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#contextual statement

ssaalexblake · 9 months

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honestly the snw fandom is annoying (and mostly just bc the ability of self curate is being kneecapped on the internet lbr) but in that mostly benign way where it's almost all bullshit ship wank and it's kind of comforting in a really weird way, bc i think the dw fandom has killed me inside for all the reasons not even slightly involved with shipping

#i say Mostly benign bc the root may be simple ship wank #but some of the ways its show just highlight shitty biases and if i were on mobile #rn i'd be using the middle finger emoji here #but it's Nice not to be side eying really fucked up implications or in general fucked up statements l o l #like why is this person being super fucking weird about contextual characterisation?#oh bc they want that character to fuck a different one than they actually are #it's an eyeroll and not an extreme judgement

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xxlovelynovaxx · 2 days

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I wish people realized that things like criticisms of commonly made posts or statements or similar are contextual.

For example, how trans women or men or enbies are treated by transphobes, by cis society as a whole, by general queer spaces, by specific trans spaces, and by trans spaces just for their gender are all going to be different. It's also going to be different how each of those spaces treats trans people with other marginalized identities, who are gender nonconforming, etc.

So a critique of how the trans community treats a given group (for example, putting trans women on a pedestal so that they can either do no wrong or they're horrible irredeemable monsters, which absolutely hurts trans women) is not going to apply to wider society in the same way, because wider society tends to primarily villify transfems.

Another example: I saw a very good post about not making every post about how asexual people can actually still have sex. And yes, absolutely, assimilationism is a huge problem! But also, within some of the ace spaces I've been in, sex favorable aces are COMPLETELY erased and treated essentially as "lesser" aces. In those spaces. Within those safe community spaces, talking about how it's valid to HAVE sex while still being ace is still important, because it's not an appeal to allos to recognize us as human because we have sex, but a reminder to other aces to recognize us as ace even if we have sex.

And that shows that this is even more contextual, because there are absolutely ace specific spaces that have the opposite problem!

Or take another trans example. Trans men are treated as little brainwashed autistic lost lesbians who need rescuing from their own autonomy but ALSO as evil sexual predators raping gay men and brainwashing more autistic lesbians into mutilating their bodies. So saying "trans men are villified and treated as predators by transphobes" is NOT saying "trans men never face paternalistic condescension and violation of their autonomy via control over their bodies". Quite the opposite.

Or what about nonbinary people? When we take an umbrella term, then it becomes even more contextual! Some things we face from any given part of society we share, but even stuff that overlaps in some places like transmultiphobia and anti-androgeny manifests in different ways. The end result is a collective one involving your sex, gender, other marginalizations, to what extent and in what ways that everything from bodily features to clothes to name to pronouns conform to what's expected - and even what's expected will be different in the trans community than in cis society!

It's, I could go on. I could talk about systems and parts vs people language, about the perceived vs actual "acceptance" of neurodivergence by society and by disabled communities, about similar with physical disabilities, and so on, but at the end of the day, it's all contextual.

It's important to remember the context in which a post was made before claiming it has no merit.

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knuckleblaster · 5 months

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On some level I understand the rejection or outright denial of V2's death: it was jarring and brutal, especially for a character who, at least in laws of traditional video game rivals and the rule of thirds, seemed like it'd stick around for longer. This said, inferring from in-game lore as well as dev statements, I believe V2's death, tragic that it is, is not unwarranted; and that it is commonly pigeonholed into a characterization it does not fit into due to its assumed role within the game.

This is long, so it's going under the cut.

Considering its name, it's easy to assume V2 is a new and improved version of its predecessor; but it is more heavily implied that it's simply a version of V1 with thicker plating, and nothing more. [1] V2 was an attempt at salvaging V1's design after war became irrelevant, to capitalize on the resources wasted on a highly advanced war machine by rebranding it as an adaptable worker, for security and (theoretically) other peacetime activities (...not an innuendo). This was a failure; there's no reason to invest in something so refined when a handful of lesser machines could do the same job [2].

If V2 is contextualized within its backstory, it makes a lot more sense why it ate shit so quickly. It is, out of any in-game machine so far, one of the least suited for survival in Hell. Sentries and Streetcleaners were created for war. Swordsmachine(s) and Mindflayers are scrapheads, constantly adapting to create (and protect) their perfect, lethal body. [3] If anything, it's on the same level as a Drone, able to defend itself in a limited capacity, but not intentionally programmed or built for combat. Faced with V1, something built for perfect, swift destruction, a machine made for peace would stand even less of a chance than normal, even with an equal level of mobility and build.

V2 is also doomed, in a very literal sense, by the narrative. In a meta sense, it does not matter to the game story whatsoever [4]. V1 is the butterfly whose wing flaps set Gabriel's story in motion, but V2 has no such connection to his story, and is thus irrelevant. Even its lore entry is overshadowed by information about V1/its connection to V1. A third fight, as well, was never in the running, not necessarily due to anything in the game lore, but because its first and second encounters are all it needs: a third rematch would be repetitive and messy [5]. The reason for its extremely violent death sequence is to ensure there was no question as to its fate [6].

In regards to its personality; it is oft-headcanoned as loud, irritable, and competitive, but this characterization is more likely due to its color as well as its assumed role as a "rival" to V1; rather than based upon its in-game actions. Although its initial intentions are up to interpretation [7], comparing its actions and mechanics to other enemies fully rationalizes its anger. Although it's fairly easy to enrage in-fight, the criteria for its enrage state is much more specific than other enemies, and it's quite easy to not trigger it at all. Cerberi will enrage after one of its kind dies, Malicious Faces and Mindflayers after a certain amount of damage has been dealt (on Violent). Most notably, as the only other character with a rematch, Gabriel begins his second fight enraged after his first defeat [3], which can imply by extension that even though V2 is taking its second fight more seriously [8], it is still not outwardly angry. Its enrage state is only triggered when its patience is depleted (the player avoids it for too long), or in its second fight when it has been punched with the Knuckleblaster. These can be interpreted as indicators that V2 likes it when the fight is "fair": when it's not being avoided and picked at from a distance, or being hit with its own arm; which is frankly pretty fucking mean. A side note: Returning to its creation, it can also potentially be inferred that V2 was intentionally programmed with a rational, controlled, and even marketable personality, easily suppressed or overwritten for ease of use.

In another game, or if V1 was the protagonist, perhaps V2 would not be dead. Instead, V2 is doomed by its creators, both in-game and in reality. It mirrors V1 in action and Gabriel in mind, but unlike them, it has no place in this story beyond a truly fantastic duo of fights. Although its story has any number of potential rewritings or epilogues [9], its doom was always intended. It's easy to mourn lost potential, and its end is intensely tragic; but I believe it is a tragedy that meshes nicely with the rest of the game's story. V2 is dead, and not a second too soon.

Footnotes:

Along with the lore entry for V2:

V1’s planned production was cancelled and an updated model, V2, was developed instead, using the standardized plating, since durability was far more important during times of peace when no bloodshed was necessary.

twitter.com/HakitaDev/status/1538313328715513857

3. in-game lore entries, can be read on ultrakill.miraheze.org or here in one document: steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2245904838

twitter.com/HakitaDev/status/1538336055681863680

6. "And then V2 dies as hard as anyone could possibly die to make sure people understand he's fucking dead and is not coming back" - dev commentary, 05:08:09 (youtu.be/kaImho5JioI?si=v4_m90nfLOY-DyEZ&t=18489)

9. Notably, Dream's End Come True / v2isdead.com.

#ULTRAKILL #V2 #meta #id in alt #finally fleshed this out. V2 death manifesto with bonus personality critique!

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annabelle--cane · 7 months

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I guess the thing that makes me not so fond of Jon's addiction allegory is that it's only coherent to a certain extent? Like I think people sometimes forget that he's actively violating these people

anon, through no fault of your own you have accidentally hit upon my sleeper agent trigger phrase. I have layers of answers to this.

so first off, yeah, it's not a 1:1 direct metaphor, it's a soupy dream logic fantasy plot device with flavors of a lot of different things. there's quite a lot of addiction in there, there's some abuse of power, there's some cyclical nature of trauma, there's a dash of disability, there's a few notes of gendered violence, there's a good bit of just. violence violence and being kind of a motherfucker because goddammit it feels good to be an active agent about something in your life, even if it's just choosing to be a worse version of yourself than you strictly need to be. a lot of tma's worldbuilding is very allegorical, but apart from aspects of individual statements nothing really matches up quite 1:1 with a real world counterpart, and if more things did then it probably wouldn't be a fantasy show anymore.

secondly. okay to contextualize this answer a little bit I have a kind of hypothetical video essay project about vampirism and addiction that I like to spend a few hours thinking about every so often but am almost certainly never going to make because the full research burden required is a lot higher than I actually have the time to properly do. but because of that I've spent a lot of time sorting through why framing vampires as addicts really works for me in a way that it doesn't seem to for everyone, and I think a lot of my thoughts on that also apply to jon. there's going to be a bit of a detour here before we get back to talking about tma, but we'll get there, I prommy.

I've seen a lot of people take issue with various paranormal addiction allegories because, a lot of the time, the act that is meant to metaphorically represent the act of use itself is something that is directly and inherently harmful to others, e.g. drinking human blood, handing over power to your hedonistic Evil alter ego, holding the cursed amulet and going crazy going stupid, slurping trauma out of the head of some guy you ran into on a boat to norway, etc., and yeah, I do get that. substance use is not inherently harmful like that to anyone except sometimes the user themself, and addicts are not inherently fucked up and destructive people; those are dangerous stereotypes that often lead to the demonizing of a whole group of sick people.

here's the thing for me, though: those are definitely truths I want explored and represented when it comes to portrayals of non-allegorical actual addicts, but fantasy fiction isn't for showing the world as it is, it's for showing a subjective fun house mirror version of reality where certain aspects are minimized and magnified depending on how it feels to live through it. and yes, absolutely in real life drug use is not an inherently evil act and it does not make you an inherently evil person, but... doesn't it kind of feel like that? sort of? absolutely no one is living their best life nor on their best behavior while experiencing any kind of major mental illness episode, and when it comes to addiction you've got a very clear tangible symbol of when The Episode is happening that it feels like you have much more control over than when it comes to other illnesses. it's also a thing where people are a lot more likely to be openly angry and distrustful of you if they find out it's happening. so you mix together the ideas of "I know I get worse as a result of doing this one specific thing" + "I act less like myself when I'm using, it rearranges my priorities and I care less about hurting people because that's what happens when you're experiencing The Horrors" + "society at large/people directly around me are pretty quick to say that doing this is evil," and you get the subjective emotional result of "I hurt people by using and it makes me monstrous." I tend to respond to those kinds of paranormal allegories like they're just cutting out the middle man of those subjective fears. "using makes me monstrous" -> "using is monstrous."

anyway. jon archivist.

don't get me wrong, I totally understand if this aspect of metaphor doesn't gel for some people and they only like taking it exactly as far as the text explicitly makes them, but I really get a lot out of reading jon's connection to the fears as addiction precisely because he does genuinely awful things to people as a result of it. he's a person in a very bad physical and mental place with little to no support who is constantly being told by both allies and enemies that he's already a monster just by being alive, and he copes with that by secretly falling further and further into an compulsive act of consumption that skews his priorities and makes him care less about hurting people because at least sometimes getting to be the cause of pain makes him feel a little bit less powerless when he has to be the subject of pain the rest of the time. then he's found out and is made to stop, and he has to grapple not just with the physical toll of withdrawal but with knowing there is a not insignificant part of him that will excuse any act of malice if he knows he'll feel better afterwards.

the end of tma is very explicit in the fact that the rules of its world are shaped by the subjective worst fears of those who live in it, it's "an exercise in unreliably reality" as jonny sims put it once, and I think that principle extends backwards in some ways to apply to the rest of the show. I don't think the fact that there are only entities of fear and not hope or love is meant to be a full commentary on the total nature of the real world, it's a reflection of what fear and suffering can make the world feel like. eric and melanie both go to really harsh extremes to extricate themselves from the fears and live peaceful lives, and in both cases something happens that foils their plans (getting murdered + the apocalypse, respectively), but I don't think the intended message is to say that is definitively how real life works, they are metaphors for the limits of individual agency in larger systems and represent two types of worst-case-scenarios. similarly, I don't think reading jon as an addict implies that addiction inherently involves violence or that the reactions of those around him were completely unjustified, it's just a subjective exploration of the kinds of fears that can come with addiction dialed up to 100.

#also to be clear after the first paragraph I'm using 'you' in a general sense not directly to You The Anon Who Sent This #I'm not trying to insinuate anything about whether You The Anon Who Sent This does or doesn't have any experience w substance use #tma #answered #anons

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mychemicalraymance · 1 year

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i started this post so short and made it into a full on tour outfit camp/fashion post accidentally

hope everyone knows that gerard’s skirt suit tie is like. literally a vintage “women’s” tie. when middle class women entered the workforce with gusto the fashion of professionalism and suits etc had an existential crisis about what to do with the ties...... like the ties of skirt/women’s suits are specifically bows and ribbons. i can’t give any sort of statement as to why, aside from the fact of arbitrarily and subtly keeping gendered difference while “copying” men’s standard dress and attempting to move away from 60′s professional dress, which was largely the same as women’s social and public dress. anyway. the fact of choosing this tie

and the fact that the tie reveals itself to be a scarf only after the jacket is removed is amazing... idk. it reveals the distinction between men’s and women’s dress and how gender is forcefully adapted into all ways of life, even in movements to remove it. the same goes for the kitten heels,

kitten heels are another perfect camp example of gender adaptation imo. heeled and uncomfortable, explicitly gendered but “professionalized”, largely considered frumpy to a certain degree and unsexual due to their low height. translating the professional uniform of men to women’s attire was a sort of a second wave assimilation approach to gender.

50s’/ 60′s workplace attire, which emphasized busts, hips, and waist.

and then the more 70′s / 80′s look of gerard’s tie and heels - boxy, “androgynous”, padded and square shoulders, adopting suit jackets and patterns

the tour (mostly the dresses and skirts, designed outfits) has been largely 70s to me, even with the explicitly 60′s and ww II looks.

they’re incredibly boxy and have a “boyish” silhouette, a hallmark of women’s fashion of the 70s, considering women’s lib and the gender revolution. it’s so cool to see because part of that was a move TOWARDS androgyny, and now even the pants looks are identifiably “women’s” or androgynous. even the sunglasses are “women’s”.

“women’s” sunglasses, “women’s” ties, and “women’s” specially adapted uniforms, be it nurse or office worker. all of these looks are seeded from the historical urge to de-gender and androgenize fashion, yet to our eyes it’s unmistakably “women’s”

camp by my definition in its purest form is the re-contextualization of needlessly gendered practices, society, and fashion, and the shifting context is used to satirize the notion that things are “naturally” gendered and dimorphic. camp, when effective, describes the constructed nature of gender and sexuality. women’s suits DESIGNED to be "more masculine” are by modern standards (well i mean. by modern feminist standards LOL) still obviously so far from the mark of “genderless”. it highlights the fact that gender is so insidiously woven into EVERYTHING, even social efforts to be more egalitarian, so to speak. it makes us see the gender we quietly perform as “natural” in modern life.

i’m not a fashion historian or anything else so if i’m wrong i’m sorry LOL. but i give such a huge fuck about gendered fashion in camp and also gerard way

#gerard way #my chemical romance #mcr #mcr return #long post

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skyethel · 7 months

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What does Judith Butler know about loading her son’s corpse in a cab? What does she know about the horror of turning a taxi into a hearse?

im so mad. i've been in mourning and a state of constant rage for palestine for the past few years, and these past weeks have been especially devastating. while im not palestinian myself, i have friends and family that are, and i cant help but be on edge about the things they cant afford to think about right now.

i read their 'thought piece'. its nothing new on that front, and thats why it makes me so mad. im really struggling to connect with the blind, white-american privilege of calling for non-violence in the face of a genocidal apartheid regime. the fucking gall of these so-called western intellectuals to preach how rampant anti-intellectualism has become just to turn around and buy into some colonial playbook of peace shit is hilarious. people i thought were with me on this, not only on palestinian liberation but on liberation full stop, have been a constant disappointment. i cut off so many ppl i called friends over the absolute lack of grace and empathy they handled this with. when are white western 'activists' going to stop treating us like timed bombs of irrationality?

this part in particular kept coming up and made me feel like i was going insane:

"When, however, the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee issues a statement claiming that ‘the apartheid regime is the only one to blame’ for the deadly attacks by Hamas on Israeli targets, it makes an error. It is wrong to apportion responsibility in that way, and nothing should exonerate Hamas from responsibility for the hideous killings they have perpetrated...The necessity of separating an understanding of the pervasive and relentless violence of the Israeli state from any justification of violence is crucial if we are to consider what other ways there are to throw off colonial rule"

literally nobody is asking anyone to 'exonerate' hamas. hamas is a military organization fighting the US-backed israeli occupation with smuggled weapons that is active in 365 km² at best. hamas is not even in the orbit when it comes to comparisons to israel.

israel said it with its own mouth that hamas is a product of israeli occupation. this isnt a matter of opinion, right? or am i too far left to think that a brutal occupation will radicalize its victims? and they gave them the means to become a 'terrorist organization'? how are you claiming to care about palestinians if you don't bother unsubscribing from the very schools of thought that constructed the occupation in the first place?

some of you 'leftists' have been lying about what you've been reading because where are the frantz fanon quotes you like to throw around, huh? where's the malcolm x, the angela davis? where are your insta posts with chomsky's books?

holy shit WHAT OTHER WAYS?

keep our communities out of your mouth. we are not some thought experiment you can exercise your conscience on. we're watching an ethnic cleansing unfold, and instead of supporting palestinians so many of you are playing out your own little fantasies of the 'progressive' solidarity you fail to show. sometimes, you need to fucking stop and listen instead of consulting the higher morality police on whether you need to 'contextualize' your incompetence.

#palestine #rant #im no saint but holy fuck some people are getting on my nerves #the personal is political

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counterpunches · 4 months

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source

[transcript: [slide 1]

we are treated differently and we are so tired

[slide 2] From day one, we were treated differently: the celebrations

Hamas is an internationally-recognized terrorist organization that is explicit in its aim to annihilate Israel and the Jewish people in its very foundational charter. On October 7, 2023, thousands of Hamas terrorists invaded internationally-recognized sovereign Israeli territory and slaughtered 1,200 people in a matter of hours, the majority of them civilians. They went door to door, pulling people from their beds, maiming, mutilating, beheading, raping, and burning entire families alive. About 80 of the corpses showed signs of torture. They also took over 200 people hostage, including Holocaust survivors and a 9-month-old. It was the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Israel is a small country; had October 7 happened in the US, it would be the equivalent of individually slaughtering 50,000 Americans in a matter of hours.

Instead of expressing outrage, there were worldwide celebrations. In the West Bank, Gaza, and elsewhere in the Arab world, candy was handed out on the streets in celebration. In Gaza, thousands gathered to cheer as terrorists paraded mutilated corpses. A group of 3000 United Nations teachers expressed their joy at the murder and mutilation of Israelis, including young children. All over left-wing social media, people celebrated.

On October 8, before any Israeli retaliation whatsoever, crowds of thousands gathered in Times Square to express their support for the murderers, holding signs that declared "decolonization is not a metaphor" and "by any means necessary".

Fringe extremists exist, but this was hardly the fringe. And we know this is not a normal reaction. We did not see entire protests in Times Square in support of the Russian slaughter of Ukranians, 9/11, the ISIS genocide of Yazidis, the slaughter of Yemenis, the slaughter of Syrians, or any other atrocity.

[slide 3] From Day one, we were treated differently: the contextualization and qualification

Secretary General of the United Nations Anthony Guterres' initial response to the October 7 massacre was the following: "It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum."

First, let me make one thing clear: there is no context, in international law or anywhere else, that justifies or minimizes the slaughter, torture, and rape of civilians, including women, children, those with disabilities, and the elderly.

But beyond that, there is a glaring double standard when Israel is the victim of a massacre. Let's take a look at another example of terrorism as a guideline. When ISIS bombed an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England on May 22, 2017, killing 22, Secretary General Guterres immediately "strongly condemned" the attack, and the Security Council released a statement, condemning "in the strongest terms the barbaric and cowardly terrorist attack" and extending its solidarity to the United Kingdom. No one said the attack had to be understood "in the context" of the UKs invasion of Iraq, the war against ISIS, or the UKs long history of colonialism in the region, and no one said that it did not happen in a vacuum.

Similarly, on October 7, millions of people rushed to social media to provide "context" for the cold-blooded, purposeful, and indiscriminate murder of civilians. Others, before their "condemnation" felt the need to clarify that they were not supporters of the Israeli government (okay, and?), when they've otherwise strongly condemned atrocities perpetrated on others, without feeling the need to qualify support (or lack thereof) for any other country's government.

[slide 4] From day one, we were treated differently: the victim blaming

On October 7, as the massacre was still unfolding, 31 Harvard University organizations released a statement holding Israel "entirely responsible" for the slaughter of its own citizens. I reiterate: as Israelis were still being slaughtered by the hundreds simply for being Jewish - or for being associated with Jews - we were told that our own slaughter was our fault.

They were not the only ones to do so. Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Syria, Iran, and Iraq blamed Israel for the October 7 slaughter. Black Lives Matter Chicago blamed Israel for the October 7 slaughter. Labor unions across the US blamed Israel for the October 7 slaughter. The list goes on.

After the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published an article in which one anonymous police officer said that the police is looking into the possibility that some of the victims of the Nova music festival were killed by fire from an IDF military chopper, antisemites took the statement out of context, distorted it, and disseminated it all over the media and internet.

In response to the Haaretz article, the Israeli police put out a statement that the investigation was only in regard to police activities on October 7, not military activities, and that as such, they do not have any indication about the harm to any civilians due to any aerial activity there."

Regardless, the conspiracy has taken a life of its own, so much so that Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas accused Israel of carrying out the massacre. Abbas later retracted his statement. A few other unverified reports have also similarly taken out of context to "prove" that Israel was actually behind its own massacre.

To this day, we are told, in response to released hostage testimony that Israeli women are being raped in the Hamas tunnels, that it's justified because "they were soldiers." For what it's worth, no one's rape is justified - even when they're soldiers.

[slide 5] A few days later came the denial

The 10/7 massacre was live-streamed by the perpetrators on their own social media platforms.

Initially, antisemites celebrated. After more and more heinous, indefensible details started to come out, antisemites started denying it happened at all.

To reiterate: the massacre was live-streamed to social media - by the perpetrators. We all saw it in the early hours of October 7. The perpetrators have gone on to boast about it since. For example, on January 10, the leader of the Hamas political bureau, Ismail Haniyeh, said, "We should hold on to the victory that took place on October 7 and build upon it."

The level of denial - just a few days after October 7 - is so pervasive that Israel had to compile a 47-minute film of footage with the most graphic, dehumanizing video evidence to screen for international reporters, government officials, and more.

But no amount of evidence seems to be enough. No independent investigators are enough. No video footage is enough. No survivor or eyewitness testimony is enough. Why are people denying what's before their very eyes? Why?

[slide 6] Then the one-sided demands.

From October 7, there were already demands on Israel - on Israel, as its civilians were massacred - to ceasefire. These demands came from important voices, including American Congresspeople, groups such as UNICEF, and more. These calls made little, if any, mention of Hamas, the perpetrator of the October 7 massacre.

No other country would be asked, as a slaughter of their people was still unfolding, to lay down their arms.

Since then, the calls for Israel - and only Israel - to ceasefire have been incessant. They have continued even as Hamas vowed, on October 24, that "there will be a second, a third, a fourth" October 7. When asked to clarify, in the same interview, whether they meant the complete annihilation of Israel, the senior Hamas official responded, "Yes, of course."

The calls for Israel to ceasefire continued as Yaha Sinwar, the architect of the October 7 massacre, promised on November 30 that "October 7 was just a rehearsal."

The calls for Israel to ceasefire continued as Hamas violated the terms of the temporary ceasefire every single day between November 24 and December 1.

The calls for Israel to ceasefire as Hamas has fired over 13,000 missiles at Israeli civilians. Even more infuriating, the calls for a ceasefire are often made hand in hand with calls to "globalize the Intifada." An intifada is an armed uprising; it's incompatible with a ceasefire.

The calls for Israel to ceasefire have continued as Hamas has rejected several ceasefires in the past several weeks. At this point, those calling for a ceasefire should be honest: what they care is that Israel ceases, but they are not particularly bothered (or even support) when Hamas fires.

[slide 7] The genocide accusations

There are 153 countries that have signed the Convention of 1948. Before this January, only two had ever been brought to trial before the International Court of Justice. Of the signatories, a number of them have been accused of genocidal acts after signing the Convention, including Azerbaijan, China, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Palestine, Sudan, Syria, and more.

Only Israel, however, is put on trial, which is all the more egregious when we consider that the events post-October 7 are in response to a massacre of Israelis that Genocide Watch classified as "an act of genocide."

What's even more egregious is that South Africa, which has brought this case before the ICJ, maintains close relationships with genocidal dictators, including Russia's Vladimir Putin and Sudan's Omar al-Bashir. It is a close ally of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hamas' patron, which has been brutally oppressing the people of Iran since 1979. South Africa even hosted Hamas officials for a "solidarity" event in December 2023 - two months after the October 7 massacre.

Per the Hamas Ministry of Health, 23,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza; Israel claims at least 9,000 of them are Hamas combatants. While any civilian death is tragic, there are far deadlier wars and atrocities happening around the globe right at this very second. In Yemen, nearly 400,000 have been killed and a million have died in a famine. In Syria, over 600,000 have been killed. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 6 million have been killed. In Ukraine, at least 100,000 have been killed. The list goes on and on. In many of these cases, the perpetrators of the atrocities - some of them South Africa's closest allies - have explicitly expressed genocidal intent. Yet South Africa hasn't found it necessary to bring them before the International Court of Justice. Only the Jewish state.

[slide 8] Feminist advocates are suddenly silent - or worse, accuse us of lying

Perhaps among the most infuriating responses to the October 7 massacre has been the response of so-called feminists and feminist organizations.

On October 7, and every day since, Hamas weaponized rape as a tool of war, which is not only a war crime, but a crime against humanity. There is a preponderance of evidence, including extensive forensic evidence, eyewitness testimony, perpetrator confessions, and survivor testimony.

Yet the Women's March has not condemned Hamas' weaponization of rape as a tool of war; instead, it has only called for a ceasefire. Me Too has not condemned Hamas' weaponization as a tool of war. UN Women did not condemn Hamas' massacre until December 2, nearly two months after October 7, after intense public pressure from Israelis and the Jewish community.

Angelina Jolie, perhaps the most vocal global activist against the weaponization of rape as a tool of war, has said absolutely nothing about Hamas' war crimes; instead, she has asked Israel to ceasefire.

[slide 9] Double standard: legitimacy

Israel is condemned more than any other nation in the world, but the double standard doesn't end there. Israel's real or perceived crimes are blown out of proportion in comparison to other countries' real or perceived crimes, but the double standard doesn't end there. Israel's suffering is minimized, contextualized, denied, or qualified in comparison to the suffering of other countries, but the double standard doesn't end there. Instead, there is another double standard: everything coming out of Hamas' mouth is immediately taken as fact, while everything that comes out of Israel is questioned.

This is not merely a matter of "feeling" like there is a double standard.

On October 17, an explosion went off at the Al Ahli Hospital parking lot. Within minutes, Hamas claimed that an Israeli airstrike had targeted the hospital, killing 471 people. Israel claimed that a Palestinian Islamic Jihad missile misfired and hit the hospital. But the BBC ran with Hamas' story. This triggered worldwide outrage, inciting anti-Jewish riots in the Arab world and in Russia. Eventually, most international independent investigations corroborated Israel's version of events. But by the time the media retracted its original claim - that is, what Hamas said - it was too late. Two Jews had already been killed in Tunisia in retaliation for a massacre that Israel never actually committed.

Then there is the issue of the hostage videos. Hostage videos are hostage videos because they are made under duress. The hostage is told what to say; otherwise, their life is in danger. Hamas, of course, has coerced the Israeli hostages into saying that they are being treated well. These statements, made with a gun to the head, have been taken as fact, so much so that prominent figures such as Shaun King have gushed over Hamas' so-called "humane" treatment of the hostages (that they brutally abducted after murdering their entire families and friends before their eyes).

Yet, now that over a hundred hostages have been released, and they are no longer under threat from Hamas, they are coming out with stories of abuse and torture. Suddenly, no one believes these accounts, claiming that Israel must have told them what to say. It's absolutely absurd and defies all logic.

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disclaimer: the intent of this post is to educate, raise awareness, and challenge hate speech]

#israel #antisemitism #october 7 #the double standards are nauseating #the antisemitism is so deep and insidiously rooted that many of my friends #who would never hate a jew #are falling into these tropes without thought #in the guise of the left #something something horseshoe theory

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betweengenesisfrogs · 7 months

Text

A HOMESTUCK MANIFESTO

I want to think about what comes next after Homestuck.

That’s a challenge to the world as much as a personal mission statement.

I want to see writers and artists and creators making the next Homestuck, taking its themes and binding them into new fabrics, giving life to new creatures even more beautiful and uncanny than the original species.

I hunger to see new forms of story and image evolving with Homestuck in their DNA.

This process is already underway. Homestuck is a massive boulder dropped into the waters of culture, and the full wake of its ripples is still to be felt. But let’s call attention to this process and ask: what would happen if we engaged in it more consciously? If we sifted through our feelings about Homestuck to create something new, deliberately, with great and wonderful purpose?

The tools we need are within our grasp. Homestuck presents itself as magic, but it’s a work constructed in time out of specific storytelling choices. So let’s understand those choices. Let’s understand how Homestuck did what it did, and use Homestuck’s tools to build art that grips the soul of future generations as strongly as Homestuck did ours.

What follows is not a traditional literary analysis. It does not cite its sources; it does not seek to give us a comprehensive understanding of Homestuck. If it does, it does so only to the extent it suits its larger purpose.

Our goal here, our quest, if you will, is not to understand the Homestuck that exists, but the Homestuck that comes next.

Let's begin.

0. THE WILD GARDEN

Let’s lay the absolute groundwork here.

Homestuck is constructed as a re-appropriation of itself. Or to put it another way, it’s a big improvisational move, a process of “yes and”-ing so hard it develops a sprawling continuity.

Tiny details are constantly re-contextualized to become part of something else. A joke might turn tragic. A silly aside might turn into something profound.

But it didn’t have to be that way.

It’s crucial to understand that what we experience as continuities were in fact choices made at specific times. Homestuck is a garden where seeds were scattered in every direction, grown en masse, then weeded down to create patterns and forms.

The shape of the garden is designed to conceal the gardener’s hand. But the gardener’s choices are there, every step of the way.

If we are to follow in its footsteps, what choices should we make?

Let’s talk about themes.

1. THE MEANING CRISIS

Nobody in Homestuck knows what they’re doing.

And neither do we.

All the old idols have broken down. The values we were taught in our childhood fail to measure up to the problems of the world we live in. We grasp after careers and lives we were told would make us happy and wonder why we’re left empty. The selves that we were told were us now fit us about as well as clothing we’ve outgrown. Crises loom, political, economic and environmental, and everywhere it feels like the people who are supposed to guide and lead us aren’t doing enough.

It's widening gyres and slouching beasts all the way from here to Bethlehem, is what I’m saying.

The reason people go absolutely insane for Homestuck is that it depicts this crisis of meaning. It shows the questions we might want to ask, and attempts to provide some kind of answer.

The protagonists of Homestuck struggle with what I’ve called “received narrative.” That is, they’ve inherited stories from their families, from the world, that they try to use to define their lives, and it doesn’t work. But these stories are so familiar that it’s hard to think outside them. They have to develop new stories by which to live. Sometimes they succeed, but other times they can’t escape the gravity of the ones they were given.

With me so far?

Great. Now understand that all this was improvised and discovered largely accidentally over the course of ten years.

Here’s a seed that became quite an impressive tree:

The streets are empty. Wind skims the voids keeping neighbors apart, as if grazing the hollow of a cut reed, or say, a plundered mailbox. A familiar note is produced. It's the one Desolation plays to keep its instrument in tune.

It’s a joke. But it was never just a joke. There’s an idea here of dissatisfaction with the stereotypical idea of American suburban life. Egbert here is looking for something more, dissatisfied for reasons they can’t fully articulate. This is typical fantasy protagonist stuff, but there’s something more here, too.

Eventually it’s redirected towards the idea that there really is an unseen riddler. But let’s put that aside for now.

This page, in its moment, says: your life is not the full picture. There’s something else out there, waiting, that’s going to change everything.

That's a potential set-up for a very powerful payoff. It gives us the sense that Egbert and all their friends are going to have to rethink what they know. That this suburban life is not going to be enough for them, that somehow or other they’re going to encounter something they aren’t prepared for, and they’ll have to find a new way of acting and being. That, try as they might to avoid it, they’re going to change over the course of this journey.

But to understand how they change, we need to talk about SBURB.

2. THE PORTAL FANTASY OF IT ALL

A lot of people like to joke that Homestuck is an isekai. I think it might clarify things to use the term portal fantasy instead.

Portal fantasy is simply the fantasy subgenre of characters, usually kids, going to a magical other world. Maybe they make friends, maybe they learn lessons and stuff. You know the drill. I don’t have to to tell you more because the story structure is already so familiar. That’s what gives it power.

Portal fantasy differs from the related Japanese genre of isekai in that isekai in its current form is much more heavily based on video games such as MMORPGs. In the most pervasive isekai narratives, protagonists are rewarded not so much for achieving personal growth as being able to exploit the game mechanics of a game-like system. That’s pretty different from your typical Narnia scenario.

The influence of portal fantasy is everywhere in Homestuck, especially in the beginning. We have nods to the fantasy films of the 1980s that gave us our contemporary idea of this story structure, such as The Neverending Story (itself, in its original book incarnation, a phenomenal commentary on the genre). Our protagonists are genre savvy; they recognize what’s happening here.

But it doesn’t fit quite right. The odd note is first sounded when Egbert asks Nanasprite if what they’re doing is going to save the world. They’re bit unsettled to learn the answer’s no, that something else is going on here. Next we have the fantasy worlds: the planetary lands each present a veneer of exciting adventure. But their inhabitants, the consorts, aren’t fully-realized people, they’re largely cute animals going through the motions, not really understanding the story they’re telling. The carapacians are a little better, but they’re still trapped in a fatalism that feels uncomfortable.

As things rev up in Act 4, we learn about doomed timelines from alt-timeline Dave and Rose, how your entire existence in this setting may be fodder for something other than you. When we learn the true purpose of SBURB and its froggy details in Act 5, we see that SBURB is more like a biological creature, mainly interested in its own reproductive desires. It was never really about the portal fantasy at all. The kids are just along for the ride.

So when we see that Rose wants to tear through SBURB, find out a way to escape fate, and snatch meaning from the jaws of futility, it makes sense. We’ve been given hints already that this is the conflict at hand: the characters vs the story that’s telling them.

(Note: it’s certainly possible to have a reading that SBURB is not evil so much as empty, that it reflects what you bring into it, that its will for you is your will for you. But that’s also a difficult thing, right? If you lack self-understanding, it’s a struggle to bring about your ideal reality.)

What we haven’t mentioned yet is that this is all mediated through the lens of video games. Which makes perfect sense. Because where do we seek meaning, especially as kids? In imaginary worlds that make more sense to us than real life, that give us achievements to take pride in and clear objectives to pursue.

SBURB evokes mechanics from games like Final Fantasy. We see its players complete objectives, cast magic spells, gain power-ups with colorful costume changes. But unlike the narratives implied by traditional video game progressions, leveling up doesn’t mean you grow as a person or process your trauma. Later, in Act 6, when we meet a player who has made his life about winning the game (Caliborn), it’s horrific to behold.

Homestuck is a portal fantasy, but it’s fundamentally a portal fantasy about games. It’s a portal fantasy that shows us how characters seek meaning in being the best at arbitrary game mechanics, but ultimately fail to find it.

So I guess…it actually is an isekai? Huh. Wild.

(But seriously, Homestuck is actually fairly prescient in predicting the ideas that come out of isekai and LitRPG. It’s engaging consciously and deconstructively with the weird ideas of self-fulfillment these genres are drowning in.)

So what might a Homestuckian work look like? It will almost certainly critique a false narrative we live by. It may comment on portal fantasy, or our personal satisfaction that comes as easily as playing a video game. But it doesn’t have to be limited to these things. It might talk about our popular TV shows and movies. It may take apart what’s flawed in Marvel, the latest triple-A game, or the modern dark fantasy novel.

Among its tools will be discomfort. Showing a disconnect early on between our character’s expectations and their happiness can serve as foundation to build on, so that when the flaws of the genre narrative are revealed, it feels like the truth. We may see characters who accept their narratives passively, or rebels like Rose Lalonde, who chose to rip everything apart in search of something better.

These are only some of the possibilities.

When I tell you the stories we live by mislead us, what is your relationship to that? If you were to tear these received narratives apart, what would you focus on, what would you try to say? The art that comes out of this question will be deeply personal to the soul who makes it.

But here’s another question:

Just who is giving us all these narratives, anyway?

3. THE PARENT FLIP

The world we live in was not made by us. It was shaped by forces that predate us, over which we have no control and are born into the grasp of without the knowledge of how to escape.

For instance, our parents.

The guardians who raise us provide our template for how to interpret life. We spend a large part of our lives immersed in the world they built, believing as they believe, living by the values that they instruct us in, so that we might carry their goals forward to the future.

This is an effort that is certain to fail.

Because the problems of today aren’t the problems of twenty or thirty years ago. At best, their messages can only to help in a limited way with the crises we go through as we live our lives. At worst, they actively hinder us from dealing with them productively.

If we are to escape the broken patterns of our world, then we need break out of the stories an earlier generation gave us.

How are parents discussed in Homestuck?

Initially? As jokes.

If we take our “future knowledge” goggles off for a moment, we can see that the early depictions of the kids’ parents are a goofy parody of standard parental tropes. Mom and Dad are nameless, faceless, exaggerated cartoon stereotypes, and conflict between them and their children is initially expressed through a silly video game fight.

There’s a seed of something real here, though. What we’re parodying is a familiar trope of tension between parents and children in kids’ fiction and YA fiction. But that trope exists for a reason. This conflict is rich with potential for any story about growing up. And Homestuck has smuggled the idea of it in as a silly RPG parody.

So we can extrapolate, for instance, that there’s tension between Egbert and their father in part because Egbert doesn’t know yet who they want to be, and that Rose and Mom’s relationship is awkward and contentious, with alcohol involved. We see that there’s something profoundly uncomfortable going on between Dave and his Bro, and Jade’s life in the shadow of a dead Grandpa suggests a psychology that’s not entirely a healthy one.

Understand that I’m not saying that all this was there from the start. Rather, a choice was made to develop these interesting possibilities out of the jokes, to tell a story about how parents that act like these ones might have affected their children.

A major turning point in this regard is when Egbert learns their father’s seeming clown obsession was the result of a failed attempt to connect with them. It’s quite silly, but it plays around with the idea of a gap in perception between parent and child. It’s also a sign the story’s starting to take more of an interest in character psychology, suggesting that what Egbert processes consciously is not the same as their deeper unconscious feelings. This in turn can become a setup for a portrait of Egbert as someone who represses things they don’t want to think about. From this moment, in the long term, comes June Egbert.

When the psychology machine revs up for all the characters in Act 4 and Act 5, it’s able to do so because this foundation was laid.

We also, as early as Act 3, get hints that the parents have intentions and personalities outside of how the kids perceive them. The original purpose is to hint at a larger conspiracy around SBURB, with Mom building a secret lab, Dad trying to investigate the mystery, and Grandpa jumping in and out of time. But what this suggests is that the psychology of the parents might at some point come into play.

But the most exciting development in the relationship between parents and children is Act 6.

The great role reversal. The parent and child flip.

How do you make your faceless parent figures into characters?

By making them kids.

We’re so used to this concept now t that it’s hard to remember how wild it is that Roxy is a teen version of a main character's mom. But the concept is genius. Meeting these characters on the same level forces our protagonists to understand them as people and reflect on their fallibility.

For us as readers, it adds detail and nuance to the cartoonish portraits we got in the beginning. Conversely, we also see what our protagonists might have been like as parents themselves—and turns it from a story of “parents just don’t understand” to a story of how people, despite their best intentions, can wound each other.

(The Homestuck Epilogues are a difficult text to evaluate, but one of the best things within them is Egbert’s arc in Candy, where we see how Egbert might have done as a parent, how their struggles with finding purpose in the world might lead them to embrace a narrative of parenthood yet struggle to have a good relationship their kid. It’s brilliant, and the culmination of everything we’ve talked about here.)

Thus the Homestuckian work of art will be concerned with themes of parents and children. It will play with the boundary between what children understand about their parents and what they don’t. It will show parents as people—fallible people, who make mistakes with severe costs, whose stories fail their children and themselves. It may build from a simple base of what children understand, or it may weave parent and child perspectives together. It may even show us how children fail when they become parents themselves. It will show us the cycles we are trapped in, how we wound and are wounded by our context.

And it will force us to look for a way out.

4. CLASSPECTS AS SIGNPOSTS

Hey. You want to know a secret?

Come closer, and I’ll whisper it to you.

Classpects aren’t actually all that complicated. Ultimately, they boil down to one thing:

Symbols we can use to construct a self.

If Homestuck is about a crisis of meaning, then classpects are part of its answer.

What do we do, when the world gives us no story we can live by?

We make one. We make one out of whatever symbols and messages we can find and put together from the stories we’ve read, from the people who teach and inspire us. Such collages are powerful things. They give us a way out of the dark, they give us a sense of something we are and can be, where there was nothing before.

They give us, in short, a personal mythology.

Classes and Aspects have often been read as codes to be unpacked and solved. It might be more productive to see them as creative tools, signposts designed not to narrow down meaning, but to allow us to explore it.

For instance, the portrayal of Light in Homestuck is unique. As a symbol, it combines notions of brightness, knowledge, future, luck, wealth, and narrative focus. These things aren’t inherently linked out in the world, but they are here, and that’s a choice, and an interesting one. It encourages us to imagine connections between these concepts, and to see if they have any relevance to ourselves. Identifying with the concept of Light, in other words choosing to value clarity, luck, and importance, might be a powerful tool for finding one’s way in the world.

Classes play with signposts at an even more basic level. Sure, we can talk about what a Knight does in the context of the story.

But a knight is already a powerful symbol. We bring so much cultural context to it. The word conjures up images and narratives of devotion, duty, violence, the slaying of dragons, armoring oneself against the world, and the rescuing of princesses. If we put that together with a concept like Time, we get a distinct character. If we put that together with our own experience of the world, we can create powerful concepts for who we want to be.

Interestingly, this complicates what we said about SBURB. As much as our protagonists struggle to find meaning within it, there’s still something there that they can latch onto. Classes, aspects, denizens, even consorts and lands—these things don’t have to be devoid of meaning. We can choose to affirm them; we can build something out of them, and say, yes, this is me, this is myself.

But it’s a double-edged sword.

We are responsible for the narratives we choose to live by. And we may find ourselves falling into a narrative that hinders us more than helps us, that creates a self-destructive self.

What does it mean to believe deeply that you are a thief, that taking from others to benefit yourself is the best way or comes to you the most naturally? What does it mean to tell yourself over and over that you’re a prince, with all the attendant baggage of power and grim responsibility that comes with that concept? Or, to follow the path further, what does it mean to tell yourself over and over that you are a destroyer or must be destroyed?

If we are to escape the story we’re trapped in, we must take care, lest we trap ourselves in a story of our own making.

Homestuck never quite resolves the ambiguity around these symbols of self, around whether SBURB hurts or helps, whether classpects are things you create or things that create you. But this ambiguity is a productive one. It gives us symbolic tools we can use in the creation of meaning, and it shows us the side of them that should make us wary.

The work that is to come after Homestuck will be about symbols. It may show us how we seek them in popular culture, or the people around us. It may use some of the clusters of meaning that that we see in Homestuck, but it will not be limited to them. It will write its own language of symbols, joining Light and Time to notions like Memory, Need, Rupture, and War, and be filled not just with knights and princes but brigadiers, lancers, healers, druids, taxidermists, sentries and waifs. It will build with tarot cards, enneagram types, and Babylonian gods. It will place all the signposts we’ve created in millennia of existence into new contexts and meanings.

By such means will it show us a way forward.

There’s one kind of symbol we haven’t talked about yet, however.

The kind that holds a mirror up to the world.

5. THE POWER OF ALTERNIA

There’s a reason dystopias have been so popular in young adult fiction. Sure, they’re cliché now, but they speak to something raw and visceral.

When you’re growing up into a world that doesn’t make sense, it’s natural to find refuge in emotional extremes. Stories of blood and violence, fates worse than death, and governments that demand horrific things of their citizens speak to the anxieties of the adolescent mind. They validate the feeling that something is wrong—that the world we’ve inherited is broken and unfair and has no place for us. And they’re right.

Alternia taps into these dystopian feelings perfectly. What makes it so fun is that it’s an inversion of a teenage fantasy. It’s a world where there are no parents, where kids can have access to power and violence, where you can sit around and play video games and design your own house. It almost feels like a response to the “parents don’t understand” themes of the early acts.

But the dystopia’s there, and it’s sneaky. A land of lost boys and girls isn’t actually all that great to live in. It’s lawless, survival of the fittest, with children killing each other left and right. And the future adult roles most of the troll kids aspire to are a glamorous veneer over competition for slots in a fascist military hierarchy. Which is to say nothing of the blood caste system as a way in which the kids are taught by their world to abuse and exploit each other. Crushes, personal slights, competition for status, group dynamics, attempts to define identity – all these familiar teenage dynamics play out on a backdrop of maiming and murder.

Which is perfect. Because when you’re young, all those social interactions genuinely do feel like life or death, and adulthood a regime of exploitation and horror bearing down on you. Alternia is a heightened, exaggerated version of reality. It expresses an emotional truth, not a literal one, validating our most intense feelings and giving us a road map to understanding them.

No wonder so many people wanted to skip to Act 5 and get to the trolls.

(See also Hiveswap Friendsim and Pesterquest, which explore these themes really really well.)

And Alternia, for a world where parents aren’t really a thing, tells us a surprising amount about the parental generation. In mid Act 5-2, Ancestors are added to Alternia’s wordbuilding, and we learn that as much as the trolls skipped having traditional parental figures, they were never devoid of role models. The deeds and exploits of notable figures throughout ancient Alternia gave them models to think about each other and themselves—even when those models were toxic ones. In a way, this isn’t so far from the human kids at all.

Furthermore, as time goes on, we acquire an origin for Alternia’s fascist worldview. Doc Scratch, manipulator of society, stands in for all those aspects of the world that work to create the false narratives we are born into, a true evil father figure – or uncle, if you prefer. And he's an extension of the ultimate evil father figure, Lord English, who controls not just Alternia but the timelines of the human children as well, whose belligerence and apathy give us aeons of toxic narratives and abuse. We see that story played out in Alternia in every interaction, in every moment, the beliefs its architects live by.

This is the power of dystopia—it can hold a broken mirror up to the world we live in.

Therefore the Homestuck that will come after Homestuck will worldbuild gardens of horror. It will not pull its punches but show us insidious societal systems and the effect they have on the people who live under them. It may depict fascism, authoritarianism, feudalistic tyranny, or all three. It will be unafraid to evoke blood and guts but use them to paint a picture of what we want, what we fear, and how we break under our false horizons.

As it depicts the path out, so, too, will it have its reverse side—it will show us all the hells and purgatories we’re trapped in.

6. SAILS TO THE WIND

Much has been written (including by this very author) about Homestuck’s metafictional aspects – the way it comes to foreground a more direct clash between character and narrative.

But the point I want to make here is that the metafictional angle wouldn’t work without these earlier choices. They allow the comic to talk about these concerns long before any notion of canon rears its head.

There are many ways of approaching these themes, and we don’t have to be limited to notions of Ultimate Selves and Beyond Canon to explore them. Such things are valuable, but they are only one retelling of the myth. If we are to make the next Homestuck, we must make our own.

I want to illustrate the space of possibility by offering some examples of works that explore similar themes. Note that I’m not saying these works were influenced by Homestuck in any way, but rather that they use some of the same tools to speak to the same questions, anxieties and concerns.

In trying to make what comes after Homestuck, we might consider:

Revolutionary Girl Utena, which foregrounds the archetype of the Prince as duelist, tyrant, and hero and dares its characters to break free from the false reality that shapes even these aspirations and dreams.

The Familiar by Mark Z. Danielewski, author of Houseof Leaves, whose core narrative concerns an twelve-year-old girl in thrall to an entity whose intentions are unclear but may be shaping the fabric of reality itself; which depicts the inner lives and uncertainties of her parents with just as much detail as they struggle, and sometimes fail, to make the right choices to help her; a story which, even in its incomplete form, explores a notion of a greater S.E.L.F that is not just you but also those who share something with you, where characters from other realities blur into transcendent archetypes in this one.

Digimon, perhaps the quintessential work of portal fantasy, not only Digimon Tamers, which steers the genre into a place of trauma, cosmic horror, and adults horrified by children saving the world, but also Digimon Adventure, which creates strong character arcs for eight very different children as they try to navigate a strange alien world, and shows us their struggle to reconcile with their parents as part of the process of understanding themselves.

The Neverending Story by Michael Ende,foundational text for Homestuck, which tells us not only about the rich possibilities inherent in reading oneself into fantasy worlds, but also the terrible potential for harm in making oneself an emperor over them.

Pale, by Wildbow, author of Worm, an urban fantasy story about three teenagers thrust into a world of magic and murder, a world where symbols literally create reality, where concepts like Carmine and Aurum have a powerful pull, where the Self is something that can be nourished or taken apart and put back together, a story where the parents are not just supporting cast but fully realized people forced to reckon with the ways in which they have deeply failed their children, and which contains perhaps the most thorough investigation of the question of “is it good for children to go on magical adventures?” ever committed to the page.

Heaven Will Be Mine, by Aevee Bee,in which the giant robots we pilot through space become the symbolic manifestation of our inner selves and our way of bringing about our ideal reality, and, relatedly, We Know the Devil, in which the repression of those selves causes them to burst out from us in terrifying and glorious new forms.

Crow Cillers, by Cate Wurtz, an often trauma-filled horror comic in which a group of kids and, eventually, adults, tries to fight back against an ever-present death cult that has its grips on every corner, all the while encountering Psyforms, beings made of pure mind, while characters from television and cartoons dance in the margins and all the while the line blurs between audience and art until it becomes difficult to tell who created who—a story that asks what it means to find meaning in stories when the corporate entities that own them are trying to devour us.

It's a tragically short list, I know. But perhaps it conveys some of the angles we might take.

We can also look at works that are known to have inspired by Homestuck. There aren’t many yet, but there are a few.

Undertale is famous for its Homestuck influences, with parallel timelines, an idea of agency that persists across them, and a contentious relationship between player and character, but for my part, I’m just as interested if not more so in Deltarune, which seems to be slowly building a grand thesis about portal fantasy, where the kids' adventures in the Dark Worlds seems to be offering them an escape and helping them become their best selves—but hints at a coming challenge to that simple worldview in the question of who’s really experiencing that escape.

The Locked Tomb, by Tamsin Muir – This is the big one, that really shows what building on Homestuckian themes can achieve. It turns out there really is an audience for weird aggro formalism in scifi publishing if you make it sufficiently gay. But smartly, like Homestuck, the Locked Tomb builds its weird mysteries gradually, adding on layer after layer on the solid foundation of characters we can follow and get invested in. There’s so much to notice – there’s the highly categorized teenagers involved in a murder feud, there’s the constant whiplash of humor and tragedy, there’s the endlessly open spaces in the story to interpret and project on to.

But to me, what stands out the most is the portrait of God and his court as every bit as emotionally chaotic as the sniping teenagers. You go to heaven, and God’s making out in the corner with his friend group, and you look for the adult in the room but the adults in the room don’t know what they’re doing and they never really did. It’s a portrait of the parents, it’s a portrait of the Ancestors, it’s a portrait of the gods of the new world, and it’s exquisite.

The Locked Tomb gives us a world at war with its own mythological narrative, rich with angst and irony. It’s a worthy successor to everything Homestuck was doing. It shows us how much these themes can say to us, and it gives us a hint at how powerful Homestuck's legacy might be.

7. THE APOTHEOSIS OF HOMESTUCK

There’s a lot of discussion about how to continue Homestuck. How to do it justice. What post-canon might look like, and what it might not. What fan comics, what fan fics, what semi-official works truly live up to the spirit of its characters and its multiverse.

To be clear, those discussions are awesome. I’m so glad those things exist, and it’s wonderful to see them unfolding.

But I don’t want the process to stop there. I'd be disappointed if it was only about adding to and re-articulating Homestuck itself.

I want this—

—This multifaceted, complicated, emotionally laden thing that is the experience of engaging with and creating with and interpreting Homestuck—

To go out into the world and to be infused into the world, to become waves spreading further and further. I want to experience the Homestuck artistic movement, the Homestuck school of thought. I want it to be an influence on the fiction of the coming generation of authors, and the next, and the next.

I want Homestuck to be one of those albums that's too obscure to be known by the general public, but everyone who listened to it went on to start an enormously successful band.

Homestuck can appear like a thing that was conjured out of the ether, but it isn’t. It’s a product of a particular time.

But that in itself is profound. When you create art, you reach back to all the things that have shaped you, and you listen to what the world around you needs, and you try to say what needs to be said. Which means you're a part of a history and culture that needs to say those things, which will be different from the things that needed to be told yesterday, and different from the stories that will be needed tomorrow.

There’s no otherworldliness to it, no platonic other reality. But for all I've talked about art being made of choices, there's still something transcendent here.

To make Homestuck—and to make art inspired by Homestuck—means being a node in a web formed of millions of people, where a light passes down the chain to you, and for the briefest of moments, you get to be filled with its presence, before it moves on to the next person in the chain.

That light isn't yours. Not really.

But at the same time, you do get to choose how that light manifests.

And to engage with that process consciously—to think deliberately about what we want to create—that gives us power and agency over that process, our sense of the world, and ourselves.

So let’s do this. Let’s make the thing that Homestuck is telling us can exist, the thing it’s paving the way for, the thing we know in our soul can come to be.

Let’s make the next Homestuck happen.

—Ari

POSTSCRIPT

“To put out a manifesto you must want: ABC

to fulminate against 1, 2, 3

to fly into a rage and sharpen your wings to conquer and disseminate little abcs and big abcs, to sign, shout, swear, to organize prose into a form of absolute and irrefutable evidence, to prove your non plus ultra and maintain that novelty resembles life… I write a manifesto and I want nothing, yet I say certain things, and in principle I am against manifestoes, as I am also against principles… I write this manifesto to show that people can perform contrary actions together while taking one fresh gulp of air…”

— Tristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto 1918”

"The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence....the cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of re-turning to dust...This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia. It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories...I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess."

— Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto"

“What we need is works that are strong straight precise and forever beyond understanding... let each man proclaim: there is a great negative work of destruction to be accomplished. We must sweep and clean…to divest one's church of every useless cumbersome accessory; to spit out disagreeable or amorous ideas like a luminous waterfall, or coddle them—with the extreme satisfaction that it doesn't matter in the least…freedom: Dada Dada Dada, a roaring of tense colors, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies: LIFE.”

— Tristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto 1918”

“These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me,

If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to nothing,

If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing,

If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing.”

—Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

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#homestuck #homestuck analysis #what comes next after homestuck #the future of homestuck #homestuckian art #you are actually 100% sure walt whitman said that

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