ARANEA: [Meenah] viewed the empress as a glorified slave.
ARANEA: So she a8dicated, and fled to the moon to hide.
ARANEA: I was the only one who knew of her plans. The rest of the world searched 8ut never found her.
ARANEA: At the time, I was furious with her. 8ut I didn’t turn her in.
the way Aranea describes her willingness to let Meenah hide from her fate struck me as particularly reminiscent of the Alternian Aranea, who did basically the same thing for Horuss:
He owed me for the sweeps of protection I provided after his 8razen defiance of the High8loods. It was perhaps the only such courageous stand ever taken against a superior 8y one of his supercilious pedigree[…]
and though it seems deliberate, the ostensible lack of associations between Meenah and Horuss also made it seem a little non sequitur at first. but I realise now that this is a demonstration of Aranea’s nature, and how remarkably similar it is to the nature of another troll…
Kanaya apparently knows some things about the future too. […] But what’s probably more interesting, given that Kanaya is not known to be particularly underhanded or scheming, is that it doesn’t seem she’s told many people about the dire things that are about to happen. We can wonder why this is, but I don’t know if we have to look too much further than one of her known character traits: she tends to consider herself something of a confidante when it comes to her friendships with dangerous girls, and their dark secrets and proclivities (see: Vriska, then later, Rose). That’s a flattering way of putting it. Another way would be: she’s an enabler. (Homestuck: Book 4, p. 139)
just like her fellow Sylph, Aranea is an enabler. so presumably - though I usually consider myself a bit out of my depth in this area of interpretation - the Sylph is the “enabler” class? certainly Aranea’s abilities and proclivities are indicative of someone who enables Light or enables through Light…
I often like to point out the ways in which Alternia reflects the relationships the kids have with their guardians, what with its rapping autocrats and custodial beasts, but until this week I’ve never really stopped to think about how much of this could be because those very guardians were actually the people Lord English knew growing up… (think of the room in Jade’s house where Jake’s stuffed corpse hangs with effigies of Calliope and the other three alphas)
spurring this on in particular was my recent reread of Act 5’s quadrant exposition. with fresh eyes it’s easy to see that beyond any “social purpose” any of the quadrants serve, they exist to create relationship drama; which is just another way the trolls and the alpha kids kind of bookend the betas, who aren’t really defined by their relationships at all.
though Caliborn heaps abuse upon his sister’s love of shipping, moments like his yaoi obsession show that he has his own love of romance in the same way he has his own appreciation for worldbuilding. so it’s easy to imagine that, truly relishing in the alpha kids’ interpersonal drama, he tried to replicate it on Alternia with his institution of quadrants as the main means by which trolls relate to each other; possibly adding cherub hate-romance to the mix because he thinks it will either make things even messier and more dramatic, or will fix the supposed ‘holes’ in human romance and expedite sex, or both?
though it’s easy to see Dirk and Roxy’s moirallegiencesque relationship as a symptom of the assimilation of Alternian culture into their Earth, it also makes just as much sense that Scratch would use the relationships he observed growing up as the basis for the relationships that would define his handmade society…
ahhhh, but of course the green moon is Alternia’s dream moon! because in the same way the scribbles on the walls of Dave Strider’s subconscious represent a latent urge to create that bridges timelines and lifetimes, Scratch represents a bridge between Alternia’s own instances. Alternia’s history isn’t some unique design - as I keep trying to hammer home lately, there is nothing new in Paradox Space - it’s his troll fanfiction. the things that seem like they should be uniquely Alternian in nature - the clown church, the quadrants, the lusus naturae - are all just things that evidently already existed on Beforus, but were coopted and twisted into something else when he rewrote everything. just like Dave’s dream scribbles ensuring the existence of SBaHJ on both sides of the scratch, Scratch’s big hollow head is the ark that ensures everything that once happened on Beforus happens again on Alternia.
(this is the same modus operandi employed by Meenah in the Skaianet history; she does everything in her power to make sure the post-scratch Earth turns out essentially the same as the pre-scratch, with only the necessary changes required for her plan to come to fruition.)
I wonder, then, if dolls (such as those found in dream rooms) represent holdovers or throwbacks of some kind, like toys retained from childhood… or are they heirlooms, inherited things? almost everything in a Hero’s house is inheritance from their forebears, of course, but dolls tend to embody (nigh personify) the sentimental muck that bogs them down, and seem particularly attractive to sprites, which themselves represent family totems…
huh. Doc Scratch is Lord English’s brain-in-a-jar Auto Responder.