Racing Turtles

Pale grimdorks doodle because ive become enlightened

Do not disturb, the girls are sleeping

The date-night murder of Mom and Dad continues to be a pivotal lesson: the apparent interruption of a scene is often a continuation in disguise.

zenosanalytic replied:

You haven’t misunderstood me, that’s basically my stance on the Bec Noir murder – though the other aspect of the death that struck me was 1) John joking beforehand about wanting to sink the Mom/Dad ship and 2) Bec Noir’s bloody footprints leading to John during Seer: Descend, which together seem to implicate John as the murderer (or at least, they suggest that Bec Noir is granting wishes). And its weird to me that these readings seem to co-exist quite comfortably.

But as for the second part of your question, I’m not sure. The Mom and Dad situation was a relatively compact joke, with a bunch of really overt flirtation punctuated by violence. But even though John and Rose literally travel to the site of their parent’s “death” and die, I’ve kind of resisted committing to a sexual reading of the scene, if only because nothing…seems to proceed from it? Or at least, nothing I understand. You have John kiss-reviving Rose’s corpse (with Vriska’s voice hauntingly imploring him to kiss Rose through Rose’s visor, which John seems to wear in a visual gesture toward union?), but the scene almost feels un-moored from its precedent. Seer: Descend is briefly revisited later, when John dreams about fighting Bec Noir and Rose pops in at the end and waves, but… that’s it.

(You could perhaps argue that the way John’s dream-fight against Noir replaces the revival of Rose is something to be read into, but that’s not something to be asserted lightly)

Or I guess, based on the earlier point that John’s “motive” for wishing to destroy the Mom/Dad ship is that it would make him and Rose siblings, thus decimating Karkat’s shipping grid (in which John marries Rose). So you could infer that consummation is exactly why John wanted the guardians out of the way in the first place – but that kind of set up (with John as some sort of weird conqueror) just doesn’t seem consistent with his getting sucker stabbed? The scene’s incoherent to me, it doesn’t seem to quite mesh with any psychosexual framework I throw at it. It’s a fraught subject that I can’t write about with confidence, so I mostly avoid writing about it.

i loved them THEN and i love them NOW okay

squatting here at the wretched end of everything, the final culmination of a story that ate the last six years of my life, the goddamn 4/13 apocalypse, i am just going to go ahead and say it: 

rose/john was a good ship