#refuting bad john takes

[breckstonevailskier]

I mean, that's a Screen Rant article. They're generally writers of clickbait.

They don't get that John is actually very much a good guy when you take away the unfavorable narrative framing he's constantly subjected to.

So, Screen Rant recently released an article on the 6 rules of being Captain America in the MCU, mostly it's just about how Steve and Sam fit those rules and John doesn't.

But this article is terribly written and incredibly inaccurate to even just basic factual things, and I'm going to go through and address each of the point it makes against John and tell you why it is wrong and hypocritical.

First, the article claims that Cap must be a strong and sure leader. It claims that it's always hard to imagine John ever having this leadership role and that's why his downfall is spectacular. Yet it completely ignores that John has been in leadership roles AND been successful. He's a Captain, he's been serving and leading his men into war and successfully completed missions for decades. We are not talking about some green young soldier with little experience as Comics John may have been. MCU John has been in the military for nearly 20 years. He has a clear and effective record. This claim also ignores that John's leadership ultimately failed in the MCU because no one wanted to listen to him, they were all still angry about Steve being gone and John getting the shield (that he didn't ask for). They were angry and had no intentions of wanting to listen since day one. He wasn't failing because he didn't know how to lead, he was failing because they had refused to let him lead.

Second, the article claims that Cap must be a skilled and brave fighter. It describes in a previous paragraph about Steve and Sam's fighting skills but when it gets to John, it immediately backtracks to dismiss the point. Even in the one "rule" that John can clearly fit under, this article refuses to do so and instead moves the goal post to talk about John's morality and doing questionable things. Implying that if he thought his time in war were the worst days of his life, then it must not make him a good Cap. But let me just ask here, who the hell thinks war is a good time? Steve and Sam's worst days were also when they were serving in the war, they have all done questionable things, do this now mean they aren't good Caps either? Steve even admitted to Fury that they've done their share of questionable things during the war. Sam served in the same wars in the Middle East that John served in. Pretending that John is somehow the only person to act like their worst days are during war time is to display an ignorance to the realities of war and military service. NOBODY thinks war is a walk in the park, wars have always been the worst days of a soldier's life. There is a reason people end up with massive amounts of PTSD!

Third, this article claims that Cap must make fast and tactical decisions. It claims that John's "quick thinking" led to him killing a Flag Smasher, so this is why he isn't good at quick thinking. But I just want to ask here, since when is a heat of the moment trauma response now considered "quick thinking"? If someone kills your loved one right in front of you and you scream and lash out, are you now bad at quick thinking and tactical decisions? So are we now saying trauma responses are bad tactical decision making? Was T'Challa bad at tactical decisions when he decided to seek revenge on Bucky in Civil War for the death of his father? Was Thor bad at tactical thinking when he chopped off Thanos' head? Was Clint bad at tactical thinking when he went on a five year murder spree? Was Steve bad at tactical thinking when his own rage led him to beat down on Tony after Tony blasted and incapacitated Bucky in Siberia? So not only does this article not seem to grasp that a trauma response is not a judgment on anyone else's tactical acumen, it also ignores the number of times that John IS capable of quick thinking. When Karli kicked Lemar off the truck, it was John's quick thinking and throwing out the shield that saved Lemar. In fact, in that same fight, it was John's quick thinking that saved Sam from getting his head bashed in by one of the Flag Smashers.

Fourth, this article claims that Cap must have a strong moral code. It uses Steve fighting against Loki and Thanos and protecting Bucky while Sam tries to talk down Karli as examples of their strong moral code. It claims that John doesn't have this "gift" because John would rather see Karli dead and killed an "innocent" Flag Smasher. If the act of wanting to fight villains to save people and not wanting to kill someone is enough to fit this rule, then John should too. Why does this article ignore that John taking on the mantle of Cap and willing to risk his life to protect others satisfies this rule demonstrated by its own examples? What about John saving Sam and Bucky and Lemar in that truck fight? What about John risking his life doing hostage rescue? What about John grabbing that truck full of hostages to prevent them from dying? And let's not forget, John NEVER had any intentions of killing any one of the Flag Smashers, he was always trying to simply arrest them. Death was something that only happened after they tried to kill him first and killed Lemar instead. He didn't walk into Episode 1 just going all excited about murdering folks.

Fifth, this article claims that Cap must be willing to pay the ultimate price. It claims that it's hard to imagine John ever willingly sacrificing himself for others. This is perhaps the most egregious claim and the most obvious demonstration of a complete misunderstanding of John Walker as it can get. He's risked his life for Sam, for Bucky, for Lemar, for his own fellow soldiers during his years of active duty service, for the hostages in that truck and any other hostages he's saved previously. He's even jumped on grenades FOUR times. To claim that a THREE TIME Medal of Honor recipient can't sacrifice himself for other is to claim that Simone Byles can't do a flip or Michael Phelps can't swim. Why don't we ask families of dead Medal of Honor recipients who got their medals posthumously, just how willing the recipients are to sacrifice their lives for others? Maybe not everyone knows this, but the military doesn't even like to hand out MOHs, you have to do the most high level and extraordinary kind of sacrifice to even be considered for ONE medal, and some people who have done that don't even get their medals until decades later. For John to have received THREE before he's even hit 40 years old speaks to a level of willingness for self sacrifice that readily matches any MCU hero. And even if we don't count the medals, he's demonstrated in the show itself that he is willing to sacrifice. He threw his only weapon, the shield, to save Lemar, even though it left him unarmed to face all those Flag Smashers. He left himself open to attack and death when he refused to let go of the truck filled with hostages even as the Flag Smashers pounced on him from all sides.

Lastly, this article claims that Cap must be "a good man". It states that the serum has corrupted many greedy and egotistical people over the years and that John taking the serum only made him even worse. Only worse? Are we just going to ignore that despite having taken the serum and supposedly being "corrupted" and have all this evil in him amplified, John still CHOSE to let go of revenge and do the right thing and save people? He didn't need Sam or Bucky to tell him, HE made that choice ON HIS OWN. If he is so corrupted and bad, then why did he willingly make a conscious decision to do good? How much goodness does John have to ALREADY have to overcome all the bad in him and still make the right decision? And when will we realize that the serum isn't a "good becomes great" or "bad becomes worse" but rather "good becomes great" AND "bad becomes worse". Everyone has light and dark, the serum amplifies all, and if John's bad qualities are amplified, then so are his good ones, and those good ones are the reason he CHOSE to make the right choice. And that choice matters. In Ms. Marvel, we have Kamala learn that very important lesson, "good is not a thing you are, it is a thing you do".

The irony of this whole article is that there are actually reasons why John is not suited to being Captain America, but none of those reasons are actually even properly addressed in this article.

It doesn't talk about John's insecurity and how guilt and untreated PTSD plays into that emotional volatility and fear that drives him to make wrong decisions.

It doesn't talk about his lack of a solid self-identity, and how that leads to him being easily manipulated and exploited by others (particularly those in power that he feels loyalty and duty towards) because he has tied his self worth to other people's opinions. And how a Captain America needs to know who they are and be firm in their own self, which is what John does not yet have.

Instead, this article lists a bunch of "rules" and inaccurately applies them to John in some half ass attempt to show how he's not a "real" Captain America. What is even the point of writing an article like this if you're just gonna demonstrate that you were clearly watching the Falcon and the Winter Soldier with your eyes, ears, and brain closed?

People continue to fundamentally misunderstand John Walker, and I can only hope that the Thunderbolts movie will fix this problem.

I don't claim John to be perfect, I don't even claim that he makes a good Cap, but the way some of yall still to this day refuse to recognize any kind of good in John is baffling. He isn't Steve's "total opposite", he IS Steve but 200% on crack. Wyatt Russell himself has even stated that John and Steve share the same desire to help and defend innocent people, but where they differ is the method to achieve that result. JOHN GENUINELY CARES. Even if sometimes he makes bad decisions in that care.

[lord-squiggletits]

Part of why I hate this fandom's take on Autobots vs Decepticons is ppl (mainly 'con fans honestly) who can't have any nuance of the situation whatsoever and love to write plots like "oh the humans are racist and abusive towards Cybertronians so this is how Megatron is right" no actually I don't think colonialism/imperialism and racism are justified so long as you can point the finger and say "they were the aggressors first" or "their hands are no cleaner than ours bc their society sucks too" sorry. Please come up with better sociopolitical narratives in your war story.

[lenoue]

“he wants to know now that he is the patriarch of their family, Sam will submit to him. he doesn't want that submission to be shared with John.”

yes! and there’s actually such interesting subtext to it. i’ve been thinking about that one scene from playthings where sam says “he (john) was right to say it” and dean angrily reacts “yeah, well, dad’s an ass”. it’s giving “dad isn’t here anymore. but i am. i am the one you should listen/submit to. because i know what’s best for you. i am the one in control of you now”. definitely reminds me of their interaction in 5.16, sam’s “i finally got away from dad” and dean’s “he wasn’t the only one you got away from”. the way he immediately makes it about himself. yeah it’s definitely about competition with john

also another interesting example is from 4.13:

dean: i’m gonna rip his lungs out!

sam: it’s not a big deal

dean: not a big deal? sammy, look at yourself. if dad was here —

sam: he’s not

dean: well, i am!

he wants to replace john in sam’s eyes so bad it’s not even subtext it’s blatant text. which makes the wincest dynamic so much more twisted & delicious ♡

the 04.13 exchange is making me unwell bcs this! this is it! he make the decisions when dad's not around. he decides the next course of action. it was set up so early on, so glad you brought it up

yeah it's blatant text, that's what gets me riled up when people say dean doesn't become a john variant later on. it's essential to his development that he shares traits with his dad. there are 2 mechanisms that the narrative utilizes to bind sam at dean's side. one is dean's excessive need for authoritative control over the lives of everyone he is close to (sam, bobby, lisa, cas) and sam's own guilt by hurting his closed ones by actions he did that (coincidentally) questioned their authority.

and I dont want to make it sound like sam doesnt doesn't love dean, he absolutely does. but its established that sam has the capacity to exist separately despite so. in fact, he wants to. but he doesn't leave. sometimes its covert, most times its overt that dean needs to "watch over sam" (like after seeing the endverse)

and playthings ofc is a gift that keeps giving. how quickly dean jumps to speak against john is fascinating. this is a man, who would ignore, refute or deny any claims from sam that painted john in negative lights, is now stewing in mourning and resentment. (yes, I do believe he was resentful. john left their family and dean, who views leaving your family as the crime of crimes, could not accept this.) to negate the absolute hurricane of emotions in his life, he puts focus on taking control of the thing closest to him, his sammy. (god i could talk forever about how he clutches to this control for stability throughout the show)

he has already set the reality that he will save sam. it is highly inconvenient to him that sam, now of all times, is putting 2 cents to john's words when dean is right there. keep your eyes here sam, trust me, put your faith in me. I am saying I will save you, that is the only reality you need to trust now.

the vibe of "i am the bedrock of your reality" reminds you of something else?

i also mentioned in another post that dean is insecure about his position in sam's life. he doesn't like losing sammy to even his father. in dean's perspective of their childhood in flashbacks, we only see what dean does for sam. these are at the forefront of his mind. these are his validity documents for his claim on sammy. how no one can know him better. not john, not ruby, not amelia. none of them know what's good for sammy, especially not sam.

(if I had more time I'd go back to "houses of the holy" and examine why dean didn't take well to sam's faith in the divine from a wincest lens)

[tanadrin]

The Gish Gallop was a term coined I think on the 2000s internet for a rhetorical maneuver where to buttress an argument you provide a ton of low-quality evidence; that the evidence is bad means it should be easy to refute, but the very large volume means it will take much longer to explain why it's all wrong than it did to copy-paste a bunch of links, and to a certain kind of very naive onlooker, it looks like the galloper is winning--after all, the one interlocutor has presented a ton of evidence! The second interlocutor has to spend so much time bending over backwards to refute it! Surely the first guy is more knowledgeable and authoritative. You aren't going to look at all that evidence yourself, of course--who has the time?

But listening to Dan McClellan talk about the Gospel of John this morning, it occurs to me that I don't think this is disingenuous. Not entirely. I think this is just the style of argumentation a lot of Christians (of a particular religious flavor) are used to. And I'm not just talking about in non- or para-religious matters like evolution. This is how Christianity understands the Bible.

This week's Data over Dogma is about the theology of John, and why it is non-trinitarian (because the Trinity is a much later doctrine developed as a kind of political compromise, maintained only because it had state backing) and does not actually identify Jesus with God (the theological developments are more complicated here; but suffice it to say it was not at all a given that "authorized bearer of the divine name" and "actually God" were the same being in 1st century Hellenistic Judaism, and indeed the distinction between the two had developed in Jewish thought precisely to avoid the awkwardness of anthropomorphic figures proclaiming themselves God in some of the older sections of the Hebrew Bible).

The funny thing is, there are a ton of passages in John that get trotted out as proof texts that Jesus is God. There are very good reasons in the case of each one to doubt that that is actually the correct reading; but of course, if you don't know anything about Greek, all you have are modern translations produced under the assumption of the dogma of the Trinity--mostly for devotional readers of the Bible who would be outraged if the Trinity wasn't in the New Testament--and you have been raised in a cultural and/or educational milieu where it is simply a default assumption about the way the world works that the Trinity is a timeless concept that has been in the Bible from the beginning, it sure looks like one side is spinning up tendentious arguments based on silly semantics that have nothing to do with the religion you learned as a kid.

But this exegetical approach (really, eisegetical) is common to many topics in traditional Christian theology. There are a ton of passages from the Septuagint that the Gospels warp to be about Jesus, even though, in their original context, this doesn't make any sense; sometimes even they're based on obvious mistranslations, like having Jesus ride into Jerusalem on the back of two animals simultaneously because you don't understand appositives. And you can poke holes in any individual bit of this exegesis, but psychologically having a ton of low-quality evidence for a thing is a pretty effective bulwark against thinking critically about that evidence; for every individual argument you knock down, the person you are arguing against is probably thinking, "yeah, but what about all that other stuff," even if they can't actually name all that other stuff in the moment.

And it's not mendacious! This is the stuff of true belief; this is how you get breathless Christian commentators saying the Bible couldn't possibly be written by human hands, because it so perfectly predicted Jesus even in the Old Testament--and the evidence they point to is, to anyone not steeped in traditional Christian exegesis, and especially to Jews who have their own exegetical traditions, absolutely barmy. Like really pants-on-head crazy stuff. But of course even now it is still being processed, in many parts of the world, through a two thousand year old tradition trying to reconcile it all and to normalize it all, and--to bring it back to discussions of evolution on the internet in the 2000s--I can't help but think of all those people who talk about the experience of thinking evolution was so obviously nonsense, because all they were exposed to was the fundamentalist strawman of it. When they finally sat down and began to read about it on their own, from unbiased sources--often with the intent of criticizing it--they realized how distorted their understanding was, and how limited their supposed outside view.

(If there are general lessons to be wrung from this situation, I think it's simply "beware of echo chambers." Social consensus in a bubble can make bad arguments feel much stronger than they really are, especially if you are not exposed to the actual opposing view. Be on guard against mistaking "quantity of evidence" for "quality of argument," especially if you're not gonna evaluate that evidence yourself. Also all religious traditions are fundamentally eisegetical, because in order to keep holy writ relevant to the community its meaning has to be constantly renegotiated. So, uh. If you want high-quality exegesis, ask an academic, not a theologian.)

[bambi-kinos]

Hi! Sorry in advance for my terrible english skills but after reading your insightful analysis on the beatles, mclennon and the John and Yoko dynamic I couln't help myself to ask you about a recent topic. Lindsay Ellis has made a video about Yoko and the Beatles, have you seen it? What do you think about? Personally as much she goes really full deep in her research and she covers how much women near powerful man are villainside, made the object of hate not recognising that this men have agenda men and responsabilities and you know much patriarchal society is etc, I honestly liked in general but she falls in the same mistakes as many others regarding how John and Yoko met, the usual fabricated and invented story, the fact she yes she didn't deserve all that hate, treaths, people who are happy that he ex husband kidnapped their daugher(that it's sick) but she was a bad influence on John and she is not a kind soul; he struggled with mental illness for all his wife, he lived as a reclusive for five years, she alieneted him from his son and oldest dear friend (let's thank May Pang a 22 years old girl for reperaing the riff! not a grown up woman as Yoko), she didn't permit the seventeen year son to take him his mother with him when the father died, she sold the letters of the son and so on. She is not the only person who contributes to break the beatles but make her a saint or a good person with strange quirky personality is absurd for me

I detest Lindsay Ellis and do not watch her content. She is frankly a hack who is only notable because she was a prominent figure on Web 1.0. She has terrible opinions about movies (she put out TWO REVIEWS of Disney's Hercules and they both managed to be incoherent with lots of whining about motown being on the soundtrack), she had to trade on her industry connections to get her stunningly mediocre book published (it earned those rejections fam) and now she makes her living as a mediocre Youtuber playing up nostalgia for millennials.

I have not seen her documentary and I'm not going to. Some of my friends watched it and confirmed that it's more drivel from someone who can't stop kissing Yoko Ono's ass. Apparently in the video she maligns May Pang as a scam artist in the same category as Albert Goldman and repeats a bunch of lies about Paul. None of that surprises me and I'm not giving her my views just to refute her lies that she reheated from other sources.

I don't hate Lindsay but the only reason anyone knows her name is because of Doug Walker and That Guy With The Glasses. Give me Linkara any day, he produces amazing analog horror now: Winter of '83. I would love to see Linkara make Beatles content because I know he would research the hell out of it and make videos about it that are accurate, entertaining and educational.

[sapphic-agent]

So... I didn't think I'd be engaging in Trolls discourse, but I crave violence so here we go. I recently saw a claim that what Brozone did was worse than what Creek did and I??

Listen. What John Dory, Bruce, Clay, and Floyd was shitty. Undoubtedly. No one is ever going to refute that.

But Creek?? Let's recap for a minute. Creek:

Sacrificed his entire village to be eaten alive (didn't just sell them out either, he actively lured and deceived the entire village out of hiding)

Knew and took advantage of the fact that Poppy would try to rescue him

Refused to take accountability or show any remorse or guilt

Taunted Poppy and added insult to injury

Brozone walking out on Branch is literally nothing compared to that.

(And again, yes this was shitty but they a) were his brothers- and kids themselves- not his parents and b) didn't leave him alone, they left him with a guardian. And John Dory also went back for him, he couldn't have known they had escaped. He thought Branch was dead. JD at the very least didn't abandon him, he was always going to go back)

If Creek had shown remorse or guilt for his actions, that would be different. That would make what he did understandable (not okay, but understandable). But he not only doubled down, he went out of his way to be callous about it. He's not terrible because he did a bad thing, he's terrible because of his attitude towards the bad thing he did.

(Even in TBGO where he was "redeemed," he never really shows remorse and is forgiven anyway. He did nothing to change and still got everything he wanted)

Creek was always a manipulative, condescending, and narcissistic jerk, he just didn't need to show it until then. And in a movie where the whole theme is "true colors," I'm pretty sure the implication is that that's his true self. It wasn't just because his life was in danger, he was always a nasty person.

(You can even see it during his actions earlier in the movie. Where the Snack Pack were genuinely just frustrated/annoyed with Branch, Creek was the only one who went out of his way to taunt him. Where Cooper asks if Poppy's sure she wants to invite Branch, Creek tells her to ignore him. Even when the SP is kidnapped, Creek grabs Poppy's hair where Branch intertwines his hair and Poppy's later in the movie)

Listen, if you like Creek, good for you. You're allowed to. And the stuff you guys do with him is creative and interesting. Keep at it.

But please, don't ever lie to my face like that again

[whoreviewswho]

Nothing's just rubbish if you have an enquiring mind - Paradise Towers, 1987

At the time of writing, it is impossible to refute that the production history of Doctor Who in the 1980s is incredibly, thoroughly documented. Recently, I saw a video floating around fandom on Twitter from the now current production team being disparaging and critical toward the mid-80s period of the show. None of the talking points that came out of this were anything new but it did highlight, for me, the biggest problem of this era by way of how much it was not discussed. Mid-80s Doctor Who was bad. Mid-80s Doctor Who was also made exclusively for the fans. I think that fans feel, to this day, somewhat uncomfortable addressing this fact. After all, they are a significant and vocal subset of the programme’s audience and the ones who imbue themselves, or in the mid-80s were imbued by the production team proper, with a sense of ownership and understanding of the show that eclipses everybody else’s. We know how Doctor Who works because we’ve seen it all, we know it inside out. If it isn’t working for us, it must not be working.

Of course it goes without saying that this is completely tosh. Doctor Who did and does not exist solely for Doctor Who fans. It doesn’t even exist primarily for them. Doctor Who is a programme produced by a public broadcaster in Britain as part of their remit to inform, educate and entertain. No matter how much Russell T Davies and the BBC at large would prefer one to believe otherwise. At any rate, a programme with that comfortably met the BBC’s mission statement and was appealing across demographics of the British public was not the one they John Nathan-Turner had been producing for, arguably, four years at this point. 

But this was, thankfully, to change thanks to A. the appointment of Andrew Cartmel in the role of script-editor and B. the enormous falling out between Eric Saward and JNT leading to the latter refusing to hire any old hands that would have previously worked with them as a duo. Incredibly, this decision led to an enormous uptick in quality for the next three years. Wild. One of the first writers that JNT sought after for season twenty-four was Stephen Wyatt, a promising new talent at the BBC in late 1986. Following the hiring of Andrew Cartmel as script-editor, in early 1987, JNT arranged a meeting between the two writers where they got to discussing their mutual admiration for the works of J. G. Ballard. The pair began to construct the basic plot that would become Paradise Towers with Wyatt taking particular inspiration from his own experiences frequenting council housing in London's East End.

Season twenty-four, and really beginning with Paradise Towers, would mark a significant shift in the style and tone of Doctor Who from previous years. Cartmel and his team of writers were heavily inspired by contemporary comics, specifically the series 2000AD and the works of its writers such as Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Dave Gibbons, Pat Mills and John Wagner. The second major change Cartmel employed, however, was a distinct turn back toward Doctor Who's cultural role as key viewing for British families. Regaining the general audience, and by that I mean adult non-fans watching the BBC, is one thing (and arguably the much easier one) but the task of reframing Doctor Who as an important programme for children was surely the more mammoth and, I would argue, necessary effort. Let’s not kid ourselves, where would the older fans come from if not childhood passion for the show? This is really the sole reason why fandom can never be trusted for knowing what makes for good Doctor Who on television since the answer invariably returns to “the ones that are like what I watched as a kid”. I don’t mean to spend any more time ragging on the latter half of the Eric Saward era than I have to but fully appreciating Paradise Towers simply has to go hand-in-hand with the acknowledgement that seasons twenty-one through three were playing to an older audience than Doctor Who was ever designed for. Yes, it was conceived as a programme to bridge audiences between two programmes that were targeted at older and younger demographics and Philip Hinchcliffe was correct in refuting claims that his version of the show needed to be watered down by arguing that it’s not made the children’s department; it’s made by the drama department. 

BUT this line of thinking was part of a wider rationale and objective for the show to introduce children and families to mature concepts and themes through the lens of a science-fantasy adventure serial. That’s what Doctor Who does best. The violent thrillers being told about video nasties and psychotic mercenaries being chopped up by cyborgs don’t cut it as family entertainment, even if they were really good. Paradise Towers is the Cartmel era at its most children's television. This is no way a discredit and certainly not something that disappears after this season; the balance simply becomes more nuanced. Despite its reappraisal over the years, I would find it would be hard to object to any adult viewer now whose opinion is simply that this was a bit too children's TV for their sensibilities but I think that this was still the right move. Even if this did swing too far into the realm of pure children's entertainment, Doctor Who had been so far away from that realm for so long at this point that an aggressive swing the other way was necessary. The show needed to even the scales before we could move back toward something a bit more overtly mature. Paradise Towers carries sense of a new era really beginning to fall into place (Time and the Rani is really a hangover from the Colin Baker era) but it's not quite there yet. It is similar in that way to a story like The Beast Below, for example.

With that family audience in mind, it is no surprise that the basic story of Paradise Towers is incredibly easy to get your head around; a dilapidated housing complex, that was designed by an evil mind who thinks his work is ruined by having people actually live in it, is out to kill the inhabitants. The foundational elements of this story, however, and the broader socio-political context is incredibly dense and opens itself up to thoughtful conversation about modernist architecture as an extension of urban renewal. Paradise Towers is, quite blatantly, a council estate, a place where all of the children and elderly were shunted into while the able-bodied were sent off to war. Contextualising the story in real-world history of Britain, we know that this is not what was really happened. What was actually happening under Thatcher's government, and buy no means ended with her, wax urban renewal of low socio-economic areas that largely neglected the people who actually lived there, redeveloping these parts pop England to be glimmering examples of perfect modernist architecture. Whether they were homes for those who needed them or not was a less important concern. In the case of Kroagnon here, the triumph of having built something is more important than it actually being put to use; "The whole place is polluted with flesh". And, of course, the more intellectual members of the audience would be quick to realise that Paradise Towers is obviously riffing on High-Rise. None of these things matter to a six year old though. What matters to six year olds is that the bad guys follow orders from a monstrous entity that prioritises a product and an aesthetic over living people. And, perhaps even more importantly, those same guys are just as capable of realising this is wrong and joining the good guys if they know that they should. The takeaway from this parable is as simple as 'Everybody should work together to take out the common enemy'. Which, in this case, is an actually life-threatening entity that is abusing, and symptomatic of, a larger system.

While Nicholas Mallet would never be my first choice for all-time best Doctor Who director, he does some very admirable work in this serial. Right form the off, there is a great juxtaposition between the devastated horror of the towers and a Yellow Kang being hunted and killed with the stark, shiny retro-futurism of the Doctor and Mel's, themselves an extension of those aristocratic adventurers of Victorian fiction, absorbing their bright and chipper tourist material. That being said, I love the Doctor's immediate resistance to the advertising material. The beginnings of Cartmel's interpretation of the Doctor as a scruffy defender of the lower classes are immediately apparent in this story.

The Kangs themselves are an incredibly simple realisation of what is unambiguously a political idea; they are the children neglected by the system who grew up to be warriors and hunters, just like the Rezzies did though in a much less malicious fashion as children would. It is a very dark idea but all of it is extremely pllatable for families. Speaking of the Rezzies, Tilda and Tabby are easily the most hilarious aspect of this story as an adult but they would surely be quite genuinely frightening for kids. When you are a child, there is something deeply unsettling and unnerving about the elderly. Their existence is so far beyond your scope of understanding that they are really quite alien and ripe for scares. Mel's kidnapping in episodes two and three is actually very unsettling considering the limitations on play here. For the adults, residents of the dilapidated towers descending into cannibalism is either going to come off as hilariously silly or the least apologetic Ballard rip in the whole serial. For those who really love this, it is obviously both. Tabby hilariously layering cream on Mel's biscuit is probably my favourite moment of comedy in the whole story.You can see the influence this era and this story specifically must have had on Russell T Davies' conception of Doctor Who. Gridlock and Dot and Bubble have far more in common with the stories of season twenty-four than any other in the show's history.

The 2000 AD influences are really all over this production. The aesthetic of this world and the specific socio-political subtext feel perfectly in-step with any of that house's publications. For all the Kangs' dialogue, their use of language, is silly and naff on-screen, it would be incredibly easy to dismiss on the written page. Is this especially different from, say, the language of the Mutants in The Dark Knight Returns? It is no surprise that this particular story inspired its own independent comic-book series later down the line.

But, that being said, the biggest problem here is the actual production which is, frankly, overextending its reach once again. Everybody involved is trying very hard to sell the story but this production team is not up to the task of realising Wyatt's world (Richard Briers is probably the sole exception to the claim that everybody here is trying their best to realise this material. Granted, his performance is well within the remit of children's TV villain but not in the right way). The sets are quite good though the lighting does ether cheapness no favours. The Happiness Patrol, for example, improves on this. Take the lighting in episode three's interrogation scene. The idea is there but it doesn't quite work. The cleaning robots are bloody terrible too. A redesign could have gone a long way to saving them. The legs hanging out the back are great but they're just not scary at all despite how great they are on paper. Pex is probably the biggest victim of this production not working. great character and Howard Cooke gives his all in it but he is simply the wrong casting choice for this. With that comic-book influence in mind, it is easy to see how Pex was intended too operate as this headstrong, hyper-masculine parody of the typical superhero/comic book action hero. Again, imagine him on paper being drawn like The Punisher or Judge Dread. The scrawny Howard Cooke is not the actor to convincingly sell this. I'm not entirely sure that this idea actually lends itself to the story being told. Pex is perfectly suited to the aesthetic of Paradise Towers, the tone is on point but this quite angry story about a very specific cultural context seems at odds with Pex's little story about being a deserter from war that tries to play as a superhero but is naturally ill-suited to it. It's very endearing but just its own little thing in this world rather than part of a greater thematic whole.

In his second story, Sylvester McCoy is great but, again, is plagued by that affect of being not-quite there. The script characterise shim well enough though somewhat generic and the matter is not helped but his performance still being in its infancy. It's not all pratfalls and mixed metaphors as some would lead you to believe but the multitudes that came to define the Seventh Doctor are certainly not here yet. Just like watching him parade around with a not quite right umbrella, the shape of it is there but the full definition isn't. The Doctor has so many excellent moments in this story. His outwitting the Caretakers by simply weaponising authoritarianism to suit his agenda. It's a very simple and somewhat obvious little scene but it perfectly illustrates the idiocy of blindly following inane orders; "Rules should always make sense". The shifting seats in the interrogation is also a lovely bit of theatrical play and there is a surprising glimmer of darkness when Pex volunteers for the mission that will kill him in episode four, as if the Doctor knew things were always going to play out that way. He doesn't even try to stop him from tackling Kroagnon and being blown up.

Then there's Mel. Mel sits awkwardly in this story. The world of a decaying, children's television dystopia is not an inappropriate place for a character such as Mel, who is already really just a kid's TV idea of 'the smart and plucky girl one", to inhabit. Bonnie Langford commits herself admirably but, in contrast to the Doctor, her presence is not much of a disruption to the narrative and the character is so thinly drawn that any attempt at thematic or subtextual threads to be drawn between her and the events of the story are so thin as to be entirely non-existent. Langford and McCoy play off of each other well enough but it is nevertheless painfully apparent that her character was conceived to play off of Colin Baker's Doctor and a lot of her role as a foil is nullified by the stark difference between their respective characterisations of the Doctor.

When I first saw Paradise Towers, I really did not take to it. Likely it was my previous conceptions of the Cartmel era as a fan, misconceptions that were likely informed by the impact of the New Adventures novels in fandom, that blinded me to how much good really is in here. The Cartmel era is not hard-edged science-fiction for mature audiences and Doctor Who fans. Like the best offerings of this programme have always been, the Cartmel era, and Paradise Towers, is an idiosyncratic little show for families that's punching above its weight. 

[godspeedmajortom]

Miscellaneous Malevolent musings now that I've caught up with the podcast releases...

Loved the "Dunwich Horror" vibes in season 3

Seasons 2 and 3 worked better for me than Season 1, I think because the shape of the arc and the overall goal was clearer

Could do without the amazement at "ruins older than this country," though. America is such a recent creation, and there were people here well before it. Ancient structures should not be inconceivable. Not that I want to go in the HPL direction of native peoples being corrupted by eldritch gods, more that it's ignorant to assume there was nothing here before the colonists. There are better ways to marvel at the impossibility of a place, like the scale of the structure or an unnatural texture or shine or echo or non-local stone (like obsidian in New England lol).

Not sure if this has been confirmed or refuted anywhere, but I headcanon that Arthur wrote the “Some Would Call It Madness” song

Arthur, John is not your conscience. He has no authority to tell you whether you're a good man. He's still learning what "good" means. He's a friend who can provide a second opinion at best. I know you're lonely and you want reassurance, but he does not have the human frame of reference to give you a valid answer. Sorry, dude.

On that note, Arthur seems to have two categories for beings: person and monster. Monsters are evil and should be punished, people deserve respect and can grow from their mistakes. I don’t think he has a clear philosophy yet for what distinguishes them, beyond his gut feelings or rationalizations for his actions (see: cultists are irredeemable and deserve what's coming to them, certainly not people who maybe made a bad choice, got in over their heads, and could use a second chance). Like, John is right that he and Yellow are fundamentally the same, however much Arthur wants John to be in the Good and person-like category. The main difference is that Arthur trauma bonded with one and came to like him, then expected the other to replace him immediately under different circumstances and was disappointed when he didn't. I'm not sure where Arthur puts himself on the person-monster scale. I mean, he considers himself a person, and he typically thinks he's in the right. But he toes the line with cruelty sometimes in a way that does concern him, and he still has so much guilt and shame about Faroe. He's complicated, that's the point of the story. I can see him going full "he who fights monsters," or embracing mercy and forgiveness as human virtues.

Arthur giving the cana water in the prison pits takes on a new light after hearing the whole "I am the captain of my ship" poem and hearing what happened to Faust

Petulant child John is still the best. He is especially childlike in Ep29. The movies! The handkerchief! He has so much ambition and so little agency.

On the other side of the John coin, I'm very curious about how John actually killed Emily and Parker, especially given his limited power on Earth. I imagine it's something that can occur in the ritual of opening his book. The details will surely be revealed at the least opportune moment.

Speaking of coins: Kayne, you sick fuck, I love you, what are you, what the hell game are you playing. He clearly has more direct influence on Earth than the King in Yellow, and he has some kind of influence in the Dreamlands/with the King to return John to Arthur. Presumably, he needs both John and Yellow, maybe also Arthur, for whatever he’s planning. Or maybe he just wants to be entertained by Arthur inevitably blowing up at John for lying to him and betraying his trust again. Fun times for everyone!

[thecloserkin]

fic rec: Less Than Dirt. by ulexite

fandom: Supernatural

pairing: Sam Winchester/Dean Winchester

word count: 40k

Is it explicit: no

Bottom line: when they say “go hard gencest or go home” they are referring to this fic, which went so hard that it ground up my insides and fed them back to me in a tube

In this early-season AU, Sam is beset by visions and the boys are keeping it from John. Who knows what John would do if he knew, right? That’s present-day 2006. In 1997, fourteen-year-old Sam and eighteen-year-old Dean tangle with some hunters who turn out to be bad hombres. I think either plot thread could have stood on its own—the 1997 story is entirely self-contained—but when ulexite braids them together the impact is like an airplane landing. This fic is about Sam defending Dean, and Dean defending Sam, against all comers. “All comers” unfortunately includes John. There is some violence done to John’s canon characterization but in service, I think, of a good cause. If you’re familiar with ulexite’s other work it’s probably If Gold Rusts…, which is a fantastic fic. It’s also 130k long lol which is why I wandered away before finishing. Luckily this one’s more digestible.

In 1997, while John is off on a case, the boys have been left to rusticate in a motel in Nowheresville, USA. John deliberately leaves Dean behind to punish him for fucking up on a recent hunt. We are told baldly the nature of Dean’s fuckup: his actions proved that Sam’s safety—not killing monsters—was his top priority. As a consequence his father is putting him in the equivalent of kiddie timeout. In the aftermath, there’s a lot of discourse between the boys about who John’s favorite is. From Dean’s perspective:

“Look after your brother,” Dad had said, “since that’s what you’d rather be doing.”

And from Sam’s perspective:

Might as well have said: “Look after this burden of mine so I don’t have to.”

This is classic they each think the other is John’s favorite, and it’s just as aggravating to me, the reader, as it’s intended to be. So this whole ball of recriminations is sitting between them at the beginning of the 1997 arc. Sam and Dean are not on the easiest of terms with each other.

Enter the bad hombres.

They’re hunters. They’ve worked with John before. They’re looking for backup on a werewolf hunt, and since John is unavailable, they’ll take the next-best thing, his teenage sons. Yeah you heard right these guys just press-ganged a fourteen-year-old into forced labor, all the while relentlessly belittling him. It’s frightening how simple it is for a pack of complete strangers to drive a wedge between Dean and Sam at this fragile moment. All they’ve got to do is treat Dean like one of the guys—like a grownup—and ice Sam out by treating him like a useless hanger-on kid. Here is Dean defending his unilateral decision to 1) join these randos on a hunt and 2) lie to John about it:

“Yes, Sam, I lied to him, and you better not even think about calling him again to tell him we’re going on a hunt. You’re still my little brother, and I’m still in charge until Dad gets back, so do as you’re told for once.” He doesn’t feel like pointing out how infrequently he doesn’t do as he’s told. Everyone’s always accusing him like he makes a habit out of disobedience.

This is grossly unfair! The charge is that Sam has a “disobedient” temperament rather than that he has done xyz “disobedient” thing…which makes it impossible to refute. Again and again canon shows us Sam being punished for what he is rather than what he does—“freak” is an epithet that targets his nature which he cannot control rather than his behavior which he can—and it hurts extra coming from Dean, the person whose opinion he values highest. Sam is gravely wounded by Dean’s betrayal. Still, even hurting as he is, when the chips are down you will never find Sam anywhere but in Dean’s corner:

Outside, Donovan lines up empty beer cans along the stack of firewood and tells Dean: “Time to prove you ain’t all bark, Winchester.”

He’s both proud of Dean for making every shot even with his eyes bleary from the early morning and his hangover, and also wondering why he couldn’t just tell this man “I don’t gotta prove shit to you” and walk away. But then he understands it when the gun’s put in his hands, and the cans are lined up again, and he’s being told to give it a go.

As soon as Dean says “Show ‘em what you got, Sammy,” the need to impress makes all the sense in the world. Just that Dean’s the only one here whose opinion matters to him, and letting his brother down, especially now when he needs Sam on his side the most, even if he doesn’t know that? He makes damn certain he doesn’t miss a single shot.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that in this section of the fic Dean is 18, the age of majority, the age at which he might assume legal guardianship of Sam were the worst to befall John (an eventuality he has definitely contemplated more often than is healthy). It’s not clear to Dean what Sam’s role is—is Sam his charge or his peer—and that flare of pride he gets every time Sammy does something well? Some skill Dean taught him? Muddies the waters even more. But we’re not done with this scene yet! We have to see with our own eyes exactly why these bad hombres are bad news:

Sam holds out the gun, but before Dean can make a step to start setting the cans back up, Donovan takes the gun and turns the opposite way from their makeshift targets, aims his gun over top of their heads, and shoots a starling right out of a tree overhanging the driveway. “That’s what it means not to hesitate,” Donovan tells them, sickly pleased that Sam can’t even bring himself to look at the felled bird wherever it landed. “You’ll learn, kid. Or you’ll die. One or the other.”

This dude just shot a living creature dead for NO REASON wtf?!

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

Ok so long story short our boys get separated, the bad hombres stake Sam out for werewolf bait without even bothering to arm him with a weapon, Dean shows up to clean up the werewolves but is obviously livid about the way they deemed Sam expendable. Dean feels an obligation to stay and finish the hunt, but he won’t countenance Sam remaining if it will endanger Sam (which it will, since these dudes are psychos). So Dean deliberately picks a fight. He says the only thing he can to get Sam voluntarily onto the first bus to wherever-the-hell-John-went.

“Sam… I’m staying, alright? I’ve gotta see this through. I can’t keep fucking up and getting people killed, and you’re a distraction for me. Dad’s right about that.”

“…I’m a distraction?”

“You are.”

His eyes are burning, white-hot emotion, sadness disguised as fury. “So I’m just in your way, is that it? You want me to leave?”

“This entire time you’ve been nagging and nagging at me that you wanna go home, Sam. I’m saying if you wanna go then go. But I’m needed here, and they’re right. You’re not a little kid anymore, you don’t need me to protect you like you used to.”

I am a kid, Sam thinks, enraged, and so are you!

“I want you to come with me, Dean! I don’t trust these people, I haven’t trusted them from the minute we met them!”

Sam leaves. Then he changes his mind and returns, because Dean sent him packing with their only gun, and Sam can’t bear the thought that he left Dean alone without a weapon. Thank god he does, too, because the scene Sam walks in on is one of these psycho hombres murdering Dean. It’s the real unhinged one, Donovan. Donovan is hurting Dean for fun, just like he shot that bird for fun. Dean is badly injured and unarmed but still fighting back because the son of a gun has said he will go after Dean’s little brother next, and THAT threat never fails to make Dean see red. Of course he’s losing badly until Sam shows up and shoots Donovan cleanly in the back. Aaaaand scene.

What stands out to me about this episode is not that fourteen-year-old Sam killed someone, but that the two of them tacitly agreed to let Dean take the rap for it (Sam was after all not supposed to be there). They let the victim’s relatives believe for nine years that that’s what happened, that Dean killed Donovan. When the inevitable reencounter occurs in 2006, John is entirely in the dark—the boys never told him what happened back in 1997—so John is caught off guard when Donovan’s brother and nephew draw their guns on Dean, and Sam gleefully claims credit for Donovan’s murder (“you’re pointing those at the wrong guy”), and then uses telekinesis to turn the guns on the other two. It’s hard to tell if John’s madder that he’s been kept out of the “Sam is manifesting psychic powers” loop, or madder that two dudes just tried to murder his son. One of these things is maybe a slightly bigger priority, John! It seems worth noting that Sam’s psychic powers are triggered, as usual, by a bodily threat to Dean’s life or limb. Also that John seems to assume that if people are trying to kill Sam, they probably have a good reason (instead of that people are fucking psychos). It’s this unwarranted presumption of guilt that steams my beans. There is not a shred of evidence that Sam is endowed with an evil nature or doomed to walk an evil path, and yet John’s conviction is nigh unshakeable. The visions that Sam was having at the beginning of the fic? Those were premonitions of his own death at John’s hands. He’s been seeing visions of plenty of people getting murdered, he just didn’t realize it was himself he was seeing. Omg when the dashboard read 3am I should have known I should knownnnn. ulexite is good at a lot of things but this descriptive passage stood out to me because it is BUSSIN:

Trees. He sees trees. A grey morning, barely out of the pitch of night, only knows it’s morning and not evening because of the dew clinging to the earth, the sense memory for a thing that hasn't happened yet telling him he shouldn't be awake. Dirt and mud, rotting leaf litter, new blood. He can smell it all, iron and loam. Yet, as soon as he tries to turn his head to look around, that’s when the pain hits, a needle from one temple to the other, straight through the cortex like his premonitions are killing him.

Dw John does not put a bullet in Sam because Dean shows up at the last second and he puts a bullet in John instead. And that’s our story all tied up with a bow.

Now, do I think ulexite’s characterization of John is true to canon? No, I think this is a very selective and unsympathetic reading of John. I think in this fic the boys are conflicted in their feelings for John, but John is never shown to be conflicted, up to and including when he’s about to put Sam in the ground he’s certain that he’s doing the right thing. Canon!John would never. That’s fine though, as long as the fic’s John characterization is internally consistent I’ll buy it. What really sits at the core of it though, the thing that sank a grappling hook into my heart, is the evolving relationship between Sam and Dean and the different roles they occupy for each other as they grow up:

The weight of his amulet, a constant reminder that Sam loves him the most, feels like a noose around his neck all day long, until finally he gets the courage to apologize to Sam

and

It’s not Sam’s fault Dean conspired to keep him young forever and has just now changed his mind. It’s really not. But sometimes Sam grates on him and it’s not because of any real discernible reason other than that Dean thinks sometimes he was made into a parent at four years old and that just kinda sucks

Idk this may just be my own hobbyhorse, maybe y’all don’t care and it’s just me on my soapbox watching these boys agonize about whether I’m parent or peer of what. But I mean:

“Do you hate me?” he asks, not even meaning to, it slips out insecure and irrational, unchecked.

Dean is quiet for a few beats too long for comfort, but he wraps an arm around Sam’s shoulders and he’s pretty sure Dean kisses the top of his head, and he says “You’re my little brother, you know I love you.”

He wishes that answered his question, but in this one instance, it doesn’t. It really doesn’t.

My first thought was: When Dean put a bullet in John that pretty definitively answered the question, wouldn’t you say? “I choose you, Sammy” is what I thought that bullet was saying. But on my second readthrough I’m not so sure. “I choose you” is not the same as “my love is unadulterated by other, more complicated feelings.” I think what Dean’s bullet does establish is that there’s no room in the SamDean relationship for anyone else, even the man who raised them.

[bonbongiveshell]

To the most knowledgable yet open-minded Christian I know, I have been struggling horribly with my "Calvinism" demons in this past week, meaning I cannot stop thinking every bad thing that has happened to me was deserved because God thinks I suck, and I'm being punished for going against what he wants for me. Every decision I've made recently is biting me in the butt it seems, because God wanted me to do the opposite, and I "rebelled". Any Bible quotes that refute this pattern of (toxic) thinking?

I'm so sorry to hear you're struggling with this :o( God wouldn't punish you for not following the plan because what even is the plan? And besides that, God is love you know? Here are some verses that I think will help

John 3:16, you probably know this one but it doesn't hurt to have a reminder

Matthew 6:26-34 talks about how God cares for every little thing on the planet and I'm including this because I want you to be reminded that God loves you more than you could ever begin to fathom.

Matthew 5:1-11, also known as the Beatitudes offer some comfort when one is feeling downtrodden

Matthew 7:7 (can you tell what my favorite Gospel is?) Particularly, "who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone?... How much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask Him!"

All of Romans 8 talks about punishment. Read all of it, but Romans 8:28 specifically. I have a study Bible so I'll include what it says about that passage.

It is an unfortunate part of the Christian tradition to take all bad things that happen to us as some sort of divine punishment or a failing on our part but that is simply not true. Sometimes it's the devil working against you, sometimes a bad thing is just prelude to a very good thing, sometimes shit just happens and you gotta roll with the punches. I hope I was able to give you some relief

[obsessivelollipoplalala]

But why does Brian and Roger's desire to keep in contact with John trump his need to break contact with them?

People really seem to have been taken in by this "BFFs forever" narrative pushed by the biopic. This has been refuted in SO many interviews - all four of them stated they barely spent any time together socially. Did they really have much in common with John, aside from work? How many of us really stay in touch with colleagues after we leave a job?

I don’t understand why you decided to be so stupid, wrong, and callous about this in my inbox.

First of all, you’re simply lying. The band did NOT say they barely spent time together. This is fiction you’re weirdly invested in, apparently. They were a family, that’s something stated by the band themselves several times over the course of years, and if anything, the biopic downplayed how close they really were. Queen wasn’t just a job and they weren’t just colleagues, they were brothers and it was their livelihoods. They went from college boys to men who watched each other get married and divorced and have children and go through losing a brother together. Brian and Roger still talk about how much John’s absence hurts, but durrrr just colleagues durrrr

It’s bad to cut off friends of +20 years who didn’t hurt you, actually. It’s cold, inconsiderate, and cruel. You taking the time out to send this message says a lot about how you view friendships and human relationships, and none of it is good.

[caligvlasaqvarivm]

Cut out the reblogs for length, I'll try to quote you so people have context to what I'm replying to but stuff is going to get lost so I'm sorry about that

I absolutely did not agree with the idea that it devalued the characters we'd been following the whole time because of the levels of meta involved.

I also don't think that the "meta"-ness of the retcon was the problem. Homestuck is a postmodern work, and thus, meta commentary is inextricably woven into the story from the very beginning, all the way through to the end. The problem I have with the ending actually has nothing to do with how "meta" it is. It's about how character arcs - which are ongoing even through Act 6, right up until post-Game Over - get randomly discarded en masse, which is completely inconsistent with the ENTIRE story up until that point. Karkat and Jake are the big offenders, but, for example, Dave never really resolves his hangups about not wanting to kill LE and then is suddenly just doing it, Davesprite's problems are all fixed by being combined with Nepetasprite, and Rose's alcoholism is solved by Vriska knocking a glass out of her hand. Kanaya's bad habit of completely disregarding, and even bullying/trying to kill people she doesn't like is also never touched on, and it's not like Dirk, Jane, or Roxy ever properly resolved their bullshit either.

But when the comic multiple times looks directly at the audience and says "nah man character arcs are bogus people are just people," it makes sense to think that maybe Hussie wasn't really clear on where he wanted every character to go by the end of the story.

Okay, so... when the characters are doing this prior to the retcon, it is because their character arcs are ONGOING and they are still struggling with their place in the world and what it means to be a hero, Dave especially. Much of the early comic, with Vriska and John, sets up how they kind of "cheated" their way into god-tier, or otherwise fell ass-first into it, and they muse on the implications of taking shortcuts, and whether that was detrimental to them. Given that god tiering is a metaphor for adulthood - a semi-permanent state to be reached at the end of the coming-of-age that SBURB/SGRUB is, this basically sets the tone that Vriska, and all of the kids, "grew up too fast," without having proper time to examine the circumstances that led them to god-tiering or resolving their childhood hangups.

This is ESPECIALLY true for Rose and Dave, who muse the most about their arcs and their storylines - Rose discussing whether or not it's even worth it to do her planetary quest, or if it was calibrated for a 13 year old girl and wouldn't be relevant to her anymore, and Dave's constant refusal of the call and duty to slay Lord English. What I'm saying is, the reason these characters are refuting their arcs pre-retcon is because they're still in the middle of grappling with said arcs.

Rose has ALWAYS wanted to be taken more seriously and more grown-up than she actually is. This fuels much of her arrogance in the early story, her desire to subvert the path SBURB has laid out for her, and allows Doc Scratch (the creepy uncle) to manipulate her. This also fuels her alcoholism - not only is drinking a very Adult thing to be doing, but because Rose spent so much time trying to be Better and More Mature than her whimsical mother, she wound up missing out on having a loving relationship with her, and now she's trying to reconnect with her via alcohol. Her musings about doing her planetary quests now happen as a direct consequence of the alcoholism nearly wrecking her life:

ROSE: I wonder if our young parents are like this? ROSE: I wonder if I will ever find out? ROSE: And what should I do in the meantime? ROSE: Should I... ROSE: Should I really work on completing my personal planetary quest? ROSE: That whole thing where I learn to "play the rain?" ROSE: I guess I should feel exhilarated to have the chance again after all these years. ROSE: Of course I should. ROSE: But then, ROSE: Why does it sound like such a drag? ROSE: I haven't played the violin in a long time. ROSE: I wonder if I even remember how. ROSE: Honestly I can't recall ever feeling less motivated to satisfy a looming obligation. ROSE: I think my quest was fundamentally bound to the nature of this land, which was customized to the profile, needs, and potential for growth of a thirteen year-old girl. ROSE: But I'm not that person anymore. ROSE: What if I ROSE: What if I just ROSE: Didn't bother doing it? ROSE: Like, ever? ROSE: Would anyone notice my dereliction? ROSE: Would the powers that be strike me down where I loaf? ROSE: What if I just said fuck it? ROSE: What then, silly pink tortoise shells? Hmmmm?? ROSE: ROSE: I guess I should stop procrastinating and have This Conversation with Kanaya.

The text at this point is NOT saying, "yeah man, character arcs are bogus and people are just people." It's saying, "I know I messed up somewhere, that I failed to resolve my problems, but I don't know if the advice and guidance I could've gotten when I was younger would even help me now." And here's the other thing: SHE SHOULD BE DOING HER QUEST.

We know this because John attaining the enlightenment needed to fully harness his retcon abilities is the direct result of finishing his quest. The quests remain relevant and helpful even now that they're older - in fact, Skaia/SBURB is outright stated to be sapient and omniscient, so it's actually implied that it will modify things on-the-fly to account for its players' decisions and current states of mind. LE's existence and actions are described as "sanctioned by paradox space," that is to say, paradox space has already accounted for his existence AND his defeat, which includes John's retcon powers - which is why John's quest is literally tied to said powers, and always has been.

What Rose doesn't realize - and apparently the audience doesn't realize, either - is that she's very much STILL IN THE GAME. Her planetary quest has likely already accounted for the fact that she'll be older and wiser when she finally gets around to it. Her arc has not stopped. It is currently ongoing, and questioning whether she should do the hard, gruelling, unfun, uncomfortable work of examining herself and fixing her unresolved childhood problems is part of her arc.

Rose outright likens not doing it to "loafing." This is especially true in the context of the Dancestors, who represent failing at growing up and maturing as hard as you possibly can, with so many of their problems directly stemming from NOT engaging with their mythological roles or responsibilities - Porrim ignoring frog breeding and Meenah's Entire Backstory. More on the dancestors and LE later, but I'm just going to mention here that the take that they only exist to mock the fandom is INCREDIBLY reductive and COMPLETELY misses the point. The Dancestors represent the game's Fail State - their actions are meant to be the OPPOSITE of aspirational.

So let's look at Dave, the other guy who spends the most time complaining about his arc pre-retcon. His baggage, I think, is a little more obvious than Rose's, because he was one of the few characters that actually got to talk about it post-retcon. He spent his childhood being tormented and abused by his older brother, under the guise of making him "stronger," and he spends much of the early comic defending his brother's actions and looking up to him as an ideal to achieve. Moreover, their living conditions were abysmal, and it was implied Dave had to be very careful even just to get food to eat. Thus, while Rose was obsessed with being more adult than she actually was, Dave was thrust into self-sufficiency - forced to grow up too fast.

And his planetary quest seems to mirror the expectations his brother placed on him - Dave is meant to reforge a broken blade and use it to kill LE.

DAVE: i mean DAVE: i think i might be "supposed" to kill him anyway? #air quotes DAVE: thats the feeling i get like there are all these clues about that ive kinda noticed #remember that bullshit about the pimp being in the crib? #hahaha oh god DAVE: so if i am THE GUY that needs to take him down then fine ill do that if and when i get hornswoggled into some big showdown with a ridiculous green space pimp or whatever he is #i heard he has a gold tooth #are you fuckin kidding me DAVE: i dont know i think im not really cut out for the whole reluctant hero shtick #im better at comics DAVE: like the whole scene is so obvious and trite and i cant even tell if my reluctance is ironic or if im playing it straight #reluctant before it was cool #and before i was willing DAVE: like ill wonder if im being reluctant enough to cut it or if im actually just being reluctant to be reluctant #how reluctant do you even have to BE to DOOOOO something like etc etc #sbahj DAVE: it turns into like meta reluctance and then all i can think about is how fucking stupid the whole thing is  #i also think about puppets sometimes… #unrelated DAVE: i think im probably just too self aware for this hero bullshit so dont even waste your time on me #ironic self pity

And again, we know that the end point of his reluctance is that he does need to complete this quest, because he DOES complete the quest - either when he kills Jack English with Caledfwch, or when he and the beta kids land the final blow on LE in the dream bubbles when the treasure is deployed.

In fact, maybe one his biggest moments of refusing the call is when he's talking to Grimbark Jade about this exact situation after they alchemize Caledfwch.

DAVE: the empress can suck it DAVE: i have no intention of fighting him DAVE: and this isnt even me pulling more lame self aware reluctant hero junk DAVE: i am just straight up not going to do it DAVE: see thats not reluctance its just petulant refusal on my part DAVE: reluctant hero shit is when the guys like aw shucks i dunno if i wanna but deep down we all know he really does DAVE: but i really dont DAVE: why should i DAVE: i dont give a damn about lord english or his nebulous atrocities out in nowherespace DAVE: what kind of villain is someone you never met who hardly did anything evil to you or your friends directly DAVE: or even to anyone in your universe for that matter other than through some vague insidious influence DAVE: who even is this guy and why should i hate him DAVE: am i really supposed to be pissed off at a green muscle monster i never met DAVE: cause i aint pissed off at no muscle monster DAVE: hell wasnt he in some ass backwards way responsible for us existing in the first place? DAVE: or all of humanity for that matter?? DAVE: maybe i should thank him before chopping him up via welshscalibur

But it's important to put this in its proper context: right before he has this conversation with Jade, he's looking through his old bedroom, soliloquizing about his old interests and looking through his old selfies, which causes him to laugh so hard he breaks down crying.

The context is, Dave spent 3 years on a meteor emotionally alone - Karkat hated his rap and would constantly tell him so, Kanaya and Rose didn't care, and he rejected Terezi and she started hatedating Gamzee. Moreover, he spent those three years not being able to help anyone. Rose became an alcoholic and started having relationship problems with Kanaya; Terezi's relationship was incredibly toxic. One of the big hangups he complains about to Grimbark!Jade is that he was helping her with the frog quest knowing the entire time that he would have to die and leave her alone - it's safe to say that the fact that so much bad stuff seems inevitable to him as a time player is weighing heavily on his shoulders.

The reason he has such a strong emotional reaction to his old selfies is because they represent an innocence, hope, and joy that he's lost. Much of this sequence is him thinking about what could have been and interests he forgot he had. In other words, at the point of time where Dave is saying he refuses to fight LE is when he has depression. It's not meant to be a good thing! It's not meant to be a profound statement on how people are people and don't have arcs! It's meant to show that Dave is going through it, so mired in his personal hangups, his depression, and his unresolved childhood trauma, that he's literally refusing to make their situation better.

He is literally incorrect about LE having done nothing directly to them - he WATCHED his dead friends getting double killed in the dream bubbles. Moreover, boiling LE's influence on the story and its events to nothing more than "a sinister influence" is a nutso take for him to have when that encompasses things like the Condesce being in the humans' sessions, every manipulation Doc Scratch performed, and even parts of his own abuse, as his older brother was being influenced by LE inside of Lil' Cal (sure, he doesn't know about these, but that's dramatic irony - we, the audience, are supposed to know that he's full of shit because LE has done WAY MORE than just ominously hang around in the background). By saying he thinks he should thank LE for bringing them into creation, he is functionally saying that he thinks maybe he should thank his abuser for abusing him - we are NOT supposed to agree with Dave here! This is supposed to be Dave's lowest point!

And at least part of Dave's hangups about killing LE like he's "supposed to" are displaced feelings he has towards the way his brother treated him. He has had expectations on his shoulders for his entire life, and he secretly always resented that. Now that he's once more being forcibly pulled into the line of duty, this time by Grimbark!Jade, he's going Fuck that!

But that's the setup for his arc, which he's still on. It's about processing the abuse he suffered and then choosing to better his situation. It's about taking up the sword not because the SBURB is telling him that he should, but taking it up because it will make life better.

Dave is under the impression that he's supposed to be an archetypal reluctant hero - someone who pretends like they don't want to do the big heroics, but secretly wants to deep down, and he thinks he's failed to live up to this. He genuinely doesn't want to take up the blade and confront LE. But that's because Dave is wrong about what his arc is supposed to be - making things better, and fixing your problems, is hard. Choosing to improve the world instead of letting it stay rotten is hard. It's unpleasant, boring, and unfun. But it should still be done. He CAN regain the joy and hope that he lost - he just has to make the hard choice, and do the hard work. He has to understand what parts of his childhood were cruel and unfair, and what things in his present day seem cruel and unfair, but are actually helpful and useful to him, and choose to pursue them even if he doesn't want to because it will make his life better.

[Hussie] definitely knew where they wanted the plot to go by the end, even if they fell victim to the same shit all long-running media creators face when they realize how fucking huge their narrative has gotten. I think Game Over and the retcon were, in a way, a response to Hussie believing they'd written themselves into a corner.

I agree that a large part of the post-Game Over story truncation was driven by the fact that they realized how much more writing they would have to do before they could achieve their original intended and set up ending. I'm glad that we agree that there was originally another ending planned.

However, I am going to disagree about Game Over and the Retcon being a means of escaping a corner. I believe that these elements were always intended, for several reasons:

First, because a horrible ending like Game Over actually fits perfectly into the story that was set up prior. Caliborn outright talks about how he set up the circumstances of his own defeat - and if it's Caliborn doing the setting up, then of course he'd create a situation where everybody loses!

We even see in the retcon that the characters from the Game Over timeline still exist, now with (parentheses) around their names. This means that the Game Over crew, who are now dead and in the dream bubbles, are now in position to fight and defeat LE. Thus, the story Caliborn has written for everyone is one where, yes, he is ultimately defeated, BUT it comes at the expense of everyone else dying and being screwed over, too.

So then, the retcon. It does NOT come out of nowhere as a means for Hussie to write themselves out of a corner - the retcon powers are actually a natural final culmination of John's arc as a well-meaning guy who's everybody's friend, and, perhaps more damningly, as a player of Breath.

Blood and Breath are matched pairs - if Blood is about bonds and connections, then Breath is about FREEDOM and CHOICES. Let's not forget that everything to do with LE has been sanctioned by paradox space, and, thus, is accounted for by the sapience of SBURB. And this includes granting the most fully-realized Breath player, who never gave up on his friends and never stopped wanting the best for them, the literal ability to CHOOSE A NEW FUTURE, unbound by the machinations of LE and his control over which timeline is the alpha. Because, let's not forget, the actual definition of the alpha timeline is "the timeline that leads to LE's arrival." The story has always set up that its happy ending would be one where that outcome is refuted.

And finally, there are elements that survived into the post-retcon story that appear to take cues from this setup of the Game Over crew still having arcs and adventures in the dream bubbles after dying, while the post-retcon crew are assembling and finishing their character development. The most glaring are the dangling plot threads, but there's also shit like the Ultimate Self that Davepetasprite^2 talks about, which seems like it's a way to turn the tragedy of the Game Over cast dying and staying dead into something bittersweet instead - it means that eventually, as every surviving character achieves ultimate selfhood, this will include their memories of being their Game Over iterations, so those sacrifices don't remain forgotten.

It also would mean that Lord English is defeated exclusively by dead and (irrelevant) characters while inside the dream bubbles - symbolically rendering him "nothing more than a bad dream." This 1:1 mirrors the existence godtier!Calliope:

CALLIOPE: you don't need to do anything. CALLIOPE: be who you've become, and who i didn't. CALLIOPE: consume the fruits of an existence i could never understand. CALLIOPE: live.

Those that were most screwed over by LE's existence get the satisfaction of being the ones to pummel his face in. And, by taking on that responsibility, that sacrifice, the surviving characters post-retcon are able to live - happy, together, and free.

And, here's the thing. If Hussie wanted to bring everyone who was dead back? That's what the retcon would've been there for. It was the perfect opportunity to have John pop in between all of the major fights and stop a few murders. Even if you want to argue that Terezi wouldn't have thought of that, there were absolutely no rules on that shit.

Yes. This is actually why I am arguing that that was the original plan and then it was discarded. It literally makes no sense that Karkat, who has spent the entire meteor ride complaining about missing his dead friends, whose aspect is blood, which governs bonds (such as friendship), is sitting there with MULTIPLE means of resurrecting his friends and NOT SAYING ANYTHING.

Because it's so WILDLY out of character for this to happen, it seems much more likely to me that not bringing back the dead assholes is author fiat, as it's a decision that can't be justified in-universe. I'm glad that we agree that the retcon existed as a way to bring everybody back.

This is the comic that created 10-12 caricatures of fandom culture meant to be as annoying as possible and whose main villain is a screaming tween at a computer.

I am going to outright tell you that the - apparently common - fandom take that the dancestors Only Exist To Spite The Fandom is completely untrue. There are elements there that do serve as parodies of the worst parts of the fandom, but the dancestors are incredibly thematically relevant AND fill in a lot of backstory (it's heavily implied that the dancestors cringefailing so hard literally gave rise to LE). I go very in-depth on that here - it's a whole essay on its own - but reducing them to "Hussie was mean to the audience" and LE/Caliborn to a "screaming tween at a computer" completely misses the point.

The dancestors and LE are shallow and immature - you've correctly identified that - but think about it in the context of Homestuck's broader themes. It's a coming of age. Hussie outright says it's always been about maturing and growing up.

And thusly, the main villain is a child who stunted his own growth and completely refused to engage with the SBURB's usual coming-of-age stuff by murdering his co-player before it could begin. The dancestors, who either gave LE entry into their universe, or even caused LE to be created in the first place, got to that point by being so shitty and immature to each other that they reached physical adulthood without managing to fix even a SINGLE emotional problem or interpersonal issue between them. If the story is about how kids should grow up, mature, and be kind to one another, then the dancestors and LE represent children who physically grew up but emotionally remained the same, who were immature, and who were CRUEL to each other. They could hardly BE better antagonists for this specific story, so diametrically they are opposed to its fundamental themes.

You can still choose to believe what you believe - end of the day, sometimes we must agree to disagree - but it does seem kind of odd that you bring up so many points in favor of much more being set up than Hussie was able to execute, only to then argue that they didn't have any grand plans set up. I think you might want to try re-examining your own arguments.

Murder, Love, and Destiny: An Eridan Ampora Character Study

Warnings for things from Homestuck, like discussions of child abuse, mental illness, murder, suicide, etc. etc.

Because there's a huge wall of text after this point, I'm going to summarize what I hope to convince you of in bullet point format, and then hope you'll actually read the rest of the text before arguing with me about it.

Eridan is the least casteist highblood, if you ignore all the slurs.

Those are his emotional support slurs.

Pale EriKar was not only canon, but set up to be endgame.

Eridan is incredibly plot-relevant, thematically relevant, and was definitely originally intended to be brought back to life, alongside the other dead trolls.

He's Sad.

The first thing we have to establish is what counts as "canon" for the purpose of this essay. I am only counting the original comic up to Game Over, after which there's a general consensus that Hussie kind of gave up on his original planned ending, and slapped together something that most people hate. So I am immediately disqualifying Pesterquest, supplementary material, fanworks deemed canon, the epilogues, and Homestuck^2.

Moreover, we are taking Hussie's commentaries with a grain of salt, for two reasons. The first reason is that I firmly believe - and will be arguing - that the original plan was to bring Eridan (and the other dead trolls) back; therefore, Hussie (who has a track record of playing coy with future plot twists) can't speak too fondly of him, lest he give it away. The second reason for de-emphasizing Hussie's words is that, post-retcon, Hussie isn't very well going to say that he had plans for a better ending, and then didn't execute on them; to save face, he has to act as though his trashing of several prior plot threads, including but not limited to Eridan, was the plan all along.

Therefore, this essay will not be putting too much emphasis on Word of God, and will instead be relying on textual evidence from the comic itself, of which there is plenty. So without further ado:

Eridan is a Consummate Murderer.

The reason I'm starting with this point is that, far more than any other, this truth lies at the core of his being. Eridan is formally introduced to us with a murder, and he's haunted by an overpowering genocide complex. He outright describes to Rose at one point that "killin is all i evver done practically," and uses "murder" as an expletive (ie "swweet stinkin murder"). With a conservative estimate of 5 kills per week for 4 sweeps (Vriska looks VERY young when she has to start killing, and Eridan was likely a similar age when he began), both Eridan and Vriska easily have bodycounts above 2000 - the real number is probably even higher.

At this point, many raise an objection that Eridan is only killing lusii, but I believe we need to count his kills as troll murders, for three reasons: first, a dead lusus results in the orphaned troll being culled; second, one has to assume he has had cases of trolls trying to defend their lusii, or coming after him for vengeance; and third - and most importantly - Eridan HIMSELF is thinking about the orphaned trolls.

Compare Feferi: Go Home:

That should keep her happy for a while. At least until she dies.

To Eridan: Go Home:

That should keep her happy for a while. And make a freshly orphaned troll somewhere very sad.

So Eridan, to a much greater extent than even Feferi, is thinking about the orphaned trolls he's leaving behind, and considers his own actions to be murder.

Now that we've established the facts regarding his murders - a rough bodycount, and the fact that, by his own admission, he barely had any hobbies outside of it - we can move on to the effect that it's had on him. It's not very good!

Vriska's manipul8tions and murders had to be done for her own sake - if she ever stopped, she died. Therefore, much of Vriska's personality revolves around justifying her own actions so she doesn't have to reckon with her softer feelings, like guilt or kindness - which she expresses would be viewed as scandalous by others of her caste.

But if Eridan ever stops feeding Gl'bgolyb, everybody dies. The stakes he has riding on his shoulders are, at all times, the fate of all trolls, including all his friends. Given Dualscar's title was "Orphaner," it's implied that killing lusii for Gl'bgolyb has always been a violet blood's duty, and is seen as such by the others, which is why nobody expresses gratitude for his hard work even a single time.

Which brings us to our next point:

Eridan is Crushed by Anxiety.

If Eridan stops killing lusii, everybody - especially his friends, but everybody else, too - dies.

If Eridan ever shows guilt or kindness, he'll be considered "weak" by the standards of highbloods - he shares this with Vriska.

Eridan is expected, by aristocratic tradition, to take on the mantle of his ancestor Dualscar and finish his work. Dualscar met a comedically cringefail end, so this is a massive undertaking.

Before finding out that god tiering is an option - so, for nearly his entire life - Eridan has had to live with the expectation that he will outlive all of his friends. The lowbloods from culling or dying on the battlefield, the highbloods from old age, and Feferi from being killed by the Empress when she gets old enough.

(This is reflected in who he talks to the most - Feferi, who's the only one with a natural lifespan longer than his, Vriska, who's a highblood, Kanaya, who's practically guaranteed to survive into adulthood, and Karkat, whose anonblood allows Eridan to give him the benefit of the doubt.)

Also if he can't land his concupiscent quadrants he'll die from that too, but that seems pretty secondary to the rest of his concerns.

He can't even make friends with the other highbloods, because sea dwellers are expected to hate and antagonize them.

He had a free ticket into adulthood, but would almost certainly be expected to join the army and serve as a commander. That is to say, his fate of performing the role of a vicious, murderous sea dweller seems dreadfully inevitable to him.

NO WONDER he can't stop having emotional breakdowns. NO WONDER his chatlogs swing wildly from relentless self-aggrandizement to traumadumping. NO WONDER he's obsessed with murder and death and genocide.

Doc Scratch calls him a "vengeful boy on the path of nihilism," and it's not hard to see why: Eridan's entire life has been about living up to the role imposed on him by society, sacrificing his own time and sanity for everyone else, which he "nevver got any appreciation for anywway." And all he had to look forward to was more of the same, all his friends dropping dead one by one before him. For Eridan, there has never been any hope.

SGRUB could have been a way out for him, but a combination of his own terrible choices, spurred on by his anxieties, and his teammates' unwillingness to knock some sense into him, meant that he only wound up mired even deeper in his hopelessness.

We all know about how Eridan wouldn't stop killing the angels on his planet, provoking their aggression and turning it into a ball of death. How he was definitely not supposed to be doing this, and how his stubborn insistence on it led to his further ostracization from the rest of the group. The thing is, when we look at his angel-murders from the point of view that Eridan's entire life has been about murdering things or else Something Bad™ happens, it actually starts to become... kind of sad.

KARKAT: BETWEEN A TRIGGERHAPPY PRINCE WITH A GOD WEAPON BLASTING ANYTHING THAT TWITCHED AND A MILLION CRAZED ANGELS HE DELIBERATELY ENRAGED, IT WASN'T WHAT I'D CALL AN IDEAL SOCIAL HUB. KARKAT: IF YOU WERE LONELY WHY DIDN'T YOU VENTURE OUT MORE OFTEN? ERIDAN: wwell i wwoulda but nobody else wwas vvolunteerin to pick up the slack on angel killin duties

Killing the angels is something he feels like his has to do, because his entire life has been about killing things he doesn't want to kill. He's unable to break out of that mindset on his own, and his unpleasant personality has scared off anyone who might want to help. No one on the team tries to understand his thought process on a deeper level, not even Karkat, who just tells him it was an idiotic thing to do without addressing his underlying anxieties at all. Indeed, "nobody understands."

And this is really the root of why I think so many people get the wrong read on Eridan - Eridan is constantly contradicting himself, constantly denying his own feelings, constantly pushing an image that he doesn't actually believe in, and constantly insisting that he's fine with all the horrible shit in his life - that he likes it, even. After all, he can't admit to his guilt for his murders, or how much he doesn't want to watch his friends die, or how scared he is about the future - that'd be weakness!

CC: I can't look after you anymore. CA: I DIDNT EVER NEED ANYONE TO LOOK AFTER ME CA: i was totally fuckin fine my ambitions were noble

You see his contradictory nature with his stated love of history, which he only ever offhandedly mentions - because he's not actually that interested in history, it's just something that's expected of someone of his station. And you see it with his wavy accent, which he himself calls "weird" and drops when he's trying to be emotionally sincere. And you see it with his dumbass outfit, which is very clearly an imitation of Dualscar (with the only exception being the wizard-ass scarf, because wizards are his actual interest. I don't believe he likes fashion. I genuinely believe - and Eridan himself says so - that he basically has no hobbies outside of murder).

Even being proud to be a sea dweller is pretty much an outright lie:

CC: You can't )(ave t)(e sort of affinity for "our kind" t)(at you profess if you've only spent, w)(at... CC: A few days underwater, maybe? IN YOUR W)(OL-E LIF-E!

One that he tells because he's SCARED OF THE OCEAN. Because he knows what lives in the ocean, because he's been feeding it his entire life. I see a lot of people who give Eridan an interest in marine life, and I'm telling you, that's just got no basis in canon. He's fucking TERRIFIED of the sea.

And for that matter, land dweller genocide. Eridan doesn't want to do it. Both Feferi AND his internal narration call him out for not actually wanting to do it. He outright states he wouldn't kill his friends.

CA: wwell CA: im not goin to vvery wwell kill you am i that wwould be fuckin unconscionable CA: wwhat kind of friend wwould i be

But he feels like he HAS to want it, HAS to believe in it, HAS to be talking about it constantly, because that's what's expected from him as a sea dweller, and a sea dweller is ALL that he will get to be. The mutation that puts a violet streak in his hair is damning. It's a fate he feels like he can't escape. Which brings us to:

Eridan is Not Actually Casteist, Well He Is But Not Like That, It's Complicated

Secondary title: Those Are His Emotional Support Slurs, Okay

In the exact same vein (haha) as secretly not wanting all the land dwellers dead, Eridan also genuinely doesn't feel like he's better than lower blood castes. Vriska and Equius obviously put quite a bit of stock into being nobility, and both have acted superior to Karkat for it. Feferi actually revels in her high status, and while she is genuinely well-meaning, she's not as interested in abolishing casteism as she is in changing the meaning of "culling" specifically (the hemocaste, aristocracy, and casteism still very much exist in a Beforus under her rule). Gamzee MIGHT be the only highblood less casteist than Eridan, but then again, as soon as he snaps, he does say a lot of casteist stuff to Equius, although it's unclear how serious he is, and he also proceeds to get really into his weird highblood clown cult.

Meanwhile, Eridan - despite all his slurs and talk of genocide - does not actually try to "pull rank" on a lowblood for being a lower caste than him with a single exception. That exception is Sollux... after he's already shown having entirely caste-neutral opinions on Sollux:

CC: But Sollux finally came t)(roug)(, and now I believe t)(e full c)(ain is complete! CA: man that guy CA: hes a fuckin drama machine it is fuckin pathetic CC: YOUR STUPID FIS)(Y FAC-E IS T)(-E DRAMA MAC)(IN-E T)(AT DO-ES NOT)(ING BUT W)(IN-E AND GLUB. CC: 38P CA: fuck SORRY CC: Anyway you s)(ouldn't say t)(at about )(im, )(e is a )(ero and )(e saved my life. CA: yeah sorry

CA: my feelins seem petty and meaninless noww CA: she had better things to wworry about than my ovverwwrought bullshit CA: like the dead guy wwho savved her CA: so forget it thanks anywway

It's only AFTER he's mad at Sollux for dating Feferi that he starts going in on Sollux with casteist rhetoric... which is treated as unrequited flirting and not serious casteism:

ERIDAN: hey finless this doesnt concern those wwith mustard sludge slippin through their vveins ERIDAN: its a matter for royalty only ERIDAN: so keep your mouth closed or ill slit you open ovver my next meal SOLLUX: w/e bro, not iintere2ted. FEFERI: -Eridan, please! I don't want to see any more dueling. FEFERI: Don't try to provoke )(im. It's not like I don't know w)(at you're doing! You keep trying to spark a rivalry wit)( )(im to get me to auspisticize between you two, and pull us out of our quadrant! FEFERI: It is t)(e oldest and lamest trick in t)(e book. It didn't work t)(en and it won't work now!

THEY don't even think he's being casteist.

In fact, directly contradicting this earlier argument he has with Feferi:

CC: T)(is is t)(e last time I will say t)(is. CC: W-E AR-E NOT B-ETT-ER T)(AN ANYBODY!!!!! CC: GLUB. >38( CA: pshh CA: hemospectrum begs to differ

He OUTRIGHT states his real feelings here:

CA: im the biggest fuckin idiot who ever lived CA: i cant BELIEVE i just opened up to you like a chump when i knew what was comin CA: i am one sad fuckin brinesucker CA: overemotional sappy trash youre right im not better than anybody CA: im worse than anybody CA: EVERYBODY CA: all the bodies

So the question of "is Eridan casteist" has an answer of "kind of, but also no." Eridan DOES espouse the rhetoric; he's constantly saying stuff that a casteist sea dweller "should" be saying. However, if you look at his ACTIONS, and the way he actually treats people, he doesn't actually care about blood color. He'll hit on anybody, and he's rude as fuck to everybody. The real problem with him is that he's terrible to talk to, not that he's discriminatory.

That's the thing about Eridan. Understanding him means looking past the way he presents himself, the lies he tells to himself, and even, at times, the way the narration presents him. His "overblown emotional theatrics" seem a lot less overblown when his problems ARE so real, deep-seated, and constantly causing him an unimaginable amount of anguish.

The problem is, the main people he has to bounce those problems against are Feferi, Vriska, and Kanaya, three of the people most comfortable with their privileged positions, for whom Eridan's genuine emotional distress seems like needless melodrama. Feferi loves being a princess, Vriska enjoys her noble privileges, Kanaya doesn't need to worry about culling. But for Eridan, his noble status, and the duties and expectations placed on him for it, have caused him nothing but pain - of course he would feel like nobody understands. Most of his closest friends genuinely don't, nor do they try to.

Because that's what he is at his core - a traumatized fucking child, who doesn't see any way out. Eridan is not a casteist genocidal sea dweller... he just wishes he was one, and tries to be one, because if he actually was one, he wouldn't feel so awful and scared and sad all the time. He'd be normal, like his friends.

The reason he constantly spouts anti-land dweller rhetoric and uses casteist language is to assuage this cognitive dissonance. That's why he has to come off so strong, present himself in such an aggrandized way, act like such a douchebag. They're his emotional support slurs. He doesn't actually believe what he says, which means he's a Bad Sea Dweller, which means he's Failing, which means Something Bad Will Happen, so he'd better get his ass in line and say something casteist!

And it's all made worse because:

Eridan is Dumb of Ass (and True of Word)

Oh my god you guys he's so stupid that it hurts.

Okay, that's not entirely fair. Eridan is clearly well-educated and book smart; he has some of the most elegant prose out of the trolls, and he's prone to going off on insane rants with it. (Actually, his language gets more flowery and showy when he's trying to impress a stranger, and gets progressively more laid back, chill, and even kind of "bro"-y when he starts talking to people he doesn't feel like he needs to impress.)

CA: at this point i find all her adorable black pixie dabblins to be prime kiddie playtime shit CA: all of her FRAUDULENT MAGICS cannot come close to posin threat to my mastery ovver the TRUEST SCIENCES CA: an wwith my empiricists wwand i servve as the righteous hope that wwill incinerate delusion and the deluded alike CA: my holy fire is the wwhite fury bled from the wwrath-wweary eyes of fifty thousand nonfictional angels CA: and wwhen theyre finished wweepin they wwill boww before their prince GG: wow what are you talking about

What I mean is this: his brain is so full of anxiety and cognitive dissonance and murder and death that he struggles to care about other people, which has devastating effects on his social skills. I go really in-depth on how his though process informs his behavior here. The question may have popped up in your mind already: if his casteism stuff isn't actually real, then what is Eridan actually like? The answer is, overwhelmingly, and discomfortingly, SINCERE.

This boy is gunning at 100% emotional earnestness 100% of the time, and it's deeply uncomfortable for others to deal with. He'll swing wildly from insults and derogatory language, to stating a desire to kill all land dwellers, to awe and amazement at his friends' prowess, to demanding that they do things for him, to traumadumping and venting, without missing a beat. Often in the same conversation.

CA: kan its hard GA: What CA: being a kid and growwing up CA: its hard and nobody understands

He's also specifically terrible at parsing hostility. Functionally, he interprets all hostility aimed AT him as either pitch/ashen flirting or "ironic repartee," and similarly views his own hostile words as verbal jousting, pitch/ashen advances, or even just factual descriptions of the world around him (ie calling Nepeta a "kittycat shipper cavve girl"). Hostility and aggression are just kind of his baseline, default state of being, and he basically has no ability to differentiate between good and bad attention. I talk more in-depth about his emotionally bereft upbringing (and shitty lusus) here, but suffice to say that our boy isn't getting any emotional support at home, and as a result, craves attention, no matter what kind.

This also means he's insanely gullible. For example, Rose calls him an idiot to his face, and then blows up his computer, sarcastically calling it "your first lesson in showmanship." Eridan proceeds to literally considers it that, blowing up Jade's computer after he's done talking to her. Furthermore, Kanaya sees him as a burden, insults him to his face, and pretty much just bullies him along with Rose for fun.

So she trains Eridan to become a powerful white wizard of hope to challenge her, as a joke.

And yet, in spite of all that, Eridan still has nothing but gratitude and praise for Kanaya:

ERIDAN: kan i been meanin to thank you KANAYA: For What ERIDAN: for all that trainin you did ERIDAN: i wwouldnt be the incredible holy wwizard i am noww wwithout your help KANAYA: But I Didnt Even Really Train You I Just Made You A Wand ERIDAN: yeah wwell thats all i needed i guess ERIDAN: i just needed for someone to showw a little faith in me so im sayin thanks i owwe ya KANAYA: Okay Then Youre Welcome KANAYA: I Hope You Use Your Magnificent Powers Of Light And Hope For Goodness And Purity And Lets Not Forget Science ERIDAN: dont wworry im all ovver that shit you dont evven knoww KANAYA: Uh Oh I Hope That Didnt Come Off As Too Sarcastic ERIDAN: wwhat KANAYA: The Thing I Just Said KANAYA: I Didnt Even Realize How Sarcastic I Was Being Its Starting To Become A Problem I Think KANAYA: Please Dont Take Too Much Offense ERIDAN: haha damn kan if thats your idea of offense bein made then i honestly gotta fuckin wworry for you ERIDAN: tell you wwhat ill givve you some lessons in dealin out the dark umbrage to repay you for your tutelage in the wwhite science

Like, he's in the middle of genuinely thanking her for believing in him, she makes fun of him to his face, and his response is to laugh it off and offer to teach her how to properly insult someone. It's honestly... kind of sad. Not that he doesn't deserve the ridicule, but what we're seeing here is a traumatized, emotionally neglected boy trying to communicate the best that he can that he loves and appreciates his friends, and receiving nothing but mockery in return.

It's really not a surprise, then, that he goes off the deep end. His entire life prior to the game has been shit; he got broken up with as soon as he entered the game (by someone who didn't even care enough not to use fish puns while doing it); he's ostracized and avoided for the game's duration; and then he spends the rest of his time on the meteor being bullied. He feels deeply hopeless and anxious about their situation because he literally doesn't know how else to exist, and his concerns are dismissed and mocked at every turn. When Feferi turns on him with intent to kill, that's his breaking point.

I see a lot of people say he goes grimdark, or succumbs to external influence somehow, but I don't think that needs to be true (nor is it) - he's just a deeply traumatized kid with almost no support network who's finally been pushed to the edge, despite displaying every possible warning sign and making multiple cries for help. Yes, ultimately, he's guilty for his own actions, but his killing spree - alongside Gamzee's and Vriska's - represents a cohesive failure as a team to address very clear problems in their midst.

So Feferi and Kanaya are sick of his ass. Sollux hates him platonically, Equius doesn't like him, and Nepeta thinks of him as a creep. Vriska is his awkward ex, and Terezi agrees with him when he calls himself pathetic. He never interacts with Tavros, Aradia, or sober!Gamzee. Is there anyone that treats him nicely?

Uh, okay, so I swear this isn't shipping goggles -

Pale EriKar Is Canon And I Can Prove It

So, I'm going to start this with a disclaimer: you can ship what you want to ship. I don't mind. I don't care. Headcanons are valid, death of the author, etc. What you do in your free time is up to you.

What I am attempting to argue in this section is that an Eridan/Karkat moirallegiance was heavily foreshadowed, one of the most heavily foreshadowed things in the entire comic, and - assuming that the original ending of Homestuck included all the dead trolls being brought back and redeemed - was going to be endgame. There's a torrential amount of evidence pointing to this, and very little of it is acknowledged even by the EriKar shippers, which is a shame.

At the very least, I'll be happy if I can convince some Karkat RPers to be extra nice to Eridans, because they are actually just friends who care deeply about each other. Canonically.

The first thing to note is that Eridan and Karkat, at least prior to SGRUB, talk all the time, to the point where Feferi feels the need to comment on it:

CC: You know, I'm not sure w)(y we never talk about our romantic aspirations. CC: We s)(ould more often. It is kind of -EXCITING! CA: shrug CC: Probably because you fill your gossip quota wit)( your nubby )(orned bro. CC: You leave not)(ing left to talk about wit)( your dear sweet moirail! CC: We are supposed to )(elp eac)( ot)(er wit)( t)(at stuff too, remember. CA: maybe CA: seems kinda CA: odd though

("Can you please stop having an emotional affair with Karkat" "Eh, I'll think about it")

The second thing to note is what the contents of those conversations entail. Sure, they "gossip," but it goes deeper than that, because they gossip about things that Karkat would NEVER gossip about with anybody else, because Karkat usually respects his "VERY GOOD FRIEND"s. For example, here Eridan mentions that Karkat has speculated on Kanaya's love life with him:

CA: you dont wwant to be our auspistice cause you dont wwant to get locked into that sort of relation wwith her i can respect that GA: No Thats Not It CA: yeah it is your real feelins run pretty awwful RUDDY methinks evverybody knowws it CA: especially that assblood karkat he and me havve you so pegged about that its upright silly

And it's not even a one-off thing, because here Karkat is again, mentioning Nepeta's crush on him:

KARKAT: OK, BUT TO BE FAIR, I'M PRETTY SURE SHE'S STILL OBSESSED WITH ME. KARKAT: IT'S A VERY UNFORTUNATE, VERY RED AND VERY UNREQUITED SITUATION I'VE BEEN TRYING TO TIPTOE AROUND FOR A LONG TIME, OK? KARKAT: HER DISINTEREST IN YOUR ADVANCE WASN'T A REFLECTION ON YOU AT ALL. KARKAT: COME ON, WE TALKED ABOUT THIS.

It's a situation he's been trying to "tiptoe around for a long time," and he tells ERIDAN, of all people? MULTIPLE TIMES? (AND HE ALSO TELLS ERIDAN THAT THE REJECTION WASN'T HIS FAULT???? WHAT??????)

So we've established that they talk frequently and about some pretty seriously sensitive topics. But did you know that they also talk about... their feelings?

See, the thing is, Karkat has always been weirdly nice to Eridan. Here he is in a memo near the very beginning of their game, when Karkat is at his most "rah rah, I'm the big bad leader":

FCA: i got a problem FCA: wwith feferi FCA: and im really kinda sittin here in bad shape about it emotionally speakin CCG: OK, WELL CCG: I GET THAT, I HEAR YOU BRO CCG: BUT THIS IS STILL NOT THE RIGHT PLACE FOR THIS SO I'VE GOT TO BAN YOU. CCG banned FCA from responding to memo. CCG: BUT SERIOUSLY JUST GET IN TOUCH WITH ME IN PRIVATE ABOUT IT, OK MAN? CCG: WE'LL GET YOUR SHIT STRAIGHTENED OUT.

Compare that to Tavros asking for advice later down in the same memo:

PAT: sINCE i DON'T KNOW WHERE YOU ARE NOW, bUT MAYBE HELP ME, PAT: aBOUT A THING THAT HAS TO DO WITH A GIRL, PAT: lIKE, PAT: a ROMANCE THING, yOU MIGHT KNOW ABOUT, CCG: YOU PEOPLE ARE IMBECILES. CCG: ALL OF YOU. CCG: I AM NOT POSTING THESE MEMOS TO COUNSEL YOU ON YOUR PAST AND FUTURE DATING PROBLEMS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! CCG: WHY ARE YOU ALL SUCH BASKET CASES. I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT TO SAY ANYMORE. PAT: sORRY, CCG: SHOULD I BAN YOU? WHAT'S EVEN THE POINT ANYMORE! ONE OF YOU STOOGES WILL BE RIGHT ON THE LAST ONES HEELS WITH ANOTHER SOB STORY. CCG: JUST CCG: HURRY UP AND TELL ME WHAT YOUR PROBLEM IS BRO.

He then proceeds to dispense no actual love advice; he just points out that Vriska can totally read this memo too, and then mocks them both when she shows up - thus making it clear that he is giving Eridan special treatment.

You see it again in his discussion with Eridan in [S] Kanaya: Return to the Core, where Eridan invokes a "pact" between them, and Karkat immediately plays nice with him, despite himself being extremely high-strung and stressed out:

KARKAT: RIGHT, IT'S POWERED BY SCIENCE, I FORGOT. KARKAT: OR HOPE. WHATEVER THE FUCK THAT MEANS. ERIDAN: i dont fuckin need this from you i take enough shit as it is from the rest a you dirtscrapers i thought you and me had a kinda pact or wwhatevver KARKAT: OK FINE, SHUT UP, I APOLOGIZE. I KNOW IT'S TOUGH BEING YOU.

That's definitely pity, which Karkat states to be the basis of all relationships besides pitch. But, sure, okay, Karkat is sometimes nice to his friends. He is, after all, the Friendship Troll, so that's not necessarily out of the ordinary. But how about the fact that it goes both ways?

That's right, Eridan "100% aggro 100% of the time" Ampora is actually really considerate toward Karkat's feelings, and basically nobody else's. Upon hearing that Karkat is distressed that Sollux has died, Eridan actively puts his own meltdown about his breakup with Feferi on pause:

TC: BeCaUsE OuR GoOd bRo sOlLuX JuSt kIcKeD ThE WiCkEd mOtHeRfUcKiN ShIt CA: wwhat the fuck do you mean by that CA: are you sayin hes dead TC: YeAh :o( CA: oh fuck CA: oh god fuck noww i feel like an asshole

He then goes on to chastise Gamzee for his shitty advice, demanding to be given the chance to comfort Karkat himself instead:

TC: BuT I ToLd hIm tO Be cHiLl TC: BeCaUsE ThErE Is a mIrAcLe cOmInG, i cAn fEeL It CA: that is the wworst fuckin advvice CA: wwhat an awwful thing a you to say CA: MAGIC ISNT REAL STUPID STOP BELIEVVIN IN IT TC: i'Ve gOt tO BeLiEvE At wHaT My hEaRt tElLs iN Me, EvEn iF It's a fAkE ThInG TC: HoNk CA: this is a lot a pointless fuckin rubbish and isnt no emotional help to him or me either for that matter CA: put kar on

Before finally giving up when Gamzee insists he's "too scared of Jack" to help, drinking some Faygo, and trying to ask past Karkat for help, because past Karkat isn't sad yet about Sollux dying. So, to recap,

Eridan's first instinct when in emotional duress is to go to Karkat.

Eridan feels like he knows Karkat well enough to know that Gamzee's advice would be useless (and is proven right by the fact that Gamzee and Karkat's moirallegiance fails for similar reasons).

Eridan is willing to shelve his own emotional meltdown for Karkat's sake.

Eridan demands to be the one to provide Karkat with emotional support.

And this is, again, not a one-off thing. In the memo Karkat opens right after Eridan and Gamzee have both turned murderous, after he's spent several minutes making death threats toward Eridan and insulting him directly, he goes:

CCG: I'M SO UPSET, I'M JUST COMPLETELY FREAKING OUT IN EVERY WAY POSSIBLE. PCA: yeah i knoww wwhat its like you wwanna talk about it

Eridan spends this entire memo under the belief that it's a completely run-of-the-mill conversation they're having:

PCA: i mean yeah obvviously i kneww you wwerent serious PCA: i guess i appreciate the effort youre puttin into cheerin me up PCA: i can alwways count on you for some good ironic repartee kar nobody else really gets our sense a humor CCG: UGH, NO PCA: are you busy PCA: you said youd try to make it to lowwaa soon wwell howw about it

Which implies that offering to listen to Karkat's feelings is also a completely regular thing for them.

But something magical is ALSO happening within this last memo, and to really explain it, I'll first have to be a little mean to the GamKar shippers (sorry).

So, canonically, GamKar doesn't work out for them, despite also being somewhat foreshadowed. In fact, they feature on Nepeta's shipping wall, which is actually, in my opinion, foreshadowing that it WOULDN'T work out. (Nepeta's ships being wrong, and shipping being something she needs to learn to outgrow, is a whole essay on its own, that I'm not getting into here.)

But the thing is, the seeds for them not working out were also planted in the first - and only - real post-moirallegiance interaction that they have with each other, where Gamzee tries to calm Karkat down... and FAILS:

GAMZEE: naw brother, i was just about to all say for you to try and get your settle down on, maybe. GAMZEE: :o( ... KARKAT: OK KARKAT: OK YEAH KARKAT: I GUESS YOU'RE RIGHT. KARKAT: NO, YOU'RE RIGHT, I SHOULD RELAX. KARKAT: AND BREATHE. KARKAT: I MEAN, WHAT ARE MOIRAILS FOR, RIGHT? KARKAT: THIS IS HOW IT WORKS, I STOP YOU FROM KILLING EVERYBODY, THEN YOU RETURN THE FAVOR AND CALM ME DOWN AND I JUST KARKAT: BREATHE KARKAT: LIKE KARKAT: THIS... KARKAT: SNIIIIIIIIIIIIFFFFFFFFFFFFFUCK, THAT SUN IS BRIGHT. KARKAT: CALL ME CRAZY, BUT IT'S KIND OF HARD TO RELAX WITHIN A STONE'S THROW FROM, OH, I GUESS ONLY THE BIGGEST FUCKING STAR ANY MORTAL HAS EVER LAID EYES ON. ... KARKAT: BUT I MEAN, CAN THIS BE HEALTHY? KARKAT: AREN'T WE GOING TO GET BURNED OR HAVE OUR RETINAS SCORCHED BY LOOKING AT IT? KARKAT: OH GOD I THINK I'M HAVING A PANIC ATTACK.

But let's go back to that memo where Karkat is freaking out in every way possible. This is how he starts that memo - so upset about the deaths of his friends and terrified by Gamzee that he can barely string together a coherent thought:

CCG: WE ARE SO SCREWED. CCG: OH FUCK OH FUCK OH FUCK. CCG: GUYS, I AM TERRIFIED, I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO. CCG: I'M IN A ROOM FULL OF BODIES, AND I THINK I'M NOT SUPPOSED TO TURN MY BACK ON THEM? CCG: OH MY GOD, I JUST HEARD A HONK. ... CCG: FEFERI, I'M SORRY. CCG: IT WAS MY FAULT, I DIDN'T KNOW WHAT TO DO. PCC: Sorry for w)(at?? CCG: FOR CCG: I CCG: I CAN'T DO THIS CCG: IT'S TOO MUCH FOR ME, I'M SORRY.

In fact, he's so distressed that he bans Past!Feferi and Past!Gamzee almost immediately after they come in. But then Eridan comes in, and... I mean, first of all, just compare how long it takes for him to ban Eridan:

But more interesting are the contents of their conversation. Over the course of talking to Eridan... Karkat completely calms the fuck down. Like he's entirely forgotten that he's shitting his pants with fear. In fact, he even starts critiquing Eridan for his dumbassery:

PCA: evven if i wwasnt compelled to think you wwere still bein flippant and ironic wwith me you cant exactly outright reject me can you CCG: WHY NOT PCA: cause youre future you PCA: doesnt count unless its present you til then its all fair game CCG: IS THIS REAL, ARE YOU BEING IRONIC OR SOMETHING, I CAN'T EVEN TELL ANYMORE CCG: THE PROBLEM IS, I CAN'T PUT THIS SORT OF BEHAVIOR PAST YOU AT ALL, SO I DON'T KNOW. ... CCG: YOU'RE KILLING ANGELS NOW, AREN'T YOU PCA: no CCG: YOU ARE KILLING FUCKING ANGELS, RIGHT NOW, IN THE PAST, WITH YOUR SHITTY GUN. I JUST KNOW IT. PCA: wwell uh PCA: therere just so damn many kar and theyre not gettin any less bloody pissed is the thing CCG: THIS IS WHY IT WOULD NEVER WORK BETWEEN US, MAN.

It's extremely funny. Over the course of talking to Eridan, he goes from:

CCG: OH GOD OH GOD OH MAN OH GOD CCG: NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO

To:

CCG banned PCA from responding to memo. CCG: ANYWAY CCG: THAT'S IT I GUESS.

Eridan isn't even trying to calm Karkat down. He still succeeds in doing so. This is because they are soul mates. And I mean that in the sense that the comic literally calls being moirails soul mates, which it doesn't do for the other quadrants:

A reasonable human translation would be the concept of a soul mate, but in a more platonic sense, and with a more specific social purpose.

That "social purpose" being that an even-tempered troll calms down a more hot-tempered one, and vice versa.

It also goes on to note:

But some pale pairings, as the one above [referring to a picture of Nepeta and Equius], will be strikingly obvious to all who know them.

But what's really interesting is the next page.

And yet others will seem to have been hatched for each other.

Did you catch that? Let me zoom in.

(Also, the blue and red cuttlefish to represent Sollux - Feferi and Sollux spend the whole game together, and even wind up talking about their feelings constantly in a pile - more on piles in a sec.)

In fact... in Eridan's first visual appearance...

The crab has always been there for him.

It's also important to talk about the bottle of Faygo that's been photoshopped to be candy red, Karkat's blood color. The path that it takes actually directly mirrors Karkat's relationships with Gamzee and Eridan - it's initially something that Gamzee has, but winds up being ejected out of his life, and washes up on Eridan's shore. In fact:

TC: SnAtCh aN IcEcOlD, dOg TC: MoThErFuCkIn cHuG ThAt sHiT LiKe yOu aNd tHe bOtTlE WaS ReUnItEd lOvErS CA: are you recommendin a bevverage to me or somethin CA: is that wwhat this is TC: YeAh mAn SlAm A FaYgO CA: i dont havve a fuckin faygo you stupid fuck wwhy wwould i keep that disgusting shit on hand TC: ArE YoU MoThErFuCkIn sUrE AbOuT ThAt? CA: oh CA: oh god youre right i do CA: i totally forgot about it TC: YoU SeE MaN TC: MoThEr TC: FuCkIn TC: MiRaClEs TC: :o)

When Gamzee and Eridan discuss this exact bottle, Gamzee even likens it to "reunited lovers"; it's something that Eridan has had this whole time (after all, he was cheating on Feferi with the guy), but never realized.

There are a few miscellaneous things that don't really mean anything on their own, but put next to all this other stuff, is worth considering, so I'll list those now.

First, they both do the bonk:

Second:

CG: ARE WE NOT FRIENDS ANYMORE BECAUSE OF STUFF I SAID. TA: eheheheh you LIITERALLY a2k me that every tiime are you jokiing. TA: ii cant even tell anymore. CG: IT'S A JOKE MORON. CG: HONESTLY I'M JUST GLAD NOBODY ELSE IS PRIVVY TO OUR CONVERSATIONS.

Third, Karkat muses to his future self about how he misses his friends, especially the assholes, two pages before staring at a dead Eridan's ass (joking, he's definitely looking at WV, but it's still significant that this thought is being associated with Eridan):

CCG: I MEAN, DON'T GET ME WRONG. CCG: I MISS ALL OF MY DEAD FRIENDS A LOT. CCG: EVEN THE ASSHOLES! I MISS THEM TOO. MAYBE EVEN ESPECIALLY THEM, IN SOME PERVERSE WAY. CCG: AND I SHOULD BE RELIEVED THAT THEY ALL SEEM TO BE HAPPY IN SOME WAY, EVEN IF IT'S BY FLOATING NEBULOUSLY THROUGH DREAM PROJECTIONS WITH THEIR FREAKY BLANK EYES. CCG: AND I GUESS I AM RELIEVED ABOUT THAT. CCG: BUT AT THE SAME TIME IT'S LEFT ME UNSETTLED.

Fourth, in the same conversation, he bemoans his failed relationship with Terezi, before Future!Karkat chastises Past!Karkat for his instability and mixed signals. Going back to the page on moirallegiances, an explicit function of a proper pale relationship is stabilizing a troll's other relationships:

The two partners in a strong pale relationship will serve to balance and complement each other's emotional profiles, and thus allow their other relationships to be more successful.

Of course, I don't need to tell you how messy and unstable Eridan's relationships have been.

And finally, Piles of Stuff™ are associated with moirails, and directly stated in-comic to cause an outpouring of emotion:

Standing near this pile stirs powerful emotions. The closer you stand to piles of stuff, the more freely the feelings flow. It is a law of reality.

So here's a seven-word tragedy for you: For Sale, Shitty Wand Pile, Never Used:

ERIDAN: at least i got the upright basic decency to hide my shitty wand pile somewwhere in the lab you wwont find it dont evven bother lookin KARKAT: WHY DO YOU ASSHOLES HAVE PILES OF THINGS, JUST STOP.

(Which he specifically tells Karkat about.)

So, yeah, what I'm saying is, there's just, like, a weirdly large amount to read into here. That Karkat and Eridan are probably soulmates or whatever. And that this is important because...

Eridan Is Plot Relevant (Well All The Dead Trolls Are But This Is An Essay About Eridan)

So. Now we are going to talk about themes. Yes, like we are in schoolfeeding again. I'm going to keep it simple, because "The Themes of Homestuck" is a whole essay on its own, and this one about just the shitty fish boy is already way too long.

I think it's fairly non-controversial to posit that the main theme of Homestuck is, "children should mature, care about each other, and throw off the shackles of their old society, because they will be responsible for a new world one day."

Up until Game Over/the Retcon, this is so prevalent and well-established that SBURB/SGRUB's coming-of-age themes will outright be commented upon by the characters, and the main villain is a child who deliberately stunted his own growth so he could go around kicking over other peoples' toys forevermore.

So, the thing is, with that being the theme of Homestuck, if ALL of the Alternian trolls don't survive to the end, the ending is thematically unsatisfying, because the message suddenly gains an addendum of "well, some kids just need to die," which totally sucks. Like, sure, Eridan was a violent, crazed murderer even at the best of times, but his permanent death within the canon ending kind of means that the comic is saying that people in his position don't deserve kindness or second chances. That position being a traumatized, emotionally neglected child, who was being bullied by people he considered his friends. It's a pretty terrible message.

It's even worse when you consider what other trolls don't make it to the end - Nepeta, the most outspoken troll against the hemospectrum (and Davepeta does NOT count, don't try to tell me the final culmination of Nepeta's character arc is being combined with some guy she barely knows and a bird). Feferi, who genuinely wanted the best for others, even if she was kind of a privileged princess. Aradia and Sollux also stay behind in the bubbles, even though their lives have pretty much been endless parades of suffering and being used by other people. Even Equius doesn't deserve it - he was kind of a casteist freak, but not irredeemably so, and the fact that he became kinder to Karkat over the course of SGRUB proved that he had the capacity to change. And Tavros, allergic to himself and being insulted by Vriska, is a terrible way to end his arc.

It's also really clear that, since half his friends are dead, Karkat just doesn't really have anything to do. His title is the Knight of Blood, and Blood is about bonds - romance, friendship. And yet, he ends the comic having never figured out what Blood was about, with no confirmed filled quadrants (sorry DaveKat likers, but within the comic itself, DaveKat is never confirmed), and most of his bonds nothing more than ghosts in the bubbles. It's a terribly unsatisfying ending for the most narratively important troll.

I think, then, that even if you don't agree that Homestuck should have ended with full revivals and redemption arcs for all the trolls, the essay is going to proceed on like you do, so, sorry, I guess.

The thing with Eridan, specifically, is that he's actually tied deeply into the plot and themes, and his return means more than just Karkat finally getting a date (although that's important, too). Eridan is directly intertwined with a prophecy to kill Lord English; he's set up to mirror Caliborn and Calliope; and thematically, his redemption would be the most clear instance of the "interrogating society" part of the theme of Homestuck, because Eridan is kind of the Society Troll. And also, he was definitely supposed to be Roxy's wizard boyfriend.

Just gonna get that last one out of the way real quick because it's a fast one, Roxy fucking loves wizards and is a hipster. Eridan is a wizard and is also a hipster. Roxy has a crush on a prince. Eridan is also a prince. Roxy wears a purple striped scarf. Eridan wears a blue striped scarf. Roxy uses rifles. Eridan uses rifles. Momlonde's introduction includes a passive-aggressive fridge battle that features a cameo of Eridan's quirk.

Using the colorful MAGNET LETTERS, you recently left a succinct message, which may or may not have been directed toward anyone in particular. But you couldn't find the letter W, so you just stuck two V's together. Your mother then purchased a fresh pack of W's and left them there for your convenience.

Yeah. So. Uh. Not only did Eridan need to be brought back to date Karkat pale, but he also needed to be brought back to date Roxy flushed. Can you imagine how funny it would be. They'd get together within 5 minutes of meeting for the first time and Rose would lose her shit. Anyway.

Him being a parallel to Calliope and Caliborn is also a quick one - Caliborn uses Riflekind/Sceptrekind, and Calliope uses Pistolkind/Wandkind. Eridan's two weapons are rifles and wands. Lord English is described as an evil wizard and at one point is shown using Calliope's wand. Eridan is also an evil wizard who uses a wand.

Look, I'm not saying that Eridan is necessarily directly related to these two, nor am I even necessarily saying that he and Roxy HAVE to date, but I am saying that he's got Weird Plot Connections that make him bizarrely relevant to characters that only come into play well after his death - almost like the comic was setting up that he would be coming back. His reaction to Cronus supports this, which I go into detail about here.

There's other strange "Eridan's plot important" things, too - like the fact that he's completely unimpressed by Faygo, considering it to be "just soda," and seems to be the only non-cultist who's okay with it. Or the fact that he's actually been awake on Derse since before the game (but unable to hear the horrorterrors, maybe foreshadowing some psychic resistance?) which he casually reveals to Kanaya and which Terezi is aware of, hence he's included in the people she names are "in" on the existence of the game. Or the fact that the genetic code for Alternia's first guardian was written within the pages of four FLARP books, with the addition of a fifth code Gamzee wrote in Karkat's ~ATH book... but Eridan was the fifth FLARP player in the team, implying that Doc Scratch/LE influencing Gamzee caused him to usurp Eridan's part of the first guardian code, giving LE his way into the trolls' universe.

Individually, it's all kind of nothing, but it just paints a bigger picture of Eridan being weirdly relevant, especially when we get to the juicy stuff:

The Prophecy

ARANEA: The 8ard of Hope may seem a little jaded these days, 8ut he once had a deeply a8iding faith in magic, and dedicated himself to 8ecoming a great wizard. He 8ecame convinced he was hatched to defeat an extraordinarily evil magician, one he swore the angels foretold of. ... [T]his magician once somehow from afar tried to strike him down at a young age, so he would never have to face him. 8ut the evil spell was deflected, sealing the magician's spirit away in a series of unassuming vessels until he could find some other cunning way to enter our universe. ... ARANEA: 8ut at some point he 8ecame disillusioned with magic. If there ever was any truth to his far fetched vision, the legacy of defeating the evil magician would have to 8e passed on to his descendant, or if his descendant proved to 8e as much of a failure as he did, then perhaps on to some other Hero of Hope.

ERIDAN: i slaughtered enough angels to knoww my limits and wwhere i stand against the lord of all angels they prophecized

GG: im pretty sure hes from the future! CA: wwhy GG: because he said hes my grandson CA: wwhat the fuck is a grandson CA: is that some kind of pervverse human familial thing GG: umm yes ... CA: that gun i just gavve you is somethin of a hatchright to the kid CA: happy i could play a role in your dirty stinkin lineage GG: like an heirloom? i guess it could be ... CA: i kinda think thats wwhy i found the gun in the first place CA: but noww im forsakin it because fuck i just found a better destiny than my old crappy one wwhich i nevver got any appreciation for anywway

Jake is supposed to have been the one to defeat Lord English. (No, Jake defeating pre-LE Caliborn right before he gets sealed into Cal doesn't count! He doesn't even get the final blow in that fight, DIRK does.)

But Eridan at one point had that destiny on his shoulders. Aranea turbohealing Jake, and the resultant hope field, summons a bunch of angels, which are heavily associated with Eridan - yet another random connection that Eridan has with future plot events.

Jake was another character, alongside Karkat, who was kind of reduced to a joke by the end, despite the fact that he had literally, directly, been passed the destiny of defeating Lord English. It's hard not to see this as a consequence, at least in part, of removing Eridan from the story. By cutting him out of the fabric of the ending, several plot threads - including this prophecy - are left dangling in irrelevance. And so Jake, like Karkat, now has nothing to do.

Homestuck is generally a series where every prophecy does come true, which makes it kind of startling when several prophecies fail to - Feferi's to "unite the two races," Jake's to defeat Lord English, and Karkat's to bring "compassion, forgiveness, and equality among all bloodlines" in the Signless's place.

That last one is actually relevant to:

The Thematic Importance of EriKar As Soul Mates

Eridan represents the worst aspects of Alternian society. He's a sea dweller at the top of the caste structure, with free reign to murder whoever he wants, soaked in the blood of thousands of innocent trolls. He espouses the casteist rhetoric that their society is built on, calling for the deaths of all land dwellers and the oppression of the lower castes. And while he should be benefitting from his position of privilege, it has also done nothing but hurt him.

Karkat, meanwhile, is a pariah. A mutant who would've been culled on sight, who spent his entire life living in hiding, and most of the game in fear that he would be ostracized or worse by the rest of his friends if they found out about his blood color. He's also the second coming of Troll Jesus, and thus, more despised by the Alternian ruling class than a mutant normally would be. For most of his life, he dreamed of nothing more than finding belonging within the society that had deemed him unfit.

Their friendship is something that "should not be." The highblood and the mutant. The royal-v and the off-spectrum. The empress's sea dweller and the second coming of the signless. Eridan "should" see Karkat as a miscreant to cull on sight. Karkat "should" be terrified of Eridan's very existence.

But in reality, Eridan doesn't give a shit about blood color, and Karkat just wants to be accepted. Eridan just wants someone to care about him, and Karkat loves his friends. Aside from Feferi, Eridan is the only highblood who never comments about Karkat's mutant blood, and they were best buddies even before Eridan knew.

Eridan and Karkat getting together isn't JUST the two most undateable trolls on the team finally landing a stable quadrant. These two, moreso than any other pairing, represent the themes of Homestuck. Children growing up, caring about each other, and throwing off the shackles of their old society.

In the pre-retcon timeline, their team failed to do so. This led to Gamzee falling into his highblood clown cult, Equius letting himself and Nepeta die by submitting to his place in the hemospectrum, Vriska killing Tavros because she couldn't allow herself to show weakness, and Eridan completing his caste's dream of genocide. Karkat spent the entire meteor trip and beyond beating himself up about it, since he considered it all to be his fault.

But with the introduction of John's retcon powers, they have the chance to, one by one, redeem themselves. I believe that's how the original ending would have gone: Terezi would ask John to bring Vriska back, because she only feels comfortable fixing her own mistakes. Vriska would then have asked John to bring back Tavros, whom she regretted killing. Tavros would be there for Gamzee, rendering him an ally. Gamzee would ask John to bring back Equius and Nepeta. Equius would ask John to help him not make the same mistakes with Aradia, and Aradiabot would catch John by the wrist and demand he bring her back in time to before she died, allowing her to circumvent her own death and Sollux's guilt. Sollux would ask John to keep him from provoking Eridan, saving Feferi. And Feferi would be pretty ok with the way things were... but KARKAT would then pull John aside, and drop an entire book of mistakes he made on John's lap, and this would result in a finalized timeline where all his friends are alive and god-tiered.

Because all the trolls SHOULD have survived.

Vriska should've survived because people should be allowed to have second chances.

Tavros should've survived because caring about each other, and being willing to show kindness and mercy, are good things.

Gamzee should have survived because people mired in religious fundamentalism and cults deserve to be offered a helping hand.

Equius should've survived because people should be allowed to grow and change their beliefs.

Nepeta should've survived because she was the anti-casteism troll. Casteism is bad, folks! Not only that, but I'm convinced that she was originally going to give the Ultimate Self exposition, and Davepetasprite^2 had to be contrived in the canon ending in order to shortcut Nepeta's character development, ruining it in the process.

Aradia should've been allowed to stay with the rest of the team and live a life free of the control of evil uncles and shitty ancestors.

Sollux should've been allowed to stay with the rest of the team because we all deserve to heal and be happy.

Feferi should've survived so she could be in a kismesistude with Nepeta, and realize that casteism itself is bad, not just the definition of culling, and then used her Witch of Life powers to even out the lifespans between the next generation of trolls, which needs to happen or else casteism will just happen again as long-lived highbloods inevitably amass power. And, also, it would complete the prophecy Gl'bgolyb gave her that she was intended to unite the two races (dream bubbles don't count, because by that metric, Sollux did more than she did by establishing a connection between the trolls and humans).

And Eridan should've survived, because the harm society has done to us can be undone. We don't have to submit to the roles it imposes, to the laws it wrote, to the abuse it inflicted. We can be free.

I've seen a lot of people who believe that such-and-such character did SUCH awful things that they don't deserve a happy ending. Oftentimes, it's Eridan, but nearly all of the dead trolls have gotten this treatment. So, let me just ask all of you who have gotten this far and still hold that opinion one thing. Do you think that's what Troll Jesus would have wanted?

This is why pale EriKar is so important: for it to happen, Eridan has to make a choice between upholding the beliefs of his shitty society, or pursuing a happier, kinder future, one where he outright rejects the caste system. For it to happen, Karkat has to shake all his insecurities about not being good enough by Alternian standards, and take on the duty of creating something better than what he came from. If pale EriKar happens, it means Eridan and Karkat choose love, not fear. Compassion, forgiveness, and equality.

This choice - this pairing - is the ultimate representation of giving Alternian society one big middle finger. Saying, we don't need you anymore, fuck off! Saying, we reject you at your core; we will choose something better! Saying, we will create a new world, and it will be kinder than the one we came from!

Pale EriKar means LOVE WINS.

Thank you for reading.

[the-firebird69]

She did not sound that bad she did not seem that bad but was awful is it trumpster and was clever and sharp and they themselves kept pushing it around saying you're not doing anything and she said why I'm not shouting like a 2 year old child go wrestle him and see what it's like you're sitting there screaming at him and he's having a shot within hours or less and they said okay so you're not doing anything so now I'm using tax and I'm doing stealth in his clever so she hears the voice she's clever and you're not she's doing things and I directly against me and you guys are so you guys are out I don't need you and you're getting all your people killed and they start screaming bloody murder so go ahead and refute it and they said we have a plan and it's to push ourselves so when does the delusion stop killing you because AI boy wants it. They said this it looks like he was doing it it doesn't matter that he's losing his army which actually made it look like that and seem like that in the program might have worked even though it's not my brothers what's the point without the army it won't work and they said well this makes sense so they talk to her about it and she said thank you and they went about their business but she left because they came back and started harassing her and said we want proof that doesn't work what do you mean every single battle they suck and they said there's proof so why does she have to know about it she has to be the snow at all just one of your women and she puts out there where you tell her to and they said what's wrong with us in your realm all the time it's terrible terrible but we don't care we get rid of both you and you're the idiots getting rid of people that are worth something and you're not worth anything and they start getting really mad I said what are you getting really mad so we're going to come and get you what's that worse and they said this we're out front and we're getting everybody mad they're coming right at us and we're not doing anything still and spend years I went home and they wept and then they wrote letters and told people they're disgusted with how it's going they have to stop it and they started coming here and found these dupes that were insane and they noted it and they went through it again and we don't have time for the stuff either but this lady is a complete b**** and she's harassing her son all the time and the other guy is John remillard at times and he's a trumpster and he's fired and they're firing all of them globally and they're running to the cities to try and take them back and trying to keep them and it's huge The Exodus is getting bigger and they're fighting while they're in there while they're traveling and when they get there and they're a bunch of idiots these people are primates so it's going along we are on the 3rd 20% finishing up the first at the same time they started leaving about 5% are up and out the door or up and just about to go out the door or on the road it is going to start siphon anymore off they're reaching up above half percent half point and once they reach that it will start to flow faster it's already very fast and we have to get

Thor Freya

Olympus

[kudosmyhero]

Transformers: Primacy #2

Read Date: May 21, 2023 Cover Date: September 2014 ● Story: Chris Metzen ◦ Flint Dille ● Art: Livio Ramondelli ● Letterer: Chris Mowry ● Editor: John Barber ●

**HERE BE SPOILERS: Skip ahead to the fan art/podcast to avoid spoilers

Reactions As I Read: ● Strongbox isn’t in a good position… ● Stunticons. never heard of them, but judging by Strongbox’s reaction, they’re bad news ● Thundercracker! <3 ● Predacons stripped a whole planet’s ecosystem in months?? jeez ● watching Trypticon plummeting toward the city

● Metroplex 😭 ● 👏👏👏👏👏

Synopsis: On the ruined planet Magmara Nine, courier Strongbox finds himself separated from his convoy and under attack from the Stunticons. Surrounded by the evil speedsters, his distress calls unheard, Strongbox tries to explain that he doesn't even know what cargo he's transporting, but the villains ignore him, having been informed by Swindle that the payload is cash. Wildrider leaps on top of him and causes him to run off the road, but just before they go over the edge of the bridge they're on, Drag Strip snags Strongbox's trailer with a grapple line, allowing Motormaster to reel in their prize even as the ill-fated courier falls away from his cargo and plummets to his doom. Upon opening the trailer, however, the team is surprised to discover that their booty is not the money they expected: rather, it is Thundercracker, who had paid Strongbox's convoy to transport him as part of a ruse to draw the Stunticons out. Motormaster refuses to work for Scorponok, but changes his tune when he hears that Megatron is back.

On the jungle world of Canis Tor, Predacons Razorclaw and Rampage are engaged in battle with each other; the Predacons have hunted all life on the planet into extinction and now find themselves stranded there and turning on one another. The other Predacons watch them grapple, grimly realizing that cannibalism seems inevitable—a prediction that becomes sudden reality when Divebomb collapses and the others close in to dine. The appearance of Astrotrain in the skies above stops them before Divebomb meets his end; from within the shuttle 'bot, Starscream appears and invites the Predacons back to the Decepticon fold with the news that Megatron has returned.

Meanwhile, on Cybertron, Optimus Prime and Alpha Trion confer on the discovery of Omega Supreme, who now stands guard over Optimus's quarters in Metroplex. Trion is happy to see the ancient 'bot return, but warns Optimus—concerned over Omega's continued aloofness—that it will take time for the giant sentinel shake off the effects of his million-year isolation.

On the world known as The Presidium, the Combaticons prepare to raid an old cache of Cybertronian weapons considered so dangerous by Nominus Prime that they were stored off-world. When the access codes acquired by Swindle fail to work, the other Combaticons are about to turn on him when the garrison doors suddenly open, revealing Starscream and the Predacons. The promise of ample payment convinces Onslaught and his team to board Astrotrain and blast off for home.

Elsewhere, out in deep space, aboard Trypticon, Soundwave updates Megatron on the continued re-consolidation of the Decepticon forces. Soundwave is hesitant about visiting the final planet on Megatron's list of targeted worlds, but Megatron refuses to have his judgement questioned… and so Trypticon soon sets down on the living hell that is Junkion. The native Junkions gather around the city-ship, but are immediately cowed when Megatron emerges and orders them to submit to his will and ready their "world-ship" to join his armies.

Back on Cybertron, Optimus Prime meets with Bumblebee, Hot Rod, Grimlock, and Bulkhead in response to the appearance of a huge object on their long-range space scanners. Prime hopes it is a ship carrying returning Cybertronians who left during the exodus, but soon realizes that it is Trypticon; Bulkhead refutes the notion of shooting it down, as doing so would rain devastating debris onto the planet while Grimlock and Hot Rod are quick to deduce Megatron's goal—to drop Trypticon directly on top of Metroplex from orbit. In response, Prime orders the city evacuated, and gives the command for Metroplex to transform. No sooner has the Titan assumed his robot mode than Trypticon comes crashing out of the sky, ploughing into Metroplex and tackling him to the ground. The saurian behemoth looms over the toppled titan, and greets Metroplex like an old friend…

(https://tfwiki.net/wiki/Primacy_issue_2)

Fan Art: Therapy Session by Valong

Accompanying Podcast: ● Swerve's Bar Podcast - episode 04

[anghraine]

#I used to follow some people on my old account that were really annoying about this#just snooty about how people bringing in Shakespeare et al were obviously arguing in bad faith#because fic is only really fic when it's done in the fandom context and based on commercial works#I did not refollow them here (via @chocolatepot)

Good for you tbh!

Honestly, there is something almost awe-inspiring about the snobbish takes on why fanfic is some uniquely degraded form artistically and morally alongside these absolutely incoherent arguments that constantly shift the terms of the argument because the original terms are so irrelevant to so much of human literature including the most broadly respected writer in the English language. And you get these "refutations" of fans referencing him and his contemporaries that mostly just reveal how little literary snobs know about early modern British literary culture.

I saw one "rebuttal" the other day (not to this post) that was like, oh, you can't bring up writers re-purposing pre-existing stories if they were writing before the Statute of Anne. And it's like ... oh, I didn't realize that absolute morality and value in art in 2024 is derived from early eighteenth-century British legal codes. Or they'll talk about fanfic propping up lowbrow, commercial, popular art and not high art like Shakespeare et al were working with and motivated by, which is almost comically divorced from reality.

[Rambling under the cut]

As a sidenote, I've noticed that a lot of snobbish types trying to scrape up some pretext for excluding Shakespeare from their already inconsistent argument tend to point to his more remote and highly respected sources such as Ovid. Apparently, drawing characters/plots/settings from Ovid is totally different morally and artistically from drawing on material from your own era, as fanfic writers typically do.

I don't quite get the artistic reasoning there (if the problem with fanfic ~artistically~ is entirely reducible to using stuff from other people rather than coming up with your own, I'm unsure why it matters who you're borrowing from). But in any case, the result is certain kinds of snobs conceptualizing Romeo and Juliet more in terms of Pyramus and Thisbe in The Metamorphoses than The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562), conceptualizing King Lear in terms of old myths rather than the contemporary play The True Chronicle History of King Leir (first performed in the 1590s), and so on.

It even affects conversation about other playwrights of the time—for instance, the main play I was talking about in my original tags was John Webster's masterpiece The Duchess of Malfi, its basic material drawn from William Painter's 1567 English translation of Belleforest's French translation of Matteo Bandello's likely somewhat fictionalized Italian novelle version of the fairly obscure historical details surrounding the murder of Giovanna d'Aragona, Duchess of Amalfi. Webster wasn't seriously engaging with history, he was like "cool story ... I bet I could make it even more fucked up and also poke at our narratives around class and gender."

I feel like there's a certain kind of contemporary literary snob who is just really reluctant to even consider the degree to which contemporary concepts of who gets to tell which stories, who owns stories, etc are tremendously influenced by cultural norms rather than objective universal truths about Art and the formal significance of novelty. And with regard to Shakespeare and early modern British literature, the contemporary framework is just deeply bizarre and inappropriate to their cultural understanding of storytelling.

Okay, breaking my principles hiatus again for another fanfic rant despite my profound frustration w/ Tumblr currently:

I have another post and conversation on DW about this, but while pretty much my entire dash has zero patience with the overtly contemptuous Hot Fanfic Takes, I do pretty often see takes on Fanfiction's Limitations As A Form that are phrased more gently and/or academically but which rely on the same assumptions and make the same mistakes.

IMO even the gentlest, and/or most earnest, and/or most eruditely theorized takes on fanfiction as a form still suffer from one basic problem: the formal argument does not work.

I have never once seen a take on fanfiction as a form that could provide a coherent formal definition of what fanfiction is and what it is not (formal as in "related to its form" not as in "proper" or "stuffy"). Every argument I have ever seen on the strengths/weaknesses of fanfiction as a form vs original fiction relies to some extent on this lack of clarity.

Hence the inevitable "what about Shakespeare/Ovid/Wide Sargasso Sea/modern takes on ancient religious narratives/retold fairy tales/adaptation/expanded universes/etc" responses. The assumptions and assertions about fanfiction as a form in these arguments pretty much always should apply to other things based on the defining formal qualities of fanfic in these arguments ("fanfiction is fundamentally X because it re-purposes pre-existing characters and stories rather than inventing new ones" "fanfiction is fundamentally Y because it's often serialized" etc).

Yet the framing of the argument virtually always makes it clear that the generalizations about fanfic are not being applied to Real Literature. Nor can this argument account for original fics produced within a fandom context such as AO3 that are basically indistinguishable from fanfic in every way apart from lacking a canon source.

At the end of the day, I do not think fanfic is "the way it is" because of any fundamental formal qualities—after all, it shares these qualities with vast swaths of other human literature and art over thousands of years that most people would never consider fanfic. My view is that an argument about fanfic based purely on form must also apply to "non-fanfic" works that share the formal qualities brought up in the argument (these arguments never actually apply their theories to anything other than fanfic, though).

Alternately, the formal argument could provide a definition of fanfic (a formal one, not one based on judgment of merit or morality) that excludes these other kinds of works and genres. In that case, the argument would actually apply only to fanfic (as defined). But I have never seen this happen, either.

So ultimately, I think the whole formal argument about fanfic is unsalvageably flawed in practice.

Realistically, fanfiction is not the way it is because of something fundamentally derived from writing characters/settings etc you didn't originate (or serialization as some new-fangled form, lmao). Fanfiction as a category is an intrinsically modern concept resulting largely from similarly modern concepts of intellectual property and auteurship (legally and culturally) that have been so extremely normalized in many English-language media spaces (at the least) that many people do not realize these concepts are context-dependent and not universal truths.

Fanfic does not look like it does (or exist as a discrete category at all) without specifically modern legal practices (and assumptions about law that may or may not be true, like with many authorial & corporate attempts to use the possibility of legal threats to dictate terms of engagement w/ media to fandom, the Marion Zimmer Bradley myth, etc).

Fanfic does not look like it does without the broader fandom cultures and trends around it. It does not look like it does without the massive popularity of various romance genres and some very popular SF/F. It does not look like it does without any number of other social and cultural forces that are also extremely modern in the grand scheme of things.

The formal argument is just so completely ahistorical and obliviously presentist in its assumptions about art and generally incoherent that, sure, it's nicer when people present it politely, but it's still wrong.

[jdgo51]

The Myth: “If I’m a Good Christian, Then Nothing Bad Will Happen to Me”

Today's inspiration comes from:

Flourish: The NIV Bible for Women

Editor's note: Flourish: The NIV Bible for Women includes Myths articles which expose commonly accepted myths of our culture that many women believe—misconceptions about love, relationships, God, fulfillment, sex, faith, identity, and more. Each opens with the first-person story of a woman who believes a particular myth and how that affects her life. Then, principles from the Bible refute the myth and offer practical guidance and help.

"'This isn’t what I asked for, thank you. I want my old life back. The one where my parents were the perfect couple. Where I was the only one among my friends whose parents were still together. And seemingly still in love.

The one where I was voted most likely to succeed and everyone, right or wrong, envied my life because it seemed so perfect. And I believed it was.

I want to go back to the times when I knew You were involved in my life. The ones where I prayed and You answered. I talked to You, and You listened. The times when I knew You were alive. Loving. And on my side.

I want the life where all I had to do was show up for class, and I got good grades. Name a job opening, and I landed it squarely. Speak my needs, and my husband moved Heaven and earth to meet them.

That... that’s what I want. This... that I have right now... You can take this all away.

This split in my perfect family that I didn’t ask for, and this side of my parents’ relationship I never knew.

This embarrassment of being a college graduate and yet unemployed. The shame of being “let go” from my first real job — the one I told everyone about and was so confident I’d be successful in.

This heaviness of heart from knowing that I can’t make my husband love me. This crushing realization that he may leave me for someone else someday. This fear of being divorced before I’m thirty years old.

This stagnant spirituality that barely gets me by. And makes me question all I’ve known up to this point.

This can all go. Because this isn’t what I asked for when I first came to You. I want life the way it was supposed to be.

~Felicia

Trials force us to move beyond superficial knowledge of Jesus into a meaningful, daily walk with Him.

The Truth:

If we believe a true Christian ought not to experience adversity, then the moment our lives fall apart, so does our faith.

We begin to question a fundamental issue: “Am I really a Christian? After all, if I were really following God, then this wouldn’t happen to me.”

Following this line of false thinking, we perceive adversity as God’s punishment for unknown sin. As if God is dropping hints from Heaven with every tragedy or that He has deserted us somewhere along the way. How easy it would have been for Joseph to question his belief in God and to assume God was punishing him with every misfortune (see Genesis 37; 39–40). Instead, the Bible records his remarkably opposite attitude of faith.

Similarly, we can look to Jesus as the ultimate example to debunk the idea that bad things do not happen to good people. Isaiah prophesied centuries before that the Messiah would be “despised” and “rejected” and well acquainted with sorrows (Isaiah 53:3). If Jesus’ life is the Christian ideal, an example in every way, then we must accept Jesus’ suffering as a part of God’s divine impartiality and learn how Jesus handled it. If we were to believe the claims that adversity is unfitting for a believer, then we must discount the examples of Moses, Hannah, Naomi, David, Job, Hosea, Jeremiah, Paul, Mary, John and countless others who experienced great adversity as believers.

The Bible is, above all, realistic in its approach to life. Life sometimes hurts and threatens to crush us beneath its weight. But life in the Spirit is about perseverance and peace in the midst of struggle, not the absence of struggle. To believe otherwise is to join the disillusioned throng who encounter life on its own terms and are unprepared for the blow."'

Excerpted from Flourish: The NIV Bible for Women, copyright Zondervan.