2023-10-03 2:13:11 ¶ ● ⬀ ⬈

sally-october:

> lime-bloods:

> > # Homestuck’s Gnosticism: The Conflict

> > > ==>

> > That Homestuck is “a Gnostic story” seems to be widespread knowledge, but I think there’s limited understanding as to what that actually entails. often you’ll hear that Roxy and Jade “have Gnostic themes” about them thanks to their chumhandles, but little elaboration on the matter.

> > The central cosmic conflict in Gnosticism is between two aspects of God, each with their own worlds; the feminine aspect, called ‘wisdom’ or Sophia, represents the world of the spiritual, while the ignorant masculine Yaldabaoth rules over the physical, the world of the flesh. This is also Homestuck’s central cosmic conflict (Yaldabaoth’s in-person appearance being but a small clue), and most readers will be able to identify the basic shapes these two forces take in the comic; the motherly female Muse oversees Space, and is locked in eternal combat with her brother the patriarchal Lord of Time.

> > > ==>, ACT 7

> > It’s common to hear of Space and Time represented as the aspects of creation and destruction respectively, and this holds true to a point. But something that is crucial to understand is that while the Muse of Space is ostensibly our heroine, and the Lord of Time is our primary villain, creation and destruction are, in and of themselves, morally neutral acts. Indeed, the Muse’s ultimate spell is not to truly create anything, or even to put an end to the Lord’s destruction, but to condemn him to the same destruction for all eternity.

> > This is because, while creation versus destruction is the battlefield on which much of Homestuck takes place, Homestuck is only superficially “about” creation and destruction. The creation myth serves as a backdrop to the personal arcs of the characters, but also as a veil hanging over deeper themes.

> > Keep reading

> i vehemently disagree with some of this, especially the idea that sburb being about breeding is a 'smokescreen’ because the comic has a lot of interlocking themes that only work when understood together and the gnostic stuff i think is a sub-set of the theme of reproduction rather than the other way around (yaldie re-produces reality the way an artist re-produces an idea (and maybe they’re both re-producing the shadow of the far place into substance the way parents re-produce their own soul/mind shadow into substance in a child), and the feminine/masculine element of yaldie and sophie feeds into I think a broader point being made about parenthood rather than vice-verse). However it’s still a great analysis of this specific thread of gnosticism in homestuck as a whole.

I think we basically agree, though, just in different words? it’s not reproduction as a whole that I’m dismissive of, but rather the idea that the life cycle of Paradox Space can be broken down into opposing moral forces of “creation” (good, Skaia) and “destruction” (evil, Noble Circle). Homestuck demonstrates that reproduction requires both of these things; as you point out, to reproduce is not to create from nothing, but rather is another form of craftsmanship or demiurgon. a birth always requires a death, usually delivered in the form of a meteor. this is the truth that becomes apparent only after we dispense with surface level notions of birth being strictly good and death being strictly bad.

2023-10-06 6:29:49 ¶ ● ⬈

forgottenhomestuckfacts:

> (panel source)

> Rose’s shirt used to have the official Squiddles logo on it, but she defaced it to make the “mean”-looking logo she wears today.

> Early Homestuck merchandise contained references to this, including a similarly defaced Squiddles poster, and the official Rose shirt of the time “actually [appeared] to be defaced, with ink missing around the eyes and mouth area”.

> (Submission courtesy of @mmmmalo!)

2023-10-07 16:58:42 ¶ ● ⬈

lime-bloods:

> if Homestuck is a comic making commentary about comics, I wonder if there’s anything at all to Lord English being connected not just to real-life English colonialism, but also to the British Invasion movement in comics history..?

I don’t know how much merit there truly is to this as a serious analysis, and I suspect not much at all, but a thought I want to get down before I go to sleep and forget it; Beforus being a planet where those with super powers looked after those who didn’t, transformed into Alternia where those with powers abuse them and oppress everyone else, kind of does look a bit like English did a “comics deconstruction” on them

2023-10-09 3:11:32 ¶ ●

if the twist is rose lalonde made the dark gods i’m gonna be so mad. but dirk making the most archetypal “here’s my fanadventure fanspecies named after a mythological creature” thing imaginable almost kind of evens it out

2023-10-09 6:33:48 ¶ ● ⬈

dingodad:

> okay tereziiii give us that theatre girl realness!!

2023-10-09 14:24:35 ¶ ● ⬈

##

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!

2023-10-09 14:53:39 ¶ ●

this is going back over old news, but the connection didn’t occur to me until just now, seeing two unrelated posts in close proximity: the presence of human paraphernalia (a globe depicting the Earth, a bedframe for her cocoon) in Fiamet’s residence (top) no doubt has something to do with her axolotl lusus having been sighted on Earth in the past?

2023-10-09 15:13:44 ¶ ● ⬈

lime-bloods:

> this is going back over old news, but the connection didn’t occur to me until just now, seeing two unrelated posts in close proximity: the presence of human paraphernalia (a globe depicting the Earth, a bedframe for her cocoon) in Fiamet’s residence (top) no doubt has something to do with her axolotl lusus having been sighted on Earth in the past?

add another missed connection to this pile; the mossy stone walls and floor of Fiamet’s place obviously indicate she literally lives in this cherub temple revealed in an earlier sahcon presentation, so speculation that an older portal lives here would lend itself to the idea of some earlier exchange between the two planets.

I doubt Fiamet has been on the quest herself, but perhaps her lusus has been on scavenging missions through the portal and brought back souvenirs for her charge? the Christmas lights on Fiamet’s bedframe might even suggest a New Perigee’s Eve connection, since that’s the holiday where a lusus goes out scrounging for shitty gifts…?

2023-10-15 3:34:52 ¶ ●

never picked up on the revolutionary overtones of Vriska finishing off her parasitic lusus with a “Guillotine de Marquise” before… which is a little ironic given that we later find out the guillotine has that name not because it was used on a marquise but belonged to a marquise. so it’s a particularly heavy handed example of Vriska literally LARPing as a renegade.

Hussie’s commentary on the spider execution scene specifically wonders if it’s “reasonable to ask: did [Mindfang] have to guillotine her own spider mom too? Maybe it’s becoming a Serket family tradition”, seemingly having forgotten that Mindfang’s lusus was swallowed whole by a dragon. but Mindfang’s life did end on a revolutionary chapter, so perhaps the core of this assumption isn’t totally worth throwing out…?

2023-10-15 16:38:03 ¶ ● ⬀ ⬈

karcatgirl-vantas:

> loki-zen:

> > it’s a common misconception that maths is all theoretical; they actually keep the 0 in a vault in France and u can go look at it if u got connections.

> most numbers can only be found in the platonic realm of forms but there are a bunch of seven-digit primes that physically exist inside british museums as a holdover from the days when britain had colonies inside the platonic realm of forms

2023-10-27 3:58:17 ¶ ● ⬈

dingodad:

> so like have we had the discussion about vriska’s powers being different to (vriska)’s in that she can control humans yet

there’s actually lots of stuff worth speculating on re:mind control in this update. we see earth vriska use scorpio powers, symbol and all; extended zodiac rules would seem to state that earth vriska must be bound to the light aspect like alternian vriska is. but this update also suggests our vriska doesn’t have luck powers; so is vrissy light bound but with no aspect powers, because sburb isn’t actually going to happen? or does she have different psychic powers and a different aspect binding, and is hs2 saying the two are related?

this update also has jane’s security forces wearing mind control tiaras, which it must be assumed the condesce built because despite all her experimentation, she was never able to mind control humans (she was only ever able to control jade by manipulating her animal half). so is that still true, and vrissy has power beyond the condesce’s? or have the rules simply changed now that we’re in a new reality?

2023-10-27 4:26:18 ¶ ●

tangential Jade / Jadesprite / general sprite thoughts.

the Condesce can only control Jade through a mixture of scorpio and taurus powers; seemingly she puts the human half to sleep and awakens the animal half. we know that having her “animal half” awakened doesn’t turn Jade into Bec; the “Grimbark” Jade still expresses Jade’s personality and inner feelings, simply in a more uninhibited, animalistic manner. so she doesn’t have Bec’s feelings or personality, but simply Bec’s “nature”.

this makes intuitive sense when keeping in mind what we already know about sprites, which is well-trodden ground; they’re ghost images, which contain the “essence” of someone and not really their lived experiences. and most people, i think, understand this intuitively when it comes to Jade. we don’t refer to her as “part Bec”, but as “part dog” (or “part first guardian”).

so we can probably universalise this for other characters who contain sprite essences. we know, for instance, that Lord English is “part Arquius”. but it should also be understood that Lord English always has been chiefly Caliborn, in exactly the same way Grimbark Jade never stopped being Jade. so we should probably think instead of English having Equius and Hal’s “nature”, without actually having their personalities on any upper level of consciousness.

(Gamzee is still a wildcard, even with this considered, since we’re not dealing with a sprite Gamzee but a “real” Gamzee. I still maintain that Gamzee is essentially subservient to Caliborn, and therefore would remain as such in the same body; but are we still dealing with a character who is just as much Gamzee as he is Caliborn? or does it only being “half a Gamzee” included in Lil Cal’s gene pool change things?)

2023-10-27 4:51:34 ¶ ●

we might assume that the two-faced Gamzee is himself composed of “human” and “animal” half, and that by absorbing “half a Gamzee”, Caliborn inherited only the animalistic shadow-self; a fitting fate for a character who is master of chucklevoodoos - the art of manipulating these subconscious shadow-forms - and a character who is, in all the ways that matter, the Incredible Hulk.

but it might also be argued that Caliborn, too, is simply one-half of a person, having expunged his sister personality? and that by putting two halves together, we still end up with a being who is one full half Gamzee. and if this is the case, is it not just as likely Lord English is a submissive Caliborn half attached to a dominant Gamzee half?

or perhaps it is the point that Lord English is composed entirely of two shadows with no real “face”; he is the Incredible Hulk, but one without a Bruce Banner: the very concept of the shadow self made incarnate. in which case the question of whether he “is Caliborn” or “is Gamzee” is entirely secondary to the fact that he “isn’t” Andrew Hussie, having been constructed from pieces of the author rearranged into the shape of an anti-author. (read: Lord English is God’s Hulk)