We cut from Terezi discussing her doomsday visions of babies to Aradia decapitating a (sometimes) symbol of babies… don’t know what that’s about. But the cut from the decapitated in the mud to the Faygo in the sand (effectively declaring the Faygo a severed head, full of delicious red juice) is consistent with comments I made (x)(x) on Jane’s initial tour of LOCAH: that her balloons are an inversion of the “potions” (bottles of blood), and that the wish-emissaries are furthermore consistent with decapitation imagery in Act 6. What’s more, here as with Jane’s wish balloons, the launched bottle began as a prayer.

@corvid420 says:

Mm… definitely not just an aesthetic choice, but I don’t really have a ‘why’ handy. I can give you more context and examples though.

1. With Jane, decapitated heads always seem to (attempt to) return to what they lost. When Jack “beheads” her tower on Prospit, the dome lands on an obelisk, as though in imitation of the tower it once stood on. Likewise, when Lil Seb chops off the lamp’s head (beside shaving cream, a Dad symbol), the noggin lands in a pipe-image on the floor (another Dad symbol).

2. Birth itself is a ‘decapitation’ insofar as the born has been cut off from their source – which is one explanation for baby!Dirk attempting to crawl back into his own ecto-tube, as though attempting to re-merge with the immaculate slime from which his form was iterated (eg the source of ALL Dirks). Dirk’s suicide likewise puts the bunny (his noggin) back in the (red) box – you might say death is conceived as a return to that from which we were born.

3. Dirk sending of his own head is a repetition Gamzee’s gesture maybe: sending a severed head (coded-object) to a Hope player. I’ve wondered before why the clouds on Jade’s island are Hope colored (cream and orange), and this might be a step towards explaining that: just as Jane’s wishes are launched into the sky, heads/sodas are sent to players most closely associated with it? Eridan’s lighting and Jake’s Jupiter/Zeus associations likewise situate them as cloud-dwellers, on a symbolic level (and Eridan literally flies in the clouds in his intro I suppose).

4. Actually, having juxtaposed Eridan with Jake, it’s suddenly very odd that our very first revival kiss (Feferi x Sollux) happens right after Eridan slams a Faygo? (Prompted by Gamzee, naturally) So corpse-smooches and Faygo-drinking were synonymous from the outset? I’m imagining the DirkJake kiss panel as an advertisement for Faygo, with the volcanic eruption serving as a fizzy-bottle proxy to indicate the nigh-orgasmic ecstasy of drinking cheap soft drinks.

5. Before I forget, the potion/balloon isn’t the only time Jane has flipped a symbol of wishes: flipping the capitals in ‘UrobUros’ is how she unlocked the Auryn-Juju (which granted wishes in the Neverending Story).

6. Not directly pertinent, but I’m willfully misreading the first line of Rose’s erotic puppet poem to be about decapitation, for giggles. “Prong of flesh bereft of home...”

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.

From the S1 Q&A

Alex: In fact, following on from that. “Have you ever considered your fixation with invasive worms from a Freudian perspective?”

Jonny: I’m sure I don’t know what you mean. Uh, the idea of pulsating, writhing, elongating worms tunneling into flesh is… I mean, it’s just good horror, really, I don’t know… I don’t know what you mean. It’s nonsense, really.

Some Words on Openbound

This is a step towards a more comprehensive account of A6I3 (Openbound). The basic idea: Meenah’s interactive adventures can be read as a dream-sequence from Roxy’s point of view expressing the following motifs:

First: Meenah is Roxy’s doppelganger. When we are introduced to Roxy’s fenestrated planes, we are promptly informed that if someone were caught half in/out one of the windows when the power cuts off, the poor soul would be sliced in two (4510). By Chekhov’s gun, this introduction ought to result in someone getting gorily bisected by the window, but it never happens. Instead we get this:

Gcat warps the panel away, trapping Roxy in the void, and we are shown a bisected horse puppet (left). The half-horse reiterates the looming threat of Chekhov’s guillotine. Roxy’s body is intact, but the scenery suggests she ought to be split. The suggestion is followed by the initial appearance of Meenah (right), implying that Meenah herself is a piece of Roxy, snipped away and running rampant. Thus, a doppelganger.

So, taking Meenah to be a esoteric mirror of Roxy, it follows that her adventures in the dreams bubbles are a narrative frame for /Roxy’s/ dreams. This is the basic assumption of everything that follows.

1: Language is the enemy.

Time is an impermeable barrier. It ticks on irreversibly, edging its victims unto entropic dissolution. The Lord of Time and the destruction he brings embody the inevitability of death. Aradia cracks a joke about this at the beginning of Openbound: within the ageless confine of the dreambubbles, “time is a figure of speech”, she says. Though ostensibly asserting the endless flexibility of time, an alternate interpretation would indicate that Lord English, time, and language itself are apprehended on similar terms. The most useful one presently: language, like time, is regarded as a barrier.

Throughout Homestuck, characters struggle with abstractions, beginning with the frustrating data mechanics of the sylladex and culminating in various tightrope-walks along unorthodox configurations of space and time. Language numbers among the headaches: Caliborn characterizes the text he reads as “walls”, further declaring them to be “impenetrable” and “migraine-inducing”. On one level, this aligns with Caliborn’s statement that the kids talk/think too much and he’d like them to just GET THE FuCK ON WITH IT ALREADY: speech is an obstacle towards both the completion of the kids’ objectives and Caliborn’s attainment of what he wants. On another level, this aligns with the later discussion of Caliborn’s learning disability: in all likelihood, he has difficulty reading. Another example of this disdain for language is Jade, who, in her rapturous treatise on the wonders of anthro, answers the call of the wild by renouncing words.

Just prior to Openbound, the sentiments expressed above (that language is unnecessary, an obstacle to unmediated communication and pure sensation) are restated in mythic terms: REALITY ITSELF is being DESTROYED by (LORD) ENGLISH! Language the inhibitor of direct experience becomes language the rot of the universe, language the malevolent destroyer of the capacity for any experience at all.

Meenah witnesses English’s destruction of reality and rushes off to recruit soldiers to fight him. There is harmony between the imminent threat of English and the gameplay: the primary obstacles to Meenah’s objectives are words. Literal walls of text stand between you and the end of the level, as you must navigate exhausting conversations to satisfy the game’s win conditions. Within the conversation themselves, the motif persists by showcasing various ways that speech can obscure meaning.

Kankri couches his points in overly ornate terminology and uses social justice as a tool for settling personal disputes. Latula laments how her commitment to her RAD speech affectations and persona can make her harder to understand. Cronus trips over his own accent, Mituna tumbles through various word spasms. Meulin’s deafness is thematically succeeded by Rufioh’s inability to communicate his unhappiness to the Horuss, who has sweat in his ears. The two characters who you cannot understand at all, the silent Kurloz and the pseudo-Japanese speaking Damara, are revealed to be direct servants of Lord English! Failure to communicate – inability to bridge the barrier of language – is the enemy.

The counter to the hyperbolic threat of language-as-mediation and is a fantasy of perfect communication. In Jade’s scenario, attainment of this ideal is presented visually as Jade acquiring the superficial markers of a wolf (“Wouldn’t these ears suit you? Would not this proud long snout assist you in the hunt?”), whereupon she acquires the rich experience that she associates with the idea of animal, unmediated by language. Just as Jade merges with the image of a wolf, there is an image in Openbound that Meenah seeks, the attainment of which embodies the goal of some idealized communication, without words.

The image is that of childhood.

Keep reading

Some guesses:

1. Lord English is language preventing ideal communication/merger with the child-self/permanent youth, but he’s also the power-fantasy of a child(Caliborn) who refuses to grow up(and so is ALSO a realization of the Nitram Peter Pan ideal); who physically CANNOT by normal means, as he killed his twin/inner-child rather than psychically cannibalizing/merging with her to initiate puberty. Lord English, Caliborn’s accidental, Juju-assisted merger with a collection of Alpha Males, is his wished-for detour to adulthood, past the permanent juvenility he chose/created for himself rather than accept/devour(you are what you eat :p) his feminine-aspect. This would seem to make him an ambiguous, paradoxical figure; he CANNOT merge with his inner-child OR achieve perfect-communication with them/himself, because he’s killed her, but he has attained the ideal of permanent youth&unitary narrative control anyway. In other words, he’s both the barrier TO the ideal for others, And its Attainment, AND the proof THAT the ideal of “never growing up”/entirely controlling your own narrative/perfectly communicating one’s intentions is rotten, destructive, and unfulfilling(or, more charitably, that how you attain the ideal REALLY MATTERS to the nature&moral quality of it). This could be why the “silent” characters are not only direct servants of Lord English, but also presented as villainous, or tools of the villainous, in the story; the ideal their silence symbolizes is the ideal Lord English embodies, and he’s not only the villain, but the failure-state of the story(both in that not defeating him leaves the story unfinished, and that Homestuck is about growing up, something impossible for LE).

An Aside: thinking through all this it occurred to me that Alt!Calliope/Cherub Romance might play into your pedophilia argument too? Like: she devoured/merged with her Caliborn, and then as an adult tries to recreate that relationship in a sexual context by pursuing those who remind her of the (now “kid” as he is dead and can no longer age)brother she ate(obvsl there’s an incest vibe to this, too)? Of course, unlike Meenah, she pursues ADULTS not children, so it’s not so much that this is an example of pedophilia, per se, as an example of nascent childhood eroticism(or perhaps nostalgic fetishization of one’s childhood?) acting as an inspiration/fountainhead for the mature libido(tho again; Alt!Calliope is ALSO a dead, unaging, teen; so technically she’s as stuck in a permanent adolescence as Meenah and the rest of the A1Trolls, or Caliborn in his permanent juvenility. So is it accurate to say her desires are “adult”, rather than “adolescent”? And, Aside Aside, what does it say about Epilogue!Dirk that he unintentionally situates himself as the kismestic equal and foil TO this dead, and therefore permanent, teenager?).

3. These thoughts are totally unformed, but I wonder if this is meant to convey something about the nature of Meenah and Aranea’s relationship? Like, is this exchange suggesting that Aranea was the mentor/erastes(erastis??) to Meenah’s pupil/eromenos(eromene???) originally in their relationship? Or is it rather that Aranea is trying to use her superior experience and knowledge of the situation to TAKE the “older” position in what was, very likely given Meenah’s proclivities, an age-difference relationship from the start? Or maybe that’s too literal. Meenah and Aranea are probably the same age, so maybe the suggestion of age-difference is acting as a metaphor for class-position; for Meenah’s preference for relationships where she has the upper-hand? Like: Meenah’s superior Class effectively made her(in what is, effectively, a gerontocratic society) the “elder” in their relationship, the one with all the power, and now Aranea is subverting that, foreshadowing her betrayal/abandonment of Meenah in pursuit of quite literally “becoming an adult”, ie, getting out from under Meenah’s oppressive “elder” shadow.

4. if Rufioh/Horuss is Jake/Dirk, then Damara=Jane :| Which scans pretty well given the Damara:LE::Jane:HiC dynamic, But consider it specifically in re: Jane/Gamzee in the Epilogues, and Damara’s phrase you focus on in this essay :| :| Also Damara HATES Meenah in Openbound, so this would suggest a rather powerful, underlying and suppressed, resentment for Roxy on Jane’s part.

1. I think your description of Lord English simultaneously being the barrier to the ideal and the attainment of the ideal checks out… I’ve also been puzzled by the irony of Caliborn (who detests Homestuck’s walls of text) coming to embody English, and the best solution I could arrive at was that to totally avoid mediation, one must become the medium? Maybe. Dirk experiences some of the consequences of this in Meat, where his assumption of the role of narrator kind of subsumes his every word to the thoughts of the people he’s narrating – but I’m not sure if this reduces Dirk to a puppet, a silent medium for other people’s expression. He seems to express himself simultaneously.

(I’m as unsure on how to characterize alt!Calliope’s desires as you are, but the idea of Dirk figuring out how to respond to an eternal teenager hate-flirting with him is INCREDIBLY funny. Even more so if Dirk/Calliope functions as a riff on the Hussie/fandom tug-of-war, like he’s remarking on how it’s a little weird to be bickering with his young fanbase through the medium of the story)

With respect to silence, I’m gravitating more towards the characterization of silence as pregnancy… like the idea being that silent characters are pregnant /with/ words unspoken, and are thus host to English? This would help me understand some sections of Meulin’s story I glossed over.

a. Meulin saying that she is “completely unable to can” and unleashing a barrage of crying GIFs has 2 main readings. That she is unable to “can it”, to shut up, and thus the cascade of feelings pours out; and that she is unable to get pregnant (cans being a womb symbol) and the subsequent rush of misery gifs express sorrow at the lack of baby. That silence /is/ pregnancy makes these mutually analagous.

b. If we accept the above, Meenah reinforces the notion that trauma that deafened Meulin is in part a metaphor for sexual violence:

If silence is pregnancy, “shut up” becomes akin to “get pregnant”, in this context, no? (So with this paradigm, Cronus’s silencing of Mituna acts as a metaphor for self-censorship while simultaneously furthering the undertones of sexual abuse)

2. This leads me to a possible explanation for the codpiece!

My initial thought was just Nic Cage, on loop, going “That was the plan: to give you a BONER!” as though the transmission of the codpiece were some esoteric joke on a child “giving you” a (metaphorical?) erection. And who knows, maybe there’s some validity to that. But the Meenah quote above offers an alternative, sort of. The GIF series leading to the transmission becomes important:

Recall that with Horuss, we saw a certain blurring between the baby and the phallus. The net impression I’m getting is that Meulin, through a violent experience, has become pregnant with English – and through the medium of the codpiece, she is relinquishing the child. Gamzee’s acquisition of the codpiece then becomes connected to the child-cannibalism/mpreg motif, as though Gamzee were grafting a child onto himself? So that’s one approach.

Another is to double down on Nic Cage: one approach to Porrim/Kankri was a Mind/Heart divide, and the same can be said of Kurloz/Meulin. Between his chief representation being a smile and his ‘mind control’, Kurloz can also be read as (a fantasy of?) the mind’s domineering impositions upon the heart. That dialogue could be read as an anxious denial of one’s attraction to children – the pregnancy of English becoming an unpleasant truth that demands to be spoken, as well as the (metaphorical??) boner the child cannot help but give you.

(And of course since merging with one’s child-self is masculinizing in the context of Roxy’s dream, becoming a child “gives you a boner”. We’ve come full circle)

3. The idea of Aranea herself being obsessed with seizing the elder position is interesting… and I think erastes/eromenos is a good way to characterize some of the discomfort in the dynamics here. This might be a good place for me to mention that since Aranea is linked most closely to Jake English, I tend to suspect that her interactions with Meenah are in some way analogous to Grandpa Harley’s interactions with Skaianet intern!Mom Lalonde.

Back in reread 2, I focused more on the possibility that the Openbound could be read as a look into Roxy’s past life. For example, I took the Cronus motifs as confirmation that the art Dirk drew for Caliborn may have been a glimpse of the past:

But the prospect of disentangling the memories of Roxy’s past life from her present desires is a bit daunting to me atm.

4. The odd thing is, the Handmaiden is pretty directly linked to Mom by their identical little-girl rooms (905, 4048), so it would be weird to me for Damara to suddenly be linked to Jane instead. But then again, Jane got more build up than Roxy on being linked to HIC, despite Roxy receiving the Meenah-doppelganger. So it’s likely that their stories are overlapping in a way I haven’t grasped yet.

All of this is Good Thoughts, but I just really wanted to highlight that one part because on reading it I am almost POSITIVE that that’s accurate :|

Another thing that just occurred to me:

Riffing on your past life idea, could this be a symbolic representation of the domestic situation surrounding Hiveswap Act 1? Obvsl this isn’t anything well developed, but there’s a certain similarity btw this baby, Joey, and A. Claire, and after A’s death, Mom!Roxy was recruited into being Joey&Jude’s long-term babysitter, symbolically the feminine “partner” of Jake in raising them(ie, the one who does the actual raising while he fucks off to do whatever the hell he wants in typical neglectful bad dad fashion). Jake’s eating of the baby, then, could be taken as a representation of Joey’s (possibly permanent)disappearance into his collection, something Mom!Roxy could have come to think of as a death she blamed Jake for. Of course, there are more unsettling implication to that reading of this image regarding Mom!Roxy and Grandpa!Jake’s relationship the less symbolic you make the reading of it (:( (:(

Some Words on Openbound

This is a step towards a more comprehensive account of A6I3 (Openbound). The basic idea: Meenah’s interactive adventures can be read as a dream-sequence from Roxy’s point of view expressing the following motifs:

First: Meenah is Roxy’s doppelganger. When we are introduced to Roxy’s fenestrated planes, we are promptly informed that if someone were caught half in/out one of the windows when the power cuts off, the poor soul would be sliced in two (4510). By Chekhov’s gun, this introduction ought to result in someone getting gorily bisected by the window, but it never happens. Instead we get this:

Gcat warps the panel away, trapping Roxy in the void, and we are shown a bisected horse puppet (left). The half-horse reiterates the looming threat of Chekhov’s guillotine. Roxy’s body is intact, but the scenery suggests she ought to be split. The suggestion is followed by the initial appearance of Meenah (right), implying that Meenah herself is a piece of Roxy, snipped away and running rampant. Thus, a doppelganger.

So, taking Meenah to be a esoteric mirror of Roxy, it follows that her adventures in the dreams bubbles are a narrative frame for /Roxy’s/ dreams. This is the basic assumption of everything that follows.

1: Language is the enemy.

Time is an impermeable barrier. It ticks on irreversibly, edging its victims unto entropic dissolution. The Lord of Time and the destruction he brings embody the inevitability of death. Aradia cracks a joke about this at the beginning of Openbound: within the ageless confine of the dreambubbles, “time is a figure of speech”, she says. Though ostensibly asserting the endless flexibility of time, an alternate interpretation would indicate that Lord English, time, and language itself are apprehended on similar terms. The most useful one presently: language, like time, is regarded as a barrier.

Throughout Homestuck, characters struggle with abstractions, beginning with the frustrating data mechanics of the sylladex and culminating in various tightrope-walks along unorthodox configurations of space and time. Language numbers among the headaches: Caliborn characterizes the text he reads as “walls”, further declaring them to be “impenetrable” and “migraine-inducing”. On one level, this aligns with Caliborn’s statement that the kids talk/think too much and he’d like them to just GET THE FuCK ON WITH IT ALREADY: speech is an obstacle towards both the completion of the kids’ objectives and Caliborn’s attainment of what he wants. On another level, this aligns with the later discussion of Caliborn’s learning disability: in all likelihood, he has difficulty reading. Another example of this disdain for language is Jade, who, in her rapturous treatise on the wonders of anthro, answers the call of the wild by renouncing words.

Just prior to Openbound, the sentiments expressed above (that language is unnecessary, an obstacle to unmediated communication and pure sensation) are restated in mythic terms: REALITY ITSELF is being DESTROYED by (LORD) ENGLISH! Language the inhibitor of direct experience becomes language the rot of the universe, language the malevolent destroyer of the capacity for any experience at all.

Meenah witnesses English’s destruction of reality and rushes off to recruit soldiers to fight him. There is harmony between the imminent threat of English and the gameplay: the primary obstacles to Meenah’s objectives are words. Literal walls of text stand between you and the end of the level, as you must navigate exhausting conversations to satisfy the game’s win conditions. Within the conversation themselves, the motif persists by showcasing various ways that speech can obscure meaning.

Kankri couches his points in overly ornate terminology and uses social justice as a tool for settling personal disputes. Latula laments how her commitment to her RAD speech affectations and persona can make her harder to understand. Cronus trips over his own accent, Mituna tumbles through various word spasms. Meulin’s deafness is thematically succeeded by Rufioh’s inability to communicate his unhappiness to the Horuss, who has sweat in his ears. The two characters who you cannot understand at all, the silent Kurloz and the pseudo-Japanese speaking Damara, are revealed to be direct servants of Lord English! Failure to communicate – inability to bridge the barrier of language – is the enemy.

The counter to the hyperbolic threat of language-as-mediation and is a fantasy of perfect communication. In Jade’s scenario, attainment of this ideal is presented visually as Jade acquiring the superficial markers of a wolf (“Wouldn’t these ears suit you? Would not this proud long snout assist you in the hunt?”), whereupon she acquires the rich experience that she associates with the idea of animal, unmediated by language. Just as Jade merges with the image of a wolf, there is an image in Openbound that Meenah seeks, the attainment of which embodies the goal of some idealized communication, without words.

The image is that of childhood.

Keep reading

Some guesses:

1. Lord English is language preventing ideal communication/merger with the child-self/permanent youth, but he’s also the power-fantasy of a child(Caliborn) who refuses to grow up(and so is ALSO a realization of the Nitram Peter Pan ideal); who physically CANNOT by normal means, as he killed his twin/inner-child rather than psychically cannibalizing/merging with her to initiate puberty. Lord English, Caliborn’s accidental, Juju-assisted merger with a collection of Alpha Males, is his wished-for detour to adulthood, past the permanent juvenility he chose/created for himself rather than accept/devour(you are what you eat :p) his feminine-aspect. This would seem to make him an ambiguous, paradoxical figure; he CANNOT merge with his inner-child OR achieve perfect-communication with them/himself, because he’s killed her, but he has attained the ideal of permanent youth&unitary narrative control anyway. In other words, he’s both the barrier TO the ideal for others, And its Attainment, AND the proof THAT the ideal of “never growing up”/entirely controlling your own narrative/perfectly communicating one’s intentions is rotten, destructive, and unfulfilling(or, more charitably, that how you attain the ideal REALLY MATTERS to the nature&moral quality of it). This could be why the “silent” characters are not only direct servants of Lord English, but also presented as villainous, or tools of the villainous, in the story; the ideal their silence symbolizes is the ideal Lord English embodies, and he’s not only the villain, but the failure-state of the story(both in that not defeating him leaves the story unfinished, and that Homestuck is about growing up, something impossible for LE).

An Aside: thinking through all this it occurred to me that Alt!Calliope/Cherub Romance might play into your pedophilia argument too? Like: she devoured/merged with her Caliborn, and then as an adult tries to recreate that relationship in a sexual context by pursuing those who remind her of the (now “kid” as he is dead and can no longer age)brother she ate(obvsl there’s an incest vibe to this, too)? Of course, unlike Meenah, she pursues ADULTS not children, so it’s not so much that this is an example of pedophilia, per se, as an example of nascent childhood eroticism(or perhaps nostalgic fetishization of one’s childhood?) acting as an inspiration/fountainhead for the mature libido(tho again; Alt!Calliope is ALSO a dead, unaging, teen; so technically she’s as stuck in a permanent adolescence as Meenah and the rest of the A1Trolls, or Caliborn in his permanent juvenility. So is it accurate to say her desires are “adult”, rather than “adolescent”? And, Aside Aside, what does it say about Epilogue!Dirk that he unintentionally situates himself as the kismestic equal and foil TO this dead, and therefore permanent, teenager?).

3. These thoughts are totally unformed, but I wonder if this is meant to convey something about the nature of Meenah and Aranea’s relationship? Like, is this exchange suggesting that Aranea was the mentor/erastes(erastis??) to Meenah’s pupil/eromenos(eromene???) originally in their relationship? Or is it rather that Aranea is trying to use her superior experience and knowledge of the situation to TAKE the “older” position in what was, very likely given Meenah’s proclivities, an age-difference relationship from the start? Or maybe that’s too literal. Meenah and Aranea are probably the same age, so maybe the suggestion of age-difference is acting as a metaphor for class-position; for Meenah’s preference for relationships where she has the upper-hand? Like: Meenah’s superior Class effectively made her(in what is, effectively, a gerontocratic society) the “elder” in their relationship, the one with all the power, and now Aranea is subverting that, foreshadowing her betrayal/abandonment of Meenah in pursuit of quite literally “becoming an adult”, ie, getting out from under Meenah’s oppressive “elder” shadow.

4. if Rufioh/Horuss is Jake/Dirk, then Damara=Jane :| Which scans pretty well given the Damara:LE::Jane:HiC dynamic, But consider it specifically in re: Jane/Gamzee in the Epilogues, and Damara’s phrase you focus on in this essay :| :| Also Damara HATES Meenah in Openbound, so this would suggest a rather powerful, underlying and suppressed, resentment for Roxy on Jane’s part.

This Saturday (6/29) at 1 PM Pacific, I’m gonna try streaming! 

Tune in to twitch.tv/berkachow for an hour long overview of various esoteric modes of characterization, followed by a Q&A session. Hope to see you there!

Today!

More recent additions:

2. I want to work through this Jade vs. Gramps stuff as self-mythology for a bit(this is long).

Like: Jade grew up in a house filled with corpses and trophies, with her only female role-models lifeless simulacra, and a “Grandpa” for whom these faded, blue(blue being a death-color; just pointing out the symbolism) mannequins and prints exist exclusively as sexual/romantic objects. So, she explained her existence to herself through Frankenstein/Pygmalion/Sleeping Beauty/Snow White analogy as the child of him and one of these unliving feminine objects, which Homestuck repeats throughout her narrative via Sleeping Beauty/Snow White references; her narcolepsy, the bed/ice/snow symbolism, the death/sleep dream/afterlife analogy, and the whole waking/rezzing through a kiss motif, though that specific bit plays out more explicitly through Jade’s Troll-analog, Feferi(a literal animal-person hybrid; though flipped turnways from land to sea), and her romance with Dave’s Troll-analog, Sollux, than through Jade herself.

The recent advances in Homestuck’s birth/trauma symbolism has cleared up some confusing points surrounding Dave:

Recap: So Dave feels as though he’s been severed from himself, like there’s a nebulous Authentic Dave that he is denied access to. This motif is also shown in emotional terms, as though the stoic persona fostered by the emulation of Bro has cut Dave off from Authentic Emotions. (x)

The latter lends itself to the notion of “emotional constipation”: when Dave receives the shades from John with the note of Authenticity™, Tavros manifested with his brown color scheme and claimed that he was going to make Dave shit himself. Dave follows by unloading a particularly inspired quasi-ironic gay treatise, the cathartic release itself being the realization of Tavros’s threat, excepts with FEELINGS instead of turds. (Tangential: Sometimes I read Nepeta’s 33 as a pair of butts, though this has led pretty much nowhere)

Recently, we figured out that seemingly all forms of extrusion from the body can symbolize “birth”, so I’m inclined to think that Dave’s pervasive sense of being a shitty copy of himself, the sense of being separated from an Authentic Dave and corrupted like a deep fried JPEG, results in a fantasy of birth wherein Dave shat himself out. Or rather,

The image of Bro and Authentic Dave overlap. Dave feels like he can never measure up to Bro, that the hierarchy between them is irreversible. Bro is impossibly high up, and Dave is low as shit. Bro is the unreachable ideal, just like Authentic Dave, so in this sense it is accurate to say that Dave feels like a shitty copy of Bro as well as himself. But insofar as Bro is Dave’s guardian, I seems to me that Dave’s inferiority complex translates into fantasy of having literally been shat out. Hence the comic from the ARG where Sweet Bro poops out a baby, and hence this choice aside from Act 6:

Thus when Dave breaks the LEGENDARY PIECE OF SHIT – playing the role of Bro in the theatre of his own abuse – the pee droplets and poo chunks surrounding Dave are not only there to indicate emotional catharsis, but also to indicate that in emulating Bro’s domineering behavior, Dave is become the one who shits, the action of the dominant (”bow before your new king bitch”)

The big Jade post is on the backlog (due to another big post that has my attention) but at the very least I should clear Bec’s name real quick

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Working on a larger post that will elaborate on this, but just want to go ahead and briefly note that Jake’s necrophilia (x) is analogous to his “believe in a fake thing so hard it becomes real” schtick.

The fairytale kiss of revival (aka “corpse smooch”) is depicted via Tavros as a literal insertion of Breath – on a metaphysical level, this eroticizes the act of instilling the pneuma (divine breath of life) into dead matter. This ambivalence connects Jade’s distaste for divine intervention to Jake’s fascination with the corpse puppetry in Weekend at Burnie’s: from opposite views, both are concerned with the idea of an animating force.

Shortly after that Caliborn snippet, we get this little exchange between brainghost!Dirk and Terezi:

Terezi breaths on bg!Dirk, and suddenly he becomes a tangible dream!Dirk; this suggests that Terezi instilled the brainghost with breath, thus rendering him “real” (with a healthy dose of discomfort to go accompany the gesture). Breath instills life in the dead and realness in the fake – so Jake’s cheerful advocacy of the reifying power of belief was, in a roundabout way, a nice predictor of the vigor with which he kisses Dirk’s decapitated head.