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dahniwitchoflight · 4 years

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Homesquared Chapter 14

lol gotta love John’s enthusiasm of being part of the movers and shakers getting shot down cuz he hasn’t actually flexed his Main Character Muscles in quite a long time

though he’s honestly taking his mid life crisis very well all things considered, its good he cares more about his kids than anything else and I like the bond he’s getting to make with Harry, it’s nice!

Now what’s a million times funnier though is the same thing happening to Vriska, she is decidedly NOT taking her midlife “but but I want to be important too!!” crisis not nearly as well as John is haha

VRISSY: I guess you Did go Viral, 8ut the news moves so fast these days. I don’t think Any8ody is like...

VRISSY: Glued to their phones Waiting for your New Hashtag Resistance content.

Yeah Vriska, you’re so 15 minutes ago :P people have moved on

what, did you think you were going to be important forever?

VRISKA: What’s the point of me even coming to this shitty fake reality if I’m not supposed to fix it?

to have a mid life crisis about not being important anymore obviously :P

VRISSY: Yeah, they told me about That stuff, but a Lot of the Shit that Happened in the Session if just not in the History Books.

VRISSY: You weren’t Really mentioned that Much.

VRISKA: Excuse me?

I Am Living For This Whole Conversation

VRISKA: I SINGLE H8ND8DLY!

VRISKA: CURED YOUR MOTHER’S FUCKING ALCH8LISM!!!!!!!!

JOHN: uh, vriska, everything okay over there?

VRISKA: EVERYTHING’S FINE, J8HN!

JOHN: okay.

JOHN: do you girls want a snack?

ASJHGFSHFHWE yeah calm down Vriska have a snack

ahh, loving it

Turns out, History is written by the people who were left who decided to give a damn about writing it, and if those people Don’t Like you, they can just decide to not mention you, no matter who you are or what you did

All your “important” accomplishments are for naught and have become meaningless because you’re an asshole and other people didn’t like you enough to decide that you mattered in the long run

Congrats! Infamy doesn’t matter as much as Connection

Aww, cute with Annie getting hug bombed by her moms

Though, Rose definitely has a stronger bond with Annie than just being her surrogate it looks like

I understand this family situation just fine, if Annie really was just supposed to be a way for Jade to overcome her lonliness, and Rose was her only functional way and only person she could approach with this idea, and Rose responded out of care for her friend

Rose, shouldn’t really have a distinct mom attachment here, because then it implies a stronger than platonic relationship with Jade

but it could just be a great example of “this is why you don’t agree to create a child with your friend purely because said friend was crying out of lonliness out of failed relationship and wanted a child to fill that void of lonliness but who then shoves said child off the sidelines and doesn’t interact with her at all and leaves her in the hands and care of a supposed enemy and

yknow, I think I’m just gonna stop there before I remember Jake also knew about Yiffany existing so if the only ones who didn't know were John/Dave/Karkat and Kanaya then what was honestly the point of hiding her in the first place

Its not the fact that Yiffany exists that Im finding hard to believe, its just hows she treated narratively after she started existing thats stretching my rubber band into a dangerous area

“ROSE: Is it the libidinous power rush that comes from snapping your fingers at men with guns, or are you worried that you might accidentally do something heroic?

(its the latter)

“She stopped thinking about how she would be received, and more about how she could play to the people she knew would receive her favorably.

Looking up she sees Tavvy with tears in his eyes. Rage and guilt surge inside her. This situation is not her fault.”

Gotta Justify It. Gotta Justify It.

Doesn’t matter if I’m Right or Wrong, if enough other people validate me than Everything is Fine and I’m a Good Person.

JANE: So before you accuse me, take a look at yourself!

JANE: I'm the only one who has taken any interest in her upbringing or education!

JANE: Or have you forgotten who has been paying for her schooling and taking charge of her introduction into society?

JADE: i never asked you to do that!

JADE: you offered!

Okay but Jade, you DID let Jane have Annie in the first place and then presumably washed your hands of her, when supposedly the only reason Annie exists is because you wanted a daughter with whom you could have a loving relationship with

You gotta, explain you’re thinking there Jade cuz I still don’t get this bit

Though in thinking about it, I think I know why this happened

Jade grew up isolated from any person, but still loved her grandfather, despite his absence

to her, family relationships didn’t involve any sort of personal work, they were just things she had because she had them

did she just believe the same would happen for Yiffanny? that she could paradoxically still have a relationship despite long absences? Annie doesn’t seem to have any resentment here for Jade or Rose so I mean ???

“ If they were to kill Tavros, the entire world would see them commit this war crime. And weighed in the balance, Lalonde and Harley would be off the playing board. Saving your daughter certainly counted as a heroic death, and with the damage they'd done to humanity, it would also probably be just. “

She hates them both so much she’d let Tavros die for it

But also, she really does calculate everything in terms of how the Masses would view their actions as Just or Heroic

so yeah, she was absolutely about to let Tavros die, damn Jane

literally the only thing that stopped you was that Jake viewed the threat as a real threat and was about to do something stupendously Heroic to save Tavros and you decided you didn’t want Jake to die a heroic death

On the flipside, oh damn, Yeah Vriska’s going full throttle right on the nose ahead with the obvious audience expectation, that there gonna make another sburb session and get the obvious group of important 4 kids to god tier

that’s clearly the path vriska wants and expects, but hey, just imagine if what Vriska wanted to happen didn’t happen this time, imagine if the kids were just like “nah im good?” when it comes to a god tier

The narrative is making it super clear that at least 3 out 4 kids are kinda not feeling all the outdoorsy action and excitement of a game of life and death

Annie though I could hella see her down to play sburb and get a god tier, shes got that whole “isolated childhood trauma and parental issues pressure cooking her a strong will to take her life into her own hands” energy

Vriska, go see Annie, her strong willed butt is more of the action girl you’re looking for I think

At least if they do end up playing the game and getting the tiger, Annie feels like the first one to do it or the action catalyst of their session, like how Vriska was for hers, or Dirk for the alphas, or

hmm. who was is that kinda, moved things along for the Beta’s again? I think it was Rose, but Dave did a ton to move things along as well, but also their trolls like Terezi and them gave everything big nudges, I think Rose counts as the equivalent Beta in session mover and shaker though

Side note: the panels with vrissy and vriska here very feel cartoonish and light hearted, interesting choice

but it does give off Major “Play Game: Level 1″ vibes if that makes sense

What the fuck is with the Dave Soldiers

I mean, they look more like Red Johns?Jakes? with the black hair

the glasses throw me off though-

UHH DID THEY JUST FUCKING KILL HARRY ANDERSON??

HOLD ON. HOLD UP

TAVROS AND ANNIE: WITH ROSE/JADE/JAKE/JANE

VRISSY: WITH VRISKA DOWN BELOW

HARRY: WITH JOHN. ON JOHN’S COUCH.

JOHN IS ALSO STILL HERE, MEANING HARRY SHOULD BE WITH HIM.

yeah he literally just went outside for a second to see where the V’s went and then the house gets bombed, and we get three whole panels dedicated to John slowly sitting down in the wreckage

Harry Anderson just got fucking killed holy shit.

oh my god, they were leading up to it too.

We just had three seperate death flags for the other 3 kids in a row

Brain Ghost Dirk warned Jake that Annie was gonna die via electrocution unless he stepped up

Jane was gonna let Tavros die vie neck snapping (even though Kanaya really wouldn’t have)

Vriska and Vrissy discuss god tiering, and what it would mean for Vrissy, death is a subtle implication there but still there

Now to see if Jane’s ever revived Harry Anderson before in the next update I suppose :o

*edit*

They did not kill Harry Anderson, I saw pumpkins in front of the house that got exploded and didn’t see it looks different than the other bland white suburban house that John actually left, so no one died, Harry just got his implied death threat turn

Harry is at Roxy’s House, John sits in the smoldering ashes of his childhood home, languishing in the idea that Jane, the girl who might have in another reality been his loving grandmother, actually wants him and his kids dead for realsies

he never really got to sit and think about the hole where his home was that the meteor struck when he entered sburb huh? (I know his house came with him, giving the allusion all was well in the Medium, but a real meteor still struck the place that he stopped existing on OG Earth, to an outside observer, it would look like a meteor destroyed his home)

with Vriska talking about sburb to Vrissy, it is nice imagery to imagine the implications of the Kids god tiering from Earth C

and the destruction left in their wake

#Homesquared #Harry Anderson Egbert #RIP Son #John does not have good luck with family and explosives

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autumnblogs · 3 years

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Day 41: Caliborn: Enter

https://homestuck.com/story/4956 It’s pretty natural that Dirk’s move on Jake is going to put a strain on Jane’s friendship with him, even if he hasn’t made it yet; I think it definitely gives some insight into Jane that she reacts the way that she does. Not exactly a graceful loser, and in a way that is really pretty passive-aggressive.

She’s not as open and honest as Jade is; as the Prospit Dreamers go, in general, she’s really pretty guarded.

More after the Break

https://homestuck.com/story/4961

The AR, I feel like, gives us a pretty good look into who Dirk is, and while we already know that he impulsively jumps to the first solution he can think of, we can see through the shades that he tends to advise people to do the same things that he does.

Dirk is an extremely headstrong guy, and while he’s both very intelligent, and would really like to be a Puppetmaster, he can’t help but let his personality shine through his puppets; and he can’t help but let his first inclination determine his course of action. He’s him, after all. Why would he question his own judgement?

A bit like how Kermit the Frog is really just Jim Henson the Frog.

https://homestuck.com/story/4962

So what is a Juju?

Juju is a word which comes from French, and means plaything. It is a term that has been used to characterize the Folk Magic and/or Folk Religion of the people of West Africa, in much the same way that Totem has been, or that Fetish has been. In a nutshell, Juju can mean both Spiritual Power (as Mana), and an Object of Spiritual Power (as an Amulet) - the physical manifestation of the thing, and the thing itself are the same, in this sense.

The God and the Idol are the same - at least, they are to the external viewer. While it should be clear that this is a reductive view of it, the fact of the matter is that, a central part of a lot of religious practice in general is to treat the image of a thing, and the thing itself, as though they are the same; and we see this sort of image-based performance all throughout homestuck, through symbols, and rituals, especially where they are empty signifiers - symbols and rituals that have been emptied of their original meaning, and are now practiced only for their own sake.

Following the rules actually doesn’t seem to pay all that much in the world of Homestuck, and almost universally leads to disaster - which in no small part appears to be because the creator of the rules is Lord English.

https://homestuck.com/story/4965

I think it’s pretty interesting that Caliborn’s conception of smut is something as tame as fluffy hand-holding and caressing. While on the one hand, we can just say “Cherubs think it’s taboo because they can only enjoy Caliginous romance” I think we can also associate it with the relatively sexless nature of Homestuck, beyond how horny the characters are, and a few oblique references (which is not a bad thing; it’s about teenagers). In spite of all of the suggestive language and content, there is no possibility of consummation in Homestuck, or even until well after the end of Homestuck, because Caliborn’s vision of intimacy is a sexless one.

https://homestuck.com/story/4967

This takes a turn for the fucked up at the end. I mean, it’s all fucked up to begin with, but it’s such a non-sequitur.

https://homestuck.com/story/4968

Caliborn uses consumption related metaphors and imagery in relation to smut. Aside from jokes about Vore, what’s the significance of that? That the intention of Caliborn and Calliope is to comment on the fandom of Homestuck itself (continuing the identification of the Characters with the Audience that we discussed yesterday) is not really a secret to anyone. How does Caliborn view engaging with Homestuck, and how does he therefore view engaging with Andrew? His view is Hegemonistic and Predatory. From his point of view, the universe he inhabits is full of things to be consumed; objects to absorb, break down into the parts of themselves that make him more powerful, and the parts that can be discarded.

https://homestuck.com/story/4970

I really never get tired of Caliborn, he’s so awful.

https://homestuck.com/story/4971

His conception of human romance is one where he conceives of women as essentially objects of gratification; woman on woman is allowed, I suspect, for much the same reason that it is often rationalized that f*tanari porn isn’t gay; how could jackin’ it to two women be gay?

The idea of women as actors who exist for reasons other than to gratify men, and other than to gratify Caliborn in particular does not occur to him.

Obviously, men don’t exist to gratify each other. That’d be too mutualistic.

https://homestuck.com/story/4981

The Interplay of Sex and Violence.

As long as this sequence is pretty much over;

Why does Caliborn want to play a game? I think the answer is in line with the overall theme of Homestuck. Cultural transmission.

In his book Homo Ludens Dutch historian Johan Huizinga discusses the nature of Play as an element of cultural transmission, and as a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for the generation of culture.

What this means in a nutshell is; Games aren’t the only thing that is necessary for culture to be created, but they are necessary for culture to be created. Can’t have culture without games. A big part of this is because games serve as a stage for human beings to symbolically and ritualistically practice the activities that, as a member fo their culture, they will one day have to perform in order to survive.

This is why games like Tag, and Hide and Seek are the oldest in the world; humans are persistence predators, we hunt down our prey by just not giving the fuck up.

Caliborn’s game is Irony and Porn; insincerity, reproductive activity, etc. and gaming is intrinsically competitive to him; he uses his game as a form of power over Dirk Strider, the power to make him suffer, although since he’s such a dweeb, he’s pretty bad at making him suffer.

https://homestuck.com/story/4986

Meenah likes games too, but her enjoyment of them seems to be a lot more authentic, sincere - as opposed to being a form of power for her to hold over her enemies, her little word-games, with her fish-puns, are a source of legitimate joy to her, and the fact that Aranea will engage her in them creates friendship between the two of them.

https://homestuck.com/story/5027

All this may not have a whole lot of substance to it (I’m making posts at this point almost 40 pages apart), but that doesn’t mean it’s devoid of worth. Homestuck has plenty of pathos, and in spite of the fact that Andrew adores making fun of us for caring about these characters, I do actually care about all of these characters.

They sure have come a long way.

https://homestuck.com/story/5083

As Roxy is ostensibly the stealth leader of her session, we should generally be willing to accept her takes as gospel in a way that we don’t take other characters’ (at least to a certain extent). We just got done talking about how important rules are to the cherubs, and to Caliborn explicitly - we should take heed of the fact that Roxy is very willing to throw caution to the wind and abandon the rules.

Rules in Paradox Space are largely harmful restrictions to be worked around, rather than auspicious maxims to adhere to.

https://homestuck.com/story/5071

Caliborn is a serial forced memer. We’ve already talked oodles and oodles about symbols and rituals and empty signifiers; what is a forced meme except for an empty signifier? An attempt by a malicious third party to turn a meaningless set of pictures and words into a symbol, a symbol that signifies nothing other than itself, and commands the attention and adherence of people in the culture? Rules for the sake of rules. Memes for the sake of memes.

https://homestuck.com/story/5089

Roxy’s anxious babbling is just so much like Dave’s, it’s hilarious. Their language less so.

https://homestuck.com/story/5092

The answer to what a ball’s topspin is, by the way, if you didn’t already know is

an English.

https://homestuck.com/story/5099

Why does Calliope want to be a Troll so badly?

The answer is that she doesn’t want to be a Cherub.

Why doesn’t she want to be a Cherub?

That question could probably keep me up all night, but I think I have an answer right away. Cherubs are arbitrarily powerful, and Calliope does not want to be a Cherub. She wants to be anything other than a Cherub. I can kind of relate to that, even as a human being. After all, there aren’t cherubs and trolls around, even though they are conceivable. Of all of the things we know for sure that consciously exist in our own universe, humans are the most powerful things we know exist for sure. I’d spend a lot to not be one; power, after all, makes us more inhuman.

https://homestuck.com/story/5116

Since I can’t pass up an opportunity to comment on the metanarrative indulgence of the second half, let’s pause to appreciate the term MacGuffin; in a nutshell, an object which exists to be desired. Its only purpose in the story is for someone to want it.

https://homestuck.com/story/5217

The fact that Dirk is conscious of the internal head-goings-on of Brain Ghost Dirk, and is therefore, to some extent cognizant of the head-goings-on of Jake English just opens up so many questions that I still don’t really have an answer to.

https://homestuck.com/story/5238

I rag on Dirk a lot for being a piece of shit.

But man, he is so cool.

https://homestuck.com/story/5246

This entire awful romantic escapade has been created by the Auto-responder, and while Dave has been complicit in it, he is not the puppetmaster behind it. Sound familiar?

https://homestuck.com/story/5252

This flash is just so delightful to me.

It’s the first time Roxy has ever touched another living human being and look how delighted she is.

LOOK HOW HAPPY SHE IS.

https://homestuck.com/story/5261

Now that we know who Lord English is, we have an opportunity to get to know him a little more as a person. Aside from his absurd commitment to puzzle-murders, his strange relationship with romance and sexuality, and his awful and perfunctory craftsmanship, here’s the most important thing to understand about him;

He will always destroy something irreplaceable if it means he can acquire more power.

#liveblogging #commentary #homo ludens

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bladekindeyewear · 4 years

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Blogging the new hs^2 bonus side material! I’ll be as light as possible on partial-screenshots and quotes from this except where it’s potentially plot-important, as you’re supposed to be a Patreon contributor to see it.

Thousands gather in the cold of the planet's capital for the most important event in Earth C's political history. JANE CROCKER is due to be sworn in as president.

Ahh, so some of the Bonus material is covering what’s happening in Meat Earth C--

One of the world's biggest celebrities sits behind the swearing-in, drunk as a skunk. The masses don't know this, but the two of them represent the only Creators left on their planet, abandoned by its makers to Crockerian rule.

--while the others are out on their trip? Hot damn!

Does this mean ALL the human players left to chase down Prince Dirk except for Jake and Jane???

I knew Kanaya and Jade were part of the chase party, but didn’t know they brought Dave. Did Karkat go, too? Calliope??? It only says Creators, and if taken literally that only means the human ones?

This is all especially important because it means ROXY WENT ON THE TRIP YAAAAY MORE ROXY!!! I will always take as much Roxy of any gender that we can get. That and, you know, awake goddamn Jade. WAKE THE FUCK UP JADE.

--Oh, also this means that the trip pals don’t plan on time traveling back to the point where they left, if/when they get back here.

Man, it hurt to type that “if”.

> ==>

Huh... Jake doesn’t SOUND that drunk.

Wait, is that Jake’s hair’s silhouette? I thought it said he sits “behind” the swearing in, not in the crowd in front?

DIRK: (Hey. Is this seat taken?)

God damnit. Brain Ghost Dirk can’t keep his fingers out from even THIS OTHER Jake’s day??

> ==>

--That old troll makes me feel uncomfortable somehow. Not sure why.

> ==>

JAKE: (Surprised you didn't questionably jet off with your brain ghost daughter, too.) DIRK: (I don't think I have one of those.)

Oh huh. I guess everyone is in the loop on what Prince Dirk did, though not necessarily the full import of it beyond the skeeviness.

> ==>

That troll smile is fucking uncomfortable. And, yeah, Jake’s depicted as drunk here imageways, too.

Have I mentioned how much having these PANELS and all this soft art goes to soothing the impact of the horrible stuff that continues to happen? Because it really does. It really felt MUCH, much worse when it was all in serif text and nothing else to soften just how anguished everyone was looking and feeling. Damn those epilogues...

JAKE: (Thats how you can tell youre not the real mccoy. Youre bothering to ask what i think.) DIRK: (I think you're very drunk. I'm not even real and I can smell the whiskey from here.)

Yeah, he’d have a hard time standing up to you this easily sober, you jackass.

> ==>

JAKE: (Im sure shes doing great. Shes got some good ideas you know.) JANE: I want to address this issue. JANE: I have no tolerance whatsoever for xenophobia. JANE: BUT, JAKE: (Oh goddammit i think i really messed up.)

Ppfpfffff. That’s pretty funny. ...How does Jake get SMARTER when he’s intoxicated??

(EDIT: sonntam points out, since I was too lazy to think about it: "you know how it is with Jake: deep inside he understands everything, but then willfully conceils that knowledge from himself because it means confronting uncomfortable truths. but when drunk the filters go away.")

JAKE: (I just hope theres some way to undo this damned mess that the you that doesnt live in my head got all of us into.)

Hmm... we might get some glimpses into BGD’s motivations, here. Assuming this BGD and the other one aren’t two separate splinters with limited ability to share thought.

(Someone asked in my inbox why Brain Ghost Dirk shouldn’t be exactly the same as Prince Dirk if Prince Dirk is “all of himself”. Think of a Venn Diagram that instead of two intersecting circles, is a tiny circle completely inside a giant circle: Prince Dirk is accessing just about all of his “essence of self” across creation, but that goes mostly one way unless his other selves allow it, like the one who committed suicide in Candy to grant his other self more relevance did because he’d been onboard with the same plan from before the branching point. Prince Dirk can pull from the rest of himself as an Ultimate Self, but Brain Ghost Dirk is still just a splinter. Still a discrete self not necessarily sharing the mind of the rest of the whole. Just like how we’ve had other “Ultimate Selves” who have gained access to their entire Heart, like RoboDave/Rose or Jasprosesprite^2, but their wills haven’t bled into their other separate selves and iterations. )

> ==>

Speaking of... Jasprose^2 I’m assuming, interrupting the ceremonies?? From the title and the colors involved here. (This was the panel I glimpsed while I was browsing tumblr earlier, before I started read/blogging this bonus.)

Wait, if this is their doing-- hm. Let me wait to confirm before going on that ramble:

> ==>

Pffff. This newspaper... I’m not going to cap it all for those of you who haven’t paid into the bonus tier but there are so many gems. The “Barack Obama Memorial White House” jesus christ Dave I KNOW that was your doing and it is BRILLIANT.

Hm, so that creepy asshole troll was the Vice Pres. And he HAS to be an asshole since he was willing to run with the Xenophobe to give her a better license to power. He’ll probably do some shit in her absence that Jake or other neglected non-Creator characters have to do some sideplot stuff to remedy.

And-- Oh!

That’s the last page so far.

Well. There’s no confirmation that this for-sure WAS Jasprose’s doing, but if it WAS her...

Well, keep in mind that said Jasprose -- while capricious -- also has the knowledge and feelings of Rose Lalonde’s entire timeline-spanning essence and Heart... without Prince Dirk being at all close enough to delude or manipulate her mind the way he’s been doing to the PROPER Ultimate Rose.

Meaning Jasprose may very well know just how fucking hoodwinked her other self is, and has the power to REALLY fuck with Prince Dirk’s plans for Earth C in his absence. Or at least make Jane’s presidency a little less catastrophic than Dirk was recklessly going to let it be. Suck it, Dirk!

I’m predicting Jane will be put through some serious hijinks and tomfoolery. With a boundary-less sprite uncomfortably flirting with her all the way. Let’s hope this bonus story is planned to give us a bit more hope for the state of the Earth whoever survives this Dirkchase is going to, hopefully, come back to. As much hope as we want to have... in Candy, and here, Jake is right there to help solve the problem, but on the trip chasing Prince Dirk? They kind of left Hope behind...

#Homestuck #hs2 #Homestuck Liveblog #upd8 #bladekindeyewear #blastyoboots #catnapped

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abundantchewtoys · 4 years

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Homestuck^2 re: Chapter 9: “How Goes The Eulogizing, Dear?”

So yeah. The family tree is officially a mess now.

What's more, poor Yiffy falls completely off the shipping grid in the new foursome. She's Vrissy's adoptive sister, Harry's niece/cousin, and Tavros' niece!

I've been thinking what roles, if any, they could all play in a Sburb session. Cause I don't know what, but I'm sure these kids are going to play an important part in the future of Earth C, and an Sburb session is one of the possibilities.

So...

Vrissy the Rogue of Light Tavros the Page of Time Harry the Prince of Breath Yiffy the Maid of Space

Is one of the things I came up with, combining a B2 role with a B1 aspect. Yes? No? Tavros has definitely been having to bide his time, and so has Yiffy. And both roles seem like a good fit for them. And Harry's breath was positively destroyed last chapter while running. :P

The reasoning with Vrissy should be more obvious. She's a wannabe Thief and through Rose and Vriska closely aligned with Light, and through Rose with Rogueness.

Anyway, on to the chapter, which I have no idea who it'd focus on now.

Maybe Dirk? Seems like a Rose thing to say.

---

Page 236

Ah. It's what Jake's going to say to Jane.

Anyway, good news! We'll see more of Yiffy. Maybe just in silhouette.

She seems to be wondering a lot about Tavros. Potentially more now than ever before in the boy's life. :(

---

Page 237

...

Gog.

She was wondering about GAMZEE'S FRICKIN' CORPSE. Orrrrrrr, maybe, she's preparing a speech to rile the masses to her side. Since she kind of broke things of with Gamzee.

---

Page 238

Yyyyeah, Jane's sanity and morality has really been slipping so much. She's just playing on the emotions of her followers now, and convinced herself it's for the greater good.

---

Page 239

Why.

Why did Jake's butt now become an actual thing in the art, too.

---

Page 240

Brain Ghost Dirk continues to be a voice of reason in Jake's backmind. In this way, I like seeing more of him.

"could I get that once more, sans the racism" pffffffff, smooth, Jake, real smooth. But really, for him, he's really playing the part of idiot manservant/manslave very good!

Jane just considers Yiffy a prisoner, even though she's her grandchild. As for Jake... Yiffy is in a real sense his grandchild, and the grandpup of his alt self's fateful dog, so I hope he can bond with her and help her get to safety in the end.

Blaperile had a good point - Jane misunderstood the concept of kismessitude entirely. And Gamzee actually seemed invested into the relationship, since he genuinely tried to make her improve.

What a difference with Game Over Gamzee and Terezi's relationship.

---

Page 241

... Wow.

I thought she'd look very different! Almost polar opposite.

She looks like a Lalonde, dresses snappy like a Strider... Her tail is black like Bec Noir would have had if he had one... Her associated colour is even pink! And she doesn't appear to be wearing glasses either!

... Jane's "seen to her". Please, no. She didn't put a tiara on her, did she... Eesh.

And yeah, her leg's chained down like with the cherubs. :( Please don't have her escape the same way as Caliborn.

---

Page 242

Good to see Jake is of two minds about this whole ordeal. It's the only sane way to be. And through Brain Ghost Dirk, he's actually managed to infiltrate the enemy base unnoticed. So really, props to him.

I wonder when we'll get the first reaction out of Yiffany.

---

Page 243

Pfff, the material cup on Jane's desk includes a spork next to the stapler.

---

Page 244

Ah, there we go.

So Yiffy & Jane are going to have a real Handmaid - Scratch-like chemistry for the time they're together.

---

Page 245

WOOOOOOOOW.

Black dog hair, white human hair.

A piercing. Shorts. Jade's eyes.

She looks amazing.

That collar though, it spells trouble.

Red text colour! Oh wow. So her tie & shoes just appeared to be red due to the hue on Jane's ship.

Hmm, according to the source code the text colour is #D00009, that seems to be different from Dave's.

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Page 248

Oh. It's not mind control, it'll just shock her. D:

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Page 249

Ugh. Jane. How low did you even sink.

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Page 252

... Wow. So that's how Jane knew. She enrolled Yiffy in some prestiguous boarding school for Jade & Rose. So I guess that's why she's associated with the colour red, and where the classy tie and upper piece may have come from.

I wonder if Yiffy's faking being knocked out?

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Page 253

... What ceremony? Are they going to parade her around during Gamzee's funerary proceedings?

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Page 255

Tsssh.

... Huh, she's going to get a command already. So did she or did she not get knocked out?

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Page 256

Woooooooow.

The theme changed!

So, we're going to be seeing something in her dreams. Now, let's see whether it'd be a Sburban dreamself!

Blaperile points out that Space players usually wake up sooner than the rest, so yeah, this could really happen. Or it's all wishful thinking.

But if she wakes up on Derse, it'd still be dark outside. It'd also be the first Derse-dreaming Space player!

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Page 257

Wow. So yeah, seems like Harry and Tavros share a bunk bed now, besides sharing a romantic partner (in different quadrants). Pfff.

The big question about this page is, of course, who Vrissy's moirail is, then. :P Also, Tavros' handle confirmed to be GG! :D Well, I'll be. Well, okay, it's the same as Jane's initials.

So I wonder if Yiffy's chumhandle would contain a C, or be AT/TA to complete the set of AG/GG/TG? ... Blaperile proposes TT, because then all their handles would contain the same initials as their mothers'! That's actually a very good proposal!

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Page 258

Ooooh, glutinousGymnast! So he likes working out and eating! Very special combination. Well, he IS the child of a baketress and a wrestler, so yeah.

So it appears he was wide awake. Maybe he doesn't need a lot of sleep.

And he actually sounded a bit more peppy here than he did before. Maybe he's more of a night owl!

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Page 259

So, yeah, it seems Vrissy actually enjoyed seeing Harry and John bond there.

And I suppose John doesn't like being called cute because... I dunno, maybe Terezi called him that at one point. The "strange and funny" man turn-of-phrase there seems is a reference to her, so I think that's why he dislikes being called "cute".

... The thing Harry picked up on might be related to Dave. If he saw his father's demeanour change over dinner.

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Page 260

Hah, so she actually does talk it over with Tavros. See, here? I wonder if they're not better suited as moirails than kismeses.

And there Tavros goes again, he's quite perceptive.

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Page 261

Hmmm, I wonder if Harry was really talking to Vrissy now. It seems like it was more of a Vriska-tone there. Did she hack Vrissy's account?

So Harry saw John being consoled by Rose & Jade over the news about Dave.

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Page 262

Hah, okay, so it was really Vrissy. But she was just on the verge of falling asleep, hahaah. So both Harry and Tavros got keysmashes.

Now Harry and Tavros are going to have a talk regarding knowing people that died. It's a first for Harry, but with Gamzee, Tavros has a form of precedence over him.

HOLY SHIT.

WE CAUGHT UP!!!!!

WE FUCKING CAUGHT UP!!!!!

I THOUGHT FOR SURE IT WAS GOING TO BE ANOTHER COUPLE HUNDRED OF PAGES!!!!!

Hopy shit.

HOPY SHIT.

Now soon, we'll go on to explore the rest of the site and seeing what's what on the Omegaupdate forums! :D :D :D00009

So yeah, I'm definitely invested in the new Homestuck generation. They're plenty of different yet similar enough to be interesting, I want to see how they subvert and resolve certain expectations I have developped.

#homestuck #homestuck^2 #reaction #yiffy lalonde harley #harry egbert #tavros crocker #jane crocker #jake english #liveblogging homestuck #upd8 #brain ghost dirk #vrissy ml

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mmmmalo · 5 years

Text

This is a (meandering, non-exhaustive) overview of Homestuck’s use of

by which I do not mean examples of psychological realism in a character’s words and deeds, but rather the various means by which characters’ psyches are expressed outside of themselves. I wish to elaborate on how thoughts, feelings, and desires may find expression in the environment, in the medium of the story itself, and in the form of other characters.

That’s perhaps a little vague, so here’s a ready example of what I mean: brainghost!Dirk. He talks with Jake, but since he is a construct of Jake’s mind, Jake is essentially talking to himself. Brainghost!Dirk is an alienated medium for voicing Jake’s own thoughts, irretrievably distorted through its intermingling with what Jake thinks/wishes Dirk would say (not unlike a puppet). I am claiming that this mode of characterization is not a unique to Jake; the blurring of inner and outer voices is omnipresent throughout the story.

Or, rephrased: what I hope to show is that a great deal of Homestuck is haunted with brain-ghosts, of one kind or other.

An early example of this kind of storytelling in science fiction would be the film Forbidden Planet (1956). The film contains a pair of conflicts which eventually reveal themselves to be one: the scientist Morbius wants some space explorers to get off his planet, and an immense monster (pictured above) appears during the night to attack the explorers. Morbius, it turns out, has been experimenting with a machine capable of turning thought into reality. So when Morbius sleeps, his dream of driving off the trespassers materializes in the form of beast that forcefully enacts the wish.

The beast is declared a “monster from the id”, the “id” being a concept borrowed from Freudian psychology, indicating the part of the mind responsible for the unfiltered generation of impulses, of urges. In the film, this passing mention of psychoanalysis precedes the revelation of Morbius’s link to the beast.

Homestuck hints towards its own mixing of thought and reality with a device similar to Morbius’s dream machine: Sburb.

A snapshot of Dave’s Sburb client (1519) shows that the final subprograms launched during the games installation make reference to terminology associated with Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud. The terms suggest that Sburb interacts with the ideas in the kids’ subconscious minds (archetypes) and brings symbolic representations of these ideas into conscious reality (manifests the ideas). The game alters the means by which reality is constructed. As with Forbidden Planet, a major result of this is id monsters.

When John slips on a staircase, he flips out (left, 560). And when he nearly launches himself into the abyss with the Pogo Hammer, he has to take a nap before he has calmed down enough to continue (center, 637). Immediately following both moments of vertigo, massive ogres appear. The eventual fight with the ogres begins after John looks over the edge of the platform above his house, into the abyss (right, 662).

All of this suggests that Sburb is reacting to John’s emotional state (fear) to produce in-game content. The game functions as a waking dream.

It should also be noted that Sburb provokes the reactions it elicits. Karkat once mentioned a nagging feeling that the game was mocking him by giving him a planet covered in the candy red blood he had spent a lifetime attempting to hide (2301). Karkat’s paranoia seems to be correct here, and moreover applicable to the cast in general -- John’s house was likely placed atop an immense spire /in order to/ bring John’s dread of falling into sharp relief. The suspicion can be substantiated with a few related motifs.

The story provides two likely origins for John’s fear of heights: his own fall from the slime pogo as a child (2626) and the death of Nanna, which John believed resulted from her falling from a ladder and being crushed by a book (52). What’s more, Sburb’s invocation of the Fall of Man (Adam and Eve being cast from the Garden of Eden) via biting into an apple hints that there is an allegorical significance to John’s more literal fear of heights.

We can apply these patterns to other characters in an attempt to learn more about them. LOLAR being covered in ocean suggests that Rose is afraid of water, with the likely cause of Rose finding Jaspers dead and washed up on a riverbank (presumed drowned). Dave speaks openly about how his sword fights with Bro left him anxious of metal sounds (7749), meaning the grinding gears of LOHAC were a personalized hell for Dave. Jade’s first imp manifests in response to the sight of a yellow aurora (2998), inviting the reader to investigate why that image invokes a fear response.

But we won’t get to into all of that, not for now at least. Let’s take a step back.

For my reading of the imps as manifestations I’ve been leaning heavily on a piece of film theory devoted to the effects of sequential images. The sequence above constitutes two observations. One, that by this arrangement the viewer will infer the old man sees and reacts to the middle figure. Two, that the viewer’s impression of the old man will change based on the content of the central image, even if his expression is the same. Is he smiling at Nepeta or warm embrace Marvus’s armpit? The answer may influence your interpretation of the little smile.

The neat thing about montage is that the interrupting frame need not bear any obvious relation to what precedes or follows in order to be subject to a causal reading. Moments that occur sequentially can be read as triggering one another, even if what follows any particular moment appears to be a break rather than a continuation.

Example: There’s a moment where Aranea walks into Jake’s dream, and brainghost!Dirk immediately starts razzing Jake about his attraction to the alien girl and threatening to give him a boner. The scene is interrupted by Jack committing a series of gratuitous murders. We then cut back to Jake, and bg!Dirk is now teasing him about his dirty thoughts.

DIRK: You have got to be kidding. Did you seriously just think something THAT dirty? DIRK: You must be doing this on purpose to spite me now. I mean, just wow dude. That was x-rated as fuck.

JAKE: (No no stop. See youre talking about it and now i cant help it!) JAKE: (You are psyching me into having dirty thoughts get fucking lost you interloping brain douche!!!)

DIRK: Don't worry, I'm gone. It's like a goddamn peep show in here and I feel like a sleazy piece of shit watching this from a dark corner of your mind. DIRK: You have a graphic imagination, English. I'm kind of impressed.

JAKE: (Shut up theyre just thoughts its not even like im trying to have them THEY DONT MEAN ANYTHING!)

The ostensible joke is that bg!Dirk is exaggerating or outright fabricating his account of Jake’s thoughts in order to hassle him. But by way of montage, one can infer that we /have/ seen Jake’s dirty thoughts, in the form of Jack’s display of overwhelming bloodlust. Violence is superimposed over the sexually explicit.

Whether the scene literally takes place in Jake’s mind is secondary (though such a reading would explain why Jake’s brain ghost is even aware of Jack) -- the use of montage allows Jack’s actions to function as a /metaphor/ for Jake’s thought.

Another example of Jack functioning as a murderous/libidinous avatar would be the death of Mom and Dad. At their little tea party, Dad spills some wine on Mom’s clothes and declares that she must disrobe immediately (so that Dad might launder the garment). Mom calls the aromas wafting from his pipe sensuous. The two clasp hands and declare that all they need is eachother. Then they die! The joke is that while Bec Noir is ostensibly an interruption to date night, he also functions as its culmination, with murder acting as substitute for the sex act.

The link between violence and sexuality is perhaps a hard sell, but I hope to convince you that the reading holds merit. Let me emphasize that the very act of Mom and Dad holding hands was itself sexually loaded.

I owe to HS liveblogger elfstuck the insight that John’s linear 3 card sylladex is a reflection of his short attention span. Consider how John’s role as a game character means he is thrown all around his room, back and forth, as the player figures out what to make of the situation. If you ignore the fourth wall, you’re left with an extremely distracted person, who attention flows easily from one object to another. Accepting the object-in, object-out nature of John’s sylladex and the resulting shenanigans as a metaphor for this, it would follow that the sylladex in general can offer an abstract representation of thought.

In passing, I can mention how the enormity of Jake’s sylladex (it cannot even fit on the page, and contains an object that exceed most players’ size limits) would imply that despite evidence to the contrary, the boy likely has a big brain (and perhaps its being offscreen suggests Jakes own unawareness of much of his own thought). Dirk’s comment about avoiding items that are difficult to shoehorn into his mnemonic schema (4535) could be read as a difficulty maintaining information that doesn’t fit into his personal mental models. The sylladex becomes a metaphor for the mind that requires interpretation.

Under this mode of thought, the moments when Jade’s pictionary modus fails to correctly interpret her drawing become akin to a mental slip-of-the-tongue. For the Tanglebuddies to be misread as enmeshed hands implies an association, in Jade’s mind, of horny Squiddles and clasped hands. John affirms the association much later by miming Tanglebuddies as he attempts to grapple with the question of whether Jade and Davesprite are sexually compatible (5294):

JOHN: how do things even work if you marry a sprite?

JADE: what do you mean

JOHN: i mean... JOHN: ok, he has a ghost butt, for one thing.

JADE: uh JADE: so

JOHN: a GHOST BUTT, jade!

JADE: SO WHAT IF HE HAS A GHOST BUTT!!!!!

JOHN: i'm just saying...

JADE: WHATEVER YOURE JUST SAYING, JUST STOP SAYING IT! JADE: and whatever youre trying to gesture with your hands there, stop doing that too!

It should also be noted that before launching into her “daring dream”, waxing poetic on the miraculous union of the human and the animal with her hands clasped in wonder, Jade successfully captchalogued the Tanglebuddies (796). And more to the point, Jade’s pose in reproduced during discussions of cherub (5961) and leprechaun (6007) reproduction. Hand-holding becomes representative of an (oft-sexualized) union, underlining the euphemistic nature of Mom and Dad’s post-contact demise.

The next example of using montage to communicate thought requires a little more buildup.

There’s a gag in Rose’s introduction where the reader tells Rose to play with her writing journals, and scoots the journals under the bed and retorts that she would only do that if no one were watching (220). At first glance, the moment scans as a minor meta joke in a story filled with meta jokes -- but the trick is that Rose does not /know/ herself to be a video game character, her every movement controlled and observed. Rather, she /believes/ this to be true -- the joke about being watched establishes that Rose is paranoid, as will become apparent in the hostility she assigns to Mom’s every action.

The command prompt and narration are themselves brain ghosts of a sort: the voice deployed in them is always linked to the present point-of-view character. The insults that precede character introductions ( “Zoosmell Pooplord”, etc) become marks of anxiety, an intrusive proclamation of what the kids at times think of themselves (and/or what they think others think of them). “Nice time management skills, sweetheart!” becomes a bit of self-deprecation Rose as she procrastinates, which Rose experiences as having been voiced by some objective observer who judges her deficiencies.

A blurred line divides characters from the voice at the back of their head, belonging to the (presumed) omniscient, omnipotent author-god. This is why avatar!Hussie is dressed as Calliope when he is killed by Lord English. Both Calliope and Hussie are a voice in Caliborn’s head, and thus both present apparent obstacles to an unmediated self.

The left panel (3219) foreshadows the right (3358). Gamzee is not being declared the objectively most important character in Homestuck. Rather, Gamzee is declaring himself /to have been declared/ the most important character in the story. The line establishes that Gamzee believes himself to be in a story (with an author!) and that this author has declared him paramount. Furthermore, “fondly regarding creation” is an modus operandi of Problem Sleuth’s Godhead Pickle Inspector. Applying that turn of phrase to Gamzee’s actions further establishes that Gamzee believes himself to /be/ the god-author declaring his own importance. So it should come as no surprise that 137 pages later, Gamzee outright proclaims himself to be the god(s) he worships.

Going back to montage, it becomes interesting that this snapshot of Gamzee’s megalomania is inter-cut with the creation of Jadesprite -- the moment that dead!dream!Jade merges with Bec, forming a unity with a deity not unlike the unity Gamzee claims with his mirthful messiahs. The interweaving would suggest that Jade and/or Jadesprite experienced analogous thoughts of megalomania upon the moment of ascension.

This would be a good point to mention that not only imps and ogres, but trolls also function as manifestations for the people they impose upon. Karkat is not only an interruption here, but also a continuation. He points out that Jade’s self-loathing, that she cannot safely distance herself from the qualities of Jadesprite she finds distasteful. This is precisely why Karkat ends the conversation by telling Jade to turn off the fourth wall (which divides the self!), as well as the reason he imagines Jade making out with herself: Karkat is on every front presenting the prospect of union with oneself.

The notion of trolls as manifestations first emerges clearly when Rose and Dave receive their packages from John. As they finish reading John’s letter, each is suddenly contacted by a troll and greeted with the command “Answer.” Critically, by word alone it is ambiguous as to whether the command refers to answering the troll or the letter. And as it turns out, these answer occur simultaneously: Rose and Dave’s responses to the letters are embedded in the subsequent conversations.

Rose receives a letter poking fun at her pretensions, claiming that her attempts to hide her affections for people are futile. In response we get Kanaya, who imperiously proclaims her disdain for Rose, only to suddenly change tact and explicitly seek Rose’s friendship, an entreaty which the oft paranoid Rose accepts. Dave receives a letter imploring him to let go of his insecurities and express himself. In response we get Tavros, the very picture of insecurity, who is fixated on the idea of making Dave shit himself (as part of an ‘emotional constipation’ motif that follows Dave). And Dave complies, in a sense, by way of the quasi-ironic gay treatise that compels Tavros to block him. Each conversation addresses the issues laid out in John’s letter.

Examples can be found throughout the comic. Equius remarking that he talks to Gamzee every day (2220) establishes that Gamzee is regularly haunted by the thoughts of domination that Equius voices -- both in the literal and metaphorical sense. Erisolsprite referring to Dirk as a rock 2oliid piiece of a22 and then calling himself 2ociiopathiic for even thinking something so callous (5516) expresses a conflict already present in Jake’s own mind, echoing the frustration with his own dirty thoughts expressed by the argument with brainghost!Dirk. Feferi’s pronounced enthusiasm for the imminent apocalypse should cause you to question Kanaya’s seemingly neutral resignation towards the end of the world, since Feferi manifests for Kanaya (2328). And so on.

The person being trolled is always being confronted with thoughts or feelings or memories already present within themself. Alien contact always doubles as a brain ghost haunting.

Another example, with some buildup: Karkat invokes the phrase “PERFORATE MY BONE BULGE WITH A CULLING FORK” to express his contempt for Vriska, and on subsequent pages we see Feferi pointing her culling fork at a cuttlefish (2181), as if to suggest that the creature symbolizes the bone bulge. Fast forward to Kanaya, who has just gotten through a conversation with Vriska and finds herself haunted by Eridan, who keeps going on about his romantic desperations and insisting (correctly) that Kanaya’s crush on Vriska is itself romantic. That his notification erupts from an image of cuttlefish held at Kanaya’s waist adds to the air of yearning, as though her own bulge is rumbling. The scene is capped off with a double entendre: “its hard and nobody understands” is playfully poignant jab at an inability to understand one’s own desires (among other things).

And Homestuck devotes a lot of attention to desire.

It’s long been acknowledged by the fandom at large that Kanaya’s attraction to Light players functions as a joke on the proverbial moth-to-the-flame. As reconciliation with the fire destroys the moth, there’s a morbid tinge to the attraction, as though it doubles as a death wish. And the wish is granted -- when Kanaya dies in Homestuck, she dies to light, either from Eridan’s wand or the laser blasts unleashed by HIC. Even the death of Kanaya’s lusus pertains to light -- the matriorb ripped from her innards is shaped like a miniature sun, as if to establish some loose link between the notion of motherhood and the incandescence Kanaya eventually achieves.

This can be generalized into a principle wherein lusii (and the circumstances of their deaths!) can functions as analogies for the desire of the wards.

Vriska, for example, desires execution. When offering Terezi a flimsy apology for crippling Tavros and proxy-murdering Aradia, Vriska offers to slam her head against her desk in penitence. This moment should be read against Vriska’s addiction to breaking 8 balls, and leaving the broken shards lying around as though she’s inviting the “bad luck” of stepping on them. It /is/ an invitation. Vriska seeks love via violent retribution against herself. This is why in the right panel, Vriska’s blood-spattered head is juxtaposed with a broken 8 ball: the blood came from Spidermom’s execution (which characterizes Vriska’s desire), and motif of 8R8K H34DS connects the moment to Vriska’s idea of apology.

Like Kanaya, Vriska (to a degree) seems to structure her love life along these lines. In the words of @azdoine:

like ppl are actually out here writing Vriska as the top as if her entire Act 5 character arc isn’t about bratting out until Terezi has no choice but to punish her

“oh noo, I, the thief of light, stole all of your luck, and made the coin land on the scratched side! now you have to kill me! but I’m probably going to get away with everything, because you don’t have the guts to stab me with that sword of yours!!!!!!!! if only there was somebody, like you, who could prove me wrong!”

EXTREMELY SUBTLE THERE, VRISKA

Vriska’s approach to wooing Tavros also revolves around baiting execution:

The scene: Tavros leads a horde of imps and ogres into a mystery cave, the top of which is adorned with kissing lizards and an alchemical symbol. Tavros is putting a puzzle of a frog together, but Vriska has already pieced together the puzzle: making a frog universe is, in part, a cipher for personal reproduction. The Ultimate Alchemy is making a baby! And as Vriska says, “real gamers cut to the chase. They power through all the nonsense and go for the gold.” So she brings Tavros to LOMAT and makes the moves on him.

Tavros is equated to a treasure chest by the repeated use of framing and Vriska is GOING FOR THE GOLD, like a WINNER. Tavros later reaches into the same chest for his lance before heading off to attempt to kill Vriska -- affirming that the treasure Vriska seeks here is Tavros’s “lance”.

This setup was suggested by the conversation accompanying the kissing salamanders: Vriska gives Tavros a map with a big red X, saying he should take his legion of imps through the gate and go defeat his denizen. The gate actually leads to Vriska, but she isn’t lying. She is positioning herself to be Tavros’s final boss. The imps are manifestations of Tavros’s pent up rage (much of which was generated by Vriska’s harassment), and Vriska wants Tavros to take that anger out on her. Hence the later panel which uses Vriska’s boots to place a big red X directly over her groin, making explicit the implicit goal of Tavros’s trip to the windmill X-gate.

This pursuit of love through violent comeuppance may have something to do with Vriska’s bitter disappointment that ghost!Aradia did not seem to hate her.

An intermission/introduction of sorts, as we bridge from one discussion of desire to another: did you know that Michael Bay’s Armageddon (1998) structures itself in part around Freud’s Oedipus complex? I say this in total sincerity.

The plot: a meteor the size of Texas bears down upon the Earth, threatening armageddon. Luckily, a crew of rough-and-tumble oil drillers are ready to fly into space and split that mother in two. Oh HELL yeah.

Except, wait, the movie’s actually about family drama: Bruce Willis finds Ben Affleck sleeping with his daughter Liv Tyler; Willis proceeds to chase Affleck around the oil rig with a shotgun, bang bang bang. Not Allowed. The Protective-Father-Hates-Your-Boyfriend dynamic is presented as an Oedipal triad of sorts: although Tyler is not literally Affleck’s mother, she performs the mom-function of “forbidden object of desire” -- and Willis opening fire is equivalent to the castration said to await trespassers onto maternal soil.

The above reading is buttressed by jokes: Armageddon appears to function within an implicit dream machine, such that the characters’ thoughts and fears can become manifest in their environment. So when it comes to pass that whenever Affleck climbs into a hole (heehee), a pipe breaks (hoohoo), and suddenly everything goes boom, I read that as Affleck reliving the consequences of boning Tyler, packaged in such a way that the Freudian fear of castration is more explicit. (The relevance of Oedipus to the proceedings adds some humor to Steve Buscemi declaring the entire disastrous situation a “Greek tragedy”)

At any rate, after some shenanigans, Willis comes to accept Affleck’s claim to his daughter and confers the deed, as it were. Willis gives the young couple his blessing and they get married. Hooray!

Except, wait, the movie’s actually about the perpetuation of the oil industry: the dream machine was declared at the beginning of the movie when a petty street-side argument triggered the first barrage of meteors. The meteor the size of Texas (aka Dotty) is triggered by conflicts that haunt the central cast -- namely Willis, who enters the film hitting golf balls at a Green Peace boat. On a metaphorical level, Dotty is a golf ball the size of Texas, striking directly at the Earth instead its self-declared representatives. There’s a certain irony here: the film lampshades that the men who are destroying the world have been tasked with saving it.

The family drama folds into the environmentalist angle: Liv Tyler is a symbol of the earth (which gets drilled). This is the joke when Affleck is bouncing animal crackers around on her belly like she’s host to the Savannah: she kind of is! It’s no coincidence that Willis confers ownership of the oil rig at the same moment that he offers his daughter’s hand in marriage: the motifs are being discussed simultaneously.

But enough of all of that: back to Homestuck.

Armageddon’s simultaneous casting of Liv Tyler into the roles of earth and mother offers a glimpse at the interpretive possibilities made available by Hussie’s statement that Homestuck is in a way a synonym for Earthbound (an RPG in which “homesickness” is a status ailment which can be cured by calling your mom). Stuckness or boundness can be deployed to communicate a sense of longing for “home”.

A good chunk of Homestuck is built upon feelings of nostalgia, taken to mean a sort of intense separation anxiety with the past. John speaks about this when he watches Con Air with Jade – John wants the movie to feel like it did when he watched it with his Dad long ago, but the feeling from when he was a kid is gone. This upsets him. Moreover, John’s freakout starts at the moment Cyrus puts a gun to the bunny’s head (5286): Con Air itself is partly about Nic Cage trying to return to the life he lost when he went to jail, and ‘putting the bunny back in the box’ is a metaphor for the attempt. Cyrus, in threatening the bunny, is highlighting his role as a force preventing things from going back to how they were. Thus, if we are to believe that John is responding to the movie thematically, Cyrus confronts John with his own inability to go back to a happier past – his inability to go home -- and this recognition is met with anger.

In making the leap to the psychoanalytic motifs, it helps to recall the part where baby!Dirk responds to being born by cracking open his ectotube and crawling back inside. Dirk, who aspires towards his “ultimate self”, illustrates here that he envisions his ascension as a return to the ‘essence’ of Dirk from which he (and all other iterations of himself) arose, as represented by the ectoslime. Baby!Dirk gestures at unity with his ectoslime/essence by crawling back into the place from which he was born, which I’m basically claiming is a “return to the womb” on a symbolic level, or at least that this is a useful parallel to draw. (A related motif to think about: Dirk decapitates himself by sticking his head inside a box, which as per Con Air symbolizes the place you wish to return to)

[Hella Jeff sez: “i took (my pants) off because i was banging your mom for a minute there..... AND NOW YOU ARE BANGING HER”]

Castration becomes unavoidable as you try to relate all of this to Dave, whose occasional references to banging hot moms are part of an ongoing reference to the Oedipus Complex. Critically, the complex is not /just/ about wanting to bone your mom, but also fear that your dad will chop your junk off if you do. The breaking of Dave’s sword on the rooftop is a realization of this fear (yes, we’re doing the “swords are phallic” thing). But Dave has no mom that he knows of, so what gives?

The answer is in the way Bro inexplicably breaks the record emblem on Dave’s t-shirt, as though he has introduced a fissure into Dave’s very identity. Life with Bro has made it very difficult for Dave to be honest with himself, which is to say, Dave pictures Bro’s abuse as having divided him from an ideal “true self”, which can feel emotions without all the anxious ironic detachment. I mentioned before that seeking unity with that from which you came is a “return to the womb”. This is the sense in which the Oedipal mom attraction becomes relevant: the return to the past is sexualized. The ‘home’ Dave wishes to return to is /himself/, and in this sense Dave is his own hot mom (which is related to how often Dave compliments his own looks, as well as the above gif suggesting Dave’s boner – he is literally/metaphorically “attracted” to himself).

(Incidentally: this model of desire, in which a broken subject attempt to become whole again by seeking out its lost half, is basically the concept of the soulmate, as laid out by Plato. Cherub reproduction turns the metaphysical pursuit of one’s lost half into a plot-level objective)

John’s entry item (apple) was linked to fear embodied in a childhood trauma (the Fall), and the same can be said of Dave. Hatching from the shell that contained your primordial goop (Dirk) is analogous to being violently separated from yourself (Dave), which is why Dave’s entry item (an egg) hatching coincided with Bro slicing the meteor in half: the abuse that divided Dave from himself, his “castration” by Bro, is simultaneously the “birth” that separated Dave from his “mother” (which is also Dave).

The general idea is that birth = self-alienation = castration, insofar as all are depicted as modes of being separated from oneself.

The broad motif of ‘being separated from oneself’ can be very useful for identifying brain ghosts in unexpected places. Take for example, Roxy’s fenestrated planes: when they are introduced the narrative is quick to tell us that if someone were caught half in/out of one of the windows when the power cuts out, they would be sliced in half. By the rule of Chekhov’s gun, this introduction should mean we should eventually see someone get gorily bisected by the window, but alas we never do.

Instead, when Gcat warped the panel away, trapping Roxy between the windows, we were shown the image of a bisected horse puppet in Dirk’s apartment, This signals that Chekhov’s gun has indeed gone off. But rather than splitting a body, it split a soul: Meenah’s introduction follows the sequence because Roxy has generated a shadow of herself, a doppelganger. This is not without precedent: an earlier portion of this post was devoted to exploring the fourth wall as a mode of self-alienation. Roxy’s panel mishap can be considered part of that pattern.

If Meenah functions as an extension of Roxy, all of her actions can be read as bearing some relations to Roxy’s own latent thoughts and desires. Prior to the epilogues, for example, Meenah imploring John not to give her the ring seemed to be yet another Fuck You to the late Chekov: the issue never comes up again. But a psychic link between Meenah and Roxy would suggest that John broke his promise to Meenah by giving the ring to Roxy, and that whatever motivations compelled Meenah to make her request in the first place would also apply to Roxy.

Decapitation is yet another mode of self-alienation, and thus can be construed as a mode of birth. Hence the image of Lil Sebastian hatching from his shell of taxidermied man meat. That’s a motif unto itself, but what I wish to call attention to is the match-cut from John’s broke body to Jake’s broken tower. The juxtaposition collapses the images into metaphor, such that Jake’s loose dome in the woods becomes a decapitated head -- an appropriate addition to the pumpkin patch it rests in, given all the Headless Horseman jokes. We can look to Dirk for for another example of a headless horse-man of the house echoing the head: for a guy who idealizes decapitation to such a degree, it is striking that Sburb aims to provoke him by reattaching his beheaded apartment to its underlying units.

Houses act as metaphors for heads, then “Homestuck” could also interpreted as “head trapped” -- like the title emphasizes confinement within one’s own mind. Such a reading offers up Failure to Launch and Arrested Development (posters on John and Jane’s walls) as alternate synonyms for Homestuck, as each satirizes (or outright mocks) potential failure states in the process of inter-personal and mental development (ie “growing up”). Like Earthbound, both lean on a sense of homesickness in characterizing despondency, as though characters are haunted by the needs that defined their childhood -- or else find themselves needing that childhood itself.

But collapsing nostalgia into infantile regression is far from the only way to approach the house/heads equation. One might read the transformation and growth of houses with Sburb as metaphors for expanding the mind. One might infer that the choreography of events within houses can map out thoughts like dancing bees. One might take the metaphor as a foothold for interpreting the significance of the Sburb logo being at once a house and a window. \I have my own thoughts about Homestuck’s brain-ghost haunted house-minds, but for now, I only hope that this document has raised some interesting questions -- and ideally, that the interpretive approaches I’ve described might be useful in seeking answers.

#homestuck #homestuck meta #this is basically the contents of the stream #movies #john #rose #dave #jade #jake #dirk #roxy #gamzee #vriska #4th wall #psychoanalysis #house as head #plato

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atalana · 5 years

Text

Alright, I’ve just spent 17 hours absorbing the epilogue, and in true Dirk Strider fashion, I have Thoughts.

I had plenty of responses I’ve been considering to this, about two hours ago I was honestly thinking of just dropping in with a fuckin one liner like “So Dirk Three wrote the epilogue” (Dirk Three kinda did write the epilogue, and I’ll explain that too), but we’re on the fucking essay train now and no one’s getting off it any time soon so it’s time to dive into this fucker and get it all off my chest.

Under the cut you will find essays on Dirk, cherubs, ultimate selves, both major Dirk fics (Detective Pony and Theatre of Coolty), a bunch of story bullshit, and my severe love for all Homestuck characters

(But very little criticism of the epilogue, I am no longer about that life)

So the prologue is important here. It’s the main bit of accurate information we have, not tainted by an unreliable narrator. (Well, it is, but less so). The prologue tells us that, with the characters outside of canon, they are becoming their ultimate selves, particularly the characters most susceptible to such knowledge, like seers, or heart players.

Now Homestuck wrestles a lot with the idea of the ultimate self. It is, as defined by the text, the true thing a person is, an amalgamation of every possible version of themselves. It is not a viable human being, because that’s not how human beings work. It basically amounts to Hussie’s character rules, like, there are some ways that these characters will be always, some things they’re prone to, things they like, decisions they’re likely to make, but who the person is within that is subject to extreme change depending on circumstance. The four people who embody this narrative most clearly are Vriska, Terezi, Davepeta, and Dirk.

I’m still not 100% sure on why the ultimate selves outside of canon thing is, but my best guess would be this - within the story, there’s a definite timeline, right? Like, these are the things that are written down, this is what you can see, the word of god (loaded phrase, thanks Dirk), the things that you look at when trying to apply death of the author (even more loaded phrase, thanks Hussie, also thanks Calliope). There’s more than one timeline, sure, but that’s the point, everyone is who they are within that timeline, affected by what happened to make them who they became. Outside of canon is, well, outside of the story. They’re not affected by the story here, they’re just characters. This is a fanfiction site. And what does fanfic do best? It takes the characters, takes who they are, pulls them out of the story, and shoves them in wherever it likes, to become whoever it is they become. And thus who the character is exactly becomes murky and confusing if you’re trying to jam them all into one thing, and it all gives Rose Lalonde a headache. Ultimate selves.

Davepeta liked their ultimate self, it helped two kids who were otherwise struggling with unsatisfying ultimate selves to become a better whole.

Vriska took the proactive approach, by which I mean bullying her other selves into letting her become the ultimate Vriska, which was ultimately useless and gave her no ultimate self at all

Terezi saw her ultimate self, and is still processing what that means for her (but also Terezi is still in canon, so she’s immune to epilogue bullshit)

And Dirk, god, poor Dirk. Dirk was terrified of it. Because he could see his ultimate self and he knew that’s not the kind of person he wanted to become. (And this is where I start using the Theatre of Coolty numbers because there’s no other way to get through this, if you haven’t read/seen it you 100% should, but as a general note, Dirk One is the main Dirk we know, Dirk Two is Brain Ghost Dirk, Dirk Three is “Trickster Dirk” but actually revealed later to be Hussie, Dirk Four is Hal)

Because here’s the thing. Dirk’s ultimate self is him, but it’s also Hal. It’s also BGD. It’s also Bro. And Dirk One was never as bad as he thought he was, but he surrounded himself with copies of himself, so he knew how bad he could be, and tried everything he could to avoid it. We have actual canon confirmation on multiple occasions that Dirk would so much rather kill himself than become the kind of person capable of hurting his friends. Which only got worse after he met Dave and realised Bro existed, like, that just doubled his resolve to Never Be That Person.

(Hey, fun hypothetical, if you kill yourself to stop yourself becoming a bad person because you know it’s inevitable but you’re too good a person to want to go through with it, is it heroic or just? Because I would like to have a lengthy discussion with the god tier clock!)

God, there’s so much I can write on the subject of Dirk’s ultimate self. Because you can see every version of him inside there, there’s Bro in his possessiveness, Hal in his need to fuck with people for no real reason, BGD in his hyper critical nature (beyond what is normal for all Dirks), Dirk One in his desire to never let anyone hurt him again. (God, the “I’ll never let you break my heart again” line hurt so much, because like… I can feel Dirk One in that line, but it’s delivered by ultimate Dirk, and ultimate Dirk isn’t the kind of person who would have even been heartbroken by Jake’s actions. Dirk One poured his soul into that relationship and Jake responded by ignoring him, and like, this isn’t a dig on Jake, because that did make Dirk very intense and hard to deal with, but as Calliope so beautifully put, the children left alone are those who most despair at being ignored. And every version of Dirk was so very alone.)

When sending initial thoughts to my friend, I wrote “Ultidirk is Dirk One but without the compassion or empathy and with an apparently infinite supply of horse tranquilizers”. Which was mostly a joke, but does get down to the core of the problem. Dirk One and Ultidirk aren’t really that different, when it comes down to it. But there’s one crucial element that makes all the difference. Dirk One’s life philosophy is “This is a me problem, so I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure you don’t have to deal with that problem, at any cost”. Ultidirk’s life philosophy is “This is a me problem, so I’m going to make it everyone else’s problem. And it turns out that without basic human empathy and morality holding him back, Ultidirk will just… fucking declare himself God, and use that alongside his powers of manipulation to just write a new story in which he is the villain. Very little changes in the scale of things.

(The other main difference is that Dirk One is scared to exist, whereas every other Dirk is scared to not exist, that’s the stuff, good callback, etc etc, that line fucking killed me, and also killed whatever remnant of Dirk One was still lurking inside Ultidirk and god I want to hug him)

(I also want to extract him from Ultidirk and bring him on an Ultidirk murdering quest bc he would be 100% down for that without a second’s hesitation but that’s a bit hard to do)

Now you may be wondering why I brought up Theatre of Coolty if I was only gonna refer to Dirk One as Dirk One and not touch on any of the others. Well, it’s true, saying Dirk Two and Dirk Four when I have simple three letter names for both of them is a bit ridiculous. But then we get to Dirk Three.

Now here’s the thing about Theatre of Coolty. Dirk One appears in Homestuck, as alpha Dirk, in Dirk’s usual shirt with the orange hat. Dirk Two appears in Homestuck, as brain ghost Dirk in god tier pyjamas. Dirk Four appears in Homestuck as Hal, and he wears a red hat because he’s Dirk in a different colour scheme, also because the sprite Hussie eventually made for him based on fanon had a red hat, all’s sorted there.

But Dirk Three? Trickster Dirk? Never appeared in Homestuck. They tried, but it was still Dirk One. Dirk is immune to cherubic influence (remember this point too, it’s important), because his concept of self is so present (and also because he’s depressed as fuck, but that doesn’t necessarily exclude you, it’s just the presence of both at once). And who does Dirk Three turn out to be? Well, they said it from the start, Theatre of Coolty is about the presence or absence of god, who definitely will show up at some point. Dirk Three is Hussie in a Dirk costume, Dirk Three is God, Dirk Three is The Author.

Dirk Three is Ultidirk. Congrats, all four Dirks have officially shown up in Homestuck, to whatever extent this counts as Homestuck, an extent which has been thoroughly documented by its own existence bc this is Homestuck (kinda) and you gotta lean into the bullshit or you’ll drown in it.

So yes, this was penned by Dirk Three. Who is also Lord English in two different metaphorical ways now (The trickster element, and also the fact that the epilogues insist on making Jane a second Condesce, which in this analogy puts Dave as himself and Dirk as, you guessed it, Cherub Master of All. Which is additionally insulting as fuck because Dirk grew up in that apocalypse and would never contribute to recreating it, if Jane ever was inclined to, which she isn’t, but you know).

And LE’s major force of opposition? Adult Calliope. (Also, like, Vriska, but symbolically it’s the other cherub.)

Which brings me to the main point of this essay, and that is that all of this? It’s a cherub fic. And we knew this, from the moment we were offered that choice. Meat or Candy? Well, neither of them are sustainable food sources for humans, not with the meat uncooked like that. They’re not satisfying endings for us either. But it’s all cherubs eat. (Well, that and special stardust, but that was Caliborn’s intermission. This is Calliope’s offering.)

Which again feeds back into the AO3 metaphor because from their introduction, Caliborn and Calliope have been fandom inserts, representing all of us, for better or worse. They read the story, come up with the theories, they write the fanfic.

And Calliope’s trying so hard. But she’s not human. She doesn’t get it, not on a way that connects with the characters, only with the text. Cherubs spend their lifetime alone. Cherubs only have black romance. Cherubs think trickster mode is an acceptable way to solve problems.

And, as Dirk pointed out back when he was still himself, everyone getting married and having a bunch of babies for no reason doesn’t solve shit.

Without a solid timeline, everyone became susceptible to becoming their ultimate selves. Ultidirk is a dick with the powers of actual capital g God, and none of the remorse of Dirk One, so he took control of the narrative. And so Calliope, the fanfic author, the one with the power to write a new story (with the exception of Dirk, as previously mentioned, he’s immune to cherub bullshit, and John and Terezi, who are still in canon), tried to help everyone realise their full potential.

But she made them selfish. She made them solitary. She doesn’t understand how humans work, so they became parodies of themselves. In meat, there’s a plot, but it’s insubstantial, because no one is truly themselves, facing a Dirk who lost himself years ago. In candy, it’s fluff with, again, no substance. It’s trickster mode calmed down. Everyone gets married and has babies, but it makes no sense, and everyone’s miserable.

And John Dirk and Terezi are the only ones who see it, because they’re the ones who haven’t been given to Calliope. But what’s the point, when they’ve lost their power over the story? What’s the point of gaining power if you’re not yourself anymore? (And one way or another, they all die in the end.)

The rest of them… Well, they do the things the narrative implied they would do, but usually in the worst possible way.

(Aradia and Sollux have been canon neutral since 2011 and they like it that way)

And now we go back to Detective Pony, like everyone and their mother have analysed already. Because yeah, these two things have so much in common, but also, some really crucial differences.

Both are stories in which Dirk takes control of the narrative, in which he is fought for control by another author figure, in which he considers his own role in the story, what he’s created, who’s got the authority (I still love that pun so much), and eventually forces the characters to come to the conclusion that he needs to be defeated, because at the end of the day Dirk is still hopelessly suicidal and like most problems the kids have, this is never addressed outside of ironic bullshit. (Not to him anyway, it’s kinda addressed in candy but I think if you’re talking about someone’s suicidal tendencies at their funeral it’s too fucking late).

But Detective Pony is ultimately a heavily veiled love letter to his friends. Detective Pony is Dirk exploring what he fears becoming, it’s him learning to let go, and eventually he relinquishes control of the book to the characters in it (as does Jeanne Betancourt).

Meat is Dirk’s notice of ownership over his friends. It’s him glorifying having become that thing he used to fear, it’s holding even tighter to everything he fears losing, and ultimately neither he nor Calliope trust the characters enough to pull back. They’re both obsessed with it, in both iterations, this battle between the two of them, even though it was never supposed to be about either of them.

But Detective Pony has an original story, with a timeline. It even has a second solid story for Dirk to come from, since Homestuck itself explicitly states when and why Dirk made it. When Detective Pony sits down to analyse which version of the text is better, it has that substance to fall back on. Jeanne Betancourt’s version is boring but kind. Dirk’s is interesting but cruel. And because the characters are all solid people, not their hazy ultimate selves, they have agency too, and can decide their own fate.

When Dirk analyses whose version is better in the epilogue, his whole reasoning is that neither is good. The characters rarely have any agency. Even the few moments, between Roxy’s void powers and Dave’s ability to stand up to Bro (which, by the way, so proud of him, how many people do you know who, in a situation where their childhood guardian and abuser literally became god and tried to thought influence them into doing something they kinda wanted to do already, would have the mental resilience to say “no, this isn’t me, stop that” and stand by that? Dave is the strongest goddamn character in this whole comic, holy shit), are only hints of who they were as real characters in the story. Dirk takes control, in one version, because he’s lost himself to Ultidirk, who’s overly concerned with how stories are supposed to be written, and tries to wrestle Homestuck into a shape he finds interesting. In the other, Dirk kills himself before he can hurt anyone. (And before anyone gets on my case about Dirk’s reasoning being he’s lost his purpose, his purpose was always protecting his friends.)

But Calliope’s not helping them either, just piling them full of romance and fluff and selfish parodies of themselves and thinking that’ll work out. Giving the villains “redemption” without ever actually letting them redeem themselves. Explaining all about their tragic backstories without doing anything with it. To bring back a very old quote, it’s like when Mario gets the star. He wins, but he’s denying himself many powerful moments of catharsis.

Just with less happiness, more death, and a bunch of weirdly political teen drama. And then when Calliope gets distracted by Ultidirk and gives up, everything unravels completely, but it also lets them live a life which does let some of the characters be happy, in a weird roundabout way. It’s dysfunctional as fuck, but these characters care so much for each other, not even being in a weird self melting fanon bubble could erase that completely. (And then things get buck fucking wild because this is still Homestuck we’re talking about)

(Though seriously, I could have done without the Jane is a fascist thing, she deserves better than that. Like what was the point of decrockertiering her if she was just gonna go right back to that? Also I love Dave but he barely has a leg to stand on in most of those political arguments anyway given how he completely destroyed LoHaC’s economy and once accused Karkat of communism for captchaloguing a chair. And while I’m complaining, Jake English is still not being allowed to consent to fucking anything.)

I’m not sure why this was written. I’m not sure why a lot of things in Homestuck were written, honestly. It’s certainly not a satisfying ending, but I don’t think it was supposed to be. It’s not disappointing either, and it’s definitely interesting, with all of Homestuck’s trademark humor.

When I first wrote this halfway through candy, I’d written the following as an ending:

“But if we’re going to triple kill the author, I think this is just ultimately validating everyone’s own interpretation of the ending. You can’t write everyone’s fanfic at once. You can’t be a cherub, or a god, we don’t write fic about people’s ultimate selves. What you can do is provide a timeline for them to exist in, and a better one, where they have a chance to be the people they have the potential to be. And just to be happy, in a way that feels real.”

But honestly, now? I think the point was just to fuck with us, and also do a fuckton of exposition about canon and the nature of reality

So fuck it, let’s end on a relevant Dirk quote

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ardenttheories · 5 years

Text

I lied. I’m posting more. Here’s a little hope/headcanon/crackpot theory I had while decidedly not doing any uni work for the second day in a row.

I’m wondering if Dirk isn’t actually his Ultimate Self.

In Candy, Dave becomes his Ultimate Self through Obama’s intervention and immediately dies. His body is physically incapable of handling that much information at once, and he has to ascend by going into a robot using Obama’s Hope powers. In Meat, Rose is steadily dying because of the merging of her selves; the only way Dirk can replicate what Obama does to Dave is by preserving her body and transmitting her mind into a robot.

For as much as a Prince of Heart is definitely a Heart player, and decidedly all about Splinters, it seems odd that he’s completely capable of handling the overload of information that kills Dave and Rose - someone who is just as versed with alternate Selves as Dirk is, and someone whose Aspect is deeply intertwined with Canon and all that it entails, and who also fused with an original self (that being Dream!Rose in the initial Doomed Timeline).

Princes of Heart destroy the self. Part of the reason Dirk even has Splinters in his initial timeline - Brobot, his Dreamself, Brain Ghost!Dirk, Hal - is because it is an exact destruction of his own Soul and self identity. This is what it means to be a Prince of Heart; a Destroyer of the Soul. Smashing himself up into pieces and using them to assist him in the timeline is definitely a very valid thing, and something he’s capable of doing...

But these Splinters are actively distant and different from him. Once Brobot is completed, he stays on Jake’s island and attempts to work on Jake in the way Dirk wishes Jake to grow. They never meet afterwards (from what I can recall). Dirk is incapable of controlling both himself and his Dreamself sufficiently until later into SBURB (this is why he ends up taking such long showers; he can’t be Wake Dirk and Dream Dirk at the same time, at least from what I recall). Hal literally diverges enough from his original core as a Splinter of Dirk to be defined as a wholly separate person, and though he and Dirk are capable of communication and togetherness, Hal is the Splinter Dirk is least able to control.

There’s something to be said of the irony in the idea that a Prince of Heart, notorious for splitting himself up, could ever be the first to reach the Ultimate Self - the literal fusion of all those separate entities. The ones Dirk had a tenuous relationship with and understand of, and considered to be suffocating. The ones Dirk actively fought to not be associated with because he couldn’t even handle the idea that Hal was part of his identity, and represented part of himself.

Why would this be the player that reaches the Ultimate Self without cause or harm? Why would Dirk just accept all of this, the things he hates and rebels against, after reaching a point in Act 7 where he’s started to accept the things he is capable of as things he desperately doesn’t want to do?

This much I’m still sceptical on, and believe as semi relevant. That’s the part of the post that I actually do take seriously; I’m not convinced Meat!Dirk is the Ultimate Self he posits himself as. Now for the more fun part.

To try and explain away this little thought, here’s a fanciful, half-serious, half-hopeful idea that mostly comes as a direct divergence from the “canon” of the Epilogues.

Lets say Dirk really was starting to become his Ultimate Self. He starts to see things, to remember things, to go through the sort of experiences that kills Dave immediately in a soft, steady drip. Something that drips intermittently upon his mind, his soul, and gets more unbearable the longer it goes on.

When he first locks himself away, he analyses all the data and focuses immediately on all the negative selves. The ones that have always plagued him. The ones that represent everything he’s terrified of, everything he hates about himself, everything he desperately didn’t want to become. His self-hatred gets the better of him. In one moment of isolated weakness, he comes to the conclusion that this is all Paradox Space ever had in mind for him, and he dives straight in.

But in doing so, he completely ignores the positive selves. The parts of him that represent his self worth, his determination, his sometimes-selfless attitude, his deep seated ability to love his friends and genuinely desire the best for them. He overlooks every self that could be seen as a representative of his positive attributes, and he refuses to accept them. He’s the Prince of Heart; destroying the Self isn’t exactly new to him, and destroying his Ultimate Self by only acknowledging half of his Selves is well within his powers and authority.

He slips back into old habits. He becomes aware of the narrative. He uses it to validate every thought he’s ever had. But he’s still only affected by half of who he is; he’s not suffering the full brunt of his Ultimate Self, and the drips have been so steady that he’s not aware it’s meant to be a torrential downpour. He’s dammed up everything that isn’t what he thinks he should be, what he thinks he’s worthy of being, and his Classpect is allowing it.

So, instead of the Ultimate Self, what we have is the Bad Self. A Dirk that’s only the sum of his failures and lack of restraint. A Dirk that suffers from the paradoxical combination of egotism and a complete lack of self worth. A Dirk who thinks he’s the only one capable of taking the reigns, but can only see himself as the villain. A Dirk who, because of his Classpect and his continued ability to destroy the Self, is completely incapable of becoming his Ultimate Self.

In the grand scheme of things, the Prince of Heart is not the person I’d put my money on to accept what it means to be a unified, total experience without suffering. What I could imagine, however, is a Prince of Heart coming to the assumption that he understands his deepest Self, and actively harming his True Self in the process.

But, again. More of a fanciful idea from an especially emotional daydream than something I think is really going to happen in the Epilogues. It’s still something I’m going to half hope in, though, because sometimes that’s just the fun of having these thoughts.

#homestuck #dirk strider #ardenttheories #homestuck epilogues #homestuck ramblings

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theorynexus · 4 years

Text

84 is the number we’re going with today.

I suppose I should start off by apologizing for the large gaps in between posts, and my smaller post sizes, as of late. My current work hours have got me getting up at 6:15 (technically more like 6:10, because my alarm clock is set a bit ahead), and only getting home most evenings around 6:15-6:30. This has been extremely draining on my willpower to engage in the incredibly fulfilling and mentally stimulating activity that is liveblogging Homestuck, as time has gone on, despite my love of the story in general. Regardless:

Aif. This is somewhat painful. It seems that both of them continue to view each other at least in part through the lenses of their respective Bros. I should have hoped that Dave would have made more of an effort to think of Dirk as a separate person, but I guess that’s a bit much to ask. The bonds Dirk has with different versions of himself sortof make it a bit difficult to emphasize the subtle differences between them too, I suppose: they don’t appear that visibly/prevalently, outside of extreme cases like Dirk / Doc Scratch.

This is intriguing on so many levels. Is this implying that Dave at least interpreted Dirk’s subtle control over people is something that he was aware of, and that he assumed it was via splinters of himself functioning as brain ghosts a la Jake’s own? I doubt that interpretation is correct, either in general or as what Dave is actually thinking; certainly, the allusion to Brain Ghost Dirk is pretty strong here, though. A most intriguing thing to suddenly bring up, especially given the context. Let’s see if the real Dirk also would have no idea what to say. (By the way, the idea that everyone actually has much weaker and less influential Brain Ghosts of Dirk is certainly an interesting and plausible one, all things considered: it’s just that Jake would be the only one capable of accurately modeling and giving the ghost proper housing within him due to his Hope powers [which obviously relate strongly to Tavros’s Brain Ghost Rufioh situation, by the way, which was not real, but which I wanted to bring up just for the sake of pointing out that it was a Yu-Gi-Oh! reference, and in that show, it is basically literally a haunting by a ghost living symbiotically in an insecure kid’s mind, which this story wonderfully turned on its head and made into a negative, rather than a long-term positive thing].)

Oh, that’s not good, after it’s been established that Dirk is one of the only people sensible enough to properly lock his facilities up. Also: MY GOSH, THE BRAIN-MELTING CRINGE!!! (Not only because of the incestuous overtones, but because I really don’t like the idea of Dave wanting Dirk to tell him what to do no matter if it’s going to actually be a bad thing, because he’s freaking out so hard. Poor kid. >: )

Somehow, I get the impression (or rather, a dreadful sense of foreboding) that Dirk might have ironically committed seppuku, despite his insistence that he didn’t have it in him, in the timeline he dominated. >:

***FREAKS THE HECK OUT, ESPECIALLY SINCE I AM ALSO EATING BREAKFAST***

***has basically the same fricking reaction as Dave, but also*** HOW THE HECK DID HE KNOW HE WOULD BE THERE?!?!?! IS HE TIME TRAVELLING AGAIN?!?!?!

Well... that’s an interesting way of putting that, Gamzee. Very much like Calliope’s “emerald eye of the storm” comment, but also with the implication that the universe could be literally on the other side, like a black hole’s science fiction usage as a portal to another world might have it be. This is strangely not something I’d ever considered, despite the fact that I had at one point thought it might be possible for Gamzee to have gotten to Earth 3 via the black hole from Jack English’s head. I’d just assumed that this universe had been paradoxically situated “before” the Green Sun’s existence, in the Furthest Ring. Thus, outside its influence.

... It’s time to start over for the third time today? Is that really the reference we’re going for, here?

I mean... it sortof makes sense, weirdly? Especially considering Gamzee happens to know that they are all fictional (which becomes more obvious with that statement of his, just there). But wow, that is something genuinely philosophical and relatively deep, which is not something that I would have ever thought I could possibly say about the blither coming from that clown’s mouth. The fact that I only used “clown” half-derogatorily, there, suggests that I need to stop this post about here. Also, I’ve run out of time. SHOOT!

#Dave Strider #Homestuck Spoilers #Candy Epilogue #Homestuck Liveblog #GAMZEE MAKARA

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golgoterror · 4 years

Text

Alright, this is ungodly long, but I just wanted to talk about something regarding Jake.

A lot of this fandom -- at least, from what I’ve seen -- label Jake as stupid. Some may even say Jake and smart are antonyms. This could not be further from the truth. It almost irritates me how much the fandom places this mischaracterization on him. Also, I get to talk about The Lad™ for about ten pages worth of words on Google docs, which is always very, very fun for me.

Well, first things first, let’s talk about the child genius and multi-billionaire polymath that is Jake English.

Puzzle Modus.

Let’s begin with something small. Jake’s modus is of puzzlekind! This is described as:

It's quite a handy modus, allowing you to captchalogue objects of any size, as long as you can fit them all in a finite space by maneuvering the cards around like a big game of Tetris. You like it because it keeps you sharp for solving any puzzles you might find when you go out raiding hallowed tombs, which is never. (x)

He likes puzzles! This is a huge headcanon I absolutely adore that has a basis in the comic: He’s a puzzles guy! This is just sort of a neat little fact about him that I adore to the moon and back. Just the idea of Jake fiddling about with a Rubik’s Cube is kind of adorable.

This is how he goes about doing everything every day of his life. I think that’s just amazing! And incredibly smart of him, I might add.

Skaianet.

Jake is shown in the credits to take over Skaianet after the game ended. For those unfamiliar, Skaianet made many things for the game, including but not limited to: the interstellar travel we see, transportalizers, the lab by Rose’s house, all Jake’s fancy-schmancy computers, and Sburb itself. In the beta timeline, Grandpa Harley founded Skaianet. In the alpha timeline, Grandma English did. I know Jake didn’t start it up and trying to pass off his alt-timeline self as him is a bit far-fetched at best, but he had the spoons to take it over. I think that speaks volumes for Jake’s intelligence -- this implies, at the very least, he can understand mathematics and physics at a high level. Remind you of someone we already know?

It is also important to note that Jake does, in fact, build the company back from the ground up, because it went to shit before his grandmother died:

GT: Pretty sure her company made a tidy fortune til it went belly up. At least i still have a few of her knickknacks for keepsakes. (x)

So he built an interstellar company back up -- using what his intelligent grandmother had once used -- to being very useful and practical once again.

As someone with a degree in mathematics and about to finish a degree in physics, I can say this sort of work would for sure require at the very least a decent understanding of quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, electrodynamics, calculus (vector and differential forms), ordinary and partial differential equations, and perhaps other things like topology. I don’t know about you -- and I’m probably tooting my own horn a bit by saying this -- but I think that’s pretty nifty, if I do say so myself.

Actor.

Once again, I’m reaching into the credits to show that Jake has become a movie star after the game ends. Memorizing all those lines, slipping into characters... Being an actor is no easy feat.

( Side note: This leads into my headcanon that Jake can imitate accents and voices on a whim. No more arguing about whether he has a British, American, or Australian accent -- you’re all right! )

And I would like to add he has two jobs! Skaianet and being a movie star! This guy’s a fucking polymath for Christ’s sake.

Reading People.

Let’s start of simple: Brain Ghost Dirk. I can hear the outcries now of Dirk’s powers being the cause for this. And, yes, I can’t ignore Dirk’s influence in this, but Jake’s hope powers were also needed for the projection to come alive. And the fact he was able to make such a startlingly accurate projecting of Dirk in his own mind is astounding -- even BGD himself thinks so!

TT: You could view me as a projection of the real Dirk within your mind, as expressed through all of your thought patterns about him. TT: So I'm kind of a splinter of his corporeal self who happens to live in your awareness. TT: I'm a startlingly close approximation to the real thing, for all intents and purposes. GT: Just how startlingly close are we talking? TT: I'm not going to give you a bogus percentage like the glasses cause that's not my shtick. TT: But pretty damn close. (x)

A very deep understanding of the other is needed for Jake to do this. That is pretty fucking incredible. He can clearly read people really well -- he had a few times where he was cluing in on Jane and Dirk have feelings for him:

TG: its one of those things jane likes about u so much GT: It is? TG: which TG: errrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr im not supposed to talk about 2 u evr so nm GT: Talk about what? TG: nope GT: You mean how um... GT: Well a way in which i suppose... TG: no nope GT: Jane is prone to looking upon me with what i fathom to be more than just friendly affection? (x)

TT: I guess call it an extra birthday present. But instead of a present that's awesome, consider it more like a weird confession that may change the way you feel about me. GT: Whoa uh... GT: Dirk are you... uh... GT: Saying what i think? (x)

He’s not completely clueless on people! In fact, he seems to have a really good understanding of his friends. That’s something a lot of people seem to forget because of the incident that I will be getting to later on.

Fending For Himself.

I’ve already written quite a bit on this, but I’ll sum it up here: Jake is exceptionally good at living in the wild and taking care of himself. Sort of like a wild garden; he doesn’t need to be taken care of. Survival skills, especially around fighting and fending off things, aren’t something everyone has. This, once again, counts in his favour, even if it doesn’t line-up with “book smarts”.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

That’s five things! It’s clear Jake is, in fact, a polymath and incredibly intelligent. So, what’s with the fandom painting him as being dumb? What’s with people actually thinking he’s stupid? I think we can all take several wild guesses as to why that’s the case.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Takes things literally.

This is something that plagues Jake quite a lot. Case in point:

GT: Wow like the epic kevin costner film? TT: Almost exactly. Especially by the same degree of shittiness. GT: Oh man does that mean you have to drink your own pee?????? TT: You get used to the taste. Welcome it, even. TT: That takes about 15 days in a row of hard piss drinking though. GT: Ewwwwwwwwwwww no dude. No ew. :( TT: Relax, I don't drink any goddamn piss, ok? GT: Oh ok. Whew. (x)

But, well, let’s address the elephant in the room. The chat I laughed so hard at when I read it the first time due to pure, unadulterated second-hand embarrassment: Jake asking Jane if she had feelings for him.

Let’s analyze this, shall we? Jake starts off by being vague as all Hell, and I’ll spare those details, until finally...

GT: Just come out and say it. Do you fancy me? GG: No! GT: I see. GT: Very well then. GT: Jeez i mustve really misread that one! I feel like kind of a bone head now. (x / x)

Okay, she says no, and he backs off. That’s fine and dand--

GG: No!!!!!! GG: Oh my God, what am I saying here? GG: Jake, I didn't mean it! I didn't want to make you feel that way! GT: Now jane lets not backpedal here. GT: Youve spoken the truth and i greatly appreciate and respect you for that. GT: But now that i think about it you know what? GG: ... GG: No? :( GT: Please dont take this the wrong way but your answer is actually kind of a relief! (x)

... Oh, right. Yeah. It keeps going. It just keeps--

GT: Actually since youve made your feelings apparent and only see me as a friend that makes it a lot easier! GG: Haha, yes! GG: Friends!!!! GT: Maybe you could help me sort out some stuff that has been weighing on me lately? GG: Well what are friends for Jake!!!!! (x)

Sweet Jesus, Jake.

GG: Me? GG: HOO HOO HOO! GG: I'm just GG: Terrific! GG: I'm feeling so... GG: Friendly!!! GG: I clearly just want to be a good friend and bring all my AMAZING FRIENDLINESS to bear on your problems. GG: Friendlystyle! Ahahahah? GG: Shit I mean GG: Ahahahah! GT: Thats aces. Jane youre a sweetheart. (x)

Alright, alright, enough! You all remember the fucking chat.

Regardless, it’s very apparent Jake takes things at face value. I also will cite him talking to Jane before her birthday, but not list examples, because what happened above will just happen once again.

Okay, so he takes things at face value. What’s wrong with that? He trusts people to not lie to his face -- to not sugarcoat things or beat around any bushes. Perhaps I’m projecting a bit, but I do the same damn thing. I think a lot of people do! I don’t think reading things as fact over text is a good measure of someone’s intellect. All it does is show he has issues with communication. Okay, so he struggles with one thing. Sue me.

Doesn’t catch things right away.

Yeah okay I’m just gonna dump a few examples of this.

GT: Haha wow. Must have been a hell of a guy. TT: So... TT: You're not making any connections there? GT: Where? Huh? TT: Famous comedian, about the age of your grandma, inheriting the family name of the Baroness... TT: Not ringing a bell? GT: What are you talking about! Dirk stop speaking in riddles and keep telling the story i am on tenterhooks here! TT: Ok, well it's not like it's that important. Just a super obvious thing that'll probably occur to you later when you're looking in the fridge you don't have, at which point you'll feel like an idiot. GT: Oh my god you can be one opaque motherfucker just clue me in bro! TT: Nah, it'll be funnier this way. GT: STRIIIIIIDEEEERRRRRRRR!!!!! TT: Moving on. (x)

GT: Whats going on? TT: Took you long enough to figure it out. TT: Pages really are a slow burning class. Damn. GT: Figure what out! TT: You're asleep. (x)

This leads into the point above. His mind doesn’t work that way -- but that doesn’t mean he’s not intelligent. He needs everything laid out in front of him so he can make the connections and understand what’s happening, but there’s no real harm in this, and it certainly doesn’t dictate whether the guy is “intelligent” or not.

There are many, many more examples in canon depicting Jake as having difficulties with communication and you all can open most of his pesterlogs and probably find one. I’m not going to list anymore. But, hold your horses, I swear I’m getting to a point!

Difficulty reading.

A lot of the media Jake consumes is picture-based. Movies, comics, even the puzzles are most likely spacial and probably not riddles. It’s not far to imagine Jake might not be a terribly good reader, considering nobody was really around to make him read. Of course, his grandmother was around when he was little, so he can read -- and he can read just fine. But he probably isn’t very good at it simply from lack of practice. He also has terrible grammar, something Jane picks on him for, so it’s entirely possible that’s a contributing factor. He may just have trouble reading and writing.

Speaking from experience, I have dyslexia. As such, reading and writing are incredibly hard for me. I never read the books in my literature classes -- both in English and French -- but I did get the gist of the books (enough to get a decent mark in the class at least) by watching a movie adaptation of the novel. I don’t think it’s that far-off to think Jake may, indeed, do the same thing.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

NOTE: This next part is a bit hard for me to write, because I don’t want to vilify any of you. It might not have clued in on anyone or maybe you just saw Jake as a sort of comic relief and meant no harm by it. And I hope shining a light on this will make you all think twice about the guy. However, I can’t really avoid this next part, and I may get a bit emotional in it. Just a bit of a warning.

All of the above points are just me trying to say Jake probably has undiagnosed learning disabilities and perhaps autism. I don’t think I need to go into detail about how those don’t make someone “stupid”. If you think that’s the case, fuck you. I can’t argue with ableists, much less do I actually want to.

NOTE: I wrote a thing on his speech impediments. That may be of interest too. I don’t really know, but here it is nonetheless.

My take-away message here is: just because someone struggles with socialization or other things doesn’t mean fucking anything in terms of their intelligence. Jake is very clearly smart and has the ability to read people incredibly well -- to the point of making copies of them! Perhaps it’s just a bit easy to underestimate the guy compared to other characters, though.

There are other things that muddy this up a bit, unfortunately.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Trolling.

Jake is such a fucking troll. Jesus shitting Christ, does he get a kick out of acting stupid just to make the other person look silly. Or perhaps even to make himself laugh in the process. Case in point:

uu: I WILL JUST BE YOUR PATRON DUDE. uu: OR MAYBE. YOUR PATRON MANBRO. GT: Sounds pretty gay. uu: WHAT THE HELL IS THAT? GT: Whats what? uu: GAY. WHAT'S GAY YOU IDIOT FUCK. GT: Oh right. GT: Forgive me i forget you arent familiar with all of my earth lingo. GT: Its like... GT: How do i explain. GT: You know. Its a rather old fashioned term for being jolly and festive together. GT: Like "that rollicking time we had scrumming the other eve sure was gay." uu: I SEE. uu: THEN YES. YOU ARE CORRECT. uu: THIS IS GOING TO BE GAY AS HELL. (x)

Look at his goddamn face during this exchange:

That little bastard knows exactly what he’s doing.

And these aren’t stand-alone events! Jake is very, very silly and will use the fact others see him as stupid to have a little fun. May as well, right? And, in the process, he makes others look pretty damn stupid.

But sometimes it’s a bit hard to tell when he’s acting stupid against when he’s genuinely not getting something. I think he even fools himself sometimes! So you have to be a bit careful about fake-outs. I’m sure even the other alphas have trouble deducing when he’s doing this -- which only adds to the myth of him actually being “stupid” when viewed on first-glace.

He probably also does this with crushes, purposefully ignoring the signs because he doesn’t want to deal with it or may not believe anyone could like him that way. After all, if he’s wrong, he may think himself to be conceded and having a big head. So, he ignores the signs, thus convincing himself the feelings aren’t there. Then he gets absolutely fucking bamboozled beyond belief to find out they actually do like him. But that’s just a little side-note.

Thinks he’s stupid.

This one is just a bit... Sad. Very sad. Jake genuinely does think he’s stupid. Quite a lot, really.

GT: I shoulda asked where he fit into the picture if you were raised alone. I can be dumb as a bag of penny candy sometimes. (x)

Just... Man, he’s been called and treated as stupid so many times, he’s at the point where he believes it. If you asked him, he’d say Dirk is a genius, Roxy is always smart and sassy, and Jane is brilliant. (I don’t have a source for that last one but... Come on. She lectures him about grammar. Don’t fuck with me.) But when it comes to himself? He can’t say the same. Of course he then acts that way. He sees himself as a burly adventurer who is also a gentleman and tries to live up to that. No where along those lines does he think he’s intelligent. And that’s just... a little heartbreaking, really, all things considered.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Can’t believe this blog is just me going, “Wanna see how fast I can talk about Jake?”, and a shit-ton of people all nodding before I talk for six hours straight. Anyway, take-home message is: Jake’s smart. Jake’s very, very smart. He’s also a himbo, but he’s incredibly smart. Just because he has learning disabilities doesn’t mean fuck-all.

Thank you for coming to my TedTalk. There are drinks and refreshments in the back. Have a safe trip home. Remember to tip your waiters and waitresses. Jesus fuck can I run this gag any harder into the ground? Giving me language was a mistake. No but, really, if you read this whole damn thing, thank you! I hope this was as fun to read as it was to write.

#ooc.#headcanons.#about.#ableism tw #and i hate to do this but after the speech impediment post i must:#dont steal these headcanons.#(unless youre a jake rper then by all means thats fine!)#yes these arent exclusive to jake but this took a lot of time and effort #id appreciate it if youd all respect that #tia! <3

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timaeuse · 4 years

Text

@stridetm said: 👀 + is there a part of you that hates me?

“What?” the very idea comes off ridiculous. dirk’s questioning even before dave’s finished talking -- the word hate is barely fully formed when dirk’s waving it away, affronted by the suggestion. there are a lot of parts of him. he’s not proud of the majority of them, learning how to keep them quiet and make them softer as time goes by. he can’t imagine any one of them hating dave.

dirk knows what this is about. every so often he’ll catch sight of himself in a reflective surface and not recognise the man he sees. he’s taller, stronger, a mean downturn in his lip. he’ll ridicule himself, snap stand up straight and where’s your sword in his head until he’s jumping at the sound of his own breathing. even now, there’s the tiniest urge to tell dave to quit asking questions that he doesn’t want to know the answer to and the voice that wants to be heard is not his. dirk is so used to picking this particular splinter out of himself that pausing to hear it out feels wrong, somehow -- like he’s going to fall into it, lose some part of himself he can’t get back. he swallows thickly, glancing first at dave and then at his crossed ankles. anything to avoid his eyes.

“Listen, kid.” even that’s wrong -- it’s heavy on his tongue, thick like molasses and rotten like decay. there’s something unhinged inside this locked box he keeps, and if given an inch it would take a mile. pink lightning crackles between dirk’s teeth as he opens his mouth only to close it again. he has to think. he isn’t thinking, and that’s the only thing that he knows is his own. his splinters can touch his heart but his head belongs to him, and it has to stay that way or he’ll lose it completely. “I’m not makin’ excuses for the guy. He sucked. More than sucked. He was probably the worst dude to touch down in paradox space, and that’s the truth. But he didn’t hate you.”

he says it with certainty because it’s true. dirk’s done the exploring -- inside his own shard, the largest and brightest of the bunch, there’s a warm orange glow, firelight on a winter’s night. it’s the hearth at home, safety, a sturdy place to land. it takes a while to find, but it’s there, and it’s peaceful, and knowing it exists is sometimes the only thing that gets dirk out of bed in the morning. hal’s shard is faint now that part of him has merged with another, but it beeps mechanically at him all the same. digging around in there makes him nauseous, feels like an invasion of privacy, but there’s a collection of wires even so, an oasis in the midst of lines of code. his dreamself’s shard is blank and dark. brain ghost dirk’s is tinted green and smells of fresh pine, feels too much like jake’s soul for dirk to touch without feeling unclean.

bro strider’s shard is barren, save for a small pocket of cold air.

it feels like a day at the height of an awful summer -- oppressive heat that suffocated and strangled, a kind of muggy humidity. dirk can’t stand being there longer than he ever needs to be. it’s his least favourite place inside himself. once, he’d woken in a cold sweat, both hands pressed over his heart, pink fire flickering over his fingers. a botched extraction that had almost killed him. if he’s to live, it has to stay.

he doesn’t know if it’s worth it.

the air bubble, he’d found by accident. when poking through the blistering rubble of what he’d been, dirk had gotten overwhelmed, tried to flee but found himself lost in the twists and turns of his own self. the breeze had hit him full force -- it was still thick with age and smelled like a basement, but it was something different, a far cry from ash and soot. it wasn’t calm, or adoration, or empathy. it was simply there, a space in which something had once resided. dirk wonders even now if it had been chased out by the fire, much like he had. chased out by insanity and the promise of something powerful and cruel.

“I don’t think he was right, but I know what he meant. He knew what was going to happen, I think -- or had some notion. What he did never came from hate. He wanted you to be ready to fight. Ready to lose him.”

he barks out a dry laugh, pulls his hands out of his soul and watches the black fade from the tips of his fingers. singed in reverse. “A whole lotta good that did, huh.” he doesn’t know what else to say. he doesn’t know how to explain that he understands bro strider without making it seem as though he pities him. his splinters so rarely deserve his sympathy, and bro even less so for being what he hoped he’d never be but always thought he’d become -- a monster too consumed by the big picture to see who he was hurting. a glory ardent idiot that died a meaningless death because the urge to be the hero was too strong to ignore.

“He didn’t hate you. I don’t hate you. Couldn’t if I tried, little man.” he fights the edge away from his tongue, but it beats him effortlessly. there’s strength to bro that dirk won’t ever find the will to tap into.

there’s a cold, clean spot in his soul. nothing that justifies his abuse, nothing that makes everything okay, nothing that makes him less of a creature, but a spot all the same. it belongs to dave. always had, always will.

#stridetm #im SICK. i hate bro strider so much genuinely soooo much #dave was a CHILD you idiot. he didnt have to be TRAINED for anything #yall ever hate a character so much but your muse canonically doesnt spit the same sort of vitriol? im sleep #anyways bro i dont even know if this is good but im sick of looking at it #ic.#answer.#ask to tag /

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hummingbirdbandit · 6 years

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Dirk for character meme?

YOU SURE YOU WANNA DO THIS FAM?!

Dirk Strider!

First Impression: This poor fucking dude. Has he really been alone all this time? Does he know that his whole shtick is a façade? He’s in pretty deep.

Impression Now: My BABY, I will protect you at all costs. You need to learn to be a person, and your friends want to help you - you need to LET THEM!

Favorite Moment: I loved the whole scene montage leading up to the volcano kiss. I think that was one of the best moments to show just how much Dirk is willing to give for his friends. He loves them so much he would behead himself and trust them to save him so he could do the same. A close second would be when he broke up with Jake. Dirk knew that he was hurting his friend, the man he loved more than anyone, and instead of running from that or ignoring it and seeking his own happiness, he faced it directly and owned up to it. It’s why I truly think that they will end up together in the epilogue - they broke up for important reasons and I think they can learn to communicate in a healthy way now that they’re not fighting for their lives.

Idea for a Story: Dirk’s birthday rolls around. He keeps quiet and hopes that no one will remember because he made it a point to not tell anyone, but Dave could never forget. Dave throws him a huge party, and Jake jumps out of a cake dressed like a male stripper, in safari gear. Dirk is shocked at first, but he starts to crumble. Every thinks he’s crying at first, until he breaks down into unabashed laughter. He laughs til he cries, and Jake smushes cake into his hair. He doesn’t mind.

Unpopular Opinion: Dirk is not inherently a good person. He struggles with being kind to others because he grew up alone, with no one to be kind to. His connection to his splinters shows him how cruel he can be, and he hates it, and that’s why he fights so hard to overcome the parts of himself that want to give up and be a cynical prick. He’s not inherently a good person but he fucking fights to be, and that is what matters.

Favorite Relationship: His friendship with Roxy. As hard as I ship DirkJake (they’re so cute and both completely useless and I love them), Roxy’s support is what kept him alive. They only really had each other to lean on for years, and she isn’t afraid to call him out when he’s being stupid. Unlike when he calls himself out, he doesn’t fall into a pit of self-loathing when she points out that by opening up a bit, his life would be easier. He takes her advice, and gives her someone to cling to and talk with and gossip with and they are the best fucking friends and no one will tell me otherwise.

Favorite Headcanon: I have a few! First - the reason Dirk doesn’t show emotion isn’t just because he has a wall up, but because he didn’t have any model of it growing up. Humans learn to emote and talk based on emulating the other humans around. Unlike Roxy, who at least had the Carapacians around, there were no other living creatures in his residence for Dirk to learn from. Until he is old enough to really start to surf the web (all of his formative years), he wouldn’t have anyone to see him emote or teach him how. When he starts spending time in person with his friends, he learns from them how to show emotion, and practices in the mirror when Jake isn’t home. As the years go by, his wall would soften.

Second - He and Roxy pronounce words very strangely. This goes back to the previous headcanon - we learn to speak by emulating. Until they started looking through the dead internet archives and finding videos, they would have isolated ways of communicating. They would have had to learn to read at least a bit before working the computer, so the way they pronounced written words is likely VERY different from how they were supposed to be pronounced - they didn’t have anything to go off of. As they started to learn to speak, they likely overcame this, but they likely still pronounce uncommon words in a very different way - and words may sound entirely different in their heads than when they say them aloud!

Third - Dirk still has a connection to his splinters, even though the game is over. He is privy to every dream his friends have regarding him, every conversation Jake has with Brain Ghost Dirk, and the wanderings of his splinters throughout the universe. He hates it, and he doesn’t talk about it - especially when he wakes up from one of Dave’s nightmares of Bro throwing him off the roof or beating him with the flat of his sword until he cries. Jake thinks they’re blind night terrors. His friends don’t ask him about how he knows little things about how they feel. The only exception to his splinter connection is Hal - now that he has his own body and identity, Dirk and he do not speak. They both like it best that way.

(Dirk is my favorite Homestuck character, right after our resident shouty troll. I could go on for ages about him! Thank you for the excuse to ramble, nonnie. I appreciate it!)

#anon #ask meme #dirk strider #character ask #homestuck

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dahniwitchoflight · 4 years

Text

Homesquared Chapter 13

Oh jesus it’s the clown funeral

oh wow getting Jake to hold Annie’s leash, cmon Jake don’t be complicit in this

Interesting turn of phrase calling Gamzee a “Purple Prince” though

does kinda suck to see how far Jane has fallen though

like oh man, saying only humans were blessed from birth with the ideal of moral fortitude, OOF

“ of the sword of justice that hangs over us all- “

Afraid of your own Sword of Damocles there Janey?

Could it be that you Know deep down that you are expensing the cost of your happiness on the misery of others? and That someone Just might one day Call you out on it?

and like, they couldn’t have made it clearer how hypocritical Jane’s being, she’s literally got Annie on a collar not unfamiliar to a tiara she herself once had

Dirk calls Annie Little Red as well, hah

she seems more Wolf than Riding Hood though

Does seem to solidify her “color” as being that maroony red though like a previous panel implied with the cloths in Harry’s sewing room

Now though

here’s a thing

Homesquared is undoubtable taking place in a realm of Dubious Canonicity and Reality

and Jake English proper as a Hope player, already had a good amount of potential sway over what was “Real” or “Not Real” in Proper Canon, if he’d been able to get to the core of those powers

Brain Ghost Dirk, is very much not real

but here, he’s as real as anything else is to Jake

I imagine the amount of “sway” necessary to make something “Real” or “Imagined” is a much smaller barrier on this side of the canon than back in the comic

So who’s to say Brain Ghost Dirk will Stay “Imaginary”?

Not saying it will happen, but itd be an interesting crossing of barriers of the suspension of disbelief and well, “Yiffany” exists and I seem to be accepting her deluded origins just fine

who’s to say I won’t accept Brain Ghost Dirk becoming a “real” Dirk if Homesquared decides it thus?

Where is my jump rope line of suspended disbelief truly lay? Even I don’t really know to be honest

Anyway, Get her! Sic Jane Yiffany!

no don’t kick the casket leave the corpse where it is

“JANE: For Gamzee Makara taught us that even the most loathsome degenerate can take their place in society.

JANE: All they need is the right redemption arc - !”

OH MAN. IS THAT WHY JANE TOLERATED GAMZEE????

it just hit me

If even the most Horrid of Evil person, can find a way to “Justify” themselves

Does Jane think she might have the power to immunize herself from a Just Death if she just Justifies her actions hard enough through whatever sort of imagined redemption arc???

Is she attempting to rules lawyering her immortality? Like, if reality is the sum of wills then if enough people Justify her as Good than she won’t have to suffer the Just Death she inevitably fears so much??

Oh man, no that makes so much sense for her to do, she’s always been avoidant or downplaying of personal consequences, and Death is the One Big Personal Consequence for her, thematically it works as well since She’s a Maid of Life, her game function IS a “get out of death” free card

but for it to work, for herself to be Justified, she has to push the idea that Anyone can be justified, she knows if she draws a line anywhere, shed be on the wrong side of the line

No wonder Jane feels the need to slather herself in all of her good deeds, gotta cover up all the bad she knows she’s done

What IS funny though is the idea that that’s the reason we keep having to suffer to through the appearance of Gamzee constantly in Homesquared even after his death

because he managed to get just enough Wills on his side convinced he was justified enough to keep being relevant, like calliope and somehow, inconceivably, millions of unnamed nobodies on earth C, the input of their wills, even small individually, adds up grain of sand after grain of sand, it IS Their Earth C afterall, they live in it, and if they all want to pity the clown man who’s to say they can’t?

And Annie basically is just exceptionally strong willed on a personal level

super neat, nice angle on Jane I didn’t think to consider, and I will laugh my ass off if I’m right about Gamzee

#homesquared #jane crocker #gamzee makara

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clonerightsagenda · 7 years

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We were joking about this again last night and I didn’t want to work on research was bored so here’s a relatively unpolished thing of the Game Over kids coming up with a (in hindsight) blindingly obvious solution to their problem. I remain stupefied by this apparent oversight.

Starring Nepeta, because she’s earned it.

After what you've been through, the silence of the dream bubbles is comforting. You sit still and hug your knees. It's nice to be just you, in your own skin, with nothing else in the way.

"I'm going to be sick," says the human you were imprisoned with, and he is. Nothing comes up.

You can't blame him. It had been suffocating, and he'd been throwing a fit for most of it. You'd kept quiet, but not because you didn't care. You didn't see the point of screaming when it didn't help. Instead you waited, watched, and at the right moment finally struggled just hard enough that the entity that you'd become hesitated as the Furthest Ring cracked apart and the growing void sucked you in. At least your ghosts woke up here, instead of being trapped in the singularity forever.

Wherever you are now, the black hole hasn't eaten it. The darkness is still illuminated by glittering cracks, but the surface beneath you is whole. There's no sign of Lord English, or the army. Is anyone nearby?

You didn't need to learn much about Heart during your session. Your existing combat skills were enough. Once you'd been out here for a while, you started to think it was about souls. About who people are, deep down. Maybe that's why you can handle a place where you're stripped down to your Self with a thousand others vying for the title. Maybe that's why you're recovering faster from being crushed beneath some other consciousness and buried under an aggregate of other lives. You know who you are. You're the Rogue of Heart, and here, you are useful.

There's a cluster of bright sparks in your inner vision. Souls, glowing with the dim luminescence of the dreaming dead. Part of you would love some solitude, but you also want to interact with people as yourself, to hear people call you by your name. It'll help you settle more firmly back into your skin.

"I feel some spirits not far away," you say. "I think they're friends." Dave doesn't look at you at first. Maybe you should just leave, but you feel some level of loyalty after what you've been through. "Want to come?"

It takes him a few tries to stand, but he does.

You see Karkat and Kanaya with a cluster of the humans. You shouldn't know all their names, but the entity that possessed you rifled through the memories of all Nepetas everywhen, picking whatever scraps it felt like plastering onto itself in an off-key impression. The remnants had been left scattered through your thinkpan, and so you vaguely remember being a sprite in their session. Terezi is there too, sitting next to Vriska. They're leaning into each other's shoulders. Equius isn’t there. He must still be mixed with that AI who does most of the talking. You don’t see Gamzee either, for which you are grateful.

When you approach, Jade grabs Dave by the shirt and starts asking questions about her brother that you know from your time together he can't answer. Kanaya approaches you a little more slowly. "Nepeta," she says. "It's good to see you again. I wish we were meeting under better circumstances."

"Yeah." You tuck a strand of hair behind your ears, a nervous habit you fall back on sometimes during conversation. It’s been a while since you’ve seen these people. They’re older than you now. "It's not so bad for me, but I thought you guys might win. I'm sorry you didn’t."

"Have you seen Rose out there?" she asks.

You remember Rose, the human who'd been nice enough to let you talk to her cat-lusus. It would've been hard to miss her, considering her brother screaming "That's my sister, leave her alone, don't touch her" what felt like right into your auditory sponge. "She was like us," you say. "Made into a sprite, and then prototyped too many times. So... she's still alive. Sort of.”

"She's trapped," says Dave, smoothing out the front of his shirt. He looks relieved to be able to change the subject. "And she must be pissed as hell. It's like some Lovecraftian nightmare with a sugar high sets up shop in your brain to make a mockery of everything you hold dear. Thank god none of you saw us, I'd never live it down. Figuratively."

"Then we have to get her out," Kanaya says firmly.

"Hey, I'd be right behind you," Dirk says. The others have drifted over to listen in. It’s not like there’s much else to do – this part of the bubbles doesn’t have much in the way of scenery. "I could yank her soul out and everything; that's a thing I can do. Problem is, our mobility is limited due to us all being fucking dead."

Jake scratches his head. "Ghosts can come back. That Aranea did."

"The ring," Vriska says, looking up from whatever quiet communion she and Terezi had been locked in. "She stole the ring of life from John somehow."

"That piece of shit?" Dave exchanges a look with Jade. "Did you know about that?"

"I didn't know it was magic," she says. "I just thought it was something he'd found somewhere. He didn't like to talk about it." She frowns. "He didn't talk to me a lot that last year."

"Well, there's only one of those," Karkat snaps. "So that's not very useful, unless we want to elect an ambassador to the world of the living or draw up a schedule."

"Roxy might be able to make more..." Jade says slowly. "Where is she, anyway?"

You shrug. You would have looked for her, you like Roxy, but you didn't see much of the new session, and you don't have many memories of what went wrong in the old one.

"She's alive," Terezi says. "Her and John. I saw them before I died. They were going to fix things."

The other Dave, the one that traveled on the meteor, looks around at the shattered dreamscape, the crowd of ghosts. "Not to criticize, but things don't look fixed."

"They're setting things right in a new timeline," she explains. "We're stuck here as rejects from the old one."

"A new timeline," Kanaya repeats. "Going how far back?"

"Our problems really kicked in as soon as your crew arrived," Jake says. "Although I suppose we could have dealt with things if only that troll hadn't gotten her mitts on the ring. That's the crucial moment that truly sealed our fates. As long as you stop that, I’m sure we could manage."

Terezi shakes her head. "Think further. I told them to save Vriska."

Even Vriska looks confused by that. Karkat is the first to speak. "You undid whole sweeps of our lives? Why the fuck would you do that?"

Terezi spreads her hands out. "Look, maybe it wasn't the most rational decision in hindsight, but it's not like you've never made calls based on some sort of emotional impulse."

"And look how that turned out." He shakes his head. "We should've talked to you about that guilt complex earlier so you didn't change the entire universe just to try to deal with it."

"Yeah," meteor-Dave deadpans. "If you'd sat backwards on a chair earlier this could've all been avoided."

"Shut the fuck up," he says without real rancor. "Well, good luck to those poor bastards."

"I'm right here," Vriska says.

"I notice you haven't actually disagreed."

"No.” She shakes her head, and her long braids – unraveling at the end – shudder. “I met the new me. She's a bitch."

"Good. We're all on the same page here. I'm almost glad I'm dead."

"You know..." you say.

Terezi glances at you and then away again to continue their squabble. They've never taken you seriously because you were the silly shy girl, who spent her time having fun and playing games while the others made important decisions. But you have memories of time spent with a Life player, and you'd know that color scheme anywhere. "You know," you say again, louder. "I don't think you need a ring to come back to life."

"What do you mean?" That's Dirk. He might not know you well, but he looks desperate enough to look anywhere for input.

"Well...." You shrug. "You've got a Life player right there."

The Life player in question stares at you for a moment and then down at the symbol on her chest, like she’s checking to make sure it’s still there. "You mean...?"

"That can't work, can it?" Jake asks. "It would be too easy."

"Feferi helped us once," Karkat says. "A dead one from a doomed timeline. Her powers still worked. I don't know why I didn't remember sooner."

Jane looks down at her hands. "With a body, I know I could do it. But with a ghost... I don’t know. I guess I could try."

"Just a moment," Kanaya interrupts. "I wasn't convinced by your threats earlier that Life abilities could harm the undead, but if that principle does hold, you might hurt us instead of helping."

"I volunteer," Dirk says immediately.

Jane sighs. "Dirk, really."

"I'm serious. I glitched myself into fucking pixels and I'm still here. I'm indestructible. Do your worst."

"Well in that case…” It takes Jane a moment to catch up with herself. “Wait. You did what? Are you saying the way you got here... you did it to yourself?"

Before Dirk can respond, Terezi interjects. "Save that for later. As the Seer here, I say you give it your best shot. It's a good idea."

"We're not through talking about this," Jane growls. Then she points a blue-laced hand at Dirk and gives it her best shot.

"Well?" Kanaya asks after a moment. "Did it work?"

Dirk looks himself up and down. "I don't feel any different."

"We can't see through your shades, Strider," Jake says.

Dirk hesitates (whether out of reluctance or for theatrical effect you’re not sure) and then pushes the pointy glasses on his face up. You get a good look, as does everybody else. Orange. Humans have such strange eye colors.

"It worked," Jane breathes. “Isn't that something. Gather round, everyone. I'll fix us right up." She turns, looks at Karkat, and then her face changes. "Oh. Oh no."

"What?" Jade follows her gaze and then puts a hand to her mouth. "Ohhhh."

"What?" Karkat's voice rises. "Why are you looking at me like that?"

"I can only do this once," Jane says. "Once per person. And I've already done you."

"What are you talking about?" Terezi asks. "Karkat, are you telling me you got yourself killed that quickly? And I missed it?"

"Don't blame me!" He points at Jane, who takes a step back. "Blame her. Jade too, it was her idea. Crocker here was just the willing hand with the fork.”

"The two of them decided to demonstrate Jane's abilities," Kanaya explains. "They were following the Empress's orders at the time."

"That's right," Jade says quickly. "I was bad then. And." She bites her lip. "And I was angry."

"So we can't hold that against them, right?" Jake says, with a smile that looks unnaturally stiff. "Let bygones be bygones, right Jane? After all, I've already forgotten that little interaction in the jail cell. In fact, forget I mentioned it!"

"What did Jane do?" Dirk asks. Jane groans and covers her eyes. "What the hell are you all talking about?"

"That's what I want to know," meteor-Dave adds. "Jade, you killed someone because "you were mad"? What the fuck happened to you in the last three years?"

"What happened to you, defending the aliens?" Dave snaps back. "Since when are they really on our side? No offense," he adds, glancing over at you. "You seem ok, I guess."

You roll your eyes. "I appreciate it, human scum."

Meteor-Dave has ignored this aside. "I know you were off bleeding instead of being useful during our game, but they are on our side, you outdated fucking museum specimen."

"The tiara top," you hear Jane saying to no one in particular. "I was going to apologize and explain, we just didn't have time-"

"Will all of you shut up?" Karkat demands. "I'm a little more preoccupied with the pressing matter of my mortality than whatever hangups you've got with each other. You can all pile into the confession booth later if that'll make you happy."

"But Karkat," Terezi says, "it's like watching one of your memos in real life."

"Will you ever let the memos go?"

"Like I said," Vriska interrupts, "there's the ring."

You took a step back when she spoke - your last memories of her aren't great. But this one seems milder, though maybe that's the dreambubbles nipping at the edges of her soul, like they do to everyone eventually.

"That's right," Terezi says. "The ring. The Empress killed Aranea, I saw that much. So it might be up for grabs again. It likes to vanish and reappear."

"But where?" Dirk asks. "Do you think it would be near her ghost?"

Jake balls his hands up. "Are you saying we could go beat up that spider troll's ghost? Because I am ALL for a rematch. Don't bring me back yet, Jane. That way if she tries to kill me again she won't be able to."

"I could find her, maybe," Terezi says. "This place is made of memories, so if I follow her mind... With the ring so smashed up, there aren’t that many places to hide."

"How do we tell she's the right one?" Jade asks. She’s latched onto this new subject eagerly, probably to escape the last one. "We can't just jump on every version of this troll, can we?"

"I can tell," you say. You have a knack for that out here. You can strike up a conversation with one Tavros and later pick him out of a crowd of twenty, even if his outfit is different. Once you know a little bit about how the person has changed, they don't wear their face the same. This Aranea - what she did will show.

“Sounds like a plan,” Dirk says. “I like it."

"You'll have to sit this one out," Jane says. "You're mortal again, and I can only save you once. Perils of being the guinea pig, I'm afraid. And I am officially team leader. I think it's time I actually lived up to that. Metaphorically, if I must."

He scowls but doesn't argue.

Jade turns to Terezi. "You said there's a new timeline, right? Does that mean there’s a new group of all of us?"

"That's right. It's up to that set to win now."

"I doubt they'd like us crashing the party," Dirk says. "God knows I have enough problems fighting myself, and it looks like that's a family trait."

"Can't do it no matter what," says Dave. "The Furthest Ring is neutral territory, but once we're in the same Skaia-supervised universe, doomed double rules apply. We'll get picked off."

"Great, more complications." Karkat throws up his hands. "Then where do we go, even if we do come back?"

"It's a big multiverse," Kanaya says. "There must be somewhere."

"There must be somewhere," Jake agrees. "I'm not going to sit here in the dark for eternity because some troll got a bee in her bonnet about how our story was supposed to go. I was never that concerned about winning the game on its terms anyway, as long as we made it out ok. I don't even know what the victory state is supposed to be."

"Then it's agreed," Jane says. "We find Aranea, get that ring, I bring us all back, and we go somewhere. Somewhere better."

"And we find Rose," Kanaya adds.

"Definitely," says meteor-Dave. "We can call up John and Rose's mom too, see if they want to hang out with us losers or stick with the winning team. Maybe we can get shared custody."

“If we see other people…” You almost trail off, but they’re looking at you, so you complete the thought. “Maybe we should let them come too, if they want. It seems fair.”

Jane nods. “I’m willing to try. The one time rule might not count for different versions of the same person.”

"Can I come?" Vriska asks. You’re surprised she was polite enough to ask. She really has changed.

Terezi links arms with her. "Wouldn't have it any other way, sister."

"Hold on," Karkat says. "I’m still technically leader of the Alternian band of chucklefucks, which means I get to make that kind of decision. You're not going to try another megalomaniacal plot as soon as our backs are turned, are you? If I recall correctly, you got killed for a reason.”

She juts her chin forward, a bit of her old vigor returning to her voice. "I'm not like that anymore.”

"I guess we can keep an eye on you if you’re lying."

Terezi pinches the bridge of her nose with her free hand. "Karkat, do you think you could be a little bit less of a dick if you really tried?"

"Oh, I'm sorry, I'm a little on edge. I've been murdered."

"We've all been murdered," Kanaya says. "Or most of us, at least. Just establishing that for the record."

"And it sucks.”

"I don't blame him for not trusting me," Vriska says quietly, which shuts even Karkat up. You look her over. You don't know what she's been doing since you saw her last, but the person behind the face is different now. It makes you think of a drawing in that smudgy, formless state when you’re still working out the details. On its way to being something, but not there yet, tenuous enough that a stray line would ruin the entire picture. It’s the point where you have to make a decision about what the final product ought to be.

"Well," Terezi says at last. "That's settled, then. We'll get some vengeance, and then we'll figure out what to do next. How's that for a plan?"

"It's actually three quarters of a plan, because some leetspeaking weirdo wrote a four instead of an A, but otherwise it sounds good," says meteor-Dave. She sticks her tongue out at him.

Jane nods and uncaptchalogues an enormous fork. That’s right – she is an heiress, technically, and she handles the official weapon with ease. "It sounds good to me too. Let's go win this game on our terms."

#homestuck//#kat writes fic #bluh bluh huge bitching alert #i guess #AU #also I guess #you can't actually prove this didn't happen

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bladekindeyewear · 4 years

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Freed up some time, actually! Gonna blog the new pages of HS^2. Liveblogging resume...

FYI, the post I glimpsed that alerted me to the fact that new pages exist had a translucent screenshot of Brain Ghost Dirk on it, so I know that at least is in store for me. Makes sense; a way to involve Dirk’s voice obnoxiously heavily even when he’s too far away to narrate. And ties into this... chapter(?) name, of course. Chapters, huh?

> CHAPTER 1. Ghostflusters

God. Damnit.

Could we NOT??? No?

Fuck you, Dirk. I blame you for this.

So we have greenery, a can-city and Sburb-legal human house mix... some sorta cow-looking thing from far away in the front yard...

The void resounds. Space seizes and warps as the bounds of relevance erode away to nothing but the wishful nostalgia of times passed. There is a hole in the middle of the universe, and it is hungry.

All very literally true.

But the denizens of this particular iteration of Earth C don’t know it. All of this is just business as fucking usual for a planet plagued by war, continuous inclement ghost weather, and the general malaise of being absolutely severed from canon.

--oh, FUCK. This isn’t the new planet, this is Candy timeline Earth. I didn’t wanna come back here! :C

I guess that explains most of the content warnings. Except fucking ALCOHOLISM. Gee, thanks for adding THAT to the Candy timeline, as if it wasn’t fucked over enough!!! Bluh.

I thought the closing lines of the Epilogue were that after RoboDave, Aradia and alt!Callie dove out of the Candyverse inside the singularity, the black-hole timelines and Dirk’s presumably-still-”relevant” nonsense weren’t going to collide with each other again? So... why are we seeing this? Is there going to be MORE influence like that, and the ending line was just fancy-talk? Is it just an irrelevant little follow-up to Candy to show things turning out okay or pseudo-okay, like an epilogue to the epilogue? Or is some of this Dirk nonsense presumably within the bounds of some sort of canon going to still have some last bit of influence on this so-called non-canon timeline?

That last one would make sense, given that it echoes how Homestuck^2′s dubious canonicity would still have definite influence on fanworks outside of canon. Right?

Let me pull that last line from the epilogues again--

...where’s the Epilogues’ log, this is getting kind of hard to find with all their reorganization... fuck, I had to guess at the URL even. Here we go, the last page of Meat...

The hole leaves behind an absence in the sky so calm that continuing to call it a sky wouldn’t seem to do it justice. It’s a perfectly neutral expanse into which anything one can imagine might be summoned. And for a while, anything was. But not anymore. Where the hole gaped just moments ago, there now exists an imaginary line.

Above this line resides all that matters. Below exists all else. Never again the twain shall meet.

...Right. This implies that Canon and Non-Canon shall never meet again. BOTH ways. Doesn’t quite gel with the fact that we’re cutting back here--

Oh.

This is about Jake and Brain Ghost Dirk isn’t it. I noticed his name down further on the page. THAT’S why we’re cutting back here.

So, Canon and Non-Canon aren’t exactly meeting... not for anything relevant, anyway. But we’re using Candy Jake’s visibility of Brain Ghost Dirk to get a better idea of Dirk’s broader self and plans through a splinter of him? While getting another glimpse into how the post-epilogue Candy timeline is going for our, er... “curiosity”? Is that it?

Hm. I guess that doesn’t count as the twain “meeting”... I’ll just keep reading now.

They spend their days absorbed in the petty and pointless pursuits of “having jobs” and “raising families” and “falling in love”.

Is this Dirk’s narrator voice? This sounds like something the current megalomaniacal Dirk would say.

I’m not going to quote the rest of the text’s further reminders of how Jane has been made into an absolutely fucked-over asshole in every timeline except the one where she grew old to open a Joke shop, adopt Dad, die, get prototyped and timeline-doubled, then mysteriously disappear from any mention in the Epilogues as if the Sprites were just forgotten about completely eventually.

> (==>)

Oooh, using the less-relevance-surrounding-parens that were used on retconned ghost!Vriska back in Homestuck proper to denote our presence in the non-canon Candy timeline? How handy!

Not a far-away cow, then.

John has been an incredible pal, opening up his home to Jake and his son on such short notice, and even offering him a pair of pants, as well as a shirt that he has so far neglected to put on.

Alright, that got a chuckle from me.

John’s house doesn’t have air conditioning.

What the flying fuck.

...Ah, John’s been away patching things up with Roxy some more, I presume.

It, like the rest of his assets, is in her name. She’d seen to that as soon as they were married.

Life players and assets, huh? Always gotta be hoggin’ em.

He hasn’t seen much of Tavros today either, but that’s not unusual. He’s probably out with his kismesis, the one he thinks Jake doesn’t know about.

Huh. Maybe Candy’s young Vriska? Couldn’t get the real Tavros with your main self, so your alternate nigh-clone self settled with a human by the same name? Or one of the other kids we heard of from this ‘verse..?

> (==>)

Jake’s hot man-bod cropped out of this image to avoid titillating my readers too much.

(Tumblr keeps jumping back to the top of my post after I add images and I keep thinking the title reads “Ghostfuckers”.)

Jake washes the dirt out from under his fingernails, and his eyes fall on the bottle still sitting on the counter. John had opened it, but together they’d barely touched the stuff. Jake had promised him and Tavvy he’d dry up his act and all, but... well.

God damnit. If this is still Dirk-voiced narration -- I’m not sure it can be, now I think about it, as he’s supposed to be “out of range” or something, unless non-canon is just malleable like that, which wouldnt be surprising (or Dirk’s splinter’s presence allows it) -- he could literally be inducing or writing in Jake’s drinking problem just to hurt him more. You can’t really put an overstep that assholish past Prince Dirk the way he’s gotten to be.

There was another ask in my inbox insisting that Dirk wasn’t going to stay the true villain here, if only as some sort of karmic revenge for declaring his self-importance... but I still don’t think that’s the case. For one, Dirk HASN’T declared himself the villain... he still can’t see how fucked-up and unjustified his trampling over of everyone’s wills IS. Shadows of recognition... but not really. He really honestly believes he has the fucking RIGHT to do what he’s doing.

(Which is, incidentally -- to answer another ask -- why there’s basically NO chance that Rose has some sort of control or recognition of her situation under the surface, and is playing Dirk, as another person hopefully surmised. No. She really IS being unknowingly steered away from personal growth and recognition of the thought-control she’s under... because nothing less could feel as horrible to us.)

Part of the entire POINT of Homestuck and its Riddle was to show that these crazy kids, if they put their wills to it, always had the potential to be the literal Gods of the world around them. That when ordinary people grasp the will and drive to shape the world around them, they can turn everything back from the brink of destruction... or vice versa. Thus, it’s only appropriate that a player from this game could become a villain more disgusting than any we’d imagined in the series so far. What he’s been doing -- writing twisted sorrow directly into the lives and experiences of those around him, nurturing their worst, most power-hungry tendencies (Rose) and deceiving them more directly than Doc Scratch (who was PART Dirk) ever did, making a JOKE of their free will in a more terribly direct way than ANY have been shown onscreen to do?? It IS, and is MEANT to be, the worst we have EVER seen in Homestuck. Not as clumsy and from-the-outside as Lord English, but just as blatantly direct. Not as easy to ignore or mistake as Doc Scratch’s horrible, intentional Prince-of-Hearty worsening of the players, instead just as impossible to gloss-over as it is to bear witness to. That very TITLE, “Prince of Heart”, can embody the very ANTITHESIS of the Ultimate Riddle itself, robbing EVERYONE of their ability to shape not just the world around them, but even so much as themselves or their very thoughts. When used the way Dirk is using it RIGHT NOW, anyway. And his ambition is to impose this on all of Paradox Space.

There COULD be another villain, later. But I can’t imagine a single one more appropriate. And Andrew’s just the type to use one of the Striders, both practically self-inserts of parts of his personality and presence, as that ultimate villain to be overcome in a story about escaping Canon, too.

Turning his ex into an alcoholic just for his own self-satisfaction? In a side timeline where Jake didn’t even try a relationship with him again and finally had a chance to grow up happy in SOME universe? I wouldn’t put it past him, and you shouldn’t either.

Moving on.

> (==>)

Eugh. I just... don’t want to think about him being an alcoholic on TOP of everything else. As if there wasn’t enough to deal with in Candy already.

> (==>)

Hm?

> (==>)

The jungle air is heavy, humid, and familiar. Twenty years on and the thick drag into his lungs settles on him in a blanket of nostalgia, reassuring in its discomfort.

Hm. Is this his fantasy, or a view of him in another timeline?

He is deeper in the jungle than he’d ever venture in his waking hours. There were places on his island that not even his Gran would tread, and she’d been the bravest person he’d ever known.

Hmm. So he even knows it’s a dream, but is still in control...

Jake doesn’t recognize anything. The jungle of his dreams is wild and unknown, and there are things moving in the dense undergrowth.

...Hhhuh. Still not sure what to think of this yet.

A sudden wind thrashes the canopy. There are pine needles in his mouth. There aren’t any pine needles in the jungle.

Very Dream, then.

> (==>)

--Yup.

> (==>)

Yoink--

> (==>)

JAKE: Yes you are i know that much. I saw your body! I carried your coffin chock full of all those stupid fucking swords! DIRK: Nope. JAKE: Dont nope me mister!

They would pile all those shitty swords into his coffin, yeah.

Anyway, now to see how much Prince Dirk is in this Dirk. And if he’s in one mind with himself or has the slightest chance of feeling rebellious.

JAKE: I know a dead dirk when i see one! DIRK: Sure you do. But that wasn’t me. Are you really surprised to find out I got a couple of spares? JAKE: So what youre saying is you arent my dirk. DIRK: ...That is a whole ‘nother conversation that we really don’t have time for, pertaining to exactly who or what ‘your dirk’ actually constitutes. DIRK: Do you mean the Dirk from your timeline? DIRK: Then yes, that Dirk is dead. DIRK: If you mean the Dirk that you fucked and then ghosted, no, I’m not your Dirk. DIRK: If you mean the Dirk that you felt closest to, that you really knew--

...well, this Dirk still knows how to be a presumptuous, pushy creep. :(

JAKE: Ahhh! Brain ghost dirk! DIRK: In the ghosty flesh. JAKE: Crumbs bro where have you been? JAKE: I could have used someone on my side! JAKE: You just disappeared one day without even the odd toodaloo to mark your passing! DIRK: That isn’t strictly true. I did disappear, but it was in a catastrophic blaze of hope-drenched pathos. I even threw out a couple one-liners. DIRK: But you wouldn’t remember that. JAKE: Because...it was a different dirk? DIRK: No, a different Jake.

Hhhuh. So in the claymation-reproduced Lord English stagefight -- or, maybe more likely, the pre-retcon Aranea-induced Game Over timeline -- he was too washed out by hopesplosions to manifest properly?

DIRK: Until recently there’s been a shortage of ambient narrative relevance for Dirks, since one particular motherfucker has been sucking it all up like a thirsty little twink at his first interspecies rave.

Hm! So Prince Dirk has been making it so other splinters of himself have really limited ability to influence, huh? Guess that’s a sort of price for the narrative-hijacking power he’s attained. Wonder how this Dirk really feels about that.

> (==>)

--Pff. He’s certainly not shy about letting Jake know he shouldn’t trust him, though! That’s a good sign.

I’ll split the post here for a bit. Seems we’re about halfway through this upd8 from the look of the log.

#Homestuck #hs2 #Homestuck Liveblog #upd8 #bladekindeyewear #blastyoboots

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