2024-09-07 6:20:51 ¶ ● ⬀ ⬈

mmmmalo:

> dingodad:

> > calliope’s “unreliable narration” has kind of become a big conversation topic in the last couple years wrt classpects and gender biases etc but do you think we as a people are ready to have the talk about limebloods. because all that stuff she said about them having weird names and super powerful abilities and all being extinct was literally just her making some shit up so that her troll oc could be more special and unique than everybody else’s and they only have to appear in hiveswap now because nobody got the joke back in 2013 and they took the whole thing deadly serious

> If your contention is that limebloods were from the outset a metastasized Mary-Sue joke, Caliborn actually name drops that concept in Homosuck:

> THE LUCKY MALE IS OBLIVIOUS TO HIS PRIVILEGE. OF NOT BEING CHAINED TO HIS ROOM, WITH THE HORRIBLE SISTER HE DOESN’T HAVE. THE ADVANTAGE MAKES HIM WAY TOO OVERPOWERED, AND THEREFORE HE IS WHAT SOME REFER TO AS A “HUMAN MARY SUE”. THIS MAKES HIM LESS SYMPATHETIC, AND GIVES YOU ANOTHER REASON. TO ACTIVELY ROUTE FOR HIS DEATH.

> I find it interesting that Caliborn ascribes MALE PRIVILEGE to John, defines MALE PRIVILEGE as being free of femininity, then describes John as a “GIRL” anyways – though in misogynistic terms, and with scare quotes. This is ironic terf shit: the transfeminine subject is posed as intrinsically misogynistic, upon the same hatred/envy of women that drove Caliborn to kill Calliope and write in her lime blood, as though he were her (which “he” is, which is why “he” is acting as the feminist here, dutifully enacting two-fold self-hatred). This angle on predomination (hey, isn’t that a synonym of “privilege”?) is also my theory of what limebloods represent on Alternia – the lost/gynocided females of an entirely male planet.

> Anyway I think limeblood-means-mary-sue has legs!

I said I would get back to this a while ago but put it off because I wasn’t able to form more than some cursory thoughts.

if we’re talking Caliborn’s relationship to the mary sue archetype it would be remiss to overlook his SELF INSERTION GUY, who isn’t referred to by that gendered slur in particular but is a direct evolution Calliope’s OC: where Callie Ohpeee is a parody of the “Homestuck mary sue” as a broad concept, Caliborn’s OC is riffing on one poor guy’s mary sue OC in particular. so Caliborn creating his own mary sue feels a bit like crossdressing in the same vein as hemotyping-as-crossdressing. (and in the same way Doc Scratch is kind of like Caliborn crossdressing later on in his timeline.) lest we fail to mention his mary sue’s whole look is obviously jacked from John to begin with…

if we’re to maintain despite Calliope’s fantasies that the limeblood genocide still did actually happen, it also occurs to me that this amounts to English being responsible for the very event that gave Callie Ohpee her tragic backstory; essentially he would be responsible for making Calliope into a mary sue in the first place? so what you call a gynocide also takes on shades of feminising violence.

2024-09-07 6:31:56 ¶ ●

there’s got to be something a little bit psychosexual about John walking in on Caliborn dressed up as him and wearing his Dad’s hat, right.

I seem to recall that this sequence is a direct callback to a confrontation with an imp LITERALLY wearing his Dad’s hat. someone help me out here

2024-09-09 6:09:35 ¶ ● ⬈

##

This might be a ridiculous question, but does Lord

English have control over sburb? The alpha timeline

Is set to only be the one that allows the creation of

Lord English after all. Does being Lord of Time mean

that he is the one causing all the doomed timelines

to be destroyed or that he is causing Skaia to do it?

Is Skaia just in a way another one of his unwilling

servants? I guess what I’m saying is, are Lord English

and sburb even against each other? Sure his

machinations cause the destruction of universes,

which is the opposite of sburb’s purpose, but also

his influence is why those universes were made in

the first place.

dingodad:

> one of the biggest persistent misconceptions homestuck readers have is that all events in Sburb are controlled by some overarching, interfering intelligence, and that this intelligence’s name is Skaia. when a character is given a particularly cruel or gruelling hero quest, “Skaia orchestrated it”; when a character’s actions cause a timeline to become a doomed offshoot, it’s because “Skaia didn’t want that to happen”. but this is explicitly untrue:

> > ROSE: … Skaia is a very passive entity. It only “knows” and “sees,” but it never quite “acts.”
> > ROSE: When it is asked to change everything, there is only so much it has control over.
> > ROSE: In fact, it has control over exactly one thing. The defense portals.
> > ROSE: It can decide to send important meteors to different points in time than originally planned, thus creating alternate realities.

> (remember how all games of Sburb start off with the exact same parameters, and it’s only data input by the players that causes events to deviate?)

> this is related to, and compounded by, another misconception which came to be common toward the latter half of the story: people fundamentally misunderstand what a “narrative” is and therefore get it into their heads that in order to be a narrator a character needs some kind of “narrative powers” - where did dirk get his “narrative powers”; how can doc scratch be the author-figure of alternia if he “doesn’t have narrative powers”? people think that, in order to have dominion over the incipisphere, Skaia must be some kind of wizard, capable of both predestining events and shaping reality to match its predictions. and i have occasionally humoured or implied support for this interpretation by referring to “what Sburb wants” or “Sburb’s agenda”, but these are merely convenient anthropomorphisations. the fact is that anyone can tell a story, and almost any kind of power can be wielded to reinforce a chosen narrative: highbloods control the narrative on alternia simply by living a long time; lord english controls the narrative not by conducting every single event to his whim but by being present at the beginning and setting small, key events in motion… Sburb is much the same. a video game is a type of story which can control its outcome with rules and code, but that’s the full extent of its power; the rules and code can’t change, no matter who’s playing the game, no matter what the supercomputer running the game “thinks”, and no matter what immortal time-travelling demon may or may not have hijacked the process.

> in one sense, yes, Skaia has been made Lord English’s “servant”. but in another, more important sense, Skaia cannot “serve” anything, nor can it be “for” or “against” anyone, because it is not a moral entity. Skaia is simply the cosmic force of creation, and creation and destruction are not good and evil. creation is an intrinsically neutral act, which can be at one time beautiful and at another time devastating - as in cancer, which is a disease caused be cells reproducing without limit! (and in the inverse: not only is destruction not always a net negative in homestuck, it is almost always a requirement for growth and rebirth; heroes must die to become gods, planets must die to give birth to new universes… the destruction of universes is not a uniquely disparagable crime that Lord English is committing, but rather a larger manifestation of a pattern that is intrinsic to the ecosystem of Paradox Space itself, just as it is intrinsic to real-life ecosystems.) this is in fact exactly what Karkat alludes to when he speculates the universe he created is cancerous. as should be obvious, there’s nothing actually physically wrong with the universe he created; it’s just that, like a virus or a cancer, Lord English has hijacked the process of creation for his own ends and made his own birth inevitable if the process of creation continues unchecked - a process which the horrorterrors, gods of death who at first seem to be malevolent but are in fact revealed to be victims, attempt desperately to prevent!

2024-09-10 5:41:47 ¶ ● ⬀ ⬈

dingodad:

> dingodad:

> > when you think of trolls as having an insectoid social structure it can sometimes seem redundant that they essentially have two “queens” in the form of the mother grub and the condesce. and i’ve heard exactly this used as an argument, that “it doesn’t make sense to interpret meenah as an insect queen because the mother grub is the insect queen”. but trolls having what amounts to 12 genders means that, for trolls, what we think of as 2 gender roles are actually divided up between those 12 castes. so while two queens might seem redundant to a human because in our understanding “queen” or “mother” is just one gender, to a troll the role of “mother” has actually been divided into two different roles; the mother who gives birth and the mother who raises the child. which probably has a lot to do with why meenah finds sex and childbirth to be so disgusting!

> looking at it like this could probably go some way to dispelling the confusion around alternia’s “drones”, too. the question (or assertion) i often hear is “how can drones be anything like ant or bee drones - the males of the colony - when it’s trolls, not drones, who are providing the genetic material to the mother grub?” again, what we really see is that sex, reproduction and the social structure have been carefully partitioned from each other: the role of “providing genetic material” has been made totally separate from the role of actually “inseminating the queen”, just as the drone’s role as breeding male has almost nothing in common with the highblood’s role as patriarchal male!

in the vein of Alternia mirroring Sburb: Skaia is basically this same concept blown up to a cosmic scale, a birth-mother divorced completely from the role of “Parent”. Skaia can create, but the scope of its power does not extend to actually raising its children. so when people blame Skaia for the goings-on of Sburb, it comes across as a deeply nihilistic interpretation because it’s tantamount to blaming one’s mother for giving birth to them!

2024-09-10 5:55:31 ¶ ●

while my bigger Homestuck theses have in the past relied heavily on language that pits the “motherly female” against the “patriarchal”, as I journey further down this path it becomes more obvious that notions of “male and female” in Paradox Space are just as misleading as the idea that Homestuck is about creation and destruction. the fact that Alternia’s life-giving “mother” figure is a completely sexless skull with lipstick absurdly painted on is probably as blatant a symbol you can get for the fact that gender is an alien narrative being applied to fundamentally identity-less forces of nature; just like Skaia, whose very name is a portmanteau of Gaia AND Sky - the mother AND father figures of ancient myth - the “mother grub” gives birth but is divorced from gender.

2024-09-12 8:44:22 ¶ ● ⬈

##

Does anyone remember that Lord English himself isn’t even composed of the original versions of the souls that make him? He’s the son of paradox clones, right? That means B2 Jack is the one who actually contains the original souls of Lord English, since he was directly possessed. English has been diluted by being a paradoxical copy, and being part cueball. His creation is not unlike that of breeding Genesis frogs. (The end frog does not chronologically branch off from the original frogs, he is a paradoxical copy of all of them combined. I’d argue that he’s almost like the inverse to a Genesis frog.) So the destiny of the original Caliborn, Equius, Lil Hal and Gamzee is to be decapitated by Dave and explode into a black hole. Caliborn brags about how he will become all powerful, but he will doesn’t get to do that. The paradox slime version of himself born in a lab is destined to become the laser skull epilepsy pharoah hulk man, not him. Not that any of this really matters or changes that much, I just noticed that it was odd. This all adds up right? I didn’t forget anything that would make this not make sense?

dingodad:

> you are, on a technical level, completely right: at no point in the Pharaoh Hulk’s* timeline was he ever literally Lil Cal. he emerges straight from Doc Scratch, who was only ever a clone of Lil Cal. but you’re making a critical error by thinking of the Hulk and B2 Jack as if they’re meant to be two different guys.

> > *I’ve always known this iteration of Lord English as the “Mobster Hulk” version - google seems to be telling me it’s basically only my posts that use this phrasing but I’m guessing I must have picked it up on the forums.

> I won’t give you the long-winded explanation about Ultimate Selves and how it’s the idea of a person that matters more than the specific body they inhabit because I already have about a dozen posts on the subject and I’m sure everyone’s sick of hearing it by now. so I wanna focus on two specific and related reasons why “Real Lord English” and “Copy of Lord English” is a false dichotomy, based specifically in an area of Homestuck’s worldbuilding that doesn’t really get talked about so much:

> 1. Jack Noir’s version of Lil Cal is just a copy too! Roxy banished the one containing Lord English’s soul into nonexistence, so that in Caliborn’s words it will “FLUTTER THROUGH THE SHADOWS FOR ETERNITY. SURFACING IN THE NIGHTMARES OF THE UNSUSPECTING.” Gamzee is not a Thief of Void, he can’t steal things back out of the darkness; he’s simply a psychic whose chucklevoodoos can “amplify fears through dreams.” The Lil Cal that emerges in Dave’s dreams, is adopted by his Bro, and one day makes the journey to Jack’s prison cell is just a manifestation of Dave’s fear of puppets; the one that Roxy banished is still out there.
> 2. First rule of jujus, bro: “THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE!” “if there ever appears to be more than one of the same, it is only a mirage of caUsality!”

> cultured readers will be able to draw the line between the two phrases i’ve put special emphasis on. Homestuck uses the terms existing terms “voodoo” and “juju” to deliberately evoke an anthropological concept which is found around the world but is most pop-culturally associated with African and Afro-Carribean spirituality: Lil Cal is a fetish. his power comes not from the fact that he is composed of some special material (or because, as you suggest, he has some kind of unique or special genes), but from the fact that spiritual power is ascribed to him. think of a religious idol; there can be a million idols to the same one deity, but the power of each idol will be exactly the same, because each has the same spiritual significance.

> put in overly-simplistic terms which aren’t necessarily accurate but speak to a recurring theme in Homestuck: a juju works because of the belief that it works.

> this is what Calliope and Caliborn mean when they speak of “bad juju”, some kind of mystical force which Lil Cal is filled with. the “juju” isn’t the object at all; it’s an enchantment associated with the object. Calliope says a juju can’t ever be destroyed, and yet Lil Cal is torn to shreds and repaired on multiple occasions - it’s the magic, the juju, that persists. this is the only way an object with a self-perpetuating origin could possibly exist, or else the object would just keep becoming more and more worn with each loop of its timeline.

> Scratch and Caliborn both say it: “Instances of [Scratch] have spawned in countless universes”, just as Lil Cal will continue to infiltrate the dreams of infinite children and take Caliborn “FROM UNIVERSE. TO UNIVERSE. TO UNIVERSE.” importantly, it’s implied actually quite early on in the comic that you can’t really “clone” a “soul”, because paradox clones kind of follow similar rules to jujus; there can only be one TRUE clone, who will always travel back in time to become their own origin, and all other clones are “MALFORMED MUTANTS” with no bearing on the timeline. so the exact circumstances through which Cal arrives in each universe, be it via ectobiology or clown voodoo, don’t matter: every copy is either a) inert or b) actually the same Lil Cal at a different point in its circuitous timeline.

> in other words - thanks to a time loop of his own orchestration! - all versions of Lord English have to be decapitated and/or collapse into a black hole at the end of their lifespan because they all have to ultimately return to the void. you’re really not that far off the mark in that there is a tragedy in the fact that Caliborn believes he will “GET STRONGER. AND OLDER. AND BIGGER. AND BUFFER!” each time he destroys a universe. the tragedy is just that he thinks turning into Mobster Hulk is the end goal when in fact by making himself immortal he has ensured there IS no end goal: he’s trapped being reborn as new Lil Cals in new universes forever and ever. no matter how many brief excursions he takes out into the universe to play the villain, his essence is trapped in the void for all time.

2024-09-14 17:44:28 ¶ ● ⬈

##

Ok, so this has driven me crazy for the longest time. What the fuck happened to post retcon Japsersprite? The one we know is from pre retcon, since he was on John’s planet when he brought it into the void. Nothing was ever mentioned to happen to post retcon Jaspers, so where is he. I can’t believe Hussie forgot about him, he didn’t forget about the two Nannasprites. Did post retcon Jaspersprite just not exist? Maybe he died on LOWAS when Typheus blew it up, but there is no mention of that at all. I guess only Jade or the Nanna’s would know then, but nothing is ever said about it. Also is there a way to know if the Arquius that becomes lord English is the pre or post retcon version?

dingodad:

> i’m gunna play good cop bad cop here cus there’s an answer you don’t want to hear and then there’s a sort of interesting consolation prize answer at the end.

> the answer you don’t want to hear: it doesn’t matter! :P i don’t think this really needs explaining but the whole point of davepeta/jasprose’s ultimate self spiels is that tying yourself in knots trying to figure out who’s “pre-retcon” and who’s “post-retcon” is, as they say, for the birds. john is john is john. hussie didn’t “forget” that there are supposed to be two jaspersprites: while a story can occasionally get away with having two Daves or two Roses because Dave and Rose have interesting things to say to themselves, the fact that homestuck has even ONE character called jaspersprite simply strains the reader’s ability to give a shit. there is the room nor the need for TWO jaspersprites, of all the damnedest things.

> (there can be two nannasprites because two nannasprites are funny - but if there’s one thing worse than creating the same CHARACTER twice, it’s telling the same JOKE twice.)

> the other answer is about sprites in particular. do you know why video game graphics used to be called “sprites”? i only thought to look this up just recently: it’s because, like the fairies or spirits of folklore from which they get their name, they float above the background of the game world without interacting with it directly. this should form the basis for our understanding of homestuck’s kernelsprite, as well, which borrows both from folklore and from computer programming. they are of course ghosts on a literal level, with spritely undead tails and the ability to pass through walls and physical barriers like they weren’t there - but the way they interact with the story itself is similarly ethereal-and-or-ephemeral.

> sprites appear at the whim of the heroes to serve a very particular purpose - which, you will notice, is exactly what davepeta says they’re doing when they show up in hell - but then the moment that purpose is complete they might as well stop existing. dave- and jadesprite show up inexplicably on the battlefield as the reckoning begins: are they killing themselves now that their purposes are complete? where are all the lususprites, anyway; did they do the same thing? erisolsprite initially seems to indicate that he’s going to fuck off and possibly explode like all the other sprites who hate themselves, but then just shows up again 200 pages later later at the convenience of the trickster arc. the same is true of all the sprites presumed-dead following the events of GAME OVER, who show up as-needed in the new timeline to form the next generation of redundant ghost freaks. this is simply how sprites operate. whether they’re “alive” or “dead” at any given moment is the wrong way of looking at it - they’re ghosts for goodness’ sake!!

> the fact that the story never tells us what happened to “that other jaspersprite” is supposed to make us think less about it, not more, because knowing where one of them is - the “ultimate” one, in fact - should be enough to put our minds at ease. but it also deliberately leaves the door open for another jaspersprite to show up if the story ever somehow, against all odds, finds a place to squeeze one in. which is again exactly what the plot point is currently doing with sprites like erisol, who for all intents and purposes was dead up until the moment page 666 started