#assault cw

[dathen]

So it’s easy to fill in what Agatha refuses to tell Mina about Jonathan’s ramblings as just general vampire stuff, but I think we get a lot of clues about what secret she’s keeping, and it’s not that.

For one, she doesn’t tiptoe around saying it included talk of “blood and demons.” Mentioning vampires is no worse than mentioning demons, so if that was the Big Secret between him and God then she’s already betrayed that trust. Also, the villagers at the beginning of the book whispered of vampires and witches and the like, so it’s not some unspeakable word Agatha won’t repeat.

And then there’s this:

Sister Agatha . . . tells me that he raved of dreadful things whilst he was off his head. I wanted her to tell me what they were; but she would only cross herself, and say she would never tell; that the ravings of the sick were the secrets of God, and that if a nurse through her vocation should hear them, she should respect her trust. . . . She opened up the subject again, and after saying that she could never mention what my poor dear raved about, added: 'I can tell you this much, my dear: that it was not about anything which he has done wrong himself.”

At first this may seem like a non sequiter, but if you take it in the context as a response to what Jonathan was raving about, it feels very pointed. I feel that this is brought up because she said it to Jonathan himself. That his ramblings were of guilt and despair over what happened to him, that now he’s unclean—just like Mina will weep over later after she falls into Dracula’s power.

Put the pieces together, and you have Sister Agatha saying that what she heard during Jonathan’s fevers are secrets she can’t betray his confidence for, even to his wife; that it’s likely something he felt guilt over and had to be told is not his fault; and that it’s of a topic so dark that Sister Agatha hesitates to repeat it.

It all adds up to Jonathan’s ramblings being about being violated by Dracula: metaphorically for certain through the blood drinking, possibly also sexually. It makes Agatha’s insistence that it wasn’t his fault make much more sense, but also makes her care that much more powerful. Even today it’s rare to get a narrative sympathetic to survivors of assault, let alone male survivors.

(Others have also spoken of how Saint Agatha is the patron saint of rape survivors: who they could pray to for support and intercession when they’re suffering. If purposeful, that would be a VERY heavy-handed allegory in her care for Jonathan. But even if not, all the other context is there.)

#dracula daily #jonathan harker #sister agatha #assault cw #rape mention #dracula daily spoilers

[thegoatsongs]

During Jonathan’s PTSD attack there is a parallel that emphasises his and Mina’s shared trauma. 

Mina, on the night of her attack, cries out:

“And oh, my God, my God, pity me! He placed his reeking lips upon my throat!"  

Jonathan now shouts:

“Have you felt the Vampire's lips upon your throat?” (note how Mina had also called him “the Vampire” moments earlier)

It’s the very last sentence on the list of his traumatic events before he breaks down.

(Note that only Dracula has ever been getting called “the Vampire” so far...)

In both situations, after mentioning the lips, they both turn to check up on the other: 

Mina, that night:  “He placed his reeking lips upon my throat!" Her husband groaned again. She clasped his hand harder, and looked at him pityingly, as if he were the injured one.

Jonathan, now: “Have you felt the Vampire's lips upon your throat?” Here he turned to me, and as his eyes lit on my forehead.

There’s something else that also stands out: how they put emphasis on the lips, instead of on the fangs. 

It’s as if the non-consensual intimacy of it is what truly horrifies them, more than the pain or the fear of the bite.

All those parallels are there to punctuate the fact that they have shared trauma and that they fully realise it, because the moment they mention theirs, they look at the other, as if their partner is the injured one.

#dracula daily #jonathan harker #mina harker #count dracula #assault cw

[mercymaker]

so we had a fake wedding episode in the grand bloodstorm adventure, but get ready the new season's about to start and we're opening with some drama

astarion and mal are trying to track down a relic that's rumored to have the power of protecting a vampire from the sun. neat. they find out that its last known location is at some ancient noble house's castle, so they go there but they get caught sneaking around.

fully expecting to have to fight their way out of there, both of them are surprised when the lord of the house instead offers a warm welcome to his house, taking particular interest in mal, showering her with attention and gifts.

he also reveals that the relic has been lost to the surrounding woods after their house was attacked by outsiders, but both astarion and mal are quite suspicious of that version, so they stick around to find out more. while mal focuses on charming her way into the lord's heart so he'd tell her the truth, astarion goes out into the surrounding town to gather information.

turns out, the local legend tells that the relic is, in fact, still somewhere in the woods, as when the invading forces attacked, the lady of the house took all of their most important belongings, shoved them into a bag, strapped that to a horse that she then tried to flee the castle with, but was shot down by archers and fell to the enemy as the horse galloped deep into the woods. it's said that the horse was eaten by a giant demonic bear, but the treasure still remains somewhere. and that leads various parties to venture out into the forest to seek it.

astarion decides to join one such party, if not to find the treasure, then at the very least to get more information. he leaves maleane alone with the lord, who seems to be quite infatuated with her. mal reassures her lover that she can handle herself in case something happens. she's a sorcerer, after all.

the vampire spawn & the gang set a small camp out in the woods after traveling for most of the evening. they drink and tell stories over the fire and astarion starts sneakily peppering in questions to get the information he needs. one of the drunk men decides to go on a bit of a spooky retelling of the most horrific event he had witnessed. the great attack on their town by the most brutal monsters. it happened over three decades ago, when he was just a little boy.

they came in the night, with their intricate armors, their swords and their arrows and their daggers in the dark. some of the commoners fell to poison before any blades could lick their throats. those that didn't flee in time were either massacred or put in chains and dragged back to the underdark to be used and sold as slaves. both the lord and the lady of the house were brutally slaughtered in the ritual known as the blooding, leaving their only son an orphan.

oh, so the guy's entire family was killed by drow? and who is he currently hosting in his massive castle? hmm, yes, another drow.

but not to worry! he dressed mal in the finest of silks and set up the most elaborate dinner for just the two of them. an array of intricate pastries, wild salmon and spit-roasted steak, and, of course, a flagon of his favorite wine to wash it all down.

they talk over the dinner, maleane slowly trying to poke and prod for more information about the relic and what happened to it. the lord, eventually unravels the same story that astarion heard over the campfire, and as the puzzle pieces slowly slide into their places, mal suddenly feels lightheaded. her breathing starts to become erratic as she struggles to catch her breath. and when she rises from the table, in a frantic attempt to flee, her legs feel like they're full of lead. the same petrifying feelings spreads throughout the rest of her body, pulling her to the ground in an instant.

as she gasps for air to fill her failing lungs, the lord walks right to her, watching the paralyzed drow fight the effects of the poison, and tells her how much he hates her kind. how long he's been dreaming of this moment, to get his hands on one of the monsters that took everything from him. how they all are the same. how he's going to peel the skin off her flesh, bit by bit. he chuckles at her panic, at soft wheezing coming from her throat. he wasn't sure how much of the poison to pour in her glass. after all, drow are known to be resistant to most of them. perhaps he gave her a bit too much. but it doesn't matter. by the time it wears off she won't be able to escape.

he then drags her to his personal quarters, a little dark room with chains and cages, a large wooden table stacked with books and scrolls and sketches. everything you need to know about drow and more. he takes the beautiful soft gown off her body and shackles her wrists and ankles to a rack.

a beautiful monster, he calls her, dragging his fingers from her cheek, down to her breast. yet, soon his hand is replaced with a dagger. this is more than just revenge. it's something darker and deeper. the obsession with drow, all that hatred and rage latched on something else entirely. the want to have her, to own her, to break and hurt her again and again and again, for years and years. because that's how long he's been carrying all that venom inside. it's not going to be over soon, maleane realizes.

it's almost a relief when it's his hand touching her again instead of a blade. but she knows that the intent behind the gesture is just as sharp as the bite of a dagger. she can't utter an incantation. she can't move her body to channel her magic. it's been so long that she felt this helpless.

then she feels her mind start to slip, drifting away somewhere. the lord's unhinged ramblings turn into echoes from a distant room. the throbbing pain softens into an almost-numbness. for just a brief moment, maleane is not there.

it's the odd shift in the surroundings that drags her right back into the dark cell. a sudden, violent gurgling sound. when she looks up, all mal sees is red. the blood pouring out of the lord's mouth and throat. the shock still frozen in his eyes before his body collapses just as hers did before. and then, two red irises, framed by a set of worried brows, staring at her. astarion.

#baldur's gate 3 #astarion #astarion ancunin #astarion x tav #astarion x oc #astarion romance #bg3 fanfiction #bg3 astarion #bg3 tav #oc: maleane #maleane/astarion #assault cw #sa cw #torture cw #idk this started off as a little thing and i just kept going #and i feel like i could keep going but it's time to stop somewhere alright #let me know if anything else needs tagging btw #reuploading because tumblr told me to eat a bag of dicks and i cried like a baby

[genderstarbucks]

Transmascs Who Love Cis Men!!

I saw a transmascs who hate cis men "pride" flag (do not go and harass op btw) and as a transmasc I honestly found it extremely hurtful so I decided to reclaim it

Ofc it's okay to be weary of cis men because of past trauma / experiences, but making a "pride" flag out of hating them :((

This isn't necessarily a tm4cm flag btw, but it can be used that way!

I love all my cis men homies, they're the best people I've ever met

And honestly we need to stop the stigmatization that all cis men are bad, and especially stop with the "kill all men" bullshit

Yes, there are cis men who are bad people, but I feel like we shouldn't assume someone is a bad person who will assault you just because they're cis

Cis men aren't the only people who can do bad things, trans men can do that too, gender identity doesn't matter, if they're a bad person they're going to do bad things

If you've had past traumatic experiences with cis men, it's okay to want to avoid them or not date them, but we don't need a "pride" flag for that.

It's like the transphobic lesbian flags I saw, we don't need hateful pride flags, they're hurtful.

I understand feeling safer with / would rather date trans men rather than cis men, but making a "pride" flag based on being a transmasc who hates / doesn't trust cis men just feels extremely hateful

Plus lots of cis men aren't even completely cis, there's demiboy cis men, multigender cis men, genderfluid cis men, etc. so are you just gonna include them in your hate "pride" too?

Obviously, not every trans person is t4c, lots of trans people are t4t, you don't have to like cis men / be attracted to them, that's okay, you can't control your lack of attraction

But just because you're not attracted to a certain group of people doesn't mean you need to be hateful to said group, I've never seen a nociswoma- individual be hateful towards cis women

I apologize if this isn't worded the best, I'm just tired of people shitting on my cis men friends and automatically thinking they're bad just because they're cis (some have actually been accused of life ruining things just because they're cis)

#xenogender #xenogenders #mogai #pro mogai #xenogender coining #xenogender community #mogai safe #mogai terms #mogai friendly #t4c #tm4cm #tw assault #assault tw #cw assault #assault cw

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

AITA for not wanting to tell an ex-friend why I broke off our friendship?

So me and this ex-friend (let’s call him John) had been friends since we were in kindergarten. John is white and very securely upper middle class. I am mixed-race white and Cherokee, and am solidly lower middle class. Our friendship was based mostly on the fact that I was autistic and nobody wanted to be friends with me, so he swooped in and “saved” me from having no friends. As kids, we were super into fantasy stuff. By we, I mean he was and I pretended to be. In our larger friend group, I was always sidelined in favor of a (white upper middle class) girl who John had a crush on. Me being a background character in activities/groups that were supposed to include me is a running theme in my life. When John gave me attention, I felt like I was special and stood out from everyone else. When he didn’t give me attention, I felt like it was my fault nobody noticed me except to ridicule me. When K think about our friendship now, the red flags pop up often and frequently.

I have a younger brother, who is about two years younger than me. He quickly became friends with John, and often joined us in hanging out. As we grew older, the things we did when we hang out didn’t age with us. John and I were in, like, fourth grade and still pretend-fighting in fantasy settings because he wanted to, and I just went with it.

So, I don’t clearly remember the inciting incident, but once when we were hanging out, when I was in late elementary school or early middle school, John assaulted me. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t sexual assault but I’ve tried to block it out of my memory, and it was over something small. I think I might have accidentally hit or tripped my brother and didn’t want to apologize, because my brother had threatened to hit me earlier, and I wanted him to apologize first. I don’t want to get too deep into the assault, but I was pinned down and forced to apologize to my brother, who stood there and egged John on. John said he would his family’s wealth to make sure nobody would believe me, and told me nobody would want to associate with my family if I was public about the assault. I eventually escaped, and I didn’t tell anyone for about a year.

From a few weeks after the assault until literally this month, John has been trying to get in touch with me. I’ve told my mom to pass on the message “You know why we can’t go back to being friends”, to which he responded (via him telling his mom telling mine because I’ve cut off contact with him) that he doesn’t know what he did and he just wants to hang out with me again. Which. Nah. Absolutely not. He keeps persisting, and I have to go to the same school as him this year for the first time since third grade (I’m in high school). My brother keeps taunting me with this information, and I’m just so tired of him acting like it was me just being a dramatic. I know he doesn’t view assault as “that big of a deal,” but damn. I’m his sibling. He also keeps hassling me about reconnecting, and has repeatedly said he won’t leave me alone until I provide an “actual” reason to not be friends with John? He claimed I was being an “unfair asshole”, a “drama queen”, “too sensitive”, and a “bitch” about it.

TL:DR My ex-friend who I had a pretty fucked-up relationship with and who assaulted me wants to reconnect with me despite my desire to go completely no contact. My brother thinks I’m the asshole for this, and that I’m making a big deal of not wanting to interact with the ex-friend at school this year. AITA?

What are these acronyms?

#aita #am i the asshole #assault cw

[naamahdarling]

So I'm reading The Body Keeps the Score and it's...mildly illuminating. I'm only part way through and have hope that it might be somewhat helpful to me personally or have even more good observations, because there really are some, and I think that once I get over my disgust and anger, I might even be able to appreciate them.

But what struck me is how this fuckin guy, who is clearly just really into helping people and wants to try to change things and has good intentions and a lot of meaningful experience, and has valuable observations, this guy who really fucking cares, still describes watching actual crimes occur in front of him without intervening, and participating in them sometimes, without acknowledging them directly as crimes or expressing more than some regret. And these crimes were committed upon patients who were already severely traumatized and were in a traumatizing setting, hence their fractious or nonresponsive behavior. Like, he's about as good and well-meaning a guy as you can find, and I see why he has been so important in his field, and still.

He did/does remarkable work, I won't lie, but it just drives home how even though most of these horrible people who taught him may be dead (good) and even though a whole lot of his peers are out of the game by now, STILL their poison lingers, because they absolutely trained a shitfuckassload of the people currently practicing, and trained most of the older people currently still in charge. Two professional generations back and they're using textbooks that are like "ehhh, incest isn't harmful to women, and might actually have psychological benefits." BITCH WHAT? Of COURSE it's fucking awful. That's like common fucking sense. To not be able to see that would require you being mindfucked into believing literally the opposite of what the most basic empathy would tell you is true. These people got their brains washed and then bathed in shit. And now we have the system we do, built by them.

No wonder psych wards are trauma farms and staff utterly ungoverned. They don't see a damn thing wrong with treating their inmates like animals. It's how it's always been done. I mean, I knew that, but still. I keep learning things that make me hate them even more than I did. At every turn they have chosen to perpetuate pain because all they can understand is the need to control these people into behaving "normally".

#starting to go fully anti-psych at this point #meds good #therapy good #loose diagnoses to provide a roadmap for treatment good #dsm bad #psychiatry bad #abuse cw #assault cw #incest cw #medical abuse cw #rambling again

[aronarchy]

Let’s Talk about Toddlers and Consent.

Nov 6, 2021

My daughter can be very, very affectionate. Tight hugs, big kisses, tickles, holding hands, sitting in my lap, you name it—if this kid feels like cuddling, she wants ALL the cuddles.

But she has also been, from the get-go, very much determined to be in control of how and when that affection happens. Maybe she’s in the middle of something and doesn’t want to be disturbed; maybe she’s feeling overwhelmed and being touched is overstimulating; maybe she just doesn’t feel like hugging or kissing right now. She has absolutely no worry about hurting anyone’s feelings when it comes to that stuff.

The first time she set that boundary verbally, she was barely two. I had asked to tickle her and she had giggled and said yes, but after a minute she grabbed my hand, pushed it away, looked me dead in the eye, and said very firmly, “Mama, STOP.”

And you know how I felt about it?

So. Damn. PROUD.

I have always encouraged that. Whether she says no when I ask, or tells me to stop because she changed her mind after saying yes, I tell her, “Okay, then I won’t hug/kiss/tickle you. Thank you for telling me you don’t want that.”

Now that she’s getting a little older, I routinely ask her: “Who makes the rules about your body?” “Who makes the rules about someone else’s body?” It’s a routine part of our lives at this point, and she knows that she makes the rules for her body and no one else’s, and that she and no one else makes the rules for her own body.

Now, not everyone likes this. Some people have felt deprived of those messy baby kisses, overeager toddler hugs, and now, almost-four-year-old squeezes and hand-holding. They get sad when they have to say goodbye without a hug, or hurt when she spurns their kisses.

To that I say: Suck it up and deal.

She is absolutely not wrong for deciding that affection should be on her own terms, and nothing makes me more upset than when relatives push back against this.

“Don’t you want to give me a hug? I won’t see you again for a while!”

“Aw, you don’t want to give me kisses? Don’t you love me?”

“I’m so sad, can’t I just have one of your big hugs to make me feel better?”

NO.

“It’ll make [person] feel bad if you don’t [perform specific act of physical affection]” is a guilt tactic I’m not okay with using.

Same with “It’s just [type of physical affection], it’s not a big deal.” “Don’t be uptight, it’s just tickling.” “It’s only a hug, it won’t emotionally scar her.”

I will never give my daughter the message that she owes someone physical affection, or should be okay with her boundaries being crossed if it was “not a big deal” or “nothing was meant by it” or “they’re just playing” or whatever.

I know it’s meant innocently. But if you grow up hearing “You can’t say no to being touched if the intentions aren’t bad,” then you eventually internalize that.

They’re “Just Playing,” so you’re a prude if you tell them to stop touching you.

“It’s not even a big deal,” so you’re a bitch if you get mad about being groped.

They “feel like you don’t love them” if you reject their physical advances, so you get guilted into things you don’t feel totally okay with.

Yes, familial and platonic touch are very different from romantic and sexual touch. But the message is the same—“Regardless of whether you want to be touched, these acts of affection are expected from you, and you’re wrong to refuse them.” You don’t think that message gets internalized, and applied to other relationships?

We teach very young children that they don’t have bodily autonomy, and then we’re surprised when they grow up not understanding consent. It has to start young.

It starts with asking permission—“Can I hug you?” “Can I have a kiss?” “Do you want the tickle monster to get you?”

It starts with setting an example on enforcing boundaries—“Mommy needs some space right now, can you please stop climbing on me?” “I don’t really feel like a kiss, I don’t feel good right now. How about a high-five instead?”

Most importantly, it starts with giving your child permission to say no, and always, always respecting that “No.”

My goal is for my daughter to be so accustomed to her “no” being answered with a full stop—no attempts at persuasion, no guilt, no “it’s not a big deal”—that the idea of someone NOT listening to “no” is completely foreign and jarring. I want her to be shocked and appalled at the audacity of anyone who tries to touch her without her permission.

I want her to see persistence without consent as a MASSIVE RED FLAG, and that’s not going to happen if I start off by teaching her as a child that she owes physical affection to people who love her.

I’m trying to teach my daughter that she always, ALWAYS has autonomy over her own body, no matter who she’s with or how much they love her, and that I will always have her back against anyone who dares to disrespect that.

#repost of someone else’s content #Medium repost #parenting #youth rights #youthlib #abuse culture #assault cw

[enjolraean]

TERFs be like

“We’re not trans-exclusionary! We include trans men in our feminism, they’re our ““sisters”” too!”

*proceed to fight against language that includes trans men in necessary reproductive healthcare and rights*

*refuse to listen to the lived experience of trans men and the unique struggles they face in comparison to cis people of either (binary) sex*

*victim-blame transmasc survivors of s//xual assault bc they went into men’s spaces and apparently that justifies fucking r//pe*

*just outright insult transmasc bodies with no provocation, for fun I guess?*

#trans rights #anti terf #terf #trans inclusive feminism #really sounds like you just hate gender nonconformity and trans men but okay #assault cw

[jackexmachina]

Sam "if you think I’m gonna blame you or judge you…I’m not." Winchester would not think less of/blame/etc. Dean for any of the assaults he's experienced. He just wouldn't.

A ghost forcibly kisses him to accuse him of cheating in *the pilot*, it's heavily implied Lucifer assaulted him in every possible way, and he is raped under the influence of a spell in s12.

can y'all just stop making up shit about him god damn...

#s.a #rape cw #assault cw #meanwhile dean says the reaper cas ''banged'' (*was sexually assaulted by) was hot... ok #please ask to tag!

[lizardsfromspace]

Wild that so many people are now leaning on the idea that ostracizing rich abusers who never really owned up to it or suffered consequences is some purity culture thing and not a "they shouldn't be able to hurt other people" thing. They treat it as entirely an abstract culture war issue and not one where the stakes are the safety of people who work and exist around them

A comedian will win an award and their defenders will go "funny is all that matters! what, do you expect your plumber to not be problematic???" like. Yes, I would prefer a plumbing company to not defend employees who make people watch them masturbate and then get them blacklisted from the industry for fighting back. I would prefer that they not welcome them back with open arms, declare it's wrong to "cancel" them, and give them a Plumber of the Year award while doing nothing to prevent them from hurting people in the future or to support the people they hurt in the past

#assault cw #abuse cw

[dathen]

Now that we’ve seen vampire hypnosis in practice, I feel it is yet another detail that casts a different light over Jonathan’s stay at Dracula’s castle, particularly the scene with the roommates.

Was Jonathan’s sudden urge to defy Dracula by sleeping in the dusty ladies’ quarters entirely his own idea, or were there echos of Lucy’s trip to the graveyard in that choice? And while the whole scene is a Rich Text for Victorian sexuality and implications etc etc, Jonathan finding that he wants the women to bite him as he lies helpless and waiting also fits into place as a vampire-induced trance. They attempted to cast a similar trance on him towards the end of his stay; he snaps out of it just in time and flees back to safety.

It also gives us a glimpse of what Lucy’s going through right now—except the one barging in to stop it always comes just a moment too late. And just like Jonathan, she likely wakes wondering if it was just a dream.

#dracula daily #lucy westenra #jonathan harker #assault cw #whenever I say ‘rich text’ please hear it in a Michael Hobbes voice

[byanyan]

ㅤthere's blood everywhere. it marks your hands and stains your lips, streaks down the front of your shirt and soaks the knees that press into the cold, hard concrete. some of it is yours, but you know most of it is his. his, the body that lay lifeless next to you in a puddle of brilliant crimson which only seems to spread.

ㅤyou didn't mean for this to happen. you didn't want this to happen.

a choice made of necessity. a decision he forced you to make. he, who didn't even know you, who had an awful lot of disgusting words to spew about you, despite knowing nothing of you. hand like a vice around the back of your neck, fingertips tickling and soon pressing in on your throat... he was bigger than you, capable of a great deal of damage which he seemed intent on causing.

ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤyou had no choice.

him or you, and while you're not so sure you deserve to be the one left standing either, that familiar survival instinct of a cornered animal kicked in regardless, the same way it always has. scrabbling hands turned to desperate punches turned to the bright, colourful blade of your knife stained just one colour with each panicked stab. even as his grip finally loosened, blade continued to puncture flesh over and over and over until the body toppled to the ground.

ㅤyou couldn't risk it. you couldn't take that chance that he might be able to follow you, might be able to do worse. you've let them go before, after all, and nine times out of ten they came back believing you to be the one in the wrong. blaming you for defending yourself against them.

you've dug yourself into a hole — a desperate, pathetic little hole — and you want nothing more than to scream. to release all the emotions causing you to tremble as you kneel on the ground. to release it, let it all go, and finally be free of it...

ㅤbut you know that's not how it works. and you're not sure you'll ever be able to stop screaming if you let yourself start now.

instead, you pick yourself up off the ground, trying to not let your eyes wander to the face you know will be haunting your sleep for the foreseeable future, and you run. you run like you always have, but you don't let yourself look back. you learned better than that a long time ago.

#when u lie down for a depression nap after only being awake for like 3 hours #and come out with a drabble about ur muse killing someone in self defence at 14 instead #gonna just go ahead and post this bc if i think about it too much i'll delete the whole thing instead asjkds #that's just the kind of day i'm having idfk #━━ ˟ ⊰ ✰ drabble. #assault cw #death cw #murder cw #ask to tag if i missed anything

[conduitandconjurer]

🙌 oh why not. might have to get creative, though.

Send 🙌 to strangle my muse (no longer accepting)!

It's Reginald's clipped, nasal voice in his head.

The first line of defense upon attempted strangulation is to blind your opponent!

Klaus isn't exactly the type of person known for fighting back against adversity: not with the more conventionally recognized forms of battle. But it's even harder to fight off this spindly, bruised child who will never know the exhilaration of living in a safe skin, the way Klaus, after years of the hard-to-recognize type of fighting, has.

He can't fight a protege who, if time for Klaus were linear, would have been his mentor.

He can't push his goddamned fingers into BJ's sad scared eyes and scoop them from their sockets. Like, fuck training, Jesus. The kid's crying, right now, while assailing him.

Get with the program, Number Four!

Shut up, dad. Remember your "gift" to me: it's not like it'll be permanent.

"Beej...!"

His own voice is haggard. Dissociation tries to bleed into the corners of his thoughts, makes him wonder, not for the first time, lately, why so many people feel entitled to lay their hands on some part of his body.

"Beej--Tangy--hk!...Dream, what'd I do? Stop...!"

He smacks the young prostitute's cheeks, imploring gently, and then insistently, and then a little savagely.

Klaus begins to black out; his eyes glow a veil-piercing teal and he is out. Bright light, the same hue, his ribcage its lantern, and then an explosion. The force throws BJ back a good six, seven feet.

Klaus collapses awkwardly on his face. He sits up and gawks through a mop of curls.

"The fuck--? Did I just go into the....fricken....Avatar State, or somethin'?"

Green eyes shift toward the waif's face. Anger and grief sink in, rapidly clouding over the comical shock.

'Why'd you hurt me, man? Whatever you needed, you coulda just asked! Like, damn! I'm super fuckin' chill, okay?! "

#ofyorkshire #ic #tangerine dream (BJ) #crossover: Red Riding Trilogy #implied abuse cw #strangulation cw #assault cw

[onlyjaeyun]

YES! I haven't read the book but the whole stalking thing is a no no for me, and the way people talk about the book plus snippets and things I've read makes me feel like it isn't worth spending my money on so it's hard pass ( also hot take: the whole 'little mouse' thing made me cringe plus the whole glorifying r*pe part )

anywayss have you heard about the book where a woman fucks a door? :3 - 💫

haunting adeline is one of my roman empires in the worst way possible and mostly for the reasons you just listed...the fmc is so empty and lowk boring, the mmc is the biggest hypocrite bc how you gonna go and fo THAT as a profession and then turn around and sa the woman you claim to """"love"""" which is solely based on her looks and what he's seen of her..the writing itself is mid at best and the storyline is just so fucked up and lowk boring. plus, the fact the author is so, so comfortable with writing such explicit and detailed assault scenes makes me gag i literally couldn't sleep after reading the first part of the sequel because of how detailed everything was...whoever says their fave book is haunting sdeline is in my dark list bc what the FUCK 🫣

and omg no i haVENT WTF BESTIE 😭😭😭

#; mailbox 📬 #sa cw #assault cw #rape cw

[mmmmalo]

Slurquest

This is an exploratory post proposing several approaches for apprehending Homestuck (Alternia in particular) in terms of racism and homophobia. Results vary.

For various reasons, I feel the frameworks are best introduced through analogous microcosms. I have a nascent personal canon of films which are not* referenced in Homestuck, but which nonetheless function as potent paratexts for the apprehension of its narrative constructs. The foremost member is Forbidden Planet, a film involving a machine that draws the violent fantasies of a man's dreams into reality, creating monsters that enact his otherwise repressed anger. SBURB deploys a similar mechanism: the game's boot log concludes with the phrase "launching manifestation systems", and accordingly we later see that imps, ogres, and trolls are all born from psychological fissures in a given player, manifesting from the emergent anxieties of the people they target. Comparing the content of an altercation with the (apparently traumatic) event that preceded it (and therefore induced it) offers a peek into the pathologies of the triggered**/accosted characters. Eg ogres climb up the side of the house immediately after John experiences vertigo, indicating a deep-seated fear of falling.

* afaik

** No, we are not using "triggered" as a pejorative. Not yet at least. And when we do, it won't be the way you think.

Recently my canon gained another entry: John Carpenter's Halloween. It share with Homestuck a love of "misrepresentation", in both its playfully duplicitous and racially fraught senses, as well as a certain preoccupation with paranoia.

Halloween (1978) is about a masked man (Michael), recently escaped from an insane asylum, stalking and killing the suburban teens of his hometown. Michael's former psychologist (Loomis), firmly persuaded that Michael is the very embodiment of Evil, refashions himself as a hunter and lies in wait with a gun at Michael's childhood home. The home, abandoned and left to rot after a young Michael murdered his sister there on a past Hallows' Eve, has come to be regarded by locals as a "spook house"; trick-or-treaters dare eachother to brave its haunted steps. The unseen Loomis seeks to deter these tiny trespassers for their own safety. But the deterrence method Loomis chooses is strange: he puts on a Big Black Guy voice and, feigning ownership of the homestead, tells the kids to get lost. Elsewhere in the film, a bit of set dressing echoes this choice: in the midst of an otherwise pristine suburb of green grass and bleached white houses, we glimpse of a patch of black graffiti on the sidewalk that simply says EVIL. An impression begins to form that the metanarrative rationale for describing Michael as a bogeyman, for insinuating that beneath his white mask is a formless shadow, is that despite Michael's whiteness, he functions as a vehicle for racialized fantasies of invasion. The insane asylum, seen only at night, represents the chaotic city. Michael's presence brings the night to the suburbs, and with it all the urban terrors (black) from which the suburbanites (white) thought themselves insulated. Spooky!

While there might be an edifying function to this deception (I came away from the film with a deep contempt for the fear mongering psychologist, personally), I mostly tend to think of Halloween as a good, mean prank: like Caliborn disguising his king as a queen and relishing Calliope's outsized responses to its impotent threats, Carpenter crafts a black killer ensconsed in white and proceeds to giggle at the viewership's unwitting investment in a racist narrative for which Carpenter himself holds no sympathy -- or so I imagine, believing as I do that such a game would be in accord with the spirit of Halloween's mischievious namesake.

( I sometimes wonder if James Cameron was playing a similar game when he cast a white man named SCHWARZENEGGER as the face of an imminent genocidal uprising of once subservient machines. But anyway )

Betty Crocker is only the surface of Hussie's engagement with conspiracy. Homestuck, like Halloween, is built upon veiled allusions to reactionary paranoia. John's vertigo is relative; what John perceives as a "fall" can be fruitfully reframed as "the ascent of that which was once below". John takes note of an increasingly grim Rose's ascent to power and roleplays a return to gender norms ("ironically" of course), soothing the vertigo of social mobility with the image of Sleeping Beauty. Alternia, though ostensibly located in the unthinkably distant past, in turn functions as a reactionary nightmare vision of the future: it is a world dominated by BLACKS and HOMOS, and therefore post-apocalyptic. This is evinced by Homestuck's playful self-censorship: the story contains various euphemisms for n*ggers and f*ggots, through which the racism and homophobia become associated with a more familiar medium for paranoia, the casts' anxious regard toward the fourth wall. The denotation of slurs, therefore, will be our organizing principle.

Part A: Racist Slurs

Gamzee uses "ninja" as a sugar free "nigga" in the Epilogues; terms of endearment like "my ninja" and the like. As it turns out, this usage can be projected backward into the early acts: the phrase "NINJA SWORD" acts as a euphemism for "N-WORD", such that Dave hurling his blade at a crow can represent hurling slurs at a black person (It just slipped out. Dave is distraught). That a flock of crows would later, in a dream, represent for Dave the innumerable portals of the 4th wall through which he observes himself is thus consistent with the racial connotations of the term "peanut gallery"*, which was invoked in Act 1 to describe John's "allergy" (ie fear) of the judgemental gazes of others. The allergy joke is followed by an early hint of Her Imperious Condescension (a "Hi-C" commercial), a villain with black speech affectations whose title connects her to the peanut gallery's scorn, and who is eventually defeated by a NINJA SWORD**.

* The peanut gallery is also racialized via allusions to Charles Schultz's Peanuts: Snoop Dogg's visage watermarks the proceeding when John is commanded to Snoop on Rose (1693), and the resident Brown Charlies (Barkley and Duttle) are presented as a philosophical visionary and a dreaming prophet, respectively (1706, 2988).

** Technically it's Dirk's UNBREAKABLE KATANA, but the pejorative-encoding of "ninja sword" transfer to the "anime sword" preferred by Act 6.

So racial minorities are associated with the gaze of the audience, peeking in from the 4th wall -- a motif originating in Problem Sleuth, where the literal 4th wall of Problem Sleuth's office was peppered with the eyes of minorities, faces on a mural celebrating racial diversity. The veiled pejorative of NINJA SWORD channels aggression (and other emotions) towards both concepts.

Another paratext, this time embedded in Homestuck: Deep Impact, for which John has a poster, is about fears of white replacement. An early scene takes care to associate the word "waves" with both the soundwaves of black musicians (Elle Fitzegerald, Duke Ellengton [sic]) and tidal waves (yet another ELE, the "Extinction Level Event" which drives the film). The film's black president and his prodigious voice* are thus presented as existential threats on par with the imminent flooding of the Earth, recontextualizing various responses to watery doomsday as abstracted reactions to the rise of black people in America. Homestuck draws upon this association of blackness and water, beginning with the Lalonde household (where the lights are out and the air is filled with the sound of running water), continuing in Barkley's association with oceans and "dunking", and perhaps culminating in the black-affecting Condesce's flooding of the Earth. In the middle though, we have Alternia, which is a somewhat drier fantasy of a world overtaken by blackness. 3 points:

1. The highest echelons of Alternian society are black-coded, and rap is an aristocratic art form.

Gamzee and Equius makes this difficult to miss, but a subtler point is that this cultural ascendance makes blackness aspirational: Karkat, for example, seems to express racial envy (like gender envy, but for black people).

Gamzee manifests after Karkat looks over his Thresh Prince poster, implying that Gamzee's presence as a black-ish voice is an elaboration on Karkat's feelings toward Troll Will Smith. It might seem odd that despite Karkat calling Smith his hero, he expresses nothing but contempt for Gamzee's mode of speech. But admiration and hostility are reconciled by envy*. Karkat's irritation towards Gamzee's miracles (ie being dazzled by the richness of sensation) is underlaid by a sense of injustice, that Gamzee (by merit of his "blackness") has access to sensational joys that are inacessible to Karkat. Gamzee protests that explanations steal the magic from his miracles; Karkat on some level agrees, and exists in a state of feeling robbed.

* Another reconciliation, and one that we'll see a lot of, lies in the simple fact that this world of black predomination is conceived as a racist construction. Therefore, anti-black sentiment persists within it. Even so, envy is a useful paradigm.

Over the course of the story, we can see hints that Karkat wishes to reclaim that "stolen" blackness: finding identification with a "black guy" through Will Smith's sickle and Jack Noir's shared blood; Karkat assuming the mantle of his ancestor, who Suffered in chains; Karkat dressing up as Geromy for Halloween ("karkats problematic nobody tell him" says Dave); Karkat regarding* Dave's assertion that he is "so much more than Obama" as an insurmountable expression of love... but more on Karkat later.

* Dirk was narrating, but his words are bound to the thoughts characters were already going to think, much the same as Vriska's timeline interference in Act 5 asserts responsibility for things that were already going to happen.

1a. The apparent esteem for hoofbeasts is a subset of black cultural ascendence; horses are yet another veiled pejorative.

Dirk draws attention to the proximity of "nicker" to "nigger" in Detective Pony by injecting the phrase "vile slurs omitted" afterward, a gag echoed in the mosaic that fails to obscure a highly offensive horse dildo belonging to Horuss, who similarly observes that "Trigger" sounds like a wonderful name for a hoofbeast. Equius is obsessed with submission, but Zebruh is an outright slaver. We might in this vein construe John's traumatic fall from the slime pogo (the probable origin of the fear that manifested as ogres) as a racist's reframing of the end of slavery, a sense of having been unfairly bucked off one's horse. For illustrative purposes, I've taken the liberty of replacing the word "niggers" with "horses" in an old comic of Hussies:

The original joke being that the speaker's enthusiasm is tethered to a sense of domination. As a followup, here's an excerpt from page 7689, in which I've taken the liberty of replacing the word "horses" with "niggers":

(Vriska): What do you think, Meenah?

MEENAH: aboat what

(Vriska): Niggers!!!!!!!!

MEENAH: ummmm

MEENAH: they ok

MEENAH: kinda dumb and smelly

MEENAH: be makin like

MEENAH: fucked up sounds out their big ass snouts and floppy lips

Meenah here distances herself from black speech and bodies. It bears repeating that our cast subsists within a racist world; even "black" characters can express racism.

2. Miscegenation is a central paradigm of Alternian sexuality.

Anxious allusions to race-mixing have come up before: John's books make short disparaging references to "listless octoroons" (69, 629); Lil Cal manifests three panels after we see naked black & white puppets chained to each other (448); and ICP's depiction as evil (literally the result of combining Laurel and Hardy with the ecto-essence of Hitler, according to the cursed lore) is a result of their being the exemplar of whiteness "tainted" by blackness, a cultural spin on miscegenation. They are evil /because/ they are white rappers, their monochrome facepaint emphasizing the admixture.

I could go on. But the main point is,

"White" + "black" = gray, hence the trolls.

2a. "Slurry" was a hint. Troll reproduction is described by the phrase "incestuous slurry" not only because trolls impart their genetic material to their own mother, but also because "motherfucker" is used near exclusively by characters affecting blackness. The Freudian Oedipus is black, and mother he fucks is paradigmatically white: in one case, following the conclusion of WV's chess game, black's resounding victory over white is immediately provided a natal counterpart in the form of BROWN liquid erupting from the belly of a PINK can of Tab*. This association of childbirth/hatching with (racial) uprising later returns via Tavros, a brown-blood whose game of Fiduspawn (which spawns a horse, appropriately enough) prefigures his links to the Summoner's rebellion.

* As though in reaction to WV, the white-carapaced PM carries two letters bearing the postage marks of Rhodesia, the defunct colonial government of what is now Zimbabwe (896). There are two colored stamps bearing the name to her right, and a notice regarding "Southern [Rhodesia] Stamps" to her left.

2b. The example of WV and the racial polarization of mother & child inform us that miscegenation is being construed in terms of black men acting upon white women. This arrangement suggests the possibility of latent racial tensions in the mother/child dynamic of Porrim and Kankri, and we find them: within Porrim's critique of Alternian patriarchy, there are traces of antiblackness. When Porrim encourages Latula to cease performing for the public gaze and "be herself", she singles out Latula's black-flavored speech affectations for elimination, first striking at the proliferate 'yo' and Latula's use of zees for pluralz, then expressing contempt for the phrase "all up inz". Explaining Kankri's racial entanglement requires a digression.

2c. In another point of commonality, horses and black men are both sexually stereotyped by prodigious cock size -- modern miscegenation porn often advertises itself under the label BBC, "big black cock". In MSPA, the racialized gaze of the 4th wall is itself construed as a phallic intruder, a BBC. One example of this is in the Intermission, where Snowman weilds a whip called "Black Inches", a euphemism for dick borrowed from a black gay porn magazine*. Snowman seizes Spades Slick's arm with the whip and leaves him humiliated. This scene functions as a violent repetition of a prior humiliation, in which Snowman does no more than observe Slick goofing off: in this instance her very eyes are the Black Inches**, and the embarrassed Slick relieves himself of the horse hitcher between his legs in the emasculating gaze's wake.

* The magazine Black Inches shows up in Jail Break (50).

** Since the zigzag of a lightning bolt is used to represent the scratch of a disk, and the tendrils of the Red Miles represent tears in the fabric of reality, it seems likely that Black Inches would in some sense be yonic as well as phallic -- but one thing at a time.

A still earlier example is found in Problem Sleuth, where the massive eye of a horrorterror peeks through the 4th wall, its massive tendrils probe Ace Dick, and the violated AD walks away in shame, recalling the shame he was made to feel for being fat in his youth. The idea is that the probing tentacles ARE the judgemental gaze. The outer gods in Homestuck are similarly racialized. The brown skin of the Duttle (alchemical fusion of Charles Dutton and Squiddles) perturbs Jade because the tentacles now look like black dicks. Rose borrows a fear of water from Deep Impact*: Rose's "avarice for the inscrutable", her interest in drowning amid the Deep Ones, becomes associated with Charles Barkley via the "Chaos Dunk" John performs in her slumber. Later, the reference to tentacle rape in Rose's chumhandle is made manifest when Doc Scratch "smothers [her] with surprise noodles" (3632), his barrage of inscrutable question marks teasingly sexualized, after which the now-darkened Rose gets rendered as the basketball player from SBaHJ. Again, both Brown Charlies are associated with the Peanut gallery. And the gaze of the Horrorterrors is further racialized by a name: "Oglogoth" as in "gothic ogle" as in "dark leer".

* Is the aversion to water also part of Rose's cat motifs? The phobia was initiated by Jaspers' apparent drowning after all...

The etymology of Darkleer is our path back to Kankri: the omnipresent glare of the red sun is synonymous with the dark, leering ogles of the 4th wall. This is likely why Gl'ybgolyb has the title "the Rift's Carbuncle", the carbuncle being a mythic, glowing ruby. Latula's black affectations are referred to as "rad" to emphasize the link between redness and blackness. Porrim tells Latula to stop performing and be herself, but the red blooded Kankri (who finds fault in all) embodies the judgemental gaze to whom performance is addressed, a point underlined when Kankri informs Latula that he is ALWAYS WATCHING HER, even in moments she believes to be totally private. This gaze is, again, phallic: Dave, the first to be haunted by the red glow of endless webcams, rejects the criticism of the readership by slicing apart the phrase "insufferable prick". This literal reading of "prick" (and its connection to judgement) is one justification for transforming the Kankri's mythic title of the Sufferer into the Insufferable -- he is the prick. For this all these reasons, we can assert that all the terms emphasizing the length of Kankri's judgemental red diatribes ("prohibitously loquacious harangue", "enormous in progressive virtue") are coded references to Big Black Cock*. Poor, innocent Karkat takes the brunt of it.

* One wonders if Horuss's usage of "Trigger" as a minced oath retroactively casts the n-word over all of Kankri's meticulous content tags. "Nigger warning"

3. The elimination of the limebloods was white genocide*.

The blood of the cherubim establishes that lime is the opposite of candy red, so if red=black, lime=white. The racial element of black/white is emphasized by Caliborn affecting black speech (eg KNIFE A BITCH, eg MONEY AS FUCK)** while Calliope is an avowed teaboo (how convenient that the chief pejorative for English people is "limey"). Caliborn kills Calliope, breaks his chains, and escapes to a freedom encoded by decayed Statues of Liberty, lying in the sand -- a reference to the Planet of the Apes, yet another movie about black ascent in the social order (and the fear that this consigns whiteness to oblivion). It follows that the elimination of the limebloods, retroactively framed as Lord English repeating his predomination over Calliope, his "mating" her, likewise encodes a triumph of black over white (which again is also a central paradigm of Alternian sexuality: miscegenation).

* At the risk of contradicting myself, I should note a reservation here: if Caliborn relishes painting his words in Calliope's blood, and ICP is characterized a white affectation of blackness, would it not be sensible to regards the death of lime as a black genocide, after which black speech was appropriated? As though, in the spirit of the "I LOVE NIGGERS" comic, laying claim to group-exclusive language and asserting dominance over that group go hand in hand? I suspect that the lime-as-black account might be superimposed on lime-as-white, as though the reversal of Halloween's Michael were here bi-directional -- colonization likely being the framework in which masculine-white acts upon feminine-black. But we'll talk about bivalent cocks and James Cameron's Avatar shortly.

** Caliborn-as-black grounds his claim (leveled at Jane) that "bitch" and other pejoratives are actually terms of endearment in a distorted understanding of AAVE, as though the use of "bad" to mean "good" were a universal principle. Jane listens to rap music and cries dot jpeg.

Part B: Homophobic Slurs

THEY'RE ALL MEN. BECAUSE I SAY THEY ARE. AND I WANT THEM TO BE.

IF I BELIEVE HARD ENOUGH IN THEM BEING MEN.

THEN THAT FACT BECOMES ABSOLUTELY INDISPUTABLE AS A PERMANENT MAN REALITY.

(Caliborn, concerning the Felt)

If the paradigm of miscegenation dictates that men are "black" and women "white", it follows that the white genocide of the limebloods was also a mass femicide -- yet another retroactive repetition of Caliborn killing Calliope. Every motherfucker on the planet submits genetic material to the Mothergrub, not a soul gestates, and therefore everyone on Alternia is "male", just as Caliborn desires. The castes adjacent to the missing lime might gesture at the womb (Nepeta's bloody cave, Kanaya's midwifery), but all reproduction occurs via "gay sex". Male-on-female miscegenation is abstracted into a paradigm of gender relations, only having any bearing on material relations by way of analogy. The world has been overcome not only by blackness, but by gayness.

A consequence of the above is that EVERY GIRL ON ALTERNIA IS A TRANS GIRL. Roleplay is coded as a feminine activity not only in replication of real world perceptions of rp communities, but to associate Alternian women writ large with performance. FLARP is a "game for girls" not (just) because girls are more dangerous but because girls roleplay, categorically. Feferi describes her cuttlefish rescue as a roleplaying scenario, Nepeta is Nepeta. Kanaya... is perhaps best approached by contrast with Karkat.

Karkat is likely the only exception to the all-male rule: his status as a mutant lime blood implicates him as Alternia's only surviving female, and thus its only trans man*, red concealing lime. His aforementioned race envy would then double as gender envy, blackness being the Alternian paradigm of masculinity. Karkat chose his sickle in imitation of Troll Will Smith, later emphasizing the connection with the sickle HOMES SMELL YOU LATER, likewise a Thresh Prince reference. Kanaya's love of fashion (of "the aesthetic over the utilitarian") is a statement of her transfemininity, while Karkat's utilitarian insistence that trolls think fashion is stupid becomes an anxious assertion that his masculinity in non-mediated, as though a hint of performance in his demeanor would out him. The nubby horns, the suggestion of menses from the Blood aspect symbol, the jokes about hysteric fits, & the love of romcoms... they all begin to seem like tells. Does Porrim insist Kankri wear a sweater in order to censor the female presenting nipples, I wonder.

* I've heard Sollux was presented as a trans man in his Pesterquest route (I haven't played Pesterquest). I think Vriska route's presentation of her as a trans girl was correct, so the Sollux route makes me wonder if this approach is wrong-headed. OH WELL

Karkat shoosh-papping Gamzee (the sound effects are in lime) becomes an image of "white female" soothing the "black male" -- "pap" as in pap smear, mother's offering the baby milk. I'd even guess the entire "pale" quadrant is a pun on the pacifying power of whiteness (dairy and racial, but they've been equated through the paradigm of white motherhood) -- this becoming the reason why Equius, our leading example of moirallegiance, loves milk. Does "filial pail" mean "white mother"? Is the powerful horseman shattering the milk container a violent miscegenation joke, as though he breaks the mother? Is that why Karkat (potential white mother) of all people voices the concern (twice!) that contact with Equius will shatter him? DON'T TOUCH ME. Anyway

1. "FAIRY" IS A SLUR

In the wake of Vriska's pesterchum route, tumblr user abraxasgrip posited that Karkat referring to Vriska as FAG (the seemingly accidental acronym of "Future arachnidsGrip") and Vriska's general status as a blue "fairy" should be considered parcel to a trans narrative*. She was right! The entire notion of trolls pupating into butterflies upon ascension is in part a trans allegory, not unlike the modern designation of nascent trans people as "eggs", waiting to hatch.

* For that matter, I half-wonder if "Vrissy" was chosen for its proximity to "sissy".

Earlier I mentioned a racial dimension to the paradigm of birth in Fiduspawn, but here we can focus on the gender. The fairy girls on Tavros's wall are an extension of the urge to fly, as though fairy girls are the butterflies unto which Tavros intends to pupate. Tavros being unable to sink into his cocoon (ie unable to iniate metamorphosis) because of his HUGE HORNS functions as metaphor for bodily dysphoria. Vriska is introduced as one of Tavros's poster made manifest, the fairy ideal to which he aspires, and she denigrates Rufio because his red hair represents a bloody stump, a point of castration*. The ideal feminine dismissing Rufioh as fraudulent and fake emulates taunts that trans women, even following bottom surgery or what have you, will never be "real women". It bears repeating that this Alternia-as-paranoid-fantasy is arose from a homophobic/transphobic world view (one that slurs together all it would describe as feminine men), so characters tend to express the prejudices that drove their own creation.

* In Openbound, Rufioh attempts to "break up" with the dick-faced Horuss 8=D in service of a dysphoria metaphor. Damara, taking a role akin to Vriska's above, locked away Rufioh's "happy thought" to illustrate the corresponding lack of euphoria.

Also, if Karkat is female, "STOP PLAYING GAMES FOR GIRLS" functions not only as one of Karkat's defensive assertions of masculinity, but as yet another example of "real women" denigrating "imitations".

It should be noted here that chasing after the butterfly entails chasing after the cocoon, which bears connotations of death (eg the cherubim use a magic tomb, the sarswapagus, to turn from boy to girl and back). In some cases the objective (the feminine) collapses into the mediator (death), such that femininity is construed as intrinsically morbid. Mommy becomes a mummy, pregnant with scarabs. Jake's interest in blue girls intersects with his love of skulls: When Aranea asks "Do you want me to talk until I'm blue in the face?" Jake gulps not only because of the thought of literal blue skin, but because exhausting one's Breath means death.

We'll talk more about Jake later, because the narrative insinuation of necrophilia that follows him is channeled into a very particular homophobic/transphobic construction, but for now let it suffice that the butterfly Grandpa shoots has the colors of the trans pride flag.

2. HIS HONORABLE "TYRANNY" MEANS "TRANNY"

The Condesce attempted to recreate Alternia on Earth, implementing blood castes and installing (black-tainted) clown presidents in imitation of the Grand Highblood. What then is Guy Fieri supposed to emulate? The cursed lore alleges the name to be a mispronunciation of "guy Feferi", but what does that have to do with his position as a Supreme Court Justice? How is Fieri related to His Honorable Tyranny? The answer is as simple as the names: "Tyranny" means TRANNY*, and "Guy Fieri" sounds like GAY FAIRY.

* I talked about Kankri as a figure of judgement earlier -- I wonder if his status as a trans man has anything to do with the nickname "Kanny"

Terezi is likewise a trans girl, and her kangaroo court functions as a castration fantasy: dragons are phallic, she strings them up. "LEMONSNOUT" means "PISSNOZZLE". ("Lemonsnout represents Vriska!" you protest, "we see Lemonsnout on Terezi's desk when she informs Doc Scratch of the cueball!" To this I reply, "The design of Vriska's dotted eyepatch is lifted from the Goonie's 'One-Eyed Willie', who represents a penis!")

Terezi wishes she could have a baby, you see. When Terezi says her lusus dreams about babies, Karkat says "I thought you didn't have one", and Terezi replies "I don't yet, I'm not allowed to." The omitted subject is doubled: Terezi is allowed neither a lusus nor a baby. This motif plays out again in Terezi's roleplay with Nepeta: the phallic dragon (Terezi refers to the dragon head as her "alarming and splendiferous girth") attempts to steal and consume the child, representing the assumption of pregnancy. Cronus (named after a god who consumes children) similarly has a seahorse lusus in reference to male pregnancy.

Earlier still, this wish is encoded in the crime of Senator Pissnozzle, dipping his snout into a "beetle coffer". The invocation of scarabs implies that the Pissnozzle poked into a mummy, meaning that Terezi (whose name invokes Tiresias, the blind prophet of the play Oedipus Rex) is simultaneously punishing incestuous access to the death-mother and the intrusion of the masculine into the domain of the feminine. As with Terezi and her desire for baby: NOT ALLOWED. This society is at least as homophobic as it is gay.

To wit: when Terezi notes the "unmitigated cheek" of the Senator strutting around with pilfered scarabs beneath his clothes, she is complimenting the Senator's ass. Terezi then recommends the court take recess to puke. This is a compliment of sorts, because vomiting blood is one way trolls produce genetic material: the conversation prior to the trial feature Karkat summoning the image of girls "erupting like a vomit volcano" at the sight of Sollux; this image of bile and fire is followed by a dragon drawn by Terezi, who retches with a BLAR; and the phallic status of dragons informs us that vomiting amounts to ejaculation. Anyway,

When Karkat responds to Terezi's cryptic baby talk with "WE NEED TO GET YOU OUT OF THAT FUCKING TREE AND INTO A PROPER GODDAMN LAWNRING," what we should hear is "GET YOUR HEAD OUT OF THE CLOUDS." It's an early iteration of the infamous "STOP PLAYING GAMES FOR GIRLS" that accompanies Tavros's attempted flight. (Another instance of Blood pulling down an ascendant trans girl: Dave offering bloody bro fistbumps to keep John from blasting off.)

3. "HUMAN CIGARETTE" MEANS "FAG"

Cronus ostensibly couches "human cigarette" in quotation marks to signal that he is introducing new terminology to the conversation, but in much the same way as Caliborn would describe his King as "Queen", readers can take the quotes as indication that some manner of substitution is afoot. The suggestion of euphemism (and the fact that Cronus doesn't smoke the cigarette) doesn't just offer a joke about how Cronus likes putting sticks in his mouth -- it's a comment on Mituna.

"Human cigarette" is a rephrasing of TROLL CAEGAR, Terezi's two headed coin. The precedent of G substitution in TROLL JEGUS allows the cigar pun to slip by unnoticed. The two heads of the coin, and its scratched/unscratched eyes, are quickly embodied in the form of Sollux, who likewise has alternated eyes and two-headed motifs. He even carries on Terezi's abuse of the pissnozzle by slicing through his BEEHOUSE MAINFRAME tower -- the yellow MIND HONEY represents piss. The taste of piss turns Sollux into a vomit volcano, a grandiose iteration of the (imagined) spittake resulting from John drinking pee disguised as apple juice. BLUH! The eruption of lasers from his hivestem resembles ejaculation, again pointing to the reproductive function of disgust.

Now we need to superimpose several points:

a. The blast also signals that "Sollux Captor" (sunlight capacitor) can function as a store of energy, a battery. This was the use to which HIC put the Psiionic, using him to power her ship, a cruelty that Cronus (speaking to Meenah) deploys to defend his own abuse of Mituna. This is one point of convergence between batteries and cigarette/cigar: posing a person a fuel, a resource to be burnt out (hence the emphasis on Mituna being brain-fried).

b. Rose has a small tirade in early act 6 about cigars being a phallic symbol, and we should take her word for it: when Meenah goes to take a bathroom break during the interfission, its not until a newly blind Sollux stumbles into the ship's hold with Meenah that her bladder meter starts to decrease. This is another reference to the Psiionic, posing the yellow-blooded Captors as a pissnozzles awaiting depletion. Meenah quips "like captor like captor" afterwards to underscore this parallel (though she formally only refers to Sollux falling down, as Mituna is prone to do).

The dick is a synecdoche of the boy, and as the GameGrl theme tells us, GIRLS RULE & BOYS DROOL. Which is to say, girls and boys are posed as defacto mother/child pairs, because children (being black boys) are all "motherfuckers" in the Oedipal sense. But on Alternia, access to the mother is mediated so the little gay babies (to borrow Meulin's turn of phrase) all have to fuck eachother instead. Hence, "human cigarettes" (ie troll caegars, ie batteries) are fags.

4. "FAYGO" ALSO MEANS "FAG"

Drinking Faygo is synonymous with kissing a dead head, such that Gamzee's soda habit prefigures his attempted revival of Tavros. A shot of Aradia decapitating a frog statue (2065) cuts directly to Eridan picking up a red Faygo. Later, Gamzee advises Eridan to "chug that shit like you and the bottle was reunited lovers", invoking a passionate kiss. Eridan does so, upon which we see Feferi revive Sollux (the Caegar) with a passionate kiss. Eridan demurs on the spittake, but Karkat gags, and Spades Slick consummates the gesture with a reference to puking blood.

Later on, the most dramatic boy-on-boy kiss of the story replicates this structure: Jake takes the bleeding head of Dirk and kisses him to life. Onlookers gag, and a vomit volcano erupts in the background. Bluh.

But hey, on the subject of Jake breathing life into dead people,

5. "WINDBAG" ALSO ALSO MEANS "FAG"

Here we'll need to be familiar with an aspect of Homestuck's metaphysics again, so let's proceed from Jade's fear of lightning:

a. Jade's first imp manifests after she spies a yellow aurora coursing through the sky in the shape of a lightning bolt. Since imps appear in response to psychic turmoil, this establishes that for whatever reason, lightning is a source of fear for Jade. Furthermore, the imp arrives in a reproduction of Bec's introduction, associating Bec with this fear of lightning.

b. Elaboration on the phobia arrives in the form of 1. the image of Johnny 5 being struck by lightning and assuming consciousness and 2. the corpse of dream!Jade being animated by the infusion of Becsprite, after which she immediately requests death. What Jade fears is no less than life itself: life is regarded as a coarse intrusion upon the serenity of death.

c. Another way to put it: in conceiving of her very life as originating from a numinous elsewhere, Jade becomes terrified that the will coarsing through her body is not her own, that she is an automaton, a puppet. But the terror is selective. Note that during her introduction, Jade only attributes her failures to alien wills: the discordant flute play and botched memory game are framed (by Jade) as reader interactive segments, while kickass bass solos and success with the modus are framed (by Jade) as a consequence of Jade assuming total control.

d. The flute example is instructive: another name for the spark of life, the divine pneuma, is Breath. Hence when Tavros attempts to revive Vriska, we see the Breath aspect symbol flow from his mouth. For whatever reason, Jade seems to regard Grandpa as the source of her (unwanted!) Breath, despite his being dead: she disparagingly refers to him as a "bag of wind" while recalling one of his old tirades. When Jade nearly shoots herself but instead shoots Grandpa, suicide and murder are rendered synonymous insofar as Jade is striking out at (someone presented as) the source of Breath. The puppet cuts its strings and is motionless forever.

e. Corpse kissing arises from more than necessity: rescuscitation has apparent overtones of necrophilia. Caliborn illustrates this when he claims Calliope will leave a truly "breathtaking" corpse. Jake's intro drags him into this paradigm with a joke in which the phrase "beating a dead horse" is twisted into the visceral "assaulting the mushy carcass of a horse who passed away long ago", playing upon the sexual dimension of "assault". Blue girls are beutifully dead and the pneuma is seemingly phallicized. Grandpa had Jade's corpse sitting around for a long time.

f. So it came to seem that Jade's relationship with Grandpa had undertones of sexual assault. It became unnerving that Jade seemed to go grimbark at the sight of Jake's banana hammock, that Jade's corpse fell from the sky in Candy at the mention of rape, that another will takes over Jade's body when Meat!Roxy muses that ectobiology did not require their consent to make them make babies. Jadesprite's desperation to die, to empty herself of Pneuma, obtained a connotation of uninvited semen, the memory of which could trigger extreme responses. It seemed frivolous that Jade's dreambot beat up Grandpa's effigy while dream!Jade pummeled the Courtyard Droll, but the association turned ominous when CD killed Jade with an explosion of white goop as a lightning aurora coursed overhead... in short, all signs seemed to indicate Grandpa was a rapist. I'm still somewhat convinced this is true.

But its also true that Homestuck is a conspiracy theory, self-consciously depicting homophobia. A nudge towards a paradigm shift arrives when Jane compared Jake to Arrested Development's Tobias Funke: "How could he not see the pain he was causing with his oblivious demeanor, his repressed feelings of attraction toward men, and his total inability to understand other people's feelings in spite of his credentials as an analrapist?" The message being, much as ICP is framed as evil by dint of being "tainted" with blackness, a Grandpa might be framed as a rapist by dint of being gay. Suddenly the ominous pneumatic dimension of Jade calling Grandpa a "bag of wind" seemed to be a consequence of the more readily apparent contempt Jade has for Grandpa's overwrought manner of speaking. Jade (or else the narrative to which both Grandpa and Jade are subjected) uses "bag of wind", and the elaborate metaphysical assault narrative it invokes, to call Grandpa a faggot.

This filter can superimposed on much of what seemed ominous. The impression that grimbark Jade was triggered by traumatic memories of Jake's groin wraps back around to her open contempt for the garments: she responds negatively to Jake's undies because they're REALLY FUCKING GAY (derogatory). Jade spurning the gift of Ahab's Crosshair (a symbol of lightning, and thus phallic life) becomes inseperable from Eridan's contempt for human reproduction (ew! pussy is gross!)... and speaking of lightning, we've discussed the pneuma's relation to life but less so it's relation to will.

6. "COLONIZER" MEANS "SODOMIZER"

Emphasis on "colon". The gist is that fags, in their femininity, are conceptualized as tresspassers upon the virgin land of womanhood. Recall a dream Jake had, remixing a scene from James Cameron's Avatar, a film in which a colonial soldier is able to assume the body of the blue skinned natives. Jake speaks exploitation and condescension: "Ooh Neytiri, I'm learning so much about myself through your primitive culture." Jake awakens to find Neytiri replaced with Aranea, another "blue girl" upon whom the fantasy of bodily possession is transferred, presumably possessing as much sexism as the quote had primitivism.

A more involved example would be Damara, and her apparent possession by arch-colonist Lord English:

a. Rufioh's use of "doll" in reference to Damara implicitly compares her to the host plush of Fiduspawn, suggesting that she is in some sense a lifeless vessel through which some other thing perpetuates itself. (Which applies to literally everyone in the story, this being fiction, but it becomes a point of focus here.) Damara speaks in staccato bursts like Caliborn, which in light of the above could suggest she is literally "possessed" by Lord English, being puppeted around by an alien life force that moves through her (again, Fiduspawn)

This sense of possession is compounded by Damara being "fake" Japanese -- per tumblruser fishmech, her Google-translated speech is likely diegetic, meaning Damara's sloppy Japanese is acquired and she's what might be called "Japanese kin" in the context of Openbound's various otherkin characters and internet archetypes. Alternatively, we have the standard understanding that Beforan Japanese is intrinsically a “fallen” form of the Japanese that exists as-we-see-it on Alternia, with the caveat that Caliborn is the demiurge responsible for the generation of this degraded form -- and that Caliborn is the one who kins sexy anime girls (his admiration of the self-creating girl on the How To Draw Manga Cover comes to mind), making Damara his avatar/self-insert, and leading us back to the motif of possession.

But this could be folded back into the subjective experience of a Japanese-kin Damara, as though she perceives her seeming inability to be “authentic” as the fault of a cruel and/or incompetent God -- or rather, it is only through the eyes of God (the reader) that Damara's language is degraded, but since Damara sees herself through our eyes, the apparent inauthenticity of Damara's Japanese communicates a subjective sense of inauthenticy which Damara feels towards her own speech. Sometimes the gap between character and authorial voice in Homestuck is brought to attention to underscore a feeling of profound alienation in a given character, a sense of not belonging in their own skin... dysphoria, in other words.

b. As mentioned earlier, the paradigm of colonization also has a racial element to it, seemingly reversing the black/white coding of masculine/feminine as explored elsewhere. "Damara is Japanese tho" you say. "Ninja means nigga" I remind you.

Conclusion

God I wish I knew how to conclude this. The organizing principle of offensive puns is all that kept this profane intersectionality together. My only real thesis is that I believe we've been pranked, and that the ability to recognize the discursive twists that constitute the deception (or rather, our collective misreading) seems broadly useful. Beyond that, I don't know. I'm not even certain I've done an adequate job separating the metaphorical from the literal on Alternia, to whatever degree those two things are distinct. My head is swimming. I believe some things of substance have been expressed here, but time will tell what details survive subsequent sifting.

I guess as a closing note I'll just mention that before June clicked, I was pretty convinced John was gay. Now remaining traces of that gay reading seem to have been slurred into superposition with the trans reading? Feels kinda nice somehow

#homestuck #race mapping #long post #assault cw #special thanks to blurds and red-zora for proofreading #homestuck meta

[beaft]

so if jk rowling's new "women-only" crisis centre doesn't admit trans women, which i think we can reasonably assume it doesn't... how exactly are they planning to verify who's trans and who's cis? i'd love to know. because the only reliable option i can think of is to do a full medical exam, and i don't think i need to point out why making traumatised women submit to a forced genital inspection at a rape crisis centre is maybe not the brightest idea in the world.

#rape cw #assault cw #transphobia cw #jk rowling cw #so sick of this. so so tired and fed up