#post scratch damara

[astronomicaltaxon]

green ancestors (⁠◠⁠‿⁠◕⁠)

[rose-icosahedron]

The Handmaid

(I never understand why all of her fanart is so horny) (my floor is covered in little red paper triangles)

[the-daily-felt]

Day 86

[hmstckpanels]

> [o] ==>

[pubbyboards]

[flint9]

Wow... I, uh, was not ready for Damara Megido translated. Damn.

[lime-bloods]

Reading Roxy and Meenah as doppelgangers: a digression on manifestation theory

A brief introduction to manifestation

Manifestation theory sounds scary - the idea that the appearance of trolls and other fantastical creatures might double as insight into the psychological goings-on of our human protagonists is not one that necessarily comes intuitively to all readers. But as blogger azdoine succinctly put it: it's basically "just symbolism". Characters in a story symbolise something, and, understanding that Homestuck is chiefly about its human protagonists, it's logical to presume that the non-human elements symbolise things that are relevant to the protagonists' human experience.

mmmmalo has written at length about what he identifies as the signs linking Meenah to Roxy's inner psychodrama - the things that make Meenah an "esoteric mirror" or "doppelganger" of Roxy. For comprehensiveness' sake, I'm going to outline from scratch what I have identified to be the key signs, and to that end this post is going to discuss the topics of reproduction, reproductive coersion and miscarried pregnancy (with text-pertinent allusions to grooming and incestuous abuse).

One big happy family

Looks like a little girl's room. This all strikes you as a bit odd.

Hussie suggests only briefly in commentary that the young Roxy's (β) upbringing was at the hands of "a younger grandpa Harley" (Book 2, p. 106), but we needn't take their word for it; the scenery here speaks for itself. Roxy grew up in a dark green basement, trained from childhood to become an agent of Harley's goals, just as Damara (β) - and then by succession Meenah (β) - would be trained as English's agents. So, by analogy, Grandpa Harley is Lord English.

This is another point mmmmalo has (in)famously already made, but regardless of your thoughts on the particulars of that specific reading, the key clues pointing to English as a manifestation of the "Grandpa" character are still plain to see. When John says "the worst case scenario" would be "[facing] our grandfatherly paradox-dad as a last boss", he's explicitly referring to he and Jade's family patriarch, but he's also implicitly foreshadowing Lord English - a character who, in the maturity of 2024, we should now all be able to recognise is in one way everyone's grandfatherly paradox-dad. He represents the same upper echelon of paternalistic power on a cosmic scale that Jake (β) represents on a familial level.

Moving this along towards my point: essentially all of Acts 1-4's adult characters form part of this elaborate Nuclear Family Roleplay - a pantomime of the 'Suburban' setting Homestuck is founded upon. In the same way Jake being known as simply "Grandpa" symbolises his arch-patriarchal position, the reason Roxy is known only as MOM for the first five acts of the comic is because this is the archetypal, impersonal role she has been reduced down into. Her relationship with the character named DAD is a direct invocation of this - the two are essentially playing house, living out the gendered roles that have societally/cosmically been laid out for them. The comic's exposition coyly brushes over this, but a deeper look at Alternian culture gives us a much clearer vision of why 'MOM and DAD' make such an iconic matespritship: on Alternia there ARE no real family units, only procreation, and therefore matespritship is understood by the planet's inhabitants as a mere expression of "mating fondness". MOM and DAD make such a cute couple because they are exactly what their assigned titles depict them as - a breeding pair.

This is basically the crux of Roxy's arc right up to the very end of the comic; though Roxy's (Α) post-apocalyptic anxieties about the extinction of the human race bring these thoughts to the forefront, her struggle within the patriarchal structures of the household / society / reality itself has always been that she is only valued as a MOM - as a breeding machine.

The problem therein is that Roxy is seemingly incapable of having children.

The grieving mother

Within Sburb's scheme of universal childbirth, a "void session" is one that simply doesn't have the eggs required to bear fruit. So it's immediately easy to see why the Hero of Void would have similar trouble bringing a pregnancy to term. But certainly not for lack of trying!

Sorry, Jaspers [...] your final resting place is already a mockery. You should have decomposed years ago under a bed of petunias like a normal cat. Not given to a taxidermist and fitted with a tiny, custom-tailored suit, and then stuffed in a coffin built for infants.

When Rose was still very young, Jaspers was found dead. Roxy took the death of her CAT so hard that Rose found it difficult to take her grief seriously, interpreting the cat's elaborate mausoleum as a "structure erected with a spirit of scornful IRONY in response to [a] youthfully innocent request to hold a funeral for the animal." But more than any other, Rose and Roxy's relationship is one defined by miscommunication, and this assessment of Roxy's grief doesn't even seem to hold up to Rose's own recollection of events: later, we hear that the funeral service was something Roxy "insisted upon".

And thus begins probably Homestuck's most clear-cut example of a character's arc stretching across multiple iterations, because from this point - parallel to her neverending quest to settle down with a nice hubby and start a family - Roxy (both β and Α) becomes fixated on bringing back her baby - I mean CAT - only to produce failed mutant after failed mutant. These freaks of nature are not Jaspers, and by the laws of time travel dictating the lives of Paradox Clones they can never be Jaspers. The younger Roxy's first few attempts are literally stillborn; while she's eventually able to create what she calls "healthy felines", she still keeps those monsters locked in the basement they came from, for fear of upsetting her real CAT.

Even as over the course of her Sburb quest and her interactions with the new arrivals from the other session Roxy is seemingly able to address and even overcome some of this obsessive gnostalgia for the things she's lost, her apparent inability to bring to term resurfaces when she's made the reproductive object of another grieving mother.

The lamenting queen (or: the other mother)

Her Imperious Condescension is not so immediately recognisable as part of the family pantomime because the troll social structure doesn't use the same terminology we're familiar with, but she's always been there; just as Lord English is grandfather of grandfathers, Meenah is the family tree's literal grandmatriarch of grandmatriarchs, placed upon the Earth in the guise of Betty Crocker - archetypal nurturing housewife - so that her children's children might seed the events architected by her master. This kind of familial roleplay is exactly how English and Meenah's story is passed down to her descendants; Jake recalls that "the witch used to be married to a terrible man named english." Dirk is insistent, though, that this is a masking of the truth, and that English was only ever "her superior". And while it's true that we can't say for sure a young Meenah (β) slept in the same bed Damara grew up in, the fact that Meenah was only formally recruited after Damara's death should not be mistaken for suggesting that Meenah was not one of English's many daughters. She was "the Lo+rd's slave all alo+ng", even if implicitly.

ARANEA: Once she claimed the throne, she would have to serve for many thousands of years, until the next successor was ready.

For all the differences between Meenah and Roxy's cultures, slavery in the form of motherhood has always been the expectation of the female fuchsia caste, right from the very beginning of Meenah's arc - not as the empress of Alternia, but on Beforus, where the hemospectrum is reframed in far more familial terms:

ARANEA: The jo8 of each 8lood caste was to serve the needs of all those 8elow it. ARANEA: We were to use our progressively greater longevity and wisdom to help the lower castes learn and grow. To listen to them and try to provide whatever they were missing. Like a hierarchy of caretakers with increasing social responsi8ility.

Crucially, this is where Meenah and Roxy appear most to act as reflections but not carbon copies of each other; because where Roxy constantly strives to contort herself into this motherly, wifely role, Meenah perpetually runs from it. Saddled with the "incredi8le responsi8ility" of sitting atop Beforus' structure of care, Meenah "viewed the empress as a glorified slave" and fled to the moon, and even forced into ascendancy on Alternia she finds implicit ways to be absent from her children, spending her life flying further and further away from the planet where they're born and taking every opportunity to hand off any real political authority to clown rappers (a tendency reflected in her human heirs - the company is always passed on to the son and never the daughter).

But when Meenah finally returns home to find her children suddenly massacred by a galactic apocalypse, her arc begins to pull into line with Roxy's in earnest.

A fluffy twitching prison

TT: The rumors say it was her own "pet" who killed them.

From the moment of her dramatic introduction, Meenah's tragedy is that though she can extend life indefinitely, she cannot have back what she's lost, and this continues to be true as she attempts to resurrect her children on a new planet; attempt after attempt, her babies all die. Despite Gl'bgolyb's explicit death in the meteoric holocaust which claimed the rest of her family, the creature has inexplicably returned on the trolls' prospective new homeworld with the apparent sole purpose of making sure Meenah can't carry to term. We're left to our own devices to figure out just what's going on here.

Act 6 of Homestuck introduces Watchmen to its repertoire of intertexts through Jane's poster of cobalt beefcake MANHATTAN. Watchmen's Dr. Manhattan is an omnipotent world-shaping being who flees the responsibilities of Earth to settle on the planet Mars, iconically rendered in beautiful rosy hues by colourist John Higgins - when we hear the story of Meenah's refusal to the call of being Beforus' own god-empress, it's against the backdrop of a photograph of Mars literally hue-shifted pink (see fourth image), and images of Meenah's ship flying over a settlement on the red planet are included among the products advertised by Crockercorp. Far more explicitly, though: Watchmen originated the idea of using the screams of a psychic alien squid as political leverage, and that's why Gl'bgolyb has to be here for this part.

Alongside commenting on the political landscape of the 80s and the fascist undertones of the superhuman archetypes found in comic books, Watchmen pays particular attention to these characters' sexual eccentricities, and particularly their hangups with women. It stands to reason that of the latter closet homosexual Ozymandias' are the most severe, but they also become the most explicit: the artificial 'horrorterror' he uses to usher in his new world order is his fear of the female body made manifest. With its single clitoral eye and sphinctered mouth, the creature is unmistakeably yonic, and included in the horrific psychic imagery it broadcasts to instill fear into the Earth's population are nightmarish images of juvenile aliens chewing their way out of their mother's womb - the very same image trolls use to describe their disgust at human reproduction in The Homestuck Epilogues. Meenah's relationship to Gl'gboylb should be thought of the exact same way; one of the rare insights we receive into the adult Meenah's psyche is that she finds the process of giving birth "revolting", and it's for this reason she insists that humans procreate only through impersonal cloning. Gl'bgolyb reappears as Meenah's own manifestation: alienated from her own lusus after spending centuries literally running away from it, and traumatised by repeated miscarried attempts at reviving her race, she sees her own reproductive organs as nothing more than a hideous, baby-killing monster. It's no coincidence that when we see our single glimpse of the enigmatic emissary to the horrorterrors on Earth, it's with its tendrils wrapped around the throat of a symbolic depiction of the Genesis Frog (see above image) - the baby that grows in the womb of Skaia.

Breaking the cycle

By Act 6, the matriorb has already long been associated with failed and aborted pregnancies, having been rescued from the first mother it killed and taken into the care of Kanaya, who is then blasted through the abdomen just as it's destroyed, symbolically miscarrying through physical trauma. So when Roxy is tasked with finally bringing a dead baby back to life, it's a coalescence of multiple disparate threads.

(p. 6463)

Meenah unwittingly - or perhaps uncaringly - perpetuates a patriarchal cycle which has been repeating for eternity by selecting a younger, more fertile doppelganger to take over the role of mother, and locks Roxy in a dungeon with the intention of making her have the baby in her place. But, cycles being cycles and doppelgangers being doppelgangers, the same problem arises. Roxy can only create mutants.

When Roxy does ultimately overcome this, ending the comic with the culmination of this long, meandering motherhood arc, superficially it's because of time spent blitzing her Void chakras in the space outside of reality, and with the help of Calliope as a Muse. But in the time Roxy spends in the white nothingness, she's crucially able to take steps to end her own obsession with reviving the past - not just by burying a version of her own mother, who she spent so much time hoping to resurrect in sprite form, but also in sharing a tearful reunion with the literal ghost of her dead CAT. As with so much of Homestuck, the key to ending the suffering is breaking the self-perpetuating cycle that causes it; made literal, in this case, by Roxy's slaying of her dark mirror image using a sword known for splitting vinyl records - symbolically, for breaking the ever-turning circle of time. And in passing the matriorb off to Kanaya rather than letting Meenah have control of it, Roxy never actually brings this baby to term herself, either - at the end of the day, the minutiae of biology aren't really what motherhood is about:

ROXY: the way i see it is you shouldnt have needed to worry about makin the thing ROXY: i think it will be challenging enough like... ROXY: hatching it?? ROXY: and tending to all the stuff that comes next ROXY: isnt that basically being responsible for the preservation of an entire race of people?

Physically overcoming her demonic doppelganger isn't the end-all of Roxy's struggle with gendered expectation, either. Roxy's complicated relationship with their sex and their motherhood, introduced to us only indirectly through the relationship between Meenah and Gl'bgolyb, becomes central to their understanding and exploration of their own gender identity as they grow into adulthood. Anxieties about the inherent femininity of a childbearing body - the glorified slavery that is seemingly inherent to the cosmically-assigned role of the mother - give way to an understanding of the human body as "something altogether different [...] A flesh machine" with "a specific, practical purpose."

But I digress

The threads running between Roxy and Meenah exist along the types of lines most Homestuck readers will already be familiar with in some form. When two characters share a class, or an aspect, we expect that traits from one character can be used to analyse and further our understanding of the other. Manifestation theory simply asks that we look for even more subtle and non-literal connections between characters than these - a process which Andrew Hussie themself has identified in authorial commentary as part of what they call "persona alchemy". (Book 4, p. 151)

Roxy and Meenah's particular relationship, though, should also be thought of in terms of another phenomenon which is central to Homestuck's structure - escalation. Homestuck constantly reorders and transmutes the alchemical elements that compose one character into 'new' characters, but it also consistently stretches these fundamental concepts to their logical extremes. Just as a game that destroys planets works its way up to the destruction of universes, John striving to leave his house in Act 1 should be taken as the logical precursor to our heroes leaving reality itself in Act 7. The forces keeping these children in their houses - essentially the story's first ever antagonists - are their parents, and as we scale this story up to a cosmic level, we find that the cosmos is dictated by the same suburban family structures; by celestial GRANDPAs and MOMs, raising/grooming/training/neglecting entire worlds or even galactic empires at once.

By allowing us to meet not only the teen MOMs and BROs and NANNAs, but also the teen Lord Englishes and the teen Condesces, the scratch takes us in the opposite direction, reducing these faceless, larger-than-life figures into their smallest, weakest, most fundamentally human forms. And in some cases, as in Roxy's, this creates the opportunity for the child-form to confront and overcome the very darkest of their potential; by being the one to put Meenah down, Roxy not only liberates herself from her own expectations for what a mother has to be and do, but shatters the very cosmic image of MOM itself, breaking the mold that reality had set in stone for her entire sex - her entire caste.

[meraki-sunset]

A lot of people were asking about the fussion trolls God tiers So here they are! Plus the dancestors

In case you forgot them or haven't seen them this is them. They were born like that in this AU, and their hemospectrum it's smaler and has diferent colors as a result.

I'll cover the story of their game as well as their dancestors and ancestors in another post

Here are the dancestors! Like in canon, they played their game and ended up scratching their game. But things went a little diferent for them...

The Legido. Araeta has Aradia's aspect and Nepeta's class, while it's reversed with Damlin, who has Damara's class and Meulin's aspect.

There isn't much to say about them, in the alpha trolls session it was Araeta who ascended last moment and stoped Jack noir. Damlin ascended in order to sabotage the beta troll's session, like Damara did in the original story.

Karlux Captas has Karkat's aspect and Sollux's class, while Mitkri has Kankri's class and Mituna's aspect.

In his session, Karlux took the role of the leader, his classpect Mage of blood should've made it easier to manage leadership (mage=understands aspect. Blood=Bonds) and the session went of well, for the most part, thos the ending was almost the same as the canon one, with them being traped in the meteor and people shooting left and right.

Mitkri was the seer of his team, but his vissions only consisted of fatidic scenarios, which his teammates often ignored due to his insistence geting in the way of progresing in the game. in the end, he lost his mind while using his powers in the final battle, losing conciousness. when he woke while his moirail restored his brain, his prediction had already been fulfilled and they had lost the game.

Teraya has kanaya's aspect and Terezi's class, and Latrim has Porrim's class and Latula's aspect.

As a seer of space, Teraya was tasked with the creation of the genesis frog and was helped by Karlux.

Latrim, she was the secondary healer of the group and kept everyone's mind active

Tavius has Tavros's aspect and Equius's clas, while Rufuss has Ruffio's class and Horuss's aspect.

This arrangement of class+aspect i did simply because the oposite of a heir of breath + rogue of void would've been a Page of void + Page of breath, and that would've been kinda ridiculous, plus i'm trying to have as many classes as i can.

Tavius literally has John's classpect now, he's more free than ever

Rufuss,on the other hand now has Roxy's exact aspect too, which is a funny coincidence. Like roxy he worked on manifesting things for his team.

Dear lord this two.

Erizee has Gamzee's aspect and Eridan's class, while his dancestor Crolos has Kurlos's class and Cronus's aspect.

Due to the wierd conection between the Amporas and Makaras this two would've shared class one way or another, since Gamzee and Eridan have eachother's dancestor's class, with Eridan being a prince like Kurlos and Gamzee being a bard like Cronus, but having the rage aspect like Kurlos and eridan having the hope aspect like Cronus.

I decided against having too Bards because i felt like a price creates a straigther path to destuction. Since a prince not only destroys his aspect but with his aspect, wich means Erizee would've appeared Rageless during the game but exploded in the meteor.

Crolos on the other hand whould've been manipulative like Kurlos but ill intended and gaslighty like Cronus, appearing hopeless until he ended up destroying everyone's hope.

His ghost would've kept instructing Erizee on how to proceed when he reached the new session, Erizee doesn't like him.

The heiresses to the throne of Alternia and Beforus.

again, to avoid having two thiefs (funny enough they would've been a thief of life and a thief of light) Vriezi is a witch of light and Meenea is a sylph of life.

when combining the two Serkets and the two Peixes you get a real interesting result, you get two very similar girls.

To me the fact that instead of them being thiefs, they both have "benevolent classpects" makes it all the more interesting. Makes you think how they can use good powers to cause harm.

Vrieri being the heiress has Feferi's will to dethrone the condesce (wich was alternate-adult Meenea) but Vriska's savage aproach to fighting. And Meenea, like Vrieri, looked forward to dethrone her ruling ancestor (wich was alternate-adult Vrieri) looking to manipulate and eliminate those in her way.

By playing the game, they both lost the chance to do so

if this two cross paths, it'll be a deathmatch on sight

If you haven't realized by now, this means, the two teams of trolls together, compose a full team.

It also means the dancestor's session was unviable from the begining, due to the lack of time and space players. just like the canon Alpha kids session

[hemonoir]

Tell me more about hotdog

hhHOh boy, okay, I'm just gonna start this off with a brief recap.

TL;DR: "Hotdog" Aka. Damara Lalonde, or "Mara" for short, is the adoptive daughter of Roxy Lalonde.

She is the same Damara raised by Doc Scratch who would later become The Handmaid, but was spared this fate when Roxy plucked her directly off the meteor using her void powers.

But I take it you're explicitly not here for a tldr so-

LONG AS FUCK EXPLANATION BELOW

Due to the bizarreness of her situation, a lot of the surviving cast post-game had some part in her upbringing. But most prominently were her mom's (Roxy and June), and Dirk, who served as an uncle of sorts. The latter being where she gets all the Stridisms in her design.

Personality wise: She's still extremely crude like Beforus Damara, but it's from a more direct ironic place meant to catch one off guard or to be absurdly overdramatic, rather than attempting to scare people away. A lot more snarky and confident, but not jaded or mean unless given reason to be.

Her interests include: Godzilla and similarly campy kaiju franchises. Practical effects in general, but mostly anything big dumb and explosive. Any Shonen slop Dirk showed her. Parkour and any reckless dangerous physical activity that would nearly give her friends a heart attack seeing her attempt. And starting sudden random indie projects in a medium she never returns to once she's finished.

Mara lives life fast and doesn't take time to dwell, especially as she's well aware of her own lifespan in comparison to her peers and her family. After highschool, she didn't want to bother with anything academic or to pursue some grand project to leave behind in her wake. Aside from flings, she doesn't really want to pursue a committed relationship either, as the last thing she wants is someone else fussing over her being careful, or bemoaning her short life in the last years she has of it.

It's her's, and her's alone. And she intends to live it to the fullest.

As for the concepts behind her character and creation-

In the shortest terms, Mara is a direct foil to the faults in Rose and Dave's upbringing. As well as an optimistic look to who Alpha Roxy and Dirk could have become despite who they were in the Beta Universe.

Both getting a chance to take supportive parental role's in Mara's life, Roxy more directly in being her mother, and Dirk more indirectly as someone Roxy could depend on to look out for her daughter, and who saw himself in another "out of place" kid.

Mara never had to wear the scarf of her dead mom, or mourn the fact they never truly got to know eachother due to her addiction. She had a loving mother who she knew for a fact supported her interests, and didn't keep things from her.

And instead of a shadowy violent figure that made her feel like she was never good enough, and without Cal's influence, she had someone to teach her to protect herself and who felt more like a trusted friend than another parent.

The parallels continue when brought back to her original upbringing under Scratch, a fate she narrowly avoided in this timeline due to Roxy pulling her off the meteor.

The idea for the whole AU actually initially came from the fact that Damara and Rose have a lot of direct parallels:

-Both use Needle-kind.

-While Rose would threaten suicide, Damara has a parental figure that actually would push her to suicide.

-John makes a comment about Rose seeming more "witch-like" in comparison to Jade, being a Seer and Witch respectively. However Damara actually is a Witch of Time when looking at her role in Beforus.

It makes it almost seem like Scratch will directly fit anyone he manipulates into a specific mold, but that's beside the point.

There are also parallels in Hal/AR being a piece that makes up Scratch/English, despite his initial role being one of sacrifice. But instead of knowing a sliver of Dirk that got ultimately corrupted and morphed into something cruel and unrecognizable, she got to know Dirk in full who never mutated into some kind of sick beast.

Lastly, though this is more of a side note:

Initially, I actually planned Mara to be raised by Scratch for a brief period, but taken before she could serve English. I.E. Instead of spawning green boxes, Roxy pulling a girl out of a green box.

I'm still mulling it over, but me and my wife most of the time lean towards her never having to suffer under Scratch bc Roxy with her stupid hotdog baby is nice fluff. But the narrative of a kid narrowly avoiding a grizzly fate and having severe repressed trauma she can't remember despite her currently good life, is a story element I still gravitate to as someone with DiD, who also headcanons Dirk as having DiD.

So it's sort of up in the air at times whether or not, Troll named Hotdog. Ever actually was. Hotdog shaped.

At least under Roxy's care.

[starlit1daydream]

Witches & Heirs: Adherence and Manipulation

Well, here we are again. It's always such a pleasure. (Do you remember when you tried to kill me twice, blah blah blah...)

Witches & Heirs are a pair with a lot of material to work with, owing to the fact that Homestuck's main protagonist happens to fall under this category; though comparatively the other characters in the group (besides Jade, fellow Main Character) happen to be relatively obscure.

...But I've also written a whole goddamn analysis on one of them, so this should be fine.

The Witch:Heir class dichotomy embodies adherence, manipulation and fundamentally, control. This is both control over the Aspect, and the control the Aspect has over the person - and practically functions as a means to manipulate & bend the Aspect freely.

Canonical Witch players are Jade Harley (Witch of Space), Feferi Peixes (Witch of Life) and Damara Megido (Witch of Time).

Canonical Heir players are John Egbert (Heir of Breath), Equius Zahhak (Heir of Void) and Mituna Captor (Heir of Doom).

Point A, the narrative function of the Witch.

Narratively speaking, the Witch is the Class of active manipulation. What this translates to is a person whose Aspect has a heavy influence & sway over their life and their actions, which ends up manifesting in them growing to control & influence it in rebellion. And therein lies the key word everyone uses when analysing Witches - rebellion.

The Witch is somebody who rebels against their Aspect. They bend the rules, play around with it, they think they're above its whims. And this, more often than not, is because they don't want it to try and control them in turn.

Jade Harley, Witch of Space, spends her whole life in isolation. Space has her under its thumb, she's got one big, floating empty canvas to play around in and nobody else to inhabit it with. She's so far away from anyone or anything, and has no freedom to explore it to her heart's content because of the fucking First Guardian that keeps teleporting her around.

Feferi Peixes, Witch of Life, has her future decided for her. She's the princess & the heiress to a colossal empire, and the trajectory & development she's meant to undergo is pre-planned. Her life isn't her own to control, and she has to worry about a titanic sea monster that'll kill everyone on the planet if she doesn't tend to it.

Damara Megido, Witch of Time, finds closure to be something hard to swallow. All the toxic & debilitating relationships in her life, she can't bring herself to burn the bridge until the bridge starts burning her - and that's when she resorts to pulling teeth and cutting off heads. And her post-scratch self ends up being groomed & made to serve the Lord of Time himself.

Noticing a pattern here? Witches often find themselves literally controlled by a grand manifestation of their Aspect. Becquerel for Jade, Glb'golyb for Feferi & Lord English for Damara/The Handmaid.

And this brings us to the point that Witches want to rebel against these forces of control. Jade has to learn to break the rules, to disobey her guardian & travel as far from that desolate rock as she can.

Feferi wants to bring great, sweeping change to the whole empire and everything underneath it, she's got big dreams & wants to change the way that everyone's lives grow and develop.

Damara figures out that she doesn't have to take shit & deal with abuse because she can end things, and oftentimes in her situation that means ending lives. And, furthermore, bringing about total oblivion with the Scratch.

(Damara was totally justified in doing that, by the way. Fuck you, Meenah & Rufioh).

This leads to the fairly digestible Point B of the Witches' practical function.

The Witch controls their Aspect to an absolute. The power they gain is to manipulate it and make it do whatever the goddamn hell they want it to do, best exhibited with Jade who gains complete dominion over physical space; which ties directly into her Quest.

Even then, there's still an upper limit to her strength, but from what we see of her God-tiered self (and she's unfortunately the only Witch to reach the God-tiers), Space basically becomes her bitch.

It's one of the most straightforward power sets of any class. Manipulating the Aspect is pretty simple to grasp, and it's moreso the narrative idea of a Witch that's harder to explain.

Point C, the narrative function of the Heir.

Heirs find themselves in an opposing situation, but like the Witches, the Aspect has them under its' thumb. Like the Witch, they find themselves with a huge influx of their Aspect that they don't really get a say in - though I think the difference is that the Heir isn't aware of it as much.

John Egbert, the Heir of Breath, is unrestrainable. He's impossible to keep down or chain in a way that matters, and that often applies to him being impossible to sway emotionally as well. He just glides, freely, from one thing to another without a care in the world - obeying every whim of Breath and disallowing himself the time to dwell on one thing and process it.

Equius Zahhak (yes, I'm going here again) feels empty. He has no substance to himself, and he despises it. Every single facet of his life, he feels is controlled by the untenable nothingness inside him that he can't fight back against, and Void is all he feels he has to him.

Mituna Captor, the Heir of Doom, is fate's chewtoy. He's overwhelmed by prophecies & foretellings of Doom, finds himself repeatedly suffering & stagnating as the world subjects him to misfortune after misfortune, and ultimately sacrifices his own sanity & stability for the greater good.

(And, of course, I don't think I need to mention how the Psiionic gets the raw end of the deal as well).

The Witch uses their Aspect. The Heir is used by it. And though these often overlap, the passive nature of the Heir means they're far more likely not to fight the control their Aspect has over them.

Point D also ties neatly into this, the Heir's practical function.

In the sense that they may metaphorically be consumed by their Aspect to the logical extreme, they are literally granted the ability to become it.

Not only is John seen turning himself into gusts of wind, but further on in the story once he gets his 'retcon' powers; he basically becomes untethered from the narrative. He's unable to stop himself from jumping between places & ideas, becoming instability in its purest form.

This means Equius could become invisible, which is really funny.

So, overall, I find that the Witches & Heirs are deceptively simple to comprehend - and that perhaps my initial frustration with trying to work with them comes from me searching for a hidden complexity that wasn't there. The key words here are definitely control & rebellion, and the way that manifests in them.

I wouldn't go as far as to say their sessions always have this great influx of their Aspect, because I think it's more personal to them - but often the metaphorical cloud of their Aspect that follows them ends up influencing other people around them. That's how changing the Aspect works, right? Change with it, change through it, change it itself. That's the joining point of both Classes; they change.

(That's interesting in of itself because it implies Feferi as someone who changes change, but that's something I'll focus on more when I write about Life; which happens to be my own Aspect anyways).

Next week, the post will be about the most controversial players in Homestuck analysis; The Princes & Bards.

(...oh, christ, please don't make me write about the Makaras).

[calware]

dear calware, I'm not sure how much you know on the topic of Doc Scratch, but I was wondering, why is the common consensus around him that he's like a creepy pedophile? after rereading his messages with Rose, he seems more tone deaf and weird than a fully on creep. is there something I'm missing?

scratch isn't "literally" a pedophile (or a hebephile, which is the accurate term for this situation) which we know because of this

but at the same time, that is still the Way he's written

(i'm sorry if this following explanation is confusing.... i really do not have the right wording to describe it) it's almost like a metaphorical representation. he's a child predator in every way but the actual sexual attraction. the way he's written references the behavior of actual child predators and is meant to signal to the audience that this is the Kind Of Character he is. it's a literary tool(?)to tell the audience that he is literally taking advantage of characters in various ways (as well as straight up abusing damara) while at the time comparing it to child sexual abuse

but if you do want literal actions on his part, he does Literally groom young girls and they are his targets for manipulation

also, directly from the author commentary (which. is not 100% serious at times. but i do think it sometimes offers some actual insight):

I know I just said a bunch of stuff about [DD] maybe being a creep. But look, this is just my OPINION here. I don't think he's actually being creepy about this. I think he has a genuinely parental attitude toward Aradia and wants to see her succeed in her violent and underhanded schemes. See how he wants them to conduct their business with efficiency? He's way too professional to go Full Doc on these girls.

Another peek at Rose suggests she's still at it with her creepy uncle, Doc Scratch.

Then you have a few beats of conversation which bring Equius to mind, such as the creep-factor

[Dirk and Equius] have this creepy-guy streak running through them, with strange or offputting interests, and seem to get a quiet kick out of making others uncomfortable through demonstrations of these fascinations. [...] I'd say these self-examined qualities are just drawn out, isolated, and inflated both for dramatic effect, and also as critical write-up of those qualities existing within many human beings in general, which I would like to think is grounded in a creative process involving a certain degree of humility about some of this bullshit. I like all these characters here, but that doesn't mean I think their unpleasant qualities are good. It just means I am harnessing and heightening those qualities for creating strong villainous portraits.

We start getting the sense that the entire purpose of this conversation, from Doc's vantage point, is just to passive-aggressively manipulate Rose into peering directly into one of his cursed testicles. Wait, my youth pastor is literally barking like a dog right now for some reason. Probably because I put him on a leash and tied him to a post in the backyard. I guess I fucked up again? I mean one of Doc's seeds.

Maybe it's fair to say I have a higher than average tolerance troubling content. But even I have to admit to shuddering a little when I read Doc's creepy lines toward Rose. I think Doc's creep factor toward girls is most likely channeling part of Caliborn's personality, which almost seems to revolve around his horrid attitude toward women. For Caliborn, this weird combination of wrathful misogyny, yet fixation and obsession with certain girls, is obviously central to the type of real-world profile he's meant to portray. But when his personality is more muted among the collective in Doc's head, those qualities come across as more "restrained," "polite," and "flattering," which arguably just makes it all creepier. The result is a creepy dude profile that also exists in the real world, sort of adjacent to the Full Caliborns out there. There seem to be many stripes of this kind of unfortunate male behavior, which all exists in a broader family of sub-Caliborns. The Docs, the Eridans, the Cronuses… They're all sketchy in different ways.

Doc sitting back just to "watch" is another creepy Equiusism. Remember that was a thing with him.

I wonder what Jade would think if she knew she had in her possession since childhood one of Doc's testicORACLES!!! Oracles. The word I meant to say was oracles, not anything else. Anyway, like I was saying, how would Jade react if she realized every time she played with one of her beloved toys, she was actually fondling this weirdo's plump, juicy oracle. I know you think my youth pastor may have something to do with this peculiar outburst, but you're wrong. I "dismissed" him recently, because he told me with great pride that I learned everything he had to teach me. I don't need anyone to keep me from shoving my foot in my mouth anymore, I'm sure you'll be pleased to know. Now let's watch this grieving teen receive a demonic message from an evil puppet's big fat nut.

bonus commentary from book 6 that has nothing to do with the post:

We're reaching a specific kind of story partition. Not the end of an act, but the end of a year. Also an end of "disc," which is a kind of meta-partitioning I just made up for the purpose of closing the book on two years of content, as well as being a good meta-device for introducing the Doc sequence we're about to get into in the next book.

"next book"...... sad

[astronomicaltaxon]

day 1 - young

get that fucking broom outta my face

[verdimel]

moe damara!

the look is * inspired * by both the maiko and the geisha; i didnt know which would be more appropriate for damara so i added elements from both; the painted lips are resonant of the geisha but the obiage is flat which is designated to the maiko (to my understanding)

i love her in her god tier and shes so pretty and i love love love damara !!! shes goated

also i draw her horns in a dif way to differentiate between pre and post scratch

[the-daily-felt]

Day 120

(Strawpage request)

[psiimaid]

tbh i don’t rlly see why so many ppl think the megidos would get along awesomely…… aradia and damara are soo opposed like. aradia, adamant abt not being lord english’s handmaid, considering herself a caretaker of the dreambubbles. damara’s god destroying said dreambubbles. damara wildest fantasy her post-scratch life spent serving lord english as his handmaid. meenah’s ur not like the megido i know and aradia’s i should hope not.

[damarassanctuary]

being half a month away from october it's time to share the list i made for my upcoming Damztober event! ^u^ just like last year ill be making daily drawings of Damara (post or pre scratch) until the end of the month

this is going to be so much fun! ^u^ (also if anyone wanna join in doing their own drawings you're free to do so, the more the merrier ^u^)