#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.

[fluffypuffybroccoli]

this image encapsulates a lot of things ive been thinking about john egbert recently.

[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!)

[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.

[dingodad]

Brolin remembered Steven Spielberg shutting down his super-intellectual approach for the teenage character. “I think [my character] Brandon is freaking out, and the tunnels represent the inside of his mother’s womb, and he’s trying to cut that umbilical cord,” Brolin remembered pitching to Spielberg, who promptly disregarded such a take.

immediately thought of you @mmmmalo

[fluffypuffybroccoli]

i kind of associated johns breath powers and wanting to get away from grasp of narrative telling him what to do with him desperately wanting agency/to escape the masculine hero role expected of him, but seeing john's potential association of femininity with humilation/ weakness(while still finding it desirable), makes me think of john desperately wanting roxy to be more combative/contrarian in the candy route, and to not just roll over and do whatever he sais. i guess not wanting to fulfill the stereotypically masculine role of the patriarch, but included in that is kind of a subtle rejection of having control? i guess sburb was always trying to push the "leader" title onto john in early homestuck. but i also think many of johns interactions and stuff in sburb ended with his intentions/wants being trumped in desire of some greater good. like vriska stopping john from prototyping jades sprite with the weak doll, because she knew it wasnt what was supposed to happen, even though following what was *supposed* to happen resulted in the mass havoc and suffering that jack noir caused once fused with bec. but its okay, those deaths HAD to happen in service of the greater good(of the timeline). so i dont know, john never felt like he had much agency, since he was so suggestable, and often just went along with (sometimes because there was presented to be no other option) with this idea of the "greater good". just a tool to serve the plot, the narrative, blah blah.

were there ever legitimate times in hs proper where john ever actually had control? even his retcon powers which youd imagine would finally give him some massive control over everything were really just a means for terezi to set the plot back on track, and ensure that some version of the players would win the game. fullfil what paradox space wants, and continue to propagate the reproduction of universes. the greater good.

johns friends and john himself were obviously having their brains meddled with in the epilogues in the candy route, by authors such as alt calliope. a metaphor for the systems of control in real life that force you to think and act a certain way? capitalism, patriarchy, etc. johns forced to fulfill the role of the dominant father and husband, and roxy the subserviant mother and wife. and john i guess being a breath player, can FEEL the strain of his friends desires being changed and suppressed to fit self indulgent roles for an audience, even if he may not be conciously aware that that is even what is happening(hes not a seer after all). maybe johns desire for roxy to be more dominant is akin to wanting to bottom in a controlled environment, where you actually have control over how it goes. he wants to be able to choose to play a more feminine role, rather than being forced to play a more "dominant" one (which ironically, isnt very dominant in a zoomed out sense, if hes being forced to play it by the narrative powers that be lol).

next i need to figure out how this ties in with john fucking terezi. i mean he was literally being forced to reject his reservations by alt calliope. and then theres the sword being used by terezi representing a phallus, and johns wound which she operates on representing a vagina. how much of the situation was orchestrated by alt calliope? i think the most she lets on is that john probably would have rejected the sex were it not for her interference, but that he was definitely aroused. and we can also go with mmmmalos interpretation of the car representing the masculine body that locks away the inner desire. so then john and terezi are inside the car, so youd imagine the fucking with terezi being the obvious instigator and literally starting off the whole thing by putting john in the feminine role as the desire? the desire which alt calliope forcibly tears away from the body by taking away the fact that john was going to reject the sex. but thematically doesnt this still fall in with john being forced to reject his own wants by a third party with control over him? i mean part of his reservations were probably that he was in really bad shape and didnt know if he could even handle sex. and he couldnt!!!! he literally died right after. maybe death is a metaphor for him finally being stripped from his body, and his role within the comic, since its stated that his "death" involved a dissolution from canon entirely. the final straw that caused it being that tearing out of that desire?

but its also stated right after j and tez bump uglies, that j doesnt even know if they enjoyed it?? thats what really throws me off. though its stated that j's main qualms are at the fact that tez was doing him way to roughly, and that he didnt feel like they were on the same wavelength? that even though it seemed like j did want sex with her (on some level) theres still this misunderstanding of his true desires for her. she likes him black, and is into that kinky shit, him not so much. he liked her red. maybe it kind of represent his relationship with his dad? trying to do what he thinks his son wants, in the form of clowns, but there being severe miscommunication, and that not being what john wants at all?? maybe alt calliope is the dad?? idk. did john even like the sex with terezi at all?

figuring out johns wants after the sex get especially hard since dirk is the one who starts narrating it, and considering that it can be assumed that he is the one who makes john give up on being alive to fit his own plans, its hard to tell how much of johns feelings on this part are being manufactured by dirk. but idk i feel like it kinda make sense he wouldnt like the hard sex, idk. oh yeah theres also the symbolism of terezi literally putting her hands on j's throat as if she about to choke them, which makes their heart race. a metaphor for the blocking of johns desires? or would breath represent the greater breath of the narrative which flows through him? considering hes about to be forcfully ejected from it in a page or two.

if we read it as john's own breath and freedom being suppressed, then idk how to read this scene in a trans fem sense. maybe its that even though, the narrative is yet again pretending to give john what he wants, in the end its still not quite right, and its still being forced on him. he wanted terezi to be more gentle and loving with him.

was john not wanting sex with tez him being hesitant to break free his desires from the body, his fear of leaving canon and leaving his role? what exactly were his reservations that we're not made privy to?

but then what can we make of the fact that its doubtful he even liked the sex???

does calliope forcing him to have sex on the assumption that since hes aroused he must want it. is that some greater assumption about characters as a whole? it certainly falls into alt callie's ideas of what makes a good story. self indulgence, candy. doing what you primally feel like even if youre concious mind is opposed to it, or you logically know that you shouldnt. i guess in this way meat john is being forced into the same shoes as candy john. get married have babies. we know that john pulled terezi into his lap, does that mean the had jpenis in tezussy sex? you are aroused at this situation, so now you must have sex immediately, not doing so is a rejection of your deepest desires, and your very personhood! which i think is a thing that is very typically put on men. "theres no way you dont want sex! men always want sex!" "youre a pansy if you dont go for it". i guess its basically the same situation with roxy in the candy timeline. its not like hes not attracted to them, but his relationships with both terezi and roxy are being deviously orchestrated in some way by a third party, i think in both cases alt calliope?

is it feminine to be the one who rejects sex? in that way was his feminity being denied? or is it more feminine to try to reject sex but be taken anyway? i guess he didnt even really get to try. i guess im still kind of at a loss here for how it all comes together.

Halloween Jack posted:

Like a million other people, I was obsessed with Evangelion as a teenager, so I can so: the problem is that the competing interpretations are very bad. Actually, it’s worse: they aren’t really interpretations of anything, just a lot of spotting references and drawing connections, without ever adding up to a real analysis.

SuperMechagodzilla replied:

As an example of this: because fascist Shinji is vaguely feminine and sad in highschool, the show apparently has a sizeable queer following online. (A chicken-or-egg situation with the Jesus ‘shipping, I guess.)

So, go back to the part I noted, where the giant demon in the form of his dead mother tries to seduce him into being absorbed into her body. One fan interpretation is that this means Shinji wants to become a girl, so Shinji is trans! Cue a bunch of fanart of Shinji with breasts.

Like, I’d be down if that were going on, but there are literally multiple scenes in the show where Shinji gets uploaded into the matrix, and he invariably identifies as male - male avatar, etc. The ambiguously-gendered person who does identify as female is the ginormous demon. But, more importantly, this misreading basically unwittingly says that trans people become that way due to debilitating mommy issues. It’s like saying Marty McFly is a transwoman because she wants to obliterate herself in the incestuous vortex of sex with her mom. Problematic!

I understand the need for representation, but it’s also important to identify what isn’t representation. Evangelion itself is basically just a less-successful version of Michael Bay’s Transformers, but fans - who don’t actually like the show - mentally edit out the satire of fascism, and the part where the protagonist kills Jesus (and so-on), to create an entirely new and distinct series of works.

Not necessarily endorsed, but as a person who is literally simultaneously engaged with ‘death as return to womb’ and ‘death as sex’ and ‘death as union with feminine identity’ (in the context of Egbert at least), the above is something I try to be wary of. The possibility that only a fraction of those things are relevant, I mean, and that their apparent superposition is my failure as a reader.

The first instance (afaik) of Egbert thinking about death and femininity is the shot of wondering whether the mailbox has mail in it (only for it to be scooped by Dad). I read that as the same dysphoria metaphor as Damara (the doll, the body) stealing Rufioh’s ‘happy thought’ – retrieving the green box from the car is Fiduspawn, is godtiering, is death-rebirth, is suicide, is becoming-yourself. This is why the shot of looking out the window is reused when Egbert meets Vriska.

But I wonder to shift the point of focus to the mailbox, the other instance of John thinking about death in act 1 (gazing at the fireplace below Nanna’s portrait) is dominated by discussion of whether a fire belongs in a fireplace (and whether his voice belongs in his body)(x) – which makes knocking the ashes out of Nanna’s urn sound like a displaced attempt to exorcise the invading voice? Which perhaps again works as dysphoria for people who dislike their own voices, but I keep getting this nagging sense that I’m focused on the wrong things, regardless of how consistent it sounds (because confirmation bias is real, and I’m very good at thinking I sound convincing!).

I wanted to counter myself with how this could run counter to John’s sexism (eg saying prototyping Jack with the armless girl doll would make him weak) but even that seems to be anticipated in anecdotes like the Dersites discovering that there can be value in an apparently ‘ruined’ crumpled hat. John emerging from a crumpled car to talk with Vriska (and her big red X!) about rejecting the path of aggression becomes linked to Equius’s perverse enjoyment of submission in the prior scene, like there’s this sense that femininity is simultaneously humiliating and desirable? But Equius’s literal loss of breath (feminized corpses) again makes me wonder if I ought to be more focused on like, narrative control in some ill-defined way, especially since John appears to have assumed such control in Seer: Ascend?

Gamzee meme ‘cant it be both things’ is comforting but not much of an argument.