You are also troubled to contemplate FRIGHTENING FAUNA, and plagued daily by their regrettable REALNESS ATTRIBUTE. / You are also pleased to contemplate FRIGHTENING FAUNA, though saddened by their regrettable FAKENESS ATTRIBUTE.
lines caught my eye… it’s a great gag on its own: jake lives with lusii, jane reads a webcomic with devil beasts in it. but it struck me as an odd inclusion just for the gag’s sake; beyond Jane’s shirt, which shows her appreciation for Problem Sleuth more than anything, we’re never given much of an indication that she is “pleased to contemplate frightening fauna”. it was common in earlier acts for characters to be introduced with interests that didn’t really pan out (John’s programming, Dave’s hipster music), but Act 6 is more tightly written than that.
but it’s surely another Act 6 allusion to Watchmen, in which the fakeness of the horrorterror was the only clue that it was all part of Ozymandias’ plan?
ruminating a little more on Watchmen as an intertext with Act 6; with Gl'bgolyb dying along with Alternia, one assumption we might be forced to make is that, like Ozymandias, Meenah was forced to create her own monster when it came to invading the Earth… and that being the case, it’s only natural to wonder if the psychic scream that kept thwarting her attempts to resurrect the trolls was also, like Ozymandias’, a fabrication of her own making (hence the “fakeness attribute” of Jane’s “frightening fauna”)
I’ve wondered in the past if Gl'bgolyb reflects back at Meenah a fear of her own womb (again, in the same way Ozymandias’ monster acts as a manifestation of his homosexual gynophobia). looking at things from this angle, the wording of Dirk’s retelling becomes more interesting: “the thing is a kind of an enigma […] a double edged eldritch horror. As much in her service as it is calling the shots […] Or so the story goes.” like maybe it’s not just Homestuck using Gl'bgolyb as a metaphor for Meenah’s barrenness (baroness), but Dirk himself using it as a literary device for Jake - to whom the frightening fauna are very much real?
or even just that Meenah herself concocted the Gl'bgolyb story to justify why she was for whatever reason unable to conceive. Dirk and the Condesce both have reasons to be acting as “scratch doctors” here, making Earth’s history seem more like Alternia’s even when it wasn’t necessarily..
lime-bloods:
ruminating a little more on Watchmen as an intertext with Act 6; with Gl'bgolyb dying along with Alternia, one assumption we might be forced to make is that, like Ozymandias, Meenah was forced to create her own monster when it came to invading the Earth… and that being the case, it’s only natural to wonder if the psychic scream that kept thwarting her attempts to resurrect the trolls was also, like Ozymandias’, a fabrication of her own making (hence the “fakeness attribute” of Jane’s “frightening fauna”)
I’ve wondered in the past if Gl'bgolyb reflects back at Meenah a fear of her own womb (again, in the same way Ozymandias’ monster acts as a manifestation of his homosexual gynophobia). looking at things from this angle, the wording of Dirk’s retelling becomes more interesting: “the thing is a kind of an enigma […] a double edged eldritch horror. As much in her service as it is calling the shots […] Or so the story goes.” like maybe it’s not just Homestuck using Gl'bgolyb as a metaphor for Meenah’s barrenness (baroness), but Dirk himself using it as a literary device for Jake - to whom the frightening fauna are very much real?
or even just that Meenah herself concocted the Gl'bgolyb story to justify why she was for whatever reason unable to conceive. Dirk and the Condesce both have reasons to be acting as “scratch doctors” here, making Earth’s history seem more like Alternia’s even when it wasn’t necessarily..
certainly the idea that the Condesce invented a Vast Glub through technological means is consistent with the story that she used technology to replicate parts of Alternia that were otherwise incompatible with Earth… but it’s hard to tell whether this lines up chronologically? the narrative as related by Dirk suggests that the rise of technology only began after her attempts to replicated Alternia through “ill conceived biotech nonsense” failed, which Gl'bgolyb’s destruction of the troll clones presumably contributed to.
so say we look at this the other way; there was a real second Gl'bgolyb, who was replaced by technology later on. presumably this means the technological tendrils which permeate the “Crocker tier” Jane are merely the updated version of the organic tendrils Meenah used to control people in eons past… which, themselves, no doubt owe their existence to the doldrum flagella of Jane’s favoured fictional beasts. so, reason #2 for Jane’s interest in frightening fauna?
TT: Later she instated a lusidroid system to serve the same function, as she began phasing in more robotic solutions in favor of all this ill conceived biotech nonsense that always did nothing but backfire.
on reexamination, this line comes across as such a coded misogynistic slur… like Dirk has a vested interest in making it seem like Meenah had no choice but to adopt cool, logical machinery after all that messy, emotional biology inevitably failed on her. potentially paints his whole retelling of Earth’s history in a different light (read: scratch doctoring). the narrative that machines overtaking organisms is inevitable ultimately only serves those on the side of Sk(y)aianet and Lord English/the Terminator…
feel a little foolish having discussed Ozymandias as a gynophobe on more than one occasion and never for a second considered the gynophobe was Dirk!
Terminator and Watchmen also share in themes of false flag attacks being used as justification for rising fascism; Skynet uses the opportunity provided by human war to take over the United States’ military assets, Ozymandias uses a manufactured alien invasion as justification for bringing about his New World Order… the two stories are actually contemporary, Terminator even predating Watchmen by two years, so they no doubt draw on the same Cold War paranoia
lime-bloods:
TT: Later she instated a lusidroid system to serve the same function, as she began phasing in more robotic solutions in favor of all this ill conceived biotech nonsense that always did nothing but backfire.
on reexamination, this line comes across as such a coded misogynistic slur… like Dirk has a vested interest in making it seem like Meenah had no choice but to adopt cool, logical machinery after all that messy, emotional biology inevitably failed on her. potentially paints his whole retelling of Earth’s history in a different light (read: scratch doctoring). the narrative that machines overtaking organisms is inevitable ultimately only serves those on the side of Sk(y)aianet and Lord English/the Terminator…
feel a little foolish having discussed Ozymandias as a gynophobe on more than one occasion and never for a second considered the gynophobe was Dirk!
when we view machine supremacy as analogous to patriarchy, it becomes even easier to see how Alternia is only superficially matriarchal. though it appears at the surface level to be a world dictated by the biological processés of flesh and slime, these processes are in actuality the front of a vast machine. colonies of workers form vast mainframes, with the lifespans of organisms reduced to mere lines of code
and if everything on Alternia is couched in this organic esthetic to mask the truth that there are computers watching you everywhere you go, I’m once again forced to wonder if the cocoon-bed is just code for a computer-bed!
lime-bloods:
Terminator and Watchmen also share in themes of false flag attacks being used as justification for rising fascism; Skynet uses the opportunity provided by human war to take over the United States’ military assets, Ozymandias uses a manufactured alien invasion as justification for bringing about his New World Order… the two stories are actually contemporary, Terminator even predating Watchmen by two years, so they no doubt draw on the same Cold War paranoia
compare and contrast: Alternia as the Ur-Postapocalypse where every possible thing has gone wrong (authoritarian future government overlays machine uprising overlays plagues of the undead), Lord English as an entity who can only enter a universe once it has been destroyed from the inside
Doc Scratch is an exercise in trust between reader and author. when he takes over Homestuck’s narrative it’s natural for us to distrust him on instinct: we were used to the other guy telling the story, who’s this new guy and what are his credentials?
but by that point we already know that “the other guy” was just a fallible human; one locked in an attic by bullies and tormented by stuffed wolf heads, no less. the only reason we have to “trust” the first guy is because he’s the devil we know. when Hussie calls Scratch’s version of events “troll fanfiction” there’s no real reason to believe that Hussie is “right” and Scratch is “wrong”; whether we choose to believe one author over the other is ultimately arbitrary. indeed, out of the two, Scratch is the only one with any real claim to “omniscience”, even if it is partially compromised omniscience; so in all possibility we should believe him over the human one, right?
probably Scratch’s main qualification for reliable author is that he does not lie. but if you already distrust this guy, what reason is there to necessary believe him when he says this, right? he could be lying about lying. so in truth whether we believe what Scratch says or not is, once again, totally arbitrary. like Rose’s inquiries as to whether the Horrorterrors are evil or not, this is a fruitless line of questioning that ultimately achieves nothing. more important questions present themselves; why might Scratch be lying or telling the truth? what reason do we have to believe - or disbelieve - the things he says?
I’ve pointed out before that Scratch’s policy of honesty reflects less on himself and more on Homestuck’s narrative as a whole. Hussie’s own commentary makes the exact same point: “…this is where some of his views as a nefarious alt-author figure start leaking out. If you imagine that his spiel here is being applied to a philosophy on storytelling, it tracks pretty well. […] He isn’t even that much worse than me in terms of things like authorial sadism, jerking the reader around in certain ways, self-indulgence.” (Homestuck: Book 6, p. 388) So in deciding whether or not you “trust” Scratch, what you are really being asked to do is decide whether or not you trust Homestuck itself; you’re being forced to either engage with Homestuck on its own terms, on the merits of its own themes - or to disregard the text entirely!
dingodad:
dingodad:
wait this is driving me a lil bit crazy… we know Rose’s MEOW code was written in a journal, presumably after the interview with Jaspers in which he told her his secret. so, presumably, Rose was under the delusion that when she was filling a journal with the word ‘MEOW’ she was actually transcribing some incredible secret Jaspers had revealed to her.
but Tavros, Aradia, Terezi and Vriska wrote their codes in Flarp books. which means that when they wrote them they were probably under the delusion they were filling in Flarp books. right. so were they filling in character sheets? like Vriska thinks her Flarp character is called Mindfang but when you look in her book does it actually just say the word 8R8K over and over again. was the entire Flarp campaign between these four trolls literally just a shared delusion
given the subtext of the Flarp game being that the kids are reenacting the lives of their ancestors, it’s also interesting that the “t1ck” quirk Tavros uses while under his trance retroactively became the quirk associated with his ancestor… like it’s being suggested that the ancestor myth, that trolls have the destinies of their forebears literally genetically coded into them, is actually true? and that the act of “role play” - or perhaps more specifically role play that leads to the reenacting of the traumas that encoded these genes in the genes in the first place - is the trance that allows these recessive ideas to bubble up into consciousness…
(to say nothing of the real missed fact here, which is that Doc Scratch so typically arranged for his own genetic code to be written in the traumas of children)
footnote: the idea that trauma can cause epigenetic changes which alter gene expression is a more recent theory than Homestuck can account for, but… being the man with a nuclear bomb for a head certainly makes Doc Scratch a pretty viable candidate for someone who causes traumas that alter your genes
