific cultish trot/maoist/etc. party, that would know exactly how to exploit him and turn him on people for their own gain.

zebruh represents an entirely different form: an abuser who is a position of extreme social power, who’s recognised that he can exploit the machinery of ‘social justice’ to help build up his own image. talk to him for even a few minutes and you realise how completely full of it he is - but he’s completely insulated from the harm he causes, which falls always on the more vulnerable people he’s supposedly advocating for. he’s a true ‘bad actor’, who ‘cares’ only insofar as it furthers his own ability to have power over others.

such people do exist, of course. any ‘instrument of violence’ such as ‘call-outs’ has to recognise how it can be exploited in such a way, or it’s worse than useless.

dave might be kind of full of himself, but he doesn’t do any of that!

he comes across as someone who like, knows about social violence in a pretty abstract way, rather than having lived it. (personally i headcanon dave as Black, but the comic never really shows him facing any of that shit on Earth). he does obviously genuinely care about Karkat and the other trolls, not in a chaser-y way - and he’s willing to take personal risks for their sake. he’s like, i guess, a truly well-meaning but naive young activist - but someone who will ‘get it’, in time, as he gets more of a direct, personal experience of how shit things are outside of his old bubble (or in this case, in an entirely new cultural context that he invented).

[pochapal]

If you are interested in the song itself, I recommend also the full song then. Here the youtube code PDkOre9ZUyg. The Italian segments at the start is different in the full reason, for some reason, but but the rest is the same song but extended.

Also also (sorry to send so many asks) the anime OP is also cool and still mostly based on EP1. It takes some stuff from early EP2, so better wait.

ohhhhhhhhhh this extended version goes so hard. i can't understand a single word of the lyrics but on Vibes alone i am blown over.

yeah wrt the anime i've been told the best time for that is after i'm done with the question arcs so i look forward to checking out that stuff then!

[journeysintowebcomics]

The Homestuck epilogues are quite polarizing but, on my opinion, it is frankly amazing. Also, even popular opinion seems to have been weaved to favorable with time. Many people who disliked the ending liked it, though I can not stress enough that the epilogue is *not* a "fix". Overall it is such a different story that I can only ask you to check for yourself.

I’ll consider it. I’ll read it in my free time, write a few notes along the way, and then if I decide it’s worth liveblogging I’ll start it.

Although, well, I guess it wouldn’t be a 100% liveblog by then? I would have the notes and thoughts I write along the way, and then I would connect them together. Oh well.

heattth also says: Also, because I know you will get the reference, there is a certain part of the Epilogues that reminds me a lot of Umineko. Or, rather, a certain theme in the Epilogues that reminds me of Umineko. I've been dying to hear someone else make that connection, but the two fanons don't overlap much, it seems.

Hah! In my case the fandoms overlap, so to say. Buuuut, fair warning: I’m kind of dense when it’s about noticing stuff, at least most of the time. I may not notice this, haha

[rose-reads-visualnovels]

I don't think it is worth worrying about the EP8 manga right now, that is ways away. More important, the context for why many people like the manga can be discussed during or after EP7, so might as well wait 'till then

Yeah! I was just answering anon asks and Homa told me it wasn’t a spoiler since it was just “fandom reaction” to “unknown things happening” so I felt like a poll to understand my followers opinions on it/the manga would be an interesting move. It very much is a long time away from happening though since I’m like 5(?) chapters into Episode 1

- Rose, the Revolutionary Witch

[fandomsandfeminism]

@Heattth

I'd probably want the lamp redesigned. At this scale it looks like more of a teapot, honestly. Buuuuuut it is charming

Thoughts on an Austin flag redesign.

I think it'd be fun to keep the gold somehow, but nothing initially tried looked good. I may keep playing witg it.

But I like the idea of keeping the spirit of the lamp with some stylized fire.

[dukeofriven]

Your analysis on the Prologues is an oasis in the endless span of nonsense that is the Homestuck tag and subreddit. So thankyou, truly, about it.

Hey I forgot to comment on this at the time but you often leave really inspiring and nice shit in my inbox and I wanted to publicly thank you for it. There are days I dread seeing a New Mail message in the ol’ inbox but never when a heatth/heattth message is involved.

[momestuck]

Calliope is obsessed with aspects of human/troll romance that are not natural to Cherubs, so I think this fascination extending to reproduction would make sense. This also extends to Caliborn interestingly enough. When he ask for "Porn" from Dirk, he explicitly asks for marriage and babies.

yes that’s a good point!

in this regard, taking Candy as “Calliope’s story”, and previous observations of Calliope and Caliborn representing opposed ‘sides of Fandom’ - Calliope represents a side of fandom that wants everything to be very neat, of consummated ships producing babies and living happily ever after. insofar as this work emerges from a side of Fandom that wants to like, dive into the angst and struggle, perhaps Candy is a repudiation of that - though not just shitting on it, but trying to present some kind of alternative, in a kind of ‘life is messy but that’s good’ way or something

[dunmeshistash]

Do you have the Daydream Hour comic of Kabru and Holm talking about Gnomish torture in English? I am not sure if I ever saw that one.

Here it is!