Alien is such a fantastic film… I was entranced by the way the sets on board the Nostromo are just as unfamiliar to the viewer as the sets aboard the alien ship, allowing the xenomorph to blend in among human technology just as easily as it blends in with the Gigeresque machinery it was born from - backgrounding the mirroring of the android and the xenomorph (the way Ash literally tries to kill Ripley by forcing something down her throat!) - until it seems to literally become part of the ship in the climax!
watching Prometheus back-to-back with its predecessor (and in the wake of Ripley’s totally bankrupt rehash of Gladiator, which to disclaim I have yet to see [though I have rewatched the original recently enough to reaffirm its quality]) only highlights how much of a poor man’s version of this that the sequel is. beyond the beat-for-beat reruns of Alien’s iconic plot elements, the heavyhanded themes of creator-meeting-creation seem to serve only to make the original film’s subtext into text - yes, the xenomorph is just like one of man’s own creations.
when page 666 was still in progress I engaged in some idle speculation regarding the Plot Point and the black hole from Problem Sleuth which splits angels into ANGEL/ANTIANGEL PAIRS. even at the time I realised that splitting Vriska up into even more Vriskas would be totally antithetical to Beyond Canon’s mission, but still the idea of a “demon” Hell Tier Vriska bursting from the Plot Point remained interesting. and I’m not totally convinced that 8r8k isn’t evoking this in some way, with Jake’s swarm of angels being born from the hope sphere right before Vriska hatches?
anyway, Jake imbuing the pure potential of his Hope into the meteor which is a symbolic womb is a potent image. but in this case the spermlike angels swim away from the egg, against the flow of soldiers trying to wriggle their way towards it? hm.
even the name of the animation, 8r8k, has special significance, because the Break is the name given to two separate but interconnected events within Homestuck. the first is the “8r8k H34DS” which signifies Lord English breaking his way out of his cueball egg and into the universe - remember that Vriska encountered (Vriska) inside an eight ball:
and the second, or rather “First 8r8k”, seems worthy of mention because it occurred when Skaia became so heavy and black that it collapsed into a black hole - the resulting explosion creating Caliborn’s fifteen billiard ball planets, referring to the “break” that first scatters the balls across a billiards table.
8r8k has a really interesting thread running through it about busting dichotomies, especially as they pertain to vriska’s past (naturally); when Jake apparently ‘intervenes’ in Jade’s resurrection process it evokes the ambiguity surrounding Vriska’s own resurrection, and as the bullet flies toward Rose we see an adult Terezi reenacting her iconic coin flip:
the flip is always symbolic of two timelines - one clean and one scratched, one where you live and one where you die - and the scar running through Venus’ head makes it clear which one Rose is supposed to be living in. but Vriska’s intervention throws all that out the window. the split is no longer clear cut.
others have already pointed out that Vriska’s hatching from the meteor removes the brackets which usually distinguish Candy-volume commands from Meat-volume commands - busting down even the distinction between the relevant and the irrelevant, just as was Calliope’s plan for the Plot Point from the beginning!
secondly; I now think the Plot Point storyline actually sets (Vriska) up as a symbolic angel? the segment opens with this kind of offbeat callback to Jaspers’ tomb…
…which employs a trifecta of symbols that malo already figured out years ago - cats are angels are babies. but page 666 plays in this space in its own unique ways, too, frequently reiterating that the sprites and other hell-ghosts are eternal children. within the example set by Davepetasprite, the sense is that Vriska’s eternal child-self must also be her angel-self.
(I also can’t shake the feeling that the allusion to Jaspers’ tomb - especially keeping in mind that it’s Roxy herself who engineered one-half of the Plot Point* - is supposed to put us in the frame of mind of burying a child: that (Vriska) has to be buried for Vriska to ascend, in the same way I previously suggested an eight ball would have to be “sunk” to end the session? but it could be that I have things the complete wrong way around, and that the point is to exhume the child, as Rose does - if what follows is the “8r8k”, then an eight ball is being set free rather than sunk? after all, Vriska’s transformation also comes with being liberated from parenthesis!)
far more than vague symbols, though, there’s one thing that page 666 directly calls attention to but which doesn’t yet seem to have been paid off: the two-Nepeta problem.
right before Vriska comes face to face with herself, she calls attention to the fact that there are two Nepetas, and as a result one of them is whooshed away back to irrelevance. so what was that all about? if this hanging thread suggests the hatching of the meteor isn’t necessarily the end of the Plot Point story thread, does it suggest, as I speculated previously, that the ascension of one Vriska means the descent of another? and so long as I am speculating: how sure can we be that a Twin Peaks scenario hasn’t happened, and that the Vriska who ‘ascended’ is the one we think it was? Hell Tier Vriska’s costume prominently evokes (Vriska)’s red belt and tall boots; is that because Vriska has come to accept (Vriska)’s existence, or because the new Vriska is Vriska? or maybe the distinction just isn’t important anymore, like the 8r8k seems to be trying to tell us.
*if we can still think of Meenah as Roxy’s doppelganger, it’s hard for all of this not to be coloured by the fact that (Vriska) is Meenah’s own 'little girl’, too, even if it is in a slightly different way to the way that Jaspers is Roxy’s 'little girl’… (though malo once argued that these things are more connected than they are distinct.) considering the consistent emphasis on (Vriska)’s youth and the vivid canny with which page 666 addressed Vriska’s relationship to Doc Scratch, it would be an odd choice at this point to not ever address the situation with Meenah, especially now that the latter has risen to such a prominent role in the cast. the way Vriska subtly slips into the role of her own abuser over the last four years in the Plot Point only places emphasis on the lingering unease behind the whole thing. setting (Vriska) free for a bit could be one way to do that, though a merged Vriska could just as easily have the same confrontation.
it’s hard not to think hussie was maybe making some kind of commentary on the demographic of many of his readers by making jane a problem sleuth fan also. like even the part where she says “comics aren’t really her thing” despite having a poster of dr manhattan on her wall
like i’ve commented on this before in the contrast between dave and calliope but you’ll notice that in act 1 the character representing “mspaintadventures readers” was like an esoteric hipster who listens to weird music and is responsible for sweet bro and hella jeff then in act 6 the character who reads mspaintadventures is a suburban white girl heiress who watches parks and recreation and is so glad hussie just kept making more of the same comic instead of experimenting
it’s interesting to look at jane crocker’s political career not always in terms of how it makes her a “"fascist monster”“ so to speak - along the lines of homestuck’s literal fascist monsters like the condesce and lord english - but in how it plays into the crucial fact at the heart of her character that she is "normcore”. jane is a character of the context she was born in, the almost-exact midpoint of the barack obama presidency; superficially and popularly, a time of great optimism for a liberalising america, but through this facade of optimism a time which also saw a great deal of “normalisation” of deeply evil american imperialism both abroad and at home.
jane’s love of the NBC’s Parks & Recreation is emblematic of this.homestuck and parks & rec are similar in one respect, which is that p&r also began and ended over the course of the obama presidency - and like jane, p&r is deeply of that era. in many senses it is the ancestor to the “copaganda” of programming like Brooklyn 99 which took over its position of popularity into the trump era: at the core of its comic dynamic is the interplay between leslie knope, a progressive-liberal “girlboss” and champion of big government, and ron swanson, the hard-working, moustache-toting libertarian sentinel of private capitalist interest. but in the classic mode of liberal american thought, the core message of the show is that these two characters are friends. despite the complete incompatibility of their respective ideologies, the two must work together and make compromise at every stage, ensuring that the political landscape of america - implicitly the perfect state - never changes or progresses from where it is now. and it’s telling that, despite being the liberal “girlboss” with visions of political ascendancy, jane’s love and admiration is for the male character. like obama himself, swanson serves to put a friendly, sometimes goofy but always loveable face on american patriarchal hegemony.
because by the time homestuck had closed up and the post-canon had opened america had crossed that threshold from obama’s presidency into the next, it’s impossible not to draw parallels between jane’s descent into xenophobia and the overt isolationism of the trump republican administration. but i think putting jane on this trajectory is also in a very real sense just as much an indictment of the democrat majority of homestuck’s genesis; xenophobia is not a “trump problem” but rather an AMERICA problem, and in fact the political landscape of the late 2010s and 2020s is an inevitable progression of the kind of politics that were considered “normal” in 2011, not the result of some freak misstep of electoral probability in 2016.
Watchmen, Issues #1-12; Homestuck, pp. 4167, 5585; Homestuck: Beyond Canon, p. 716
Naked White Jake is the fulfilment of something of an unspoken prophecy in Homestuck regarding a mustachio’d radioactive mutant. Like Manhattan, over the course of his life Jake’s trousers have been shortening inevitably towards this point. But for Jake in particular, this development represents not Manhattan’s increasing detachment from humanity, but rather an escalation of his ongoing objectification-as-woman. Specifically, I think the next chapter in Jake’s story is to be an exploration of ‘apotheosis’ as a form of female objectification in fiction.
End of Evangelion (1997)
Beyond the superficially Manhattan, the most obvious cultural point of comparison for Jake’s new form would seem to be the End of Evangelion’s Rei Ayanami - colloquially dubbed the “Giant Naked Rei” by Evangelion commentators. The similarities are in more than just their pallid, luminescent, larger-than-life (be that figuratively or literally) and naked forms; pictured above, Rei caresses in her hands a meteorite which was at one time the birthplace of the human race and now acts as the womb toward which all human souls are drawn in order to be born again. The parallels to Jake’s protection of the meteor in 8r8k - a meteorite from which the population of Earth C was born and toward which they seem to find themselves once more inescapably drawn - are obvious.
But it’s not the literal events of the battle for the meteor that are necessarily most significant here; more relevant is what Rei represents as a cultural symbol. Rei’s designated role throughout Evangelion is primarily as object, sexualised and maternalised both - sometimes simultaneously - and it is in her apotheosis as the Giant Naked Rei that this objectification reaches its logical extreme. Like Naked Jake - and in some ways like Doctor Manhattan, too - Naked Rei’s transformation into Lilith places her at the furthest possible point from her own humanity, as a sheer force of nature. Within Evangelion’s mythology, Lilith is essentially an artifact; she is called by female pronouns, but only on the technicality that she exists to facilitate this process of birthing and re-birthing. Within folklore, Lilith’s role is hardly any more illustrious, an existence solely to submit to husband Adam’s will and to mother his hundreds of children - but it’s this lot in life that speaks particularly to Jake’s own history of objectification.
(taking all that into account, the nurturing nature of Naked Jake’s actions does strike me as worthy of comment. while all of Earth C appears subconsciously intent on claiming the meteor-egg at the center of the universe, Jake’s actions are protective, even generative; I’ve commented already on how unintuitive it seems that his hope field causes angels to radiate outwards from the meteor when everything else is trying to impregnate it. he almost appears to go through the motions of performing acts which had previously belonged to the women on the battlefield: it’s hard not to draw the link between his hope bubble and Jade’s force field {which itself seems to call back to the “containment” dead Calliope set up for Earth C itself}, and the part he plays in Jade’s revival had up until that point been solely the domain of Life-givers Jane and Meenah {who have their own long and complex relationships with motherhood}. Naked Jake’s hope field is destructive, but only ever passively; his primary contribution to the battle’s events is that of midwife.)
Doctor Who (2005), Series 1 Episode 13 “The Parting of the Ways”
A further point of comparison, which is less immediately apparent and has been far less widely discussed despite its broad cultural reach but I feel has equally significant potential ramifications, is to Doctor Who’s Bad Wolf.
The gendered power dynamic between Doctor and companion is key to Doctor Who as a piece of art. By the very nature of the programme’s structure she is disposable, interchangeable; and by the nature of the culture from which the story originates, the purpose of her existence teeters on the same precipice between emotional support and sex appeal that is usually occupied in our minds by the magician’s assistant or the airline hostess. In reviving a 20th century concept for the 21st century it fell upon writers of modern sensibility to somehow make the programme’s female deuteragonists just as 'special’ as its male idol, and through the nadir of Doctor Who’s relationship to gender politics (under self-proclaimed fetishist of “powerful, sexy women” Steven Moffat) this process came to be emblemised by the transformation of women with names into girls with titles. Following the example set by the prototypic “Girl in the Fireplace”, “The Girl Who Waited” and “Impossible Girl” are stripped of human identity in order to sell their human identity: ascension to mythic status as the ultimate logical endpoint of the 'strong female character’.
Without delving too deep into all the nuances of Rose Tyler herself - who is just as worthy of being distinguished from the above examples as she is of being included among them, but this isn’t quite the place for that essay - the Bad Wolf is easily identifiable as the genesis of Doctor Who’s obsession with the (all-)powerful woman. Like Manhattan, Tyler is an ordinary human made unexpectedly omnipotent by exposure to exotic energy; but also like Manhattan, at least early in his life - and perhaps unlike the Giant Naked Rei - Tyler’s actions as the Bad Wolf are still motivated by a recognisably human emotive impetus. Such it is that, even as-god, Tyler continues to be weighed down by the fetter of Doctor Who’s intrinsically patriarchal dynamic: for a human (woman) to act above her station in such a way, by taking up the authority to control life and death which belongs traditionally to the Time Lords (gendered deliberately), could be not just her own undoing but the undoing of the whole (social) fabric of reality. The 'Bad Wolf’ is referred to as if she/it is a separate entity from 'Rose Tyler’ almost by necessity; a woman is 'allowed’ to be a person or to be powerful, but never both simultaneously, because, crucially, a woman who is allowed to be a person makes mistakes.
Jake’s powers are - so like a woman, one might cynically add - intimately tied up in his emotions. A comparison perhaps more familiar to Homestuck’s established repertoire of cultural touchstones would be the Jean Grey-Phoenix (two names which, very much like Rose Tyler and the Bad Wolf, have come over time to be used to refer to two distinct entities, out of fear for what it might mean for one human woman to wield such omnipotent power) of Christopher Claremont’s Uncanny X-Men, whose transformation into cosmic force of nature goes hand-in-hand with her self-discovery as an independent, sexual woman. Significantly, Jake retreats into his own force-of-nature state seemingly in direct response to objectifying treatment. The hope field isn’t just something he struggles to control; it manifestsitself directly out of feelings of loss of control.
Though the explosion of energy that lays waste to Derse is the most dramatic manifestation of this retreat into hopelessness, Beyond Canon throws us hints at how these attacks can arise in less drastic, day-to-day scenarios: specifically, how Jake’s “just wishing that [Tavros’ nut allergy] would nix” causes it to disappear, completely by accident. Like Rose Tyler, Jake English is a character that the story has decided is simply too tiny-minded to comprehend the massive power he wields, and as a result he reacts to situations of misunderstanding and distress by simply warping the world into one that he does understand.
Beyond Canon, p. 716; Doctor Who, “The Parting of the Ways”
For the Bad Wolf, this shows itself in the resurrection of Jack Harkness. Gunned down only moments before, Tyler decides in her childish ignorance that he should be alive again, and the result is that Jack Harkness being alive becomes a fact of reality: just as Tavros will never experience another allergic reaction again, Jack is abandoned by the Doctor - who in all his patriarchal authority on the matters of life and death has decided his existence is a mistake - to live an eternity without ever knowing death.
Naturally we must then question the significance of Jake intervening in the same way in Jade’s death. None of the same ambiguity surrounds Jade that has previously surrounded other victims of resurrection interference; having done little in the way of villainy, and being struck unceremoniously from afar by an unnamed gunman, there is little reason to believe Jade’s death could have possibly been narratively significant enough to stick. So if the lack of clarity is not on our part, we have to assume it is on Jake’s: what, then, are the possible repercussions of Jake bringing back from the brink of death someone whose circumstances he does not fully understand? If Rose’s assessment is correct - that whether a god is deemed heroic or villainous depends on the internal judgement of their own complex and nuanced “moral grey matter” - what then are the potential ramifications of Jake praying that this moral grey matter be cured of what ills it?
What are the consequences of the apotheosis of the sex object?
I havent collected my thoughts completely. But I noted this opening line: “this development represents not Manhattan’s increasing detachment from humanity, but rather an escalation of his ongoing objectification-as-woman.”
Wouldn’t it be essentially the same though? If I understand this essay correctly, objectification and a “a sexy powerful” being in the shape of a woman go hand in hand. Wherein if object, then not woman/human. It’s like that saying - angels have more in common with printers than people. Objects bear a function, and internally morally neutral, especially as they are devoid of human faults, especially missish ailments like emotions.
as you later say: “a woman is ‘allowed’ to be a person or to be powerful, but never both simultaneously, because, crucially, a woman who is allowed to be a person makes mistakes.”
then jake at the height of his power, and objectified as a woman, would make him more object than person at this point? unless im like way off base
well pointed-out! don’t worry, I think you got my point; the confusion is an ambiguity of wording on my part, but it’s an ambiguity that serves well to illustrate the gendered colours of the point I’m making, so I’ll go into it a bit.
Manhattan’s apotheosis and woman’s objectification absolutely are both forms of “detachment from humanity”: the purpose of my distinguishing the two is that Manhattan’s detachment is self-imposed. He deliberately removes himself from personhood by strict adherence to what might be best described in this context as rigidly masculine values: a suppression of emotional responses and total dedication to logic above all else - put another way, rigid adherence to 'objectivity’. The objectification-as-woman is in contrast pressed upon Jake by outside forces: though we observe that Jake is a highly emotionally-driven being, his feelings are necessarily stifled by external actors who seek to project their own desires unto him.
I should also point out that in generalising apotheosis-as-objectification I have engaged in a degree of willful conflation, between objectification-by-author or by-audience (external to the story) and objectification-by-characters (within the story). Rei is such a strong example of the all-powerful woman cliche in part because she is equally subject to both; her transformation into the Giant Naked Rei is essentially the successful completion of a lifetime of grooming into sexual and maternal object by Evangelion’s various conspirators. But for Rose Tyler and Jean Grey, their objectification is only implicit; the minimisation of their human agency is not the agenda of a shadowy cabal but rather the simple result of living as human women in a patriarchal society. In this sense their apotheoses are almost in spite of objectification, rather than a logical extension of it (think again of Jake’s powers flaring up the most dramatically when his emotional agency is stripped from him) - as I say, at least within Doctor Who’s established paradigm of power, Tyler becoming the Bad Wolf is an act above her station. The Bad Wolf and the Phoenix’s objectification is exterior to the text; a re-claiming of the powerful woman as sex object for male consumption, just as the mundanely powerful woman like Lara Croft is empowered within-text but objectified from without. To the point: I believe that Beyond Canon’s reflective nature (and Homestuck’s generally) puts it in the perfect position to tackle the history and tropes associated with objectification-by-audience using a character like Jake who has a history of being objectified by his fellow characters.
followed up my rewatch of Alien and Prometheuswith Aliens on Thursday and Alien: Covenant on Saturday. given how closely Prometheus commits to being a straight-reinterpretation of the story of Alien, I felt primed for Covenant to be in some way a deconstruction of the sequel, and the film’s opening act gave me ample reason to hold onto these expectations: where Aliens is an unashamed glorification of American heroes slaughtering communist guerilla monsters against all odds in Vietnam, Covenant is much more understated about its band of colonists landing on an unfamiliar world with slightly more assault weaponry than you think seems necessary for the job. but perhaps my hypothesis was coloured by the still-great theory that Avatar was James Cameron’s apology for the crass implicit racism of Aliens, because Covenant quickly abandons any ideological qualms about colonising a planet which has already been agriculturally developed (don’t worry, someone already killed off the entire indigenous population and the remaining wildlife is hostile enough to justify slaughter on sight - it’s terra nullius!) - and maybe it would have been rude for Ridley Scott to have a go at someone else’s movie like that, anyway.
i do think Covenant has some interesting developments to make on Prometheus’ core theme of creator-versus-creation, though they’re clumsily executed and go hand-in-hand with the franchise’s struggle to come up with a horror prop that comes anywhere near to the effectiveness of the original facehugger. the whole film hinges on the line about humanity finding emotional androids unsettling and creating a more perfect soldier to replace it, and it’s a great exchange, but as a whole the story fails to live up to the premise
