2022-04-30 8:08:10 ¶ ● ⬈

lime-bloods:

> > The lawnrings are empty. Blood skims the voids in your porous cranial plates, as if grazing the hollow of a threshed stem, or say, an abandoned cocoon.

> > The streets are empty. Wind skims the voids keeping neighbors apart, as if grazing the hollow of a cut reed, or say, a plundered mailbox.

> lawnrings are presumably the closest thing trolls have to streets, and the setting of Karkat’s rant takes place in his own brain rather than in his neighbourhood so that the line about wind can be replaced with one about blood (though it probably has some implications regarding the interconnectedness of the characters’ homes and their inner worlds); but after using ‘threshed stem’ as a synonym for 'cut reed’, it feels particularly pregnant that a cocoon is compared to a mailbox? particularly because we know by now that a cocoon is a bed, so that’s not just their name for a mailbox. the very next page tells us trolls won’t even have a word for mailboxes because they don’t have mail full stop, so maybe those are just two parts to a joke, but trolls not having mail could be a part of this analogy too…

“plundered mailbox” positioned with “abandoned cocoon” I think evokes the image of a snatched cradle, especially given that the plundered mailbox in question is actually one that has “already been scooped by your father”. which is to say, Alternia is a world of children scooped away by their father English, the word choice in “abandoned cocoon” reflecting the troll psychology, grieving for a parent that abandoned them.

obversely; “the voids keeping neighbors apart” becoming “the voids in your porous cranial plates” makes me think maybe “the neighbors” in question are in fact iterations of the self; all living in the same head, separated but only by a permeable membrane… just as the empty lawnring is the void between layers of the mind, so too is the Yellow Lawn Ring of Life and/or Void a boundary; maybe not just between life and death, but between a person’s own lives. which is why the path Jade takes across the scratch, from one version of her life to another, is in the form of a Yellow Lawn Ring.

the barriers between a person’s lives are of particular concern to Karkat, who inherits the burden of the existence of Beforus: which is perhaps why he reacts so severely to the presence of the fourth wall in Jade’s home, imploring her to stay away from “FORCES WHICH IF HANDLED RECKLESSLY WILL NULLIFY THE BASIC ABILITY OF INTELLIGENT BEINGS IN ALL REAL AND HYPOTHETICAL PLANES OF EXISTENCE TO GIVE A SHIT.“ this comes across as a general warning about metatextual forces coming from Karkat, but when Hussie sets up the yellow yard/ring he’s going to use to influence the story, he uses the exact same phrasing. so whatever outside force Karkat is worried about, it isn’t just ‘the author’; could it be what he’s afraid of is the Ultimate Self, the consequence of allowing the multiple iterations of a person to collapse into one?

it surely seems relevant that as he gives this warning, he’s waving away this fantasy of Jade and Jadesprite embracing; literally dismissing the prospect of a union between different iterations of Jade. he’s not telling Jade to cover that window because the puppetmaster is using it to leer in; he’s telling her to cover it lest she be tempted to crawl out and meet her otherself, which is where he believes true catastrophe lies.

the position of “reality has separated you from your otherselves” with “reality has separated you from your mother” also seems to suggest that reuniting with the otherself and reuniting with the mother are intrinsically linked quests, though I think someone other than myself may be better suited to picking apart that side of things.