motherhood in homestuck is so compelling to me like… ok 4lph4kidz gave me the courage to post about my kanaya miscarriage thoughts but the idea of giving kanaya, a character who was nurturing and motherlike from the start, a metaphorical miscarriage (eridan killing her through her stomach, destroying the matriorb, kanaya being held back from defending herself bc of the matriorb, etc) and having that haunt her deeply and personally is fuckin INSANE… and she becomes a vampire and a vampire’s existence is inherently selfish, and she must consume other beings to survive. a mother’s existence is physically selfless, as in, she literally loses part of herself…
but like. the way she gets the matriorb back doesnt require sacrifice either. so many things that are created in homestuck require something to be destoryed (a new empress, a new universe, a new cherub) but roxy, homestuck’s not perfect but most earnest mother from human society, literally does not destroy anything to create a new matriorb? kanaya literally says :
and then she assumes that to create such a gift, roxy would need to go through a huge, sacrificial trial, but:
she’s surprised that roxy just… used her void powers to make life out of nothing. i think this being one of the few times that creation doesnt require sacrifice in homestuck is so important. to be a mother (specifically in the context of two people who WANT to be mothers) should not require sacrifice. it is an achievement and an honor for both of them and that makes me go CRAZY
There’s a particular quality to early-to-mid Homestuck that I really loved when I first read it, but which I tend to forget when thinking about the story retrospectively.
This quality of like … taking pre-established elements, and building larger structures out of them. And then repeating this recursively, as these larger structures now become “pre-established elements” unto themselves.
A camera zooming further and further out from the same central point, “Powers of Ten”-style.
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Homestuck is initially about the process of playing “Sburb,” a fictitious base-building computer game.
The vast majority of comic pages in first 4 Acts are either about a character doing something in this game, or (if they are not yet a player) attempting to obtain and install it.
Everything else is secondary, at least formally, to this core activity. The main characters are always playing Sburb (or at least trying to), no matter what else they’re doing. Dialogue is presented as a temporary side-stream overlaid onto the game; the characters play in silence unless they need to talk, and when they do talk, it’s usually about the game.
This quality appears in the mechanics of Sburb. It’s a game about combining things you have to make new ones (“alchemy”); about constructing a building by continually extending it at the edges; about making a tower that gets taller and taller, building on a pre-established foundation, using new components made from earlier ones.
And it appears, less literally, in the mechanics of the story. An element is introduced – casually, weightlessly, accidentally – and once introduced, it sticks. It gets brought back again and again, in a series of bigger and weirder riffs.
(John lived in a house, which we spent some time surveying. In the process, we learned about his father, who was his only caretaker. So now everyone has a single caretaker, and everyone lives in a house which we spend some time surveying. But with every iteration, the houses get bigger, the surveys grander, the caretakers more bizarre.)
Whimsical elements introduced very early on, like the “kernelsprite prototyping” mechanic, end up very deeply baked into everything. There’s a palpable joy to the way the comic handles these things. A joy in doing something on a whim, and then committing completely to the bit, indefinitely; a joy in making mountains shaped like molehills.
This kind of dims away in the later, more “plot-heavy” portions that loom larger in my memory. There’s a similar vibe to the way the plot elaborates upon itself, even much later on, but we lose this dynamic on the micro-level.
Homestuck is an example of what I once heard described in a senior seminar as “database-driven” narrative, as opposed to a more traditional linear narrative. Narrative information exists in a database format (i.e., every kid has a guardian, an instrument, a funny fake name, etc.) and much of the narrative is driven by the listing and collation of this information.
