#the outer series excerpt

[waltzshouldbewriting]

“Do you carry any weapons?” Rat interjected.

“I have a stunner,” Neuron replied. He had already replaced the stunner on his belt, so it was no longer hidden in his boot. “It won’t kill someone, but it’ll knock almost anyone out. It has a setting for droids and drones too.”

“Drones?” RJ asked. “Like, robots?”

“Yeah,” Neuron said, “but less humanoid, more… bug-like.”

“And that’s something you have to worry about?” Ariel asked. “Robots?”

“Unfortunately.”

“Unfortunately?” RJ asked. “That’s so cool! Much cooler than anything we’ve fought.”

[waltzshouldbewriting]

(This is unedited)

For a second, Neuron felt nothing. No sense of feeling, or touch, no sense of anyone around him, no sound or sight.

And then, suddenly, the presence of others - four strangers, each surprised and startled - followed by the smell of dust. His sense of touch returned next, and with it his sense of gravity and temperature: he was laying down on his back somewhere with rough ground and hot air. He could hear the high-pitched whine of old electronics, and the lingering taste of smoke in his mouth, and then - finally - his sight came back.

The four strangers were staring at him with wide eyes. None of them were armed, nor were they ready to attack. Behind them, a cavernous empty room stretched. Bright fluorescent lights hung from the high ceiling, one of the lights flickering slightly and another shining only half as bright. There was a pile of supplies - backpacks, blankets, and something that might’ve been a bow - in one corner. No places to hide traps or weapons.

Neuron mentally checked himself over for injuries. He was starting to get a headache, but he felt no sharp pains or dull bruises. Whatever had transported him here hadn’t harmed him.

But where was he?

Neuron pushed himself onto his elbows to get a better look at the strangers. They all tensed at the movement - not hostile, but nervous.

Only one was in arm’s reach - someone who looked a few years younger than Neuron, with short blonde hair, pale skin, and bright blue eyes. The person was unscratched, despite torn-up clothes - likely invincible - and was crouched down, one hand out as if to protect the others.

The person in front said something, and it took a second for Neuron’s brain to catch up. It was in English - with some type of a North American accent.

“Please don’t be mad at us?” Another person said - the one farthest to Neuron’s left. They looked eighteen, at most, standing off to the side with hands shoved in pockets. The person had light brown skin and dark brown eyes, messy chin-length hair, and a large sweatshirt and baggy sweatpants.

“He doesn’t even know what’s going on yet,” the person in front said.

“What is going on?” Neuron asked.

“You got kidnapped,” the person in front stated.

“But not by us!” The second person said. “We are very anti kidnapping.”

“We can explain,” another person said - the one nearest to the person in front. “My name’s Rat. I’m the oldest, so I guess that means I’m in charge.”

Rat had a scar over one eye that gave him an experienced look, but even then he didn’t look much older than the others. He had blue eyes, suntanned skin, and blonde hair, and worn-out clothes covered in dust and patches.

“He’s not the oldest by much,” the person in front said.

“That’s Ariel,” Rat said. “She’s friendlier than she looks.”

Ariel scowled.

“I’m RJ,” the fourth person added. “And the bundle of nerves next to me is Monsoon.”

RJ also had patches on her clothes - mostly on her shoulders and knees. Her black hair was pulled back out of her face, showing off a bruise on one cheek - with her pale skin, the bruise really stood out.

“Hi,” Monsoon said.

“Like Ariel said,” Rat continued. “You were kidnapped, and now you’re here-”

“- and it isn’t our fault,” Monsoon added.

“And you’re with us,” Rat said.

“And we’re on the run,” Ariel added.

“And we’re on the run,” Rat agreed. “Which sucks.”

“The government here sucks,” RJ added.

“Everything here sucks,” Ariel muttered.

“And where is here?” Neuron asked.

The four of them exchanged glances, a worried energy forming. It was almost familiar - it reminded Neuron of debriefs where a scientist or expert had to deliver really weird news. We looked into what caused the explosions, and we think that someone engineered exploding ants. Or the perpetrators belong to a group who is trying to make fruit flies extinct.

“So, um,” Rat started, “well…”

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[ironicveghead]

Armament for the wip game 👀

Armament is a Zosan whump series that I chip away at when I'm feeling savory. My hope is that maybe each will bloom into it's own standalone story but for now they live in that doc as a possible like 5+1 type of thing.

Here's an excerpt from one of them:

Three doors down on the left is the ornate mansion door the guards had been posted at. It’s also the only one in the hallway with two sets of steel bars fastened to keep it shut. 

No… that wasn’t right. 

They were braced to keep someone in. 

The outer edges of the wood door were charred, the paint cracked and peeling from heat. 

“Can you get this or do I need to find a way to unfasten it?” Usopp asks, gesturing to the steel beams. 

“I’ll handle it,” Zoro replies, bringing Kitetsu down in a tense downward strike. 

The metal bars bracing the door fall away and Zoro’s forcing his way through scorched wood before the metallic clanging stops.

The parlor is a large, opulent room. There are various pieces of smoking, crisp furniture shoved against the walls. A rug in the middle of the room trails smoke from its tassels. 

And there, in the middle of the parlor, is a man chained to a metal chair. His still body is hunched forward and there’s a brown sack fixed over his head. Tendrils of blond hair drape below the edge of the sack, the locks curled against a blue dress shirt. 

Zoro freezes. The body is so- so still and it strikes him with terror. 

He holds his breath and wills himself to move but feels as if he’s made of lead. 

Then. 

“Chou?” 

The word is quiet. It’s a hesitant whisper behind thick burlap and it’s the most beautiful and dreadful thing Zoro has ever fucking heard. 

“Curls,” he rasps out, rushing forward and dropping to his knees as he reaches for the ties of the burlap. “We’re here,” he swallows thickly, “I’m here.” 

[dailydemonspotlight]

Could I request one for Haokah? It is a rare demon of Native American mythology and it comes from smt 2, a game out of the Devil Summoner series where they took ahold of the narrative and made demons with their first appearances?

Haokah - Day 60 (Request)

Race: Yoma

Alignment: Neutral/Neutral

June 21st, 2024

Wow, we've got a pretty obscure one today! As the series has continued, a lot of demons have unfortunately been left behind- whether it be due to changes of licensing, controversy, or simple forgetfulness, a lot of demons earlier in the series failed to recur later on, a rather unfortunate symptom of how many ideas they had that struggled to translate to the metaphorical big screen. Today's Demon of the Day is one of those, and one I'd love to see make a return- the tricky Jester at the top of the Lakota food chain, the Haokah.

Also called the Heyoka, this role is that of an incredibly important figure in Sioux folklore, someone blessed by and able to see the all-important figure of the Thunder Being. Contrary to the explanation in SMT, the Haokah is not a deity in-and-of-itself, instead being the role of someone who effectively works to be the exact opposite of those around them, calling into view questions of and satire relating to life itself. The Haokah will typically work as what could be best seen as a funhouse mirror, twisting and calling into effect the flaws of the society they live within by exaggerating the opposites.

When one becomes the Haokah, they are given the role of doing various incredibly foolish things, acting afool, almost like a jester who manifests during a performance. For example, if food was to be scarce, a Haokah may end up complaining about how full he was, or during a horse-riding ceremony, he may ride it backwards. One such example of this was an infamous Haokah literally called the straighten-outer, who, to quote an excerpt from 'Lame Deer Seeker of Visions', "...was always running around with a hammer trying to flatten round and curvy things (soup bowls, eggs, wagon wheels, etc.), thus making them straight."

Honestly, I have no idea where the SMT idea of the Haokah as a hunting god came from- it sent me for a bit of a loop, as it's the only place online that lists the Haokah as a hunting god instead of as the ceremonial role it actually is. Also, funny enough, a lot of posts online related to the Haokah have to do with someone being an empath of it? I won't even begin to pretend I understand what that means, but okay. Honestly, I wish they also did a bit more with the design- most interpretations of the Haokah are weird, and this one feels just a bit too plain? It feels like they're trying to play into the hunting god idea, which is not what the Haokah even is. I wish they took a bit more inspiration from contemporary depictions of the Haokah, but... well, it was very early in the series, so I can't fault them much.

Still, flaws aside, I quite enjoy the fact that the series introduced me to such a unique concept! I guess I can see why they abandoned this demon down the road, though.

[artdecosupernova-writing]

Excerpt St. Guess

↳ Joey peered hard through the doors, cupping his hands around his eyes to get a better look inside. "Huh," he muttered, his breath fogging the glass in front of his face. "Well, it ain't a whiz-bang in there. Guess it's not open after all. Let's come back tomorrow."

Mickey looked in over Joey's shoulder and his expression settled on a concentrated frown. Farther inside the museum, in front of what Mickey could vaguely make out to be the security office, a man in a tan single-breasted suit without a hat spoke to a much more refined, older gentleman. The younger man took a catalog envelope from the older man and smiled personably, patting him on the shoulder and engaging with him directly, holding grateful eye contact. The older man smiled as well, shaking his hand as his brows pitched in apology.

"Are there people inside?" Joey asked.

Mickey watched the younger man laugh at something and turn toward the front of the museum. "Security guard talking to the director. Likely picking up a series of misplaced paychecks."

Joey stepped away from the door and urged Mickey to do the same. "What?"

"During the renovations, the staff paychecks were either misplaced, improperly handled, or halted," Mickey explained as he moved to stand closer to Joey. "One of the security guards has just received his back pay."

"How do you do that?" Joey shrugged, mystified. "One of these days, you gotta tell me how you do that."

"And give away my secrets? Joey." Mickey tutted with a grin. "It's fairly obvious."

"If it was obvious, d'you think I'd be standin' here makin' myself look stupid?"

"Hmm," Mickey intoned, choosing at the benefit of everyone not to respond to that otherwise.

The security guard opened the door, brushing past the pair as he exited. "'Scuse me, fellas," he said, gracing them both with the same warm smile Mickey had seen inside the museum.

Mickey locked eyes with him for one moment that dragged on like several. Neatly combed, blue-black hair—dyed. Shiny. Slicked down with pomade. His eyes were green, full of life, youthful in contradiction to the shallow crow's feet at the outer corners. His smile could have illuminated an entire room.

He shifted the envelope to his other hand and bounded down the steps.

Mickey watched him, his gaze tight. Willing the man to glance back at him.

Some physical distance grew between them before he did just that. He threw one last look behind him, halfway across the street, and the friendly smile developed into one of deep understanding…an acknowledgement of words unspoken, or perhaps a pass of pleased appraisal.

Joey's stare bounced from the man to Mickey. "You know him?"

"No," Mickey said.

But he was sure he would.

[rayningnight]

Star Wars - Ray’s Fic Recs List - Feb 2023

For Want of a Nail, Time Travel, AU/Dimension Travel/Crossovers, etc. Fic Recs List. Mostly Obi-Wan centric! Please mind the trigger warnings in the turn-offs. Relationships specified in the turn-offs too. I kept off the big name fics you probably already know/read that are the top-kudos-ed on AO3.

💫 are my favourites at the time of posting!

Italics are excerpts, summaries, author’s notes or tags, etc, for a glimpse of the fics!

Happy birthday I.C.! Hope whenever you need a break, you can peruse through this easily and find fics you haven’t read or fics you want to go back to! 😊

For Want of a Nail

Pre-Episode I

How one (1) mission changed mission reports for all by jemtessaremuslupin Review: Obi-Wan isn’t taken back by Master Qui-Gon Jinn, and becomes a Floater Padawan. His reports are... interesting. Part 2 is where this fic series shines! Work in progress, as of 12 Aug 2022. Words: 31,473. Works: 3

Be that monster you've been wanting by otherpeoplescoats Review: Imagine if Dooku took Obi-Wan as his padawan when he was 10 years old. Work in progress, as of 12 May 2022. Words: 29,164. Chapters: 12/?

aka, Obi-wan's no good very bad Padawanship fucks up the galaxy

Episode I

Tatooine Gusha by Natural_Logarhythm Review: Master Qui-Gon lost Obi-Wan on Bandomeer. Ben ends up in Tatooine, raising Anakin. This is an interesting storytelling method, where we see Ben’s voice at the beginning when he’s already back at the Order, explaining Episode I in his POV. Work in progress, as of 03 Feb 2023. Words: 51,592. Chapters: 11/15

“How in the Sith-hells do these things happen to you, Kenobi? Enslaved to a Hutt on a desert backwater in the Outer Rim and you still end up raising the Chosen One and defeating the first Sith Lord anyone has seen in a millennium.”

A Novel Alignment by quomores Review: Imagine if Darth Plagueis took in Obi-Wan. (This is not a happy fic.) “Sith Family Comedy,” indeed. I have mixed feelings overall after finishing, but I still think it’s a fic worth reading, this bleak world is... Yeah. Complete, as of 20 Jun 2020.  Words: 62,291. Chapters: 21/21

Darth Plagueis comes into possession of a Force-sensitive child and decides to run a little experiment. It doesn't go quite according to plan.

Cin Vhetin, Ogir'Olar (New Beginnings, One way or Another) by pureimagination Review: Okay, so the premise is that Obi-Wan gets separated from Satine and ends up losing his memories under torture from Death Watch, and this fic starts off 6 years after this, when Ben aliit Mereel ends up preventing Galidraan, and walks the path only Tarre Vizla has ever walked before. SUPER fast updates! Author write 4 chapters ahead and keeps a speedy schedule, and has already posted a sequel! Complete, as of 30 Jan 2023. Words: 28,260. Chapters: 17/17. Turn-Off(s): Character Death

When he is sixteen, Obi-Wan Kenobi is separated from his Master while protecting Duchess Satine Kryze. In one galaxy, he does his duty, falls in love, and leaves that love behind to follow the path of the Jedi. In another, he does his duty, and Death Watch takes him. Torn between two families, Obi-Wan has to find his own path forward.

Post-Episode I

Just Go Kill Palpatine by nevertheless_turtle Review: Yes. Obi-Wan is given the sus truth from Quinlan and responds not as a Jedi but as the caretaker for Anakin, thus exposing Palpatine’s hand early. I dearly hope this updates! The memes in the end too, are just *chef’s kiss*. Work in progress, as of 24 May 2021. Words: 6,832. Chapters: 4/5

In Which Obi-Wan Kenobi is Shown Holofootage of His 12-Year Old Padawan in a Seedy Nightclub With The Chancellor of the Republic And Has A Proportionate Response.

Men of Power by AlabasterInk Review: So, so many father-son feels between Obi-Wan and Anakin here! The what-if where people DO second guess why Old Sheeve Palpatine wants access to tiny padawan Anakin here? Work in progress, as of 04 Jan 2021. Words: 86,177. Chapters: 11/? Turn-Off(s): Gaslighting.

When an old powerful man suddenly comes in and sweeps your underage Padawan away without so much as a by your leave, that’s the time to start asking questions.

💫 Sith Killer by Livsy Review: This takes canon a bit sideways, because a Sith is not just a title here. Work in progress, as of 20 Dec 2022. Words: 107,559. Chapters: 27/40

In this one the Sith are magical dark space creatures kinda like demons

Based on the idea that killing a Sith Lord in turn makes you a Sith Lord

Where We’re Going by Thousand_elf Review: Can we just keep giving Anakin some hobbies? This is great. The glassblowing fic! Work in progress, as of 26 Dec 2021. Words: 8,436. Chapters: 2/?

In a Galaxy where Anakin Skywalker learned how to handle delicate objects, the Jedi and the Republic didn’t shatter, and Palpatine never got to rule an empire.

dead and the gold by Icarus_is_flying Review: This is not a fix-it. This is a what-if: Orders 66, during Episode I. Obi-Wan runs to his ex-grandmaster, because at least he’s not a hunted Jedi, right? Work in progress, as of 25 Dec 2020. Words: 115,123. Chapters: 27/? Turn-Off(s): Gaslighting.

The Republic is in turmoil. In the wake of the harrowing Naboo Crisis, Chancellor Valorum has seized control of the Trade Federation’s droid armies. A failed coup has branded the Jedi Order as traitors. Thousands of Jedi are dead. The rest, fugitives.

Stand By Me (What's in a Padawan?) by ShawnArms Review: Give Obi-Wan a padawan, so give him therapy too! Master Nu really is the best. Throw in some positivity and Tatooine Slave Culture realizations and... tada! Work in progress, as of 25 Dec 2022. Words: 40,138. Chapters: 10/?

The Making of Mand'alor Kryze by phoenixyfriend Review: If Satine died and it turns out Korkie Kryze was Obi-Wan’s son with her? Love the justification that Obi-Wan has to call Anakin his son... Work in progress, as of 18 Oct 2022. Words: 3,916. Chapters: 3/?

Obi-Wan now has his Jedi brother-son, age eleven, and his literal blood son, age six. He’s still a depressed mess; he’s kind of, retroactively, broken the Code, and Bo-Katan won’t stop calling him in the middle of the night to demand her nephew.

💫  Obi-Wan Declares Himself Dad Shaped by phoenixyfriend Review: There seems to be a trend here... but nevertheless, this is such fantastic voicing, for the POV Outsider. Complete, as of 19 Sep 2021. Words: 2,403. Chapters: 2/2

In walks this thirty-something Jedi-looking motherfucker, in robes with some small amount of armor, the second-most ridiculously Core accent you’ve ever heard outside a holo screen, and two kids who look ready to bite someone. The human one is twelve-ish and angry and wearing clothes that are too big for him, and has a lightsaber that he can’t really wrap his entire hand around. The Togruta looks about eight, and is chomping her way through a freshly killed, still bleeding lizard the size of her arm. She is clinging to the human kid’s tunics, and looking around like she’s got no fear whatsoever. You're almost impressed.

Episode II

💫 Shifting the Blame Around by Machina_Fun_T Review: Anakin places the blame on the Senate instead of the Jedi. This skews his views on a lot of different people. Complete, as of 14 Jan 2023.  Words: 17,680. Works: 3

The Ground Beneath Us by stolen_pen_name23 Review: Basically if Obi-Wan put the walker in Skywalker. If only one simple change could have happened for real... Complete, as of 27 Nov 2021. Words: 7,566. Chapters: 4/4

General Jocasta by BairnSidhe Review: Give the librarian the leadership to organize an army and well... Complete, as of 03 May 2022. Words: 18,474. Chapters: 8/8

there is no death (there is a wedding) by virdant Review: Crack. Pure, but hilarious. Excerpt: “Married?” Obi-Wan squeaked. He was unfortunately going through puberty. “What do you mean, I’m married now? I’m a Jedi! I can’t get married.” Or: Obi-Wan accidentally marries a ghost. Only... Jango isn’t dead. Complete, as of 11 Jan 2021.  Words: 8,759. Works: 5. Turn-Off(s): Jango/Obi-Wan

Episode III:

The Vagabond Crew by StephanieStephanie Review: What if Anakin didn’t Fall and ran away with the younglings? It’s not actually that long, and it paints a bleak picture still, but this some-what-of-a-fix-it isn’t a new hope, but many hopes still burning. My heart... WIP as of 16 March, 2021. Words: 19,185. Chapters: 31/?

Sacrifice by Artikka Review: Obi-Wan watches the video of Order 66 with Yoda. There’s a different hurt, here. Even as my heart shrivels up and twists more tears out.... this is still a better 'verse than canon. WIP as of 5 Sept 2020. Words: 6,976. Works: 2. Turn-Off(s): Character Death.

Post-Episode III

💫  Knightrise by deviantaccumulation Review: I think I’ve reread this like four times. There’s so much going on in this ‘verse where we get into the heads of the survivors of a genocide, of Vader, and the bonds between all. The nail here though, is Obi-Wan convincing Yoda away from a fight, from fighting Vader at all, and saving the cinders of the Order. Work in progress, as of 03 Dec 2021. Words: 89,475. Chapters: 27/?

Instead, a small but still alive Jedi Order rises from its ashes on Mandalore.

Unmasked by Mallow_of_the_Marsh Review: There isn’t a central character to this one, but it delves into the consequences of the whole Galaxy seeing the Jedi Temple getting gunned down. Complete, as of 12 Dec 2022. Words: 16,673. Chapters: 6/6

sun of my right hand by loosingletters Review: I need more fics like this one, where Obi-Wan raises Luke himself. Work in progress, as of 01 Mar 2021. Words: 4,307. Chapters: 6/?

inheritance by jesuisdeux Review: Grandpa Dooku gifts his life savings to Obi-Wan. Some officer shows up at Ben’s doorstep on Tatooine. Yes. Now we await part 2 in this series... Complete, as of 14 Mar 2021. Words: 4,737. Chapters: 1/1

Time Travel

Pre-Episode I

Hope Like a Blade, Intolerable by berrymascarpone Review: Would you like your heart shattered, just a little bit? Obi-Wan is born crying, remembering his death. Complete, as of 22 Apr 2020. Words: 2,716 Chapters: 1/1

Whispers of the Future by cywsaphyre Review: Oldie and goodie from ffnet. Author’s stopped writing, so read knowing that Obi-Wan may see the future, but we may never see the future of this fic. WIP as of 28 Jul 2012. Words: 37,640. Chapters: 5/?

💫 One Hundred Hours To Rearrange The Stars by soft_but_gremlin Review: PLEASE READ THIS. Part 1 is completed and Part 2 is a WIP and it’s just glorious seeing Obi-Wan, Anakin and Ahsoka in teeny-tiny bodies being cared for by Mandalorians and Jedi on Galidraan. Work in progress, as of  03 Feb 2023. Words: 41,319. Works: 2

Jango Fett expected several things from this hunt on Galidraan. Three hypothermic Jedi children stumbling into his camp was not one of those things.

💫 Change in the air by Ancathepurple Review: Obi-Wan travelling back after his death in canon to his 13-year-old-body fic on the ride back to the Temple after Melida-Daan. The trauma of a General is much worse in everyone’s eyes, and the ‘genius’ he shows by accident... yes, all of this, YES. Peggy Sue-ish, but I’m living for the family lineage feels. I’ve reread this twice already... Work in progress, 18 Nov 2021. Words: 34,521 Chapters: 14/?

Obi-Wan Kenobi left the Jedi order, for many months, only to return, sullen and quiet at Qui-Gon Jinn's side as people speculated the future fate of the once padawan.

Who you are today (is not who you have to be tomorrow) by wildimaginingsofhalfbakedideas Review: Another Obi-Wan travelling back in time to his 13-year-old-body fic, but this time, he hails the True Mandalorians for help since he knows their views on children. There’s quite a bit of mando’a throughout the fic, as Obi-Wan leaves with the True Mandalorians. Work in progress, as of 29 Jan 2023. Words: 69,612 Chapters: 20/?

Time and Time Again by seriouslythoughwhat Review: This has a lot of potential and I hope it’ll continue one day! Basically, if Ben was sent back , before Xanatos is found, but after Melida-Daan. Work in progress, as of 13 June 2020. Words: 12,168, Chapters: 3/?

Obi-Wan's mind travels back in time to his 13-year-old body post Rise of Skywalker. He tries to navigate being a child again, dealing with a Master who doesn't really trust him, and saving everything he loves. In order to do so, he must be willing to accept the help of those who love him, the question is, can he?

💫 a comedy in four acts by jesuisdeux Review: There isn’t another fic out there that captures this kind of prose, at least not one that I’ve found. It’s funny and definitely written by some English major out there who was like: what if we had not-gonna-take-your-shit Master Obi-Wan and living-to-spite-the-world Grandpa Dooku deciding to change the plot.  Words: 17,263. Chapters: 4/4

Yoda tries to comfort Padawan Kenobi about Melida/Daan, he just doesn't know that Obi-Wan takes his words for, uh, a particular Clone War. Nor does he know he is actually 57.

undeserving fall (this kind of sunlit love) by loosingletters Review: I’m putting this FIRST - Turn-Off: Luke/Palpatine. Yes, you read this crack right. This is crack treated seriously. I gave this fic a chance and so maybe everyone should? Redeeming Palpatine is never something most fics do. Complete, as of 19 Mar 2021. Words: 9,662. Chapters: 1/1. Turn-Off(s): Luke/Palpatine, Romance

A Naboo proverb says that it takes seven steps to fall from grace or climb towards glory. Sheev had never understood why the fall wasn’t considered a victory, when he had fallen towards the dark side with laurels adorning his head.

Post-Episode I

💫  General Kenobi and the Twins by phoenixyfriend Review: Obi-Wan is trying to train Anakin here, and then comes his future-self straight out of a war with two babies in tow. Lovely. Wish there was more in this ‘verse! Complete, as of 11 Nov 2021. Words: 13,174. Chapters: 2/2

Episode II  

💫 Ashes To Ashes, Dust To Dust by Livsy Review: OMG OMGOMG THIS IS JUST. PERFECTION. The POV Outsider from Anakin’s view on a changed Obi-Wan and how THIS Obi-Wan treats him. ;-; I have no words how much I love the hurt/comfort vibes. Work in progress, as of 29 Jan 2023.  Words: 24,477 Chapters: 9/10

In which Old Ben has time travelled back to the clone wars era, but twenty years on Tatooine have left their mark. Anakin notices.

Looking Glass by Livsy Review: Another Obi-Wan time travelling to the past; but he carries a Sith lightsaber. Misunderstanding ensue. Work in progress, as of 08 Aug 2022.  Words: 18,451. Chapters: 7/?

💫 Living Memory, My Fate to Follow by elsa3beth Review: Ben here really doesn't know his self worth and I hope that this journey not only saves the galaxy, but saves himself. Props also on handling the mental issues, the moral issues, the politics and the military! Definitely a favourite! WIP, as of 13 November 2021. Words: 353,548. Chapters: 30/40

It is a road paved with military campaigns, media faux pas, too many OCs to name, good Jedi, and a very very slowly developed angst that will eventually come to a boil. An exploration of war and friendship, and the moral grays of the Star Wars universe.

Visions in Red by likethesoda Review: So, imagine if jedi and clones recall the canon future-that-would-be. I wasn’t sure to put/categorize this as it’s technically time travel but the memories time travelled, not the person? Anywho. It’s amazing to see how people react to Anakin, how Anakin reacts, and though horrifying, this is also comforting? That they are all alive, and can maybe, possibly, do something. Work in progress, as of 06 June 2022.  Words: 16,546. Chapters: 6/?

The Jedi suffer a mass vision, one of death and horror. One of the end of the Order and the Republic. In order to prevent this and save their family, in order to plan, they run to far corners of the galaxy. They lock down as hard as they possibly can. It allows them to truly reflect, for the first time in decades.

💫 Birds Fly in Different Directions by Triscribe Review: One by one, jedi recall their deaths in the future. Yes. YES. Complete, as of 15 Dec 2022. Words: 14,666. Chapters: 3/3

In the corridor beyond her quarters, other Jedi were emerging from their own doors, most of them wide-eyed with shock. A few merely looked blearily concerned, and Aayla heard snatches of questions as she darted past, queries as to whether everyone experienced the same distressing vision. But those who clutched at their chests or throats, their weak points- those Jedi bore a muted horror in their eyes, and Aayla didn’t doubt they’d just suffered their own betrayals from trusted men.

desecrate my lungs by loosingletters Review: Let’s have Vaderkin wake up in the body of General Skywalker, and he forgets to breathe, because he’s been in a suit for two decades. Work in progress, as of 12 Dec 2020. Words: 16,050. Chapters: 8/?

Anakin Skywalker died in his son’s arms on the Death Star. He woke up again in the middle of a battlefield during the Clone Wars, choking because he forgot how to breathe without a machine forcing air in his lungs, unable to stand because he hadn’t been standing on his own legs for two decades.

a distant fire is burning by e_va Review: Cal Kestis travels back in time and ends up in his 10-year-old body, sent off to be Obi-Wan Kenobi’s padawan, and everyone deals with the consequences. I love the perspective,   the video-game-esque aesthetic, and I want to see more of the changes in dynamics with this new addition to the dysfunctional Jedi lineage! Work in progress, as of 23 Jan 2023. Words: 40,214. Chapters: 7/?

Cal's "time travel" ability has its roots in me joking with a friend about how the game could have canonized the Meditation Points/death respawns in the game (the way they did with the Force Echoes being used as an excuse for worldbuilding.) Don't expect it to be wildly OP or get spammed; it's just a game mechanic that spawned this idea and will be used with reserve.

They Don't Care About Us by ironhoshi Review: Here is another Cal-centric fic! With an added time traveller: Boba Fett! Imagine if these two interrupted Obi-Wan’s meeting with Jango at Kamino, and ended up causing much confusion and interesting changes to the world? Work in progress, as of 27 Feb 2022. Words: 62,215. Chapters: 33/? Turn-Off(s): Obi-Wan/Jango

(I Promise) This Time Will be Different by Nation_Ustria Review: Yes, here’s a third one with Cal. I love the conversations and the interactions with the clones in this one! Seriously... There’s something about these fics... Work in progress, as of 05 Nov 2022.  Words: 21,975. Chapters: 7/?

Cal doesn’t know how he ended up back in the Clone Wars. Last he’d checked, time travel isn’t possible, but then, what would he know? He’d only been a Padawan for eight months before Order 66 had gone out.

To Fix the Shattered Past by Forever_A_Thief Review: Throw Obi-Wan, Anakin and Ahsoka from the Clone Wars into child bodies during Melida-Daan, and stir. I love the Grandpa Dooku vibes here. Sometimes it’s nice to have fics without the dark side showing in Anakin and Dooku, y’know? Work in progress, as of 22 Jan 2023.  Words: 35,976. Chapters: 10/?

Stop All The Clocks by Panda_2703 Review: This fic has Obi-Wan thrown into the body of his General body, and he attempts, through his trauma of dying four years into his exile on Tatooine, to save whoever he can 8 months before the end of the Republic. Ahsoka’s trial goes differently! Work in progress, as of 14 Nov 2022.  Words: 37,866. Chapters: 7/?

how to disappear completely by jaigeye Review: Have you ever read a fic with Jango Fett as the time looper? Not just a single travel back but he dies, so many times, and gets back to square one- at least, until we have a hopeful ending for everyone. Complete, as of 25 Feb 2022.  Words: 11,595. Chapters: 1/1

Touch Starved by CourtesyTrefflin for uncorrectgrammar Review: This is THE hurt/comfort fic starring Obi-Wan and Vaderkin. There is so much to unpack with these two... Complete, as of 15 Dec 2022. Words: 71,012. Chapters: 22/22

They are Anakin and Obi-Wan. They are Darth Vader and Ben Kenobi. It doesn't matter. Names mean nothing. Not for them. They should be enemies. They are a Jedi Master and a Sith Lord. And yet... nothing can truly keep them apart.

Fate Gives Second Chances by The_subtle_briar Review: Ben is not of sound mind when he wakes up in the past, and it’s understandable that years of trauma and in exile would make him think this all a sham at the beginning. Work in progress, as of 16 Sept 2022. Words: 111,199. Chapters: 30/35. Turn-Off(s): Longfic, Cody/Obi-Wan

there but for the grace of god by wanderlove Review: Let’s have Luke travel back in time from an alternate universe where he’s being raised by Ben! Miscommunication and misunderstandings ensue. Complete, as of 24 Apr 2021. Words: 49,217. Chapters: 12/12

The Kenobi Scandal by AppoApples Review: Both Luke and Ben travel back, and they explain Luke’s existence as Luke Kenobi. Shenanigans ensure for a grand fix-it fic! Complete, as of 23 Dec 2020.  Words: 97,426. Chapters: 19/19

Alternate Universe / Crossovers

💫 still much that is fair by RaineyDay Review: Padawan Obi-Wan dimension travels/time travels into a war-torn universe where his padawan saves him? He’s a Master? He’s on the Council?!? Complete as of 4 May 2021. Words: 21,173. Chapters: 8/8. Turn-Off(s): Suicide Attempt/Thoughts.

Aliit ori'shya tal'din by SilverRayan Review: This universe has the Sith Empire, the Mandalorian Empire and the Galactic Republic. The excuse to have Obi-Wan and Jango Fett fight for their sons is great. Work in progress, as of 25 Jul 2022.  Words: 18,847. Chapters: 6/? Turn-Off(s): Jango/Obi-Wan

Manda'kara by Virodeil Review: BB!Obi-Wan delves deep into the archives as he nearly ages out for Knighthood. The worldbuilding in this one is amazing! The idea of the culture of the Mandalorians still being preserved here... the POTENTIAL of this series! Completed, as of 22 Dec 2022. Words: 10,569. Chapters: 10/10

24 Seconds by c_m_li Review: Imagine Obi-Wan and Quinlan, teenagers sent off to a mission, go MIA, until they are found by the True Mandolorians. I like the respect in cultures/traditions in this. Complete, as of 26 Sep 2022.  Words: 11,314 Chapters: 1/1.  Turn-Off(s): Obi-Wan/Quinlan

devoted by loosingletters Review: If Anakin was more eldrich, god-like and this has consequences, in a world, “where the Force splits into aspects of itself, deities for all sentients of the galaxy to worship, people cling to their silent gods, wishing they could be just as powerful.” Complete, as of 06 Mar 2022. Words: 34,308. Chapters: 8/8. Turn-Off(s): slightly Anakin/Obi-Wan.

“You Jedi keep the Republic’s deities,” Shmi spoke before Anakin could. “Or at least those that are not owned by their planets. You have a certain pull to you.”

falling up by obiwanobi, shatou Review: This series is based on if Obi-Wan never got to take in Anakin as his padawan, and Anakin is raised by Palpatine. Vader shows up at Obi-Wan’s doorsteps, and this is Vader’s journey back to the light. Work in progress, as of 18 Nov 2021. Words: 24,060. Works: 9. Turn-Off(s): pre-Obi-Wan/Anakin hinted?

With no root in the land --(To keep my branches green) by llamallamaduck Review: This NARUTO crossover is something I never imagined to like, but wowza. Imagine Anakin, an eldrich being instead of our canon humanoid, dimension travels to the Five Great Shinobi Countries, specifically, Whirlpool. Uzushiogakure will never fall, but the other nations? Hm. Work in progress, as of 28 Nov 2022. Words: 25,490. Chapters: 7/?

He is not a human and he is not a beast and he is not a creature, but he is. He is a being, then. A being that changes and learns and lives. He thinks his name is Ani.

A Star to Steer By by dogmatix, norcumi Review: I’ve never even read/watched Stargate Atlantis before, and you don’t really need to after either. Just… Jedi are all snake-things. Sorta. Obi-Wan and the 212th Company arrive in an alternate dimension. Work in progress, as of 21 Dec 2022. Words: 115,437. Works: 2.

Not so long ago, in a galaxy not very far away at all, there's a Republic with an order of Jedi - a symbiotic species and their clone hosts.

Bare Your Teeth, Soldier by phoenixyfriend Review: OKAY AS A HEADS UP THIS IS NOT A ROMANCE. IT IS NOT SMUT. Now, imagine our regular, canon duo, The Team, ending up in the omegaverse. Yes. This is that fic. I highly recommend, please suspend all disbelief, for the worldbuilding. Work in progress, as of 19 July 2022. Words: 13,306. Chapters: 2/?

A pair of assholes, covered in blood, land in your conference room during a meeting. They bicker for five minutes without even acknowledging the dozen people that were already here, and then greet your coworker like they know the guy, immediately asking why he isn't dead anymore.

On the other side by esama Review: What-if Obi-Wan never became a Jedi Knight? AgriCorps = academics and plants. Much love. Complete, as of 20 Dec 2020.  Words: 53,143. Chapters: 14/14

Canon Universe

💫 Reputations. by outpastthemoat Review: There’s something to be said about a fic that captures a badass Gary Stu from POV Outsider, and then POV Obi-Wan is like: ??? Me??? Perfect??? What is a consummate jedi because it ain’t him, fumbling along. Read when you want a feel-good. Complete as of 18 March 2021. Words: 36,738. Chapters: 12/12

not the place that I was born in (doesn't mean it's not the place where I belong) by ghostwriterofthemachine Review: Worldbuilding on Jedi Traditions, in Anakin’s POV. Could be AU and lead to a hopeful future, but too short (and sweet) to know for sure. Complete, as of 06 Aug 2020. Words: 5,030. Chapters: 1/1

Acknowledged by EclipseMidnight (EternalEclipse) Review: What-if there was more initiations to be done to become a Knight of the Jedi Order? 25 Sept 2017. Words: 14,328. Chapters: 1/1

The Folly of Foresight by Blue_Sunshine Review: The author of Desert Storm made a side-story about canon Obi-Wan knowing his fate with Infinite Sadness, and I live for this. Complete, as of 18 July 2022. Words: 2,431. Works: 2

twin suns by too_obsessed_with_everything Review: There’s something special about fics that verge off the script but still end up back into canon. Leia from Obi-Wan Kenobi (TV Series) is precious and precocious and this really captures a dangerous, coming-of-age adventure. Complete, as of 18 Dec 2022. Words: 37,610. Chapters: 15/15

everything I have ever learned by Fialleril Review: I’m sure everyone and their mother in the SW fandom has heard of the author of Double Agent Vader and the originator of the Tatooine Slave Culture tag. It’s again, amazing worldbuilding, focusing on Luke, and can coincide mostly with canon! I missed this years later, so here’s a flag you missed it too! Complete, as of 04 June 2019. Words: 12,717. Chapters: 2/2

Remedial Jedi Theology by MarbleGlove Review: This one is old, and I was going to leave the big-name, many-kudosed fics out of this list, but I felt like this one may be harder to find. The fic that made me first click the Obi-Wan Kenobi & Anakin Skywalker tag. Complete, as of 15 Aug 2018.  Words: 51,336. Chapters: 7/7

Let us consider the fact that the Jedi Order is a monastic religious organization based out of a temple, with five basic tenets of faith. Ch 1: Death, yet the Force (meeting Anakin) Ch 2: Chaos, yet Harmony (teaching Anakin) Ch 3: Passion, yet Serenity (teaching a teenaged Anakin, good grief) Ch 4: Ignorance, yet Knowledge (Anakin is a Knight now, why is he still Obi-Wan’s problem?) Ch 5: Heresy, yet Orthodoxy (actual plot? Ie, Clones and Sith) Ch 6: Emotion, yet Peace (epilog) Ch 7: extras / deleted scenes

[mediaevalmusereads]

The Princess Diarist. By Carrie Fisher. Blue Rider Press, 2016.

Rating: 3.5/5 stars

Genre: memoir

Series: N/A

Summary: When Carrie Fisher discovered the journals she kept during the filming of the first Star Wars movie, she was astonished to see what they had preserved--plaintive love poems, unbridled musings with youthful naiveté, and a vulnerability that she barely recognized. Before her passing, her fame as an author, actress, and pop-culture icon was indisputable, but in 1977, Carrie Fisher was just a teenager with an all-consuming crush on her costar, Harrison Ford.

With these excerpts from her handwritten notebooks, The Princess Diarist is Fisher's intimate and revealing recollection of what happened on one of the most famous film sets of all time--and what developed behind the scenes. Fisher also ponders the joys and insanity of celebrity, and the absurdity of a life spawned by Hollywood royalty, only to be surpassed by her own outer-space royalty. Laugh-out-loud hilarious and endlessly quotable, The Princess Diarist brims with the candor and introspection of a diary while offering shrewd insight into one of Hollywood's most beloved stars.

***Full review below.***

CONTENT WARNINGS: alcohol, adultery

The aspect of this book I liked best was Carrie's honesty. Carrie holds nothing back and is quite upfront about her insecurities, her naivite, and her desire to please. The effect is that this memoir reads like a snapshot of a teenage girl who is starstruck by a much older man, and it's both hilarious and a little sad (in that Harrison Ford comes across as... not great).

Let's just get this part out of the way: this is not an in-depth behind-the-scenes look at the filming of Star Wars. The book jacket and marketing might be a little misleading on that front. If you're here for more Star Wars trivia or juicy gossip from one of the franchise's buggesy stars, best go elsewhere.

What this is, more than anything else, is Carrie's reflection on a number of things: her relationship with Harrison Ford while she was was a teenager and he was married and in his mid-thirties, how so-called "washed up" actresses struggle to make a living, the complicated feelings Carrie has regarding conventions and fame. For what it is, this book is endlessly funny, raw, and heartbreaking, moving from Carrie's characteristic humor and self-deprication to a hard-hitting insight into the workings of Hollywood and celebrity fandom.

Still, I don't think I can give this book more than 3.5 stars because there were aspects of Carrie's writing that didn't click for me. Some of her phrasing was a little awkward, and sometimes she would veer off in different directions (which is fine - that's the way her mind works - but it is also hard to follow sometimes). I also would have liked Carrie to deliver some sort of takeaway for each chapter - not necessarily a "moral to the story," but a clear(er) verbalizarion of the insights she gained by reflecting on the stories she's told.

The excerpts from her diary were also nice little insights to Carrie's headspace at the time, and if you care about Carrie as a person (not just Carrie as Princess Leia), they're a lovely look into the way her mind works.

But perhaps the section I liked best was Carrie's chapter on conventions. I found her honesty and complexity to be incredibly insightful and it shines a light on what she had to deal with for 40 years after the first Star Wars film.

Still, I'm glad I read this book. It's quick, it's amusing, and the photos are charming and nostalgic. The book perhaps hits a little different because both Carrie and her mother are gone, so some of my good feeling might be influenced by me being a fan who misses these icons. But if you love Carrie, you'll cherish this chance to "hear" her voice again.

[lunastarhawk]

The Call of the Stars

Part 14 of Julian post-route series Tides of Memories (on AO3).

On and on into the starry abyss, living my best life. Because who needs canon anyway.

Also, The Star is my new favourite to write. She's so fun.

Summary

An unexpected visitor sheds new light on Julian's book of constellations and myths. Altheia's desperate search for her gateway leads her to make a reckless decision to venture to the Arcana realms alone, and only Julian can pull her out - and chance encounters with The Star and Judgement are more than a little revelatory.

~*~*~*~

"I felt something pulling me, across the lake.  But then the feeling faded, and I walked us right into Valdemar’s trap.” “Is that really what happened?” “Yes,” Altheia said bitterly.  “I nearly got us both killed.” “Hmm.”  Judgement’s trunk curled upwards lazily.  “I don’t think so.” “That’s exactly how it happened,” Altheia said bitterly.  “My ‘intuition’ wasn’t good for much.” The impossibly deep, golden eyes narrowed a little.  “Your intuition wasn’t the problem.  When you stopped listening to it - that was where you made the wrong choice."  They paused, and then added, "But was it really wrong, after all?  You didn't find your gateway, but you found something else, didn't you?" Altheia shifted her weight on her knees as she thought.   "Well, yes.  Valdemar."  "A purpose." Altheia huffed in frustration.  “That doesn’t really help, you know.” “It helps more than you think it does.”

Excerpt

“You… really don’t know what this is, do you?”

“Ah… it’s a book of stars and stories?”

But it was intoned as a question, because suddenly Julian was certain only that it wasn’t just a book of stars and stories.  

“The name didn’t give you a clue?”  Selina was lightly mocking him. 

“I… I didn’t think… no, it didn’t, I didn’t…”

He looked at her helplessly.  Now she smiled gently.

“I won’t pretend to know much about it,” she admitted.  “But I read about a fair few schools of magic before I settled on alchemy.  Astromancers take the science of astronomy, and the magic of astrology, and they make talismans.  Very powerful ones.”

“They do?”

Julian was aware of how stupid he sounded, but for once he couldn’t find any words.

“Like I said, I don’t know all that much about it.  But I do know that these are alchemical…”  She traced around the outer circle again.  “These are planetary, or astrological… or maybe illusory.”  She tilted her head a little as she traced around the inner circle.  “Could be.  Anyway, and then you have the star chart in the centre.  I’d bet that one of those magical symbols is a trigger.”

Julian’s head whirled, partly from disbelief, partly from his underlying mistrust of magic that hadn’t quite faded - despite being in love with a magician - and partly from excitement.  

“Star charts, I understand,” he murmured.  “Alchemy, too… you take something, and you make something else.  I… don’t know about these other symbols, but…  What is it?”

Selina gave a little burst of laughter, of disbelief that Julian still wasn’t understanding.  

“It’s a spell, Julian.  Three different schools - or languages, as you say - alchemy, astrology magic, and astronomy.  Two charges, and a when.  It’s astromancy.”

“What does it do?” 

Selina shrugged.  “I don’t know.  I’m not a magician of any kind.  I don’t even know all the alchemical symbols.”  She flashed him a grin.  “Try it and find out.”

Julian’s breaths quickened, his heart raced, and a cold sweat broke out on his palms and neck.

“I don’t know, I’m not a magician, I know science, the astronomy makes sense, but I don’t know any of the rest of it.”  He pushed his hands through his hair with one hand, the other on his hip.  “And how does it even work?  How do you cast it?  Just… just draw it?”

“I was joking,” Selina said gently.  But then she peered up at him, and he knew how flustered and wild-eyed he must look.  And she hesitantly ventured, “Unless…?”

Julian’s hands were trembling and a sense of panic was coming over him.  He shook his head vigorously and closed the book firmly, pushing it halfway across the table.

“No.  No, I don’t think it’s a, uh…”  he fluttered his fingers.  “a spellbook , or astromancy, it’s quite nonsense I’m sure, and besides which I have no business with it.”  Nodding decisively, he turned from the table and waved his hand in the air as he spoke, looking back over his shoulder at Selina as she followed.  “If there’s one thing I’ve learnt in all my years, it’s not to fool around with magic you don’t understand.”

~*~*~*~

“Mm.  Very wise.” 

The Call of the Stars

Part 14 of Tides of Memories

[waltzshouldbewriting]

“RJ doesn’t have moot either,” Rat said. “She nearly blinded herself just a couple weeks ago.”

“Almost nearly blinded myself,” RJ corrected. 

“What are your powers?” Neuron asked. 

RJ grinned and raised her hand. A ball of glowing red formed around it and shot out towards the ceiling, where it exploded. 

“They call me Cannon Blast,” RJ said. 

[waltzshouldbewriting]

“This is depressing,” Neuron muttered. No wonder there were doomsday warnings everyone - this felt like a scene from a post-apocalyptic movie. A really, really cheaply made post-apocalyptic movie.

“You’re not in Kansas anymore,” Ariel replied.

Neuron nodded.

“What’s it like, where you’re from?” Ariel asked.

“That’s a pretty big question,” Neuron replied. “What do you want to know?”

Ariel frowned. “Well - I don't know. You’re a telepath, right? So you would have had to go through the surge, what, ninety-eight years ago?”

Neuron nodded. “Yeah. Everyone got powers. Some got a power plus shapeshifting.”

“Same thing here,” Ariel said. “If I had to guess, the surge was the splitting point between our two worlds - but there’s no way to confirm that, without comparing history books or something.”

“I know a good deal of history,” Neuron replied. “Try me.”

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[inksociopath]

The preferences and selfishness of the highest commander

——An analysis of ADHP relationship based on original novel only.

It is well known that Albus Dumbledore is the highest commander of the white side of the war campaign against Voldemort. Everyone on the white side took Dumbledore's orders as top priority and right answers, because Dumbledore's instructions "Always turns out to be right" Dumbledore is such a God-like existence in Harry Potter novels: he knows things like god, knows people like god and his magical skills are indisputably the most powerful in the whole series. At various scenes in the book, Harry thought he was in the stratosphere, only to discover he's actually in outer space in the end. Dumbledore's personal abilities are extraordinary, but I believe that while his abilities as a commander were excellent and outstanding, there were some serious and even fatal omissions. Much can be found in a speech he gives in chapter 37 of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, The Lost Prophecy.

The following is an excerpt from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, chapter 37, The Lost Prophecy, in which Harry talked to Dumbledore after Sirius's death when he returned to Hogwarts.

"It is my fault that Sirius died,’ said Dumbledore clearly. ‘Or should I say, almost entirely my fault ——I will not be so arrogant as to claim responsibility for the whole. Sirius was a brave, clever and energetic man, and such men are not usually content to sit at home in hiding while they believe others to be in danger. Nevertheless, you should never have believed for an instant that there was any necessity for you to go to the Department of Mysteries tonight. If I had been open with you, Harry, as I should have been, you would have known a long time ago that Voldemort might try and lure you to the Department of Mysteries, and you would never have been tricked into going there tonight. And Sirius would not have had to come after you. That blame lies with me, and with me alone.’"

Let’s translate what Dumbledore said: It was not Sirius's fault that he disobeyed my orders and went to the Ministry of Magic himself, for he was by nature an energetic man who could not hide at home when believing others were in danger. Nor was it Harry's fault that he had taken it upon himself to run off to the Ministry of Magic, regardless of the consequences, because he was also a man who goes to save people when believing they were in danger. It was my failure to tell Harry that Voldemort might use the link between Voldemort and Harry, and why he was learning Occlumency, that led to this tragedy. Because I am so capable, I should be able to see all the minds of our soldiers, anticipate all your actions, and count in all your recklessness. And I was wrong, which led to Sirius’s dead. This is all my fault.

What a harsh self-requirement.

Later in the chapter, Dumbledore told Harry about the contents of the prophecy: Neither can survive while the other is alive. Most readers have been caught up in the prophecy the first few times they read this chapter, and have missed the rest of Dumbledore's message. But as I listened to the audiobook for the third time in a row, word for word, I noticed how informative Dumbledore's words had been:

‘I cared about you too much,’ said Dumbledore simply. ‘I cared more for your happiness than your knowing the truth, more for your peace of mind than my plan, more for your life than the lives that might be lost if the plan failed. In other words, I acted exactly as Voldemort expects we fools who love to act.

‘Is there a defence? I defy anyone who has watched you as I have – and I have watched you more closely than you can have imagined – not to want to save you more pain than you had already suffered. What did I care if numbers of nameless and faceless people and creatures were slaughtered in the vague future, if in the here and now you were alive, and well, and happy? I never dreamed that I would have such a person on my hands.

It can be known from the passage above that Dumbledore cared for Harry far more than he cared for the other White warriors, or the other Hogwarts students. His caring about Harry had blinded him to the interests of the other " nameless and faceless people and creatures ". In fact, in the original books, Dumbledore also came up with many dangerous plans for other soldiers in order to protect Harry. For example, Moody's death and George's loss of an ear were the direct result of the seven Harry's air battle plan, not to mention the fact that Snape was doing dangerous wirewalking every day because of the tasks he was sending him on. Dumbledore cared for Harry as much as a parent would care for his own child, who was more important than anyone else. And this is very unfair to the other white soldiers. Other righteous characters, like Hermione, the Weasleys, Moody, Lupin, Tonks, Sirius, etc., all have sense of justice and virtue no less than Harry's, but Dumbledore, as he himself admits, has favoured Harry over many others. And these omissions, which he himself was aware of, were caused by his caring and loving for Harry, being a "fool who love". If Dumbledore were regarded as a god with flesh, such selfishness and favouritism would not be proper. But in the end, he is still a human being, and a very good and great one.

[darsynia]

Diminished Seventh (ch 3)

(Stephen Strange/OC, 'mistrust to lovers,' Animate Objects series)

art found here: duttaayon14008 | gif by @marveledits

Length: 3,551

Animate Objects | Previous Chapter | Next Chapter

I am quite new, and a wee bit shy about tags and asks, but please feel free to send them anyway! Tags: @starryeyes2000, @raith-way, @arrthurpendragon, @sobeautifullyobsessed

A 'diminished seventh' chord creates tension that begs to be resolved.

Excerpt:

“Have you made any progress in differentiating the deaths?” Wong asked without preamble.

Stephen shook his head. “No, and I don’t see that there’s a path, there. You know you’ve died too many times when you lose track of how many times it was impalement over incineration.”

He stripped off his outer clothing, down to a simple black pair of trousers and a cream-colored tunic with no sleeves. The torch he’d lit upstairs from one of their most ancient relics crackled as he lit the other three and set the fourth into its recess. The hour he’d spent meditating beforehand had been restless in a way it usually was not, so Stephen anticipated this to be a rough session.

“Are you ready?” he asked Wong.

“Am I ever?” came the usual reply.

“One of these nights you’re going to change it up. You’ll say ‘never,’ and that’ll be the night I find the thing I’m looking for.”

“May it pass from your lips to your mind’s eye.” 

Chapter Three

“Once again I have to ask you if you know what you’re doing?”

Stephen was still watching Amy marching away from him. Maybe if he pretended not to hear--

“If you won’t listen to me, I won’t help you.”

He wheeled around, jaw clenching. The expression on Wong’s face was sympathetic rather than angry, and that didn’t bode well. “Define ‘won’t help,’” Stephen gritted out.

“I was happy to come once a week and help you wrestle with the visions, Stephen. I’m certain you would have continued searching through them by yourself, if I hadn’t. But I don’t think you realize that you incurred more than just a mystical debt, in your battle with Dormammu.”

“Yes, yes. Psychological damage, which I’m dealing with as best I can,” he dismissed. “What the hell does that have to do with--”

Wong stepped closer and lowered his voice. “Every minute you spent in that loop took you chronologically farther from safety, farther from the people and places you loved. Time can heal, but it also separates.” He threw a look over his shoulder in Amy’s direction, and Stephen felt a roiling anxiety froth up in his gut. “I fear you have chosen to seek truth in your time loop torture for the same reason you’ve taken up the mystery of this woman.”

“I don’t have to stand here and listen to this bullshit,” Stephen snapped, pushing past Wong on his way to opening the door and getting out of there.

“Are you looking for answers or excitement, Stephen?”

Wong’s accusation rang out, and he stopped still, teeth grinding. Stephen could feel his pulse speeding up, commensurate with his anger. He spun on his heel and walked back toward his friend and colleague. His voice had always been one of his most powerful weapons, and Stephen employed it now, dropping his tone, stirring in a pinch of threat, a scoop of innuendo, but even he could hear the hefty serving of defensiveness when he was finally standing in front of Wong.

“Tell me exactly what you think my problem is. Don’t dance around it.”

“I’m not prevaricating at all. If you think so, you’re the one dancing.”

It was calculated, this risk. Kamar Taj’s location wasn’t a secret to anyone who was looking, and it was populated with powerful, strong-willed people who would like nothing better than to protect it. Still, Stephen’s head was filled with the past, various chunks of it-- undoubtedly a remnant of his weekly battles to remember. Wong’s accusation about excitement was off-base, but Stephen was chasing something.

“I stand by what I said,” Amy told him. It was the first time she’d spoken in a full five minutes; their portal had been facing the mountains, and after stepping out, she’d simply walked as close as she could get, pressed herself up against the wall of the courtyard, and stared. She was clearly in awe, but her body language told him she was also nervous. “You don’t make any sense.”

“Some would take that as a compliment.”

She turned her head and regarded him. “You think I’m an enemy and still bring me here of all places? The spiritual heart of your--” Amy struggled for words, then looked back over at the far mountains. “Stephen, what on Earth happened that you’re so fearful and trusting, all at once?”

This woman seemed determined to get under his skin. She’d been immediately comfortable with using his name, had somehow touched him multiple times despite their having only just met. Through his life, he’d gone from being a brilliant but driven student to a brilliant but driven surgeon, and now he was Sorcerer Supreme. In every role, he’d been given deference, distance.

Amy didn’t bother with those things.

She was looking at him expectantly, and Stephen thought of Kaecilius, then of himself, newly trained and thrust into a position to fight for his life and the safety of the sanctum. “I’m not fearful, I’m guarded, and for good reason. Those allowed into our most sacred spaces are the ones with the most power to do damage. That’s as true here as it is as a metaphor.” He took in a breath, setting loose his gathered thoughts about that ordeal in a long, measured sigh. “I brought you here in case you had been here before. In case someone recognized you.”

“That helps, actually,” she said, her crooked smile lifting more on the right. “It’s the suspicious ‘you’ I recognize.”

Stephen indicated that they should start toward the center of the courtyard. As they walked, he noticed a group of students practicing across from them. It was too far to hear the instructor’s words, but the sharp sound of her staff striking the ground made the front row bow in apology.

“We’re distracting them!” Amy said in dismay, starting to angle away.

“Maintaining focus is part of their task,” he said. He felt a drag on the Cloak and looked over to see that his relic had caught her arm to prevent her from moving away. The look on her face was fond but uncomfortable as she slowed, deciding what to do. “I wanted you to watch them for a few moments.”

“Can we do that in a way that doesn’t put us right in their line of sight?”

He thought about that for a moment, then inclined his head. With a swift, practiced gesture, Stephen opened a portal, indicating for her to precede him through it.

“What kind of life have you led where you expect people to trust you that much?” she asked him, incredulous. “For that first one I could see the mountains and a safe place to stand. That just shows the sky!”

Stephen’s response was to add a gesture, causing the portal to sweep toward and over them, taking them to his chosen destination. It was either that or grab her hand and yank her along with him, and he suspected he would have enjoyed that too much. 

“Well, you certainly don’t do anything in halves,” Amy said, crossing her arms.

The place he’d chosen was a roof-top alcove that overlooked the courtyard, an observation space he’d often used himself, for this exact purpose. He appreciated that she took stock of her surroundings as a matter of course, turning in a careful circle, just as she’d done when he’d pulled them into the Mirror Dimension in the basement. It was a good habit, and Stephen chastised himself for seeing her more as a potential trainee than someone to be wary of.

“I know I’ve only been here for ten minutes, but-- have you ever seen one of those warning signs that are meant to scare people into being careful? ‘Not only will this kill you, but it will hurt the entire time you’re dying,’” Amy quoted. Stephen’s brows furrowed, and she nodded toward Kamar Taj, laid out in front of them. “It really feels like this place is the spiritual opposite of that.”

He breathed the compliment in before he could stop himself, sending its sweetness coursing through his bloodstream until the words suffused his whole body. The “Thank you,” he offered felt inadequate. “Sounds like experience talking.”

“Electrical substation, or something like that,” she told him. “It was close to the flood zone after a hurricane, and we had to send someone to guard it, so that no one proved the sign right just to get a picture.” Amy shook her head. “This is another level of sightseeing, here.”

“Well, I didn’t bring you for the mountains or the architecture. I brought you to observe them,” Stephen said, indicating the training students.

She looked confused, but obediently (for once) stood quietly watching for a few minutes before saying, “Is it that there are many more students than just me? People who will fight back if I am the villain you seem to hope I am?”

He ignored her jibe and said, “Not quite. May I cast something to amplify your hearing so you can catch the instruction?”

“How long will it last?” she asked, adding, “I took public transit to your sanctum, Stephen. I do not want to hear everyone’s conversations on my way back.”

He liked the way she said his name. He didn’t want to like the way she said his name.

“Twenty minutes, usually.” Stephen lifted a hand, pulled on his connection, and waited for her nodding response before casting.

“Oh my,” Amy said immediately. “That has to be tuned to voices or I’m certain I’d hear your heartbeat!”

“Just listen” he instructed, tamping back the parts of him that were greedy to explore the charming ways she reacted to things.

Stephen didn’t need to enhance his own hearing. He knew the group and liked and trusted their instructor, so he watched as Master Wolfe moved from student to student, suggesting something here, chastising there. Karl Mordo’s loss was a loss for all of Kamar Taj, for all that he’d rarely spent time with large groups like this by the time of Stephen’s arrival. He had been the one the Adepts hoped to spar with, someone who was complimentary but never condescended to lose.

Amy had asked Stephen what he was afraid of, but how could he explain that Kamar Taj had gone through one betrayal, and might soon suffer another? ‘The bill comes due,’ Mordo had said, after Dormammu. It wasn’t until the nightmares had started just a week later that he connected his former friend and colleague’s defection with the glimpses of a horrible future, seen in flashes between dying repeatedly in the time loop. The next search would be that night, brought forward a day thanks to Wong’s visit.

Perhaps Wong was right. Maybe Stephen was looking for a distraction, a mystery wrapped in defiance and the light scent of vintage perfume to balance out the experience of reliving those moments.

“Not everyone can conjure, yet!” Amy realized aloud.

“Exactly,” he said, pleased that she’d figured out what he’d wanted her to notice. “That was me, once. I didn’t handle it very well.” Her laugh was a welcome sound. “It took a lot of time and a lot of reading before I made the right connection.”

Her hand landed on his forearm, squeezing. “Reading?” Amy asked, obviously excited.

Wong wasn’t the permanent librarian anymore, but he’d been there when Stephen and Amy arrived, meaning that Stephen could take care of a few things without needing to take her along with him.

He came back in an hour to find that she had a stack of books and a notebook, and was already taking diligent notes.

“You can’t take those home with you, you know,” he said by way of greeting.

She scrunched her nose at him. “I know that. Wong says you can take them to the sanctum though, and if I have to show up every day to baptize Spike, I might as well have something to do.”

“You’ll be training during that time.”

“So you’re planning to design your entire schedule around every time I can come by?” Amy’s lifted eyebrows spoke volumes.

“I most certainly do not! You’ll need to--”

“Yeah, the thing is, it’s not my interdimensional sanctum of protection that’s at stake if I don’t pop by to pet an umbrella, so I don’t think so.”

Behind them, Wong cleared his throat. “This is still a library, so I’ll ask you two to keep it down.”

“Are you--” Stephen started in full voice, but someone hidden in the chained books across the room made a loud shushing noise. Amy pulled a book up in front of her face to hide it, but her shoulders were shaking with laughter. More quietly, he said, “Promise to leave your notes at the sanctum too, and I’ll consider it.”

“Yes, Master,” Amy murmured.

“All right. Time to go!” he said, picking up the stack of books beside her and holding a hand out for the one she was holding. If he kept moving and making noise, he could excise that tone of her voice from his mind, so he wouldn’t relive it later.

“Shhhhh!” someone behind them hissed.

Stephen reluctantly set her up in a small side-room off of the smaller sanctum library. It had a large desk, a lamp, and not much else. That would let her leave the books in a state of respectful disarray and not worry they’d be tidied up when she wasn’t there.

Time was nearing to lunch, and he could sense that she wanted to get going. Every so often she would look around, as though some obligation was pressing for her attention. He offered to show her the path from her temporary office to the front door, telling himself it was to allow her to reveal a desire to stick around to do more spying-- but the truth was, his suspicion had faded greatly over the course of the day. 

That meant it was past time for her to leave, not that he was actually learning to trust her, Stephen decided.

On the stairs, she paused, looking back over her shoulder as if expecting Kamar Taj to be there. “Is-- Pardon me, but are all the people who seek out your Himalayan sanctuary broken in some way?”

Stephen had fully intended to continue down without her, but he halted, turning to look up at her. “Excuse me?” The set of her jaw was vulnerable, and her eyes were apologetic, even in the face of his strong response.

“I overheard--” Amy pulled in a breath and let it out slowly. He’d seen her do it before, both done to calm herself down, maybe to prevent an emotional reaction. “You implied you sought Kamar Taj after you couldn’t be a surgeon anymore. In the library while you were gone, I met Master Hamir and we talked a little while.” She didn’t mention the other man’s amputation, but her implication was evident. “Before that, outside, I overheard a conversation between three people, all speaking of the healing they had been seeking when they came to Kamar Taj.” She bit her lip, then smiled, as though she’d thought of something to soften her suppositions. “I wouldn’t dream of asking Wong--”

“All right, I get it,” he interrupted. “What’s the purpose of this?”

She looked away, toward where he knew there was a staircase to the basement. “Can a relic know that I’m broken?”

His first instinct was compassion, but he immediately had the thought that she’d neatly set him up to feel that way, had used her skills as a manipulator to drive him to trust her, only to reveal that trust in a moment like this one. 

He took no careful, deep breaths.

“You’re crafty, I’ll give you that,” Stephen said, mounting the stairs toward her. “Telling the leader of a powerful group of warrior mages that he’s broken isn’t going to ingratiate yourself to him. It just looks like you’re parroting the language of your own master.”

Infuriatingly, she didn’t look hurt-- and he was forced to remember her saying she’d worked in crisis management, had been an on-site mediator. Thousands of hurt people spewing retaliatory anger had probably inured her to his.

“My ‘master’ is grief, Stephen Strange. It’s more powerful than you.”

With that, she walked down the stairs, her head held high. He stood still, stunned, until her hand tugged at the door handle and found it locked. Only then did she drop her head in a sad sort of gesture of defeat.

He could cast a portal to unlock the door without having to move his feet at all. That wouldn’t be respectful, though. Her words resonated, and even if she was sent by Mordo, even if the thing he’d hated most about being a surgeon had been the potential grief in the eyes of his patients’ families, he couldn’t bring himself to dismiss her. Stephen started down.

When he reached her, though, she did the most unexpected thing.

“How about we start over? I assume there’s a wealth of information, perhaps even in that library at Kamar Taj, about how a mistrustful instructor inhibits the potential of their students,” Amy said softly, when he reached her. She’d been speaking while still facing the door, but now she turned, a clinically warm smile on her face. “Amy Cairn, it’s nice to meet you,” she said, offering a handshake.

She was right, but on top of that, Stephen couldn’t help but notice that his suspicion had done nothing to constrain her. If she were truly a tool of Baron Karl Mordo, sent either to ascertain Stephen’s arrogance or scout the sanctum, he could hardly learn more by maintaining his animosity. 

He took her hand, shaking firmly. “Doctor Stephen Strange. Do you plan on visiting us again tomorrow?” Her answering squeeze was relief-driven, he could see.

“Yes, but it won’t be until late in the evening, I’m afraid. We have much to catch up on at work, with the building closed today.”

“I’ll see you then,” he said, releasing her hand and unlocking the door. It was lucky that his vision-seeking had been moved to this evening.

“Until then,” she agreed, and left.

Stephen had to remind himself to shut the door. After preparing himself a sandwich on autopilot, he was halfway through eating it when it struck him why his surroundings felt so strange: it was the first time he’d eaten in the dining room for lunch since the influx of odd visitors. He grabbed his plate and made his way to the surveillance closet.

Wong was there already, of course.

“You seemed distracted,” Wong said, as if in explanation.

Stephen cleared his throat. “Anything to report?”

“No. There were no incidents along the wards overnight, either, which I’m sure you were going to look into at some point today.”

“Well excuse me for trying to figure her out! I suppose it would be easier to just let the woman bring us all to ruin than prevent it in any way,” he snapped back. It was as if Wong saw no value in what he’d done all day.

“Is that what you were doing? Preventing ruin?”

“Maybe lay off of whatever brand of tea you had this morning. It clearly doesn’t agree with you.”

He was most of the way down the hall when Wong’s retort made it to his ears.

“There is such a thing as too agreeable!”

For all their petty bickering at various points of the day, when the time struck 10:30, Wong showed up in the basement room prepared to help, as always.

“Have you made any progress in differentiating the deaths?” he asked without preamble.

Stephen shook his head. “No, and I don’t see that there’s a path, there. You know you’ve died too many times when you lose track of how many times it was impalement over incineration.”

He stripped off his outer clothing, down to a simple black pair of trousers and a cream-colored tunic with no sleeves. The torch he’d lit upstairs from one of their most ancient relics crackled as he lit the other three and set the fourth into its recess. The hour he’d spent meditating beforehand had been restless in a way it usually was not, so Stephen anticipated this to be a rough session.

“Are you ready?” he asked Wong.

“Am I ever?” came the usual reply.

“One of these nights you’re going to change it up. You’ll say ‘never,’ and that’ll be the night I find the thing I’m looking for.”

“May it pass from your lips to your mind’s eye.” 

Wong adjusted his stance, mystical energy already sparking between his fingers. Stephen was always insensate during the most intense parts of these memory encounters, and as such he never knew what it was that Wong was so intently prepared for-- but he knew it was fearful.

He sank to his knees in the very center of the recessed circle, held his arms out to his sides with his palms up, and tipped his head back. With a single word, he connected to the source of dimensional power, pulling it inward until he could hardly bear the pressure, and then releasing it straight into the part of his mind that held the memories of his deaths before Dormammu.

There was no telling them apart, as he’d said-- but that meant there was also no mechanism to differentiate the times he’d spoken the phrase etched into the bones of his consciousness and simply died, with no flash of prescience, no glimpse of the future, beforehand.

Dormammu, I’m here to bargain.

This was one of those times. Stephen died, feeling the agony of it, the pain in his chest glowing golden as Wong cast the spell to pull him out.

“Anything?”

“No. Again,” Stephen coughed. It always felt so real. When he’d finally won that war of awful attrition, he’d promised himself that he wouldn’t have to go through it again. Mordo would have laughed, if he knew. He’d say, How does it feel to be wrong?  

“Ready?” Wong was the one who asked this time, the light forming again at his fingertips.

“Ready. Ama-gi,” Stephen intoned, drawing power anew for another dive into the depths of his worst despair.

Next chapter...

[writernopal]

Happy (late) STS! How much do you describe your characters? Do you leave their appearance intentionally vague or go into intricate detail? Something in between? As a bonus, how is your MC(s) described? You can share an excerpt or just otherwise describe!

Happy late STS, Karkki!

How much do you describe your characters? Do you leave their appearance intentionally vague or go into intricate detail? Something in between?

So I'm quite bad at this lol. I struggle to imagine faces or body types so they might have one or two defining features and that's it. So I'll say oh, this character is old, or they have blonde hair, or they have a crooked nose and nothing more haha. For me it's more about their personality, aura, and vibes so physical description is really only mentioned when it complements one of those things and is relevant to that part of the story. They're literally just little blobs to me. It's part of why I commissioned art for the main cast because one day I was like okay, I need to really figure out how these guys look lol.

As a bonus, how is your MC(s) described? You can share an excerpt or just otherwise describe!

Okay I am going to add excerpts here because I'm quite proud of them!

Mariel

I gave the room another pass when my body tightened nervously, and the breath departed my chest. Just along the back wall was a short human woman, adjusting a sheer pink shawl over her shoulders. Her hair, a soft sandy brown. Her skin, a pale olive color. And her waist…yes, small and pinched. Could it be…Miss Frère? No, it couldn’t be... She flipped her fan open and turned to look in my direction. My heart pounded hard in my chest. If it was her— No. No. It couldn’t be. I waited, like a fish gasping for life on the end of a fisherman’s hook, as her eyes lifted to meet mine. Through her lashes, I spotted a pale blue color, not at all like the gentle and warm almond of Miss Frère’s. And her face was all wrong too. Her features were too handsome. Miss Frère wasn’t ugly by any stretch of the imagination, but her face was not…well, it just wasn’t like that. She had a softness to her as if she were always being seen through fogged glass. One’s eyes could easily roll back and forth across the gentle slope of her cheeks and the tiny bow of her lips.

Axtapor

His lavender scales were lit beautifully by the low firelight in my tent and seemed to have a sheen to them of the most lovely violet. He was dressed as one might normally find him—in well-fitted trousers, a loose shirt, and a coat. Many trinkets dangled from him, though he seemed completely unarmed and his eyes, which I had only seen to hold ferocity, looked almost tender, making the whole of him appear dashing... But he, by contrast, looked to be handsomely carved of marble by some forgotten master. There was something easy about taking in his features… And the light in this place seemed to agree as it reveled upon the high points of his face and the shadows seemed to melt and fall asleep comfortably in his contours. At this distance, I could observe his eyes more closely than I’d ever had the chance to, and despite being the eyes of a predator, they were altogether enrapturing. He blinked, and a series of thin white eyelids moved under his outer one to perfectly frame the smoke-gray eye within them. His pupil was a vertical one with a thin ring of bronzy yellow just around it, and in their dark reflection, I could see myself.

Fay

She was leaning against one of the masts and somehow managed to look imposing and enchanting at the same time. Her face was long and elegant, each feature upon it well-defined and distinguished. Her eyes were a golden color that stood out against her skin and hair; both appeared the color of rain-dampened soil, rich and dark. There was something about how the very rigid quality of her nose contrasted with the easy nature of the waves in her hair that almost seemed like she could be nobility, but the rest of her told a different story.  She was tall for a human woman, probably standing close to six feet, and was lean-looking in build. She had no overt fullness anywhere, though that was not to say that she had no curves to mark her shape out, just that even with them, she appeared more like a racing dog or a wildcat. She was not armed from what I could see, but I took no comfort in that notion; she was plenty dangerous even without such implements. I gathered her to be a witch, as they were the only regular practitioners of rune inscription I knew of, and given our previous encounter, it was something she was clearly well versed in. Though now that I looked at her more closely, her fingers seemed to be blackened on the ends, and the nails upon them were long and sharp-looking. A sign that she wasn’t just any witch but one that practiced the dark arts.

Wilkes

His scales had become almost translucent but still managed to capture the light like some finely cut gem, and just underneath, I could see millions of tiny red veins chasing after one another. Even his eyes seemed to be alight with more fire than usual, smoldering like his own pair of setting suns. The opalescent sheen of his scales, the sealike swell of his sloped horns, and the feathery mane upon his head, all of him was beautiful as if he had been born for the sole purpose of being admired. And what wasn’t his by nature felt alive with his spirit all the same, for that ruby upon his forehead even thrummed with the frantic life of a third eye.

[thestrangestinthisstrangeland]

Written in Song

Incandescent Bodies~ Series Finale

Part 1

Rating E: (MINORS DNI) explicit sexual content, warnings in tags for story typical romantic sex with lots of, praise kink, a little bit of a bossy reader, a very protective Din Djarin, and the conclusion of your story—Choose your own ending

Word Count: 4802

Summary: So, you finally splurged. One first class ticket to the outer rim affords you a lovely view of the stars and you're happier than you've been in far too long.

The cruiser begins its descent and in your eyes, the gray planet looks just as beautiful as the luxury of Canto Bight, the lights of Coruscant and nature of Naboo. Sure, you could have chosen a more traditional vacation. But you want Nevarro.

Lava fields and volcanic rivers are your waterfalls and blue skies so long as the planet is home to him, Din Djarin.

And to think all it took was one out of control, unexpectedly hot —how tf did you recover— hook up in the bathroom of a flight just like this one to kick start the entire thing, and you're thankful for it every day. After all, a relationship is only as good as the foundation it's built on.

Yours is as solid as beskar.

Chapter 1 excerpt

"It's been way too long Din! Way too long." You scold and come to stand over the massive expanse of beskar and leather covering that rich brown fabric.

You are excited to be, not just on the same planet, but so close that all you have to do is reach out and...

Din grabs you by the hand so quick you hardly feel him yank you down onto his lap. With a yelp that erupts into laughter, you lean into him, gripping the cool pauldrons to brace against his enthusiasm. The happy, deep rumble in his chest is calming.

"I missed you," He sighs his words, and they are heavy like he's confessing his deepest truth, and you let the last wave of giggles go silent. Din presses the curve of his helmet to your temple until your eyes close.

The winds of Nevarro roll more than blow today, something to do with the volcanic atmosphere possibly. When they pass over you, it's like being immersed in your man's world completely, baptized in the breath of this well-deserved respite with no threat of having it end too soon this time.

You hear how he inhales deeply like he's pulling himself from a thought, and the helmet moves as he sits up to look you over, perched proudly on his knee. "I like this… travel outfit?" He tries the words you might use, and it makes you laugh.

"Why thank you, good sir." You bow your head. "I thought you might." He's not the only one. You like the full-bodysuit and boots too. Makes you feel less like a woman who spends her days in an office, on digs, or furiously documenting her interactions with distant civilizations and more like the people Din might know.

All those brave women and men running from one fight to the next…

He's kept you up to date on everything when he can. Filling in blanks that only make you ask more questions. His life is one adventure after another, and there are times you wonder why he even comes back to you at all. But then you see how much he enjoys these quiet times with you, and it all becomes clear. Sometimes a person just needs a place to come home to. A place, can be four walls, but it can be the heart of a rambling outer rim nobody who's worked her way through the ranks to become an inner ring someone that still talks too much too.

You are happy to have been home for him when he had none, and now you are rewarded with this; the simple pleasure of being outside, enjoying the sun and air and the unspoken effort it took to get here and just sit with the man on land that belongs to him.

Eyes back on the helmet, you give the beskar a stroke and lay your hand flat to it. "I've missed you too Din Djarin. More than you know."

Your foreheads touch, sending sparks of love down your spine to kindle the flame that lies in embers at your core. One touch, and you are ignited.

Keep reading on AO3

[aangussca]

Art Studio 2 Research: Artist's Archive/Inspiration Board on refining the visuals (mainly in the terrestrial segment of the short film)

The artworks below draw from nature in some capacity: aquatic, terrestrial and other environments. I will also include artworks that draw from organic forms in nature.

As such, all of these could provide visual inspiration for refining the animations I used for the projected film in Organic Space.

(NOTE THAT ANY PHRASES HIGHLIGHTED IN PURPLE COULD BE VERY HELPFUL IN MY APPROACH TO EITHER THE ANIMATIONS, THE INSTALLATION OF THE FINAL WORK, THE SOUNDSCAPE OR ALL THREE.)

Firelei Báez's Untitled (Premiere Carte Pour 'Introduction à L'Histoire du Monde) (2022, oil and acrylic paint on archival printed canvas)

Potentially relevant description excerpt: "She sees her art as a conversation with this earlier period [of colonialism], opening up space for questions and alternative histories. Here, she might be imagining the world represented by the Atlas ending in dramatic fires and floods. Or she could be continuing its traditions: her own imagery was inspired by the fantastical pictures of outer space transmitted by the James Webb Space Telescope in 2021 - today's equivalent of the eighteenth-century star map."

David Aspen's Waterscape (2005, synthetic polymer paint on white wove watercolour paper)

Potentially relevant description excerpt: "For Aspen, painting was as much an act/process as well as the creation of an all-encompassing colour environment. His early interests lay in international formalist/ hard edge painting, which gave way to a more nuanced and lyrical abstraction influenced by music, landscape and nature. Above all, his work emphasised colour and expressed his remarkable facility for tone, and interest in balancing interlocking shapes, colours, tones and light."

Pat Steir's The Wave - from the Sea - after Leonardo, Hokusai, and Courbet (1985, drypoint, etching, aquatint, spitbite and soapground)

Potentially relevant description excerpt: "In this tripartite composition, Steir vertically stacks quotations from three artists' images of the sea: Leonardo da Vinci's pen-and-ink drawing of a whirlpool (1507-1509); Hokusai's The Great Wave (ca. 1830-1832); and Courbet's 1869 paintings of waves at Etretat in Normandy. Steir described her ambition to "show people ways of seeing ... [how] artists see through time and place." She was struck by how these three representations of the ocean from different cultures and centuries somehow "carry the same feeling." Working from reproductions, Steir engaged in an act of translation and comparison that allowed her to consider her own relationship to time and art history."

Alex Katz seasonal paintings (oil paint on linen)

Row 1: Spring (2023)

Row 2: Summer 21 (2023), Autumn 5 (2022)

Potentially relevant description excerpt: "In many instances, [Katz] omits the horizon lines that are typical of traditional landscape painting a decision that, when paired with the large scale of his works, produces the illusion of environments with no clear beginning or end. "The sensation of color is what I wanted," says Katz. "It's the sensation of seeing." [These series of seasonal paintings] celebrates the artist's ever-evolving approach to interpreting the natural world. These days, he often begins with photographs shot on his phone or small painted sketches, which he subsequently transforms into large-scale compositions. Working intuitively, he paints at a high speed and frequently completes an entire painting within a single morning. He cheerfully describes this all-or-nothing process as "Hold your breath and hope for the best.""

Jan Erik Waider's Frozen Colours of Winter series (2023-2024, photographic prints)

Potentially relevant description excerpt: "My focus as a landscape photographer is clearly on abstract perspectives, especially concerning water and ice: landscapes that are constantly changing and never look the same on any given day. I spend a lot of time in countries like Iceland and Greenland, but winter can also lead to incredibly exciting compositions in Germany with the necessary frost, especially in the macro field of photography. In contrast to Iceland, there is a lot more vegetation and trees, and therefore a plethora of colors in the ice: frozen leaves from autumn, grasses, or pine cones."

Nicole Hone's Hydrophytes (2018, short film with 3D-printed moving sculptures)

Row 1 sculptures: 'Imp Root', 'Feather Nurse'

Row 2 sculptures: 'Nomadic Cleaner', 'Haven Flower'

Potentially relevant description excerpt: "“I have always been fascinated with nature. It inspires my design ideas and aesthetic. For this project, I became particularly interested in botany and marine life. I was amazed by the way sea creatures and corals moved, and I wanted to reflect similar qualities in my designs. They can respond to external forces such as gravity, water ripples or currents, and interaction with people or other 3D prints in real life,” Hone said. “Their man-made composite materials behave uncannily similar to living organisms.”

She went on to explain that each Hydrophyte has a unique character that is defined by both their style of movement and appearance. The colored lights that illuminate the printed plants were chosen to “complement each personality and amplify the emotive qualities of the film,” and the functions of each plant were inspired by the effects of climate change on marine species. “As the 4D printing experiments developed from abstract shapes into more plant-like models, their appearance and movement helped me think of which function would best suit each character,” she added."

[caligvlasaqvarivm]

I think we'll have to agree to disagree, but I think your argument is flawed because it misses the lens of allegory, symbolism, and metaphor that Homestuck is intended to be viewed through; your points largely consist of interpreting Homestuck as a series of events that literally occur to real people, and said peoples' realistic emotional reactions to those events, where Homestuck is instead meant to be read as an allegory first and literal series of events second. While interpreting it in other ways is valid, a la death of the author, because we literally have the author weighing in, we can empirically surmise what Hussie intended the story to be read as.

THE THEMES OF HOMESTUCK (yes, like we are in schoolfeeding again)

Given that I like to quote things and cite my sources, I would really appreciate if you could extend the same amount of effort when discussing this with me. It also helps to ensure we're all on the same page, so incidents like stating broadly that "Hussie does not employ themes" when you meant that "he didn't employ them in a more specific instance" don't happen again. I also find that I tend to have a more solid and grounded argument when I know for certain what I'm referencing, rather than relying on memory and emotion. So with that request out of the way:

Hussie has spoken extensively about the comic having always been about two things at its core: the first, a coming-of-age story regarding a bunch of internet friends, and the second, a creation myth.

I always saw HS as an exploration of young people developing relationships over the internet [...] There's a lot more to HS than just that obviously, but if there's anything which it's been about through and through, it's modern kids relating to each other from afar, developing as people and growing up.

HS was always going to be a story about an extremely elaborate creation myth. As elaborate as I could conceive. In the HS reality, Sburb/Sgrub is the means by which universes procreate. Planets and civilizations are the seeds from which one or many new universes will blossom if the players succeed, at the expense of the life on that planet.

Homestuck also regularly invokes mythology, religious themes, and folklore, in order to put the reader into that mindspace. Naming the denizens after proper mythological figures, having the kids' entry artifacts all be references to mythological or folkloric "departures," naming angels and cherubs "angels" and "cherubs" - this isn't done merely for the cool value. SBURB itself draws so much from mythology, because within the universe of this story, mythology itself is derived from SBURB.

This was actually my line of thinking in writing Rose's wizardfic. If you sift through that dense excerpt, you find it's about 12 evil kids who played a role in influencing every dark event in history. My intent was that this was her subconsciously echoing the creation story of her own universe.

Squiddles I guess are a sort of candy coated representation of the outer gods. Not literally. They are a brand in a fictional universe. A cartoon show. They were not necessarily conjured into existence by the gods, via dark conspiracy either. It's more likely that humans created them as an echo of their subconscious awareness that these gods exist, and present them through this cute, approachable facade.

Hussie also outright discusses how much religious stories influence the themes and setting of the work when discussing the dancestors:

We learn more about the troll race, as a once peaceful species and such before kid-ancestors as players scratched their session, though the short term relevance of this is mainly as a preamble to Scratch's religious story. Establishing an Eden-like paradise from which there is some departure through sin is sort of the boilerplate basis for religious lore. Scratch is a devil figure about as blatant as the Sufferer is a Christ figure. The failed players from peaceful Alternia made a classic "deal with the devil" move by causing the scratch after being given a choice by the mother of all monsters. (Echidna. Hey, she's a big snake!) By doing so they brought Scratch into their universe, and therefore all the things you'd expect that comes with summoning the devil. This resulted not only turning Alternia into a planet full of violent murderers, but it only technically granted them what they wanted with a huge caveat, as is the case with such ill-advised bargains. The players were strong enough to win, but made a terminal universe, were barred from entry, hunted by a demon, and then started killing each other.

Something I generally notice when discussing media online is that many people are "trained" to interpret media off of more popular, accessible, long-running fiction, such as children's cartoons, SuperWhoLock, Star Wars, MCU, etc. In these works, theme often takes a backseat to character drama and hijinks - it's still there, especially in the stuff considered "better," but it's usually not the major focus of the work, save as a barebones framework upon which the rest of the story is draped.

Homestuck - and many pieces of classical literature, especially older epics (which Homestuck draws many cues from) - is constructed in the opposite way: its themes are its most important aspect, and everything else in the story is working in conjunction to prop the themes up. The interpretation you have of the story is RADICALLY different if you consider Homestuck from the POV of its literal events, and if you consider Homestuck from the POV of Homestuck-as-allegory - and the second one is more consistent with the ways characters act and react, as well as the way Hussie describes the work.

If you read Homestuck as if it's an allegory for growing up, then SBURB naturally slots in as a metaphor for the emotional state that children find themselves in as they begin their paths to adulthood.

SBURB AS A METAPHOR FOR ADOLESCENCE.

There comes a point in childhood where the child stops being a child - the safe, familiar, comfortable world that they knew stops existing, and they can never get it back. They are thrust into a world that is alien and massive, and forced to grapple with the weight of their future duties. They deal with losing their guardians and finding direction in their absence. They must decide how they want to grow up, and then are responsible for shaping the society that comes after them.

Each of the kids' entry artifacts has an element of a new beginning, but also of loss of innocence:

John bites an apple, the act of original sin from the Bible.

Rose breaks a bottle, the way ships are christened; however, alcohol is something very associated with "adulthood" in Rose's character arc.

Dave must wait for an egg to hatch, an act of birth and parenthood.

Jade must shoot a pinata effigy of her dog - pinatas are associated with birthdays, and therefore, birth, but the shooting of her dog is a direct reference to putting down Old Yeller.

The symbolism of killing her dangerous dog to enter (i.e. a step toward growing up) borrows notes from the Old Yeller story, but in this case, it's a dog that can't die (though nevertheless would assume a death-like state through prototyping). Also included in her challenge was taking a shot in the dark (much like Rose's leap of faith) and relying on her friend who redirected the bullet through his own head, the very friend she was attempting to slay in effigy.

(Emphasis mine.)

Therefore, we are not meant to read SBURB's destruction of the old world as fully literal; we are intended to read it as metaphorical. Entry into SBURB is the loss of innocence, a child suddenly thrust into adolescence, into a world where their peers become more important than their guardians. A world where light and dark, kindness and cruelty, creation and destruction, are locked in eternal battle, and the children must navigate it, and determine where in it they stand.

Through this lens, the guardians (sprites, parents, lusii, etc.) dying is not a malicious act from an omniscient sadist, but another part of this coming-of-age metaphor. Even if a child's parents don't literally die, there is usually a point in adolescence where they undergo a metaphorical death in the eyes of the child - where the child realizes that their parents are fallible, mortal humans, and not permanent fixtures of paragon morality. That's why it's literally baked into the game that sprites will feel compelled to go to the Battlefield when they don't know what else to do, where they will presumably die. (And why all the lususprites are dead, despite the trolls being so good at the game that all their dreamselves except Sollux's spare are still alive even post-BK fight.)

DAVESPRITE: the battlefield will probably be wiped out soon JADESPRITE: can we do something to stop it? DAVESPRITE: would there be a point JADESPRITE: i dont know..... JADESPRITE: i like it here though JADESPRITE: i felt like i was drawn to come here when i wasnt sure where to go DAVESPRITE: yeah me too

The end goal, then, is to grow up and mature into gods - god-tiering once more being a metaphor for adulthood, as it's a semi-permanent state at the end of a character's questing through SBURB/journey through adolescence. Not only that, but as gods (adults), to repopulate that world (become parents or guardians for a new generation), and to determine its nature. This latter aspect is as true for the real world as it is for the characters - the children of today become the voters, rebels, police, and politicians of tomorrow.

In fact, I agree with you that the characters are justified in resenting SBURB - because human people often resent adolescence. This doesn't make SBURB an antagonistic force, nor does it make it a villain to defeat. When characters grapple with it, what they're really grappling with is growing up, and what that entails.

The Outer Gods are actually a part of the game - they and the Furthest Ring fit in with the duality that pervades SBURB. Dark and light. Derse and Prospit. Light/Void, Breath/Blood, Mind/Heart, Hope/Rage, Life/Doom, Space/Time. Active/Passive. Skaia and the Furthest Ring. Half the players start out on Derse for a reason, and Horrorterrors are still seen as guides and still wind up playing a crucial role in the propagation of a new universe, despite calling for destruction. This is because navigating these dualities, uncertainties, and ambiguities is a massive part of growing up. Rose rebelling against the path SBURB has set out for her by acting as an agent of the Horrorterrors is, itself, an action that has been sanctioned by SBURB. It turns out that listening to dark influences, and maybe even succumbing to them, is a common part of growing up, and not every impulse to destroy is evil - in fact, it's sometimes necessary.

I never said the game was good, but viewing the game as evil is also a misread. The game is a neutral, omniscient entity that serves, in-universe, as a means of propogating universes, whose goals are ultimately aligned with the players, as raising mature, kind players coincides with creating a stable, fertile universe; out-of-universe, the game is a metaphor for the struggles of adolescence, magnified and heightened. Neither of these are villainous or antagonistic.

But a story isn't really fun or engaging if it's just blandly telling you its message - you know, like I'm doing now, in yet another long, boring essay from Tumblr user caligvlasaqvarivm. Therefore, what Homestuck does is engage the reader with a fun, magical story about kids going on an adventure, full of twists and turns. Moreover, exaggerating the stakes to such a massive extent aids in the delivery of the themes, moreso than just saying the themes outright - makes them more emotionally impactful and spiritually profound.

FREE WILL > PREDESTINATION.

Moreover, I think you've fundamentally misunderstood how time and predestination in Homestuck work. Homestuck falls firmly on the side of free will, and always has - the retcon is the most blatant example of this, but it is always, always character actions that shape the past and future, with SBURB and its constructions desperately running around to catch up.

The exiles/carapacians in general are explicitly stated to be running around in the backlines making sure things work out for the players:

GC: TH31R ROL3 1S TO H3LP YOU ON YOUR QU3ST 1N SOM3 W4YS GC: TH3 OBV1OUS W4Y 1S BY D1R3CTLY GU1DING YOUR 4CT1ONS GC: BUT M4YB3 TH3 MOR3 1MPORT4NT W4YS 4R3 TH3S3 L1TTL3 TH1NGS TH3Y DO PROB4BLY W1THOUT 3V3N R34L1Z1NG 1T GC: 4CT1ONS TH4T COMPL3T3 LOOPS 1N TH3 T1M3L1NE GC: COGS 1N P4R4DOX SP4C3

Things in Homestuck seem predetermined because perspective is a very malleable thing - thus, even if it's character actions and intentions that cause things to happen, because we're gazing at the story non-linearily, things seem as though they're predestined, especially from the point of view of the characters.

Aranea gives us one of the most solid explanations of how time works:

AG: Think of it like circulatory system, where the veins and capillaries that do not help the overall flow of 8lood through the system are likely to wither and die. Those are doomed offshoots. AG: Reality itself is using you and many others to propagate its own existence. Strictly speaking, there is only one path to its successful propagation. 8ut it still permits you to make choices. Not all that are conceiva8le, 8ut some nevertheless, as dictated 8y who you are and the challenges you face. And you are free to make key decisions however you like, as long as you understand that some of these paths unfairly or not will lead to o8livion. 8ecause those choices do not contri8ute constructively to the perpetuation of all existence, including your own. AG: Such is the 8urden assumed 8y anyone who plays this game.

If it were the case that predestination is predestination, and the story is about the illusory nature of free will, then certainly, Hussie would make note of how much that factors into the story in all their thousands and thousands of words, right?

But they don't. I searched up the words "fate" and "destin" too, and there's very little discussion of that. If you look at the Hussie excerpt on the dancestors above, I think it's very telling for just how much free will weighs on the story rather than fate - the Dancestors are stated by Doc Scratch to have suffered a glitch that rendered their game unwinnable from the start - however, it's also heavily implied that said glitch was a result of Damara's "timeline sabotage" (more on this later), and would not have existed in their session if the Dancestors had been less shitty to each other. In fact, given the way Echidna's Choice for the dancestors was worded, it's entirely possible that, had they chosen not to scratch, LE would simply not exist:

The heroes, understanding their defeat was absolute, sought advice from the mother of all monsters. She offered them a choice. The heroes could either accept their defeat along with the extinction of their race, and put no others at risk. Or, she could show them a path to a second chance, to a reality in which the chosen heroes of their race would be strong enough to succeed with ease, and claim the reward.

SBURB modifies the timeline to account for player choices, not the other way around. Choices and free will preside over predestination. Skaia is stated to be extremely passive, and when requested by the Scratch to perform an active action, it ONLY has control over where and when its defense portals exit to. As Terezi says:

GC: 4ND 1 FORC3D MY OWN H4ND. 1 COULD 31TH3R L3T 3V3RYON3 D13 1N ON3 R34L1TY, OR K1LL 4 FR13ND 1N 4NOTH3R GC: 4ND 1 T3LL MYS3LF THOS3 W3R3 TH3 ONLY TWO VORT1C3S 1 S4W... GC: BUT TH3N, 1 W4S TH3 ON3 WHO M4D3 TH3 S3R13S OF D3C1S1ONS WH1CH L3D UP TO TH4T CHO1C3, 4ND COMPL3T3LY P41NT3D TH3 OPT1ONS 1NTO TH4T CORN3R

So any read of the text that places emphasis on the tragedy of predestination is missing the point - predestination, fate, and prophecy ARE factors in play within this story, but only insofar as they become the inevitable results of the choices players make (and aren't even that inevitable, as time travel is another massive variable in play). And, again, we must discount the words Dave says about the point of time travel being not using time travel, because firstly, time travel DOES END UP SAVING THE DAY (he uses it in the final boss fight, not to mention the Retcon), and secondly, he's at his lowest point when he talks about it, and most of what he says is representative of the emotional hangups he must overcome.

CALIBORN, THE DANCESTORS, AND LORD ENGLISH AS EXTENSIONS OF THE COMING OF AGE METAPHOR.

So Homestuck is a story about being a kid and growing up. The game wants them to become mature, empathetic, kind people, because doing so - forging friendships and caring about each other and getting over their personal hangups - are literally baked into the game as win conditions. Personal quests are directly tied into personal growth, and failure to achieve a healthy Bilious Slick are directly tied to characters failing to overcome their emotional issues. Even if you want to read this literally, and not as a metaphor, it is still very much in SBURB's best interest to raise kind, mature players who succeed - because SBURB's goal is to propogate a new, healthy, fertile universe.

Therefore, the antagonists in this story represent the opposite: they are people who remain immature, don't care about their friends, and are cruel to each other. I'll start with the dancestors and work my way up.

The Dancestors are awful to each other in very creative, interesting, and horrible ways. I'll really quickly go over their baggage one-by-one, but I'm mostly going to recommend my Dancestor essay again, so you can get a closer look.

Rufioh cheated on Damara long-term with Horuss, would never have told her if the rest of their team hadn't found out, and calls her crazy and jealous, while simultaneously asking her for advice on his relationship with Horuss.

The other Dancestors are implied to be keeping Mituna brain-damaged on purpose, despite multiple means and multiple years in which they could've found some way to heal him, because his constant prophecies of doom (and implied attempts to make the Dancestors stop being so shitty) were really annoying.

Kankri is completely full of shit. At one point he tells Mituna to stop being brain damaged in a way that makes other brain damaged people look bad.

Meulin is fucking over her team's romances because she's repressing all her awful feelings and self-loathing, which we know because it's advice she gives to Horuss, and mages are prophets (but since free will > predestination, it's more like mages can call the future than that they're reading the future).

Porrim was a bra-burning radfem throughout the game and is basically the only dancestor that got better after she died; she was so busy fighting the patriarchy that she ended up shirking frog breeding entirely.

Latula is so insecure that she's literally dating Mituna because "he will always need me." Yikes.

Aranea... well, we see a lot of it, but she's also relentlessly bitchy and mean to her teammates when she's expositing on them. If you re-read her segments, she basically can't help herself from shitting on them, to the point where even Meenah's like "yo, uncalled for" sometimes.

Horuss is so incredibly, genuinely casteist that he apologizes to Meenah for dating Meulin and Rufioh, seeing them both as incredibly beneath his station. If he isn't outright ignoring Rufioh's attempt to break up, then he's obliviously refusing to listen because he legitimately doesn't care what a lowblood has to say.

Kurloz either is outright evil and wants all people ever to fail, or turned that way after the constant mistreatment the dancestors showed each other (and maybe especially that they showed Mituna). Can't blame him. He's also a creep using mind control on his matesprit.

Cronus... well, Cronus. But also, his friends literally bullied the hope out of him, because they're all fucking awful to each other.

Meenah is Vriska at her worse times ten, and doesn't even have the sad backstory and extenuating circumstances to justify any of it. She relentessly bullied Damara, while everyone else was complicit; when she discovered Rufioh's affair, she used it AGAINST DAMARA (and still everyone else remained complicit), and maintains the stance that shirking responsibility is actually cool and great. She never stops thinking the Condesce is awesome, nor does she ever apologize to Damara.

Damara was treated abhorrently by the rest of her team - even those not involved in actively making her life worse were still fully complicit in it - and was treated as less of a person because of her low caste, shy disposition, and inability to speak English. Her finally snapping as a result of her maltreatment is implied to be how the glitch in their session came about in the first place, which is how LE gained his entry into the Trolls' universe.

Many people reduce them to acts of hostility against the audience, and they really aren't. The original trolls were already commentaries on internet archetypes, specifically forum culture (that's why they're called trolls - they're internet trolls), and the Beforus trolls do the exact same thing, just with Tumblr culture. If people took these archetypes as personal attacks, perhaps they have some self-examination to do. For example, Kankri is not a bad person because Hussie thinks social justice is stupid (in fact, Hussie praises Porrim for not being a "boring asshole" about it and acknowledges her post-death feminism as valid). Kankri's a bad person because he uses social justice as a cudgel to wield power over others with and as a cloak to hide behind - like many jackasses do in real life. So on and so forth.

This isn't necessarily aimed at you, but it's wild to me how many people I've run into who hold the opinion that the Dancestors were middle fingers aimed at them, personally. No - the Dancestors played a vital function in the story's greater mythology and history. And yes, they do suck, but they suck because they're antagonists, or at least aligned with the antagonists - in blatant ways, like granting LE entry into the story or being in cahoots with Gamzee, but in metaphorical ways, too.

You see, in the greater context of Homestuck's coming-of-age themes, the Dancestors represent something very specific: an older generation that failed their children. Abusive, neglectful, cruel, and short-sighted, they've passed on their messes for later generations to clean up. This is why they reached physical adulthood within the Medium before they died, why it's important that they did so - it's because, in a coming-of-age, that's the "finish line." That's the point at which the story stops. The Dancestors are adults that failed to grow up. And because they chose to Scratch, that means that it's their descendents' problem to fix.

SBURB is about propagation, both of universes and of the races playing them. Even so, the game gave them an option, after such a comprehensive failure to mature, to simply end the line there, and "put no others at risk." It's important that that's how the Choice was phrased - and I find it interesting that Aranea actually leaves that part out when talking to Terezi about it.

AG: I sought advice from Echidna, and she told me how to scratch the session to give us another chance. AG: 8ut the choice to do so came with accepting the annihilation of our existing forms. In the new instance, we would lead completely different lives with no memory of what happened.

Interactions with the Dancestors nearly always wind up with the cast worse-off. Aranea's involvement leaves Vriska in a position of inadequacy, enough that she wants to call it quits and leaves with the LE-killing treasure (which is encouraged and enabled by Meenah); Meenah is weirdly obsessed with Karkat, who's way too young for her (thank god Meulin didn't set them up), and he nearly jumps off the meteor to go on a suicide quest to kill LE with her. Eridan goes on a date with Cronus (ew), and Terezi feels so inadequate upon meeting Latula that she accepts Aranea's offer to heal her eyesight, which fuels her slow meltdown. Not to mention Game Over. The fact that they see romantic viability in children so many sweeps younger than they are speaks to how immature they are.

They're awful to each other, and pass on their problems to their kids, including literally making a deal with a serpent to invite the devil into their universe, while taking responsibility for none of it. So let's talk about that devil.

I think you're giving Caliborn far, far too much credit. First of all, Aranea tells us outright that if one cherub identity is destined for kindness, then one is destined for malice.

The two halves are endowed with polar opposite predispositions as well. One predisposed toward malevolence, another toward 8enevolence. Good or evil, if you prefer to deal in simplistic terms, or at least those which are convenient for the sake of this story!

According to her, possibly due to this absolute dichotomy between their natures, cherubs are generally never meant to play SBURB (which Hussie later backs up) - especially as she also exposits that they usually serve as viruses/immune systems for the universes they inhabit. From the get-go, they're creatures of myth and legend, symbols of absolute good or absolute evil, who aren't judged by the same standards as the other characters in the story.

He was allowed to 8ecome the solo player of a game which his kind was never meant to play.

But if you don't want to believe her for whatever reason (Aranea sucks, but she's usually reliable as an exposition fairy), and believe that Caliborn was fully capable of kindness and compassion, then I can roll with that. You say that he needed to kill his sister "anyways," and this is only partially true. In fact, it's outright stated that he killed her too early, and this has left him emotionally stunted. (This is backed up by Aranea, who notes that cherubs that mature properly will have wings as adults - which LE lacks).

You may be destined for bigger things, but you're still an atrocious, stupid child. And you may have won the "game" with your sister, but that doesn't mean it was the best thing for your development as a person. You had her dream self killed, which is not an opportunity your species typically gets. So she died prematurely, instead of allowing the conflict within you to settle itself naturally. In short, you forced your predomination to happen a little too early, and now you're stuck. STUCK? Yes. Your personality is stuck in some sort of cantankerous prepubescent limbo. You are going to be a stunted, miserable tool forever.

(And just as a sidebar, given that the two had wholly separate dreamselves sleeping on separate moons, this implies that they could've god tiered into separate bodies - if only they didn't make the choices they did.)

If we read this as literal things happening to literal humans (and NOT aliens that have wholly different biologies and neurologies to us), then yes, this is a fairly tragic instance of a developmentally disabled child being ragged on for that. But that's not what this is. Homestuck is themes first, characters second. And thematically, this is a perfect antithesis to what the story deems to be "good."

Driven by the selfish desire to reap the rewards of the game himself, and only by himself, and driven by impatience, cruelty, and malice, he MAKES THE CHOICE to kill his sister prematurely, locking himself into emotional immaturity. There is no point where he ever expresses regret for his actions, and when he hears about what he'll get up to as LE, he's all for it. I think it's incorrect to divest Caliborn from Lord English, when Caliborn himself so strongly believes LE to be an extension of himself.

uu: AS A LORD OF TIME. I THINK I'M GOING TO MASTER TIME. NOT WITH MY BRAIN. WHICH WOULD BE TOO HARD. BUT WITH MY INSTINCTS. uu: LIKE IN A WAY THAT WORKS WITH MY NATURAL IMPULSES. SUCH AS MY AMBITION. MY WILL TO COMMIT MAYHEM. MY DESIRE TO PUNISH THOSE I DESPISE. uu: SO IF I WANT YOU TO BECOME STRONG. SO YOU CAN CHALLENGE ME LATER. AND I SEE EVIDENCE. THAT YOU PROBABLY BECOME SUCCESSFUL. uu: I THINK TO MYSELF. WHY SHOULDN'T I BE THE ONE TO MAKE THAT HAPPEN? IF IT'S GOING TO ANYWAY. uu: I THINK PART OF MY PERSONAL QUEST. IS TO BECOME AT EASE WITH THE FORCES OF INEVITABILITY. uu: INEVITABILITY THAT ALL THINGS SHOULD AND WILL FALL IN MY FAVOR. THAT ALL CAUSALITY ANSWERS TO ME. AND THAT ALL OUTCOMES NOT ONLY SERVE ME. BUT CONSIST OF MY BEING. uu: SO I FEEL THAT. THE MORE I GROW IN POWER. uu: THE MORE STUFF IT SHOULD TURN OUT I AM RESPONSIBLE FOR. uu: UP TO AND INCLUDING. EVERYTHING THAT EVER HAPPENS. uu: EVEN IF IT HAS TO BE. uu: RETROACTIVELY.

But, yes, there are other souls in there. And Caliborn is super down for that, too.

IT IS VERY MUCH CROWDED IN THERE, CHOCK FULL OF SOULS, BELONGING TO HARDCORE BRAWLING BRUTES. ... THE PUPPET'S ESSENCE WILL FLOP AND FLUTTER THROUGH THE SHADOWS FOR ETERNITY. SURFACING IN THE NIGHTMARES OF THE UNSUSPECTING. WEASELING ITS WAY INTO THE HEARTS OF YUCKY SHITTY CHILDREN. AND WHEN ITS INFILTRATION IN THAT UNIVERSE HAS TAKEN HOLD, THE SEED WILL HAVE BEEN PLANTED. AND IT WILL PAVE THE WAY FOR MY EMERGENCE, TO WREAK MY BADNESS. FROM UNIVERSE. TO UNIVERSE. TO UNIVERSE. EACH ONE WILL FALL. AND EACH TIME I WILL GET STRONGER. AND OLDER. AND BIGGER. AND BUFFER! OHHHHHHHHHHH YES.

And here's what Hussie has to say about the other souls in there (from the book, an excerpt exists on the wiki):

I think when the time comes to show the douchebag cocktail stuck inside Cal, there's a brief temptation to regard it as an odd, semi-random melange of characters. But there are several layers of logic to the guys who all combine to form his personality. Much of the logic orbits around these negative traits associated with men, or more specifically, the "toxically masculine" aspects often linked to certain male personalities. Dirk has a lot of these traits, which are central to Dave's feelings of tension and abuse concerning his bro. The intellectual aggression, the power of assertion, the knowitall-ism, the mansplaining. That's a lot of Dirk stuff when he's at his worst. Equius shares a lot of those traits too, with some different points of emphasis. Both of them have this creepy-guy streak running through them, with strange or offputting interests, and seem to get a quiet kick out of making others uncomfortable through demonstrations of these fascinations. They are actually pretty similar characters in this way. ... But then, this still doesn't really close the book on the topic, because [Doc Scratch] also plays the role of the sinister, devil-like alt-author figure, making these character choices seem more meaningful in relation to the idea that all these guys are different spins on dramatized, negative, author-insert figures. Both Dirk and Equius inside Cal are splinters of those characters, offshoot variations of the originals. But I've also talked about splinters in a different context, which is that any collection of characters in a story could be viewed as compartmentalized, somewhat exaggerated splinters of the author's total personality. ... Which is why me saying characters like Dirk, Equius, Doc, and a few others exist as dark authorial surrogates shouldn't be taken as overly self-critical lacerations.

In other words, LE is literally a combination of a child who deliberately emotionally stunted himself so that he could have everything all to himself and three other creepy guys at their absolute worst, literally likened to "toxic masculinity," and thus, the patriarchy. LE encapsulates not only the personal qualities that the themes say are adversarial - cruelty, selfishness, ambition, vengeance, misogyny, classism, etc. etc. - but the societal ones as well. In his various forms, LE is a casteist, a creepy uncle, an abusive father, a toxic lover, the literal devil, and a generally shitty man that forces women into subservience for his own amusement. Caliborn knows that this is how he will turn out and he thinks it's fucking awesome. He isn't a tragic villain, he's an antithetical villain. He stands for everything that the main cast learns to oppose.

ARANEA: The player is somehow also im8ued with a limitless supply of power. Enough to destroy anything he wanted, for as long as he wanted. ARANEA: And knowing the villain of our story, anything he wanted would be everything. And as long as he wanted would be forever.

And that is why I say with full confidence that, prior to Hussie throwing away his original ending after Game Over, Homestuck is emphatically about children maturing, caring about each other, and throwing off the shackles of their old, shitty society, because they will be responsible for the creation of a new world.

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.