2022-03-04 10:01:27 ¶ ●

if SWORDS = WORDS, presumably the constant 1/2ing of blades has some connection to John’s tendency to split compound words so as to obfuscate their identities? and Dirk’s “unbreakable katana” would be the fundamental indivisible concept, fitting Dirk’s avid interest in Platonism…

presumably this is also why the unbreakable katana is secretly one of the “zilly” weapons; zillium being modeled after a diagram of the quarks inside a fundamental particle like this one?

2022-03-05 15:51:59 ¶ ●

looking over Calliope’s dialogue exploring her bias about passive and active classes essentially being “selfless” and “selfish”, respectively, the fact that she calls herself selfish on multiple occasions jumped out at me; seemingly betraying some kind of hypocrisy that Calliope is aware of herself, deep down?

> UU: i really thoUght i was going to be someone special.
> UU: that i coUld Use my abilities do something no one had ever done.

and when Calliope does prove herself to be special with an ultimate expression of the Muse’s power, it’s by actively inserting herself into Caliborn’s time loop, forcing her way into the infrastructure of reality; meanwhile, despite all his own selfishness, Caliborn’s greatest strength is that he passively bends reality around him merely by existing.

2022-03-09 3:39:44 ¶ ●

so the image of the trickster lolly appearing when Caliborn activates his HYPNOT1C GL4R3 implies that, in much the same way that the trickster lolly is a drug, being possessed by Lord English is a sort of trip; as malo points out, “the joke” around Meulin and Kurloz is that a psychic attack is basically a bad psychedelic experience.

as of Volume: Meat we have a John poisoned by Lord English in such a way that suggests he is primed to be bodily possessed. I spent a little while throwing different poisons at the wall to see what else could be gleaned from the little information we get about John’s affliction, but ultimately seemed to come to the conclusion that, once again, the trickster lollipop somehow held the answer. I didn’t make the connection at the time, but following these two angles until they intersect, the answer seems clear; when John is ‘poisoned’, we should take that as synonymous with John being 'drugged’.

but talking about poisons that are also drugs, it’s hard to look past Gamzee’s sopor slime… again, I had a stint ranting out loud about what the true significance of the slime could be, and somehow ended up at the conclusion that sleeping in slime somehow amounted to having a little bit of Lord English in your head. that seemed like a bizarre train of thought at the time, even to me, but thinking now along the lines of drugs and poison it clicks perfectly into place… green slime is the very essence of Lord English, but surely it must also be his venom! to sleep in it is to be immersed in his world; to consume it is to become his willing follower; to have it injected into you directly is to become his next bodily host.

fitting, too, for the poison that prevents a god from regenerating - but does not kill them! - to also be used to fill up cocoons; in the troll subconscious, a symbol of ascension. the same poison English used to prevent John from metamorphosing being used for centuries beforehand to suppress the entirety of Alternia… the other day I touched very briefly on the idea that Alternia is a world where the spiritual is suppressed to allow the physical to take control; poisoning the entire race so as to make them unable to access the world of dreams, forcing them to live in the world of English’s illusion, would be a perfect way to do that.

2022-03-09 3:45:12 ¶ ●

Caliborn’s hypnosis just being the power to Drug People fits so neatly with my old headcanon that chucklevoodoos are actually based on magic pheromones rather than real psychic powers too

2022-03-09 3:49:54 ¶ ●

funny how since ectoplasm both represents ghosts and also genetic material (manbro bukkake theatre etc.) then impregnating someone becomes a form of possessing them

2022-03-10 7:17:11 ¶ ●

I saw it said a few weeks ago that Lord English’s poison is irrelevance. it must be understood that this is a mislead. Lord English’s poison is relevance. being in a story in the first place is Lord English’s curse

2022-03-16 7:46:37 ¶ ●

huhhhh… saw a post just now reminding of the fact that the quote “servant/master axis” is flipped from beforus to alternia; given that Scratch/Caliborn authored alternia as a response to beforus, that makes Caliborn what… a liberator of enslaved coolbloods? malo’s been homing in lately on Caliborn breaking free of his own chains and how that evokes liberation of the enslaved; and I suppose to Caliborn that chain does represent being forced to “swap blood”, so it would make sense for him to observe beforus’ blood dynamics and take an interest in flipping them on their head?

more importantly this implies Caliborn saw a planet where men (male-dominated high castes) serve women and decided what he needed to do was MRA that shit into a world governed by misogyny

2022-03-16 7:51:09 ¶ ● ⬈

lime-bloods:

> huhhhh… saw a post just now reminding of the fact that the quote “servant/master axis” is flipped from beforus to alternia; given that Scratch/Caliborn authored alternia as a response to beforus, that makes Caliborn what… a liberator of enslaved coolbloods? malo’s been homing in lately on Caliborn breaking free of his own chains and how that evokes liberation of the enslaved; and I suppose to Caliborn that chain does represent being forced to “swap blood”, so it would make sense for him to observe beforus’ blood dynamics and take an interest in flipping them on their head?

> more importantly this implies Caliborn saw a planet where men (male-dominated high castes) serve women and decided what he needed to do was MRA that shit into a world governed by misogyny

ye olde thinkpieces about Eridan’s misogyny really being progressive by troll standards because matriarchy were right all along… just about the wrong planet

2022-03-16 8:24:08 ¶ ●

I was also thinking last night about the fun sort of bait and switch situation surrounding the Condesce’s control of her own empire… the fact that Meenah spends all her time in space and leaves the Alternian homeworld under the control of her clown enforcers could be naively taken as suggesting that whatever’s out there in space is way more important, and the clowns are just a puppet regime [with] carte blanche to carry out their idiotic whims (supposedly in the same way Alternians might hold the naive belief that their empire is a true matriarchy?). but in spite of the Condesce’s habit of delegating to her clown underlings, in this situation the one being delegated is actually Meenah herself; Lord English and his faithful understand that the homeworld is the true stage of things to come, and the assignment to conquer the galaxy is just a distraction to keep her out of the way (which we also now understand is exactly the way Meenah wants things to be, given her disdain for responsibility)

2022-03-16 8:31:36 ¶ ● ⬈

lime-bloods:

> I was also thinking last night about the fun sort of bait and switch situation surrounding the Condesce’s control of her own empire… the fact that Meenah spends all her time in space and leaves the Alternian homeworld under the control of her clown enforcers could be naively taken as suggesting that whatever’s out there in space is way more important, and the clowns are just a puppet regime [with] carte blanche to carry out their idiotic whims (supposedly in the same way Alternians might hold the naive belief that their empire is a true matriarchy?). but in spite of the Condesce’s habit of delegating to her clown underlings, in this situation the one being delegated is actually Meenah herself; Lord English and his faithful understand that the homeworld is the true stage of things to come, and the assignment to conquer the galaxy is just a distraction to keep her out of the way (which we also now understand is exactly the way Meenah wants things to be, given her disdain for responsibility)

back when it all seemed a lot more important, a lot of discussion went on about how it could be possible for Gamzee to belong to a “RATHER OBSCURE CULT” if he was actually part of the empire’s theocratic enforcer class… at the time I bandied about the idea that the subjugglators were more of a behind the scenes secret society type of ruling class, and then eventually we all seemed to accept that the “obscure cult” line was just an artifact of slapdash worldbuilding, but I don’t think I ever considered that Alternia’s whole “fake matriarchy” might have been set in place for the explicit purpose of disguising the machinations of English’s followers in the background?

2022-03-16 8:37:25 ¶ ●

sort of an OTIM; after first experimenting with the trickster lolly, Caliborn stuffing all this stardust and candy corn into the Homestuck cartridge is literally him “putting more Candy in Homestuck” in the same way Andrew describes himself as “shoveling more and more red meat into the story’s maw” post-Jack: Descend.

2022-03-16 9:23:06 ¶ ●

since candy is drugs I wonder if it’s worth reexamining the whole glitch portion of the comic as a trip akin to the trickster sequence?

2022-03-16 12:23:29 ¶ ● ⬈

lime-bloods:

> since candy is drugs I wonder if it’s worth reexamining the whole glitch portion of the comic as a trip akin to the trickster sequence?

in a manner of speaking; but I think it’s more helpful to think of the very idea of a ‘narrative’ as a mass hallucination, in the sense that it dictates how the reader and/or characters perceive events without actually changing reality. by shoveling more meat or candy into the narrative, so to speak, one merely shifts the nature of the hallucination into a more saccharine or meaty direction

2022-03-18 1:06:44 ¶ ●

just to be clear I’m not really interested in any interpretation where Beforus is “just as bad” as Alternia but under a guise of woke language or whatever, primarily because this narrative only really rises to the forefront if you take everything Kankri says as gospel, which I think misses the point of Kankri as a character. certainly Beforus won’t have been totally without its own problems, but seeing it as a relatively utopian, or at the very least a relatively normal society is essential to The Point of Lord English and his corruption of reality

2022-03-18 3:34:00 ¶ ●

though maybe there is something to said about recent musings that Lord English doesn’t make things evil, he just disguises the evil that already exists…?

2022-03-18 4:05:07 ¶ ●

is it worth giving an outline of my gendered gnostic reading of homestuck its own post or is the general idea already obvious from just reading all my individual posts

2022-03-19 9:44:49 ¶ ● ⬈

mmmmalo:

> @lime-bloods I think your url means “white people”

> I had already been playing with the idea that “lime” might be used in the sense of “chalky white substance” instead of the fruit, but Latula’s “rad” speech affections linking redness and (racial) blackness suggested lime/white might have a racial dimension too. So between the Planet of the Apes reference (a world overcome by the “inferior” race), the Deep Impact references (flooded worlds representing black ascendance in the cultural sphere), the Maryam-Ampora concern with the purity of the race, I get the sense the missing lime blood caste is a play on the notion of “white genocide”? Which could account for why eg rap is a distinguished art form, or the general high-status of black-coded characters, this reading would implicate Alternia as being the aftermath of a white-black race war (which as Sburb would tell us, white is fated to lose… unless our noble heroes do something about it!)

> Also neatly ties Callie claiming lime blood to her Anglophilia (English people elegantly enough having the assigned pejorative “limey”).

> I’m too tired to think of what this would mean for Karkat…

> ==> / ==> / ==>

there’s as good a precedent as any for a “lime” monster to be a chalky white monster, and the fact that its defeat prefigures the slaying of the mastermind of the Hilarocaust does lend toward a racialist interpretation… though Fieri, painted black here, ranks among the Condesce’s minstrels, and to my understanding of your psychology of Rose her ogres probably wouldn’t be white guys?

Alternia as a post-apocalethnic world, so to speak, is certainly congruent with the planet as a version of Beforus where race relations have been flipped. when we chatted about the genocide of the lime caste in private, i suggested it should probably be compared to Meenah’s genocide of humankind, so viewing it as a ‘white genocide’ would link it directly to Jane’s white genocide paranoia (suggesting that Earth C is a world where the “servant/master axis” has been flipped once more, in fitting with Beforus being 'the paradise that was’ and Earth C being 'the paradise to come’… which I guess makes the Signless a racist agitator??)

2022-03-19 13:02:52 ¶ ●

as I suggested in those last tags, a fully race-oriented reading of Homestuck is kind of outside my wheelhouse; but there’s an undeniable racial layer to the Condesce, who has a fetish for blackness. beyond her own depiction in blackface, her primary fixation is on clowns and juggalos; people that Homestuck essentially regards as “white people who act black”, which is something she also strives to imitate

2022-03-20 1:25:17 ¶ ●

I’ve got an inbox too you know 💔

2022-03-23 5:05:42 ¶ ●

# 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.

A notable example of a force that obfuscates the morality of creation and destruction - and a force literally hidden behind a Veil of secrecy at that - is the Noble Circle of Horrorterrors. Described as “Evil Gods Who Oppose Skaia” and its ultimate goal of creation, in truth it is impossible to know for sure whether these gods are “evil” or not. That way lies madness, in much the same way trying to decode Homestuck as a morality story of creation versus destruction can never bear true fruit. If the 48 signs of the Alternian sky are to be believed, the Horrorterrors were themselves once creators; seemingly they only oppose creation now in order to prevent the rise of the Lord of Time, whose destructive tendencies they, too, fall victim to.

> [A6I5] ==>

The Gnostic Lord of Time, Yaldabaoth, is not a destroyer. On the contrary, he’s a demiurge; a craftsman. Not a creator, per se, but one who takes materials and turns them into something else. As the axiom goes, there is essentially nothing new in paradox space. “[I]n this particular fictional realm, and especially where alchemy is concerned, the fundamental ideas the objects represent are more important than the objects themselves” (Homestuck: Book 3: Act 4, p. 335): something cannot be created from nothing, only transmuted from an existing list of ideas hard coded into reality.

This is what makes Yaldabaoth truly evil; not for destroying the spiritual world, but for transmuting it down from its pure essence into a corrupted form where sin and suffering are allowed to exist. And so too is this the sin of Yaldabaoth’s favourite protege Lord English. Homestuck’s worst kept secret is that Lord English’s tendency to destroy, and sometimes kill characters we by all rights shouldn’t care about, is not the thing that must be stopped. What must be rectified is what he has already done to reality. Beforus was once a peaceful, spiritual world, where the physically strong acted as protectors over the spiritually enlightened; but when English “rewrote everything” it became a planet where the dominantly male cool blooded castes subjugate the warmer castes, suppressing spirituality. And each subsequent world spawned from this corrupted universe would too be corrupted; merely killing Lord English would not be enough. A new, uncorrupted spiritual world - a foretold paradise planet - needs to be created.

> DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 &l t; everything that ever happens to every version of you is an important part of your ultimate self… like a superceding bodyless and timeless persona that crosses the boundaries of paradox space and unlike god tiers or bubble ghosts or whatever, it really IS immortal

As Homestuck exists in a fictional realm, the act of crafting a world out of ideas also becomes the act of crafting a story. This is why Scratch is called a “nefarious alt-author” (Homestuck: Book 4: Act 5 Act 1, p. 184), English “arguably is me [Andrew Hussie], but detached from the literal AH persona by several layers of symbolism” (Homestuck: Book 6: Act 5 Act 2 Part 2, p. 71), and their retelling of the ancestor story is “troll fanfiction”: Caliborn, as taught to him by Yaldabaoth, is telling a story where he is God, and everyone else is merely trapped playing the roles he assigns them. The purity of the blank page behind Homestuck, that “well of potential from which every conceivable possibility arises” accessible only to John after interacting with Caliborn’s ultimate weapon, is corrupted by the placement of words upon it.

Thus is the Homestuck cast’s preoccupation with “ascension”. To reach the god tiers is to become one with one’s dream body, something which “kind of operate[s] outside the normal time continuum” and can share information across all versions of a person; which is why the moon insignia of the dreamer appears on the chests of the sprites squared. This is the basis of the Ultimate Self, one’s pure essence as it exists in Plato’s world of ideas; the untarnished version of someone that exists outside of any fictionalised account of them, malevolent and otherwise.

Not to lose sight of the gendered conflict at the center of all of this; to say that the feminine aligns with the “good” spirit and the masculine with the “evil” flesh is not to say that the genders of our heroes places them on either side of some cosmic chess board. Vriska speculates that the game of Sburb seeks players “right around the cusp of sexual maturity”, going on to make the assumption that this is because Skaia has a breeding program in mind for its children from the beginning. But knowing that Sburb being about breeding is entirely a smoke screen, we can see that its fixation on pubescence isn’t about reproduction, or even about sex at all; what Skaia wants is heroes who haven’t yet fully formed a sexual identity. Ascending to godhood is intrinsically linked to the act of growing up, because at the cusp of adulthood heroes are at the perfect stage to shed off the evil flesh. This doesn’t necessarily mean shedding off maleness entirely, only the oppressive trappings of maleness established by Lord English as the patriarch of Alternia (and by his servants and disciples like Dave’s bro, who instill in children a toxic version of what masculinity should be); but it naturally makes perfect sense for our protagonist to be troubled by the overwhelming expectations of masculinity and tend toward femaleness instead.

> John: Zoom in.

As a final aside, viewing the primary threat in Homestuck as a masculine corrupting force, we can extrapolate parallels with various other forms of corruption and oppression . In as much as Jake serves as a proto-Lord English - Caliborn ’jacks Jake’s swagger’ just as much as he follows in the footsteps of Yaldabaoth - his habits of settling uninhabited islands and filling his grandiose homes with cultural artifacts looted from eastern tombs paints him as something of a coloniser; suggesting that Lord English’s corruption is in essence colonialism, a force that corrupts foreign cultures, forcing them to adhere to the coloniser’s own narrative, transmuting existing societies into strata of race, or blood colour, or binary genders. The Alternians could be said to have not only been corrupted but “colonised”.

An alternative, perhaps more modern, reinterpretation of the Gnostic masculine-versus-feminine conflict might even reinterpret Sophia as precolonial androgyny, and Yaldabaoth as a gendering force; a narrative not incompatible with that presented in Plato’s Symposium, where primordial androgynes are torn into gendered halves by the worship-hungry Zeus, just as English takes the very ideas of our heroes and splits them into multiple fictions, across scratches, across timelines, through his dominion over Time. In either case, it is the Lord of Time’s enforcement of his gender narrative upon reality that forms the central conflict of the comic; to the point where escaping gender, escaping the confines of the comic, and becoming the true version of oneself all become synonymous goals; the goal of knowing the truth behind the lie, attaining the Gnostic gnosis.

2022-03-23 5:27:00 ¶ ●

…and Jake has “dozens of children with many families strewn all over the world” in exactly the same way English has “seeds” spread across the multiverse 🤦‍♀️ of course every Homestuck spinoff has to center around one or more of Jake’s offspring, his “seed” is what allows a story to exist in the first place!!

2022-03-23 17:07:28 ¶ ●

the denizens draw from the same “well of potential” as Skaia does, and “if an agreement with a denizen is reached in one reality, that same denizen in another reality could become aware of it”; the implication is of course that the denizens are in tune with their “Ultimate Selves”. and where the Ultimate Self is the pure idea of a character, beyond any notion of narrative or “canon”, presumably this can only lead to the conclusion that Homestuck’s Yaldabaoth is not just “some Yaldabaoth” but the Yaldabaoth, as in literally the same Yaldabaoth spoken of by the Platonists and the Sethianists

2022-03-23 17:38:37 ¶ ● ⬈

lime-bloods:

> > ==>

> 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.

> A notable example of a force that obfuscates the morality of creation and destruction - and a force literally hidden behind a Veil of secrecy at that - is the Noble Circle of Horrorterrors. Described as “Evil Gods Who Oppose Skaia” and its ultimate goal of creation, in truth it is impossible to know for sure whether these gods are “evil” or not. That way lies madness, in much the same way trying to decode Homestuck as a morality story of creation versus destruction can never bear true fruit. If the 48 signs of the Alternian sky are to be believed, the Horrorterrors were themselves once creators; seemingly they only oppose creation now in order to prevent the rise of the Lord of Time, whose destructive tendencies they, too, fall victim to.

> > [A6I5] ==>

> The Gnostic Lord of Time, Yaldabaoth, is not a destroyer. On the contrary, he’s a demiurge; a craftsman. Not a creator, per se, but one who takes materials and turns them into something else. As the axiom goes, there is essentially nothing new in paradox space. “[I]n this particular fictional realm, and especially where alchemy is concerned, the fundamental ideas the objects represent are more important than the objects themselves” (Homestuck: Book 3: Act 4, p. 335): something cannot be created from nothing, only transmuted from an existing list of ideas hard coded into reality.

> This is what makes Yaldabaoth truly evil; not for destroying the spiritual world, but for transmuting it down from its pure essence into a corrupted form where sin and suffering are allowed to exist. And so too is this the sin of Yaldabaoth’s favourite protege Lord English. Homestuck’s worst kept secret is that Lord English’s tendency to destroy, and sometimes kill characters we by all rights shouldn’t care about, is not the thing that must be stopped. What must be rectified is what he has already done to reality. Beforus was once a peaceful, spiritual world, where the physically strong acted as protectors over the spiritually enlightened; but when English “rewrote everything” it became a planet where the dominantly male cool blooded castes subjugate the warmer castes, suppressing spirituality. And each subsequent world spawned from this corrupted universe would too be corrupted; merely killing Lord English would not be enough. A new, uncorrupted spiritual world - a foretold paradise planet - needs to be created.

> > DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < everything that ever happens to every version of you is an important part of your ultimate self… like a superceding bodyless and timeless persona that crosses the boundaries of paradox space and unlike god tiers or bubble ghosts or whatever, it really IS immortal

> As Homestuck exists in a fictional realm, the act of crafting a world out of ideas also becomes the act of crafting a story. This is why Scratch is called a “nefarious alt-author” (Homestuck: Book 4: Act 5 Act 1, p. 184), English “arguably is me [Andrew Hussie], but detached from the literal AH persona by several layers of symbolism” (Homestuck: Book 6: Act 5 Act 2 Part 2, p. 71), and their retelling of the ancestor story is “troll fanfiction”: Caliborn, as taught to him by Yaldabaoth, is telling a story where he is God, and everyone else is merely trapped playing the roles he assigns them. The purity of the blank page behind Homestuck, that “well of potential from which every conceivable possibility arises” accessible only to John after interacting with Caliborn’s ultimate weapon, is corrupted by the placement of words upon it.

> Thus is the Homestuck cast’s preoccupation with “ascension”. To reach the god tiers is to become one with one’s dream body, something which “kind of operate[s] outside the normal time continuum” and can share information across all versions of a person; which is why the moon insignia of the dreamer appears on the chests of the sprites squared. This is the basis of the Ultimate Self, one’s pure essence as it exists in Plato’s world of ideas; the untarnished version of someone that exists outside of any fictionalised account of them, malevolent and otherwise.

> Not to lose sight of the gendered conflict at the center of all of this; to say that the feminine aligns with the “good” spirit and the masculine with the “evil” flesh is not to say that the genders of our heroes places them on either side of some cosmic chess board. Vriska speculates that the game of Sburb seeks players “right around the cusp of sexual maturity”, going on to make the assumption that this is because Skaia has a breeding program in mind for its children from the beginning. But knowing that Sburb being about breeding is entirely a smoke screen, we can see that its fixation on pubescence isn’t about reproduction, or even about sex at all; what Skaia wants is heroes who haven’t yet fully formed a sexual identity. Ascending to godhood is intrinsically linked to the act of growing up, because at the cusp of adulthood heroes are at the perfect stage to shed off the evil flesh. This doesn’t necessarily mean shedding off maleness entirely, only the oppressive trappings of maleness established by Lord English as the patriarch of Alternia (and by his servants and disciples like Dave’s bro, who instill in children a toxic version of what masculinity should be); but it naturally makes perfect sense for our protagonist to be troubled by the overwhelming expectations of masculinity and tend toward femaleness instead.

> > John: Zoom in.

> As a final aside, viewing the primary threat in Homestuck as a masculine corrupting force, we can extrapolate parallels with various other forms of corruption and oppression . In as much as Jake serves as a proto-Lord English - Caliborn ’jacks Jake’s swagger’ just as much as he follows in the footsteps of Yaldabaoth - his habits of settling uninhabited islands and filling his grandiose homes with cultural artifacts looted from eastern tombs paints him as something of a coloniser; suggesting that Lord English’s corruption is in essence colonialism, a force that corrupts foreign cultures, forcing them to adhere to the coloniser’s own narrative, transmuting existing societies into strata of race, or blood colour, or binary genders. The Alternians could be said to have not only been corrupted but “colonised”.

> An alternative, perhaps more modern, reinterpretation of the Gnostic masculine-versus-feminine conflict might even reinterpret Sophia as precolonial androgyny, and Yaldabaoth as a gendering force; a narrative not incompatible with that presented in Plato’s Symposium, where primordial androgynes are torn into gendered halves by the worship-hungry Zeus, just as English takes the very ideas of our heroes and splits them into multiple fictions, across scratches, across timelines, through his dominion over Time. In either case, it is the Lord of Time’s enforcement of his gender narrative upon reality that forms the central conflict of the comic; to the point where escaping gender, escaping the confines of the comic, and becoming the true version of oneself all become synonymous goals; the goal of knowing the truth behind the lie, attaining the Gnostic gnosis.

2022-03-23 17:45:30 ¶ ●

about time I had a pinned post, I think the gnosticism one just about sums up what needs to be known coming into this blog

2022-03-24 4:26:54 ¶ ● ⬀ ⬈

dudesrock:

> dudesrock:

> > dudesrock:

> > > yeah you know what i’m realizing with the dreambot is that dave was double-right about it being a voyeurbot - not because JADE is watching people in her dreams (which she would do regardless of the bot) but because thanks to the bot any third party can also observe her movements and dreams, from watching her robot fly around to literally looking at the recordings that may not even be uploaded at jade’s will. it wasn’t built for jade to explore her dreams, it was built for her grandpa to do so.

> > > jade doesn’t even seem to use the recordings herself. apparently she organizes the information she learns with colorful finger reminders. the robot is pretty much worthless for her beyond being really cool

> > this also makes the dead grandpa smackdown make more sense imo. she’s beating up two thieves at the same time - cd who surreptitiously stole the ring, and grandpa who surreptitiously stole her dreams. both of these taking a piece of prospit to which they are not entitled for themselves, albeit perhaps for some greater purpose on the behalf of their organization, but a pickpocket is a pickpocket and pickpockets get dead-grandpa-smackdowned.

> with regards to “to what end”

> i would say the most concrete example of potential usage lies in the fact that grandpa obtains jade and immediately is granted the inspiration to find and settle bec’s island. how did she give this information to him? it’s certainly possible that he already knew, since we know the guardians seem to be in the loop on the end of the world and some of what that entails, and that jade’s arrival indicated to him that it was go-time on going to the frog temple. but i do wonder if her presence somehow gave him the information in the first place, and jadebot was an attempt to mine more information out of her! someone needs to tell this girl her awesome toy is just a bitcoin machine.

> wonder how bec fits into that. if grandpa knew and was waiting for go-time, maybe jade’s presence is what appeases the dog allowing people to approach. really don’t know what’s prognostication or space-instinct with that little beast. feel like i’m lacking information still and don’t know what path forward to take with this yet

Hussie’s commentary suggests that the dreambot was built “to prevent her from sleep walking” (Book 2, p. 157)… one has to wonder how the hell a dream robot is supposed to stop someone from sleep walking, but that probably isn’t really important; what it suggests is that before the dreambot was built, Jade was a sleepwalker. logically I think it follows that she could have been a sleeptalker, too, and that the dreambot was built to replace her sleeptalking with a more reliable stream of information?

2022-03-24 5:00:11 ¶ ●

I had pegged Jake as being a voyeur purely for the sake of being a voyeur, because you know, that’s just what fourth wallers do - but cen is absolutely onto something in speculating that he was really using Jade as a scrying orb (“harvesting inspiration” in other words) hell, what was I saying just the other day - Jade is Jake’s “seed” in exactly the same way the cue balls are Scratch’s seeds, of course he’s going to be using those seeds as crystal balls the same way

2022-03-24 5:17:05 ¶ ● ⬈

lime-bloods:

> I had pegged Jake as being a voyeur purely for the sake of being a voyeur, because you know, that’s just what fourth wallers do - but cen is absolutely onto something in speculating that he was really using Jade as a scrying orb (“harvesting inspiration” in other words) hell, what was I saying just the other day - Jade is Jake’s “seed” in exactly the same way the cue balls are Scratch’s seeds, of course he’s going to be using those seeds as crystal balls the same way

reapplying this to cocoons-as-computerised beds obviously ponders whether Lord English is ‘looking for something’ in the minds of his subjects (who also have his seeds planted in their heads); but that’s also the conceit behind the fanadventure in my head so i’m both biased towards and warily against it as an interpretation of Homestuck

2022-03-24 7:24:59 ¶ ●

##

re: yaldabaoth as gendering force to an androgynous sophia; interesting that both sprite^2s are made up of two gendered halves. roxy too exists between genders depending on the universe, which i think is fitting for a void player

absolutely the bigenderedness of the sprite2s crossed my mind… Jasprose flagging up that “[c]ats don’t have particularly deep feelings about gender” is an acknowledgement of gender as an artifice, too, but then Dave gets merged with a cat that specifically does have feelings about gender, so I guess that bears some thinking about…

2022-03-24 7:40:11 ¶ ●

Fefeta is Roxy’s totem, so Dave’s “soulmate” being Nepeta might suggest that the ultimate androgyne is the unification of Strider and Lalonde? (if you ascribe any cosmic significance to moirallegience you may gain some satisfaction from the fact that this makes Nepeta the “other half” of Equius (Dirk’s totem) by extension, but that’s not really my take on the quadrant so I digress)

Dirk not really wanting much to do with Roxy postcanon could be read as a blow against this interpretation, but then Dirk’s a Plato buff so it’d be no wonder if he thought as a gay bloke his other half would have to be another guy

2022-03-24 14:23:00 ¶ ● ⬀ ⬈

lime-bloods:

> lime-bloods:

> > I had pegged Jake as being a voyeur purely for the sake of being a voyeur, because you know, that’s just what fourth wallers do - but cen is absolutely onto something in speculating that he was really using Jade as a scrying orb (“harvesting inspiration” in other words) hell, what was I saying just the other day - Jade is Jake’s “seed” in exactly the same way the cue balls are Scratch’s seeds, of course he’s going to be using those seeds as crystal balls the same way

> reapplying this to cocoons-as-computerised beds obviously ponders whether Lord English is ‘looking for something’ in the minds of his subjects (who also have his seeds planted in their heads); but that’s also the conceit behind the fanadventure in my head so i’m both biased towards and warily against it as an interpretation of Homestuck

> #if lord english is looking for anything it’s Callie

i’ve been thinking about this. literally everything makes sense if we imagine that for whatever reason Lord English thought Calliope was hiding out on Alternia, and was spending all his time scouring the minds of the Alternian people for any sign of her, only flying off to search the void once the empire had been reduced completely to rubble and she had nowhere else left to hide… like, you wouldn’t even have to dismiss the limeblood genocide as “he killed them because they reminded him of his sister” anymore, he obviously had them killed because he thought his sister might literally be one of them. but thinking about this is also making me really mad because i’m SURE this was the original outline for Hiveswap and now i KNOW we’re never actually going to see anything like this play out

2022-03-24 14:26:10 ¶ ●

and if Calliope “wants to be a girl” based on a version of girlhood that she literally invented why shouldn’t it make perfect sense that she also “wants to be a limeblood” because she literally invented what it means to be a limeblood. this shit writes itself!

2022-03-25 10:39:57 ¶ ●

of course it could just be that Lord English is using his vast network of recooperacomputers to mine for calcoins

2022-03-25 10:56:09 ¶ ● ⬈

lime-bloods:

> of course it could just be that Lord English is using his vast network of recooperacomputers to mine for calcoins

forcing myself to look at this from a more serious angle I guess the calcoin mining sequence does actually establish an (ante-)precedent for caliborn forcing his subjects to become part of a computer network? (esp. given that real life blockchain mining doesn’t actually involve people sitting down at computers at all)

a meta very quickly emerged back in 2014 that gods of time associate themselves with money (caliborn’s crypto mining, dave’s stock market manipulation) because money has value (time) but no substance (space); it’s pure quantification, so to speak. and looking back the quantification of nothingness, the corruption of pure essence into mere data, is certainly demiurgent behaviour; so if we pretend for a second Lord English has hooked the sleeping minds of all of trollkind up to an immense blockchain, then what he’s really doing is quantifying dreams? which is still annoyingly vague but perhaps offers a more accessible diving board