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mmmmalo · 2 months

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how do you feel Limebloof repasent a type of white genocide

Summary isn't my strong point but here you go:

Within the context of Homestuck's ironic scaremongering, race is gendered: white is feminized and black is masculinized. Hence the sexualized threat of white being "mated" by black in cosmic chess games, later repeated in lime Calliope (who speaks with a British accent) being "mated" by her brother Caliborn (whose triumph is marked by imagery from Planet of the Apes, a racialized post-apocalyptic film).

After black "mates" white in WV's game, we see a PINK can explode with BROWN liquid -- understanding those as abstracted skin colors, the scene poses whiteness as a mother that dies upon giving birth to black children.

On Alternia, everyone sends genetic material to their shared mother, whose face is a skull. This poses the trolls of Alternia as "black" and their symbolically dead Mother Grub as "white". (Tangentially: the word "motherfucker" tends to come from the lips of character affecting blackness)

The lime caste exists in the gap between olive and jade, both of which are associated with reproduction but do not give birth: Nepeta paints pictures ("reproductions") on a bloody cave wall to invoke the womb, while Kanaya is midwife to the Mother Grub. Implicitly, the missing lime caste (the black hole the local castes orbit) embodies the trolls' inability to become mothers, which means whiteness†

Karkat, the mutant lime blood, is implicitly the only "female" on Alternia in this reading, the focal point of the supposedly exterminated "whiteness". The constant jokes about his sense of emasculation (eg horns are nubs) fall somewhere between commentary on the struggle to assert your masculinity with a clitoris or a parody of pornography humiliating white guys for small dicks (when compared to Big Black Cocks) -- both pejorative paradigms that are built on making the penis the measure of manliness. The jokes about Karkat's "hysterical" tantrums and his being haunted by blood symbols become allusions to menstruation, which serves a similar purpose.

Sorry if the BBC thing seemed to come out of nowhere, but it's kind of a fixture of sexualized racial scaremongering, within pornographic contexts. We see a direct invocation attached to Snowman (a name that suggest whiteness): her "Black Inches", a name taken from a black-focused gay porn magazine. Snowman's position as the only woman at the center of the Felt seems to parallel the missing lime bloods at the center of Alternia, and her 8-ball planet later becomes the basis of Alternia's green moon. The universe ending upon Snowman's death is a repetition of the PINK can exploding when black mates white, by my reckoning.

I could go on but that's the gist of it.

#race mapping #homestuck commentary

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