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utopianparadoxist · 2 months ago

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On Roxy, Centrism, Gravitation, and Love

So Candy Roxy has gotten a lot of shit--rightfully so--for taking a consistently centrist and peacekeeping role in the Candy timeline. Generally averse to the spotlight and of the opinion that the Gods, with their outsize importance and cultural weight, should stay out of the governing affairs of regular people, Roxy has largely been reduced to a passerby watching as her friends plummet the world into chaos as they try to tear each other's throats out.

But there's another way to read her fundamental centrism, one where her focus and perspective simply aren't political, but rather interpersonal. As one redditor (I lost the comment and don't know who, sorry!) put it, they read Roxy in this latest update as a character striving to "keep everyone together", to pull the fracturing group back into unity.

Pulling things together. That sounds familiar.

It sounds, in fact, like Gravity. "In physics, gravity (from Latin gravitas 'weight'[1]) is a fundamental interaction primarily observed as a mutual attraction between all things that have mass." In other words, Gravity is a word we use to describe the fact that everything that physically exists, that has substance and matter, is inexorably pulled towards each other.

Rose describes gravitation as "the intrinsic nature of nothingness", that is to say, the nature of Void itself. And while the force of Gravity gets weaker the further things are spread apart, this weak and subtle force is what draws together cosmic gases that compact and condense into each other with such intensity that they give birth to the Stars themselves.

In this way, Void is a force which creates and becomes Light. And in the same way Gravity acts as a force pulling stellar objects together, laying the foundation for organized solar systems and ultimately Life itself--could Roxy be trying to act as a force pulling her friends into harmony reflect her relationship to the Void, right at the time the Black Hole threatens to grind them all into oblivion and they most need someone to rally them to a unified cause?

Let's see how deep we can dive into the dark.

--@lime-bloods's Void/Home Collage.

To start with, there's some required reading to understand where I'm trying to go. The image above is from Homestuck blogger @lime-bloods, who has done some absolutely brilliant work unpacking the symbolic importance of Black Holes.

I suggest reading the images above to grasp the full context of the idea, but in essence, it suggests that Black Holes are synonymous with the concept of the Home in the bounds of Paradox Space.

As Lime-bloods states, The local Black Hole of a Cherub's birthplace is identified as that Cherub's home, and Cherubs always return to this same black hole in order to reproduce. John's speech about the note that desolation plays makes reference to "the Voids keeping neighbors apart", in other words, the houses separating communities into families.

--@lime-bloods's Void/Home Collage.

The Sprites, too, are bound to the gravity of their player's Home during Sburb, unable to leave the house until the player reaches unlocks the ability to summon and eventually release them. This carries over into Homestuck: Beyond Canon, where almost every sprite manifests inside the Black Hole created by The Point.

The only exception to this is Jasprose, who A) As a Light player may have some natural resistance to the call of the Void and B) was the only Sprite explicitly released from her duty by her Player--Davepeta "released themselves" as Davesprite, but we don't know if that represents true freedom from their Sprite nature or merely a more nuanced rebellion against it. That's a tangent though, lets get to The Point.

--@lime-bloods's Void/Home Collage.

The Plot Point is a massive machine created by Roxy and Calliope for the purpose of stabilizing a Black Hole, a supermassive source of literal and narrative Gravity, and for all intents and purposes, it represents a Space/Void fraymotif, or feat of combined Aspect magic.

And what it does once Vriska dives into it is pull her into an cocoon forcing to re-experience of her old childhood Home, her very experience of being Homestuck, to force her to confront and grow past it. In this simulacra of her Home she has to contend with the toxic family dynamics she grew up with--Mindfang and Spidermom as her mothers, Doc Scratch as her groomer and symbolic father.

Diving into the Black Hole makes her once again Homestuck.

"...Understanding that Rose's lapse into alcoholism is her own way of succumbing to 'gravity' - a pull towards toxic familial cycles which not only evokes Vriska's own "addiction" to breaking 8-balls but also literally surrounds the drinker in a dark pocket - her allusions to the Void and gravity here are also tinged by her own experience and outlook as a Seer of Light (who heavily relied on a magic cue ball as her source; a fountain of information which is symbolically opposed to the information-consuming black hole)..." @lime-bloods reader response to my ask.

Lime-Bloods also draws the insight that Rose's relationship with alcoholism--brought out by her grief over the loss/absence/non-existence of Mom in the first place--is itself her succumbing to the call of Void, of Gravity, the narrative and force that pulls her toward Roxy, Mom, and her own childhood. It is in the midst of her alcoholism, after all, that she has the very revelation that leads her to tie Gravity and Nothingness/Void together in the first place.

There's another name for that force. Another form Gravity can take, that is experienced not narratively, but emotionally.

"My instinct is that Rose has reached the same conclusion I have: that 'gravity', as a metonym for the influence of a black hole, is just the inevitable pull towards oblivion. I think she's using "nothingness" as a euphemism for "space", over which gravity has dominion, but through this we can start to appreciate how the concepts of Space and Void weave into each other ("nothingness", "space" and "void" all being functional synonyms)..." @lime-bloods reader response to my ask.

At the same time that lime-bloods identifies Gravity with characters being pulled towards their homes--and so, emotionally, toward their histories with each other, in the context of Child/Guardian pairs-they also identify Gravity with the pull towards oblivion, towards nothingness.

Towards death, like how it was in death itself that Rose's mother gained the gravity to pull her daughter's heart closer to her, bringing all of Rose's love flooding to the surface. Death is itself a kind of nothingness after all, and while Space is the neighbor holding Void's left hand on the wheel, Void spins through the cosmos holding Doom's hand on its right.

And there's something interesting there when it comes to Roxy. A recurring pattern in her emotional responses to death and brushes with mortality. When Jaspers died and she held an elaborate funeral for him in an attempt to connect with Rose, like when Rose died and she held a private funeral for her and reached out to embrace Jaspers, when Dirk committed suicide in Candy and Roxy reacted by proposing to John at his funeral--

when faced with her mortality, Roxy reaches out for love.

She actually lays out this logic explicitly in the midst of her proposal. Death reminds her that time is finite, and that reminds her that what she wants to prioritize in her life is her love and connections to the people that matter to her.

John's inner thoughts in response to her proposal describe love in a rather interesting way, too--describing it as a feeling that goes "unexamined", unobserved, not directly paid attention to, as if out of the spotlight of the concious mind, until it becomes overwhelming and crashes over you.

As if a mass of cosmic nebulae gaining enough Gravity to compact gases together intensely enough to birth Stars--or Light. This association between realized Love and Light isn't new--as the aspect of Truth and Importance, the original comic associates Light with almost every major pairing, including Dirkjake, Vrisrezi, Rosemary and Roxycallie.

But the process of being drawn closer together and developing love, of strangers becoming acquaintances becoming friends becoming family or life partners, gaining importance in each other's eyes through the mutual attraction of Gravity--that process tends to take place mostly in the Void in original Homestuck, askance and askew from the viewer's perspective, hidden and private.

Though perhaps I shouldn't limit the force of Gravity entirely to the word "Love" (perhaps Passion is a better one, Heart's echo to Void's Gravity as a horizontally mirrored pair on the wheel) after all, Terezi tells John that the purpose of kissmesitude is ultimately to force both partners to "Shine a Light" on parts of themselves that would otherwise go ignored in other to improve both parties, meaning Hate can serve much the same purpose.

Dirk, for example, shines a light on massive problems with himself and with his effects on other people interpersonally through his relationships with Jake (Love) and Hal (Hate). Both force him to contend with himself and grow, enabling his eventual rooftop conversation with Dave.

Coming back to the Candy timeline in this latest update, we find Roxy trying to pull everyone in a centrist position on the matter of Jane, again reaching out to the friends she knows and loves for support when faced with the imminent mortality of someone she cares about. She finds nothing.

The thing is, the call towards love, towards Home, isn't inherently either good or bad. What I'd call it instead is essential, as in that in the same way gravity pulls astral bodies together and keeps us bound to Earth, it is in the essence of people to be pulled towards one another.

This contextualizes the Home as a Void symbol somewhat. Above all else, what a Home literally is is a House, and what a House really is is Empty. A house means nothing by itself, its purpose to be a hollow shell encasing people away from the elements.

It is the shared life, the mutual draw of love or the conflict and hate between the people sharing that Home that defines it, that gives it distinct meaning, whether for the better or for the worse. Without that inner Light, a House is indeed a perfectly generic object--an oversized Box, forgettable, infinitely replaceable. A microcosm of the Void itself.

So as Lime-Bloods says, Gravity/Love pulls Rose towards reliving toxic family dynamics, and in this case it pulls Roxy towards saving the life of a fascist who will inevitably make the world more toxic and cruel for everyone, simply on the strength of feeling provided by Jane having been a core part of Roxy's Home herself.

That said, what is toxic in one context can be productive in another, and right now the Candy adults are desperately in need of a leader who can get them all to agree on a direction to take towards solving the very real, very imminent problem of the Black Hole obliterating the Candy Timeline to nothingness.

While Vriska suggests that it may be possible for them to save Earth C from its fate, it is really only Roxy that is stepping up to the plate of advocating for it, continuously emphasizing the metaphysical threat and her unwillingness to abandon her Home, and by association, the very Black Hole that entraps her.

She says it best herself: She feels it in her gut that they can still save this place, and who better than a Hero of Void to make that kind of determination? A Black Hole is after all as much a symbol of Void as it is one of Space.

So I suspect she's going to rise to the occasion of meeting this particular challenge, and if she does, she's going to do so on the merit of the Gravity/Love that keeps her bound to Earth C, in all its wretched beauty.

The two easiest ways I can think of to solve the Candy Earth situation are for either John to dive into the Point and become June, for all the Gods to work together on some sort of large-scale abstract fraymotif or combined God magic the likes of which we've never seen before, or some combination of both.

In any of those scenarios, it feels like Roxy will likely be coordinating and keeping the group on task, simply because everyone else is too distant and divided from each other. And all of this makes me think about someone else. The other Roxy, traveling to confront Dirk in Meat.

When I first read this update, Meat Roxy came off unusually cold to me, surprisingly callous about the idea of killing Dirk. He even came off as willing to do the deed himself if need be, and like he was simply asking Dave if he was up to the challenge.

Now I find myself wondering. It feels to me at the moment like Meat Roxy is playing it cool, so to speak, keeping his own cards close to his chest and deliberately providing the space for Dave to express his own feelings and opinion. Neither Roxy nor we get to hear Dave's answer, but considering Roxy even said he hopes things end hunky dory, he really asked the question as neutrally as possible, providing space for Dave to go either way without feeling judged.

But considering the lengths Jane was able to go and still have Candy Roxy's love keep her attached to her, at least as far as wanting to offer mercy, it seems likely to me that Meat Roxy would feel similarly merciful about Dirk. I'm sure Dirk will do everything in his power to make Roxy and Dave feel they have no choice but to try to end his life, but I think he and we may end up surprised at how far he'd have to go to really convince Roxy of that.

I suppose time will tell. This somehow feels incomplete--perhaps fittingly, even now it feels like nuances of both Void and Roxy escape me, and I find myself simply waiting for what the future will bring. But I think the association between Gravity and Love treads new ground on the subject of Void, and I hope you enjoyed reading about it.

Nothing to do now but wait for the next upd8.

Keep rising.

#Homestuck #Homestuck: Beyond Canon #HS2 #Roxy Lalonde #Meat Roxy #Candy Roxy #Classpects #Void #Lime-Bloods

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