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applestorms · 2 years ago

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i'm in a bit of a john mood atm, so i wanted to write a post about some of the things that i think fanon gets wrong about him. the biggest thing is that imo a lot of people flatten john a ton in considering him the poster child for Homestuck™ as a story, which sucks because i think it should go the opposite way around. he's the prototype kid, yes, but that just means his unique traits have interesting implications for the rest of the story and homestuck's core themes, not that he doesnt have any unique traits to begin with. john informs homestuck of its themes, the story doesn't inform him of his character traits; sburb gives him the kernelsprite, but he & his friends are the ones doing the prototyping.

so, then, what are those character traits? who is john as a person and how does that inform the story as a whole?

TL;DR: if jade's overarching story arc is about the struggle of loneliness & isolation, john's is about the feeling of falling behind your peers, which is why i think his ending the story depressed works so well

trapped in the s(u)burbs

okay, argument: SBURB is clearly pronounced "sss-burb," like suburb but skipping over the first u. when the kids enter the session they are basically trapped in the world of the game until they can beat it and make the new universe -> they are trapped in the s(u)burbs -> they are home, stuck.

this is a weird line of thought but it's kinda interesting to go through the ways that the (human) kids are trapped in their homes, both physically and emotionally. rose is stuck in that she lives seemingly in the middle of fuckin' nowhere surrounded by a forest, dave is stuck in his apartment due to being watched by an abusive parent, and jade, jake, roxy, & dirk are all stuck in the middle of the ocean. john (and jane) however? they're just in the suburbs.

idk how much this cultural context translates to people living in other countries, but john & jane's original neighborhood is the fucking Epitome of modern american suburbia. i cannot emphasize enough just how much i fucking despise neighborhoods like this: sprawling and empty, they are a modern labyrinth to navigate. every single house looks like it was copy and pasted one spot over, the streets are all named the same thing but with slight differences ("Bluejay Road" vs. "Bluejay Lane" vs "Bluebird Court" HELL), driving through them is agony and walking is impossible. my dad pointed out to me one time that every single house looks like it was painted with a different shade of baby shit and he was correct. and this is not even mentioning the people that live there: i don't want to overgeneralize too much, but these houses are usually pretty big and the fact that they're supposed to be a "safer" place to raise kids makes them decently expensive, so these places are generally very white, very upper-middle class, and you can just. Feel It in the air

so this is where john starts his story. the page (A1:82) was one of the first things that caught my eye when reading homestuck originally, even as a dumb little preteen the age of the characters themselves with barely any greater social consciousness. john starts the story fucking around in his room, talking to all of his friends online, and who could ever blame him when it's such an american wasteland outside. not to get too far into my opinions on american architecture, but if you live anywhere in the united states and ESPECIALLY the suburbs you are basically trapped in the house until you can get your license at 16, transportation entirely at the whims of where your parents can/want to drive you. it makes sense, then, that john's aspect is breath and so heavily tied to transportation, a desire to get out and moving and interacting with the world. the sick irony of sburb, imo, is how that desire is later twisted against him.

when john first enters the session, meteors are beginning to destroy the world and the rest of the entire human population of earth. but to a kid for whom the entire world feels so far away and empty, how much does that really matter? especially when your internet friends, the few people you actually care about, are just going to enter the same game and escape along with you. speaking of,

2. social anxiety & internet friends

one thing i really like about the alpha kids is the fact that you can kinda reverse engineer them and their core character traits from the beta kids, which actually still works within the logic of canon if you consider their biological relationships. not only do the alphas and betas share chumhandle initials, but the person they share with is also the person they are most similar to across generational lines:

rose & dirk are both anal retentive motherfuckers + rose's interest in psychology informs dirk's interest in philosophy/old greek dudes, roxy & dave care about their friends to a fault and serve their needs constantly (emotionally vs. practically, maybe; and also maybe are in love with all their friends to some degree or another too?), jane & jade both have ties with their respective universe-iteration's first guardian and are mentally separated from everyone else at the start of their arcs (jane by not believing roxy and jade by getting prospit visions).

imo rose & dirk have the strongest connection and jade & jane the weakest, and each kid is also pretty unique on their own + informed by their more direct familial relationship too, but i think the chumhandle connection is key in understanding how the characters were initially created in terms of basic personalities, likes, dislikes, etc. since it fits with the stacking nature of how homestuck as a whole functions, both as a story and a world.

so: john & jake. i think fandom has actually done a good job with learning how to appreciate jake better in recent years by figuring out just how much of a persona he puts on to hide his intelligence, but since this is a john post, what's really interesting to me is how that might inform the way we view john.

to start, there are some really obvious connections between john & jake that are as clear as jake's first letter to john (A4:1955): both like pretty shitty movies, are allergic to peanuts, and they're practically identical in terms of appearance. what i see as the key connection however, which informs the entirety of homestuck's medium, is their shared social anxiety.

jake is a very socially anxious dude. all of the alphas are characterized by their inability to communicate and navigate interpersonal relationships, but this is especially true for jake, and i think the most obvious evidence for this is in the specific kind of character that he creates for himself. while realistically we know that jake spends most of his time (pre-brobot, at least) watching movies alone in his room, he specifically likes to take on the persona of an adventurous, extroverted action hero, charming and gentlemanly and generally a dumb jock. it's the dumb part that's important here: jake pretends to be a dumbass himbo so that when he fucks up and hurts people when he manipulates them into doing what he wants, he doesn't have to shoulder as much guilt/blame. he plays up being stupid specifically to avoid the agony of people being mad at him, caring way too much about other people's opinions (A6A2:4587). it's why the trickster arc is so painful for him, and also why he is so non-confrontational.

john is also pretty socially anxious, though i think it's a lot more subtle for him since john's upbeat personality isn't entirely a facade in the way that it is for jake. the most obvious evidence for this is again the fact that he only talks to, like, three people online and his dad. despite being 13, none of these kids ever mention jack shit about school or the other members of humanity about to be murdered by meteors from their own game, and i think that's more than just a necessity of the story considering how much homestuck seems to value realism (at least in terms of characters' emotional reactions & arc). john's dad (as pipefan413) clearly knows the neighbors since in the serious business chatting app you can see fedorafreak & the others also talking about escaping meteors, but the existence of any other kids in the neighborhood is unknown, though i would think likely considering john's early arc is set up to be as normal as possible to set up for the crazy bullshit later. (there's also the whole thing about john's peanut allergy + fear of the "peanut gallery" so)

since homestuck tells almost its entire story through the chatlogs of awkward teenagers, this is one key place where i think john's personality informs homestuck: namely, in its focus on isolation, loneliness, and growing up. SPEAKING OF,

3. childhood ignorance

jake isn't dumb, john isn't dumb, but why do so many people think that they are? for jake it's pretty clearly cause he wants it that way, but for john... i think it's cause he kind of. is? but also, he isn't. let me explain:

john often comes across to me as the most 13 year old 13 year old in the cast of homestuck. he's a sweet kid and intelligent enough for his age, but when that age is 13, there's not necessarily a lot there. john has also had the closest (closest. there's still a lot of weird shit there) thing to a Normal™ childhood out of the entire cast of homestuck (and yes that includes jane, she was the heiress to a corporate empire avoiding assassination attempts at 16, please don't call that shit normal), meaning that, in my opinion, a lot of his (lack of) maturity can be attributed to growing up pretty sheltered. where dave and rose had to contend with overt childhood abuse through toxic/neglectful parents, and even jade had to deal with a dog-parent & dead grandpa, john got a dad that actually cared about him.

this is not a bad thing in and of itself, but john being sheltered does mean that by the time they are actually entering the game and interacting with all these other worlds & alien peoples, he is imbued with a certain distinct ignorance of the greater world that becomes a very significant weakness in a story fucking dripping with semi-omniscient narrators that live to make you suffer. and, from the way he scribbles on the walls (A3:1049), this is something john is both aware of and frustrated with, calling himself a FOOL, tying to the tarot card (#1, his role as protagonist), the harlequin thing (clowns & their incredible pull on the meta of homestuck), & his anxieties (feeling ignorant & out of your depth stepping out of childhood into a world much broader and more complex and cruel than you're prepared for)

4. not a homosexual

i think i'm gonna run out of space here, so i'm just gonna copy & paste some hussie commentary here & maybe reblog this w/ some analysis of john & karkat's dynamic/parallels as "leaders" later (and maybe some june thoughts too):

5. successfully saved the world: the hero is depressed

okay, so earlier in part 1 i ended with a question:

but to a kid for whom the entire world feels so far away and empty, how much does that really matter?

i mostly left the answer to this implied earlier since it made more sense for the transition, but i think homestuck proper does give us an answer to this: it does matter! it just isn't until the end of the story, after they've won the game and finished the session, that it really starts to set in the extent of what they've lost.

so this entire post was largely motivated by another post i read earlier, which questioned why john in the snapchat credits didn't just go to live with the crockers. i gave a long ass commentary in the notes on that post, but my conclusion was basically this: john is depressed (!!!) and depression makes you apathetic & lose all motivation to do anything.

i've focused a lot on john's early life and the beginning of the story in this post, which is maybe in part because i've been rereading from the beginning recently, but also because john kind of loses touch with everyone else in the story as soon as he enters the session.

i think this is often read as just being a product of john's classpect, heir of breath. john doesn't just inherit breath when he godtiers, he also becomes it in a very literal sense (can't fucking find the page where he transforms into wind but ugh, whatever), so he when he literally loses touch with the reality of the story after gaining his retcon powers, it follows with the thematic concept of him being breath. this isn't bad, but i think it also goes further, again connecting with that idea that john is basically the "main character" of homestuck, which is actually a very unfortunate title as it means john in particular gets very wrapped up sburb & the story as a whole in a very literal sense. again: retcon powers.

for all my frustrations with the execution of the retcon, i can't deny that it makes a shit ton of sense for john to get those kinds of powers, since his character and position as the starting kid has always been so closely entwined with the story of homestuck as a whole (see: the entire rest of this post). it also ties back to that idea of john being particularly vulnerable as a naive kid in a world of maliciously omniscient characters (e.g. doc scratch, but also vriska/terezi & all of the trolls to some degree), puppetted around by the story and slowly losing all connections with "reality" and the rest of the cast (his friends!!)

you know all those scenes where john starts interacting w/ the shittily-drawn caliborn versions of all his friends? (or this page: (A6I5:6207)) that has always come across as kind of sad to me, because it feels representative of john's (lack of) connections to his friends by that point in the story. he gets so swept up in Plot Bullshit that he basically loses most of the contact he has w/ the people that were his closest friends for years (ik people hate inversion theory but he & karkat really are complementary in some ways), and that loss of connection just exacerbates his previous anxieties about being ignorant. the conversation between him, dave, & karkat on the meteor is really revealing of this (A6A6I5:7487). where dave & karkat & everyone else got three years to sort through their shit together, john was getting dragged off to make the story make sense again, technically completely losing everyone he had known and grown up with. it's not just that dad crocker is different: everyone is different.

(this also has the kind of even more depressing alternate implication that john doesn't even really get the chance to feel that difference outside of jade, since he wasn't able to connect with "his" original dave, rose, etc. in the pre-retcon timeline regardless. great!)

john's depression has always been one of my favorite parts of his character arc tbh, which ig is a weird thing to say, but it just makes so much sense to me as the next step in his story, if not the true conclusion. it's only after winning the game that john really starts to catch up with everyone else in terms of maturity and understanding, and by that point, when everyone already feels so far ahead, how could he possibly catch up? (the answer is that he can, just not alone, but it is that exact feeling of not being able to that makes him isolate in the first place. depression is a fucking shithole)

so much of homestuck is about loneliness, but in turn so much of homestuck is also about social connections, about the people around you that you love and care about and change your life. where karkat is able to heal the connections of the people around him by helping them through their interpersonal relationship bullshit, john gets caught in the wind of the plot and loses his connections, thus losing his ability to really mature as a person at the same rate as everyone else (not to mention how he might've felt behind in the first place). but still, even w/ john's arc ending on a heavy, perhaps unsatisfying note at the end of homestuck proper, i like to think there's still a lot of hope for him: after all, his dearest friends and family are all right there. he just needs to get off his ass and start talking to them.

(sidenote: while editing this part of the post, i suddenly realized just how sad it is that karkat and john talk so goddamn little in all of the post-canon shit. which fucking sucks actually because karkat would be the perfect person to yell at someone until they finally get off their ass and start trying to be a person again, exactly what john needs after the game imho. pumpkin route you are forming in my mind)

uhh anyways, i don't know how good of a job i did at tying this post back to my original goal, but if you read this far, thank you. i have been typing nonstop for like four straight hours (ᵃⁿᵈ ᵗʰᶦʳᵗᵉᵉⁿ ᵐᶦⁿᵘᵗᵉˢˀ) and i think my right ring finger is about to fall off.

bonus: 6. john is hussie???

OKAY, actual finale, this is quick and dumb but this idea comes pretty much entirely from a couple random lines of hussie commentary from a john & dave conversation on (A2:324):

John makes some pretty sassy quips here. I like the "15th day in a row" line, which makes sense since I was the one who actually said it in a real conversation about this.

most people make the connection between hussie & dave (& dirk, i suppose) since dave's sense of humor is basically just unfiltered hussie, but this comment makes me wonder what was put into john too (though i suppose you could consider all fictional characters imbued with some aspect of their author). i'm not super into psychoanalyzing hussie as a person through homestuck itself, but if you're into that, here ya go.

#the one thing this post is missing is the significance of john's movie taste #but unfortunately i think i'm too young and i grew up on basically none of that shit so :skull:#someone else is gonna have to make up for that #hs #astronaut rambles #super long post #wrote this while procrastinating an actual essay are you proud of me #i like john if you couldn't tell i vibe with june a lot #probably cause i kinda physically look like her + peanut allergy lol #and her childhood is vaguely similar..... idk i just get the arc kinda #shoutout to the homestuck wiki btw #saved my ass #i wrote this all in one sitting and now i kinda hate myself for it #fingers hurt #homestuck #john egbert #The John Post #update: edited!

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