#i'm actually kinda proud of myself for this one

[genderqueerdykes]

I was reading through your replies to the lesbian who was explaining why they hated cis men, and I found you replies really insightful and well put. I've often had trouble articulating *why* man hating queer people is so frustrating and upsetting to me. I'd also love to add another point from my percpective to the conversation:

I've almost exclusively been sexually assaulted by women. The only time a man has ever done something that could be considered sexual assault to me was a situation I wouldn't consider sexual assault (more just, he did things in sex that I wasn't into and didn't like, felt more of a case of 'having bad, poorly communicated sex/kink' than anything else). I've also been told by people that I was quote unquote "lucky" for being sexually assaulted/harassed by a girl in my dorm room when I was fifteen (maybe sixteen? bad at time) because it wasn't a man. The worst transphobia, abuse and harassment I've been through has been from women. My ex was femme enby who was kinda man hating and they fucked me up badly. I still love women, as a queer sapphic who adores the people in my life rn women are still wonderful, but they aren't safer than men. In several ways I actually feel safer stuck alone in a room or at a bus stop at night with a man than a women. The fact people make spaces that are supposed to be queer but deeply hostile to men is so infurating bc they act like everyone has a right to 'be cautious of men because of bad experiences' and make spaces less open to queer men but no one would ever say that about my bad experiences with women. (and no I'm not usually in women's only spaces, the reason I've never been SAed by a man is not bc I'm not around men, I'm around men plenty)

Feel free to not answer ask if its too much, have a lovely day and thank you for talking about intersex issues, about the way gender essentialism and fear of men hurts people. I appreciate your blog greatly.

i really appreciate you sending this, thank you. i really cannot stop myself from talking about how man hating is fucking everything up because this experience is so important and it's being completely erased

i'm sorry you've gone through all of that. that's a lot to deal with, and it's an experience that doesn't deserve to be erased. pushing the thought that women are inherently safe to be around puts women who are assholes into a situation they're allowed to be mean as fuck to everyone else because "oh i'm traumatized from patriarchy". we all are. you're not special.

i have also been abused by women as well. my mom, sister, other family members, friends and exes have all abused me. i talk about it a lot, but one of the worst times in my life is when i lived in a queer punk house. i really thought it would be accepting, i thought i had found my people. there were a lot of trans girls who lived and stayed there and i got to know a lot of them because they found me cute.

whenever they would find out i'm also a trans man as well as genderqueer, these girls would clamor over each other to misgender me. i was ridiculed for not having a penis, being told that that's what makes a man a man. these girls would also brag about how they hated twinks, gay and bisexual men. they were proud to hate men, even the queer ones around them. there were so many pieces of trans art and things like estrogen bottles everywhere, but nothing transmasculine at all. even though transmascs showed up there often

it sucks that other queer people can sometimes be one of the most transphobic people you know. people have to start caring about how this affects people. women are not inherently safe to be around. men aren't inherently going to hurt you. we have to grow up past this mindset

[taffywabbit]

it feels weird to finally get a year where I get to say this but I think maybe 2024 actually WAS my year. hopefully not the last, but it really feels like the first, at least in a long time. I was stagnant and static and drifting without much momentum in any direction for quite a while, and then suddenly this year:

I finally moved into a solo apartment and am no longer living in a house with an ever-shifting pool of like 5 roommates. having my own quiet comfy space to cook and relax and be nocturnal without bothering anyone has been HUGE for my mental health

I worked very hard to recoup the money I lost from that move and got myself in a fairly stable and comfortable position again, work-wise

I finally started HRT in June, after about 5 years of waiting/struggling to find a doctor/fear/general motivation issues. which absolutely kicks ass and is probably the highlight of the whole year if I had to pick just one

I also finally got diagnosed with ADHD and (with a little trial and error) got medicated for it, which is another thing I've been trying to sort out for like 6 years. hey did you know executive dysfunction and problems with memory/task management/motivation make it really hard to go through the process of getting treated for the cause of those symptoms? wild huh

I rekindled a much closer relationship with a couple of my younger siblings, especially the elder of my two sisters, and we have really nice chats fairly regularly now (crazy considering we did nothing but fight constantly for like 20 years lol)

I came out fully to my family, for better or worse, and MOST of them have been surprisingly chill and supportive about it

I worked on a little game project with a friend for a couple months! it didn't end up working out but I learned a lot from the experience

I started doing WAY more personal art and kinda rediscovered my passion for it, and as a result I've progressed a lot stylistically and technically within the past few months

I beat Pseudoregalia 94 times since the first time I tried it in February. not really an achievement on the same level as all this other stuff but I'm still proud of it

like idk! there were a lot of rough patches this year and I was honestly pretty burnt out for the first half of it, but 2024 still feels like the year where I bundled up all my frustration about going nowhere with my life and achieving none of my goals and turned it into fuel to just blaze through a bunch of stuff in the back half. I wish I'd done a lot of it sooner, but life has been reminding me a lot lately that it really IS better late than never, so I'm trying to keep that perspective in mind and not let the idea of a ticking clock intimidate me like it used to. I am trying to be optimistic that 2025 will allow me to continue this momentum. we'll see I guess!

idk if I really have any resolutions per se? I guess I'd really like to make music more often in 2025, even if it's just small things I do in one or two sittings occasionally instead of full songs. I started writing a song this year, with lyrics and everything, and then didn't finish putting it together, so at the very least I'd like to make THAT happen soon. I think finding a way to get myself back into animation casually would be neat too - I have a lot of mental hangups and personal roadblocks holding me back, largely from my awful college experience, but I think if I can just find some tools that are comfortable for me then I'll be able to conquer those and hopefully start enjoying it again on my own terms. there's other stuff I'd like to pick up this year as well but honestly I'm keeping my expectations small for now and we'll just see what happens! let's do it, wahoo

[confessionseddie]

2024 💖

tagged by @butchdiaz and @saryasy and @livingincolorsagain for a 2024 fic roundup (thank you!!) but since i didn't publish all that much fic i'll include some gifsets too just because i'm proud of them :) @cinematicnomad also tagged me in a 2024 in gifs roundup so i thought i'd combine the two 💕 bit late but hey.

AUGUST

most popular: buddie in 6x01 favorite: gayddie in season 6b my first proper gifset for 911 before i was even really in the fandom :) i still had 911 blacklisted while i was watching so i wasn't spoiled for anything, and watching eddie in s6b in particular felt like.... well, it made me want to actually make a gifset after the hobby had been soured for me for a while. also i think many now beloved mutuals found me through this post so 🫶🏻 thank you eddie

SEPTEMBER

most popular: eddie in 4x06 favorite: buck + it lingers for your whole life :)

OCTOBER

most popular: buck in 8x03 favorite: parameddie in season 8a honarary mention: eddie's hands in 8x04

FIC

kerosene (6.5k words, E) dear to my heart kerosene, which was as much a love letter to buck as it was a little bit of selfish catharsis-- i think i'll never write anything as good as this again and i'm completely fine with that.

NOVEMBER

i'm pretty sure this month rendered me temporarily insane. luckily i wasn't alone in that.

most popular: good cologne / hence the button down favorites: gossip eddie the sheer joy i felt making this and it only took me like two hours. i was genuinely smiling grinning chuckling kicking my feet the entire time. whimsy eddie forever and: bobbyeddie something i wouldn't really have thought to make myself but my dearest kasia suggested it and i thought. why the hell not. this gifset is probably the one that took the most effort out of anything i made last year but it was also the most gratifying in the end :) and the response i got upon posting was SO lovely i felt my heart warm for weeks after :')

FIC

groom (548 words, G) a drabble from a fic that will never see the light of day, probably. haha but i think i got all their voices right and it felt like an actual scene from the show which i was proud of considering i often struggle with dialogue. DIAZ (3k words, E) my most kudosed fic ever :) i reread this one myself all the time because it feels so cozy. i love when the words just pour out of me and buddie sort of write themselves. freaks 4 monogamy buddie my beloved risky (ryliver, 3.4k words, E) yeah. 🏇 did not expect anyone to even read this honestly lmao, considering i posted it anonymously. half writing challenge half blacked-out-watching-rg-dance-in-his-underwear kinda situation pulmonary (4.5k words, M) while this is not polished to perfection i still managed to write what i wanted to write :) i got some of the loveliest comments i've ever received on any of my writing here, too, so it was all worth it

DECEMBER

most popular: brat taming - a guide by eddie diaz favorite: the above forever and ever :) best thing i've ever posted.

some sap-- said it before, will say it again, this is the most fun i've had in fandom in years and years. i love coming here and posting my silly lil gifs and words, and i appreciate reading every single tag or comment or message anyone ever sends me or leaves under my stuff so thank you!! MWAH. 💋💋

[itooaminthisepisode]

hiii thanks for the tag!! held off on posting this cause i knew i would be uploading another fic by the end of the year and i wanted to include it lol :3

thank you @spicedrobot for the template! and without further ado, here's my wrapped!

66k words is an absolutely insane number of words that i never dreamed i would be able to write in the span of a year and yet somehow here i am. Holy Shit!!! i'm pretty sure that's more writing (or at least creative writing) in one year than i've done in the rest of my life combined.

without further ado here's an overview of all the fics i've written this year, with a little added commentary because i love yapping!! below a cut cause it got kinda long:

something sweet and safe - after wilson flirts with a nurse at work, house decides to put him in his place.

this one was my first published smut and my first foray into horrible freaknasty old man porn!! dove straight in headfirst and have never looked back since :3 need to do something with this dynamic again at some point... hmmm ;)

sick little feelings in my sick little brain - house makes wilson piss in his mouth. that's it, that's the fic.

piss md!! featuring house and wilson's (absolutely canon) shared piss kink!! i just think house should make wilson do horrible humiliating things alright. also i've had a sequel outlined for like literally MONTHS at this point i just haven't gotten around to it yet... but next year. stay tuned👀 (also maybe a third one as well we'll see how it goes!!)

wiped away my thoughts and cares - wilson sometimes struggles with incontinence. house decides to help in a rather... unorthodox way.

wilson abdl because i cannot resist putting that man in a situation!! spent two hours total writing this one (including editing) which is literally the least time i've spent on a fic Ever and somehow it's my favourite out of all 38(!!) that i wrote this year. this is another one that i am doing more of in 2025 trust🤞 little wilson is so precious to me i cannot resist him🥺

look at those puppy dog eyes - house and wilson try out petplay for the first time, and - to no one's surprise - they like it. a lot.

this is actually the first fic i started writing in 2024! i just got major writers block towards the end and left it sitting half-finished for months. but then i wrote a couple other fics and came back to it with fresh eyes and i'm really proud of how it turned out!! another dynamic that i rotate in my brain a lot. ouppies <3

i wanna throw you to the hounds - house is a werewolf - and sometimes, he can get a little... frisky when he's transformed.

this was the fic i was most nervous to post (yes, even more so than the abdl one), but im so glad ppl seemed to like it cause like. Waow :3 another one where i just put wilson in a situation!! also i love writing him having a moral crisis but doing it anyway purely cause house wants to :3

whumptober 2024 - all the filled prompts from this year's whumptober! some are short, some are longer, all of them are emotionally damaging in some shape or form.

okay look if i listed each individual fic in this series we'd be here all day so i'm just gonna talk abt whumptober as a whole. but it was SO MUCH FUN!!! wrote em in like three weeks, was churning out like 2 or 3 a day by the end, and was delirious with fever for a significant chunk of time but i'm so proud of myself for finishing in time!! if all goes well i'll be participating in 2025, albeit with slightly better planning and pacing this time!! :D

can you catch me when i'm falling down? - wilson's been having a bad day. luckily, house knows just what to do to make him feel better.

my gift for @russell-crowe as part of the 20th anniversary exchange! it was a little different to write to someone else's specifications cause i've never done it before and it's out of my comfort zone, but it was a super fun challenge and i enjoyed it a lot!! will definitely participate in this again if it runs in 2025, cause it's such a good way to feel connected within the fandom!! :D

this year's for me and you - house hangs mistletoe above wilson's doorway in an attempt to fluster him. wilson isn't so easily fooled, however, and he finds a way to beat house at his own game.

my final fic this year!! this one is another gift, this time for @nekomura-chanzu as part of the holiday gift exchange!! had a blast writing this one, it was a nice break from all the whump and smut. nothing like a sweet silly fluff fic to end the year with a bang! :3

and that's it!! what a brilliant year it's been, and here's to 2025 being even greater!

i never know who to tag for these things (social anxiety will do that😅) but to any housefic authors seeing this, feel free to add on!! <3

my ao3 wrapped! tagged by @greghousebignaturals, template by @spicedrobot

2024 was my first year of getting back into writing fanfic since literally 5 years ago - and I only got back into it in the second half of the year (and I'll still be posting more stuff before 2024 is over lbr)

very briefly, these are the House fics I wrote this year, in chronological order:

Kill the Mood: Hilson try doing doctor roleplay during sex (and fail)

Bonk: Wilson gets a concussion :)

Don't Touch Me: Wilson hates physical contact and has a bad time

inappropriate use of hospital technology: House sends Wilson a dickpic and trans!Wilson jerks off about it

acting like a tough guy: House avoids Wilson on Valentine's Day (Wilson is very endeared by this)

sleep(less): Wilson is sleep deprived to the point of hallucinating a week after he started dating House

Slow Blink: Wilson is turned into a kitten. House is confused by cat body language

ow: trans!Wilson has period cramps

oh, and one more thing: Wilson gets hurt, House mother hens him, Wilson is a little shit

Want/Deserve/Receive: Wilson starts dating House and freaks out because he doesn't feel like he's allowed to be happy

the truth I chose to bend myself around: House accidentally takes truth serum. Nobody believes him (wip)

Tie Me Up, Pull My Leash: Wilson bets House to wear a tie and then tugs on it like a leash and they make out about it

I'm tagging @itooaminthisepisode and @oldmanffucker and @coffins-and-marbles and @defibrillism (if you wanna)

template below

[myhamartiaishubris]

"What kind of Chinese Propaganda Shit are you watching now?"

Ladies, gentlemen, and variations thereupon, may I present to you the c-drama response to anime's Weeb Ass Shit scale. This scale is brought to you with help from @vyther15.

The C/P/S scale, broken down:

Chinese - This is how much Chinese context you need to understand the show, or how much the show relies on the tropes of c-drama. Pretty much all period/fantasy dramas score at least a 5 or higher, while contemporary dramas vary depending on things like current events, Internet jokes, and metatextual cliches.

Propaganda - This one's a little more difficult to define. On the surface, it is what it is on the tin: how propagandistic it is. Any drama set in the Sino-Japanese/Chinese Civil War period is guaranteed at least a 7 on this front. However, the Propaganda scale also measures how dutifully the show toes the censorship line. A show like Rattan, where the modern-day magic is loosely handwaved as aliens, but we all know it's magic? Around a 4. This also applies to shows like Joy of Life or My Heroic Husband, where a simple framing device is used to bypass the transmigration taboo. Shows that don't toe any lines but also don't really bother with propaganda sit at a solid 5.

Now, where this scale gets really interesting is the BL adaptations. You see, unlike all its other counterparts, the Propaganda scale can actually dip into negative numbers. The more boldly it flaunts censorship rules, the more negative. Word of Honor sits squarely at -4. To breach the -5 bound, it needs to be pretty explicit (take that word for its literal meaning, folks), i.e. Farewell My Concubine's canonically gay protagonist, which is pretty difficult to get these days.

Where this scale gets really wonky is when you get simultaneous positive and negative (or at least really close) numbers. The Message, for example, is about a (non-explicitly) lesbian couple fighting the Japanese. Scores about an 8(0) on the P scale. Technically this evens out to a 4, but the bracket system helps clarify the different applications of the meaning.

Shit - This one's exactly the same. The shittier something is, the higher its score, up to 10. Of course, this is also the most subjective of them all. What scores an 8 on the Shit scale might only score a 2 on yours.

Now go, be free and rank shows.

[exophreak]

HEY LOOK IT'S THAT THING FROM ULTRAKILL

i haven't even played the game proper, but i found myself overcome by my love for robots :]

[vulpinesaint]

Venom + Kissing Death by MOTHICA

[t3chborb]

I'm one year older today, so I figured I gotta wrap a present or two~

.

..

...

... Wait...

... I got it backwards, didn't I...

... I'm supposed to be... uhh... the one opening gifts today...

... Oh, how incredibly silly of me...

Welp, I'm sure Ramattra doesn't mind~

[dogboner]

personal growth is crazy because it seems like nothing has changed until you're crying because you don't want to die. you learn something about yourself that ten years ago would have actually killed you, and now you're thinking about what you can do to heal and make peace with it. nothing may have changed to you, but to the person you were however long ago, you are the "it gets better"

[justsimplypanic]

Just wanted to share this cause i'm pretty proud of how it came out considering i'm really not an expert.

I drew my beloved boys!!!

[fascinationstreetmp3]

messing around with modifying her is pretty fun. i’m actively breaking some npcs probably because i don’t know how to make new material entries but they’re a sacrifice i’m willing to make

[applestorms]

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.

[lock-my-feelings-in-a-jar]

another day, another walk

[lord-squiggletits]

whats ur fave megop fic uve written?

I'm not sure honestly 😔 I'm one of those people that hates rereading my own writing, and even though I will sometimes reread my own stuff and go "wow, past me was so smart and cool and clever for writing that," I'm not sure I enjoy any fic in particular? It's not just a matter of self-esteem either.

When I write a story it's sort of like me exorcising a set of thoughts from my brain, and once the story is finished I more or less stop thinking about it because when I finished writing the story and posted it, that act allowed me to say everything I had to say and resolve all the thoughts that prompted me to write the story to begin with.

I guess Pay Unto Evil is probably my favorite fic mostly because of how proud I am about it being such a long project (178k words I think) that took me a year and a half to finish, but it's literally the first novel length project I've ever completed. That being said, I'm not really proud of the earlier chapters of PUE (like... 1-4 or 1-5) because I feel like even though they're good, I didn't have as firm of a grasp on the characters back then as I did around chapter 6/7 and onwards. So it's a mixed bag honestly.

[frangipani-wanderlust]

Tales From Dispatch, Pt. 44

(the police are attempting to serve a warrant on a parole violator) ME: Let's take a look at this bad guy. (pulls up his driver's license) Huh. I didn't know you were allowed to get your DL photo taken while completely baked. COWORKER 1: Baked? Like in an oven? ME: No. Just look at that DL photo. (she and COWORKER 2 pull it up) Tell me you can't smell the weed just emanating off it? COWORKER 2: Oh, he's fine. COWORKER 1: What? COWORKER 2: Yeah. All the smoke will just escape through that gap in his teeth!

[whysamwhy123]

It took me forever - slowest writer in the world right here - but I've finally sort-finished a first draft of my silly trash Ricky/Christian fic that no one asked for. I say 'sort-of' because while I've written the set-up and the ending, there's a giant hole in the middle that needs to be filled. Pun intended, because ideally, there should be smut that goes right there. But I've never been able to make myself actually write smut before, and every attempt has resulted in me deleting it before posting because I'm just not happy with it at all. Usually, I end up doing a fade-to-black instead and I guess I could do that here but...it really needs them to actually fuck this time. Especially if I somehow end up continuing this AU like I kinda want to but probably won't. I don't know. Maybe I'll give it a shot and see what happens? I ain't holding my breath though - I'm painfully aware of my limitations as a writer and I don't trust myself to write smut that isn't unfathomably embarrassing to read. Y'all should free to laugh at me if/when I fail spectacularly at this.