April 2022

does “alien monster that lets out a deadly psychic scream when it dies” have its origins in lovecraft or was hussie pulling a watchmen with gl'bgolyb

lime-bloods:

does “alien monster that lets out a deadly psychic scream when it dies” have its origins in lovecraft or was hussie pulling a watchmen with gl'bgolyb

okay lots of good chat going on in the replies but I think my point is getting kind of lost lol. I’m aware Hussie makes references to Lovecraft through several layers of irony and pop cultural permutation, and just about says as much in his book commentary:

The goofy alt-universe Lovecraft mythos had its roots in Problem Sleuth […] The creatures are known as Horrorterrors, and their presence in the story was always meant to be a silly one […] with HS you may reap the spoils of these pilfered concepts without soldiering through an actual Lovecraft novel, which I think even Lovecraft’s ghost doesn’t recommend.

Homestuck: Book 1, p. 217

which is what makes me think Hussie probably hasn’t read much Lovecraft himself (I was trying to get at this in my tags, but my wording may have been poor).

I’m also aware the way Andrew uses cosmic horror in Homestuck tends toward being generic deconstruction of Lovecraftian horror; the monsters have generic “Lovecraftian” names like Oglogoth and Fluthlu and Nrub'Yiglith, and they have generically “horrifying” psychic powers like causing one’s bones to explode or forcing all the children in a galaxy to frown for a thousand years. So obviously the fact that Gl'bgolyb is a giant mollusc with a psychic scream on its own does not seem like a reference to anything in particular; it’s just What You Do when you’re making a generic cosmic monster.

but Watchmen, being a deconstruction of comic book tropes from the mid-80s, seems like an example of post-Lovecraft writing that Hussie very feasibly would have read. and I’m not just flagging up that Gl'bgolyb has a psychic power; it’s that Gl'bgolyb’s psychic power, which is to unleash a scream that kills the surrounding population when it dies, is the same specific psychic power that Ozymandias’ artificial organism has.

not only this, but Scratch and Ozymandias’ monsters share in the fact that they are Horrorterrors with a purpose. their deadly screams were engineered specifically to influence society in a particular way using the threat of armageddon. it’s true that while Ozymandias’ monster was designed to unite the human race across the East-West divide, Gl'bgolyb was used to sew conflict; but it might also be remembered that Gl'bgolyb gives Feferi the promise that she will one day “UNITE THE TWO RACES”, and it is the emissary’s psychic holocaust that ultimately allows this to happen.

(actually the fact that the Condesce was able to use Gl'bgolyb’s threat of annihilation to pull the land dwellers into line, effectively consolidating the two races into one chain of command, could also be seen as an act of uniting the two races… wonder if that was something of a sick little joke coming from Gl'bgolyb after all!)

the presence of a bald, nuclear-powered omnipotent looking over everything also feels particularly Moore-esque to me, but Scratch has been analysed down into a fine paste by now so I’m much more interested in using this as a lens into the more mysterious Gl'bgolyb for the time being

even beyond any perceived similarities in fiction, Watchmen’s mastery over the comic book format - clever use of varying narratives and voices, incorporation of fiction-in-fiction and multimedia, recurring and “recycled” symbols and motifs, all just examples that immediately spring to mind - all seem like very obvious forerunners to the genre that eventually birthed Homestuck. while Andrew tends to be coy about his influences, or speak of them in the negative - “I don’t watch anime,” “I don’t read Lovecraft,” “I never saw Twilight” - there’s little doubt in my mind that Alan Moore is among them

TT: Though the Baroness made very few substantive gestures of aggression, the global fear of her looming threat would trigger all the changes she needed.
TT: Governments prepared for war, as if to defend against the invading alien armies she undoubtedly commanded.
TT: But of course, she had no army. She was always the only of her kind.
TT: Instead, the world powers were only setting about to build her armies for her.

recently I’ve been wondering again what Gl'bgolyb was doing on Earth, especially if all she was accomplishing there was ruining the Condesce’s plans… I’ve been bouncing around comparisons between the emissary and Maplehoof which haven’t really seemed to amount to much beyond “they were both cloned”, still leaving open the question of why the Condesce would clone such a problematic element. but if the Condesce really were, to coin a phrase, “pulling a Watchmen” on the governments of Earth, that would go some way toward explaining how having a genocidal monster on her side might have proved beneficial?

saw Videodrome. what’s there to say… James Woods, a nonchalant enabler of the sexist establishment, is caught in the male gaze of the television screen (“the retina of the mind’s eye”), which feminises (appearance of the vagina on his stomach) and emasculates him (his gun literally being sucked up into his body)… chauvinist establishment take ownership of the feminised Woods, repeatedly molesting him with video tapes, using him for their own goals; then he receives enlightenment and fights back with his pussy power, right down to a far-from-subtle use of vagina dentata. feminist movie!

dingodad:

dingodad:

thinking about trolls as a race who are biologically (eu)social but being ruled over by an especially antisocial member of a race who are asocial by their very nature

thinking now about whether Alternia’s fucked up repressed approach to sex might in fact be because the culture was shaped by a fucked up sexually repressed manchild… I always recall being kind of taken aback by the liberal references to sex in the Meenahbound intermissions when the worldbuilding up to that point had basically led me to believe that trolls don’t really do “sex” in any way that’s familiar to humans, but I guess the juxtaposition between sexually expressive Beforans and repressed Alternians could have been entirely deliberate?

Caliborn aside, Alternia is also subject to the whims of a sex-repulsed overlord in the form of Meenah, though I wonder if that particular aspect of her personality has anything to do with Scratch and English’s grooming?

bringing this back to Gl’bgolyb and Watchmen, I noted one of Watchmen’s main fixations is that sexual inversion is key to the psychology of a costumed crimefighter; Ozymandias, while not explicitly gay, is fashion-minded, shows no interest in women, and perhaps most importantly is represented by the symbol of a pink triangle. with that in mind, the fact that a recurring motif surrounding his artificial horrorterror is visions of babies eating their way horrifically out of the womb suggested, to me, gynophobia of a sort?

malo wonders what the Vast Glub represents, and the answer seems to be that it’s a mass manifestation of the Condesce’s infertility. but I posit that Meenah isn’t just barren; as I said, she’s petrified of the very idea of reproduction, finding human procreation “revolting” and as such bombarding the earth with propaganda to CEASE REPRODUCTION. to that end, in the same way Ozymandias’ monster is a fear of woman’s ability to create life, I wonder if Gl’bgolyb is the manifestation of a similar terror in Meenah’s mind; a fear of her own womb, a monstrous, alien child-killer?

which is of course only cyclical; Scratch - who is himself a womb whose only purpose is to eventually explode open into a new life - pulls the fear of motherhood out of the Condesce’s mind and manifests it as a yonic monster that reinforces the her fear of her own femininity in the first place, preventing any form of Alternian female liberation from ever taking place

no doubt there’s a racialised element to the Condesce being asexual, too, but I’m not sure where that leads

I felt very sure that Homestuck also had a reference somewhere to babies chewing their way out of the womb somewhere but I couldn’t for the life of me remember where it might be

growths of the caliborndyceps fungus

the biological link between Beforans and Alternians is difficult. Meenah and Feferi are clones of each other, so they’re the same species; if Beforans are different from Alternians, then Meenah and all her friends would be considered mutants there. if Alternians are different from Beforus then Feferi and co. are all mutants instead, which is even more problematic given Alternia’s culture.

the first stumbling block is that we don’t really know “where” life comes from in Homestuck’s cosmology. for a lack of any other information, we might assume evolution and natural selection rule, as in real life; but how can there be any “natural” selection in a world where paradox clones exist? Jake doesn’t have parents or a family tree; he’s not descended from any human being. so was he intelligently designed? and if he was, does that mean the rest of humanity was “intelligently designed” to be like him?

we can’t be totally sure this isn’t the case, as per. Book 3, p. 459:

Skaia sacrifices the planet of origin so that its child (a new universe) may have a chance to be born. But it simultaneously seeds the dead planet with the potential for new life and civilization (exiles), and retroactively seeds the planet with the children who would fertilize Skaia with the new universe. This is the essence of the universal creation cycle. Sacrifice the old to make way for the new. Life rises again from the ashes of the old. Rinse and repeat. Something else to wonder: how often has Earth itself been through this process before humanity came along?

exiles arrive on the destroyed Earth with all the technology they need to start everything all over again; so if this has happened before, who’s to say carapacians didn’t engineer humankind in a lab?

but gl'bgolyb was introduced at the dawn of trollkind’s sentience - anywhere between thousands and hundreds of millions of years in the past, depending on how Scratch interprets the nebulous concept of ‘sentience’ - and when Becquerel first arrived on Earth, pterosaurs still soared the skies. so when a scratch happens, there’s the potential for the evolutionary tree to branch significantly before the paradox clones are even meteoric twinkles in the sky. so when those carapacians were designing trolls in a lab, were they designing the trolls that would come to exist on Beforus, or the trolls that Feferi and her friends would live amongst?

@raguna-blade points out that “genes are in themselves a kind of idea” (coincidentally something I found I had also said in the past while I was searching for the above Book 3 commentary); so in the way that ideas tend to sink into the void and then rise back up again throughout time in Homestuck, it wouldn’t be too farfetched to assume that, given enough time, the same genetic ideas would eventually assert themselves on both Beforus and Alternia. but Alternia has also been subject to a pervasive eugenics program for an unknown stretch of time; and Scratch knows that as a scratch doctor, his job isn’t to totally rewrite every part of Alternia, but to make sure the broad strokes remain the same while altering the details to fit his own narrative. Alternia’s history isn’t an original work, it’s only his fanfiction of what the trolls should be like. (we also see this philosophy at work in the history of Skaianet Systems, where Scratch’s protege Meenah crosses over to the post-scratch Earth and works behind the scenes to make sure events take place in roughly the same way, right down to cloning John’s father to act as an identical father to Jane).

Meenah was a teenager in Beforus’ modern day; so when her meteor arrived on Alternia, centuries or thousands or millions of years in the past, was she advanced for her race? had trolls been selectively bred in preparation for her arrival, or did her arrival mark the initiation of a new ideal troll form, sending subsequent generations of her race on a trajectory that would lead to the perfect conditions for her identical descendant Feferi? in either case the long con of Scratch’s eugenic master plan is revealed; there is no perfect Alternian warrior race. Meenah’s trolls aren’t being bred “toward” anything, to be good at conquering or playing games; they’re being bred to make sure they stay exactly the same as they always were, and never become anything new.

when there can be lifetimes between the a troll’s death and the hatching of their descendant, it might also be called into question just how much room for evolution there even is in the Alternian reproductive system. the incestuousness of the Alternian gene pool isn’t lateral, but backwards; the genetic material of each new generation of trolls is constantly being folded back into the genes of the trolls who were alive centuries ago. the very concept of “Ancestors” in the Alternian culture exists because Alternian children are separated from their progenitors by such a vast gulf of time; but on Beforus trolls raised each other from youth, so did they have any use for the idea? after the scratch, Dirk and Roxy were flung far into the future to ensure they never met their forebears; it was by the Condesce’s decree that humans would be born “long after the original donors had died” so that “no one would ever be able to know who their "parents” were, or be able to trace their lineage“. so could the same thing have been done on Alternia, the reproductive process tweaked so that trolls would take centuries longer to be hatched, another way of minimising any potential connection or intimacy between Alternians?

in the same vein as mutants being the true “God-intended” troll race of Alternia, if Alternians are vampires under the influence of Caliborn’s poison I wonder if that makes the shambling hordes of shadow droppers like, the “real trolls”. who’ve seen the light, so to speak

my immediate gut reaction to the Epilogues, which was a creeping paranoia that Dirk had been responsible for Homestuck the entire time (commentary from Book 2, p. 131: “The orange fingers are my fingers. Why are they orange? Let’s not answer that question.”), mostly fell to the wayside after the first week as I began to focus on other interpretations… but now I wonder.

You possess the extreme dexterity to operate your FALSE FRIENDS UNSEEN, that is, when they are not pre-ambulatory through your LOVINGLY IMBUED MECHANIZATION.

@mmmmalo (from here)

Equius is the only person who resists Vriska’s mind reading on-screen… established as a my-blood-outranks-you thing but perhaps it could speak to this?

I’m thinking the blood hierarchy angle might be misdirection… Gl'bgolyb’s psychic attack gets to the warmer bloods first and takes longer to get at the colder bloods (who generally speaking have minds that are more closed off to psychic frequencies, I guess?), but a little while after Vriska and Equius’ exchange it seems to be implied that Vriska’s powers actually work the opposite way; she finds it “difficult to manipulate the mind of the psychically gifted.” (later on, with some assistance, she incorporates sea dwellers into her army of thralls).

so the fact that Vriska has a hard time probing Equius’ brain and then immediately gets counter-probed right after might be taken as suggesting Equius is, in fact, “psychically gifted”, just in a different way to what the reader might have been familiar with at the time? the particular way in which Equius rejects Vriska’s influence - “D –> I can feel you trying to read my mind“, not just immunity but awareness - reads like an equal coming up against an equal, like when one narrator senses another narrator dabbling in their story

the reason an apocalypse buff “is something you can be on Alternia“ is because, just as it is a planet that suffers under every possible kind of dystopia, Alternia bears the scars of a history of apocalyptic events; (repeated) political uprising and suppression, undead plague and alien invasion are just the examples that are the most clear in the text. and this is of course deliberate; Alternia’s trolls have had apocalypse after apocalypse thrown at them to culturally prepare them to leave their world behind entirely once the species of their race, SGRUB, is fulfilled.

Aradia and Sollux go by the tags “apocalypseArisen” and “twinArmageddons” because they’re psychically aware of another imminent world ending event; but I think even they are aware that this is far from something unique to them. generations of warmbloods will have gone through this same experience, knowing that it’s only a matter of time before the forces that be wipe them from the face of the planet like a stain to make way for the next iteration of the regime. the tragedy of a story like Hiveswap isn’t that we all know it’s going to end in a meteor shower anyway; the tragedy is that no matter what any of the characters achieve, it can only end in yet another in a long line of tragedies that stretches forever in both directions. the crushing piston in Alternia’s machine is inevitability; how can you hope to escape what has already happened and will happen again for perpetuity?

who wants to be my code monkey and help me make my own commentary mod for the homestuck collection

mmmmalo:

dingodad:

tags should be a little more consistent now… kids and their adult counterparts are all tagged under just their first name for consistency (though john is just egbert), ancestors are all tagged under first name across both iterations… beta trolls are still tagged firstname lastname just because i’m torn between which i like better

lime-bloods:

who wants to be my code monkey and help me make my own commentary mod for the homestuck collection

hehe

i don’t think i’m going to make much progress just going through Homestuck from the beginning annotating every page one by one, so if anyone has any particular parts they’d like to see annotated or a place you’d like me to start, definitely let me know

whoops

Also note all of the items are, in a way, edible. The boys have directly edible objects, apple and egg. The girls have objects which contain edible goods; the bottle and piñata contain wine and candy, and both needed to be broken. Dave’s was actually a little of both, a food product, and a container for that product which needed to be broken (i.e. hatched).

what did he mean by this

it seems obvious that Gamzee’s lack of custodial guidance has left him with “mommy issues” - his first on screen conversation kicking off with a reference to drinking from a “tItS bOtTlE“ of wicked elixir, which leads directly into his whole deal in the Epilogues - but the way Terezi and Gamzee swap remarks about their unconventional family lives in their first chat together, which Andrew describes as revealing a “deeply misguided fascination [Terezi]’s always had with this shitty clown boy”, suggests that Terezi’s side of this arc stems from “daddy issues” thanks to her own lack of a lusus… obviously lending itself toward her fixation on this member of the paternal clown class, and one who was her mentor in their past ancestral lives no less. hence the intentionally vague ‘you don’t need him’ message she gives herself later on

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…

fishmech:

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…

Lawnrings are yards, not streets. Meenah encounters an Alternian street during the part of meenahquest where she encounters cronus, mituna, meulin, and kurloz.

She comments it’s not unlike Beforus

the lawnring is literally a ring around the hive. use of the term is versatile; Gamzee referring to “those dwelling in more common lawnrings” implies it’s also a double entendre for 'social circles’, and while it might also be colloquially used to refer to what’s inside the circle, it is first and foremost a ring, not just a circle, around a troll’s hive, and the use of the word to parallel 'streets’ on earth, in conjunction with the panel on the same page showing the rings interlocking with each other, makes it pretty clear that the phrase 'lawnring’ refers to a kind of path

obviously we are to assume that when Karkat calls the yellow yard is a ‘yellow lawn ring’ he’s mistaking the yard unit for the yard one has out the back of their house, while also alluding to Oz’s yellow brick road; but in terms of a lawnring as a line that delineates two adjacent territories from each other, he’s also not really wrong? and given his established knowledge of the fourth wall as a gateway to another reality it’s not exactly farfetched to think this was intentional on his part either

to read a more traditionalist classpect interpretation into the streets/lawnrings parallel construction, wind (read: breath) skimming the streets implies freedom of movement, wherewas blood would imply restriction; maybe the word ‘lawnring’ is used in place of ‘street’ in much the same way ‘cocoon’ replaces ‘mailbox’; because trolls don’t have streets, and the lawnrings are representative of a more oppressive culture with an interest in keeping its people where they are

lime-bloods:

to read a more traditionalist classpect interpretation into the streets/lawnrings parallel construction, wind (read: breath) skimming the streets implies freedom of movement, wherewas blood would imply restriction; maybe the word ‘lawnring’ is used in place of ‘street’ in much the same way ‘cocoon’ replaces ‘mailbox’; because trolls don’t have streets, and the lawnrings are representative of a more oppressive culture with an interest in keeping its people where they are

obviously Hiveswap flies in the face of such an interpretation of Alternia by very much putting an emphasis on the existence of streets in Alternian neighbourhoods and, perhaps more importantly, putting the entire second act of the game on a train; but this only speaks to the difference between the two stories, Hiveswap being an adventure game about a character travelling from one place to the next, while Hivebent stars a troll who is very much hive bent, living in a culture designed in every single way to make sure he stays in his house until his purpose has been well and truly fulfilled. very plausibly this could represent an actual change in the Alternian culture between the two depicted time periods

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.

the ‘cocoons are computers’ angle is starting to feel like it’s wearing pretty thin even for me, but some fresh notes regardless because i can’t help myself:

read the cocoon as a sort of surrogate mother, something that embraces the troll when they sleep in lieu of their genetic forebears separated from them by the lord of time. in such an interpretation, the fact that a troll’s computer resembles their cocoon indicates a similarity in purpose: in an antisocial world such as Alternia, a device for communicating with friends becomes another surrogate for connection with other people. when a troll sleeps, they’re soothed by the womb-slime of their cocoon; when they wake, they’re soothed by the simulation of interaction offered by the internet.

in a similar vein, if “cocoon” can refer to a computer just as much as it can a bed, then substituting “plundered mailbox” with “abandoned cocoon” is really just saying that trolls use computers in place of mail. I suggested that Alternia’s lack of streets implied a lack of freedom of movement; the Peregrine Mendicant’s insistence that mail is liberty carries a similar implication that a lack of a postal system on Alternia comes with a lack of freedom. again, the computer becomes a replacement for human interaction. where Act 1 starts off by handing John a quest to venture outside and collect his mail, which includes physical artefacts of affection from his friends, Hivebent offers no such goal to Karkat, who is instead sated by the arrival of a new chat client beta. indeed, while Karkat does briefly leave the confines of his hive in a manner similar to his human counterpart, it’s not part of any plan; it serves only to demonstrate the isolation of Alternian society to the reader, and to remind Karkat of his place in this society in the process.

the panel where Karkat yells at Terezi on his cocoon-phone about what she’s done to his cocoon-toilet has a funny sort of “you’re hooked up to the machine at both ends” implication to it but i’m not sure if using the phone on the throne was even such a pervasive cultural icon back in 2010 as it is now

dingodad:

ALL YOU NEED TO DO IS TURN THE THING OFF!!