2024-08-01 3:17:47 ¶ ●

##

by god i hate tumblr search cause i could have sworn you made a post on abusive quadrants/quadrants as a deeply unhealthy and toxic system on alternia but i cannot for the life of me find it

I made a brief series of posts about this on @dingodad, chiefly this one about “girls […] continually being put in situations where they have to play free therapist to dangerous men”, but i don’t believe it’s a line of discussion i’ve ever formally written about on this blog. if that’s something people would like a more definitive post about though then it might be a good idea…

2024-08-01 3:29:54 ¶ ●

had a really interesting conversation with a friend this week about the Ultimate Self versus character growth, particularly in relation to Vriska and the hell tiers. in the past I’ve advocated pretty strongly for the Ultimate Self as core to Homestuck’s themes, and as part of that I’ve been pretty defensive against its detractors because I think the idea is largely misunderstood and unappreciated. and while I still believe an appreciation for what the Ultimate Self represents is a really important tool for understanding Homestuck proper, now that we’ve moved out of Homestuck and into a new fictional framework I’ve come around on the importance of being able to critique the concept as well.

there’s been a lot of talk lately about whether classes and aspects are really reflective of “reality”; whether Homestuck really says that someone might be defined by arbitrary labels applied to them by a video game - even if that video game literally is responsible for the propagation of reality - or if these are merely roles that we are expected to play but are free to break away from. I’ve always been in the latter camp; I’ve made quite a few posts now about how the class-based roles assigned to heroes of Sburb are reflective of the class-based roles assigned to trolls on Alternia, which are themselves biologically-essentialist assumptions that play a similar role to sex and gender among humans. and the Epilogues attest to the queer reinterpretation of such biologically-essentialist social structures; gender is an arbitrary label perpetrated only by cruel, self-serving cycles, and can be cast off if one’s self-liberation calls for it. so the conclusion one might draw from this is that the Ultimate Self and the classpect are in a way opposed to each other; that the Ultimate Self is androgynous, without blood, and without class.

however.

it must be recognised that while Homestuck is one story, the Epilogues detail the exploits of characters who have stepped outside of that story and - depending on which Volume you’re reading, and the outlook of each individual character - either into another story or outside of “narrative” altogether. and within a narrative, the roles assigned to each character do have special significance. just as one labelled “Thief” is expected to play the role of self-interested antagonist, and one labelled “jadeblood” is expected to live out her life looking after larvae underground, the “narrative” places certain expectations on characters designated as “boys” and “girls”. as far as the narrative is concerned, characters are not “people”, but rather ideas to be played with, and that’s exactly what the Ultimate Self is - the “idea” at the core of a character’s being. so it could equally be argued that a character’s class, aspect, blood colour or gender are part and parcel with their Ultimate Self, and therefore that, stepping outside of the rules that govern Homestuck, shrugging off the Ultimate Self could be just as important as - or interconnected with - shrugging off gender.

crucially, Homestuck is a story about teenagers, and there is baggage that comes with this conceit. the coming-of-age story is one of self-discovery; the disrobing of the cocoon of childhood and the uncovering of the “true self” underneath is core to the genre. but importantly, at least in Homestuck’s case, this never actually means becoming an “adult”. coming-of-age stories are about teenagers because teenage makes for great stories, and as such it’s only natural that a Lord of Time interested in creating a neverending story would try to engineer neverending teenagerdom. allusions to this abound, particularly surrounding Alternia, a planet populated entirely by teenagers who awaken from literal cocoons every evening only to return to their cocoons of a morning when it comes time to sleep. their quadrants seem hand-designed for the express purpose of making not “healthy” relationships but compelling ones, driven by the confusion of teenagers learning about themselves for the first time. by pretending to be a story “about” reproduction, Homestuck uses the fact that its heroes “enter right around the cusp of sexual maturity” as a smokescreen for the truth that Homestuck characters are expected to “come into” their genders in just the same way they “come into” their class and aspect roles.

in this sense, while the attainment of the Ultimate Self may superficially represent the dispersing of narrative contrivances like “timelines” and “alternate selves”, it also follows Homestuck’s “children coming into themselves” script to the letter. and to uphold our “full potential” as the Ultimate version of Self, as Hussie describes it, is to fetishise the prenatal kernel from which our entire life grows, untouched by any worldly corruption; to insinuate that we grow forward by stripping away our outer layers like insects, rather than by embracing each new layer as it comes, is a romanticism of childhood that borders on the reactionary. when viewed through this lens, what is “true” is also what is “innocent” - just as the world Before-Us, before Lord English’s “corrupting influence”, is innocent, Edenesque before the fall brought on by a serpent’s bargain.

the Epilogues and more pertinently Beyond Canon, meanwhile, are very essentially not about teenagers at all! breaking free of the old cycle of storytelling also means breaking free of that expectation to stay a child forever, and in a world no longer inhabited primarily by children, how much need is there, really, for a “true self” that determines everything about your being? within the bounds of Homestuck, we can accept that characters like Meenah and Vriska must by their very natures be selfish because selfish teenage girls fill a vital narrative niche, and because when you grow up in a situation like Vriska’s, being selfish isn’t necessarily the same as being a villain. but becoming an adult means growing up, and among grown ups, on a planet where selfishness is no longer a survival mechanism, being selfish often does make you a villain, and there is an expectation that in order to continue being a hero one must learn and change. and in a world where a Thief no longer has to be selfish, how then can it still be said that every character has an immutable platonic Truth at the essence of their being?

the presence of the sprites in Vriska’s purgatory illustrate this idea perfectly. because a sprite is an “idea”, they represent a step toward the Ultimate Self, just as the sprite^2 is another step closer. but a sprite is also a ghost image; a photograph captured of a person in a particular moment in time, forever unchanging. this is why the sprites seem to simply disappear at the conclusion of a game of Sburb: while they are immensely powerful and vastly knowledgeable, their significance is tied to a specific purpose within a specific context. whether they simply cease to exist or commit deliberate suicide-by-meteor on the dying battlefield of skaia, they demonstrate an understanding that as great as it is to be an immortal and omniscient sprite, they lose their purpose for existing once the game of Sburb ends: just as the Ultimate Self loses all significance and purpose once the game called Homestuck ends. Davepeta demonstrates this exact superfluousness within the Plot Point; while they may have been a fountain of knowledge about all things arcane within Homestuck, when it comes to actually “growing up”, there’s not a single piece of advice they can give!

finally, and probably most crucially of all, Beyond Canon has not merely stepped outside the bounds of the rules of the original Homestuck, but outside of its authorial purview altogether. if escaping into Universe C means escape from Lord English’s expectations for what it means to be a “man” or a “woman” or a “Page” or a “lowblood”, then escaping into Beyond Canon also means leaving behind any of Andrew Hussie’s expectations for what it means to “be your Ultimate Self”. this is exactly why the story is CALLED Beyond Canon, and is central to exactly the kind of questions it is asking about canon; if Hussie is no longer in charge, why should “the Ultimate Self in Hussie’s Own Words” (as linked above) remain the “canon” answer? and these characters’ new home, in the custody of a diverse team of new creatives, is reflected by the multiple competing narrative forces within the story; it’s probably significant that the character who shows the most reverence and concern for his Ultimate Self is Dirk, the very same character who wishes to bring Homestuck back to its heyday with throwbacks to nostalgic and outdated plot artifices like Sburb! no doubt the story’s other key schemers, like its various Calliopes, have their own points of view on the meaning of the Ultimate Self and Homestuck’s other mysteries, and the writers responsible for this story in our own world should be allowed to have their own views as well. in order to live up to its very premise, Beyond Canon can and must be allowed to offer up different opinions and interpretations to those of the original text.

ultimately this is key to understanding why Beyond Canon is not a traditional “sequel” and should not be thought of as such; why it was never Homestuck 2, only Homestuck^2, and then dropped the 2 altogether. in much the same way Homestuck was a story not “controlled” by its fans but rather written in continuous conversation with them, Beyond Canon, now finally under the control of fans, is a story in conversation with the text that came before it. in the end this is what any narrative-about-narrative boils down to; there can be no “reality” in fiction, only a version of reality as told by a given narrator. and while we are forced to take a narrator at their word when offered no other options, that doesn’t mean every subsequent narrator is going to narrate the same story from the same point of view! it’s important to have an understanding of the Ultimate Self as portrayed by Andrew Hussie because it deepens your appreciation of the original Homestuck, and a well-formed appreciation for Homestuck will in turn increase your understanding of Beyond Canon: not because HS and BC are the “same story” by any means, but because better knowing HS will make us better prepared to engage in the conversation being made when BC deconstructs, subverts, and even critiques the story we already know.

2024-08-01 8:02:15 ¶ ●

> Pose as a team. The world is real.

noticing a deeper significance to Problem Sleuth’s final words in the wake of that last post; as a sort of Homestuck prototype, Problem Sleuth shares in Homestuck’s Plato-paraphrased philosophy that what is good is that which is “true”, or real. but “The world is real” is also another way of saying “SHIT JUST GOT REAL”; which is to say that an escape from the world of fiction into the “real world” is not an escape from all problems, but rather an escape from contrived video game problems into the world of real problems. like, say, divorce, infidelity, and the rise of fascism in the American democracy, as Homestuck’s epilogues would go on to demonstrate

2024-08-01 15:59:46 ¶ ● ⬀ ⬈

dopplesgryndthloggle:

> lime-bloods:

> > > Pose as a team. The world is real.

> > noticing a deeper significance to Problem Sleuth’s final words in the wake of that last post; as a sort of Homestuck prototype, Problem Sleuth shares in Homestuck’s Plato-paraphrased philosophy that what is good is that which is “true”, or real. but “The world is real” is also another way of saying “SHIT JUST GOT REAL”; which is to say that an escape from the world of fiction into the “real world” is not an escape from all problems, but rather an escape from contrived video game problems into the world of real problems. like, say, divorce, infidelity, and the rise of fascism in the American democracy, as Homestuck’s epilogues would go on to demonstrate

> somewhat unrelated but this is the main thing that made me very confident that homestuck’s ending was about escaping the constraints of the story when I first read

> Like, I feel like it’s so neat (in a tidy sense) that both major MSPA’s have the same ending with the ps gang finally escaping MK’s imagination dungeon and the HS gang finally escaping LE’s imagination dungeon

> (if you oversimplify it)

yes! PS even features stories-within-stories that act as diversions from the characters’ true goal of escape in the form of games which Death forces his guests to play!

2024-08-01 16:06:29 ¶ ●

god. even the fact that Problem Sleuth ends with an off-handed suggestion that its villain will be forced to play games with Death forever and ever and ever is a perfect roadmap to Homestuck’s ending

2024-08-01 18:03:20 ¶ ●

##

i would LOVE a post on that. i have been thinking extensively about pitch romance and how deeply, cruelly toxic it is and how quadrants are in general. a lot of stuff is based in karkat's pov on it (and karkat is like. sooo biased love the guy to death but he is SO BIASED!!!) but sometimes it's in the narration and the existence of auspisticism & the fact that quadrants potentially existed on beforus trips me up as well...

this is a great question! and I suppose “the beginning” is probably the best place to start for a post about this, after all.

it’s important to be aware that when we think of Beforus as a planet that is “good”, this is not necessarily because it is wholly good by our own standards or even by the author’s standards, but because it is good within Homestuck’s philosophy, that the “good” is that which is “true” or “real”, rather than what is “true” necessarily being good. to put this in another way - which I’ve only just recently begun to fully understand myself - Beforus being free of Lord English’s corruption doesn’t mean it’s free of problems, just that it’s problems are “real” problems, as opposed to fictional problems; they’re reflective of problems we have on Earth.

pivotally, Beforus still has systems of gendered oppression, and in that sense it’s clear how the intrinsically gendered violence of Alternia’s quadrants would find their own place in Beforan society. it’s just that in this context, these dynamics arise as part of complex sociological phenomena over thousands of years and aren’t put in place solely for a specific purpose by an omnipotent time god, and as such won’t necessarily manifest themselves in the exact same ways, or necessarily be “as bad”. as with so many things in Homestuck, it’s the idea at the core of the concept that’s most important; kismesissitude and matespritship on Beforus should be recognisably the same idea as the quadrants on Alternia, just as they are recognisably the same “quadrants” practised by cherubs and humans, despite all of these arising from vastly different and largely disconnected cultural contexts.

the tendency for the same ideas to reliably bubble up to the surface again and again in different contexts is a central law of Homestuck’s metaphysics: in the words of the reliable Doc Scratch, “there is essentially nothing new in paradox space.” and it’s relevant that Scratch is the one to relate this truism, because therein lies a crucial different in connotation between “storyteller” and “narrator”; it is not a narrator’s job to invent new ideas, but rather to spin their own interpretation of what has already happened. this is why Scratch’s ancestor stories are “troll fanfction”; he’s writing an AU of characters who already lived on Beforus. we can only assume that, in the same vein, in “creating” Alternia’s quadrants Scratch merely took those parts of Beforus that were convenient to his vision and amplified them to be all-important. (alchemy, as described by 9th century author Jabir ibn Hayyan, was the transmutation of one material into another by manipulating qualities that already existed within all matter, pushing some into the background and pulling others into the fore.)

it’s easy to think of auspisticism, meanwhile, as unique among the quadrants in that it superficially seems to provide a service that is beneficial to all involved, and certainly towards Act 6 a lot of the children seem very interested in interpreting it this way. but in the narrative context in which it’s introduced to us, I think it’s clearly much more about control. as far as the ashen quadrant is concerned, what happens to the participants themselves is inconsequential; a successful ashen quadrant merely upholds the social idea of monogamy by stemming “widespread black infidelity.” which is on its own a patently absurd idea: fidelity enforced by the race who practice punishable-by-death polygamy in order to mix all of their genes together in a single pool?! yes, it makes sense within the context of a nonsensically complicated alien reproductive process, but the nonsensical complicatedness of it all is entirely the point; the quadrants are designed to intersect in ways that not even the trolls themselves could ever fully understand. just as it’s often impossible for a troll to distinguish between feelings that are platonic, pale or red, when Eridan attempts to “spark a rivalry wit)( [Sollux] to get [Feferi] to auspisticize […] and pull us out of our quadrant” it’s “t)(e oldest and lamest trick in t)(e book” precisely because it’s the quadrant working exactly as intended! all of the quadrants serve to make relationships messier under the guise of making them more structured because messy relationships make for a great story, which is Alternia’s fundamental purpose.

I think the Karkat point is worthy of another post deconstructing all the quadrants more broadly, because a lot of different things have been said about it already and it’s worth getting into, but straightforwardly I think it must be understood that Karkat and “the narration” have fundamentally the same bias; the narrative wants us to take Alternia seriously because Alternia as a machine is a construction of the narrative for the purposes of the narrative, and Karkat wants us to take Alternia seriously because he’s a massive stooge who has made his whole life’s purpose out of buying into that narrative.

2024-08-01 18:09:09 ¶ ●

there’s maybe a little shared DNA in the fact that kankri was a social visionary who saw exactly what was wrong with alternia but became a self-righteous crony for the patriarchy on beforus and karkat obviously identifying exactly what was wrong with the quadrants (that such a system naturally tends toward vacillation) but thinking that just means it needs a new set of graphs and charts to govern it instead of realising the foundations of the whole system are arbitrary and meaningless

2024-08-02 17:32:21 ¶ ● ⬈

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please god i need to know what U think of the whole “jadebloods are all female!” thing because i got into homestuck in 2019 around the time of friendsim and (retching) Lanque so i always assumed they were explicitly intended to be an all-female caste. however, re-reading the comic this year, i couldnt find a mention of it other than virgo and the Space aspect being really feminine, but i think kanayas journey with motherhood is more kanaya-centric than All-Jadebloods centric??

on one hand, it makes sense given that alternia has very real gendered oppression, so what’s better for that than CATHOLICISM?? on the other hand, i always saw kanaya as being transfem coded, because it connects so well with roxy yknow.. homestuck fans love to insist that certain characters just have to be cis women (kanaya, jade, roxy)

(as an aside; was “long hair was butch on alternia” a one off joke? i like speculation about alternia’s fashion opposing earth, lol)

dingodad:

> most all of our basis for explicitly gendered interpretation of Alternia comes from act 6 intermission 3, where Aranea tells us that “jade 8loods were also an almost exclusively female caste”. so the door has always been open for there to be “some male jadebloods”. but it’s a mistake to view this as having anything to do with any kind of “biological sex”. the whole idea of biological sex among trolls is a smoke screen. the jadebloods’ assigned gender at birth is “jadeblood”. this is what makes them a feminised caste.

> Caliborn doesn’t have a clue what biological sex is. Aranea will tell you that there are boy cherubs and girl cherubs, but for your own sanity you need to cast this idea out of your mind: cherub sex takes place between good and evil cherubs - which is determined by their blood - and anything else is just roleplay. Caliborn’s attitude toward sexing is that the ones he likes are boys - that’s all the thought that goes into it. and that’s the mindset we need to be aware of when we delve into understanding troll gender. there are some trolls who have breast tissue and some who don’t, but they aren’t “mammaries” in any sense, so there’s no reason to believe they’re actually sexual characteristics of any kind; maybe this is what Lord English chose to base his gender schema on, but the idea that this means there must be “male trolls” and “female trolls” is completely imagined for the narrative convenience of the human reader.

> when we read that there are “male-dominated” highblood castes and therefore by implication female-populated lowblood castes, it’s not by some coincidence of biology: the highblood castes are male-dominated BECAUSE they are highblood castes. each caste has a role to play in Caliborn’s Alternia, and just as the highblooded roles are those of patriarchal domination, the lower castes must take on roles of feminised submission; and in the case of the jades in particular, this means breeding duties. the fact that this also comes with the expectation to wear makeup and pretty clothes is just more roleplay.

> so tl;dr what i think of “the all jadebloods are female thing” is that it is very obviously true but in a way more 5 dimensional gender studies way than anyone else tends to mean when they say it

> my pet “long hair was butch on alternia” headcanon - which is a joke but in the way all headcanons about alternia should be jokes of some kind - actually kind of relates to this lol. bc i figure that if gendered expectations of female trolls includes working in disgusting underground caverns filled with genetic material, it’s going to be practical to keep your hair close to your head where it won’t get dirty, in much the same way the feminist image of the short-haired woman became popular in the west during and after world war 2, wherein a lot of women had to start wearing their hair close to their heads to avoid scalping themselves in the factory machinery they suddenly had to start working with. hence kanaya dedicated to her assigned feminine role and wearing her hair short vs. porrim rebelling against it for feminist reasons and thus wearing her hair at a length that would be totally impractical for wading through gene pools.

2024-08-06 6:25:54 ¶ ● ⬈

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you can link to it if youve already answered it, but how do you think lord english “runs” his empire? by the way you talk about alternia, it sounds to me like you imagine he did play a role as some kind of shadow political leader that made active decisions in the structuring of alternia. is that the case? i think thats really interesting, i always wondered what his rulership over the condesce actually looked like. iirc lord english has only ever shown been screaming and destroying things so i’ve always struggled to imagine if he would even be lucid enough to make decisions or do anything other than mass murder. does doc scratch have some way to implicitly understand his desires and then deliver orders to the condesce on his behalf? or was the caliborn that the “kids” fight at some nebulous time in the “future,” the one who’s soul dirk rips out, not teen caliborn but an actually fully realized adult cherub caliborn who had already been fucking with alternia? idk if that makes sense, the part of the comic where the beta kids are described by caliborn to have been sucked into the juju has always been a little weird for me to wrap my head around. i always imagined the battle happened between them all as kids still but now that im trying to imagine a lucid lord english im realizing they could very well all be adults because we still havent “seen” it actually happen aside from caliborn’s claymation right? anyways. very interested in what your thoughts on caliborn’s active influence on alternia looked like

dingodad:

> lots of really great questions! i’ll try to get my thoughts in order here.

> to start at the beginning of lord english’s story: yes, it is an important point that we have no idea “when” caliborn’s masterpiece actually takes place; how old caliborn is, where the kids who beat him up even came from… and I think this is because the details in that story don’t necessarily matter. while i certainly believe there is a point in caliborn’s timeline where a gaggle of teenagers show up and stuff him into a puppet, what we see play out on his claymation stage is a mythologised account of something that happens to him over and over again in many many different ways over the course of his time loop.

> so while i wouldn’t call that caliborn “fully realised”, necessarily, i think we are supposed to see him as “caliborn-as-lord-english”; he has the peg leg, he has mastery over the felt, he’s finally obtained the rainbow magic eyes, and while he certainly hasn’t encountered the trolls yet, no, he has had loads of practice at being the puppetmaster of his own world as he hones his homosuck craft and uses the terminals left to him by his session to influence homestuck itself! (i don’t think whether caliborn is ultimately “teen” or an “adult” is hugely relevant, because caliborn’s specific circumstances mean that he doesn’t really “grow” or “mature” by aging the same way a human does; he gradually acquires power in different ways.)

> related to this, i tend to use the names ‘caliborn’ and 'lord english’ interchangeably. which i know not everyone will agree with, but i think it aligns with the hussie’s philosophy that act 6 is about the kid versions of the comic’s grownup characters; while, yes, the lord english contained within lil cal also contains sprinklings of equius, dirk and gamzee, these characters are ultimately caliborn’s servitors, and i would argue that subsuming weaker personalities into his own is kind of part of caliborn’s Bag as a dominant cherub.

> anyway, all that is just to say that it’s important to be aware that lord english DOES act like caliborn, and isn’t just a mindless, speechless force of destruction - at least not all of the time. when damara tries to escape his captivity, he speaks to her in caliborn’s voice, and perhaps more importantly, tells us the one thing you must never forget about lord english: he is ALREADY HERE. never be fooled into thinking lord english only showed up at alternia’s death and then fucked off into the furthest ring to hunt his sister - his first act was to travel back to the beginning of alternian history and become its architect. notice how as soon as lord english speaks, two things happen: first, the cursor changes into english’s reptilian hand; second, we see the puppet hole in doc scratch’s back - he was the literal puppetmaster behind scratch’s actions the whole time!

> so yes, lord english was an active participant in the shaping of the alternian empire, though i think “political leader” is probably the wrong description; he certainly never had any face-to-face conversations or gave any direct orders to any trolls, at least within modern troll history. but that’s not what he’s about: as the cuestick, and with scratch as his cueball, english’s manipulations are more about lining up the perfect shot, executing a precision strike, and then letting events play out exactly as planned.

> probably the most influential of these precision strikes was establishing the subjugglator cult, who worship him and his puppet as twin mirthful messiahs; while we don’t know exactly how he did this, it’s not hard to imagine it had something to do with appearing to them as an all-powerful angel at the very dawn of their society. compare this to how the condesce makes cordial visits to every planet she passes on her journey through the stars, then fucks off to let her army of trolls decimate the place. after all, scratch operates in exactly the same way: he doesn’t waste his time constantly relaying orders to his proteges, but rather grooms them when they’re still young, turning them into his unwitting soldiers so that when he finally does intervene he’s only telling them to do things that “deep down, they already know they want to do.” (commentary from Homestuck: Book 4, p. 216)

> while the condesce formally becomes english’s puppet when she kills the handmaid - inheriting both the rustblood’s curse and essentially taking up scratch’s role on earth - it’s not like she was ever particularly hands-on when it came to helming the metaphorical ship herself. in porrim’s words, she was “the Lo+rd’s slave all alo+ng […] thro+ugh manipulatio+n by his cunning emplo+yee”, but what the condesce enjoys doing most is delegating! on alternia she gave most of her authority to the subjugglators, and then did the exact same shit again on earth. remember meenah never wanted the responsibilities of heiress, and ran to beforus’ pink moon to escape them; the way i see it, the condesce rushing off into space to explore the galaxy instead of overseeing the planet she’s responsible for is just a repeat of the same behaviour, and doing so left a power vacuum for english to essentially insert his own guys into. (possibly thematically relevant, since lord english’s role is fundamentally to shoot balls into unfilled dark pockets.)

> in short, english is cleverer - or at least, more competent - than we give him credit for. it’s just that rather than a chess master who moves each piece to its proper place individually, he’s playing pool; if you line up just the right shot, you only need to make one move, and the balls will play the rest of the moves off of each other. looked at another way, as the Lord of Time and master of the alpha timeline, english makes his moves by controlling inevitability itself. he engineers things so that events can only play out in the exact way he wants them to, and all other options are doomed. and to do that, he only needs to be present at key moments in alternia’s history - most importantly its very beginning and its very end.

2024-08-06 15:58:14 ¶ ●

some less cohesive thoughts wrt something touched on in that last post.

i have assumed in some previous posts that by killing Calliope, Caliborn carves out some essential part of himself, and is thus cursed to an eternal Lack no matter the effort he might put into self-improvement. and while this is at least one interpretation proferred by the text, there is a fair argument i think to be made that it’s a cruel or even ableist one. the idea that Caliborn is “stunted” is ultimately a bit of poking fun (possibly even at the author’s own neuroses). while Caliborn makes it easy for us to come away with the impression that he’s stupid, he’s clearly not: his original plan to pass on the assassination of Calliope’s dream self to Jack Noir is, yes, an evil plan, but it’s a clever one! Calliope’s underestimation of Caliborn’s twisted genius is clearly a part of what allows the plan to work in the first place, and in retrospect this subterfuge clearly prefigures the kind of underhanded dealings that allowed Caliborn to take such complete control of Alternia.

I think it’s very tempting to see Scratch’s knack for manipulation as something Caliborn “stole” wholesale from Dirk-as-AR: the “Land of Someone’s Handicrafts I Took” certainly comes across as a suggestion that Caliborn is incapable of truly creating anything for himself. but this too is just making fun of Homestuck’s long-standing love affair with the Google image result photobash, and in the end the copy+paste only serves as one small step in Caliborn’s creative journey. Lord English is a dark mirror of Hussie, after all, and to accuse Caliborn of being creatively bankrupt is to suggest Homestuck itself of lacking originality… but of course that’s all part of the point. we can’t necessarily assume Homestuck’s default position is one of self-confidence; while it’s never been particularly shy about the bits and pieces it aped from the works of fiction that came before it,* the comic crucially does set out to question the ethics of reusing ideas, or even of telling a story in the first place. that Hussie didn’t even “create” his own characters - that they originate as some kind of timeless Platonic ideas that one merely plucks from the void when they’re needed to tell a story - is essential to the comic’s mythology; hell, how much of Homestuck even is there that isn’t just a remix of Hussie’s own previous work?

I asserted a couple years ago now that Homestuck is “only superficially” about creation and reproduction… but one particular rebuttal, that Homestuck actually very much is about reproduction in the sense that it is about the reproduction of images and ideas, has stuck with me since i first heard it. and though conversations about the difference between stealing / copying / learning / coming up with an original thought are obviously a LOT older than modern machine learning, given that Caliborn very literally goes on to become a Terminator-esque AI singularity (in a setting where all AI is just direct copies of living people’s essences, no less!) and even played with early examples of tech bro grift a couple years before the debate really took off, I find it a fun thought exercise to ponder the ways in which Caliborn’s contribution to Homestuck preempted the current discourse on algorithmically-generated art… which I suppose grows not just out of the more pedigreed argument about digital art as a medium, but probably stems all the way back to the dawn of comics as a medium, in all their entanglement with the burgeoning pop art movement. but that’s about where my area of expertise ends.

*it’s probably meaningful that the name of the planet Lord English “stole” his ideas for Alternia from, “befor-us”, is so widely reinterpretable as referring to pretty much anything that came “before us”.

2024-08-13 6:52:43 ¶ ●

when Caliborn first embarks on his journey as a storyteller he starts out by making his characters act in ways that entertain him but ultimately make no sense because they totally contradicts their personalities (THE ALPHA MALE WHISTLES FOR HIS BITCHES). but his end goal is to tell stories that fit the characters so well they’re indistinguishable from the “truth”; as per Hussie’s commentary, Doc Scratch can only really “nudge people in the direction of doing the nasty thing that, deep down, they already know they want to do.”

Caliborn’s main way of interacting with the world outside his session is of course through his command terminal; and while exiles can use these to “command” the heroes, they can’t just control them outright. if you command someone to do something they don’t want to do, they won’t do it! so in this way, Hussie’s tutoring of Caliborn with self-improvement literature is a direct parallel to the Mayor improving his relationship with John through self-improvement literature not just visually but thematically; they’re both, in essence, being taught to make their “commands” more effective by making their language more persuasive!

2024-08-25 18:20:47 ¶ ●

I decided to take the plunge and look for responses to this update on Twitter, and was disappointed to find a lot of people expressing that they thought this episode was pointless trauma for trauma’s sake, when I thought it communicated its point very effectively.

One of its main points of course is the truism that “recovery isn’t linear”. Vriska’s echeladder at the end of the chapter symbolises this; not only does it include “regression roast” among its rungs, but it’s the first echeladder thus far that Vriska has actually failed to complete by the end of the episode; Scratch expresses this point literally by shrinking Vriska down, reversing the literal growth Vriska has experienced over the course of page 666. Consequentially, the Doc Scratch chapter lacks any kind of catharsis at its conclusion, and as a result it does feel really awful to read, but the deliberate choice behind this is clear to see.

While cliches about the intricacies of recovery from trauma do not, in and of themselves, make for a particularly profound message, this chapter also more importantly gave us a clear vision of what Vriska needs to work on next in order to move on from this obstacle: her compulsion to constantly be acting, always moving forward, is in fact part of what holds her back.

This manifests itself most glaringly in Doc Scratch, who positions himself as an impulse that Vriska cannot ignore - echoing Hussie’s commentary that “He’s always there at the right moment to nudge people in the direction of doing the nasty thing […] they already know they want to do.” - with English removed from the picture, the threat Scratch poses is now simply the fleas he’s left in Vriska’s mind. No matter what she tries to “do over” within the Plot Point, the decisions she made in the past are still part of her life, and there’s always the possibility that she will make decisions like those again. (there is nothing new in Paradox Space.) But from the beginning, Vriska’s brash decisionmaking is also exactly what leads her into Scratch’s parlor in the first place: she has an eternity in front of her to just spend time with the friends she’s made amends with, if she wants to; but even when the challenge facing her is literally just growing and maturing as a person she tries to blaze ahead and take the quickest path through it. And Aradia foreshadows this in the first chapter when she warns that Vriska’s attitude is defined by “direct acti0ns”; so long as she obsesses over cause and effect, the repeating patterns that shape her world and her life will always be in her blind spot. (Perhaps that’s why she wears an infinity loop on her missing eye?)

This chapter also shakes things up in an important way by turning our understanding of Vriska’s echeladder candle on its head. We’ve had the vague sense that it’s been “burning down” to something since the first chapter, but with Gcatavros advising Vriska this week that she needs to slow down “sO YOU DON’T BURN OUT,” it suddenly seems like the candle burning down isn’t necessarily all a good thing. Her interaction with Scratch is filled with allusions to this; there’s a “convenient timer” keeping track of Vriska’s life in the Plot Point that she’s not paying attention to because she’s too busy looking forward, and he sees her off with a coded warning that her “Light” may soon run out just as it did when she was a child. Ultimately what this latest chapter has brought to the table is stakes; by demonstrating that it’s still possible for Vriska to face losses on her journey through the inferno, we can no longer be so confident that the “Hell Tiers” have to be a straightforward “upgrade”.

2024-08-25 18:24:22 ¶ ●

oh my god, Gcatavrosprite “DOING PRETTY GOOD, oN THE NOT BEING ALLERGIC TO MYSELF FRONT, / cOMPARED TO BEFORE,” but still occasionally having to sneeze is literally a direct analogy to Vriska’s recovery taking a backslide in this chapter

2024-08-26 3:29:55 ¶ ●

After this chapter I’m starting to get a clearer idea of why chapter 4 is represented by Davepeta’s feather… when Nanna appeared in the momfang chapter it seemed to be communicating that each chapter would have Vriska aided by a new sprite, so I wasn’t sure why we would get another Davepeta chapter after their appearance in chapter one. But now that this latest chapter has introduced two sprites at once, it seems more like Davepetasprite’s chapter will be one featuring the sprites as a group; Vriska rejected Tavros and Erisol’s offer to just hang out for a bit and it led to her rushing headlong into retraumatising herself, so it would be a logical next step for her to actually take them up on her offer and just spend some time among friends re-healing. After notably not aging at all for the first time in this chapter, it would represent a significant milestone in her development for Vriska to now spend some time simply growing older without acting - becoming wiser and more powerful without necessarily having to keep burning away at her candle.

2024-08-26 5:28:55 ¶ ●

Early on in page 666 we touched on the sprites, and how, like the other ghosts in the Plot Point, they’re frozen in time and unable to change. This latest chapter further emphasises the forever-childhood of the dead trolls; when Gcatavros and Erisol suggest that Vriska just chill with them for a little while, it’s an appeal to her own childhood - the years she spent roleplaying with them back when they were just Tavros and Eridan. Vriska comes close to calling this out directly when she teases Erisol for the fact that he “literally can’t change his clothes”, but Erisol pointing out that Vriska’s been wearing the same jacket since they were kids is actually stating plainly the thesis of the above post: for all the ‘progress’ Vriska has made up her echeladder thus far, she’s still reluctant to actually “change”, which is what the Plot Point was really constructed for her to do.

When Scratch reverts Vriska back to her own forever-childhood, he makes one last connection between growth and clothing by referring to it as “get[ting] you into your uniform.” Outfit updates have been a staple of Beyond Canon since its inception, and since last year’s relaunch quite a few characters have even received their second or third new designs; but Vriska stands out as one who has yet to be revamped in such a way - beyond receiving a new eyepatch, which is its own kind of regression to the way she used to be - given how uniquely fashion-conscious she could be in Homestuck itself. While sprites have no choice in what they wear, Vriska does, but has simply chosen thus far to remain in her old clothes in the same way she’s chosen to remain in an old mindset; if she is indeed on the way to some kind of “Hell Tier”, it seems very likely her first new outfit is on the horizon, and that inevitable change has now taken on a considerable symbolic significance.

2024-08-26 5:38:00 ¶ ●

“Trolls think fashion is stupid” is code for ‘trolls don’t prioritise individuality’ the same way “[t]rolls don’t have mail” is code for ’trolls lack freedom’; while Sburb offers its human heroes the opportunity to launch into adulthood by customising their looks to express their unique personalities, the trolls are seemingly taught from a young age to avoid this kind of thinking in order to streamline the process of playing Sgrub. So for Vriska to finally graduate from the black tee with her astrological sign on it would also be a significant symbol of growing out of her Alternian mode of thinking in that respect

2024-08-30 16:34:07 ¶ ●

thoughts on Scratch’s Parlor that don’t really lead anywhere in particular:

I saw someone point out that these final three chapters consist of two different pool balls separated by what looks like it could be a sprite-oriented intermission, and that this might be taken as suggesting two takes on the Doc Scratch confrontation - the 8-ball chapter representing the version where Vriska is in control, and not the cueball. I’m torn on this.

one the one hand, I think it would be a really compelling elaboration on the “recovery isn’t linear” theme for Vriska’s therapyquest to not involve beating Scratch at all! (in my search for sicklyseraphnsuch’s post I saw someone refer to this as scars “healing around” the trauma and moving on, which I thought was really good but immediately lost the post. shoutout if that was you.) this chapter didn’t end like previous fail states; the time loop didn’t repeat (Scratch specifically says no do-overs!) and we end on a level-up screen, which brings a level of finality to the interaction.

on the other: having Vriska spend some time working on herself, hanging out with the sprites like they asked, and then be able to re-approach the same situation with a new mindset and ultimately come out victorious would be a great demonstration of her ability to grow and solve problems without brute force. after all, while Vriska did level up this month, she didn’t fill out her echeladder like she has in previous chapters, and her previous failures to advance in the time loop have all ended in death, either by Tavros’ lance or being eaten by her mother… so maybe that’s all “no do-overs” means? Scratch won’t kill her, so she won’t get to play this conversation out again, but that doesn’t mean she can’t come back and initiate another dialogue entirely, try to overcome him a different way… if Vriska needs to learn to grow without burning her candle, maybe she just won’t earn any new levels in sprite chapter, and she can come back and finish what she started for the big finale?

both options clearly have thematic value, which is a great position for a story to be in.

I absolutely see the appeal of the common theory, too, that the 8-ball chapter will feature Vriska confronting herself (possibly in the form of the alternate (Vriska)). but I also think the events in Scratch’s Parlor cast the idea of Vriska confronting a younger version of herself in a totally new light… one thing I realised upon reading the linked post is that the final chapter is of course represented by an 8-ball because the 8-ball is the ball the player has to pocket to finish the game. but Vriska is already in a pocket in the form of a black hole: so for Vriska to sink the 8-ball here means what, exactly? to sink another Vriska into the hole so she can be free? leaving a younger Vriska behind while the alpha continues on into adulthood would be a potent symbol of growth, for sure - but it would also be a repeat offense.

say that is the path we go down, though; the big finale to Vriska’s therapy is a confrontation with herself. it occurs to me that there’s an alternative - but equally nonoptimal - consequence to journeying into the underworld and confronting the shadow-self. and it’s one that anyone who’s seen Twin Peaks will already be intimately familiar with: what if isn’t Vriska who sinks {Vriska} into the pocket to win the game? what if the “Hell Tier” Vriska who escapes from the Plot Point is in fact the shadow-Vriska? it would certainly put a dark spin on this particularly emphatic thread of philosophising we’ve followed in the pages leading up to now:

> JAKE: […] its nice to think that there might be countless janes somewhere out there who never stopped being happy […] If i can believe in those janes, / i think i can let this one go. (p. 635)
> VRISKA: C'mon, we’re not doing this again. You can’t keep comparing yourself to her! She’s a freak and you’re like the least freakish person I’ve ever met.
> NANNASPRITE: […] it’s simply a fact of reality. […] The past is always going to be the past. […] And while in my twilight years of retired spritehood, I have often pondered the “could be.” / Seeing that choice isn’t innate to every iteration of Jane Crocker has assured me that I did indeed fulfill a path of potential to its fullest degree. I’m grateful to her for that… marginally. (p. 666)

of course, we’ve already seen this play out to an extent with the younger Vrissy, who Vriska evokes directly in her conversation with Momfang (“I didn’t have to go through aaaaaaaall of THAT to 8e strong. Vrissy didn’t!”). and something I’ve maintained ever since the the veil was finally pulled off the Plot Point is that there is absolutely no way Beyond Canon can possibly sustain itself if that damn black hole manages to produce yet another set of duplicate characters- OH SHIT

> Due to principles of uncertainty regarding the existence of angels in a vacuum, each splits in to ANGEL/ANTIANGEL PAIRS.
> For each pair, one of the two escapes, while the other falls back into the black hole.

2024-08-30 16:57:38 ¶ ●

on a more grounded note, I find it pertinent to think back on the role 8-balls actually played in Vriska’s life:

> You consult with these ominous globes, but routinely destroy them in frustration over the PUZZLING GUARANTEED INACCURACY of their predictions […] and with each you destroy, you add to an insurmountable stockpile of TERRIBLE LUCK. You have to stop. But addiction is a powerful thing.

the time when Vriska was actually “using” 8-balls was her lowest point; when even her signature luck had abandoned her. given Scratch’s warning that Vriska’s Light “will abandon [her] once again, perhaps for good”, then, the fact that an 8-ball acts as the symbol for the final chapter of her journey is more than a little ominous!

in addition to being metonyms for Mindfang and Doc Scratch as characters, the ancestral journal and the cueball are both objects that had their own very literal influence on Vriska’s life in and of themselves; so it seems reasonable to expect that the chapter marked by an 8-ball, in addition to whatever confrontation it may involve, will also shine a spotlight on Vriska’s addictive personality in order that she might break free from that cycle of addiction (…or else regress in some seriously reality-shaking way.)

2024-08-31 4:38:45 ¶ ●

dolls are ALL ideological manifestations of something far scarier, aren’t they… the Squiddles being abstracted Horrorterrors, Gamzee manifesting John and Dave’s fears of puppets as dolls in their dreams; even Doc Scratch being essentially a mask hiding Lord English’s true nature. it’s all the same thing!