#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.

[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