Musings on Gaze: wondering if Nepeta is ‘scratched’ in the sense of a Caegar, such that the pseudo-windows in her cave suggest blindness even if Nepeta’s own eyes are fine. Or if the matter of Nepeta first appearing as Sollux rebuffs the fourth wall has anything to do with the motif of the crossed-out eye… (an earlier impression had been her hatching out of Sollux, but those are compatible)
Also… I think the disparaging reference to Nepeta’s autism can be brought under the banner of Slurquest. One of John’s underdiscussed coding textbooks is simply titled Automata. I learned a while back that the Homestuck’s psychological exploitation of the fourth wall to depict the subjective experience of being controlled from without, of your very thoughts being alien bombardments, has some precedent in the concept of “mental automatism” (the “mental” will make sure you get Clérambault of the French “alienists” instead of the Surrealist art practice they inspired). Nier: Automata is conducive to a similar connection, giving the protagonists blindfolds to communicate the sense that they see themselves from the perspective of the player that controls them, and thus they have no need for their own eyes. My suspicion is that Homestuck has blurred the term automatism with autism (granted the words have some manner of shared history, but I trouble tracking the details), such that Nepeta being “an autistic girl in a cave” is synonymous with the “blindness” at which her non-windows gesture. The collision of “alien control” with “perception through a god’s eye view” I think would likewise account for the suggestion of mindcontrol upon Feferi’s third-eye tiara (god’s eye view), while potentially providing a rationale for Feferi being among the characters to invoke 'retardation’ as a concept, even if disparagingly, by way of the automatism/autism conflation. And I’m inclined to think that this in turn is a symptom of all the girls on Alternia being trans because 1. Karkat disparaging deployment of “autistic” would in Nepeta’s case (as with Terezi and Tavros) be functioning as the transphobic voice dismissing girls as deluded and 2. one of John’s key moments of self-alienation/automatism in Act 1, of experiencing her own voice as not belonging/originating in her body, occurs while gazing as Nanna’s portrait over the fireplace. Which would bring this line of thought into contact with Homestuck’s account of dysphoria…
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