i think it’s interesting how ectobiology is being used as a symbol of the regressive and the repetitive; it is literally the science of “making babies out of ghosts”, so in other words the art of remixing existing ideas over and over again (its literal main purpose in Sburb: creating multiple groups of slightly different kids, literally ‘paradox clones’, so it can attempt to reproduce the same way again and again until something works). Dirk thinks making a new species out of old ideas via ectobiology is the way for Homestuck to keep going forever. Jade thinks having a new kid without ectobiology is the one way to break the monotony, even if it’s literally with one of the same eight people her family has been tied up with for the past 5000 years.
this does have further implications worth discussing when viewed through a queer lens. what does it say, for instance, that these characters appear to view pregnancy as the only way to have a “real” baby, and making a baby in a lab as the “fake” way? even Kanaya seems to echo this sentiment when she expresses resentment over her race having been forced to reproduce with machines. we have been talking a lot recently about how aspects of paradox space that may seem queer or liberating on first glance - quadrants, for instance - are actually just veiled tools of the patriarchy, and it’s true that the same could be thought of ectobiology; for one thing, Sburb only seems interested in pairing men and women, even when they lack any sexual chemistry in reality. so maybe it is queer and liberating that Jade and Rose, by eschewing ectobiology altogether, have earned the place of being the first gay couple in Homestuck to make a baby together, breaking that streak. but because Homestuck^2 inherited by necessity the Epilogues’ positions on sex and gender, which at times come across as deeply un-queer and un-liberating, it’s also true that Jade and Rose have only been allowed that opportunity because of some fluke of their biology. nothing seems to have been truly liberated from the way it was before; if two people on Earth C want to have a kid regardless of their own biology, the very machines which are being painted as regressive seem to be the only option they currently have. and this has ramifications for the building of interspecies families just as much as it does nonheterosexual ones, which is a major concern not just for the subjects of Jane’s xenophobic regime at large, but also for a great portion of Homestuck’s own core cast
wow my first ever sincere analysis of hs2 now just a little over a year old… right now feels like a good time to revisit this too because this exact line of thinking has panned out in a really interesting way.
the birth of Jade and Rose’s miracle gay baby was not queer or liberating because it was never about breaking a streak. the deceit of Yiffany’s creation was carried out in the name of fulfilling what Jade was promised by Karkat and by Sburb when she was only 13 - the opportunity to start a family with her logical breeding partner Dave. we find things even worse than we suspected a year ago: Jade’s sentiment is not merely for the process of procreation itself, but for the white picket, heterosexual nuclear ideal with which it is associated. indeed, Jade’s justification for the subterfuge with her friend’s wife - to create “a normal kid with a normal life”, without the baggage of implied “abnormalcy” that comes with being a
test tubeecto-baby - is the very same reason she now gives for sticking with a dying world: “the kids have a chance here, john. / to grow up like real people do and be… actually FUCKING normal!” Jade is driven entirely by this fixation on the “normal” life.at the core of Jade’s accusation, that John’s idea of happiness “is just chasing after whatever it is you dont already have”, is a hypocrisy. because what Jade is really fighting so hard to protect is the chance to live a life different to the one she was condemned to as a child. for Yiffany, a “normal life” is one without the burden of a celebrated deity for a mother and without people “fucking bark[ing] at her while walking down the street” - but for Jade, the “normal life” is just the one where she doesn’t have to be all alone on an island. and she can’t understand that the reason John wants so badly to escape that life is because the white picket fence was exactly the purgatory he was trapped in for all his youth.
when Beyond Canon positions procreation and pregnancy as “normal” and therefore in philosophical opposition to ectobiology, it is not to insinuate that what is “normal” is synonymous with what is “good”: it’s to establish the rock which sits opposite the hard place of Dirk’s (and now John’s) regressive way of thinking. the suburban fantasy Jade is trying to catch for herself by replicating the heterosexual familial structures she longed for as a child is just as fake as the heroism and cosmic destiny the Sburb-focussed parties are so obsessed with. ectobiology and “normal” biology are both perfectly valid tools for achieving the same end, neither intrinsically regressive or progressive on their own - it’s the ideologies with which these tools are exploited which can lead to ruin. whether suburban or Sburban, dictated by a magical frog or by a long-dead father figure, the never-ending cycle of necessary destruction followed by necessary creation is a game you can only win by choosing not to play, and Jade and John are currently losing very, very badly.