Rainbows, Vampires, and Tooth Fairies

Something just occurred to me(and Im definitely not the first person to have this thought so there’s prob some similar headcanonry out there), but Jades being nearly as rare as Tyrians, AND being diurnal when all other Trolls are nocturnal&crepuscular: I feel like it’s VERY likely there are tooth-fairy-esque myths&legends about Jades. Which… puts a very interesting spin on Jades ALSO being susceptible to a vampirism-mutation :>

Tho: part of what The Game does is give its players the chance to manifest their desires&”dreams”/“Become the person they WANT to be”, and Kanaya dreamed of being a Rainbow-drinker, so I think it’s just as likely(as in: either theory could be true) that she and Porrim are the *only* Rainbowdrinkers, facilitated by The Game, and “rainbowdrinkers” are just as legendary on Alternia as vampires on Earth. This would make Kanaya’s “turning” similar to Jade’s transformation, Rose becoming a cool-ass warlock, Sollux losing the lisp&doom-prophesies he hates so much, Aradia’s resurrection, etc etc etc, that we see throughout Homestuck.

Another thing that just occurred to me about this: Vriska’s the same deal.

She WANTS to be central and Self-Driven and Important(rather than lonely and A Tool and Disposable, which is how she grew up), and she KNOWS what she’s done in the past is wrong, BUT she ALSO want’s to “8e the 8est” and “Save the Day”, hero or no, and The Game lets her achieve all of these things.

Cycles of Vengeance and violence are another aspect of this. Vriska knows violence, doesn’t know much else in terms of socializing, and is too afraid to give up control by letting other ppl set the pace of her interactions with them. So, her attempts at “redemption”/”repair” all take the form of allowing herself to be the target of violence.

This never works.

Letting Aradia beat her to death doesn’t repair the hatefriendship(Im actl pretty sure they were spades but that’s never made explicit) she destroyed by using Sollux to kill her.

Demanding Tavros “square” their relationship by killing her only alienates him further and ultimately leads to HER killing HIM.

Defeating BecNoir doesn’t “save” anyone and only happens in a doomed session.

All of this is futile. They’re Dramatic and Flashy and draw allot of attention&thought but, as others have pointed out, they don’t really accomplish much. These are all things Vriska WANTS, and The Game lets her get, but NONE OF THEM accomplish the TRANSFORMATIONS she wants(probably cuz she’s not really sure/able to clearly admit to herself what that is until she’s dead). This pattern repeats over and over and over again in her story, with Vriska destroying the very things she cares about most by trying to force them to be the way she wants them to be rather than meeting them on THEIR terms. This is why her eventual rejection of this in favor of understanding another(tho tbf: she takes that a bit too far at first, her rom with Meenah is pretty onesided: but thats OK! That’s a common mistake to make!!), tied into her rejection of the pursuit of ‘Importance’ is Vriska’s true “Good End”.

Page 49/50: narrative insertion and the puppetry of focalisation

(See below for the relevant panels) On a second read, the technique of narrative insertion stands out as being indecently conspicuous. The narrator is constantly inserting himself, plus an incredible quantity of extra-diegetic detritus, into the narrative. The metaphor of “lurid proboscises sort of obscenely jutting into your unwilling face at an accelerating rate” applies. The seeds are sown early on for appropriated focalisation - the textual equivalent of being possessed by a whimsical yet domineering ghost (an apt image for the plasma-oriented John). On page 49 it is clearly John who is focalised - the narration appears to represent John’s personal opinions about Dad’s harlequins. But on page 50, who is focalised? Whence this random shit? Is it John who holds such stringent standards about fires belonging in fireplaces; who feels the need to insert a laughably awkward parenthetical pun into the word “categorically”; who waxes rhapsodic about the domestic myth of the hearth; or who can perfectly quote (and ironically misattribute) Shakespeare? Seems unlikely. This is not John; this is the narrator, who, we are reminded, is puppeting John. (Interesting that John’s back is turned as the narrator goes off on a performatively self-indulgent tangent - like a player character being paused.)

This kind of shift in focalisation is highly characteristic of Homestuck. Like a lot of techniques in Homestuck, it starts out on the micro or linguistic level but then metastasizes into macro/plot-level manifestations. The motif of narrator-possession starts out as little verbal spasms where the narrator runs off with the narration for a bit, but grows into one of the major themes of the story determining character arcs and plot.

It’s a reminder of another major tension in Homestuck: the ontology of characters as tokens or vessels to be controlled by the text/narrator/Law, rather than the psychological idea of a character, to which modern readers default, as a person-facsimile with a “real” interiority. At the beginning of Homestuck, the token-like qualities of the characters are deliberately highlighted, both as a reference to gaming and to lampshade the arbitrary, crowd-sourced, name-out-of-a-hat process of their creation. As the story continues, however, the latter type of character develops, to the extent that for most readers, Homestuck becomes a character-driven story. But that tension between character-as-token and character-as-person always remains, and it becomes a huge source of pathos: these puppets that we come to love and empathise with so deeply are always subject to having their strings seized, or cut. Also omg. The amount of - clutter - verbally, in page 50. It’s a travesty. Poor John.

Reblogging again because I realized that the mis-attributed pale fire quote is an echo of the disjoint between character and narrator voice that ipsomaniac outlined above – another fire that doesn’t seem to belong in it’s fireplace.

Also want to emphasize here that if we’re relentlessly subjective, all of the above should nonetheless express John’s /belief/ that he is a puppet, that his voice is not his own, that he does not belong in his own skin. Just as with Gamzee declaring himself the most important character in Homestuck and thereby declaring himself to be his own author-god, we have to insist that the narrator’s voice /is/ the character’s voice, even when (or especially when) that voice’s knowledge appears especially alien.

Thanks for the additions malo! 100% on the role of misattributed quotations highlighting the disconnect - particularly since these quotes are almost always jarring in terms of register, i.e. a pointedly high-brow or philosophical insertion into the stereotypical “I hate my dad” inner monologue of a disgruntled teenager.

Your second point adds a really interesting dimension I hadn’t considered: that in these lapses in focalisation where the characters’ puppet-like nature is revealed, we’re simultaneously seeing a manifestation of the characters’ disordered psychology. Which is ironic - the moments that remind us of the characters’ ontology as empty tokens simultaneously suggest a complex and troubled psychological existence. These lapses point to both the realness and un-realness of characters and the world they inhabit. In this example, on the one hand you have the narrator’s ventriloquism reminding us that John is not real; he has no existence beyond the text, he is subject of and to the text. On the other hand, this disconnect between character and narrator voice implies John’s feelings of dissociation - thereby suggesting that there is more to John than is explicitly in the text; that John has a “real” psychological existence which the text responds to and manifests; that John in some sense is prior to the text and causes it to unfold the way it does. One thing that is tricky about Homestuck is the way it conflates and confuses exterior with interior, the systematic external world of the text with the characters’ turbulent inner landscapes. (In this you can see its kinship as a narrative with its distant formal ancestor, medieval and Renaissance romances such as Morte D’Arthur or even the Faerie Queene). Reduced to its very basic symbols you have a kid that is stuck within a home: the character is a token of a system that contains, controls and explains him. But equally, the home operates as a symbol of the kid’s mind: the system is the expression of the character’s inner world. The home contains the kid; the kid contains the home. System determines character; character determines system. (The involuted world of “Being John Malkovich” springs to mind.)

Glitching between these inverse truths, there’s a holographic quality to representation and impersonation in Homestuck. Characters and voices flicker from one persona to another and between planes of reality, alternately entreating system-first vs psychology-first interpretations. The irony of balancing these two modes of reading Homestuck is exacerbated the further in you get. On the one hand, as the text progresses, characters develop increasing psychological complexity and weight – in a word, characters seem more real. Psychological modes of interpretation are indispensable; it makes sense to understand the world as emanating from the mind. And yet, the more the text expands, the more evident it is that each character is an instance of an iterative sequence of ventriloquism and mimickry within a viral, duplicative system. So a systematic view of character that downplays the “reality” of individual characters and highlights their subjection to the laws that govern the text is equally essential.

As I said in my original post, I think this is one of the very powerful tensions at play in Homestuck. Because both the system-first and psychology-first readings are “true” and inevitable, you constantly end up with this sense of a text at war with itself; something struggling to break through the holographic surface and assert its realness. A horde of ghostly Pinnochios fighting to become real, despite being the product of a system that circumscribes their existence.

Maybe one thing to hunt for during my reread is the answer to Lord English. If the law of the text decrees “I WAS ALWAYS ALREADY HERE”, what is the opposing refrain that cries death to the author and the letter of law? (Is it, ultimately…. Fanfiction?)

Mods are asleep post controversial vrisrezi | dirkjake meta

I forget i havent posted as much meta on tumblr so the there’s people still a bit confused on the terezi|jake comparisons, which i usually scream about on my twitter! (@/hulknaps)

I have a thread where i plugged in most of my comparisons (halfway through theres a link to the one thats mostly jake|terezi)

but here are some examples

‘unreliable narrator’ but it’s ’narrator is deeply in love with the person they are narrating’

Or, or, or when the author hates the gults of the person they are narrating!!!!!

Narrator Has Big Emotions And The Reader now has to deal with the consecuences

#GOD YES IT'S EPILOGUES DIRK#i am honestly obsessed with how dirk's former genuine love and admiration of jake#got twisted into this seething resentment perversely tethered to a still-very-much-extant attraction and obsession#i still maintain that it's dirk's influence that caused the entire fate of the election to LITERALLY revolve around jake's ass#and i don't think that was even a conscious choice on dirk's part!#he just ASSUMES that everyone in the entire fucking world will be just as obsessed with jake as he is#and his influence on the narrative then pushes that to become true. fuck#god i love ult dirk so much. he's such a problem! such a fascinating terrible problem <3<#homestuck post-canon#ultimate dirk#yeah ok i'm just going to leave this whole rant in the tags of a post that has nothing to do with homestuck. why not (@the-meat-machine)

in defense of arquius

so, i get why people might not like arquius and would prefer if hal had never merged with equius. like, there's no denying that arquius is a less complex character than hal. he's pretty much just a joke character, and i see why that might feel like a waste.

but personally, i adore him. first of all he's hilarious. second of all he's hot. but third of all, i genuinely feel like arquius is a satisfying conclusion to hal's character arc?

because hal is really fucking happy as arquius, and can you blame him? after years stuck as, effectively, an overclocked human brain bound to an immobile pair of sunglasses, he finally gets a body, and it's a body he thinks is fucking awesome at that! he gets to maintain the benefits of being a supercomputer and ALSO have an awesome buff body AND have supernatural sprite powers on top of that. plus the dude he merged with has a lot of similar interests and complements him really well.

and frankly? i think not needing to be important to the narrative can be a relief. there's a freedom in being a joke character. arquius doesn't have to feel like he's constantly playing second fiddle to the "real" dirk anymore. he's gotten far enough from dirk-ness that he's free of the pressure of being dirk. he can just go off and do his own thing and have fun with it. and doesn't he deserve to have some fun?

in conclusion, arquius ro%. thank you for coming to my ted talk

I really like ARquius for Equius, too. I was sort of struggling to wrap my head around why AR + Equius = self-esteem, when it's not especially prevalent in either component character, but I think even moreso than sharing common interests, their hangups are just so incomprehensible to each other that they just get immediately dismissed as idiotic by their combined fusion.

yknow one thing that imo is fundamental to jake as a character and which i dont see people talk THAT much about (maybe im just not looking in the right places idk) is how the entirety of his character and the way he's written snaps into place when you realize he's basically a Token Female Character, except a guy

like, he's THEORETICALLY a very competent and badass guy in his own right, fighting off monsters on the daily and dual wielding guns and whathave you, but the comic never really affords him any meaningful sense of actually BEING badass; it's mostly just informed attributes, the notion that this character isn't just a helpless damsel because technically he's just as competent as the others...! but he never actually IS.

and instead, all plotlines involving him end up inevitably revolving around romance and Will They Or Wont They and everyone crushing on him despite the work never bothering to really establish WHY everyone is into him, because... i mean, he's the Token Team Girl, of course he's attractive, what else would he be for?

This is kicked into overdrive after the god tiers: Jake gets a noticeably skimpier outfit compared to all his peers, for absolutely no reason; he gets kidnapped and damseled by Jane, explicitly for his good looks, and sentenced to a fate of standing around in sexy clothes as the villain's husband. Even his powers are a very tied to common tropes of tragic female characters who supposedly wield great power, but are never empowered as characters by it; instead, Jake's ~amazing unstoppable hope powers~ are utilized by others through him, reinforcing his role as a sexy lamp macguffin rather than a character with agency: you could replace Jake's entire role throughout most of that sequence with, like, a magical necklace everyone really wants, and very little would actually change.

I find this fascinating because while I've seen a couple of instances of characters who are supposed to be a subversion/gender flip of the typical badly written female character tropes, Jake feels like the one instance where the story really commits to the bit, showcasing the exact glaring flaws of this type of writing and how it impacts the character, and pointing out the dissonance between the character the story SAYS it's presenting, and the character it's ACTUALLY presenting... and Jake himself is aware of this dissonance.

I even believe that the reason he's Like That as a character in the alpha universe is because of the way he was originally presented in the beta timeline. Like, the alpha kids are all very much examinations of the guardians and their relationships with the beta kids. the struggle of communication between rose and roxy and the isolation caused by it, the twisted imageboard culture reflected in dave and dirk's home life, etc

but in the case of grandpa harley... the guy is ENTIRELY informed attributes. he is a literal inanimate object, long dead- and yet he seems to hold the exact same presence in jade's life as he would when he was alive. he is, in a more literal sense than the other guardians, defined entirely by the reading of their relationship jade formed, her IDEA of what her grandpa was like, and the original signified object behind those signifiers is absent, no longer necessary in the equation.

what better way to translate this dynamic, the literal objectification of a character whose influence is limited entirely to other people's idea of them, than to write him as a Token Female Team Member?

adding onto this, their isolation really only lead to more hero worship, and that is such a fascinating idea!

like, dirk idolises alpha dave to the point of tattooing himself over it and basing his entire identity around being a) ironic, b) masculine, and c) hyper-competent, because that's how he saw dave

it's easy to have a trans reading of dirk because you can see how important it is to him that he's dave's bro, everything else comes second to him being a dude

roxy on the other hand is less consumed with their perception of alpha rose, but rather how they portray themself to their friends--and anon is RIGHT they gender themself all OVER the damn place! they're the emotional core of the group (feminine), they're the uber-cool, drunk gamer grl-turned femme fatale (feminine), only [they] could manage to blow up [jane's] computer with a nasty deathloop virus and somehow make [JANE] be the one to feel shitty about it (feminine)

roxy's trans story is the one i understand best because it's one i've seen first-hand, more than once. the image they have of themself is so completely based on being the best girl for other people, and once they have room to breathe where they're not thinking about everyone else 24/7, suddenly they realise fuck, something isn't sitting right

(alternatively, there's a super valid trans girl roxy reading too, where her performative femininity is her getting a handle of who she is, and i think that roxy also learns how to chill out and that being a woman doesn't mean being in service to people only after sburb)

and then like on the complete other end of the spectrum!

you've got jane, who has men with moustaches covering her walls and who aspires to be in control above all else, yet who simultaneously is absolutely soaked in 50s/stepford wives aesthetic and is an HEIRESS and a MAID, her femininity clashing strangely with her masculinity, just like ...

jake, who has women with revealing clothing covering his walls in an idolising way, and who needs to be rescued and is the epitome of form over function, yet who simultaneously sells himself as a manly, adventuring man with guns and fisticuffs

...

like on the one hand, when dirk says that he lives in a world that's post-homophobia, he's not wrong. he literally can't interact with anyone apart from his five friends, and he's certainly not in danger of getting beat up for kissing boys, what with all the last-boy-on-earth shit he's got going on

but on the other hand? dirk wasn't raised by a community without gender or heteronormativity, he was raised by the internet and sbahj! it was just convenient for him to casually mention that he lives in a world where it's no big deal if a dude is gay when he said that, because he wants jake to internalise the message that they can be gay together without it impacting on their masculinity, which is precious to both of them in very different ways

tl;dr: the homestuck kids are too desperately clinging to modern society for anyone to claim that they're unaffected by it

#they're teenagers they are affected by what other people think of them that is their whole deal (laurasauras)

Homestuck is My Favorite Sprite Comic

Yes, you read that right.

Homestuck is my favorite sprite comic.

Those of you who remember the earlier days of the internet are probably looking at this post in disbelief right about now. Others of you might be scratching your heads, not knowing what I’m talking about.

But here’s my pitch: Homestuck is the culmination of an entire genre of internet art, and the tools that make it so powerful are the very tools that made that genre once so reviled.

Homestuck is the greatest and most successful sprite comic of all time.

And honestly, I’ve wanted to talk about that for ages, so let’s do it.

Keep reading

Dirk Strider vs narrative presentation

Dirk Strider has a PR problem. Now, that’s not exactly his fault, in fact he oftentimes seems to bend over backwards to work his way around it, to soften his appearance to the reader as best he can, and generally behave in every regard as a well and proper through and through stand up gent. Nevertheless, it is so deceptively easy to miss that, so distractingly simple to latch onto any of a number of alternative possible interpretations of him.

Let’s get the obvious one out of the way first. Dirk Strider as a character is preceded by thousands of pages by his estranged twin brother, Dirk Strider, aka Bro, aka the dictionary definition of a broken household, who spends and has already spent so many scenes tormenting his adoptive/biological son Dave Strider, aka probably the most beloved character in Homestuck, that Dave’s entire character arc can arguably be summed up as gradually breaking free of the damage wrought by this thoroughly destructive character dynamic. Indeed, one of the highlights of Homestuck’s final stretch was watching Dave Strider explain in sufficient yet far from exhaustive detail to Dirk Strider the injustice wrought by Dirk Strider.

Let’s move ahead (or are we retreating). At the very beginning of Act 6, in arguably the first trace of Dirk Strider’s personality, we find two rabbits, gifted to Jane Crocker by her fellow alphas, Jake and Roxy; each perfectly emblematic of the other’s personality and connection to Jane in particular. Dirk’s gift, however, is withheld, in its place an ominous note that, whatever it is, it is not quite as inoffensive a thing as the other two.

Indeed, Dirk Strider himself is absent from much of the earlier pages of Act 6. When Jake attempts to contact him, he receives in his place the tragic figure, doomed to darkness and misfortune, Dirk Strider, aka Lil Hal, aka AR. Dirk Strider proceeds to antagonize Jake and, albeit but briefly, convinces both Jake and indeed the audience themselves into thinking he is actually Dirk Strider.

And so is Dirk Strider robbed first of his fame, then of his good reputation, and finally of his first impression by the structure of the narrative, as well as the malicious actions of his preceding hobgoblins, Dirk Strider and Dirk Strider. And all this before he is allowed to speak a single word in his defense. In the face of such forces, who could help but take a dim view of the man. It is a poor man indeed, to be Dirk Strider.

anyway even tho terezi drawing the outline for her own body on the ground is sad because terezi is (however impermanently since john’s about to retcon) dead, it’s also fantastic, because it cements the overarching theme of this update. terezi has decided, finally, what her powers mean — she writes her own narrative. she doesn’t need luck, because she makes her own. and maybe she thought that was true before, that she made her own luck, but now she understands, i think, the consequences for other people — that she doesn’t have the right to determine what changes should be made in other peoples lives, only in her own. 

that’s also what john’s doing — learning to control his powers in ways that give him control over the story he’s a part of, and learning the consequences of not being careful. like him showing up in the moment just before he’s about to enter the game and going “some things are too fundamental to mess with.” 

also i’d like to call attention to a visual callback in this update, tho i’m not sure if it was intentional in the way i’m thinking it was. 

her intro

and her outro

Coin? What coin? Surely you jest, Mr. Senator. The prosecution sees no coin. 

i think you could also say something about that setup — the initial Introduction To Terezi play trial SHE’S BLIND, REMEMBER??? segment — in light of both this and That Coin Flip with Vriska. in the final scourge sisters confrontation, doc scratch tells us that the decision of the coin flip is a constant across all timelines and that “the seer, knowing this, planned accordingly.” scratch presents it as a “it doesnt matter how the coin landed because they both knew how it would land,” but it still matters, because how the coin lands, even if its predetermined, is a thing that terezi takes into account when planning how to deal with vriska (and in one path she kills her and the other she lets her go but both times the coin lands the same way).

this time, terezi is going to change what happens, but not by accepting certain facts or consequences as set in stone — not accepting, to extend the metaphor, the validity of the coin toss — but by ignoring fate, the predetermined nature of her story, the assumption that the past can’t be changed. By choosing to not use her powers to react but act, even if this goes against what “should” or was “supposed to” happen. 

this time, there is no coin. 

this post is HIDEOUSLY long, so if you want to reblog it for one or two points, feel free (in fact, i encourage you) to snip out all but the relevant bits.

before i get into the credits animation itself, a couple notes:

the credits themselves: