calliope’s “unreliable narration” has kind of become a big conversation topic in the last couple years wrt classpects and gender biases etc but do you think we as a people are ready to have the talk about limebloods. because all that stuff she said about them having weird names and super powerful abilities and all being extinct was literally just her making some shit up so that her troll oc could be more special and unique than everybody else’s and they only have to appear in hiveswap now because nobody got the joke back in 2013 and they took the whole thing deadly serious
If your contention is that limebloods were from the outset a metastasized Mary-Sue joke, Caliborn actually name drops that concept in Homosuck:
THE LUCKY MALE IS OBLIVIOUS TO HIS PRIVILEGE. OF NOT BEING CHAINED TO HIS ROOM, WITH THE HORRIBLE SISTER HE DOESN’T HAVE. THE ADVANTAGE MAKES HIM WAY TOO OVERPOWERED, AND THEREFORE HE IS WHAT SOME REFER TO AS A “HUMAN MARY SUE”. THIS MAKES HIM LESS SYMPATHETIC, AND GIVES YOU ANOTHER REASON. TO ACTIVELY ROUTE FOR HIS DEATH.
I find it interesting that Caliborn ascribes MALE PRIVILEGE to John, defines MALE PRIVILEGE as being free of femininity, then describes John as a “GIRL” anyways – though in misogynistic terms, and with scare quotes. This is ironic terf shit: the transfeminine subject is posed as intrinsically misogynistic, upon the same hatred/envy of women that drove Caliborn to kill Calliope and write in her lime blood, as though he were her (which “he” is, which is why “he” is acting as the feminist here, dutifully enacting two-fold self-hatred). This angle on predomination (hey, isn’t that a synonym of “privilege”?) is also my theory of what limebloods represent on Alternia – the lost/gynocided females of an entirely male planet.
Anyway I think limeblood-means-mary-sue has legs!
I said I would get back to this a while ago but put it off because I wasn’t able to form more than some cursory thoughts.
if we’re talking Caliborn’s relationship to the mary sue archetype it would be remiss to overlook his SELF INSERTION GUY, who isn’t referred to by that gendered slur in particular but is a direct evolution Calliope’s OC: where Callie Ohpeee is a parody of the “Homestuck mary sue” as a broad concept, Caliborn’s OC is riffing on one poor guy’s mary sue OC in particular. so Caliborn creating his own mary sue feels a bit like crossdressing in the same vein as hemotyping-as-crossdressing. (and in the same way Doc Scratch is kind of like Caliborn crossdressing later on in his timeline.) lest we fail to mention his mary sue’s whole look is obviously jacked from John to begin with…
if we’re to maintain despite Calliope’s fantasies that the limeblood genocide still did actually happen, it also occurs to me that this amounts to English being responsible for the very event that gave Callie Ohpee her tragic backstory; essentially he would be responsible for making Calliope into a mary sue in the first place? so what you call a gynocide also takes on shades of feminising violence.