#homestuck commentary
If you pronounce “=” as “equality”, Spades Slick’s “You are getting really tired of mashing the ’=’ key” makes a nice precursor to Egbert’s “Being culturally sensitive is really hard work.”
…confirmation bias speaking, but Hussie removes the troll horn headband when shrugging off narrative commands. “Get back to the story jackass” > *removes horns* > “Oh I’m sorry, am I not going fast enough for you?” Puts the horns back on, shrugs off a command that is posed as a question (Recap?), then obeys the command “Reel it in.” So that’s fun…
Suddenly really funny to me that the guy with a hovering seahorse hunting a flying whale has a hard time believing in magic
Like granted, I guess it’s just like… telling Feferi to cut the fish puns with “okay i get it we are nautically themed” sounds like a frivolous meta joke but the idea is to show that Eridan is kind of at a remove from life on Alternia, right? Like things feel artificial to him. So I’m getting a feeling like he regards his surroundings as magical but feels his SURROUNDINGS aren’t real. Like an earlier version of that sense that the world is bullshit that John has in Candy route.
Terezi was already linked to Dualscar through the motif of blinding, but it just struck me as I went back through Act 5 that Cronus’s “human cigarette” (quotes his) was a riff on/clarification of Terezi’s TROLL CAEGAR (the double headed coin) – unsure if the “cigar” reading applies to the original coin flip or if the rephrasing with Cronus just functions as an invitation to compare his story to Terezi’s
More “peanut gallery” shit: in addition to Snoop Doggy Dogg, Homestuck fixates on Brown Charlies: Charles Barkley & Charles Dutton
Terezi was already linked to Dualscar through the motif of blinding, but it just struck me as I went back through Act 5 that Cronus’s “human cigarette” (quotes his) was a riff on/clarification of Terezi’s TROLL CAEGAR (the double headed coin) – unsure if the “cigar” reading applies to the original coin flip or if the rephrasing with Cronus just functions as an invitation to compare his story to Terezi’s
Sollux is a Troll Caegar – 2 head motifs, red/blue eyes refracting the scratched/unscratched profiles of the coin. Cronus compares his abuse of Mituna to HIC’s use of the Psiionic as a battery, so his non-burning of “human cigarettes” relates to his contempt for the mentally burnt-out Mituna.
“Gl'bgolyb” is also a Caegar – one half of the reduplication of Glub is “scratched” with an apostrophe. And it turns out Glubglub has a second face in the back, I hadn’t noticed before
Thinking about Gamzee putting blood the life-regenerating “coffee machine”… I wonder if Gamzee murdered people in doomed timelines to save them from oblivion (because doomed timeline), since that transfers their souls over to dream bubbles? Like what Meenah did with her bomb before the Scratch wiped out her party…
But it’d be strange for those killings to be unrelated to the killing of Equius and Nepeta, so maybe that’s just a happy coincidence? Vriska’s theory that ghosts are being kept “on ice” for Lord English seems like it’d be related to Gamzee’s preservation refrigerator though…
Thought in development, but I wonder if “suckers” is downstream of “caegars” (shares consonant cluster except the devoiced k/g, like darkleer/redglare) and “batteries” (designation of exploitable store of energy).
Way way back I noticed that once people build up their house-towers, planets look like lollipops (orb on a white stick), so that the cherubim’s status as planet-eaters aligns with their taste for candy, but I never had a good sense of what to make of that. My best guess had been, the game of Sburb is supposed to facilitate the sort of personal growth that the Juju lollipop makes you believe you’ve achieved? But these days I’m less inclined to indulge the view of the lollipop as a “fake” planet that perverts the purpose of “real” planets, instead viewing it as a condensed planet, a microcosm of what the game does. In which case becoming “peachy” would be a normal function of Sburb, in some sense.
Lord “English” is Caliborn wearing the name of whiteness, which is kind of the idea of Trickster mode? In which case his ruling over a planet (consisting of “caegars” in the form of trolls) is akin to a victory state of Sburb, which gives you first a planet and then a whole universe to lord over? Which via LE draws upon the association of European imperialism… or something like that
The clear middle ground between “caegar” and “sucker” would be “sugar”, but idk if Nepeta’s planet of sugar cubes supports this approach – her giant teapots that sit atop the sugar piles are associated with death via Problem Sleuth, which could connect us to the skull monster’s grip on Alternia? Eh
Really stupid but one nice consequence of the Megidos being “ninjas” and Caliborn’s black-coding is that ALL the Time players now mesh with the Flava Flav imagery Rose introduced in Complacency of the Learned:
“I am afraid I am becoming more [certain] with each terrible tick groused by that gaudy timepiece slung around your neck.” In case it wasn’t clear, Frigglish wore a clock Zazzerpan didn’t care for. It was magic.
Response to a bit in Slurquest about spittakes, nsfw
@zenosanalyticsaid:
Ok: Something just occurred to me: Eridan demurring on the spittake is a VERY subtle joke on the infertile/Unfuckable jokes which surround the Ampora’s and the Hope Aspect in general(Cronus’s name being the big tipoff)!
Like: He not only DOESNT cum; he CANT cum/reproduce XD(which, I guess, probably ties into some cuckoldry thing re: sollux, feferi, eridan)
I could see the story getting on Eridan’s case for apparent “impotence”, since a similar joke hangs around the Nitrams and their inability to summon the “nerve” (the erection) to “finish [girls] off” – more mockery of insufficiently manly men. At the same time though, I’m partly inclined to view it as an indication of a desire for motherhood, of wishing to hold the blood like the mothergrub instead of transferring it like drone, and thereby be more feminine…
On a similar note, there’s a hint of… I guess masochism? in Kanaya’s intro – when she says she’s one of the few to enjoys the sun’s rays, I’m not certain that means it doesn’t hurt. And the deployment of it’s “it’s hard and nobody understands” when Vriska kisses Tavros – that was an erection joke when Eridan said it, so I’m not entirely certain Kanaya didn’t enjoy being cucked on some level. Certainly explains Homestuck^2…. Kanaya’s sadism I’m more familiar with, she seems to like denying people information as a provocative tactic, and her attempt to tie Rose up in time loops was some kind of flirtation… anyway, point being that at the intersection of “denial” and masochism and not-cumming as a feminizing thing, the chastity modus gives me pause now, if you’ll pardon me being crude
Thinkin bout Karkat
Vaguely wondering if Echidna was trying to suggest Kanaya perpetuate trollkind through Karkat… like if Karkat actually represented the possibility of troll reproduction unmediated by the mothergrub, that would be significant, right? You’d expect the story to make something of that… so far this is the closest I’ve found to something referencing that idea.
I’m reading Kanaya’s line against an old Scratch line where, in reference to Rose’s intrepid variation on suicide, he says “As a man with a passion for the subject, I’m intrigued.” The apparent “subject” is suicide, but the term is simultaneously being stripped of its specificity and refers to the “subject” as in “psychological subjectivity”, ie a person. So Scratch is expressing concerning for Rose’s life, in the same way that “don’t turn your back on the body” meant “don’t kill yourself”, or “live”. (ie the exact command alt-Calliope issued in the dream-lair of Echidna prior to Kanaya’s invocation) There’s also an element of necrophilia/Sleeping Beauty to it insofar as Scratch is positioned as the life-giver, who instills his “passion” into the pneuma-vacated subject.
So Kanaya’s line in that context would seemingly refer to Karkat as the “subject”, such that line scans as a double entendre to the effect of “now isn’t a good time to fuck you”. As though that were Echidna’s condition! In which case the restoration of the Matriob sort of derails the consummatory path Kanaya and Karkat were being sent upon…
Loaded pause… the whole appeal for the release of the Genesis Frog is just overloaded with Try For Baby type speech.
Hard pivot: Karkat tying up Clover is a less aggrandized version of Caliborn beating Yaldaboath (4 pronged luck symbol) but I suddenly wonder if the both of those are linked to the red X that featured so prominently earlier in the story… I bring it up cause the X is used as a symbol of yoni and castration (like the blood symbol), so Light and Blood might be connected in their relation to femininity in this context…
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…
Or something like that
A while back I got an ask wondering if the “flushed” quadrant had anything to do with toilets, and I gave a meandering reply about the association of toilets/assholes and eyesight. Never quite made it back to the core question.
In the wake of Slurquest though (particularly the use of “pale” quadrant to invoke the whiteness of milk and motherhood*) it feels pretty straightforward: I think the term “flushed” may be an artifact of Alternia’s ubiquitous homosexuality, like the very concept of romantic love is entangled with anal sex.
* I framed moirallegiance as an extension of Alternia’s racialized (and age-polarized) notions of gender, where the black-boy’s tantrum is “pacified”, in the sense of a rubber nipple, by the white-mother and her white milk. But the notion of Rose needing to be Snow-White'ed out of her grimdarkness makes me wonder if this overlaps with a misogynistic trope too, the idea of sexually subduing hysteria… which would reverse the gender polarity and offer a position where women are the “blackness” in need of masculine “whiteness” (ie the colonial paradigm). In either case, the degraded are posed as irrational
I got an anon way back implying (but never outright stating) that grimdarkness was horniness, subsiding as it did through sexualized death. I think the above lends itself to that misapprehension, as does Damara’s schtick, where her Japanese speech (akin to Rose’s eldritch babble in its ostensible incomprehensibility) literally disguises an unrelenting (if insincere) demand for sex, representing a framework wherein irrational dark pockets categorically demand filling, presumed white.
Not as sweeping as the title might imply. The post draws an association between Kinbote’s homosexuality and some lines of verse imagining a heaven spent playing lyres and having conversational “cypress walks” with Socrates and Proust. It works as both a fantasy of speaking with your departed heroes in the afterlife and as a reflection upon the act of reading, “talking” with the dead via words on paper, a wood byproduct. OP alleges that the choice of cypress (over any other sort of wood) and mention of lyres further refer us to the myth of Orpheus, who, having sworn off of women after losing Eurydice, spends his remaining days in the company of “young boys”, however they mean that. Orpheus would afterward play the lyre and the nearby cypress tree (the tranformed Cyparissus) would sway to the music.
OP doesn’t say as much explicitly, but this implied to me that Kinbote is effectively Pale Fire’s Orpheus, and his sexuality is partly, if not primarily, in service of the allusion. Zembla as Eurydice? While Shade would be Cyparissus, his poem becoming his tree-body which sways in accord with the lyre play (liar play) of Kinbote’s commentary? I don’t know how far the analogy travels, I read the book ages ago.
I stumbled on this while searching for any academic discourse on homosexuality in Pale Fire; in the wake of Slurquest, there seemed to be a potential correlation between Nabokov’s manic gay caricature and the matter of Act 1 Egbert’s glimmer of gender trouble being accompanied by a Pale Fire quote
