I do think that the way Tenel Ka and Jacen handled the lightsaber incident where Tenel Ka lost her arm during a training duel with Jacen really layed the ground work for how their relationship would develop and why they are such a good couple despite literally the whole galaxy being against them. He worries about being the reason for her loss while Tenel Ka firmly reminds him she ignored her lightsaber's issues, she ignored that it was going to fall apart and subsequently cost her an arm and eventually they come to this silent agreement that they will simply take this in stride and that this incident only made them stick together even CLOSER rather than dividing them.
Neither Jacen nor Tenel Ka are great with words when they really mean them they both know how to talk politics and get what they want but when it comes to what is REAL they stumble and they learnt very quickly to be comfortable with each other's silence. Jacen never minded her clumsy very direct choice of words, Tenel Ka was never bothered by his awkward rambling. They just fit together.
They do not need words to communicate and they do not need to explain themselves to each other. They understand each other's duties, priorities, thoughts — they were 14 / 15 when Jacen accidentally cut Tenel Ka's arm off and this could have ended a friendship forever between other children but they took maybe a single day to figure this out and then it was never an issue between them ever again because they just ... get each other.
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Me watching as my niche note topic becomes the most discussed legal issue by every news outlet, knowing my journal missed out on so many citations by deciding not to publish my article because there is almost no scholarly literature on this particular application:
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homestuck was so perfect for autistic teenagers bc it took characters being sorted into categories and having Attributes to its absolute extreme. forget four hogwarts houses, every character has their associated colour their zodiac sign their associated animal their dream planet their god tier class and aspect their typing quirk their pesterchum handle their weapon their planet of x and y, as well as each of them having a handful of other very quantifiable Personality Traits and Interests (e.g. this one is a clown this one is angry this one likes fashion this one is just rufio from hook for some reason) and THEN they all also have their respective ancestors and dancestors(?)(plucked that word from my memory) who have all of those things as WELL
and god not to mention the fucking quadrant system
as a 13-15 year old autistic kid i didnt even need homestuck to have a plot i just happily made a big big spreadsheet of character attributes in my brain
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I can't stop thinking about the relationship between Jon and Helen as perhaps one of the most important ones in the entire show. They are narrative parallels for each other, and they both know it. They've both known it from the very start!
Helen walks into the Archives, paranoid, unsure of who to trust, and Jon sees himself in her. And he thinks "If i can help her, maybe there's hope for me too." Then he can't save her. The next time they meet, she's a monster. They're both monsters. There was never any other way their stories could have gone, their fates entwined from the very start.
And Helen answers his original thought with one of her own: "Maybe if we can help each other, there's hope for us both." But Jon looks at her and sees everything that he fears becoming, and so he turns her away, and refuses to accept that their stories are still one and the same.
Helen went to the last person who was ever kind to her, the only person who both knew her as a human and had the context to understand what she'd become, and he hated her. He hated her because he liked Helen, and told her that she couldn't be Helen.
So she stopped trying to be Helen, and embraced being a monster. Reveled in it even. Then Jon wakes up from a six month coma, more monster than person, and tries so hard to cling to the things that mattered to him when he was human. Even with no support, even with the entire archives staff against him, he chooses humanity and compassion over and over again.
And this is a direct threat to Helen's world view. Their stories are entwined. If Jon can continue to be a person even after everything he's been through, then she could have clung to her humanity too, if only she'd tried a little harder. And that terrifies her! She wants to conceptualize herself as someone who was completely overwhelmed by forces beyond her control, who never had a choice but to become a monster. She want's to be an innocent victim. But Jon argues with his actions that they'd both had choices.
And, Jon, in turn, holds out hope that she might make better choices until the very end.
This is the conflict between them for all of season 4 and 5. Jon wants to prove that they can both be decent people, and Helen wants to prove that they were never going to be anything but monsters. This is why she's so devoted to trying to goad Jon into enjoying his newfound godhood. She knows that they are the same, and wants that to mean that he has a spark of evil inside of him, and not that she was always capable of doing good.
When Jon kills her, she loses her life, but wins the argument. Helen is nothing but a dangerous monster who needs to be killed for the good of everyone, and in the moment he decides that, Jon dooms himself to the same fate. Their stories are one and the same. "If i can help her, maybe there's hope for me too." he thought. But he couldn't help her, refused to, even, in the one moment when it actually mattered. And thus, there was never hope for him.
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