With regards to Spamton’s totally real sob story, it seems worthy of note that during the NEO fight he uses the idea of “living in a garbage can” as shorthand for a shitty situation, even in reference to people other than himself like Kris.
indeed it’s probably this stream of consciousness of his that makes him such a natural at freestyling, in the same way his hash map modus is highly convenient for hashrap (while Dirk’s more analytical mind takes a “more elegant and sophisticated” approach).
obviously most things on Alternia are designed in a particularly slimy, chitinous way that gives them a uniformly alien (is that oxymoronic?) look, but I’m wondering if it’s more than a little conspicuous that a troll’s recuperacoon is basically identical to their computer.
it was already in the back of my mind years ago, writing what probably turned out to be my first ever proper Homestuck analysis, that there were insidious undertones to the fact that Alternia’s green slime of patriarchy seeps into every crack, right down to the beds the empire’s children sleep in. in Dave’s words, “your grandpa was a sick fuck why would he build a voyeurbot for a little girl”: it probably goes without saying that the subjugglators are kind of sick fucks for building voyeur puppets for little children too! the puppet as a voyeurbot is a well established tool in Dave’s own guardian’s repertoire (…I’m just now realising Dave is secretly relating to Jade with that line), and it says a lot that Dirk’s ultimate voyeurbot (slash fondlebot) took on a form almost identical to that of Jade’s (with Equius even trying a little bit of lowblood-puppeting of his own using another robot of the same type).
this brings to mind Karkat’s strange moment of seemingly unfounded paranoia about the Viewer, accompanied, in fact, by his own spontaneous voyeuristic fantasies about a certain little girl. the takeaway here is of course that the darkness lurking in the troll subconscious is none other than the Viewer, which is obviously true; all trollkind are merely the pawns of Lord English, the ultimate Reader-Author of their reality. but possibly also implicit is that if the Viewer lurks in the subconscious of every troll, then every troll is, themselves, deep down, a Viewer. which is also literally true! as the trolls watching the humans’ game unfold from their meteor laboratory act as yet another of the comic’s many audience stand-ins.
or in Persona Alchemy terms… just as the author of Homestuck imbued every character with an aspect of himself, every single troll in Lord English’s domain contains a little bit of ‘Lord English-ness’. in essence making them their own voyeurs, in the same way Jade is both the voyeurbot and the little girl?
what’s troubling about this idea is that it could be taken as meaning that a subjugglator having the power to mess with people’s dreams also means that a subjugglator has the power to change someone’s very essence… but of course, the chucklevoodoos don’t just “create” puppets ex nihilo: they “psychically amplify fears through dreams”! the chucklevoodoos are in fact the psychic ability to perform persona alchemy, externalising the most internal aspects of a person!
Gamzee didn’t “make” John afraid of clowns; rather he just emphasised what was “always there” in John’s innermost mind. Dream rooms work like this all the time; the MEOW code that Jaspers supposedly whispered to Rose merely unlocked what she had already scribbled all over her dream walls, and the Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff scrawlings in Dave’s sanctum explain how Dave came to think of the same idea in two completely different lifetimes, even though his apparent inspiration only happened in one of them. There is essentially nothing new in paradox space; all ideas come from somewhere, either locked away in someone’s genetic memory or floating around in the void. And Gamzee’s summoning of Lil Cal into Dave’s subconscious is only a very literal example of this; though we may at first be led to believe that this is the “starting point” in Cal’s timeline, we later find out that he was only reconstituting something that had been banished to the void by someone else’s hand!
1. some part of me has always been convinced that Alternia’s green moon was in some way a dream moon. something about this strange new colour-coded satellite and its native colour-coded doppelganger of Aradia being introduced right as the mystery surrounding Aradia’s missing dream self came to a head formed a connection between the two in my brain when I was first reading as a kid… of course some of this was probably deliberate misdirection and maybe I was an idiot for falling for it, but I maintain that the seemingly arbitrary introduction of a moon to Alternia’s orbit should fall somewhere within the already established significance of moons. (maybe the revelation that the ghosts previously thought to be Aradia’s “ancestors” might have actually been Aradia herself goes some way towards the idea that Aradia and her ancestor are interchangeable in some way?)
but in the sense that green slime is also the genetic material of the patriarch - the manbro bukkake used in the paternal act of ectobiology - the green moon is actually a lot more like the green slime than I initially realised! the cue ball planets, the black planet/green moon among them, are Lord English’s seed, and the green moon happens to be the seed that is also literally carrying Lord English’s seed in the form of Doc Scratch. it’s a giant floating ball of manbro slime!
This is a step towards a more comprehensive account of A6I3 (Openbound). The basic idea: Meenah’s interactive adventures can be read as a dream-sequence from Roxy’s point of view expressing the following motifs:
The threat posed by (Lord) English functions as a metastasized metaphor for problems posed by language itself.
To escape from the clutches of language is to achieve perfect communication, represented by a return to a pre-lingual, child-like state (“pre-lingual” at once referring to image, sensation, and silence)
The recurring motif of ‘merging with child’ is also used to a. to express the desire for pregnancy b. to express the desire to become one’s True Self, conceptualized as an inner, child-self that is “born” within oneself like an embryo c. to express pedophilia
First: Meenah is Roxy’s doppelganger. When we are introduced to Roxy’s fenestrated planes, we are promptly informed that if someone were caught half in/out one of the windows when the power cuts off, the poor soul would be sliced in two (4510). By Chekhov’s gun, this introduction ought to result in someone getting gorily bisected by the window, but it never happens. Instead we get this:
Gcat warps the panel away, trapping Roxy in the void, and we are shown a bisected horse puppet (left). The half-horse reiterates the looming threat of Chekhov’s guillotine. Roxy’s body is intact, but the scenery suggests she ought to be split. The suggestion is followed by the initial appearance of Meenah (right), implying that Meenah herself is a piece of Roxy, snipped away and running rampant. Thus, a doppelganger.
So, taking Meenah to be a esoteric mirror of Roxy, it follows that her adventures in the dreams bubbles are a narrative frame for /Roxy’s/ dreams. This is the basic assumption of everything that follows.
1: Language is the enemy.
Time is an impermeable barrier. It ticks on irreversibly, edging its victims unto entropic dissolution. The Lord of Time and the destruction he brings embody the inevitability of death. Aradia cracks a joke about this at the beginning of Openbound: within the ageless confine of the dreambubbles, “time is a figure of speech”, she says. Though ostensibly asserting the endless flexibility of time, an alternate interpretation would indicate that Lord English, time, and language itself are apprehended on similar terms. The most useful one presently: language, like time, is regarded as a barrier.
Throughout Homestuck, characters struggle with abstractions, beginning with the frustrating data mechanics of the sylladex and culminating in various tightrope-walks along unorthodox configurations of space and time. Language numbers among the headaches: Caliborn characterizes the text he reads as “walls”, further declaring them to be “impenetrable” and “migraine-inducing”. On one level, this aligns with Caliborn’s statement that the kids talk/think too much and he’d like them to just GET THE FuCK ON WITH IT ALREADY: speech is an obstacle towards both the completion of the kids’ objectives and Caliborn’s attainment of what he wants. On another level, this aligns with the later discussion of Caliborn’s learning disability: in all likelihood, he has difficulty reading. Another example of this disdain for language is Jade, who, in her rapturous treatise on the wonders of anthro, answers the call of the wild by renouncing words.
No need to answer. Words slough from the busy mind like a useless dead membrane as a more visceral sapience takes over. Something simpler is in charge now, a force untouched by the concerns and burdens of the upright, that farcical yoke the bipedal tow. It now drives you through the midnight brush, your paws whisking through creepers, unearthing with each bold stomp bright odors demanding investigation.
Just prior to Openbound, the sentiments expressed above (that language is unnecessary, an obstacle to unmediated communication and pure sensation) are restated in mythic terms: REALITY ITSELF is being DESTROYED by (LORD) ENGLISH! Language the inhibitor of direct experience becomes language the rot of the universe, language the malevolent destroyer of the capacity for any experience at all.
Meenah witnesses English’s destruction of reality and rushes off to recruit soldiers to fight him. There is harmony between the imminent threat of English and the gameplay: the primary obstacles to Meenah’s objectives are words. Literal walls of text stand between you and the end of the level, as you must navigate exhausting conversations to satisfy the game’s win conditions. Within the conversation themselves, the motif persists by showcasing various ways that speech can obscure meaning.
Kankri couches his points in overly ornate terminology and uses social justice as a tool for settling personal disputes. Latula laments how her commitment to her RAD speech affectations and persona can make her harder to understand. Cronus trips over his own accent, Mituna tumbles through various word spasms. Meulin’s deafness is thematically succeeded by Rufioh’s inability to communicate his unhappiness to the Horuss, who has sweat in his ears. The two characters who you cannot understand at all, the silent Kurloz and the pseudo-Japanese speaking Damara, are revealed to be direct servants of Lord English! Failure to communicate – inability to bridge the barrier of language – is the enemy.
The counter to the hyperbolic threat of language-as-mediation and is a fantasy of perfect communication. In Jade’s scenario, attainment of this ideal is presented visually as Jade acquiring the superficial markers of a wolf (“Wouldn’t these ears suit you? Would not this proud long snout assist you in the hunt?”), whereupon she acquires the rich experience that she associates with the idea of animal, unmediated by language. Just as Jade merges with the image of a wolf, there is an image in Openbound that Meenah seeks, the attainment of which embodies the goal of some idealized communication, without words.
entertaining the possibility that “SWORD” = “WORDS”, and that as per Some Words on Openbound our Lord English is the embodiment of language, Caledfwlch being one of English’s key weaknesses suggests that one of language’s weaknesses is the power of language itself. this aligns with the more literal interpretation that the sword is made of a cueball, and that the cueball comes from the immortality clock, essentially making Caledfwlch a piece of the very workings of time that English protects himself with (alluded to by the use of the sword as the hand of a clock when Dave uses his powers in Collide).
(regarding malo’s toying with the idea of certain swords representing slurs in the former post, it struck me that English’s own name, Caliborn - itself the name of a sword - is treated as a dirty word by his adversaries, who censor it when they can’t avoid saying it; and that Caledfwlch essential hides Caliborn’s name within its own name, censoring the English name with the Welsh name?)
also pertinent is that Caledfwlch’s design owes its inspiration to Problem Sleuth’s Tectrixcalibur, a legendary sword that literally doubles as a writing implement; and specifically the writing implement of an Arbiter, especially for the purpose of ratifying the Law. again, as per Words on Openbound, time and/or language are the Law that governs reality; the legendary sword Excalibur, or Tectrixcalibur, or Caledfwlch, is a tool of the very Law that English represents.
it dawned on me for the first time as I was drafting that cartoon about “the truth utterly indescribable by language” that the name given to the asteroid belt at the rim of the incipisphere, the Veil, is a very literal reference to the mythological Veil that separates the living from the spirits; it separates the incipisphere, the throne of life, from the void, the realm of the dead… (and hell, it’s just now that I’m realising “the Medium” between the Veil and the egg of Skaia can also be seen as alluding to spiritual mediums… references to modern spiritualism seemingly abound)
it seems apposite, then, that the birth of our heroes takes place on meteors travelling “inward” from the Veil to Skaia; away from death, and toward life. implying that the ectobiology process that takes place in the Veil is not just a form of birth, but is in fact rebirth. which fits perfectly with our understanding of the void beyond the Veil as a place where ideas go when they are “destroyed”, and where ideas come from when they are “created”, as is the story of Lil Cal. the axiom is, of course, that nothing is new in Paradox Space; it’s only natural that our heroes are subject to this law as well.
