it’s taken me however long it’s been between reading homestuck and now to realise that a “stem” (as in what sollux lives on) is also a part of a “brain”
went through the process of forgetting and remembering this a second time, it seems… i’ve been ruminating a lot on what exactly Karkat means when he says “[b]lood skims the voids in your porous cranial plates, as if grazing the hollow of a threshed stem“, which doubles as a reference to a plant stem (of the sort you might cut with a sickle) and to a hive stem (which you might find in an abandoned alternian neighbourhood). but it is also of a piece with his “porous cranial plates” inasmuch as it is another part of his brain through which his blood flows… so if this tract speaks to “the interconnectedness of the characters’ homes and their inner worlds” as I say, and the lawnrings separating Karkat from his neighbours represent the barriers separating him from his otherselves, it should be similarly significant that Sollux lives on what is a giant brain stem (or spine?)… I’m not sure if there’s some “mythology” regarding the brain stem I may be unfamiliar with, though, or if the actual biological function of the brain stem is relevant in some way here