2023-07-05 16:12:04 ¶ ●

it was inevitable, and now here it is; I saw the movie, took note of its shared thematic heritage with Homestuck, and now I’m making a comparative analysis post involving Across the Spider-Verse. I won’t bother covering the nature of canon events themselves, because to be frank that’s entry-level comics deconstruction. I want to discuss the specifics of one canon event in particular; the death of Gwen Stacy.

i saw some discussion of Sollux and Spider-Man earlier today the exact details of which are not important, because I came away from the discussion thinking one thing; “but Sollux doesn’t really react to Aradia’s death the way a Spider-Man might react to Gwen Stacy’s death.” and the reason for this should be obvious; because Aradia isn’t the Gwen Stacy to Sollux’ Spider-Man, but rather the other famous dead woman in comics:

> Some (probably everyone) may have noticed that many of the trolls are loosely or not so loosely related to various super heroes and villains.
> Sollux - Cyclops
> Aradia - Jean Grey (including parallels with her death/resurrection to Phoenix, which augmented her powers)

and because it’s impossible to think about the stories of Gwen Stacy and Jean Grey and the canonicity of these stories without deconstructing the function women serve in comics and stories as a whole, this thought reminded me of something else about Sollux, which I’ve talked about before, but which can be summed up by an extract from Hussie’s own commentary:

> As a psychic, he’s aware of things on a lot of levels, such as future visions of doom and gloom, but he also seems intuitively aware of his place in the narrative as just a marginal cast member in a story containing people much more important than he is. […] his resigned sense of fatalism is inseparable from his narrative impotence, and the basic truth about him is that he was built to be little more than a serviceable part of a big machine. Just like his ancestor. (Homestuck: Book 4: Act 5 Act 1, p. 96)

knowing that these “future visions of doom and gloom” tie Sollux and Aradia together as twinArmageddons and apocalypseArisen, it seems only natural that we should assume Aradia is in the same boat here. and with that in mind, Porrim’s own theory on the Alternian system seems to apply in retrospect; when we think of lowbloods as mere cogs in a machine, we must also be thinking of women as cogs in a machine.

this isn’t a theory post so much as as it is a thesis proposal… I’ve been diving deep into the X-Men as of late but have yet to pluck up the courage to go right back to the beginning and read the Claremont stories that started it all, but if this could be a serious line of inquiry, maybe it’s the impetus I need? again, Homestuck and Spiderverse descend from the same long tradition of comics deconstructing comics, and the Watchmen references later in the comic show that Hussie isn’t above using the language of his predecessors to do that deconstruction… Claremont is known as an early subversive when it came to the treatment of women in comics, and starting with Aradia it might not be such an absurd assertion to suggest that the so-called “comic book death” phenomenon is one of the parts of comic history that Homestuck attempts to deconstruct (forget not that the primary villain is a monster capable of not just killing, but wiping away the immortal ghost forever, voiding all chances at revival). so with movies like Spiderverse and comics like Hickman’s recent X-Men revival putting such a spotlight on death in comic books, maybe now is the right time to shine such a lens on Homestuck?

2023-07-05 16:12:17 ¶ ●

Comic Book Death of the Author

2023-07-05 16:37:25 ¶ ●

god. Vriska’s whole “apocalypse buff” thing is just her trying to copy the lowblood shtick using the magic cueball as a substitute for actual lowblood prescience

2023-07-08 9:58:14 ¶ ●

oh yeah, while I was on my holiday I rewatched the first two seasons of Twin Peaks with my girlfriend. I was hoping to push through and see the whole show and didn’t quite get the time, but I did have a handful of new thoughts.

foremost, I’ve had my conviction reaffirmed that the “owls [which] are not what they seem” are not dark spirits like BOB, a position currently reflected on the Twin Peaks wiki, but are in fact guardian spirits from the white lodge. there’s just one scene that seems to try to throw off the scent with regards to this; a dream Cooper has in which BOB appears at the foot of the bed with an owl’s face. but I think there’s actually a pretty vital clue that tells us not to trust that particular dream; when Major Briggs describes the distinction between “visions” and “dreams” … which are “mere sorting and cataloguing of the day’s events by the subconscious”. it is vitally important that the BOB-owl dream does not actually contain any new information; merely flashes of information Cooper and the viewer already know. that scene is not meant to truly indicate that BOB is directly connected to the owls, but merely to tease us by showing how Cooper’s own mind is attempting to reconcile seemingly unrelated mysteries. seeing for the second time the scene in which the owl seemingly captures BOB’s wandering, vermin-like spirit has only reinforced my interpretation that that is indeed what’s going on.

2023-07-08 10:12:13 ¶ ●

on the other hand, an entirely new thought; Harold is dead, isn’t he? as in, the entire time he’s on the screen, he’s a ghost… the weirdness surrounding Mrs. Tremond certainly suggests the interiors of the houses on the Meals on Wheels route aren’t as cemented in time or space as the world surrounding them, and the way Harold collapses the moment his shaking hand reaches out of the bounds of his home feels eerily reflective of BOB’s creeping out of the black lodge toward the end of the season… having Donna deliver some of the orchids grown in his home to Laura’s grave brought to mind the Ancient Greek cthonic gods whose domain was the earth in which the dead were buried and simultaneously from which produce grew, and his declaration that the “ultimate secret [is] knowing who killed you!” feels particularly pointed. it’s been a little while, so I’ll have to rewatch his scenes to recollect my thoughts…

2023-07-08 10:16:02 ¶ ●

is Audrey’s name supposed to make us think “audience”? one of her most iconic scenes is the one in which she declares the show’s own background music to be “dreamy” and begins to dance to it in a way the onlooking characters seem to find strange; and then she spends much of the rest of the show watching other characters’ secret moments through a hole in the wall. this thought came to me early on in my rewatch and seemed to peter out following the season 2 tone shift, but maybe I’ll have some more thoughts once I pay closer attention to her weird situation in season 3

2023-07-20 7:32:02 ¶ ●

now that i’m really opening myself up to the idea of analysing Homestuck with reference to traditional comics, I wonder if it’s worth thinking about how familiar Hussie was with the intricacies of the Hulk character when he created Lord English? like, how reasonably can we read into the fact that English is half Jigsaw (serial killer puppet who traps people in scenarios that force them to undergo brutal redemption before they escape) and half Hulk (gamma-fueled manifestation of ongoing cycles of patriarchal abuse)

2023-07-20 8:08:24 ¶ ●

jake has a ghost image of dirk in his own mind… lord english has a ghost image of dirk in his own mind

2023-07-20 8:18:24 ¶ ● ⬈

lime-bloods:

> jake has a ghost image of dirk in his own mind… lord english has a ghost image of dirk in his own mind

wait and i was literally just the other day talking about the subjugglators manipulating their subjects by fucking with their mindscapes. hold on

2023-07-20 13:36:48 ¶ ●

so let’s suppose the leg Dirk built to potentially puppet Caliborn around was really just a prefigure of sorts to the little puppet of himself he’d put in Lord English’s brain; and the puppet went rogue a la your Hal 9000 or your Terminator? I guess the question then is what Dirk’s initial intention for English could have been… are we to assume, in the way one often can assume patterns of Homestuck, that he was merely going through the same motions Vriska went through to create Bec Noir? or is such a base motivation as creating a villain to fight for himself beneath someone like Dirk…

2023-07-21 18:28:22 ¶ ●

writing a sequel to my pinned post. it’s long. sorry

2023-07-30 17:23:46 ¶ ● ⬈

lime-bloods:

> Lord English as “sort of Hussie, but projected across several layers of fictitiousness” actually brings me back several pages to another commentary snippet:

> > TG: its the conksuckiest piece of fucking shit that ever still somehow qualified as a boot
> > GG: <3
> > TG: you just know imigrants were responsible

> > The fact that “imigrants” made the conksuck boots is also in reference to [a SBaHJ] comic. So it’s not actually Dave just randomly being racist out of nowhere. It’s just him being racist by proxy of his ironically crafted comic about a shitty buffoon. Which is actually a comic I made, and assigned credit to him. It’s not me being racist though, since I’m now impeccably insulated by two fictional characters’ worth of deferred accountability.

> > Homestuck: Book 6, p.34

> Like Lord English exists as a sort of “excuse” for Andrew Hussie to enact his more evil and destructive authorial tendencies on the comic. Which is of course, from a real-world perspective, literally true. When we find out that Alternia is a hellhole “because Lord English made it that way”, that’s just code for “because Andrew Hussie wanted it to be”; something I’ve always thought was a really pertinent example of Homestuck’s metafictional form of storytelling in action, but which also gets frequently criticised - and quite fairly, i think - as flat-out lazy worldbuilding by less forgiving critics.

and this is totally why Lord English manifests as a “Hulk” in the vein of Marvel comics, too: one the one hand, the Hulk is the manifestation of cycles of patriarchal abuse, but he is also Bruce Banner’s violent alter ego a la Jekyll and Hyde!

it’s relevant enough to note here as well that this is the exact same relationship between Dirk and Hal, too; Hal is “a splinter”, so the things he does don’t reflect on Dirk purely because of a technicality. which is of course why Hal is Lord English! the glasses are Dirk’s Hulk in just the same way English is Hussie’s Hulk.