2025-02-20 9:58:28 ¶ ●

> Watchmen, Issues #1-12; Homestuck, pp. 4167, 5585; Homestuck: Beyond Canon, p. 716

Naked White Jake is the fulfilment of something of an unspoken prophecy in Homestuck regarding a mustachio’d radioactive mutant. Like Manhattan, over the course of his life Jake’s trousers have been shortening inevitably towards this point. But for Jake in particular, this development represents not Manhattan’s increasing detachment from humanity, but rather an escalation of his ongoing objectification-as-woman. Specifically, I think the next chapter in Jake’s story is to be an exploration of ‘apotheosis’ as a form of female objectification in fiction.

> End of Evangelion (1997)

Beyond the superficially Manhattan, the most obvious cultural point of comparison for Jake’s new form would seem to be the End of Evangelion’s Rei Ayanami - colloquially dubbed the “Giant Naked Rei” by Evangelion commentators. The similarities are in more than just their pallid, luminescent, larger-than-life (be that figuratively or literally) and naked forms; pictured above, Rei caresses in her hands a meteorite which was at one time the birthplace of the human race and now acts as the womb toward which all human souls are drawn in order to be born again. The parallels to Jake’s protection of the meteor in 8r8k - a meteorite from which the population of Earth C was born and toward which they seem to find themselves once more inescapably drawn - are obvious.

But it’s not the literal events of the battle for the meteor that are necessarily most significant here; more relevant is what Rei represents as a cultural symbol. Rei’s designated role throughout Evangelion is primarily as object, sexualised and maternalised both - sometimes simultaneously - and it is in her apotheosis as the Giant Naked Rei that this objectification reaches its logical extreme. Like Naked Jake - and in some ways like Doctor Manhattan, too - Naked Rei’s transformation into Lilith places her at the furthest possible point from her own humanity, as a sheer force of nature. Within Evangelion’s mythology, Lilith is essentially an artifact; she is called by female pronouns, but only on the technicality that she exists to facilitate this process of birthing and re-birthing. Within folklore, Lilith’s role is hardly any more illustrious, an existence solely to submit to husband Adam’s will and to mother his hundreds of children - but it’s this lot in life that speaks particularly to Jake’s own history of objectification.

(taking all that into account, the nurturing nature of Naked Jake’s actions does strike me as worthy of comment. while all of Earth C appears subconsciously intent on claiming the meteor-egg at the center of the universe, Jake’s actions are protective, even generative; I’ve commented already on how unintuitive it seems that his hope field causes angels to radiate outwards from the meteor when everything else is trying to impregnate it. he almost appears to go through the motions of performing acts which had previously belonged to the women on the battlefield: it’s hard not to draw the link between his hope bubble and Jade’s force field {which itself seems to call back to the “containment” dead Calliope set up for Earth C itself}, and the part he plays in Jade’s revival had up until that point been solely the domain of Life-givers Jane and Meenah {who have their own long and complex relationships with motherhood}. Naked Jake’s hope field is destructive, but only ever passively; his primary contribution to the battle’s events is that of midwife.)

> Doctor Who (2005), Series 1 Episode 13 “The Parting of the Ways”

A further point of comparison, which is less immediately apparent and has been far less widely discussed despite its broad cultural reach but I feel has equally significant potential ramifications, is to Doctor Who’s Bad Wolf.

The gendered power dynamic between Doctor and companion is key to Doctor Who as a piece of art. By the very nature of the programme’s structure she is disposable, interchangeable; and by the nature of the culture from which the story originates, the purpose of her existence teeters on the same precipice between emotional support and sex appeal that is usually occupied in our minds by the magician’s assistant or the airline hostess. In reviving a 20th century concept for the 21st century it fell upon writers of modern sensibility to somehow make the programme’s female deuteragonists just as 'special’ as its male idol, and through the nadir of Doctor Who’s relationship to gender politics (under self-proclaimed fetishist of “powerful, sexy women” Steven Moffat) this process came to be emblemised by the transformation of women with names into girls with titles. Following the example set by the prototypic “Girl in the Fireplace”, “The Girl Who Waited” and “Impossible Girl” are stripped of human identity in order to sell their human identity: ascension to mythic status as the ultimate logical endpoint of the 'strong female character’.

Without delving too deep into all the nuances of Rose Tyler herself - who is just as worthy of being distinguished from the above examples as she is of being included among them, but this isn’t quite the place for that essay - the Bad Wolf is easily identifiable as the genesis of Doctor Who’s obsession with the (all-)powerful woman. Like Manhattan, Tyler is an ordinary human made unexpectedly omnipotent by exposure to exotic energy; but also like Manhattan, at least early in his life - and perhaps unlike the Giant Naked Rei - Tyler’s actions as the Bad Wolf are still motivated by a recognisably human emotive impetus. Such it is that, even as-god, Tyler continues to be weighed down by the fetter of Doctor Who’s intrinsically patriarchal dynamic: for a human (woman) to act above her station in such a way, by taking up the authority to control life and death which belongs traditionally to the Time Lords (gendered deliberately), could be not just her own undoing but the undoing of the whole (social) fabric of reality. The 'Bad Wolf’ is referred to as if she/it is a separate entity from 'Rose Tyler’ almost by necessity; a woman is 'allowed’ to be a person or to be powerful, but never both simultaneously, because, crucially, a woman who is allowed to be a person makes mistakes.

> Homestuck: Beyond Canon, p. 630

Jake’s powers are - so like a woman, one might cynically add - intimately tied up in his emotions. A comparison perhaps more familiar to Homestuck’s established repertoire of cultural touchstones would be the Jean Grey-Phoenix (two names which, very much like Rose Tyler and the Bad Wolf, have come over time to be used to refer to two distinct entities, out of fear for what it might mean for one human woman to wield such omnipotent power) of Christopher Claremont’s Uncanny X-Men, whose transformation into cosmic force of nature goes hand-in-hand with her self-discovery as an independent, sexual woman. Significantly, Jake retreats into his own force-of-nature state seemingly in direct response to objectifying treatment. The hope field isn’t just something he struggles to control; it manifests itself directly out of feelings of loss of control.

Though the explosion of energy that lays waste to Derse is the most dramatic manifestation of this retreat into hopelessness, Beyond Canon throws us hints at how these attacks can arise in less drastic, day-to-day scenarios: specifically, how Jake’s “just wishing that [Tavros’ nut allergy] would nix” causes it to disappear, completely by accident. Like Rose Tyler, Jake English is a character that the story has decided is simply too tiny-minded to comprehend the massive power he wields, and as a result he reacts to situations of misunderstanding and distress by simply warping the world into one that he does understand.

> Beyond Canon, p. 716; Doctor Who, “The Parting of the Ways”

For the Bad Wolf, this shows itself in the resurrection of Jack Harkness. Gunned down only moments before, Tyler decides in her childish ignorance that he should be alive again, and the result is that Jack Harkness being alive becomes a fact of reality: just as Tavros will never experience another allergic reaction again, Jack is abandoned by the Doctor - who in all his patriarchal authority on the matters of life and death has decided his existence is a mistake - to live an eternity without ever knowing death.

Naturally we must then question the significance of Jake intervening in the same way in Jade’s death. None of the same ambiguity surrounds Jade that has previously surrounded other victims of resurrection interference; having done little in the way of villainy, and being struck unceremoniously from afar by an unnamed gunman, there is little reason to believe Jade’s death could have possibly been narratively significant enough to stick. So if the lack of clarity is not on our part, we have to assume it is on Jake’s: what, then, are the possible repercussions of Jake bringing back from the brink of death someone whose circumstances he does not fully understand? If Rose’s assessment is correct - that whether a god is deemed heroic or villainous depends on the internal judgement of their own complex and nuanced “moral grey matter” - what then are the potential ramifications of Jake praying that this moral grey matter be cured of what ills it?

What are the consequences of the apotheosis of the sex object?