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applestorms · 5 months ago

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doom, aspect complements, & oppressing social systems

some kinda half-baked (literal) shower thoughts on aspect complements, particularly life & doom, with, surprisingly, not too much on the captors but a decent section on jane. this is long as fuck, shit.

TL;DR: aspect complements are nice in how they expand the meaning of each individual aspect, doom & life in particular are cool in how they have such overarching influence over the lives of characters and should really get more attention analysis-wise, ft. my own musings about how the alpha kids' lives are seeped in doom, in large part because of madame HIC herself. written in one sitting because i guess i'm insane.

the one thing i really, really like about the canon established by the extended zodiac is the way it splits aspects into complementary pairs. to me, one of the major appeals/frustrations of homestuck's classpect & lunar sway system is how vague and yet distinct the categories are, how blurry the borders are but how distinct of an Feel you can get almost instantly upon even just hearing the names of each aspect. e.g. i can say that [x] character from an entirely separate piece of media is a prince of doom, and even if you don't know jack shit about homestuck classpects on some level you can still get that, understand the implications that has on the character-- what "prince" means for how they treat others or the expectations they have for themself, the specific emotional connotations of what a person presiding over "doom" might be associated with. they play into long-established cultural categories, basically, remixed Jungian archetypes as some people might (and have) put it. still, i think homestuck has a pretty interesting way of interpreting these categories, which is part of why classpects can be so appealing.

homestuck aspects hold a lot of implicit associations that you can learn & guess at over the course of reading the comic, so setting up these complementary pairs works really well in my mind since it only strengthens the associations. take light & void, for example: light is associated thematically with knowledge, luck, and being in the spotlight. typically (at least in my own american context), the opposite of light is designated as dark-- but homestuck instead makes light's complement void, the aspect associated with nothingness, secrets, people & characters forgotten or left behind, waiting. following the logic of this video, void isn't even associated w/ the color black (typically associated w/ darkness) but rather the color white, pure emptiness, something that can't really be known, 道可道，非常道。名可名，非常名。"The Dao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Dao. The name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging name," (Daodejing, Legge translation) or, alternatively, "A Way that can be followed is not a constant Way. A name that can be named is not a constant name," (Ivanhoe translation) and so on and so forth. light in homestuck thus isn't just knowledge about the world, it is the world. it is, period. understanding the world, being a major player within that world is equivocated with being itself though this pairing-- and, in turn, a lack of understanding is associated w/ a lack of (meaningful? seen?) existence itself.

anyways, there are interesting things you could said about all these pairings (thinking about blood & breath and hope & rage in particular), but the one i really wanna focus on right now is one set that i think often goes overlooked, which sucks because i think both aspects carry a lot more weight in homestuck than people tend to give it credit for: life & doom.

life is the side to this i have less strong feelings/thoughts about, so let's maybe start with that. we have a handful of pretty relevant life players in comic so this is perhaps the clearer side of the dichotomy: while feferi doesn't get a ton of focus after her original introduction in hivebent (and especially after murderstuck, rip), jane, meenah, and the condesce are all pretty major characters so we have a decent amount to work with for analysis. i particularly like the classpect-navalgazing summary of life as an, "aspect of affluence," life players being people that grow up with a lot materially but in turn have a lot to figure out about the emotional/empathy stuff, who benefit from a kind of "dubious privilege," that makes their homelife cushy and gives them a hefty inheritance to fall back on, but makes all the social shit more confusing.

it's that struggle against the status quo that they simultaneously benefit from that really stands out to me here, especially because the main life player that i want to talk about is the condesce-- not just meenah, but )(er Imperious Condescension herself. so, to get into that...

homestuck really functions under a systems brain, which is obvious from the start w/ all the computer science jokes (that i definitely 100% understand) but easily expands past that as the series goes on. if you've gotten this far into reading this essay, you know what i'm talking about. what's been more relevant in my mind recently, though, is not just the ways in which homestuck itself is built up through these systems, but the way it both thematically & literally portrays social systems as well, as a general concept/working force in the universe even outside of more specific social systems like racism/sexism/ableism/etc.

from all the reading/watching i've done looking at peoples' various classpecting analysis (long way of saying i forget exactly where this comes from), i've come to view rage & doom as two sides of the same coin, or more accurately, two reactions to the same perceptions: both doom & rage are acutely aware of just how much the world & greater forces around them are fucking them over, it's just that doom reacts by giving in to the Inevitability of it all, trying to work within the restraints of the system surrounding them, while rage reacts by giving a giant fuck you and trying to tear it all down.

tying this back to life, the dichotomy of life & doom as complementary again has some interesting implications, specifically in how life players benefit from the status quo while doom players suffer so heavily under the weight of it. keep in mind: just like meenah, the condesce is a thief, the only real difference being that the condesce's power extends over a much grander scale of space & time. when the condesce kills off humanity, stealing life from the planet & replacing it w/ her own faux/more desirable replicas, she is in the process dooming humanity & the planet itself (parallel to roxy: steal void, create being, steal life, create nihilistic inevitability). as one of the major villains in homestuck, really second only to lord english, the condesce is thus not just an individual person but something like a system of power itself. as dirk says to jake on (A6A3:4864)

TT: Though the Baroness made very few substantive gestures of aggression, the global fear of her looming threat would trigger all the changes she needed. TT: Governments prepared for war, as if to defend against the invading alien armies she undoubtedly commanded. TT: But of course, she had no army. She was always the only one of her kind. TT: Instead, the world powers were only setting about to build her armies for her.

thus HIC, as the most powerful iteration of meenah that we see in comic, both benefits from the status quo as it is already established and has enough power to evolve/expand upon it herself, to the point where you can really see her as the figurehead/leading innovator for oppression, both on alternia and earth in the B2 timeline.

it's because of this that i think doom has a lot more influence over the plot/world of homestuck than people give it credit for. to give a more distinct example of this, while the alpha kids' game is called a void session, i don't think it's too far off base to note the ways in which doom hangs over it as well. looking specifically at some (alpha) kids:

DIRK is probably the least directly connected alpha kid to doom, being associated more w/ void through homestuck's systems brain & his various connections to equius (& nepeta), as well as the heart/mind pairing (and jake's hope influence sneaking into everything tbh w/ BGD). still, i think it's pretty obvious to anyone that's like. read through dirk's self-hating bullshit that he has a lot of doom-related thoughts, which can in part be attributed to HIC's influence on his apocalypse world, but also, and more notably in my mind, dave's lasting legacy on him.

alongside the typical patron troll pairings of john/vriska, rose/kanaya, dave/terezi, and jade/karkat for the beta kids, we also have the (less overt/clear) pairings of which troll resembles each kid the most: namely, karkat being the "john" of the trolls, leader-ship/social position-wise, jade being associated with both nepeta & feferi, and rose... being like kanaya, vriska, and terezi, i guess?? it's less clear for the girls i suppose, and perhaps not a super strong connection in general as the trolls are pretty distinctly themselves separate from the human kids, but the important detail here is the connection between sollux & dave, as the (not at all) "cool kids" and primary besties to the main leader of their respective group. visually, they can also be loosely associated through their trademark glasses, sollux's red and blue lenses being connected to the A & B universes of the trolls & humans respectively and dave's stiller shades being connected to paradox space & the greater universe of homestuck (and problem sleuth) as a whole after passing through a black hole.

dave's biggest connection to doom however is in his connection to doomed timelines and the dead daves all of his timeline-hopping shenanigans lead to. he kind of ends up constantly skirting around the edges of doom, in a way, utilizing terezi's seer of mind help to just barely avoid his own inevitable doom. you could almost define time itself as an aspect along those terms, actually, with the stress time players are constantly under coming from the impending doom hanging over their heads that they're always just barely avoiding, like a satellite constantly falling and missing the planet as gravity pulls it along into orbit. sick imagery regardless.

sidenote: perhaps i've been staring at this dumb aspect circle for too long, but it seems notable enough to mention that doom & time connect in a line that is directly parallel to life & space's connection. ALSO, just now remembering that i wrote an entire essay on space & time and those aspects' connection to life & death (the concepts, not just the aspects) way back in like, february, that i almost entirely forgot about until literally just now. guess i'll try editing that later?? (edit: i'm a doofus. i talked about the space/time stuff mostly in my kant essay. still gonna post something about death in homestuck later, though.) carrying on.

anyways, even looking past beta dave's connection to sollux, alpha dave is a character so seeped in tragedy that i don't think i even need to say all that much to make this connection clearer. his entire life as dirk dictates it is essentially just one big fight against an inevitable end, not only for himself but the entire rest of humanity as well, and the underlying implications that even if he had lived to old age he never would've been able to meet or raise dirk only hammers this in even harder. alpha dave was doomed from the start, not just from the moment HIC landed on earth but the moment skaia took his and dirk's baby meteors and damned them to separation.

JAKE's connection to doom is similarly primarily through sollux, though it's both more direct and less obvious than dirk's. putting his connections to jade and my space/life thoughts aside for another essay, jake's main link to doom is through erisolsprite-- fittingly, in the biggest catastrophe of a doomed timeline, in game over.

the mention of erisol in general actually brings up another weird, not-quite complementary connection between doom & hope, which is another line of connection in the rectangle that is hope/rage/life/doom-- notably, i believe optimistic duelist referred to these as the mutable aspects, the most abstract of the twelve. to bring back my point from earlier, i would also say that these are the aspects with the most far-reaching, powerful influence over homestuck, whether that be in-story in the world, through the systems of power and oppression that characters live under (in the case of doom & life), or on a meta level on the story itself, particularly when it comes to what is or isn't allowed to happen/plot contrivances & coherency, etc. (in the case of rage & hope).

sollux & eridan's dynamic in A5 really establishes doom & hope as two opposing viewpoints, complacency & utter surrender in the face of a horrible fate you can never escape versus faith & imagination to the point of fucking lunacy & calling a magic wand a "science stick". in erisolsprite, it's really the doom that comes through the strongest, perhaps in contrast against jake's own pitiful attempts to hope himself through the in-game social awkwardness he wants to pretend doesn't exist. in parallel to fefetasprite's complete silence (but simultaneously, implied perfect support & friendship), erisolsprite is an asshole that can't stand anyone and especially not himself and has completely given up on any remaining semblance of hope-- kind of a thematically nice conclusion, actually, finding the middle ground of sollux's doom & eridan's princely destruction of hope after all their conflicts from earlier in the story. or it could be, if it weren't so fucking miserable to look at. point is, i think jake's hopelessness (or perhaps more accurately, his inability to access hope) later in the story becomes quite synonymous with doom, similar to dirk in how neither of them can see much of a future.

ROXY is actually probably the least doom-ridden of the entire group, which i suspect may come from the fact that she is herself a void player and thus is more at home in the context of a void session, even if all her friends are being shitheads the entire time. really, the points where roxy is the most bitter & doom-ridden occurs before they even enter the game, when she is still under the strongest influence of the condesce, like how roxy continually pushes back on even starting the game at all just as a fuck you to HIC.

fittingly, i think it's actually the absence of doom that makes roxy such a strong & great friend once she gets her shit together in-session. she kind of has an opposite arc to the rest of the alpha kids, starting off completely doom-ridden thinking that she's never going to meet her mom or her friends and constantly paranoid that HIC is going to fuck everything up, only to re-evaluate once she's physically with her buds and have more faith in the future. a good example of how life & doom are connected to social systems (or not just any specific system of bigotry, but moreso the general feeling of having greater powers outside your control that have a major influence on your life) maybe-- roxy must extricate herself as entirely as possible from the status quo, from world-wide and/or world-influencing figures' expectations, before she can start focusing on and figuring out what really matters to her and pursue those goals, e.g. getting sober.

and of course, our beloved life player, JANE. as a life player, jane's connections to doom are a lot more obvious than the previous three, but i think that only strengthens this idea of doom residing over the alpha kids' session (and homestuck as a whole, really). where you have to look more to the generally miserable, nihilistic sentiments of the other kids to see the influence of doom, jane is literally and regularly brainwashed to the values & ideals of HIC. note some of the specific orders that her tiaratop gives her (A6A1:4153):

You put on your highly fashionable UNREAL HEIRESS THOUGHTWAVE TIARATOP and flip it on. It immediately hums to life as its blazing fast processes mingle with your thoughts. It is the most efficient computing technology in the world by far, as long as you don't wear it for too long. But aside from a few migraines, you can't possibly imagine any OBEY drawbacks that CEASE REPRODUCTION could come with SUBMIT merging CONSUME your thoughts with EMBRACE YOUR CULLING experimental technology CONFORM TO SOCIAL ORDER from an STAY ASLEEP extremely powerful DIE corporation, wait what?

or, one by one, categorized loosely:

OBEY, SUBMIT, CONFORM TO SOCIAL ORDER, STAY ASLEEP: obvious implications, again ties to the idea of doom & life dictating overarching social systems/order. the last one is notable in that it also ties jane to jade's narcolepsy, which fits the whole crockertier/grimbark arc that happens later on when those two meet.

CEASE REPRODUCTION: perhaps more HIC specific, in that she hates human reproduction. i think i might address this more in that time/space essay, if i ever get around to editing/finishing that.

EMBRACE YOUR CULLING, DIE: the "DIE" part of this is pretty on the nose w/ HIC's stealing of life aka eradication of humanity, but the "EMBRACE" part of the culling one really solidifies a connection to doom.

what stands out to me is that it is unclear how much of these subliminal teachings jane is meant to internalize & apply to herself personally versus spread & share & execute in her job as an heiress & tool to HIC. it's clear from the way that jane talks to jake in the jail cell that even while in full-crockertier mode she at least in part goes against some of these teachings, telling jake on (A6A6I1:6443):

JANE: You do remember our recent agreement to have "a zillion babies," don't you, Jake? I do hope you were not planning to renege on this vow. JAKE: *Sob sob sob...* JANE: Our children will rule the empire when we are gone, which of course will be never, because we will be eternally young and beautiful and immortal and in love, for ever and ever.

clearly conflicting with the whole "CEASE REPRODUCTION" thing, though she does admittedly treat him with quite a bit of disgust at the same time that she's telling him he's doomed to be a baby making machine or whatever.

point is, as a life player, and especially as a life player under the direct influence & control of HIC, jane is in that conflicting & confusing position talked about earlier, where she simultaneously benefits from privilege & has extensive control in deciding which standards she wants to, as well as extends those expectations onto the people around her (e.g. for a more minor example, think of how she dictates the grammar of her friends when speaking to them online), but is also stuck in a position where she deals with some of the most significant negative side-effects of such standards.

jane's gender fuckery really sums this up best: she both loves & idolizes gumshoes and the traditionally masculine aesthetics and attitudes that come w/ them, but is also in one of the most obsessively feminine, stay-at-home, stuck-in-the-kitchen 1950s housewife archetypes ever. she's a girlboss heiress to a capitalist, corporate empire, a job that is itself very traditionally masculine in the inherent power it holds, but resides over one of the most traditionally feminine spheres it possibly could. jane is made of life, she was born into and built out of the status quo & social standards of the world she landed on and reaps all the benefits & consequences of such, trapped in a system that protected her, in her house by a father that loves her, and constantly keeps trying to break out even if she doesn't even understand the full magnitude of what she's doing or wants. crockertier jane is really just the epitome of this-- a form that dooms her just as much as it benefits her, wealth that cushions her ass and means absolutely nothing, a title that she cannot be extricated from, for better and for worse.

#astronaut rambles #the prince of doom is shadow the hedgehog btw #hs #long post #homestuck meta #almost as much connection making bullshit as actual astrology in this one can you believe it #akjdsaakfa this is not super coherent but it was fun to write i missed writing homestuck essays #even if it kills my hands n ass to sit down n aggressively type this shit as fast as i can for hours at a time so i don't lose the thoughts #i really should finish that space & time essay too #not just for the strider stuff but to talk more about jade & jane too #they've got an interesting connection and deserve a lot more analysis #ok whatever posting this now before my computer pulls a karkat and explodes #edit: forgot to add #but my thoughts on LE as a stand-in/figurehead/whatever for patriarchy in homestuck applies to this too #jegus this is a particularly rambling astronaut rambles good luck to anyone who manages to read this thing

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