#in every other context i don't care about Vriska

[kiseiakhun]

Every day I chase the high of what Vriska gave to femslash back in 2012

When I say femslash is boring now, what I mean is you can't go into the tags anymore and find 6 different fics where the older woman burns down the house and murders the entire family of an underage girl and then adopts her and grooms her into becoming her perfect wife. And also they have fucknasty problematic sex. You just don't get that anymore.

[davekat-sucks]

every now and then ill come back to this blog because its the only place where i can criticize homestuck and have people listen to it without screaming, "gurhhh ummm u just hate cuz um um um.. your.. your transphobic! homophobic!"

i just wanted to say homestuck fans have some of the worst humor ive ever seen, ESCPECIALLY the homestuck team. it feels so, milk toast. i get a insane vibe of old person who is trying so hard to make funny memes.

one of the comics was just,, vriska saying "gay" over and over? its not the fact that its a gay joke, cuz i think lgbtq jokes can be funny. but its just so uncreative here. it feels like laziness on full display. repeat gay over and over.... i dont really get it i guess.

or the general obsession with lgbtq identity in homestuck fandom. again, out of context this sounds like homophobic or transphobic bs but its moreso i just feel a insane dissapointment how storytelling is not valued anymore in this fandom. you just slap a label on a character and thats as far as content goes now a days.

its been like that for years as well. how many variations of different genders and sexualities until we get.. some creative headcanons? a creatively made comic? some storytelling that fleshes out the characters deeper?

the thing is people could make interesting stuff with lgbtq identities too but they never do. the bar is so fucking low man.

TLDR; homestuck fandom is the epitome of anti-creativity.

Yeah, that Vriska gay jokes was from the official Homestuck Independent Creative Union team that was posted on Patreon, drawn by floralmarsupial. It sucks hard. Someone said it looks like Vriska trying to gaslight Dave to thinking he is gay (for Karkat). It should feel wrong, but LGBT and Davekat fans don't care. Bullying and grooming are the same kind of definition in their eyes. Most of the humor in modern Homestuck plays it safe. They don't want to offend others if they try to do edgey, dark, or slapstick humor. So the go-to kind is often the hashtag relatable humor. But even then, that could be taken as offensive by someone. Even the pool of latest Internet memes can be hard if most of it sucks for what's currently popular or can't be portrayed in certain forms of styles. Simple text over image is not the same as trying to say it in a speech bubbles at times. Sudden deep fry visual humor won't pull off well if previous art styles had them looking clean and crisp at first. Maybe it can pull off well, but the execution of it mostly sucks in recent times by modern generation. LGBT themes really have taken over priorities in story telling, even when it is not involved or that important in the narrative. Like how does being trans gonna help save the world from impending doom from a big bad that is destined to appear in every existing timeline? Can we also get headcanons that may expand on the characters interest? Like if Eridan is interested in military war history, would that extend to movies or video games he could watch/play? It could get people to look more into other things they never thought they would be interested in. What about Dave's interest in collecting dead things? How about him having a fucking dinosaur collection in his house because it is cool? Showing his silly side a little? Or have Jade's gardening being taught to the other citizens of Earth, be the one that ends world hunger since plantations would be possible even in places that shouldn't be able to grow certain types of food?

[thewertsearch]

Asks Comp 1/5

We don't even need to speculate about Vriska's hidden motives - even her stated motivation is dangerous.

As I said before, we know exactly how she 'helps' people.

Thank you! It's good to be back.

Act 5.2 has been fun so far. I didn't realize how much I missed the kids until we got back to their PoVs.

Homestuck could have opened on Rose, watching her mother drink herself into a stupor - or Vriska, tossing a corpse into her spider's pit. These events are canonical, but bringing them into sharper focus would turn the story into something very different.

That Homestuck chose to start with John tells us a lot about its identity. It's a dark story, in a lot of ways - but there are much darker stories, two steps to the left.

Sburb Any% in 23:59:59 (Green Sun skip)

Haha, that's fair, actually. Although you're probably not chastising them for failing to understand the time loops you're both navigating.

(If you are, though, you have the coolest job imaginable. Are you hiring?)

@gravity-rocks asked: Ooo, saw the person who asked you about your thoughts on lusii and troll evolution and thought I would pitch in with my little theory. I like to believe instead of lusii being the parasites, maybe TROLLS evolved as brood parasites. All these lusii seem to have consistent blood colors, and the blood colors always match the troll theyre a guardian of. I know we havent seen baby lusii, but maybe before they become "white" their babies are a bright color, and the bright blood colors of the trolls evolved as a way to trick the lusii into caring for them. Now, not all animals actually care for their young, so it's not a perfect strategy, so some creatures taking 'advantage' of this parasitism couldve evolved side by side, which I find super interesting. And with troll genetics and slurries, that made me wonder if troll genomes are particularly unstable and able to incorporate all sorts of other dna into it, like some bacteria - perhaps lending to this ‘infiltration’ power. The troll powers and mutations relating to their lusii is really really interesting, I mean we saw sollux’s ogre lusus with similar powers. I wonder if that sort of matching dna in subtle ways influences which trolls are adopted by which lusus. Alternatively an even more interesting explanation. Trolls grow their powers over time with their lusus and incorporate more of their dna over their lifetime with them. With huge wiggled populations, the way the genetics slurry with each other, and ease of mutation, perhaps it explains how intense their anti mutant and culling sentiments are, and why they might have evolved to be as extreme as they are.

This is some great speculative biology - I particularly like the idea that trolls are highly prone to mutation, like an alien Eevee.

It is interesting that Sollux shares his eye-beams with his Biclops. Their powers are identical, so there has to be some casual relationship between the two - we just don't know what direction it's in.

Aw, Kanaya. Neither of you is the Stupid Girl - it just feels that way when you have a crush!

I started shipping these two because they're my favorite characters - but I'm continuing to ship them because their relationship is cute as all hell.

For sure! The added context of Hivebent really adds a lot of texture to the plot. The playing field feels wider, and the stakes are much higher.

@manorinthewoods asked: What are your favorite songs from Homestuck? [ they listed their own faves but some are technically spoilers, will send them later! - C] . ~LOSS (25/4/23)

My current favorites are Descend, Dissention, Sburban Jungle, Upward Movement, and The Beginning Of Something Really Excellent!

Another album review is well past due, but Homestuck Volume 5 is longer than the first four combined, so I'll need to set a day aside to really take it in.

I never got an ask about this, so send away!

Zathura! Damn, it's been a while since I've thought about that movie.

I love the idea that every 'real' game in fiction is actually taking place in an infinite sea of monsters.

That's true, I guess, and you do need to get there to fight the final boss - but Sollux proved that you can freely fly between planets, if you have the means. The houses seem kind of redundant, if that's their only purpose, but I don't think it is.

Act 4, I think! Hivebent's troll worldbuilding is great - but Act 4 focused a lot more on Sburb's game mechanics, and that's still my favorite part of the comic.

We don't yet know the circumstances of his Exiling, but he probably needed to lose, to be Exiled the way he did.

As for why he needed to be Exiled the way he did... well, we've already talked about how weird and arbitrary these loops are. In the end, WV's army was just a casualty of causality - and messing around with causality is beyond the scope of the game.

Not impossible, necessarily - just beyond the scope of the game. Rose knows what I'm talking about.

It's either that, or the meteor's seed was what fell into the portal, and it grew to full size after it left the Medium. Either works.

It's impossible for me to choose - but I'll default to Descend. It was a great bookend to pre-Hivebent Homestuck.

Thanks for the list of names - and congratulations on your evolution to full blog status!

That's all true - and I never considered that Karkat would be jealous of John's social circle. Things are just easier for him - his friends all get along, and he doesn't need to needle them into working together. From Karkat's perspective, John barely has to do anything as a leader, while Karkat worked his ass off and still failed. Damn.

[ this post! ]

Hahaha, damn. I forgot about those early predictions.

I was right about the terraforming, I just wasn't thinking big enough. In retrospect, it's pretty funny that I only gave it a 1% probability - for all the help they were, I may as well have pulled those numbers out of thin air.

John's the kismesissitude mascot, after all!

Earth's a big place, so there could easily be thousands of unseen temples - but I'm starting to doubt they'll ever get any focus.

I've slowly begun to accept that Earth's other sessions might just be out of scope for this story. That's for the fanfiction authors - and, maybe, for 'semi-canon' spin-offs.

Yep, this chicken/egg stuff is so common for Sburb that it's practically routine by now. It's simply not possible to say whether Titles cause personalities, or vice-versa - both were 'simultaneously' encoded into the Alpha Timeline. The point is moot.

Yeah, quadrants really haven't shaken out the way the original infodump implied they would.

Karkat's Dark Crush on John doesn't seem nearly as toxic as whatever's going on with Jack and the Queen.

Is Karkat wrong about his feelings? Do Carapacians experience kismesissitude differently? Has Hussie quietly retconned some of Hivebent's quadrant stuff?

At this point, who knows. Alternia's original view of quadrants might not even matter - it's gone, and the surviving trolls are free to do their own thing.

[hungeringheart]

Inaugural Classpect Analysis Post: Witch of Life

Doing my own most recent one, Witch of Life, first, and then I'll probably work through more as they're requested or occur to me.

So, all right, let's get into it!

There beneath the willow tree

I learned a lot about the way of things

I learned that everything (the wind, the leaves)

Has breath inside

~ There Beneath (The Oh Hellos)

Witch of Life is a difficult one because it's one of the canon matchups - my patron troll is actually Vriska, but I'm classpect and ezodiacmates with Feferi, whatever that might or might not mean for me (it means I have an evil fuchsia blorbo, for one).

For the gentle reader it means that Feferi is a canonical example whom we now have to analyze as realized or not, and we will get to that (which is also my opinion about her realization or not). But first we have to find out what a witch is, and what Life means in Homestuck.

So our canon witches are Feferi, Jade and Damara. The wiki tells us all kinds of things about witches, but it's actually all fanon, so we should be careful about how we handle things. It is true that witches are an active (-) class, but here's the rationale behind the fanon definition.

So, the best the fandom has been able to glean from Jade warping space, Feferi healing others and mimicking their abilities, and Damara ... um ... well, Damara, is that all three of them had the basic ability and inclination to fuck around with their aspect. Damara spent her Time Fucking Around until she was required to Fuck Around with Time; Feferi fucked around with the course of life (her animals) and with her own and other lives (her position on the hemospectrum) and with biology itself (every shown manifestation of her Lifey Thing); Jade lived out her life just sort of fucking around with and in space in general (where she lived, what she did in-session, why her dream self was always awake).

Thus, we can assume that the fanon definition of a witch as "one who manipulates or changes their aspect, and their world through it" is fairly spot-on. We may also define it more idiosyncratically as "one who has and uses the power to fuck around". Do they have to find out? Well, maybe not all the time -- certainly not as Doom or Void players...

But let's continue on to considering Life, which is more complicated.

Clearly and obviously we know what Life usually symbolizes in video games, and we have our own preconceptions about it as an elemental force. But what does it mean in Homestuck, to SBURB's internal symbology? What sort of hero exactly is the lifekind (perchance)?

Sea Hitler, that's what kind. No, really, the only Life heroes we have are Her Imperious Condescension Meenah "Betty Crocker" Peixes, and her children (Feferi [biologically] and Jane [socially]). Sweet Baby Ray, what a lineup. I'd normally not even mention it on a blog like this, but in this specific context is it anything that I'm Jewish?

Fuckin eh. All right. Let's examine what it is that Fef, Meenah and Jane have in common as characters and in their arcs.

To refresh:

Meenah, Jane and Fef are all "heiresses" of some sort.

Meenah and Feferi are young members of a rare troll biocaste destined to rule their world (if one of them can kill the other for it). It seems like they have a lot of agency in their world, but they don't really - at every step of their existence, the powers that be make decisions that affect them in deep and fundamental ways. Their only objective in life is really to survive it, for all however many billion years they're given.

It's my personal headcanon that mother grubs have some level of control over the brood. It's stated in canon that the "ancestor" relationship is rooted in some kind of an appreciation of a person's most similar predecessor. The genetic relationships between ancestors and descendants are probably not always literal (a person can be the centuries-delayed biological offspring of their ancestor, a biological sibling created from the same genetic material, or in fact the offspring or clone of a direct ancestor of their social ancestor, or something else).

I think if they can hold gametes for potentially centuries, they can also probably sort the material and consciously select the blood caste of their young. This means that mother grubs have the ability to choose when a new fuchsia is born. Of course, it's not like there's a strongly enforced law against just killing the resulting grubs, and raspberry syrup has to come from somewhere -- and that too is an administrative choice, made either directly by jades or by jades at the behest of the reigning Empress.

The point here is that for an Alternian heiress her entire continued existence is a matter of public opinion and the whims of her predecessor and the machinery of state, going all the way down to her own mother (which some of the hivebent adjacent stuff seems to imply might be an elite jade who undergoes some sort of helmsmanlike second metamorphosis rather than just the naturally occurring royal jelly-induced gyne I expected, which would add a circular dimension to this that is ... oddly horrifying. in your own fanon you can do what i do and ignore it if you want).

Enmeshment in this multigenerational spidernest of trauma is a really miserable way to live -- you constantly have to struggle to prove that you're worthy, that you deserve to live, that you're good enough and strong enough to be deemed fit to exist. And considering who Meenah is as a result, it's no wonder that the Condesce (as Betty Crocker) passed the intergenerational trauma torch to Jane.

Since they all fulfill the same culture role (albeit adapted for the colonized Earth in one case) and are directly socially related (Feferi is Meenah's successor in one timeline, Jane in another) we can meaningfully talk about the impact of the same system on all of them -- and about how they reconciled themselves to it, and what they did to fight for their own survival and right to growth.

It's that fight that's essential to the Life aspect -- the struggle to live, to thrive, no matter what, against all imaginable odds. Vitality, vigour, the state of life, the persistence of life against scrutiny and pathologization. Rejuvenation, plenty, and the ability to exert your will in your own life. The constant striving-to-be of all that is, and the way of things, which is comprised by it.

For Meenah, a Thief of Life, her relationship to her aspect was opportunistic and desperate -- she took whatever she could for her own benefit, and was willing to take considerable risks to fuck around and find out. Fuck her predecessor, fuck the system and fuck the entire world -- all of it had done nothing of any worth for her (as a person, as a child), and she felt within rights to claw everything out of it in revenge. Ultimately her hatred of and refusal to be beholden to the Alternian system, selfish and maladjusted as she was, led her to abdicate, run away, and enmesh her friends in the game, sealing their fates and giving her accidental control over their stolen lives. In that control she was manipulative and callous, sowed hostility among her acquaintances in the probably traumatic belief that struggle would help them survive. That's how she made it this far, isn't it?

For Jane, her alternate-universe daughter-figure and a Maid, her relationship to her aspect was servile and self-essentializing. Adult Meenah's parenting philosophy (if you can call it that) was a mirror of her AU self's style of play, with the same obsession with winning and the same roots in a simple wish to be good enough to live, good enough at living, good enough at helping others live.

With that kind of mother figure, even at the distance that they had, and with her other parent being AU Dad, it's no wonder that Jane (a Maid of Life) turned out the way she did -- initially a pushover, reliant on others for agency, for healing and to flourish. How else was she supposed to survive and preserve that thing most sacred to a child, the sense that things are as they should be?

It may also be worth exploring that Jane was a member of a species where all of one sex has the ability to reproduce, to create life and to know that they did so -- and Meenah was not, and their relationship was at least partly contextualized by that. But we can talk about that in a different post; what about Feferi?

Now that we've established an archetypal relationship between two people defined by the struggle that typifies Life players, and begun to shed light on a relation of Life to cycles (of cellular repair, of bad choices, of maturing, of abuse -- "that's just life, you know"?), we can talk about what it means that one part of this cycle tried to break it.

Feferi went out of her way to be as sweet as possible and to save the most possible lives -- bending the rules of struggle was the way she chose to respond to the pressure and the social dynamic that damaged Meenah and severely affected Jane.

She had absolutely no clue what she was doing at any point, but I think that's what typifies the idea of the Witch of Life to me: somebody who tries to understand, tries to exist in the system into which they were introduced, but ultimately decides that the best thing they can do to win is not to play by the rules at all.

Early fandom tended to take the trolls' side regarding how adaptive was Feferi's relentless optimism and at least attempt to refuse to be a bad person. In text and probably internally, Feferi deals with a lot of pressure to be a certain way, and questioning of her motivations for acting otherwise. From a hopepunk point of view, and from the point of view that she's a victim of the same institutions as everyone else who refused to let all this make her cruel, we can examine the possibility that Fef really was doing the best she could, sincerely, at all times. Her existence was defined by struggle, albeit struggle that was different in kind from the rest of her society's struggle, and she didn't want to pass more suffering on to others. She wanted to flourish outside the "rules" of flourishing, which in her society said that it was inherently impossible and maybe even immoral to ensure flourishing for anyone else.

Now, is she phenomenally weird about it, does she not apprehend her own sociopolitical context contra those of her friends, and does she fail spectacularly? Sure, but she's also thirteen. At thirteen anybody's idea of saving the whales is going to be a little odd and disrespectful of the whales' agency - how much more so if they're a future absolute monarch (or human sacrifice) in a society that's totalitarian and soulless, and can only envision its opposite in a historical stifling paternalism?

I'm, apparently, a Witch of Life myself, and maybe that biases me a little bit, but I think that what all of this means about the classpect is that a Witch of Life is someone who aims to manipulate or change or at least reject the circumstances of struggle and flourishing, the "life" about which people say "that's life" for people.

I think it's actually quite a noble thing to strive for if you're an adult, who has finished coming of age -- but to replace a system, one needs to be able to envision and make something that works in its stead. Even works only provisionally -- but works. Feferi never fully realized her potential to do this for her society, although her SBURB powers developed well; it seems like a similar type of journey should take place for other Witches of Life as well, in which control over bodily integrity, cellular life and well-being evolves into control over circumstances and conditions for themselves and others. Life at the micro and macro scale, broadening perspective from cell to ecosystem.

The journey is not easy, and requires experience and the cultivation of a particular type of thinking about oneself and the world that takes a long time and lucky experiences to achieve -- no wonder that at least one person forced by a possibly sadistic space cancer game to rush through a Life-related development process became Sea Hitler.

Overview

Overall, Witch of Life is a very strong classpect potentially, with the ability to manipulate, alter or reframe life itself (life-force, biological matter and the abstract concept of flourishing) -- but the work required to realize oneself in it is something that we all struggle with, well past Feferi's age. Maybe that's why it was given to the single longest-living person in the cast?

A fully realized Witch of Life would have a developed sense of what to and what not to screw with, I think; they would be someone with a very strong sense of the way of things, and a very strong sense of what parts of it are truly essential. They would be able to bend their Aspect to their will, but also aware of the impact their will has on their Aspect, in a human carnivore's resolution of the enrichment paradox.

Was it Ursula Le Guin who once wrote that the more agency someone has, the more power someone has, the less they actually choose to do? The more choices are made, the fewer choices remain, until despite the fact that the world is open to you, there remains one "correct" way to go. I think this is probably something that Life players learn sooner than others -- but not in the way that Doom or Rage players do, where the focus is on the nature of inevitability or the application of zeal to do what you can do. For Life players, this process is underscored by a need to understand that while their own struggle is essential, everything else wants to live too, and there is no evil in that -- a shift from personal to system-focused thinking. Cell to ecosystem.

For Witches of Life, despite their ability to change their world, I think the real end goal on their journey in-game is coming to a place and time when they've struggled enough, meddled enough, done enough for the situation at hand, personally -- a literal journey through the life course and the different stages of involvement in the generational struggle, in miniature.

Oh, yeah, and they can sprout improbable vines from the ground and resurrect the recent dead, that's cool too.

[quadrantbot]

kismesissitude! what it is and what it isnt

this is like a bit of a remake of an old post from my instagram a couple years ago but WHATEV i privated thag so... kismesissitude! blackrom!

things it is!

•kismesissitude is mutual hate!

•on top of the hatred, it's mutual respect! you can't have a good healthy kismesissitude without respect for each other!

kismesissitude is a relationship where you see all of someones good traits, and you respect and like those, but that liking of their good traits is outweighed by how much you hate their bad ones. in a kismesissitude you both inspire each other to get better, because you care about each other and WANT the other to get better and be all the good things that you already know they are capable of being.

common misconceptions!

•kismesissitude isn't JUST hating each other. respect is ALWAYS necessary. if you don't respect each other, that isn't a kismesissitude!

•kismesissitude is NOT something that SHOULD end in death. you do NOT and should not kill your kismesis.

•blackrom should ALSO not include any extreme bodily harm. for example, vriska blinding terezi. that is NOT something you do in ANY quadrant relationship, including blackrom.

•not every two characters that hate each other have pitch feelings for one another! another example, erisol, is written in a way that is NOT blackrom, they just hate each other. wanting each other dead and wanting to kill each other like they do is not even remotely a good example of pitch romance.

•kismesissitude is NOT just hate sex y'all. come on. YES its a concupiscent quadrant, NO thats not all it is. all the other bits still apply. im sure there are plenty of blackrom relationships that arent even sexual. its not a requirement (although its a bit of one canonically on alternia, anywhere else and in any other context does not require it)

[alines7777]

right now i'd like to talk about kankri from homestuck

people talk about him like he's the absolute worst piece of shit who ever lived, and that his intentions must be less than admirable, especially karkat, and people take karkat's word for it because we like karkat — but here's the thing, that wouldn't be the first time that katkat's been wrong about someone he hardly knew.

( image artist : @n0pies )

but first, i'd like to provide a little context from the text of homestuck about the planet alternia/beforus

alternia and beforus and their rulers

starting with alternia, troll society engages in a practice known as "culling", in which disabled and 'mutant-blooded' trolls are slated for extermination, as per the condesce's will for trolls to become stronger through violent division, as was meenah's intent in trying sew division among her fellow players in sgrub by starting trouble.

but culling means death, so naturally, every troll on alternia dreads the thought of being culled, so feferi, the heiress to the throne, has an idea, "why don't we simply change what it means to be culled?", she even tries to get practice in her new form of culling by rounding up wild cuttlefish to live under her custody in her abode, yet when the text brings that up, it even says that they don't need to be in her care, but she takes them in anyway, which shows her disregard for the independence and autonomy of other beings. that was a roleplay scenario — her rulership over beforus was this idea put into action.

on beforus, troll society engages in a practice known as "culling", in which disabled and 'mutant-blooded' trolls are slated to be placed in the custody of trolls of higher blood and be coddled, as per the empress's will for trolls to live in comfort through disparaging unity. text on feferi and recounting on the part of aranea basically confirm it, beforus is quite plainly coddle country.

but culling means indefinite tutelage, so naturally, every troll on beforus dreads the thought of being culled.

the intentions of both meenah and feferi for trolls to be strong and well off respectively are all well and good, but the methods of both are all wrong.

the knight of blood

fortunately, there is a lot of canonical text providing exhaustive documentation and insight into karkat's background.

we know that his predecessor, the signless, encountered a troll of higher blood who took pity on him upon his emergence from the brooding caverns, where if that hadn't happened he would have been alternian-culled. we know that he advocated the abolition of culling and the bloodcaste system. we know that his followers took it upon themselves to create a sign and breed a lusus for his successor, in order to prevent his successor's alternian-culling, and we know that karkat was highly secretive about the color of his blood to avoid being alternian-culled, and also to avoid being pitied. we know that this was all tailored specifically so karkat might live to enter his session.

we also know that the signless and kankri are virtually one and the same.

the seer of blood

unfortunately, there is virtually no canonical text regarding kankri's background. if it existed, surely many would be as sympathetic toward him as they are toward karkat, even in spite of karkat's conduct. but thanks to canonical text into the signless and karkat, and the method of cross-reference, we can make a highly educated guess.

starting with karkat's beforan counterpart, we might say that he, like karkat, was secretive about the color of his blood so as to avoid being beforan-culled, which is virtually one and the same as being pitied, assuming he wasn't beforan-culled or maybe he found the friendship of someone who didn't and wouldn't particularly hate or pity him. (perhaps the beforan counterpart to sollux or vriska? who knows?)

either way, nobody is killed on account of beforan-culling, "besides, we're only taking care of him because we already know he can't take care of himself, so what's the harm?", nobody would feel any compelling need to create a sign or breed any lusus for a mutant-blooded successor, after all the intent would be to coddle him, to treat him as an invalid or perhaps even as a pet, so he would live to enter his session regardless.

now onto kankri himself, knowing the story of the signless, it would probably be fair to estimate that he would meet a higher-blooded troll who would pity him for having no corresponding sign or lusus, thus he might have been slated for beforan-culling.

i'm not saying with certainty that kankri was beforan-culled, what i'm saying is that it would make sense. i mean, we might also in some sense regard the death of the signless as alternian-culling.

what also makes it make sense is how kankri reacts to the way he is regarded by porrim. when she reaches to wipe his face, he becomes upset, when she calls him "kanny", he becomes upset, and voices that he'd rather be called "the insufferable" than be addressed as a "wiggler".

i mean, he's probably taking porrim's pale feelings toward him the wrong way, and there are probably better ways for porrim to express them, but it's almost as if kankri knows that he doesn't need her pity and doesn't want her pity, and to be clear, the operant emotion behind moirallegiance is pity. and he probably also takes her regard toward him as an attempt on her part to coddle him, which he clearly doesn't like, he is perhaps no stranger to being coddled, or he at least understands the concept and why it should strike him as offensive, and yes, dreadful.

kankri wants to be regarded as independent and autonomous, and he at least makes it convincing that he wants the same for others, so, like his alternian counterpart, kankri advocates for the abolition of culling and the bloodcaste system.

so if we want to regard the intentions of the signless as genuine and noble, then we ought to insist on kankri being treated with the same amount of good faith. they're the same person, with the exact same set of fundamental principles and ultimate goals, the only difference is the circumstances behind their reasoning.

yea, kankri was a total hypocritical dick in the way he spoke to mituna, in belittling mituna's legitimate need for headgear in retaining his autonomy, yet as kankri might rightfully fear, headgear could be construed by beforan bluebloods as a reason that's as good as any other to engage in beforan-culling, because, "he's so helpless, if he weren't then why is he wearing a helmet?", and then they might decide that all trolls who wear helmets for whatever reason might be slated for culling. but yea, that doesn't excuse kankri's conduct, besides, they're all dead anyway, so nobody is going to get culled, get a grip, kankri.

but karkat routinely antagonizes his friends, even while bearing remorse over having previously antagonized his friends, so he knows it's wrong and yet he still does that, and then he dodges culpability by compartmentalizing his actions as being the actions of his "past self" and not actually as his own actions, or did we somehow manage to forget that?

and then karkat talks a mountain of shit about kankri behind his back as kankri happily abides a seemingly pointless and arbitrary request from a friend whom he doesn't regard as disciplined or interested in his beliefs, a request that was intended as a ploy to trick him.

yea, in some ways, kankri is worse than karkat, but in some other ways, i also think he's far better as a person.

seriously, if we think kankri is the negative stereotype of 'sjw' tumblr, well, then i frankly think that his portrayal might in some sense be doing us too much honor.

yet for some reason, we are duped into hating his doctrines praising autonomy and condemning mollycoddling tutelage and genocide, doctrines that we all should cherish in principle, but we throw him out because he is shown as not very well-liked, even though we aren't very well-liked either. so whatever.

"but he talks too much"

that's already known to be a very typical tendency for seers and blood players, so why shouldn't it be doubly so for a seer of blood?

seriously, don't act surprised.

o, one other thing

with this shit of alternian-culling being about killing and beforan-culling being about mollycoddling, i guess we could say the two troll planets correspond to the troll emotions of hate and pity respectively.

so if karkat was inauspiciously encouraged by alternian culture to hate himself, then it seems fairly likely that kankri was encouraged by beforan culture to pity himself, especially if he were culled.

on alternia, if it's, "you were born with mutant blood, and everyone hates you, so why haven't you died yet, you sorry waste of space?", then on beforus (let me reiterate that it doesn't seem very likely to me that kankri had a lusus or a sign to his name, and if that's the case, it would merely have been difficult for him to go on without being discovered and beforan-culled, instead of impossible), it might've been, "you were born with mutant blood, and you don't have a sign or a lusus. how would you even be able to take care of yourself? if you could then why doesn't anyone believe it? it's so sad that everyone else thinks you need someone else to care for you, it's sad, you poor little thing."

if alternia instills hate, then we can be sure that beforus instills pity. if alternia taught karkat to self-hate, then why wouldn't beforus teach kankri to self-pity? (even assuming he wasn't culled, the threat of losing his autonomy and independence by being extensively mollycoddled constantly loomed over his shoulder.)

we all know that karkat made himself out as an asshole because he desperately wanted to find someone more deserving of his own hate than himself, so i think kankri makes himself out as an asshole the way he does because he hopes to find someone, really anyone, who would be more deserving of his own pity than himself.

so yea, i don't think it's fair on any account to talk shit about kankri, that is unless we also want to talk excessive levels of shit about karkat, which i don't