#sorry that you've caught me in a quibbling humor

[mmmmalo]

you do a lot of in depth readings in HS proper about like. gender and roles and stereotypes and fitting into/breaking out of them. or 8re8king out, in this case?? since I am asking specifically about vriska. I see a lot of people say she comes across as transfer, but I've been rereading Homestuck and I don't see it at all ?? I know you've made some jegbert jender posts so I was wondering if you had any insight. thank you very much, feel free to disregard this. congratulations on passing the japanese test and I hope you have a lovely rest of your week!

Thank you! Sorry for the late reply, I needed a minute.

I reread some Vriska sections to see if anything stood out, but unfortunately if you've read my June posts you've probably read everything I have to say regarding Vriska and transness. I only seem to pick up on the ways she acts as accessory to other trans narratives (those attached to Tavros and Egbert)... Her old sunglasses are a reference to the pirate One-Eyed Willie from the Goonies, which was totally a penis joke, but that alone doesn't tell you much...

Maybe a month ago I would have said with some confidence that all girls on Alternia are trans girls, because I've been reading the slaughter of the limebloods as a mass gynocide that rendered Alternia exclusively male. But recently the overlap of phallic and papillary symbolism has me wondering if some of the castration imagery doesn't double as mastectomy imagery, rendering the polarity of much of the story's transgender symbolism ambiguous... like not so much intersex as a quantum superposition of binary sexes. Like, I cited Tavros in relation to trans symbolism, and another moment for him was the struggle to get into bed because his horns are too big -- I've read this as a dysphoric moment, with the horns being phallic, but Equius (and Mallek) demonstrate that horns can be papillary as well so suddenly I'm compelled to reevaluate that moments as Tavros potentially (metaphorically) experiencing a transmasculine dysphoria posed by having enormous breasts. Or quasi-reevaluate, since the former reading would remain quasi-valid

So my answer is, I don't know and I've recently come across information that maybe undermines a great deal of what I thought I knew. I'm currently stuck between a model of Alternia where Vriska is a trans girl and a model where Vriska is Schrödinger's trans girl, existing in a story where both interpretations are encouraged. That the name "Alternia" could be self-referential, always posed as the alternative to another version of itself, feels distinctly Homestuck -- likewise the notion that the circularity of Alternia <> Beforus was anticipated by each term's self-circularity. But the matter of it feeling appropriate isn't really an argument so eventually I will need to reread to confirm and the prospect is daunting, because I'm sort of worn out.