every character is Lord English so all characters must seek to bond with each other to complete themselves. #hatewins
#black hole = blackrom singularity? cmonnnn
running on fumes here, but we’ve got a black hole alongside a red sun… there aren’t any ashen planets, but Jane’s ashes are standing by as John thinks about the moon’s pale fire?
seems at least worthy of comment that trolls have an ashen quadrant, where cremation has recurring significance; trolls don’t traditionally have any funerary rites - …don’t typically bury their dead. Leaving bodies to be consumed by wild animals is more customary - so the Signless being burned after his execution may have been a deliberate disrespect against him. which explains why it’s Meenah’s two least favourite children who get cremated rather than preserved: Jake’s grandma, in particular, had to be burned “with haste so the monsters wouldnt eat her”: a pointedly nontraditional disposal for the daughter of a troll.
how this connects to the so-named quadrant, idk… Karkat’s ashen-grey sign is supposed to have cooled from fiery red, but that doesn’t line up with the function of the quadrant. do John’s “pale fire” or Vriska’s “irons in the fire” having anything to say about it either… and one has to assume the differing symbols of ascension for humans and trolls - eternal sleep vs the dissolving/burning of the old body - factor into this somehow too
haha, Jake naively thinks of his grandmother’s trident wounds as “three big fang marks“ because he assumes the attacker is another wild monster… but of course a trident is so-called because it is a weapon with “three-teeth”, and the image of Jade being punctured by three false golden fangs is not one to be so quickly dismissed
ohhhh, Face/Off’s Castor last name Troy is so called because when he wears Travolta’s face he acts as a one man Trojan horse… I wonder if that’s part of the reason English’s defeat in the proximity of some horses is so “ironic”
started watching 1979′s Caligula for the first time last night… a film famous, of course, for its orgy scene/s. though it’s Tiberius, not Caligula, who orchestrates the first of these scenes in the film, the centerpiece of Tiberius’ orgy palace is a vast swimming pool surrounded by a body of virile “nymphs” and “satyrs” Tiberius affectionately refers to as his “fishes”. ample cause to wonder if “Caligula’s Aquarium” might be a deliberate reference to this?
thinking of “kismesis” as “kiss me sis” feels like such a childish assessment, but the quadrant being called caliginous, after Caligula of all people, really gives pause, huh.
i will disagree with the notion that hiveswap’s worldbuild makes hivebent seem desolate and that there must have been some widespread social change on alternia between the two time periods. i think the fact that hivebent seems so desolate has very little to do with the fact that it’s set on alternia (though not NOTHING to do with it, mind you) and almost everything to do with the fact that it’s homestuck. hivebent’s selection of trolls live in rural regions and barely speak to anyone outside their tight knit social circle by design, the exact same way the human cast are… if you based your whole opinion of how human society works on john and his friends you’d probably find that pretty scary too!!
I guess this plays into some thoughts I had earlier about the integral differences between Hiveswap and Hivebent; Hiveswap is a story about a quest, which necessitates it taking place in a world with roads and freedom of movement, while Hivebent is a story about being stuck at home, hence the bounding “lawnrings” in place of streets.
in the tags for that post I begrudgingly accepted that this might be interpreted as a cultural difference between the two Alternian eras, but let’s keep ignoring that and focus still on the fact that Homestuck is about living nowhere in particular and playing a game called “suburb”, while Joey (who notably starts off in a mansion far from any friends) gets transported straight into the middle of civilisation…
all that in mind, it obviously strikes as significant that Dave and Sollux live city lives in such contrast to the rest of the cast… in both cases the “stems” that connect them to the rest of the world are inevitably cauterised upon entry to the Medium, but for what reason does Dave start off with his stem intact when Dirk’s was broken hundreds of years before his arrival on Earth?
on Sollux’ living situation: it’s never really crossed my mind before that his two-headed lusus shackled to his hivestem by the ankle prefigures Calliope and Caliborn, but it obviously does. presumably the mind honey that “helps [the bicyclops] not be such a complete idiot all the time” has something to do with candy-drugs the cherubs’ home is stocked with?
i donno. in that same vein, though… while it makes sense to disregard most of the trolls’ game planets as irrelevant details, keeping in mind the principle that the denizen and their associated quest act as mythological stand-ins for the parent and the hero’s household struggle, we can glean a little about even the more background trolls… while the “Brains” on Sollux’ planet obviously have something to do with all the mind honey in his hive, might the “Fire” part pertain to his lusus’ wearing of irons?
Do you have any takes on why fiamet is wearing a aquamino sign instead of one more connected to her theorized sign of canra? I have no idea what it means honestly
I’ve only given it a little bit of thought… while my first thought is to agree that Aquara would make a lot more sense, I can think of a few reasons why it wouldn’t be that.
we don’t really know at this point in time if the aspect bindings and lunar sways are actually “a thing” in-universe; like, does a troll know what it means to have a sign with a “prospit sway” or to be “mind bound”? if those things mean nothing to a troll then the symbol they choose as a disguise is totally random… and if those things do hold meaning to a troll, isn’t it more likely Fiamet chooses a sign that doesn’t match her birth sign, to enforce the deception?
I realise, of course, that there are symbolic considerations, and that Fiamet didn’t actually choose her seadweller drag sign. it was chosen by… someone? artist? writer? and it might make sense to assume that whoever chose that particular sign had a reason to do so… however, I think it’s been well established by now, through various insights into and comments concerning the game’s development, that these characters were not designed with their zodiac signs in mind. it seems to be that Fiamet was designed by Andrew’s hand, and notably, without a sign; Trizza, too, was Andrew’s design, and when she was first conceptualised, she was a Pisces. i know many will disagree with me or calling me boring for this, lol, but I stand firm by my assertion that the signs given to the Hiveswap cast are of little significance. and while the low regard i have for classpect-oriented analysis in general plays into this, I do think the quote unquote “"randomness” of the Hiveswap trolls’ signs is deliberate in its own way. signs had a significance in Homestuck where heroes were born from ectobiology, and there were forces of destiny at play causing Vriska and Aranea to be given the same sign. Hiveswap exists outside of that mythology, on a more “realised” version of Alternia, where Trizza can be born from the Condesce’s gene and appear to be in almost every way a clone of her ancestor, but be given a totally different sign.
ALL that being said, i’m not totally convinced Fiamet’s “true sign” is gonna be Canra just cus of the obvious axolotl motif… it’s possible the axolotl look was a coincidence, or even more likely, that whoever designed the signs (which in contrast is a process of which we know remarkably little… to my knowledge we know who wrote the extended zodiac copy, but the making of the graphics is basically an unknown?) knew hiveswap would involve a limeblood with an axolotl motif and saw the opportunity to make one of the signs fit, even if it wasn’t the sign in question. I’d be silly to deny, of course, the possibility, or even the likelihood, that The Axolotl Sign is in fact fiamet’s. but my existing hypothesis on Fiamet’s sign, which part of me would still love to be true, is based on this carving in Dammek’s hive:
which looks a lot like Dammek’s sign carved next to what could easily be some greenblood’s sign, but probably not Canra. if it isn’t a carving of Fiamet’s sign, then i’ve no idea what it is! but i guess that’s the kicker, that I really have no idea. it’s been tempting to think of these trolls in terms we’re familiar with, where everyone’s girlfriend has to be a character we already know about. but like I said, we’re outside of that Homestuck mythology now, and any troll can be friends with any number of trolls we just haven’t met yet…
sorry, stopping myself from writing insane paragraphs speculating on silly Hiveswap sign stuff based on snippets of what we know about behind the scenes… TL;DR i’m not even totally convinced the signs in the extended zodiac were designed to fit into particular aspect/moon axes, Canra and Aquamino could have been designed as a pair and then just separated at birth when the idea for the quiz came up
I guess as long as I’m revisiting my old Fiamet speculation I should properly get into it… it seems a foregone conclusion at this point that what we’ve been calling the “first guardian axolotl” is Fiamet’s lusus. which should make us think even harder about Jude’s drawings:
the pencil shading of the character could lead one to think this is one of the monsters, but the eyes are a detail none of the other monsters possess… whether this means it depicts the actual salamander or a monster very clearly cloned from it is ultimately irrelevant: either the creature was on Earth at some point, or a cult from Earth were able to get to it…
to risk pointing out the obvious, this new locale teased at the convention seems like a pretty clear candidate for the location of another, much older cherub portal… notably the Skaianet Systems background - which I’ve noted before seems to play into Jude’s conspiratorial tendencies - has Jake spending his time sailing the Pacific in search of ancient temples; something explicitly flagged up in Hiveswap itself. in the context of Homestuck’s mythology it’s obvious what Jake’s looking for is the frog temple; but divorced of that mythos, and keeping in mind the likelihood that Jake imported that cherub portal for the purpose of looting Alternia the same way he looted the Incipisphere, having cherub portals strewn around various ancient temples would be an interesting way of keeping that part of Jake’s character embedded in Hiveswap’s story without having to tie it into extraneous Sburb nonsense.
though part of me also ponders whether it would make sense for this hypothetical ancient cherub portal to lead to Earth… the portal to take Joey back home is back in Dammek’s basement. why shouldn’t these portals lead all over Paradox Space? if one were to choose to believe Fiamet’s lusus is literally a first guardian, and in the knowledge that all planets have one, having a portal from Alternia to another planet and back again would no doubt be convenient. and I always thought it would be a shame to introduce us to a world that ships all able bodied adults off to fight interplanetary wars without showing us at least a little bit of one of those other planets…
started watching 1979′s Caligula for the first time last night… a film famous, of course, for its orgy scene/s. though it’s Tiberius, not Caligula, who orchestrates the first of these scenes in the film, the centerpiece of Tiberius’ orgy palace is a vast swimming pool surrounded by a body of virile “nymphs” and “satyrs” Tiberius affectionately refers to as his “fishes”. ample cause to wonder if “Caligula’s Aquarium” might be a deliberate reference to this?
as malo points out, the emblem associated with the film is a relevant detail. the bleeding-eyed Caligula coin slots in with a loose motif of Roman emperors in Hivebent, calling to mind Terezi’s scratched-eye coin, which in turn seems to evoke Dualscar’s eye scars.
malo asks, then, if anything else in the film could be pertinent to Dualscar, so I promised i’d keep my two eyes peeled into the second half… and I think there are grounds to think that the story of the mythological Cronus might be a theme at play?
the Caesars claimed divine right through descent from the Roman ancestral goddess Venus, a fact which Caligula addresses directly in the film:
Lucky girl. To lose one’s virginity … to a direct descendant of the goddess Venus.
to us, pop culturally, Venus is the girl Botticelli depicts as rising fully-formed from the sea on a clam shell; born from the foam of Uranus’ manhood, torn from his body by his son Cronus (the very name “Aphrodite” means born from sea-foam, “aphros”).
and while the removal of eyes can itself be taken as an act of castration, the act is depicted in a far more explicit way shortly after Caligula’s declaration of divine descent, with the order of a man’s cruel emasculation and the feeding of his removed parts to dogs (with the remainder of his body sent to his wife Livia; the very woman whose virginity Caligula claimed in the name of the gods). the birth of Caligula’s daughter immediately follows.
soon enough we’re treated to another orgy - Caligula’s whoring of the senators’ wives - this time with emphasis on fellatio; cuts of a man being brought to completion are interspersed with soldiers gaily prancing around the brothel at Caligula’s invitation. Caligula’s descent into madness comes to a head at a symbolic ejaculation, surely calling to the “foam” of Uranus’ loins which led to the genesis of his bloodline. following, at the very peak of his insanity, Caligula has a legion of naked spearmen attack the sea in a symbolic invasion of Britain, doubly serving as a symbolic sexual conquest of the sea of the sort that might lead to the birth of a Venus.
(in some retellings of this myth, Caligula had his men take clam shells - “conchiglia” in Italian, and a euphemism for the vulva in some Latin languages - as plunder to prove the conquest, though the film instead has papyrus reeds as Caligula’s preferred loot.)
thinking of Dualscar as the mythological Cronus, the presumed Orphaner duties of dropping harpooned lusii into the sea takes on an interesting subtext… the feeding of Gl'bgolyb has been compared to the fertilisation of the Mother Grub ad nauseum by now, I’m sure, but looking in the exact opposite direction, does this give the killing of the lusus undertones of castration?
thinking of Dualscar as the mythological Cronus, the presumed Orphaner duties of dropping harpooned lusii into the sea takes on an interesting subtext… the feeding of Gl'bgolyb has been compared to the fertilisation of the Mother Grub ad nauseum by now, I’m sure, but looking in the exact opposite direction, does this give the killing of the lusus undertones of castration?
this makes Sollux having his lusus chained up pretty funny.
seems at least worthy of comment that trolls have an ashen quadrant, where cremation has recurring significance; trolls don’t traditionally have any funerary rites - …don’t typically bury their dead. Leaving bodies to be consumed by wild animals is more customary - so the Signless being burned after his execution may have been a deliberate disrespect against him. which explains why it’s Meenah’s two least favourite children who get cremated rather than preserved: Jake’s grandma, in particular, had to be burned “with haste so the monsters wouldnt eat her”: a pointedly nontraditional disposal for the daughter of a troll.
how this connects to the so-named quadrant, idk… Karkat’s ashen-grey sign is supposed to have cooled from fiery red, but that doesn’t line up with the function of the quadrant. do John’s “pale fire” or Vriska’s “irons in the fire” having anything to say about it either… and one has to assume the differing symbols of ascension for humans and trolls - eternal sleep vs the dissolving/burning of the old body - factor into this somehow too
I wouldn’t dismiss it having a connection. The auspistice’s duty is to cool off hot tempers, in a way - to mediate in such a way that two people don’t hate each other enough to kill each other. Might be a stretch but it came to mind.
that’s a misrepresentation of the quadrant; an auspistice stops a relationship from forming, not violence from taking place. “fires of passion” still work euphemistically in this case, but the Signless’ cooling flames went from red to gray, and the ashen quadrant deals with black relationships and not red ones, so it’s still a detour from established colour symbolism
“The Narrative” is a spacetime fabric that permeates all of Homestuck; every Hero of every aspect dents this field in equal measure, just in different ways