Blood and Breath as “mediums”? Blood as, of course, the confining medium; the universe of frog-flesh whose lifeblood is literal blood, versus Breath as the freeing medium outside of the flesh… “The Medium” as it is represented in Homestuck is literally a version of space filled with breathable air, i.e. a medium allowing for absolute freedom of movement: but on Alternia, “…paint sets are manufactured with the pigment from the blood of culled wigglers”, meaning that blood is also quite literally an “artistic medium” for them
i’ve long held that there can be no proper discussion of all trolls as “male” without acknowledgement of the drones, but for the first time i’m also wondering if this was deliberate reasoning for the drones’ existence? Alternia’s drones arise from a lineage of machine enforcers in fiction (Terminator’s terminators and the X-Men’s sentinels are both evoked in Homestuck if only in a very indirect fashion on the part of the latter), which in Homestuck is necessarily analogous to a machine patriarchy. so in contrast to this - as well as by analogy to the social structure of colony insects - i would argue trolls are almost necessarily feminine.
last night’s Matrix rewatch in particular highlighted to me the sort of compromise Alternia’s drones have with their trolls; Alternia’s drones are biological insomuch as they require the biological processes of organisms like trolls and mother grubs to breed - in not dissimilar a way to English keeping a facade of matriarchy around his empire so long as this compromise continues to be convenient for him. but by the time the drones arrive on Earth, this pretense has seemingly disappeared entirely. drones no longer enforce reproduction in any meaningful way; they are, essentially, drones for drones’ sake.
i guess implicitly the ultimate robotification of the troll empire, as with the shedding of superfluous biological elements like caste and, eventually, trolls themselves, is all English-as-Terminator’s design. by forcing reproduction and adherence to the design on pain of death, the drones even act out on a microcosmic scale what English does on a universal level; the culling drone becomes an avatar of the inevitability of death that English represents. i ponder, even, if the idea of a drone as a male insect born from an unfertilised egg is alluded to at all by Caliborn as a male creature born from a failure to absorb his feminine half?
yea i very much agree with ur take on sollux in his relation to older technology, u get it
please id love if youd share some more of ur analysis on his character (as well as ur art bc that shit is 👌👌👌)
either way, thanks for feeding my brain worms
beescake:
im glad it resonated!! :’) always happy to explore his character, he contains multitudes!!!
i think i may be out of sollux analysis for now, in the sense where i don’t have anything new to add that hasn’t already been covered in these posts? (please add if there’s more…)
however i will say there’s another thing i really like abt him:
his Range!
he has a v flexible face.. even with his neutral expression, you cant help but read a tinge of melancholy/pensiveness to it.
he deters people from getting too comfortable with him by acting crude, but no matter how unapproachable he looks you can’t help but wonder if he’s ok. seems like he’s never content with himself.
just like karkat, anger gives him purpose = something to care about & react to. without it he can appear aimless/uncertain.
it’s especially interesting when you compare him to aradia, who despite having endured a lot of shit, ends up enjoying the freedom of expanding her worldview, riding the unpredictable tide of the narrative and observing the changes. sollux… doesn’t.
he doesn’t like watching major things progress in a way he can’t predict. the lack of certainty actually overwhelms him.
and it’s pretty clear why; imagine the only reassurance you get after unknowingly killing ur gf is that “it needed to happen”. the only way to appease that sort of emotional turmoil is by intellectualizing those events as inevitable and out of your control.
(hs, A6I5)
when you’re just a tool for the author, trying to sit out is just feeble self-preservation until you’re needed again. if you’re not called on stage to help/assist in some way, it feels like your presence spells doom (either you or someone else will get hurt). so you avoid Events as best you can.
partially in conversation with Malo’s response to this post, but i think not really enough to justify turning it into a full-size thread:
in contrast to that last post, in which I position Alternia’s drones as a class of patriarchal machines who have essentially hijacked the reproduction of (implied feminine) trolls to perpetuate themselves The Matrix-style, i have in the past suggested that drones being made to participate in troll reproduction with no genetic representation of their own amounts essentially to “getting cucked” - or even to being physically emasculated - which malo alludes.
this latter idea wasn’t so much part of my broader understanding of sex and gender among trolls as it may be for Malo, so it didn’t really occur to me as I explored drones as patriarchs. but ultimately the two gendered views of drones are not so difficult to synthesise. trolls-as-(organic-)female can be responsible for the emasculation of drones-as-(robotic-)male; but as with all things on Alternia, this veneer of female empowerment no doubt only serves to obscure English’s patriarchal machinations behind the scenes.
perhaps i’m not entirely right in suggesting that a drone being born from an unfertilised egg serves as a parallel to English being born without a female half: instead maybe being born without genetic material is “being cucked” in the same way Cronus “got cucked” when English’s possession spell (read: genetic material) bounced off him and went into someone else? (or perhaps these two ideas are not so irreconcilable anyway; pattern dictates that if Caliborn is ever going to cuck anyone, he’ll do it to himself first, and it is indeed nobody’s fault but his own that English lacks his feminine other half.)
by being genetic blank slates, drones could well be the “avatars” of English in much more real a sense than I suggested in my last post; in the same way that Cronus was marked for possession with a scratch across his face, or Jack Noir pulled his eyes out to replace them with billiard balls, the drones have been scooped out and made empty shells ready to potentially host English at any time. so long as we’re thinking of drones as a Matrixesque army of robot oppressors, we should continue to keep in mind that robots are puppets, and that both of these things can at any time be one English’s vessels (ala Lil Cal) or his voyeuristic eyes (which is of course the textbook understanding of a “drone”).
I think the drones are such a great piece of economical storytelling because we as the reader understand two key things about the trolls - that they are social insects and that they live under a militaristic regime (both of which are also such stock staples of the sci fi fantasy genre that they take very little effort on the part of the reader to comprehend) - and just by giving these things the name “drone” we are immediately able to draw the connection to what a “drone” is both in insect social structures and in a military technology context. and from these inferences we can very easily and correctly assume basically everything there is to know about these very much minor but essential worldbuilding characters that don’t even make an in-person appearance in the story until well over 2000 pages after their introduction
lime-bloods:
partially in conversation with Malo’s response to this post, but i think not really enough to justify turning it into a full-size thread:
in contrast to that last post, in which I position Alternia’s drones as a class of patriarchal machines who have essentially hijacked the reproduction of (implied feminine) trolls to perpetuate themselves The Matrix-style, i have in the past suggested that drones being made to participate in troll reproduction with no genetic representation of their own amounts essentially to “getting cucked” - or even to being physically emasculated - which malo alludes.
this latter idea wasn’t so much part of my broader understanding of sex and gender among trolls as it may be for Malo, so it didn’t really occur to me as I explored drones as patriarchs. but ultimately the two gendered views of drones are not so difficult to synthesise. trolls-as-(organic-)female can be responsible for the emasculation of drones-as-(robotic-)male; but as with all things on Alternia, this veneer of female empowerment no doubt only serves to obscure English’s patriarchal machinations behind the scenes.
perhaps i’m not entirely right in suggesting that a drone being born from an unfertilised egg serves as a parallel to English being born without a female half: instead maybe being born without genetic material is “being cucked” in the same way Cronus “got cucked” when English’s possession spell (read: genetic material) bounced off him and went into someone else? (or perhaps these two ideas are not so irreconcilable anyway; pattern dictates that if Caliborn is ever going to cuck anyone, he’ll do it to himself first, and it is indeed nobody’s fault but his own that English lacks his feminine other half.)
by being genetic blank slates, drones could well be the “avatars” of English in much more real a sense than I suggested in my last post; in the same way that Cronus was marked for possession with a scratch across his face, or Jack Noir pulled his eyes out to replace them with billiard balls, the drones have been scooped out and made empty shells ready to potentially host English at any time. so long as we’re thinking of drones as a Matrixesque army of robot oppressors, we should continue to keep in mind that robots are puppets, and that both of these things can at any time be one English’s vessels (ala Lil Cal) or his voyeuristic eyes (which is of course the textbook understanding of a “drone”).
I’ve noted before of course that the preoccupation with reproduction and breeding control on Alternia seems to echo the broader concerns re: these same issues on a cosmic level - trolls reproduce on a mass, quantity-over-quality scale so that those masses can be cut down into a small set of perfect soldiers, the same way Sburb seems to proliferate on a mass scale while only a few sessions succeed - so it makes sense that English and the imperial drone would seem to occupy similar “bogeyman” positions on these microcosmic and macrocosmic scales. and this idea that a living system requires a living manifestation of destruction to counterbalance itself is not without precedent in Homestuck itself; it could be said that malevolent cherubs serve this same bogeyman role on an intrauniversal level.
in which case I wonder if the echoes of Kanaya in Calliope go a little deeper than their shared green blood and godhood over space; do the (virginal) jade bloods counterbalance the (asexual) drones in the same way green cherubs balance out the red?
The Matrix is often criticised for its weak central premise - humans do not make any better a source of fuel than, for instance, plants. but what I think is implicit in The Matrix is what is explicit in the movie it is widely recognised as being heavily inspired by, Dark City, in which the malevolent aliens controlling the city need to study humans specifically because the humans have something the aliens don’t have but need. I think it’s clear by English’s employment of computer beds and (spy-)drones that the situation on Alternia is the same. English needs the trolls to make a new universe for him the exact same way drones need a population of living trolls to make more drones - at least until the Condesce has the technology to do all that with machines.
maybe the drones lacking genetic material is an analogy for something else - or maybe it’s exactly that literal. maybe the reason Lord English needs a race like the trolls to reproduce for him is exactly because by disposing of his female half he made himself totally incapable of sexually reproducing himself!
(how’s that for an obvious thing I missed: by throwing off his “creative” female side, Caliborn condemns himself to be literally unable to “create” in any capacity)
mmmmalo:
Reading ‘drone’ in the sense of an utterance, ‘imperial drone’ almost sounds like a synonym for ‘lord english’
Do you have anything on the nature of doc scratch as a groomer in the context of kanaya’s rather positive description of his influence in her life vs the way he treated vriska? Sorry if this sounds vague idk what im looking for specifically
old ask because i was thinking on it for a little bit so i apologise, but i guess i don’t think there is necessarily this contrast between a positive experience on Kanaya’s part and a negative experience on Vriska’s part. if Kanaya does have a neutral or even positive memory of Scratch’s influence on her early life, that’s at least partially down to Kanaya’s more passive demeanor and in least one big part down to the fact that she probably just does not remember what it was that he did.
both girls were groomed, certainly, but Scratch is telling a characteristic truth when he insists upon his own asexuality, because he does not groom for pleasure but of course for a purpose, and Kanaya and Vriska were simply made for different purposes. which, of course, in turn reflects on their differing demeanors - after all a storyteller has no ability to alter the truth about someone’s personality, only to twist how that personality is portrayed. from Hussie’s commentary: “[Scratch is] always there at the right moment to nudge people in the direction of doing the nasty thing that, deep down, they already know they want to do.”
i guess i might argue that it’s unlikely any feelings Vriska and Kanaya might or might not have toward their old mentor are really about Scratch as “a person” or what he specifically did at all, for two related reasons. firstly that I don’t think anyone really “remembers” what it is Scratch “did” to them because he’s, really, almost beyond “doing” things to people; he acts in the nudging and rearranging of ideas, which live solely in the subconscious and in the genes (as kind of discussed or vaguely mused about here) and not in living memory.
in this sense, in this specific context, i’m often reluctant to even refer to Scratch with titles like “character” because he essentially asserts himself as an inevitable narrative force whose motives can no more be analysed than the motives of the sun or the night sky. the effects of Scratch’s manipulations are ultimately not so much things he has “done” as they are the things he has caused others to do; which is really the crux of my second reason, that to have feelings about “what Scratch did” is really just to have feelings about where your life has taken you - railing against the narrator is just railing at God, and railing at God is for all intents and purposes railing at your own life. for Vriska, the path God sent her down led to destruction in her own life and in the lives of everybody around her, while in Kanaya’s case the manipulations were so subtle that it is still not entirely clear to us what they involved; she was awoken to Skaia’s light and seemingly grew to be a vampire as a result. if there weren’t so much suspicious mystery surrounding what Scratch would have even done to cause this awakening in the first place, one might even be tempted to think of these manipulations as “benign”, in comparison to Vriska’s, if it weren’t that there simply can be no benign act of God in Homestuck.
but ultimately Scratch as a storyteller understands that his story needs good girls and bad girls, passive and active players, and while we’re all intimately aware of the heavy load of baggage Homestuck’s chosen heroes are saddled with - a part in which Kanaya’s burden of motherhood no doubt plays - the fact that Vriska spent so much of her life convinced that she had been given the good girl hat probably contributed no small amount to the psychological knock-on effects of being groomed into the bad girl.
