green slime in Homestuck is an obvious symbol of the patriarch.
everything on patriarchy hellplanet alternia is absolutely saturated with it, from the beds they sleep in (hmm..) to their bathroom appliances and the technology they use.
it’s the substance that typifies the the practice of ectobiology, an act intimately interconnected with fatherhood.
jade, who loses her father, sends a shirt with a green slime on it to john, who loses his grandmother and gets a father instead.
gamzee makara partakes in consuming green slime when his real father figure is absent (an act which could also be seen as a ‘drinking of the kool aid’ of sorts, initiating gamzee’s participation in the patriarchal clown caste that rules alternia).
mangrit is a ‘green slime’ that acts as a contrast to the blue slime of life and motherhood.
what’s really interesting is that beyond this blatant imagery, green - especially bright green of the sort that is associated with alternia and john’s green slime shirt - has always been an explicitly feminine-coded colour within homestuck. it’s the colour associated with the space aspect, and the colour of all the space players, and the colour of the cherub sex associated with the motherly protector. so where does the discrepency come from? how can one accurately distinguish between these polar opposite interpretations of the colour? is there a connection?
actually, yeah; we can pinpoint the moment bright green slime makes the transition from feminine code to patriarchal gunk.
uu: HER PuTRID HARLEQuIN SLIME WILL LEAK FROM HER WOuNDS AND SOAK HER uGLY YELLOW ROBE.
caliborn explicitly identifies the feminine blood of his feminine sister with the masculine nasty mayonnaise that pervades the world he comes to rule. why?
PAINTING MY WORDS IN HER BLOOD. AS A TOKEN OF MY RUTHLESS TRIUMPH.
because he deliberately appropriates the colour for his own use. the coat, the elves, the mansions that all come to be synonymous with his evil patriarchal influence are all painted with the blood of the dead female, as proof of the domination of Man.
what does this symbolise? I dunno. maybe it’s simple; maybe the green of the patriarchy really is just a token of victory over the feminine. an icon of the appropriation of the female form for male use; similar, perhaps, to the scarlet of red of the royal class of alternia. i dunno. i’m still thinking about it.
gud posd op…
I was thinking of something to this effect the other day too, especially in regards to the moon. It’s only when Scratch (and by proxy LE) comes about to directly meddle with the trolls in the new universe that there’s a green moon (and a notably MUCH bigger moon), directly invading on the space of the pink. It’s LE (the masculine) directly imposing itself on the tyrian caste (the feminine). Which makes sense that on Beforus, a major plot point of the troll’s stories took place on the pink moon (It’s implied that Meenah discovered the game code in some capacity there). After the scratch, the pink moon is pretty much irrelevant to both the history of Alternia and the narrative of the beta trolls.
This is sort of a half-baked re-explanation of what you’ve just said, but what I was getting at with this is that I’d imagine– like with the Ancient Greeks and anyone who drew influence for them (see: most of Europe during the Renaissance, who had huge boners for the Greeks)– the moons as personified and specifically gendered based on this distinction. Like all the moon goddesses, there would be similar myths and deities depicting the green moon as a male and pink as a female. A dichotomy like Uranus and Gaia or something.
The Green Moon is a great example of bright green as a badge of male dominance because Caliborn literally stole it the moon from another Queen, and then went and painted it with his sister’s blood as well. It’s kind of the ultimate example of this symbol. It’s sort of surprising he stopped short of replacing the pink moon entirely; but there was definitely some method to the fact that he left the Alternians with the impression that the Condesce was in charge.