Too real, I see this all the time. Joking about how certain people in prison should be taken care of or molested. Two wrongs doesn’t make a right

this is not argue with you just adding opnions /gen

i wholehearted agree with you except for crimes against children then by all means let them rot not death but rotting in prison, death is too good for them

@fall-ofachilles, this post is about you. If crimes against children receive extra-special punishment, then the State is directly incentivized to find an angle by which to define the people it doesn't like as having committed crimes against children.

Y'know, such as defining Existing While Queer as a sex-crime against children. For an extremely non-hypothetical, entirely real world example.

I find this response unsatisfying.

Op says "A lot of people purport to believe fully in rehabilitation but really only apply it to crimes they consider forgivable."

Fall says "I agree except for class A of crime, which I consider unforgivable."

Frustrated says "But what if they included crimes you consider forgivable in class A?"

And Frustrated is right, people HAVE been including crimes that Fall considers forgivable in class A. But Frustrated still has not addressed the core disagreement that Fall failed to see between itself and op, which is that there should be NO crimes on the "rot in prison" list. Frustrated saying "but what if they put the wrong crimes on the rot in prison list" does nothing to affirm the original post. Frustrated has not challenged Fall's view that certain crimes merit rotting in prison.

I mean a valid reason to be against a kind of punishment is "the state cannot be trusted with the power to do this to people." Some people have different reasons. But they can both be against that kind of punishment together.

sure, but that's not "believing in rehabilitative justice", which is what this post is supposed to be about. Like, there's someone in the reblogs straight up saying "You shouldn't oppose the death penalty because pedophiles don't deserve to be punished, you should oppose the death penalty because it won't be the actual pedophiles who are punished." They don't believe in rehabilitative justice at all, they just don't think pursuing carceral justice is the best course of action right now.

I'm tired of my philosophical opponents thinking they agree with me just because they're my political allies.

I almost agree with this, and everyone here makes great philosophical points and also many factual political observations.

Except I wholly believe that pedophiles do not deserve rehabilitation and absolutely SHOULD be skinned alive. Slowly.

So you're saying:

AKA you do not believe in rehabilitative justice.

#weird take: if pedophiles were humanely reformed so as NOT TO DO THAT ANYMORE instead of destroyed utterly#it would probably be easier to get POWERFUL AND WELL LIKED CHILD PREDATORS to stop doing that#if your only options are 'deny that the guy is a pedophile because he's a good dude who#doesn't deserve being skinned alive'#or 'skin everyone's favorite pastor alive because yeah he definitely did touch those kids'#you're going to have to contend with people protecting their friends and relatives and colleagues in every single fuckin trial#if there was an actual functional rehab we could shove these guys through#MORE GUYS WOULD BE SHOVED THROUGH EVEN BY FRIENDS AND FAMILY#and less kids would be harmed#please note: in the last ten years of hysterical online pedophile witchhunts#i have not seen one child predator be discovered or put through any kind of criminal justice system#ive seen an awful lot of queer artists get the skinned alive treatment tho(via@roach-works)

^^^Lots of Truth in This^^^

the tough (for some) truth is that "instituting policies that will actually protect children from sexual exploitation" and "instituting policies out of a performative hatred of the social boogeyman called 'the pedophile'" are mutually exclusive goals, because the vast majority of pedophiles that exist in the real world overwhelmingly benefit from the latter slate of policies.

Dying on the hill that you can lower the rates of csa by a significant amount by just giving minors comprehensive sex ed and treating them with a basic level of respect the same way you would any other person

I’m basing this on what I’ve learned from listening to csa survivors. Making it harder for predators to prey on them means they get preyed on less.

I don’t care if the useless bandaid solutions that many have proposed are less uncomfortable for people. I care about what actually works.

Dying on the hill that you can lower the rates of csa by a significant amount by just giving minors comprehensive sex ed and treating them with a basic level of respect the same way you would any other person

I’m basing this on what I’ve learned from listening to csa survivors. Making it harder for predators to prey on them means they get preyed on less.

I don’t care if the useless bandaid solutions that many have proposed are less uncomfortable for people. I care about what actually works.

whenever you're thinking about 'keeping children safe online' remember that 'parental controls' on internet use (more accurately, domestic spyware) are statistically three times as likely to be keeping a child's abuser informed about them than to be keeping them safe from predatory strangers, because family members account for 30% of CSA perpetrators and strangers account for 10% (the other 60% is split between family friends and acquaintances and people in trusted positions of authority like doctors and priests)

I don't care if you, personally, want the U.S.'s public sex offender registry to continue to exist, (and think it will work well if it's just tweaked a little!).

Even just looking at the registries own goals: Where are your studies showing that it is actually effective at meeting any of its ostensible goals? If it's such a risk to get rid of it, why do so few countries allow public access to sex offender registries? (And were is your evidence that the public registry increases safety in the countries that have it?)

"Killing the cop the lives in your brain" means, in large part, not accepting criminal legal system solutions to problems just because they feel good and right to you. It means not accepting the criminal legal solution as the best or only solution to serious social problems, just because it's the solution that's currently in place where you live.

I'm going to respond to one of the comments on this post, because I think it serves as a good vehicle to explain why I hold this position, and why I felt the need to state that I don't care about people's personal desires for the U.S.'s public SOR to continue to exist. Before I begin: I am deliberately not including screenshots (instead just quoting the person) or the person's name, because that feels too much like targeting them and singling them out. If they want to comment in response to this, that's fine; however, if these aren't your comments, please do not go looking for these comments or otherwise be a jerk to this person.

(Also obviously a lot of discussion about sexual assault and child sexual abuse below the cut, given the topic. Please skip this if you don't want to read that.)

Continuing the theme of abuse blogging today, earlier I saw a post talking about the phenomenon of wanting to outlaw things (types of media or depiction of certain topics mostly) because "they can be used to groom" or "were used to groom (me/someone I know)"

And I don't want to air my personal trauma on op's post, but like they said, anything can be used to groom, because the problem isn't The Thing Itself but the motivations of the groomer

It's like that posts about wooden sailing ships where people keep saying "hope you like scurvy" or "weren't these used in the slave trade" as if somehow the ships themselves caused those things to happen

Literally anything can be used to groom. Any topic. Any interest. Any object. Abstract concepts like 'relationships.'

My dad groomed me by:

1) being my parent and having constant and unlimited access to + control over me from birth, the ability to define reality and normalcy for me, and enjoying a bunch of social conventions that meant anything he did to me was basically seen as his business and no one else's and the default assumption was that any intimate contact he had with me was harmless or necessary

(I can remember, as a child being taught about bad touching in school, thinking that "only your doctor or parents should touch you in these places" sounded an awful lot like an abusable loophole)

and that it would be worse to baselessly suspect or accuse him of abuse and be wrong than to let me be abused because there wasn't proof

(It was in fact pretty fucking obvious and every so often I think about every single teacher, family member, and other adult in my life who saw how I was and did/said nothing, and how many of those adults actually seemed genuinely contemptuous of me for my Obviously Traumatized Child Symptoms And Behaviors, and am briefly overcome with rage)

And 2) being nicer to me than he was to my brother, treating me like I was special, and doing fun things like taking me on trips.

A lot of the things he said and did to me as a child were self-evidently abusive and dysfunctional, like outright telling me it was normal for parents to have favorites, not only playing me and my brother against each other for his affection but me and my mom, telling me he knew me better than I knew myself and could tell what I was thinking and feeling just by looking at me, making me into his personal therapist and constantly telling me in graphic detail about the abuse he suffered as a child + his history with drug use and abuse + his marital problems with my mom + his mental health issues + his sex life and sexual interests (this also functioned as a way of training me to keep secrets, because he'd tell me things he Wasn't Supposed To so then I'd feel like we were co-conspirators and I was special and mature, etc etc)

but the fundamental thing underlying all of these specifics was making me feel special and uniquely loved by him, and then manipulating those feelings and that attachment in order to use me for his sexual as well as emotional gratification without having to worry about me fighting back, arguing, or telling anyone.

A lot of the stuff he did would have been otherwise normal if it wasn't him doing it!

There's nothing wrong with taking your kid on a business trip with you because you travel for work and it means they get to go all around the country and see places they might not have otherwise, if you're not molesting that kid.

When I was very little, he had a ritual where every weekend he'd ask me to name three things I wanted to do that I'd never done before, and then we'd go do those things. That's a great way of introducing your child to new experiences and bonding with them and making them feel like you love and value them and their thoughts, if you're not molesting that kid.

So are we going to ban parents staying in hotels with their kids? Roadtrips? Daytrips?

I do think there are a lot of problems with the current nuclear family structure as well as the social and legal concepts of 'the family' that make it much easier to abuse children and much harder for those children to get help, but the solution isn't "no one should ever have a child because parents can abuse their kids", it's to create structures that make it harder to abuse kids with impunity and easier for abused kids to get help.

This is just one specific instance of abuse, but I think it's illustrative of the flaw in the "ban all things that could plausibly be used to groom" reasoning. There isn't a single thing or topic you could have banned that would have kept me from being groomed and abused.

The reason it happened is because my dad was a deeply dysfunctional person who ended up with access to two children who couldn't leave and didn't know any better, and the only thing that might have kept it from happening in the first place was if social support systems existed so that my mom hadn't been so afraid of being a single mother when she got pregnant with me that she married him despite knowing it was a bad idea and being warned away by his own mother.

"If gross stuff that makes me uncomfortable stops existing, abuse will stop" is a child's logic. You weren't groomed because of porn or Twilight or incest fiction or shotacon hentai. You were groomed because a person decided to manipulate and abuse you using whatever tools they thought were most effective, and if those specific ones hadn't been available they would have used something else. Blaming the material is like running into a door and blaming it for being there.

Extremely dangerous how "grooming" in the context of child sexual abuse went from being a very specific pattern of isolation and trust-building with the aim of abusing someone to "telling children anything that contradicts their parents' ultra-conservative worldview is grooming" to "selling rainbow flags in a store is grooming" to "literally anyone I don't like is a groomer".

These days the word seems to most often be used by people who don't care about what it actually means and just want an easy "this person is irredeemably evil, kill them now" button.

^^^ "A Teacher having a Picture of their Same-Sex spouse on their Desk is Grooming", "A black Principal posting pictures of his white wife on his personal facebook page is Grooming", "Trans people existing in Public is Grooming" These Fuckers are NOT being shy about what the hell they're doing and why, and let me remind all of you that these are the same assholes who want to make it legal to ~marry~ 14-year-olds, and are ALREADY legalizing child-labor. White conservative christians will happily use the trauma of the people THEY TRAUMATIZE to justify their desire to exterminate people they dislike.

i cannot possibly overstate the psychological damage of growing up being abused in a way that is considered so disgusting as to be literally unspeakable and treated as such.

every single person on this website and everywhere else needs to take a long fucking look at how they talk about and think about csa and how it might fucking feel to have things that literally happened to you be considered so taboo that frank depictions are declared obscene or so disgusting so as to be talked about only in whispered tones

CAN YOU EVEN BEGIN TO CONCEPTUALIZE THE MULTIPLICATION OF TRAUMA THAT COMES FROM YOUR ABUSE BEING TREATED LIKE RADIOACTIVE WASTE THAT MUST BE BURIED LEST IT CONTAMINATE OTHERS BY ITS VERY ACKNOWLEDGEMENT DESCRIPTION OR EXISTENCE

i had friends on here that used to be very frank and open about their status as CSA survivors. because they insisted on talking about the subject frankly and with depth and nuance they were called pedophile apologists, which was quickly shortened just to pedos, and constantly harassed. one teenager specifically sent someone she knew to be a csa survivor links to triggering materials in an attempt to get them to reconsider being friends with me because i was also considered a pedo.

the way online spaces decided to Protect The Children from pedophilia has done no such thing, just like we warned you it wouldn't. instead it gave bullies and bigots a perfect label to slap onto any victim they wanted, at the direct expense of csa survivors everywhere. it's also been horrible for queer artists of all sorts. we have been saying this over and over for a decade at least.

im so fucking ANGRY

#I saw all of this go down#the same kind of people tried to take tamsyn muir down#it's all crabs in a fucking bucket#the people in power laugh and pass laws that say acknowledging that you're gay within earshot of a child is CSA#never trust anybody that says won't someone think of the children(via@some-triangles) Absolutely vital addition

i cannot possibly overstate the psychological damage of growing up being abused in a way that is considered so disgusting as to be literally unspeakable and treated as such.

every single person on this website and everywhere else needs to take a long fucking look at how they talk about and think about csa and how it might fucking feel to have things that literally happened to you be considered so taboo that frank depictions are declared obscene or so disgusting so as to be talked about only in whispered tones

CAN YOU EVEN BEGIN TO CONCEPTUALIZE THE MULTIPLICATION OF TRAUMA THAT COMES FROM YOUR ABUSE BEING TREATED LIKE RADIOACTIVE WASTE THAT MUST BE BURIED LEST IT CONTAMINATE OTHERS BY ITS VERY ACKNOWLEDGEMENT DESCRIPTION OR EXISTENCE

i had friends on here that used to be very frank and open about their status as CSA survivors. because they insisted on talking about the subject frankly and with depth and nuance they were called pedophile apologists, which was quickly shortened just to pedos, and constantly harassed. one teenager specifically sent someone she knew to be a csa survivor links to triggering materials in an attempt to get them to reconsider being friends with me because i was also considered a pedo.

the way online spaces decided to Protect The Children from pedophilia has done no such thing, just like we warned you it wouldn't. instead it gave bullies and bigots a perfect label to slap onto any victim they wanted, at the direct expense of csa survivors everywhere. it's also been horrible for queer artists of all sorts. we have been saying this over and over for a decade at least.

im so fucking ANGRY

i cannot possibly overstate the psychological damage of growing up being abused in a way that is considered so disgusting as to be literally unspeakable and treated as such.

every single person on this website and everywhere else needs to take a long fucking look at how they talk about and think about csa and how it might fucking feel to have things that literally happened to you be considered so taboo that frank depictions are declared obscene or so disgusting so as to be talked about only in whispered tones

CAN YOU EVEN BEGIN TO CONCEPTUALIZE THE MULTIPLICATION OF TRAUMA THAT COMES FROM YOUR ABUSE BEING TREATED LIKE RADIOACTIVE WASTE THAT MUST BE BURIED LEST IT CONTAMINATE OTHERS BY ITS VERY ACKNOWLEDGEMENT DESCRIPTION OR EXISTENCE

Any plan for combating CSA is going to have to reckon with the fact that teenagers are often horny and feel a desire to explore and express their sexuality and if they don't have a safe avenue for that which doesn't involve interacting with adult predators they will find an unsafe one which does

This is not a hypothetical this is not a piece of rhetoric I was a horny teenager who had safe avenues for expressing my sexuality without the involvement of adult predators closed off to me and so I found the unsafe ones

+ if your conception of why CSA is wrong is in any way based on a notion of childhood innocence your actions and rhetoric are contributing to CSA, not fighting it.

The harm that is done to a child when they are sexually abused comes from the fact that they are being placed in a vulnerable situation with a pernicious power dynamic, not from the destruction of some illusory victorian notion of purity

Like idk it's really fucked that for some people the rhetoric of "that 15 year old seduced me, I wasn't the aggressor, I'm not in the wrong" is only wrong because they think 15 year olds are like constitutionally incapable of wanting to seduce someone when that's just like categorically incorrect, when I was 15 I very much actively desired to seduce people and even made attempts at doing it. The reason "that 15 year old seduced me, I wasn't the aggressor, I'm not in the wrong" is wrong is because you as an adult have power over that 15 year old regardless of what they are or aren't trying to do and as such if they are trying to seduce you it is your responsibility to not take actions you know to be wrong. It's not wrong because it's describing some kind of impossible desire that a 15 year old would never have, it's wrong because it's seeking to invert the power dynamics of the situation and place all the contextual agency on the minor while rhetorically disempowering the adult to project an image of innocence. It's just garden variety DARVO, not some kind of Metaphysically Incoherent Assertion.

Like idk I feel like it should be pretty easy to point out what's wrong with the logic of "the child told me to commit rape so I did" without inventing a rationale about how children are constitutionally incapable of formulating the idea of telling someone to commit rape

This absurd notion of childhood innocence serves only to put minors in more danger by denying the basic facts of how they experience and interact with the world while simultaneously functioning as a justification for depriving them of useful and necessary information that they could use to protect themselves from predators if they were allowed to have it. When you deny children information about how the world works with regards to sexuality, and deny yourself information about how children work with regards to sexuality, you are putting both yourself and children in a position of having to build a plan on faulty information and you shouldn't be surprised when the house you build this way crumbles under a stiff breeze.

genuinely so fucking tired of people leveraging the "groomer" argument against people who support sex ed because scientific literature over decades shows that comprehensive sex education starting around kindergarten actually prevents children from being sexually abused and groomed because it teaches children the correct words for their body parts and also teaches them concepts of privacy, personal space, bodily autonomy, the difference between appropriate and inappropriate touching, and the fact that sex is something that only adults do. children with this knowledge are not only better equipped to identify abuse and predatory behavior and communicate that its happening to a trusted adult, but also prevent it from happening in the first place by recognizing when something is happening that shouldn't.

sex education does not sexualize children, it prevents children from being sexualized. anyone who is against early foundational sex education and claims they are doing it to protect children is a fucking liar.

Some things child sexual predators do:

* They are likely to talk very frequently - sometimes nearly obsessively - about how awful the sexualization of children in media is, how it is leading children to grow up too quickly, think their only value lies in their sexuality, use sex to seek attention from adults that they can’t otherwise get, etc.

Particularly, they will suggest that insecure children exposed to such “corrupting” media will be influenced to come onto innocent adults all on their own. This fiction is particularly beloved of teachers, preachers, and activists. There’s a whole genre of child pornography based on it.

Saying stuff like this is part of the process of “grooming the witnesses.” The predator is setting up the people around them to believe that any kid who ever accuses them of sexual abuse was actually the instigator.

It works much too often.

* They are likely to show a LOT of negative interest in selfies, talking about them in ways connected to the above complaints. They might say kids shouldn’t take selfies at all, because predators will see them; that selfies are a sign of kids oversexualizing themselves.

They may privately “neg” kids for “trying to grow up too fast” or “looking sad/lonely” in their selfies, in an effort to get the kid to go to them for “support.” The less-subtle will go further, and flat-out accuse the child with the offending selfie of “enabling/encouraging pedophile culture.”

@zenosanalytic said:

I don’t think the baby in Dirk’s drawing is Joey. There’s a bit during the snapchat updates that shows that the baby Dirk drew is indeed the genetic fusion of Jake and Roxy:

To my knowledge, the only reference to Mom’s miscarriage in Hiveswap is a vague bit of flavor text for batteries + fridge:

I guess this doesn’t rule out the possibility that Joey and Jude’s adventures could somehow be a metaphor for the experiences of their guardians, but I really hope not. I’d rather Hiveswap be a new thing.

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.

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 :|