#mmmmalo

[lime-bloods]

Intrusive thought for you: could the limeblood genocide have been Alternia's "Butlerian Jihad", riffing on Dune's anti-computer cults? as a means of explaining the green goo inside Alternian computers and general adherence to biotech/psychics for automation. Equius building robots only to ritually destroy them feels in line with this, in a loose sense

as in, a reimagining of the sopor theory wherein blood of the lime caste didn't just become bed slime, but also the data pus alternian computers run on? i bandied the idea around last time i was thinking about limebloods - somewhat jeeringly, but as far as limeblood conspiracies go it's probably among those i find the most believable. "lord english paints his conquests with his sister's green blood" is pretty solid ground and "there's patriarchal significance to the ooze that fills alternia's machines" is a pet tenet of mine, so there's certainly merit.

to my mind, i guess that would be more of a reverse butlerian jihad? where the mentats are done away with so that they can be replaced with far more ruly machines. the reversal speaks to my assessment that the extermination of the limebloods should be in some way linked to the extinction of humanity on earth, where the condesce consistently had to replace unreliable old biological machines with robotics; and the comparison to dune's jihad seems consistent with an ongoing theme we see on alternia where dramatic political change occurs as a reaction to social upheavel. first war with the signless sets the scene for hivebent's arc, and then the summoner's rebellion turns alternia into the creche planet we're familiar with; it makes sense to presume, as many have in the past, that the limebloods were done away with in response to some uprising of the organics that mirrors the rise of the machines on earth?

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

Would you sing me a lullaby?

I cannot sing, because I was hit by a bus yesterday.

[paradoxcase]

@mmmmalo:

Smash Mouth is gonna win this easily

You know, I didn't realize the All Star connection until you said that. I guess we'll see, right now it's in second place.

[zenosanalytic]

I've been thinking about how to articulate a thought I had about a possible Doylist/non-diegetic reading(EDIT: I originally wrote "Watsonian" here, which is the opposite of what I meant X| X| Brain, you Tricksome Jester *shakes entirely metaphorical fist*) of Eridan's Trollian handle, caligulasAquarium, in response to a post of @mmmmalo's, and I think I've got it.

Ok So: the popular perception of Caligula is as a "Mad Emperor". One of the points used in this depiction is his "War on the Sea", which is taken as obvsl absurd and empty and irrational(and possibly hubristic). Eridan chooses to call himself "caligulasAquarium" and he lives in a wrecked ship(a feature commonly put in aquariums)... on the surface.

So like: maybe the title is meant to be taken by the audience as ironic. Eridan's claim to an "Aquarium" is as absurd and empty and irrational as Caligula's claim to have warred upon the sea(in the common understanding of those events; as a matter of history this seems to be a Telephone distortion, from the sources I can find).

A few more points that have occurred to me since I started writing this:

Caligula "Made War on the Sea"; Eridan wants to "Make War on the Surface" by Killing All Landwellers, carrying forward the themes of inversion btwn Alternia and Earth.

Also: "Kill All Landwellers", "Kill All Humans": he's lampshading common evil-alien-overlord tropes

...Which in itself is sort of dunking on HIM, since Eridan is nobody's overlord he's just some GUY. Like: Yes, he's "Nobility" due to blood-caste, but he has no influence, no power, no RESPECT from anyone we meet, no friendships let alone alliances with other socially powerful individuals(other than Feferi, who seems to have foresworn all that to monastically care for G'lybgolyb) that he could USE to have influence; he's just a loner with his grand-dad's gun and allot of pretension.

...which you could argue furthers his parody of USian internet white-supremacists? Like: He is THEM: a gun-humping loner who only feels comfortable talking to the people he claims to hate, with no idea how unpleasant he makes himself to interact with, and even less interest in introspection or self-awareness, fetishizing past genocides as a way to claim for himself a "Glorious Past" he had nothing to do with.

As Feferi(and possibly other characters I'm forgetting) point out, Eridan's ambition to Kill All Landwellers is more than a little absurd. He's never really DONE anything to plan or prepare for it, and aside from Fef he exclusively hangs out with and befriends Landwellers, as well as LIVING ON LAND(well: a sandbar or reef). This could be taken as furthering the Caligula "War on the Sea" parallel.

Expanding on the last: Caligula, THE EMPEROR OF ROME and Grandest of Nepo-babies, was rather notably disdainful of and hostile towards the Roman nobility and inherited wealth/rank. This connects to Eridan in two ways I can think of: 1) his avoidance of other seadwellers, and 2) his philosophical hostility to landdwellers while Being, in practice, A Landweller. Basically: both Hate things about themselves shared by others.

Reinforcing #3: the choice of Caligula, a Troll-Emperor. Again: Eridan is Just Some Guy; he does not command armies, he does not command society, he can't even command Equius, who GETS OFF ON being ordered around. This is Pretension.

...which, I guess, you could connect AGAIN back to Caligula via the popular memory of him wanting to be treated "As A God", but it should be noted that 1)everyone who wrote anything about him hated the guy and was explicitly dunking on him, so we don't know how accurate these charges are, and 2)in the Roman context, while legal apotheosis was reserved for after death, imperial Divinity was already de facto given that sacrifices and prayers to the Emperor's health and success were legally mandated civic religious duties, AND 3)that classical Greeks and Romans, contra the Abrahimic societies which would later create this popular memory, considered apotheosis a real possibility for notable individuals.

[some-triangles]

Josh and I have been working on and off on a collection of Momus covers for years now and today is the day it finally came to light. Featuring contributions from @mmmmalo and @seldow and my very own brother.

I am really happy with how it turned out!

[forgottenhomestuckfacts]

(panel source)

Rose's shirt used to have the official Squiddles logo on it, but she defaced it to make the "mean"-looking logo she wears today.

Early Homestuck merchandise contained references to this, including a similarly defaced Squiddles poster, and the official Rose shirt of the time "actually [appeared] to be defaced, with ink missing around the eyes and mouth area".

(Submission courtesy of @mmmmalo!)

[mmmmalo]

Pinned 2024

Hi I'm mmmmalo, I write about Homestuck and post doodles.

In the summer of 2022 I posted the essay Slurquest, which proposed that much of Homestuck is provocatively structured around racist/homophobic anxieties of black/gay people taking over America. The bulk of the essay consisted of seeking out slur-based wordplay, hence the name.

Even now, most of my writing is an attempt to navigate Homestuck's ironic engagement with hate rhetoric and political paranoia. My #homestuck commentary tag is a meandering hodgepodge, but here's the last half-year of interpretation in brief:

Anti-Semitic and anti-feminist motifs can be united under the banner of the once common appellation "feminazi".

Thus, Vriska countering a misogynist barb by insulting "philistines" (a cognate of Palestine) suggests a complementary engagement with anti-Islamic rhetoric.

Distorted references to turbans and veils mingle with irreverent depictions of Muslim practices, in service of crafting a picture of religious authority that is simultaneously gay and homophobic.

I'm currently working on a longer piece putting the above in dialogue with Hussie's visual novel Psycholonials, which I hope will by some measure answer the question of what purpose all the byzantine obscenity serves. But this is where we are for now

[goodsniff]

To address the big grey, candy corned horned elephant in the room. Yes I am a homosuck fan. I'm still mildly amused that people are so shocked that the nerds making animated shows, are into animated nerd shit? I've already been asked a few times so I've written out below what I think the Heeler's classpects would be.

HOWEVER unfortunately for all of you I am not only into Homestuck but am also a huge textual analysis nut for it. So before you can have dessert I'm going to use this as an excuse to lay out some of my fav pieces of writing regarding it. They sum up why I still have an immense reverence for this stupid piece of shit better than I could ever explain.

@hampermarketplace Why I can’t understand Homestuck

@some-triangles I’m trying to figure out why I like Davepetasprite so much.

@optimisticduelist2 & his wonderful YT channel

@mmmmalo is a never ending stream of interesting and intricate theories and I like to pretend I'm erudite enough to understand even half of them

There's too many artists still out there posting up and drawing extremely hard HS pics that I love to list out, but fruitegg has got to get a mention. Everything I attempt to do in my art when it comes to capturing the energy and attitude of living Aus she does far smarter and far funnier. It rules I have somehow fooled her into being my friend.

______

Alright done, here's what you wanted

Bandit: Bard of Hope Chilli: Mage of Hope Bluey: Knight of Void Bingo: Page of Light

Bandit & Chilli are straight forward enough. The thinking behind Bluey & Bingo is as follows. Doing a close reading of them as kids you could easily argue they're Breath/Hope players BUT. There used to be a few working theories around Hiveswap characters mistakenly imitating the wrong classpects. And though I don't think the girls are doing that, it feels to me like their youth is masquerading what their classpects would actually be.

As they're very clearly delineated active (Bluey) passive (Bingo) and so close as sisters, I reckon they'd be a full classpect pair. As much as I think Bluey would really suit Knight of Blood, there's ways Knight of Void would act as a perfect compliment to Bingo's Page of Light. A helpful, positive Knight of Void who protects her friends from despair, and is socially intelligent enough to weaponise people's unawareness/ignorance to her and her friends own advantage seems like a really exciting angle to analyse her through.

Finally, the only classpect I would bet my life on is Muffin being a Mage of Rage. 🤡

[jakemorph]

tagged by @mmmmalo .. its kind of like the deviantart thing i get it :)

Favorite color: green

Last song I listened to:

Currently reading: ostensibly Dune Messiah but it's been a while since i picked that one up lol. so i guess Nicienza & Lobdell's Uncanny / X-Men. but it's been a while since i picked those up too. i like to find time to read them in the voices

Currently watching: 2024 releases i recently binged and enjoyed were Swift Street and House of Gods + recently rewatched Troppo since there's a new series of that out this week. otherwise i have been watching doctor who every day 😶

Currently craving: ummm i guess i could go for a delicious curry right now but thats always

Coffee or tea: i dont really drink either of these... its been really cold so ive been drinking a lot of hot chocolate though...

i wanbted to post a screenshot of one of these i actually did back on deviantart as an incentive cus i know i was constantly saying shit like "listening to: the screams of my enemies. eating: the souls of my enemies" but i think i deleted all that. but @knuckleduster @tabiheel @lydievil @ghostcrows @wifemoji @phantom-cosmos hi

[sundung]

tag game

tagged by @adamfaulknerstanheight

favorite color: PURPLE (It seems.)

Last song I listened to: RANDOM STUFF FROM SPOTIFY

currently reading: ONE PIECE...CHAINSAW MAN...in some ways, Homestuck

currently watching: Monogatari

currently craving: THE TOFU FRIED RICE I JUST ATE; I WANT MORE

coffee or tea: BOTH, I love Beverages

@himejoshikomaeda @communist-ojou-sama

@therepudiatedimmortals @mmmmalo @panvani

@meteorherd @friedbreadfast @jeannie-youre-a-tragedy

[lime-bloods]

I believe you had once noted that sopor slime resembled cartoonish nuclear waste -- since the slime's an apparent avenue of Lord English influencing the population (or just damaging it), do think that might relate to Scratch's "seeds" being nuclear bombs?

i gave this ask some thought offline and mostly came up with lines to draw between the cue balls and recuperacoons more broadly, not necessarily along the nuke line, so this is a bit of stream of consciousness...

sleeping and crystal balls are both methods of fortune telling? the cue ball and recuperacoons are both computers of a sort (was Scratch's method of helping with Kanaya's "daywalking" at all similar to Jake's computerised remedy for Jade's "sleepwalking")? the cue ball seed is also seemingly filled with some kind of slime - dark water, sloshing about the cavity in [Scratch's] head - and in fact the biggest nuke of all, the Tumor, famously turned two giant vials of 8ball slime into a giant radioactive sun... perhaps that's your in? (if I'm not mistaken, Hiveswap also makes some reference to radioactive mind honey "runoff" - literally equating the slime in Alternian computers to irradiated slag)

in a tangentially similar vein, we can think of the seed itself as a cocoon... I think it was BKEW who forwarded that the cue ball that English's head breaks out of was like a chrysalis stage that filtered out the unneeded parts of Dirk and Equius that he didn't need..? does anyone have that post?

when we pit cue ball and recuperacoon against each other, though, what my instinct immediately says is that if the cocoon is a part of the pool table, it's a pocket... specifically, if the slime serves the purpose of "relaxing ooze [that] helps assuage the terrible visions of blood and carnage that plague the dark subconscious of your species", then can we see the cocoon as one of the "dark pockets" one can retreat into to avoid English's omnipresent glare? keeping in mind, of course, that dark pockets are, in and of themselves, English's tools. cocoons as voyeur-bots/beds also puts a different spin on the idea that "no information can escape" a dark pocket.

some of my earliest speculation into the function of the recuperacoon was in response to some analysis of the Evangelion film series, in which slime (LCL here) and black holes are both functionally gateways to the same womb dimension. in this scenario, the sopor slime is one method of making sure Alternia remains a planet of preteens who never grow up, by forcing them to return to their cocoons and dissolve bodily in order to be reborn again as children every day and night. but is this not also literally the fate Caliborn is condemned to? struggling every night to be born as a world-eating monster, only to be pulled into a black hole and have to live it all over again, ad infinitum?

I mused recently that Caliborn's session acts as a purgatory, presumably holding him prisoner on a desertified earth until he can brute force his way into maturity and break free. so in the same way that Caliborn's house juju acts as a physical stand-in for Homestuck itself - four kids trapped within and forced to grow strong enough to break out - maybe the cueball is the very same thing for Caliborn, an eggshell containing the very essence of his journey, which can only be 8r8ken out of when the weakest parts of him have been dissolved away by radioactive acid? again - the seed as a cocoon. (and the cocoon as a bomb?)

I'm not sure any of this really answers your question, beyond the vague notion that maybe radioactive sludge is an anti maturing agent? (sterilisation via radiation?) but to cap things off, thinking of the cue ball seed as a bomb did make me think back to Problem Sleuth's jawbreaker bomb, which was literally just a candy shell around a highly volatile infinite recursion of realities. that's all I've got!

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

Could you write me a recipe for a delicious beef stew?

I can probably do a better job now than at the time my mom asked me to make this stew for her.

This will be fairly complex and involve a few different steps (including cooking whole meat, which has to simmer for a while after each step). The steps are:

Buy stew beef; slice stew beef thinly against the grain; simmer beef briefly in vegetable stock

Saute vegetables, etc., until they start to become tender

Add more stew beef and more broth, simmer

Adjust ingredients, etc. for more or less stew beef and more or less liquid

Remove beef from pot, allow it to cool, and use to make stew meat stock, which I will also do while the meat cools

Wrap the stew meat in butcher paper, return to the pot for the next step

[snarp]

Targeted ad for Davide @gimmickbird : accessories to go with that candle on a plate + night cap.

[exoid-the-locomotive-monarch]

mmmmalo is a homestuck analist that has in his interpretaion of homestuck, pinned at the top of his blog, jewels like "jake harley molested jade" and "ninja is codeword for the nword", like, the racism is homestuck is pretty clear to see i dont really get why try to make more from the aether

I can at least see the “ninja” being code for the N-word thing because ninja does sound similar to the soft a, and I have seen white guys use ninja or 🥷 as a means to get around saying the soft a without coming across as racist. The Jake Harley thing though, that’s something that I couldn’t even start understanding.

I don’t deal much in Homestuck fandom drama or confessions about how people feel about Homestuck, it’s story, characters, or ships.

Usually when I want to talk about Homestuck as a means of a confession or dumb fandom drama, I’d go to a confessions blog like @homestuckconfession or @davekat-sucks

[detectiveprowler]

Homestuck Kidswap Headcanons

Jade Egbert

Jade loves her dad, but her upbringing left her craving a challenge, causing her to be even more enthusiastic about STEM as well as develop a deep love of soulslikes and notoriously difficult indie platformers.

Jade collects a variety of merchandise, including a solar shield tee shirt,    posters (of course) of Dark Soles, super meat boy and a styrofoam replica of artorias greatsword which she uses in early sburb.

she’s also a dedicated cryptid hunter. Jade keeps a lot of gear in her room for this purpose, such as a camera, a pair of binoculars that blink when they sense movement, a note book full of her findings in scrapbook format, and a flashlight that serves as the second allocation to her strife deck. She doesn’t really believe in that stuff, though, but she wants to so badly! Really, she just wants to be the one to take a semi-famous blurry picture. Is that such a crime?

 Dove Lalonde

Dove is a whole ass trans woman. She wears a shirt with a lemon on it.

She has a less adversarial relationship with her mom than Rose did, but it is by no means healthier. Dove takes an interest in Mom Lalonde’s hobbies (mixology) just as she takes an interest in Dove's. Momlalonde attempts to support Dove’s interest in fashion design by buying her very expensive fitted suits, which is kind of missing the whole point, so instead of being worn, they sit on mannequins in Dove’s room to be used as inspiration or to reference the patterns. She has to hold her mom's hair back at least once a week.

Rose Strider

Rose wears circular shades, dual-wields swords, and has a pixelated Satan on her shirt.

 She is able to compete with Bro head-on in a never-ending game of one-upmanship, much like Rose Lalonde did with her mom, but two-sided this time and much more deadly. Although she’s never won a confrontation, she’s getting closer by the day.

She had a phase where she naively tried to imitate Bro’s style of irony and produced several unfunny and crewed comics, which she is deeply ashamed of and hides under her bed in a safe. Nowadays, she maintains an online cult. None of the other members can tell if anyone else present is there ironically or sincerely. The name of the game is to keep them guessing and create distrust. Rose theorizes that there are four camps her followers fall into.

Those who sincerely find comfort in the community and find the lore fascinating.

Those participating for their own ironic purposes.

A variant on the second camp but instead of actually having their own personas that are made funnier by being in an online cult they’re simply here to troll and hateread, unaware that all the stuff they find the most egregious was most likely posted by those in group number two.

Those who feel the need to “keep an eye on these people”

But the beauty of it is that all these camps look the same from the outside. She keeps a dedicated phone just for the cult, which ends up traveling around the session and into the hands of several characters.

Bro puts her in increasingly dangerous situations beyond anything he has ever thrown at Dave. The house is actually bobbytrapped. This comic by Mmmmalo is a good example of the kind of shenanigans I’m referring to.

https://mmmmalo.tumblr.com/post/190087932788/a-rose-who-was-raised-by-her-father

John Harley

John basically has no hobbies. John occasionally passes the time by deep-cleaning the entire lab. He has accidentally made dangerous substances on more than one occasion. Now he can do it on purpose if he wants and is really into chemistry. He uses spray bottles.

John lives vicariously through his friends and even entertains the trolls a lot of the time out of boredom, causing him to have a close relationship with Vriska for his whole life that turns romantic over the course of his session. John exclaims in groups of eight, "geeeeeeez!!!" He has no idea she’s an alien, but other than that, he knows pretty much everything about her life and backstory. She pushes him to do dangerous things, even putting Bec to sleep to do so. Because of this, John is able to explore the ruins in their entirety. Even exploring Vale and Skia via the tranportalizers.

He has been awake on prospit for as long as he can remember, but he has no idea that a golden moon where you can see the future isn’t normal, in part because Vriska is very nonchalant about it as well.