it was inevitable, and now here it is; I saw the movie, took note of its shared thematic heritage with Homestuck, and now I’m making a comparative analysis post involving Across the Spider-Verse. I won’t bother covering the nature of canon events themselves, because to be frank that’s entry-level comics deconstruction. I want to discuss the specifics of one canon event in particular; the death of Gwen Stacy.

i saw some discussion of Sollux and Spider-Man earlier today the exact details of which are not important, because I came away from the discussion thinking one thing; “but Sollux doesn’t really react to Aradia’s death the way a Spider-Man might react to Gwen Stacy’s death.” and the reason for this should be obvious; because Aradia isn’t the Gwen Stacy to Sollux’ Spider-Man, but rather the other famous dead woman in comics:

Some (probably everyone) may have noticed that many of the trolls are loosely or not so loosely related to various super heroes and villains.
Sollux - Cyclops
Aradia - Jean Grey (including parallels with her death/resurrection to Phoenix, which augmented her powers)

and because it’s impossible to think about the stories of Gwen Stacy and Jean Grey and the canonicity of these stories without deconstructing the function women serve in comics and stories as a whole, this thought reminded me of something else about Sollux, which I’ve talked about before, but which can be summed up by an extract from Hussie’s own commentary:

As a psychic, he’s aware of things on a lot of levels, such as future visions of doom and gloom, but he also seems intuitively aware of his place in the narrative as just a marginal cast member in a story containing people much more important than he is. […] his resigned sense of fatalism is inseparable from his narrative impotence, and the basic truth about him is that he was built to be little more than a serviceable part of a big machine. Just like his ancestor. (Homestuck: Book 4: Act 5 Act 1, p. 96)

knowing that these “future visions of doom and gloom” tie Sollux and Aradia together as twinArmageddons and apocalypseArisen, it seems only natural that we should assume Aradia is in the same boat here. and with that in mind, Porrim’s own theory on the Alternian system seems to apply in retrospect; when we think of lowbloods as mere cogs in a machine, we must also be thinking of women as cogs in a machine.

this isn’t a theory post so much as as it is a thesis proposal… I’ve been diving deep into the X-Men as of late but have yet to pluck up the courage to go right back to the beginning and read the Claremont stories that started it all, but if this could be a serious line of inquiry, maybe it’s the impetus I need? again, Homestuck and Spiderverse descend from the same long tradition of comics deconstructing comics, and the Watchmen references later in the comic show that Hussie isn’t above using the language of his predecessors to do that deconstruction… Claremont is known as an early subversive when it came to the treatment of women in comics, and starting with Aradia it might not be such an absurd assertion to suggest that the so-called “comic book death” phenomenon is one of the parts of comic history that Homestuck attempts to deconstruct (forget not that the primary villain is a monster capable of not just killing, but wiping away the immortal ghost forever, voiding all chances at revival). so with movies like Spiderverse and comics like Hickman’s recent X-Men revival putting such a spotlight on death in comic books, maybe now is the right time to shine such a lens on Homestuck?