#the jade design is from my fanfiction btw :)

[catgirlweed]

i love the homestuck art style. would like to draw in it one day :)

[landofspaceandrainbows]

Angry Rant Ahead

Or this post starts out with how Homestuck has done more for the Problem of Evil than most secular and polytheist movements, loops to some angry bitter ranting, and ends up with some (tbh pretty deranged) Christian apologia

cw for like most of the bad stuff that can happen to people, and religion ofc, which might count as bad stuff that can happen to people lmao

ok, like homestuck takes the “narrator/author is actually a character” thing as part of the story, which can always be a dicey thing, because either then you can get “hey, that kinda makes the narrator like a pompous or controlling bastard in-universe because they’re a character and can be criticized as one.  or you can just get.... cringe, in like so many ways.  but homestuck, like weirdly leans into that and does some interesting stuff with that, and i generally find it’s actually one of the most cathartic things against that feeling like bad things happen and someone is just.... laughing at you.

and i think that’s mostly because the narrator is designed tropes-wise to be pretty transparently meant to be hatable.  to be allowable for anger.

triggering stuff starts here, btw:

( and this is kinda a dialogue-ization of my personal mental processes, so people’s interpretations may vary )

like “oh, john loses his dad, are you angry yet?  dave gets sexually assaulted by his older brother are you angry yet?  dave has to watch his friends die and alternate timeline versions of himself die, are you angry yet?  jade has to be super alone, and rose gets all her failures as a girl, as ell as just creepy information about the world thrown in her face all the time and gets really sad, are you angry yet?  the trolls get oppressed by their own undemocratic government, are you angry yet?  but it’s ok to be angry, this was deliberately written this way.  like you can’t be angry at got, or your parents, or your government (yet) but you can be angry at me. as long as you don’t track down the creators irl, i was writtn like this on purpose, i consented, the author’s a troll, he likes anger.  and plus it’s all just pictures on paper so it doesn’t even matter. :) “ 

so like a lot of people like to talk about how various religious texts are kinda messed up or dark, and how getting away from them was good.  which i agree with!  i think for many people this can be a very good thing and i think there’s a lot of good points!

but also on the other hand, like people talk about how god, or g-d depending on how you like to spell it, kills children and whole cities and how that’s portrayed as good (which people argue about the “portrayed as good” part quite a bit, and i think to the extent it is portrayed as good that’s a hell problem, but i’m not sure it is and i’m not going into that here, i’m going to try to keep this on a different track)

but then it’s like, ok let’s throw the book out.  let’s just look at real life!  but let’s see, children getting killed.... sids exists, copper metabolism problems exist, cholera exists, war and conflict exist, and don’t keep away from kids always, mudslides exist.  There’s all sorts of physical forces in the universe.

And the thing about humans is we like to put faces on things, we just do, it’s cool.  it’s a human thing, and there’s some evidence it might be an all animal thing.

But then you get the sticky question of your cool fuzzy universal property or force with a face and.... it’s victims.  And you maybe can’t handle it, So one way of fixing it is saying.... ok, it’s victims deserved it, and then you get Social Darwinism.  (which is actually is kinda ironic seeing as the actual Darwin married his cousin and took care of his disabled kids, lol) 

So anyway, like, the problems are in the source material. And religious books are like, fanfictions of the source material (the world, the universe, whtever you want to call it) If the canon is taking place in the “jewel in the crown” era, you gonna get some problematic colonialist motherfuckers as characters in all the fanfics all over the place. it’s just, i think, that the bible is better than most at picking up on the.... inherent fridge horror.  but it also pokes at it.

and it’s good if lots of fluff fanfic exists too! yep! so completely other religions, and other interpretations of the same text? those are good too.

so on to part 3 of the rant:

transcendent religions can have some interesting ideas,  taking christianity as an example because i’m less familiar intimately with buddhism.

most people don’t really have great grandkids in any quantity and everyone pretty much ends up related to ghengis kahn and charlemane?  fine, you can add people to your “tribe” or “family” just by talking to them and agreeing.

shit on earth is kinda weird and sucks? heaven.  it’s kinda weird and sketchy as a concept, and relying on the other realm as opposed to irl to fix things is always a bad idea.  but you can and are supposed to emulate it on earth, and it’s one main defining feature is it isn’t like what you have now, it’s different and better. how is it different? a lot of stuff doesn’t agree *shrug* . have fun!

people make good points about not valorizing suffering (though it mostly goes over my head as a masochist and sadist), but the idea of martyrs? you het a special award for dying young or in a really awkward way because people didn’t like you? um.  checkmate republicans, jesus c. christ invented the.... participation trophy and the “you tried” gold star sticker ??

anyway i think both christianity and buddhism could do some cool stuff with queerness if both religions havent historically kinda shit the bed in regards to queer people, depending on your location.  so that sucks.

anyway, deranged rant over.

and anyway, god bless Narrator!Andrew Hussie, Character!Dream Character!DreamXD and Evil Xisuma and all evil/villanous coded author inserts.  you are probably helping victims in weird ways many others aren’t.