2023-10-09 14:24:35 ¶ ● ⬈

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I believe you had once noted that sopor slime resembled cartoonish nuclear waste -- since the slime's an apparent avenue of Lord English influencing the population (or just damaging it), do think that might relate to Scratch's "seeds" being nuclear bombs?

lime-bloods:

> i gave this ask some thought offline and mostly came up with lines to draw between the cue balls and recuperacoons more broadly, not necessarily along the nuke line, so this is a bit of stream of consciousness…

> sleeping and crystal balls are both methods of fortune telling? the cue ball and recuperacoons are both computers of a sort (was Scratch’s method of helping with Kanaya’s “daywalking” at all similar to Jake’s computerised remedy for Jade’s “sleepwalking”)? the cue ball seed is also seemingly filled with some kind of slime - dark water, sloshing about the cavity in [Scratch’s] head - and in fact the biggest nuke of all, the Tumor, famously turned two giant vials of 8ball slime into a giant radioactive sun… perhaps that’s your in? (if I’m not mistaken, Hiveswap also makes some reference to radioactive mind honey “runoff” - literally equating the slime in Alternian computers to irradiated slag)

> in a tangentially similar vein, we can think of the seed itself as a cocoon… I think it was BKEW who forwarded that the cue ball that English’s head breaks out of was like a chrysalis stage that filtered out the unneeded parts of Dirk and Equius that he didn’t need..? does anyone have that post?

> when we pit cue ball and recuperacoon against each other, though, what my instinct immediately says is that if the cocoon is a part of the pool table, it’s a pocket… specifically, if the slime serves the purpose of “relaxing ooze [that] helps assuage the terrible visions of blood and carnage that plague the dark subconscious of your species”, then can we see the cocoon as one of the “dark pockets” one can retreat into to avoid English’s omnipresent glare? keeping in mind, of course, that dark pockets are, in and of themselves, English’s tools. cocoons as voyeur-bots/beds also puts a different spin on the idea that “no information can escape” a dark pocket.

> some of my earliest speculation into the function of the recuperacoon was in response to some analysis of the Evangelion film series, in which slime (LCL here) and black holes are both functionally gateways to the same womb dimension. in this scenario, the sopor slime is one method of making sure Alternia remains a planet of preteens who never grow up, by forcing them to return to their cocoons and dissolve bodily in order to be reborn again as children every day and night. but is this not also literally the fate Caliborn is condemned to? struggling every night to be born as a world-eating monster, only to be pulled into a black hole and have to live it all over again, ad infinitum?

> I mused recently that Caliborn’s session acts as a purgatory, presumably holding him prisoner on a desertified earth until he can brute force his way into maturity and break free. so in the same way that Caliborn’s house juju acts as a physical stand-in for Homestuck itself - four kids trapped within and forced to grow strong enough to break out - maybe the cueball is the very same thing for Caliborn, an eggshell containing the very essence of his journey, which can only be 8r8ken out of when the weakest parts of him have been dissolved away by radioactive acid? again - the seed as a cocoon. (and the cocoon as a bomb?)

> I’m not sure any of this really answers your question, beyond the vague notion that maybe radioactive sludge is an anti maturing agent? (sterilisation via radiation?) but to cap things off, thinking of the cue ball seed as a bomb did make me think back to Problem Sleuth’s jawbreaker bomb, which was literally just a candy shell around a highly volatile infinite recursion of realities. that’s all I’ve got!