2022-12-05 9:00:30 ¶ ● ⬈

dudesrock:

> thinking about how the exiles arrived on earth 413 years after the beta kids, and dirk and roxy arrived 413 years after jane and jake. could you argue that they serve as exiles to the other kids? knowing a little more, but lacking the complete picture, and guiding them incoherently with conflicting instructions based on whim and opinion. also strikes a similar note with “the job of the exiles is to prepare the planet to host life (and thus sgrub) once again” and roxy wanting to repopulate earth. she also lives in a carapacian colony, so.

> i vaguely entertained the idea of their interactions matching up to mirror the four exiles from the beta session, i.e. r+jane, r+jake, d+jane, d+jake being four different trains of thought. if that’s the case maybe r+jane=pm, because jade(…bec) blew up pm’s monitor, and roxy blew up jane’s computer… but i don’t think the connections run much deeper than that, so, thought discarded.

the answer to this is that pretty much every group of characters in Homestuck is “narratively removed” from the next group in some way. as the author puts it in his own commentary:

> The first four lines Karkat says here literally sound like they could be a disgruntled Homestuck fan talking smack about me as they scan backwards through the story. Which sounds like a funny thing for me to say—and it is—but it’s also not that remarkable, since at any given moment Homestuck is full of surrogates for various factions of the readership. Basically any character who is viewing the actions of other characters on a screen can be seen as a consumer of that story through some form of in-canon digital media. Whether they type in character commands like the exiles, or use Trollian to skip around the “archive” in a nonlinear way like the trolls do, for the sake of “adventure analysis” or to heap scorn on those involved, every narrative-viewing character is temporarily filling the role of the Homestuck reader from a certain angle. Later, cherubs become the ultimate distillation of the idea. (Homestuck Book 3, p.228)

so in being given the software to observe and communicate with Jane and Jake from across time, Dirk and Roxy do form part of a cohort that includes the trolls and the exiles.

more specifically to Dirk and Roxy, their enthusiasm for their ancestors does make them seem a lot like “fans of Homestuck”, i.e. Dirk’s rambling on about Dave and Rose’s heroic achievements; the sprinkling of cliche’d troll language like “pale” and “wiggling day” throughout their speech adds to this impression.

what this makes me wonder, though, is if Vriska and the trolls are supposed to be “fans of” their own ancestors in the same way? malo talked about Lord English as the law of time that separates people, and I’ve been wondering more and more lately if the thousands of years separating trolls from their parents were placed there deliberately; as you say, the exiles are also separated from the characters they observe by so many years… so are the expanse of time and the wall that separates the story from its audience one and the same? (fourth wall = fourth dimension…?)

kankri’s conspicuous comments about how highbloods’ lifespans “[ensure] 9nly their cultural agendas and narratives receive the dial9gue’s air supply”, i.e. highbloods literally “control the narrative”, also feel worth mentioning here, since this seems to apply directly to the trolls’ ancestor narrative e.g. characters like the Summoner not even having their names survive to the modern day while Mindfang’s account of events basically dictates everything we know about Alternian history..