dingodad:
do psionics actually get employed as the “helmsmen” of ships or was that just a poetic title for mituna. i don’t think he actually got to choose where to steer that thing
as malo’s comment helped me realise, I think this is supposed to be an ironic joke: Mituna is the “helmsman” of a ship in name only, his own “helm” having been in reality cauterized (Cronus: our behelmeted buddy […] #helmchan) so that the Condesce can call the shots from atop his shoulders.
which presumably serves to illuminates more about our other beloved helmchan, Jake, whose head had to be fucked with to make way for the true Captain English?
Cronus and Meenah arguing over whose abuse of the moefied Mituna is worse feels like it has Jakestakes undertones…
it strikes me that King Arthur’s sword Caledfwlch doubling as the quill used to arbitrate law lends itself to a particularly obvious pun: whoever “Arthur” is at any given point in time is also the “author”. as i’ve said before, the one who controls the SWORD also controls the WORDS.
and as it happens, a pretty succinct version of this pun does actually exist in Homestuck, in the form of the oft-speculated upon name “Aurthour”. it’s pretty easy to imagine why Equius might be associated with the Arthur/author character - by all accounts, the guy is probably just a stand-in for Doc Scratch - but I feel it bears further investigation as to why it’s the centaur lusus in particular who gets the name? (it’s mysterious enough that he shows up totally fine later on as Andrew’s butler: but if we take it as granted that his job, for whatever reason, is serving the author…?)
Aurthour’s being a centaur might suggest that the duality of being a horse/man alludes to the duality of being a king/author; in which case Horuss, as a man who believes he is a horse, seems like the logical next place to look…
(in Monty Python’s Holy Grail, King Arthur couldn’t afford a horse, so he had to gallop along and pretend to be his own steed, becoming another man/horse hybrid. which i’m sure has nothing to do with any of this, but feels funny enough to bring up anyway)
god. of course Horuss would be the one who pursues Rufioh and kisses his corpse back to life if he were supposed to be an author avatar!
maybe it’s time for a proper replay of the flash games because i’d either totally forgotten or was just not learned enough at the time as a teenager to pick up on the big spoonful of dissociative identity jokes slapped on top of everything else about Horuss… thinking charitably, I wonder if this was to point in the direction of the amalgam Lord English reveal? Openbound’s allusions to Voldemort and horcruxes (…Horuss = Horcrux?) certainly indicate that this idea was in the forefront of Andrew’s mind during this stage of writing. seems pertinent that the word “system” also acts as a double entendre referencing Horuss’ part-machine nature (“Whenever I talk to you, my system gets a little switchy”)
perhaps more that coincidentally, Horuss and Cronus, who I suppose we’re supposed to think of as being “kin” with Lord English in their own unique ways, both get rather brusque descriptions from the author avatar: Horuss “is just Equius on horse steroids. The end.” while Cronus “is the worst character in Homestuck by a nautical mile. Any questions?” flippant dismissals of characters of little overall value, yes, but considering the interesting background we get on the rest of the Beforans, it does come across like something about these two in particular is being obscured? or even that the author character is hesitant to talk about these two in particular for some reason?
Horuss’ talk of the fragmented nature of “the void in [his] soul” also seems like an obvious hint hint at the fragmented fate of the void itself, but does that connect to Equius’ shattered-void sunglasses too? having some fun wondering if “shades” works as a double entendre for “shades of the dead” as in ghosts…
nothing new to add to the topic, but the deltarune news has me daydreaming again about deltarune as commentary on the interaction between undertale and its player
lime-bloods:
it’s hard to interpret Spamton as anything but a kind of dark authorial stand-in, ala Lord English… but that “ala Lord English” is carrying a lot of weight on its shoulders. is the “it’s just like Homestuck” explanation the cheap & easy way out? (malo’s “undertale as homestuck midrash” comment has got itself stuck lengthways in the folds of my brain, especially after my musings about Homestuck being the first one to do “combat-as-social-conflict” the other week)
it did come to my attention during recent Jevil attempts that the “secret boss locked away in the basement” thing could be a reference to the popular story about Toby developing Undertale in a basement…
jesus, actually, there IS something to talk about in that development update:
Hard to believe it, but it’s already been around 1 year since DELTARUNE Chapter 2 was released. Even now there still seems to be a passionate fan base for what we put out, thanks in no small part to a disgusting man whose dialogue is probably closest to the way I talk in real life.
as much as I really didn’t want it to be true, I guess my gut instinct that Spamton was a stand-in for the game’s developer is true?! will I have to replay the game and give this interpretation a second thought…
i’m not going to dive into ALL of the weird new ARG deltarune content but i guess it bears commenting on that the sweepstakes stream contains multiple references to “killing your TV”, presumably leading us into the next chapter being about a TV-themed dark world
again, TV-themed stuff: the deltarune site’s room exploration easter egg has these two weatherperson characters hidden away somewhere. it seems clear that their designs indicate a “sunny day” and a “cloudy day”, but the sunny character has a prominently lunar head… because the dark world doesn’t have a sun, maybe?
found some time to watch Fifth Element last night. the film has a certain preoccupation with characters being bound or immobilised by the futuristic technology around them, with Leeloo the resident Born Sexy Yesterday obviously copping the majority of it; and thinking about this it occurred to me that the first example of Leeloo being “bound in technology” is actually this very first scene of the film:
this sarcophagus, which the characters all explicitly expect to be a male character, seems at first glance to be faceless, only to reveal this face at the top. the placement is unexpected, but not particularly strange, if we think of it as stargazing, or perhaps as some sort of aircraft? but then when we find out this thing does have the capability to fly, it doesn’t do so in the expected, superman-like fashion, but instead in this weird upside-down way…
which makes the placement of the face seem weird again. it’s such an unnatural pose that we’re forced to wonder if there’s some specific reason it was designed this way. and it wasn’t until I was thinking back on the film this morning that I realised we’re clued in to why this is:
because the nature of the ultimate weapon is, ultimately, the orgasm, the weapon’s casing of course has her sealed in the state of orgasm, gaping mouth positioned ready to fire into the sky!
lime-bloods:
the question remains to be asked… why DOES spamton’s NEO form have an ovipositor?
joking as I was when I first posted this, does the petz egg stuff on the deltarune site shine a light back on this question? or nah…
Malo on anon here: do you think the title Dead Cherub relates Calliope to the Dark Carnival? Or perhaps Washington DC out of opposition to English, since Dirk compared the DC's back when he introduced the ICP presidency
‘what if there was an american revolutionary figure to oppose lord english’ has always been a very appealing idea to me, so i’m amused by this one, particularly because the first thing it made me think of was the boston tea party, the Dead Cherub being Death and all…
since the Dead Cherub actually became the black hole that contains the Paradise Planet, according to postcanon, I guess it could be argued that moreso than being connected to it, she actually is the Dark Carnival? I’ve never been able to find any real meaningful distinction between Paradise and the Carnival that takes place on it, but this seems as good an avenue as any to explore in that direction
it can be a little difficult to slot any serious analysis into clown religion stuff because out of everything in Homestuck the Insane Clown Posse parody stuff feels like one of the things that Andrew was definitely playing fast and loose with… but maybe that’s a lazy conclusion to arrive at? so here’s some Dark Carnival thoughts courtesy of giving the wiki article a bit of a touch up just now:
Gamzee tells us that “tHe bEaUtY Of tHe cArNiVaL” is “ThAt pEaCe hApPeNs fIrSt, AnD MuRdEr’s tHe sEqUeL”, and that all his life he believed not only in a Dark Carnival to come but that “THE MIRTHFUL MESSIAHS WERE FORETOLD TO BE CRASHING THAT FUCKING PIE STAND AND BRING THE HOLY RUCKUS.” so leading up to Act 6, the theme seems to be that the Dark Carnival’s primordial nature actually is one of whimsy and miracles, and that the chaos and destruction come afterwards. which explains why Gamzee thinks he’s bringing about the Carnival by “MOTHERFUCKING [KILLING] ALL YOU MOTHERFUCKERS”; at this point in time, he is under the express belief that the messiahs were always both him AND ALSO MOTHERFUCKING HIM. we the readers, though, know that the Paradise Planet where the Carnival takes place is Earth, and this is still true in the Epilogues, where Earth is explicitly identified as such.
so, what, Gamzee’s prophecy isn’t actually about anything that happens in Homestuck at all, but a portent of more evil to come even after the creation of a new universe? which I guess makes this a Homestuck^2 theory? frown
Calumbia would be a beautiful name for a cherub responsible for orchestrating the american revolution
Malo on anon here: do you think the title Dead Cherub relates Calliope to the Dark Carnival? Or perhaps Washington DC out of opposition to English, since Dirk compared the DC's back when he introduced the ICP presidency
lime-bloods:
‘what if there was an american revolutionary figure to oppose lord english’ has always been a very appealing idea to me, so i’m amused by this one, particularly because the first thing it made me think of was the boston tea party, the Dead Cherub being Death and all…
since the Dead Cherub actually became the black hole that contains the Paradise Planet, according to postcanon, I guess it could be argued that moreso than being connected to it, she actually is the Dark Carnival? I’ve never been able to find any real meaningful distinction between Paradise and the Carnival that takes place on it, but this seems as good an avenue as any to explore in that direction
little detail I was thinking about when I was formulating my response to this ask but forgot to include: it’s funny that the entrance to the new universe is literally through a White House…
the Forge is such an interesting oddity in Homestuck’s mythos; why does Hephaestus need that particular lava to craft his weapons? why is that the necessary way to deliver a tadpole into the Battlefield? our Heroes forego the use of the drill usually required to deliver the frog, but in spite of how easy it would have been to just fly the tadpole to its destination, the volcano - and the rings needed to ignite it - still seem to be essential to the process. unlike anything else, the Forge is magical in nature, but has no magical origin; it just seems to grow from the earth where it’s needed.
in the time up to and around GAME OVER, Karkat’s dangerous proximity to lava had some speculating that magma might fall under the symbolic umbrella of the Blood aspect, and now I wonder if that might be part of what’s going on here; is the significance of the Forge firing lava up into Skaia that it’s a transfer of blood from the parent into the child, like a cosmic placenta?
the Forge as placenta could almost make the whole island structure into the image of a womb, obviously taking the frog as the baby..?
is there some kind of wordplay at work with “placenta” and mount “Etna”, the volcano in Italy that was mythologically the forge of Hephaestus and the final resting place of Typheus? I couldn’t find anything convincing to explain the “place” part (which comes from Greek, “plax”, a flat plate), so probably not - but a fun fact I did learn from my trip to Wikipedia is that as Normans entered Sicily and spread the Arthurian romances through Europe, Etna became one of the locations of Arthur’s underworld kingdom, so there could be an established Excalibur connection, too
