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.