I’ve been reading a lot of interesting thoughts about Dirk’s character and the latest update today, but I’m kind of surprised that I haven’t seen anybody talking about Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff. Because this sequence:

instantly reminded me of this:

(here’s the link to that sbahj comic in full)

Whether or not it was an intentional allusion, this similarity prompted me to think about the connections between Dave, Dirk, their bros, death, and Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff. I propose that Dave and Dirk’s reactions to their bros’* deaths (specifically, the allusions included in these reactions) are indicative of the differences in the relationships that the two characters have with their bros.

*(Yes, I am conflating Dave and Dirk’s bro here, but only because Dirk himself conflates the two in the same way. So when Dirk is reacting to Dave’s death in the latest update, I think we can assume that he’s also using Dave as a stand-in to mourn his own bro.)

(This is super-long, so it’s continued under the read more.)

Before I get into the specifics of the deaths, I want to talk generally about Dave and Dirk’s relationships with their respective bros. Or at least, how these relationships appear on the surface. Dave’s bro is portrayed as an untouchably cool (if somewhat weird) dude that Dave idolizes and wants to emulate. Dave expresses unbridled admiration for him: “God you hope you can be as good as your BRO at [irony] some day. You’d never tell him that though.” Note that in this statement, Dave subtly puts himself down: he’d never tell his bro, because this isn’t a sentiment a cool person would have.

Speaking of “down,” Dave also constantly uses language of spatial relations when talking about his bro, and especially his bro’s irony: echelons, tiers, strata, levels. The implication always being that Bro is at the highest position, and Dave is trying to climb to meet him. The idea of Bro being higher than Dave is always present, sometimes subtle (consider the triple instance on this page, when their relationship is described as one-upsmanship, and Dave knows deep down that he isn’t ironic enough to understand the gauntlet that his bro is throwing down), sometimes not subtle at all (Dave needs to literally ascend to the roof of his building to fight his brother, who, after beating Dave, flies up into the sky).

Dave’s friends recognize this pattern, and try to urge Dave to break it. John writes in his birthday letter that Dave just needs to “get out of your bro’s shadow and spread your wings dude!!!” This is, I think, the best summary of how Dave and his friends see Dave’s situation: he is in his bro’s shadow, and he’ll never get out without serious effort.

Dirk, on the other hand, expresses admiration for his bro, but in a much more detached way. He explicitly explains their relationship in his conversation with Jane on page 6157:

TT: There’s dignity in taking up the work of our familial predecessors, even if what they did was insanely fucking stupid.
GG: Is that a note of bitterness directed at your superstar brother I am detecting?
TT: No way. He’s awesome.
TT: I’ve told you, I don’t begrudge any of his success.
TT: I’ve also told you he isn’t my real bro even though I call him that. We’re related through an esoteric process of genetic reamalgamation.
GG: Oh lordy. Yes, yes, I know. I don’t need another ironic lesson in science fiction!
TT: Alright. My lessons are rad as fuck, but suit yourself.
TT: The point is, obviously his satirical methods have flaws, and whatever tempered brand of hero worship I might be practicing isn’t keeping me from seeing that.
GG: Flaws?? Talk about understatement. Those movies are unwatchable.
GG: Unless your name is Jake English.
TT: Yes, spectacularly so. But they will have profound historical significance. Mark my words.
TT: And flaws aside, it’s a legacy I’m proud to inherit. My duty isn’t to appropriate his methods with absolute loyalty, but to apply reason and improve upon them. To leave my own mark.
TT: To perfect the art of irony.

That’s more or less the extent of their relationship as it’s explicitly described. After all, the dudes never met. We get a sense that Dirk has general positive feelings towards his bro, but Dirk insists that he doesn’t see him as perfect and doesn’t worship him. Dirk respects his bro, but wants to put his own personal stamp on his legacy.

So, in summary, Dave idolizes his bro and can’t escape being like him even if he tries; Dirk admires his bro but wants to differentiate himself. Or at least, this is how the characters themselves see it. However, the reality is the exact opposite. Dave has succeeded in breaking out of his brother’s shadow even if he and his friends don’t realize it, and Dirk is trapped by his ancestor’s legacy far more than he wants to admit.

Now, let’s talk about death. Dirk’s unique physical breakdown that complements his emotional one is, of course, stardust-glitch-related. (Whether/how much the glitching is being prompted by his own emotions is up for debate, I think.) But I see another reference in it: the slowly-building distortion over several panels is very similar to some of the Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff comics. (As far as I can remember, it was never definitively established whether the SBaHJ comics as such exist in the post-scratch universe. But I think it’s safe to assume that Dirk’s bro’s films would use similar effects.) Obviously, the “glitching” that’s happening to Dirk looks like the jpg artifacts in almost everything SBaHJ-related. But several of the comics also end with a slow “fadeout” effect, either with a repeated panel getting smaller, an image getting large and, as a result, extremely grainy, or an actual fading out. All of these effects are combined in this comic. To my eye, what’s happening at the bottom of that comic is extremely similar to what happens to Dirk. Also interesting to note: the pixelated fadeout in this particular SBaHJ comic begins after Hella Jeff laments his inability to fix a problem.

Then we have Dave’s reaction to his bro’s death. He also (inadvertently) responds to it with a reference: he does an acrobatic fucking pirouette off the handle (and immediately thereafter identifies it as such). Not an allusion to SBaHJ, but instead an allusion to this conversation (and many after it), in which he tells Rose that he will perform aforementioned maneuver if he sees “one more soft bulbous bottom being like kind of jutting out or impudent or whatever.” In other words, he’ll perform an acrobatic fucking pirouette off the handle in order to escape his bro’s puppets.

I’ve talked about Dave’s relationship with puppets at length before, but here’s the gist of it: Dave starts out asserting that puppets are awesome. The best thing around. Obviously they have to be, because his bro is into them. Right? Right. Puppets. Awesome. That’s really all there is to say on the matter. But as the story progresses, Dave starts to crack. He first admits that “theyre sort of starting to freak me out a little,” and though he still tries to assert they’re awesome, he sounds moreandmore desperate. Finally, he drops the pretense, and admits that he hates them. “puppets arent cool theyre shitty small fake people who haunt your dreams and grin like permanent assholes”

This last comment, which is probably his strongest expression of anti-puppet sentiment, happens immediately after he discovers his bro’s dead body. Which makes it even more fitting that he perform the acrobatic fucking pirouette at this moment: it’s a symbol of his final escape from the puppets, and with them, his bro’s shadow. The sword that impales his bro may not break, but something else certainly does. I’m definitely not saying that Dave realizes that there was nothing admirable about his brother or that he no longer feels anything for him or anything like that. But I do think that in this moment, Dave makes a big step in his journey toward maturity and independence. He’s certainly not there yet (he still isn’t), but it’s progress.

This wasn’t an abrupt change, though. In fact, we can see that Dave’s been distancing himself from his bro for quite a while. Take, for example, his decision to wear John’s Stiller shades. By wearing them, he’s choosing to replace the triangle-style shades which match his bro’s, and which he’s been wearing since “birth.” If this isn’t a symbolic gesture of independence, I don’t know what is.

And then, there’s Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff. SBaHJ is an ironic website that Dave compares to his brother’s sites, but the comic itself was born of an effort to differentiate himself from his brother. This is what he says to Terezi after showing her his “Cool Dude and Stoner Lou” comic:

TG: im not thrilled with this direction though i think its too much like my bros stuff
TG: need to figure out my own ironic statement to make
TG: spread my wings you know”

And then he does just that with SBaHJ. Dave’s friends (and Dave himself) keep telling him that he still needs to spread his wings, but he has already started to. He still admires his bro, but he’s beginning to forge his own way. And the “pirouette off the handle” reference is the symbolic moment that represents the complete break.

Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff gives us a good transition to Dirk. For someone who wants to “improve on” his ancestor’s legacy (the most prominent aspect of which is the SBaHJ films), Dirk sure has a lot of unaltered Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff accessories in his room. Other than the horse images and a single map, every poster on his wall and picture on his flatscreen is directly from Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff. He has a complete set of SBaHJ plushes. Hell, he’s even tattooed Jeff’s face (his brother’s legacy) on his arm.

Dirk eventually explains that he got all these SBaHJ accessories directly from his bro:

TT: He left some supplies for me here. Like a lifetime supply of orange soda in the crawl space, along with a fuck ton of SBaHJ merch. It was like discovering my own personal holocaust of bulbous jutting bottoms.
TT: Plus some weapons, some other gear. And a killer pair of shades.

This snippet also shows us that Dirk has had at least one success at breaking away from his brother: he added AR to the shades his bro left him. Whether or not this is an improvement would depend on who you ask, but it’s undeniably a case of Dirk leaving his own mark. Still, compare it to Dave’s symbolic shades gesture: Dirk is changing the function of his shades while keeping the appearance identical, unlike Dave, who completely replaced his bro’s shades with some of an entirely different shape and style.

Also, consider the layout of Dirk’s apartment: “You never leave your room through the actual egress. Your bro blocked the door ages ago with this totally pimp stone bust. You give CAPTAIN SNOOP a little nod of approval every time you walk by to go to the bathroom. You like to think he nods back in a way that is so smooth and so subtle, he literally doesn’t move at all. The thing is too heavy to move out of the way, and in any case you don’t really want to. You just use a different exit to your room.” This seems like a direct parallel to the safe in John’s house and the refrigerator in Jane’s: when the child is old enough to move the heavy object, it means that they’ve become a man/woman. Plus, all the other busts in encountered in MSPA stories have had treasure inside of them, implying they’re meant to be broken open. The Snoop bust is a test that Dirk’s bro left for him. But Dirk isn’t even interested in attempting this test. He’d rather routinely inconvenience himself by using a different doorway than change something that his bro put directly in his way to challenge him.

Even though Dirk copies so much directly from his bro, he does have two seemingly-unique hobbies: robotics and puppetry. (And horse appreciation, I guess, but that’s not so much a hobby as it is a beautiful and complex lifestyle.) Here’s how Dirk describes his puppets: “Smuppets are a lovable sort of plush of your own design. You love everything about puppets. You’re always thinking about the craft of their production, their operation, cool new designs and such. If the cosmos didn’t have more important plans for you, and if the world weren’t so fucked up, you’d make a run at fame and fortune with your own puppet enterprises, just like your BRO did with all his weird shit.” So Dirk isn’t going to pursue his puppetry hobby beyond the theoretical, but given the current state of the planet earth, that’s totally understandable. What’s most interesting to me here, though, is Dirk’s assertion that the smuppets are “of [his] own design.” Are they really? Because they look awfully similar to the Bro, Jeff, and Geromy plushes that Dirk’s bro left for him. Plushes which, remember, Dirk described as having “bulbous jutting bottoms.” “Bulbous” and “jutting,” of course, being words associated with smuppets. It seems to me that Dirk adapted the smuppets from his bro’s SBaHJ merchandise. Now, this could be considered an example of improving on his ancestor’s legacy. I’m inclined to be less generous, though, because of the “of your own design” line. Dirk has unconsciously plagiarized from his bro, not adapted from him.

The same goes for the robotics. It seems unique, but still has strong ties to his brother. Here’s how Dirk describes Squarewave and Sawtooth: “His name is SQUAREWAVE. You built him to have rap-offs with now and then. He’s an enthusiastic rapper, and gives it his all whenever you duel, but he’s pretty easy to destroy. You’ve never lost a match against him.
You have only built one other rapbot besides him. His name is SAWTOOTH. You designed him to be unbeatable in a rap-off, and he is. You have never won a match against him. You hope to one day, but you’re not gonna hold your breath. His flow is just that insane.
You keep one of his spare heads over there on your desk, but otherwise you don’t see much of him. It’s been months since your last encounter. He presumably spends his time traveling the world, annihilating any rapper foolish enough to challenge him.” Squarewave is, notably, the exact same height as Dirk. And Sawtooth is tall and slim, his figure greatly resembling that of the bro we see during Dirk’s relation of his famous rooftop battle. So, in other words, Dirk used his unique skill with robotics to build a lil’ bro bot that will always be inferior to the distant, godlike big bro bot.

Besides the shades, the only thing I can think of that truly fits Dirk’s goal of improving his brother’s projects is the bunny that he soups up for Jane. It was originally his bro’s, but Dirk stole it, installed a robotic core in it, and sent it to Jane in a gesture that was both ironic and sincere. This seems to be exactly what Dirk claimed he wanted his relationship with his bro to be like. I’m not sure precisely how to interpret this, but I think the important factor here might be Jane. Dirk’s showing that he can break out of his bro’s mold when he’s motivated by the emotions he feels towards his friends. But when he’s faced with the prospect of doing it on his own and for himself, he can’t quite get there. (Which, not coincidentally, is probably a familiar feeling for many people suffering from depression.)

But the bunny and the shades are the sole exceptions to the pattern that I can come up with. Other than that, Dirk is stuck emulating his bro completely. He’s reluctant to say it, but he is obsessed with his bro, and absolutely worships him like a hero, nothing tempered about it. It even shows in his vocabulary — or should I say, his brocabulary. Dirk, not Dave, is the one in his bro’s shadow, and the one who really needs to spread his wings.

So. Now we get to today’s update. Like I said earlier, I think that we can consider Dirk’s grief here to be concerning both Dave and his bro (in addition to, like, everyone else). We’ve seen Dirk and AR conflate Dave and “our bro” a couple times, such as here. This page also contains this notable passage from ARquiusprite: “I must say, while the troll part of me doesn’t give a silly figging shoot about any of this, the part of me that splintered from you has found the brotherly reunion to be everything which you and I dared not imagine, and more ” Dirk wouldn’t even admit to himself how badly he wanted to meet Dave/his bro. Not really compatible with the “we aren’t even really brothers; I respect him, but I’m not jealous; yeah he’s cool, but he’s not perfect” lines that he fed Jane.

This is (some of) what’s going on in Dirk’s head in the latest update. He is devastated that he can’t finally see the man (or even the copy of the man) who he’s based his identity around emulating. Dirk has been waiting and preparing for this reunion his entire life; of course he’s going to feel personally responsible for the disaster that prevented it. He can’t react to his bro’s death the same way that Dave did. Dirk is far too attached to / obsessed with the mythical fraternal figure in his mind to do an acrobatic fucking pirouette off the handle and away from him. As Dirk himself has said before, he, unlike Dave, can’t break. Instead, Dirk does exactly what he does best: he takes a page directly out of his brother’s Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff legacy and slowly splinters into an incomprehensible pile of pixels and jpg artifacts.

While I was rereading the new Caliborn pages today, I noticed something that I’d completely missed the first time. Namely, a joke involving one of the Japanese phrases Caliborn uses: “doujinshi man gaka." Now, maybe this joke/pun was supposed to be totally obvious, I’m just particularly slow on the uptake, and this post will elicit "well, duh"s. But I figure there must be some other baka gaijin like me out there who missed out on it completely, so I’m going to (perhaps unnecessarily) explain it until all the humor is leeched out. Here we go. Caliborn describes himself as a ”(doujinshi) man gaka" twice:

Now, my first time reading these pages, I activated my twin powers of Using Context Clues and Wanting To Read Fast; I assumed that “doujinshi man gaka” meant something along the lines of “anime guy” and kept going. But when I read through the pages for the second time, I decided that I’d try to find out what the phrase actually means. So I fired up Google Translate:

“Doujinshi” is a general term for a self-published work (translated as “fanzine” by Google). And “man gaka” means… “ten thousand painter?” …O-okay. Is it trying to invoke, like, an ego thing? Caliborn thinks he’s as talented as ten thousand painters in one? Or maybe “man gaka” is an idiom or slang that Google isn’t hip enough to recognize. Oh well, at least I tried. But just before I gave up on my translation endeavor, I remembered something relevant.

Caliborn tends to split compound words in two. So, going on a hunch, I tried deleting the space between “man” and “gaka.”

“Man gaka” is a nonsense phrase, but “mangaka” means manga artist. Caliborn tried to apply his “splitting compound words” quirk here in order to emphasize the “manliness” of being a manga artist. But since “mangaka” is a transliteration of a Japanese word and not a compound English word, this tweak made the entire phrase lose its meaning.

Ultimately, this silly little wordplay works as a great (and I imagine deliberate) metaphor for a subset of the many, many things wrong with Caliborn. He makes a very conscious effort to play up and single out the “man” part of his personality, but he doesn’t realize (or maybe just doesn’t acknowledge) how destructive and toxic this is. Because in the process of emphasizing this one aspect of his identity, he makes this identity as a whole become unintelligible and broken.

What a baka.

Slurquest

This is an exploratory post proposing several approaches for apprehending Homestuck (Alternia in particular) in terms of racism and homophobia. Results vary.

For various reasons, I feel the frameworks are best introduced through analogous microcosms. I have a nascent personal canon of films which are not* referenced in Homestuck, but which nonetheless function as potent paratexts for the apprehension of its narrative constructs. The foremost member is Forbidden Planet, a film involving a machine that draws the violent fantasies of a man’s dreams into reality, creating monsters that enact his otherwise repressed anger. SBURB deploys a similar mechanism: the game’s boot log concludes with the phrase “launching manifestation systems”, and accordingly we later see that imps, ogres, and trolls are all born from psychological fissures in a given player, manifesting from the emergent anxieties of the people they target. Comparing the content of an altercation with the (apparently traumatic) event that preceded it (and therefore induced it) offers a peek into the pathologies of the triggered**/accosted characters. Eg ogres climb up the side of the house immediately after John experiences vertigo, indicating a deep-seated fear of falling.

*afaik

**No, we are not using “triggered” as a pejorative. Not yet at least. And when we do, it won’t be the way you think.

Recently my canon gained another entry: John Carpenter’s Halloween. It share with Homestuck a love of “misrepresentation”, in both its playfully duplicitous and racially fraught senses, as well as a certain preoccupation with paranoia.

Halloween (1978) is about a masked man (Michael), recently escaped from an insane asylum, stalking and killing the suburban teens of his hometown. Michael’s former psychologist (Loomis), firmly persuaded that Michael is the very embodiment of Evil, refashions himself as a hunter and lies in wait with a gun at Michael’s childhood home. The home, abandoned and left to rot after a young Michael murdered his sister there on a past Hallows’ Eve, has come to be regarded by locals as a “spook house”; trick-or-treaters dare eachother to brave its haunted steps. The unseen Loomis seeks to deter these tiny trespassers for their own safety. But the deterrence method Loomis chooses is strange: he puts on a Big Black Guy voice and, feigning ownership of the homestead, tells the kids to get lost. Elsewhere in the film, a bit of set dressing echoes this choice: in the midst of an otherwise pristine suburb of green grass and bleached white houses, we glimpse of a patch of black graffiti on the sidewalk that simply says EVIL. An impression begins to form that the metanarrative rationale for describing Michael as a bogeyman, for insinuating that beneath his white mask is a formless shadow, is that despite Michael’s whiteness, he functions as a vehicle for racialized fantasies of invasion. The insane asylum, seen only at night, represents the chaotic city. Michael’s presence brings the night to the suburbs, and with it all the urban terrors (black) from which the suburbanites (white) thought themselves insulated. Spooky!

While there might be an edifying function to this deception (I came away from the film with a deep contempt for the fear mongering psychologist, personally), I mostly tend to think of Halloween as a good, mean prank: like Caliborn disguising his king as a queen and relishing Calliope’s outsized responses to its impotent threats, Carpenter crafts a black killer ensconsed in white and proceeds to giggle at the viewership’s unwitting investment in a racist narrative for which Carpenter himself holds no sympathy – or so I imagine, believing as I do that such a game would be in accord with the spirit of Halloween’s mischievious namesake.

(I sometimes wonder if James Cameron was playing a similar game when he cast a white man named SCHWARZENEGGER as the face of an imminent genocidal uprising of once subservient machines. But anyway)

Betty Crocker is only the surface of Hussie’s engagement with conspiracy. Homestuck, like Halloween, is built upon veiled allusions to reactionary paranoia. John’s vertigo is relative; what John perceives as a “fall” can be fruitfully reframed as “the ascent of that which was once below”. John takes note of an increasingly grim Rose’s ascent to power and roleplays a return to gender norms (“ironically” of course), soothing the vertigo of social mobility with the image of Sleeping Beauty. Alternia, though ostensibly located in the unthinkably distant past, in turn functions as a reactionary nightmare vision of the future: it is a world dominated by BLACKS and HOMOS, and therefore post-apocalyptic. This is evinced by Homestuck’s playful self-censorship: the story contains various euphemisms for n*ggers and f*ggots, through which the racism and homophobia become associated with a more familiar medium for paranoia, the casts’ anxious regard toward the fourth wall. The denotation of slurs, therefore, will be our organizing principle.

Part A: Racist Slurs

Gamzee uses “ninja” as a sugar free “nigga” in the Epilogues; terms of endearment like “my ninja” and the like. As it turns out, this usage can be projected backward into the early acts: the phrase “NINJA SWORD” acts as a euphemism for “N-WORD”, such that Dave hurling his blade at a crow can represent hurling slurs at a black person (It just slipped out. Dave is distraught). That a flock of crows would later, in a dream, represent for Dave the innumerable portals of the 4th wall through which he observes himself is thus consistent with the racial connotations of the term “peanut gallery”*, which was invoked in Act 1 to describe John’s “allergy” (ie fear) of the judgemental gazes of others. The allergy joke is followed by an early hint of Her Imperious Condescension (a “Hi-C” commercial), a villain with black speech affectations whose title connects her to the peanut gallery’s scorn, and who is eventually defeated by a NINJA SWORD**.

*The peanut gallery is also racialized via allusions to Charles Schultz’s Peanuts: Snoop Dogg’s visage watermarks the proceeding when John is commanded to Snoop on Rose (1693), and the resident Brown Charlies (Barkley and Duttle) are presented as a philosophical visionary and a dreaming prophet, respectively (1706, 2988).

**Technically it’s Dirk’s UNBREAKABLE KATANA, but the pejorative-encoding of “ninja sword” transfer to the “anime sword” preferred by Act 6.

So racial minorities are associated with the gaze of the audience, peeking in from the 4th wall – a motif originating in Problem Sleuth, where the literal 4th wall of Problem Sleuth’s office was peppered with the eyes of minorities, faces on a mural celebrating racial diversity. The veiled pejorative of NINJA SWORD channels aggression (and other emotions) towards both concepts.

Another paratext, this time embedded in Homestuck: Deep Impact, for which John has a poster, is about fears of white replacement. An early scene takes care to associate the word “waves” with both the soundwaves of black musicians (Elle Fitzegerald, Duke Ellengton [sic]) and tidal waves (yet another ELE, the “Extinction Level Event” which drives the film). The film’s black president and his prodigious voice* are thus presented as existential threats on par with the imminent flooding of the Earth, recontextualizing various responses to watery doomsday as abstracted reactions to the rise of black people in America. Homestuck draws upon this association of blackness and water, beginning with the Lalonde household (where the lights are out and the air is filled with the sound of running water), continuing in Barkley’s association with oceans and “dunking”, and perhaps culminating in the black-affecting Condesce’s flooding of the Earth. In the middle though, we have Alternia, which is a somewhat drier fantasy of a world overtaken by blackness. 3 points:

1. The highest echelons of Alternian society are black-coded, and rap is an aristocratic art form.

Gamzee and Equius makes this difficult to miss, but a subtler point is that this cultural ascendance makes blackness aspirational: Karkat, for example, seems to express racial envy (like gender envy, but for black people).

Gamzee manifests after Karkat looks over his Thresh Prince poster, implying that Gamzee’s presence as a black-ish voice is an elaboration on Karkat’s feelings toward Troll Will Smith. It might seem odd that despite Karkat calling Smith his hero, he expresses nothing but contempt for Gamzee’s mode of speech. But admiration and hostility are reconciled by envy*. Karkat’s irritation towards Gamzee’s miracles (ie being dazzled by the richness of sensation) is underlaid by a sense of injustice, that Gamzee (by merit of his “blackness”) has access to sensational joys that are inacessible to Karkat. Gamzee protests that explanations steal the magic from his miracles; Karkat on some level agrees, and exists in a state of feeling robbed.

*Another reconciliation, and one that we’ll see a lot of, lies in the simple fact that this world of black predomination is conceived as a racist construction. Therefore, anti-black sentiment persists within it. Even so, envy is a useful paradigm.

Over the course of the story, we can see hints that Karkat wishes to reclaim that “stolen” blackness: finding identification with a “black guy” through Will Smith’s sickle and Jack Noir’s shared blood; Karkat assuming the mantle of his ancestor, who Suffered in chains; Karkat dressing up as Geromy for Halloween (“karkats problematic nobody tell him” says Dave); Karkat regarding* Dave’s assertion that he is “so much more than Obama” as an insurmountable expression of love… but more on Karkat later.

*Dirk was narrating, but his words are bound to the thoughts characters were already going to think, much the same as Vriska’s timeline interference in Act 5 asserts responsibility for things that were already going to happen.

1a. The apparent esteem for hoofbeasts is a subset of black cultural ascendence; horses are yet another veiled pejorative.

Dirk draws attention to the proximity of “nicker” to “nigger” in Detective Pony by injecting the phrase “vile slurs omitted” afterward, a gag echoed in the mosaic that fails to obscure a highly offensive horse dildo belonging to Horuss, who similarly observes that “Trigger” sounds like a wonderful name for a hoofbeast. Equius is obsessed with submission, but Zebruh is an outright slaver. We might in this vein construe John’s traumatic fall from the slime pogo (the probable origin of the fear that manifested as ogres) as a racist’s reframing of the end of slavery, a sense of having been unfairly bucked off one’s horse. For illustrative purposes, I’ve taken the liberty of replacing the word “niggers” with “horses” in an old comic of Hussies:

The original joke being that the speaker’s enthusiasm is tethered to a sense of domination. As a followup, here’s an excerpt from page 7689, in which I’ve taken the liberty of replacing the word “horses” with “niggers”:

(Vriska): What do you think, Meenah?

MEENAH: aboat what

(Vriska): Niggers!!!!!!!!

MEENAH: ummmm

MEENAH: they ok

MEENAH: kinda dumb and smelly

MEENAH: be makin like

MEENAH: fucked up sounds out their big ass snouts and floppy lips

Meenah here distances herself from black speech and bodies. It bears repeating that our cast subsists within a racist world; even “black” characters can express racism.

2. Miscegenation is a central paradigm of Alternian sexuality.

Anxious allusions to race-mixing have come up before: John’s books make short disparaging references to “listless octoroons” (69, 629); Lil Cal manifests three panels after we see naked black & white puppets chained to each other (448); and ICP’s depiction as evil (literally the result of combining Laurel and Hardy with the ecto-essence of Hitler, according to the cursed lore) is a result of their being the exemplar of whiteness “tainted” by blackness, a cultural spin on miscegenation. They are evil /because/ they are white rappers, their monochrome facepaint emphasizing the admixture.

I could go on. But the main point is,

“White” + “black” = gray, hence the trolls.

2a. “Slurry” was a hint. Troll reproduction is described by the phrase “incestuous slurry” not only because trolls impart their genetic material to their own mother, but also because “motherfucker” is used near exclusively by characters affecting blackness. The Freudian Oedipus is black, and mother he fucks is paradigmatically white: in one case, following the conclusion of WV’s chess game, black’s resounding victory over white is immediately provided a natal counterpart in the form of BROWN liquid erupting from the belly of a PINK can of Tab*. This association of childbirth/hatching with (racial) uprising later returns via Tavros, a brown-blood whose game of Fiduspawn (which spawns a horse, appropriately enough) prefigures his links to the Summoner’s rebellion.

* As though in reaction to WV, the white-carapaced PM carries two letters bearing the postage marks of Rhodesia, the defunct colonial government of what is now Zimbabwe (896). There are two colored stamps bearing the name to her right, and a notice regarding “Southern [Rhodesia] Stamps” to her left.

2b. The example of WV and the racial polarization of mother & child inform us that miscegenation is being construed in terms of black men acting upon white women. This arrangement suggests the possibility of latent racial tensions in the mother/child dynamic of Porrim and Kankri, and we find them: within Porrim’s critique of Alternian patriarchy, there are traces of antiblackness. When Porrim encourages Latula to cease performing for the public gaze and “be herself”, she singles out Latula’s black-flavored speech affectations for elimination, first striking at the proliferate ‘yo’ and Latula’s use of zees for pluralz, then expressing contempt for the phrase “all up inz”. Explaining Kankri’s racial entanglement requires a digression.

2c. In another point of commonality, horses and black men are both sexually stereotyped by prodigious cock size – modern miscegenation porn often advertises itself under the label BBC, “big black cock”. In MSPA, the racialized gaze of the 4th wall is itself construed as a phallic intruder, a BBC. One example of this is in the Intermission, where Snowman weilds a whip called “Black Inches”, a euphemism for dick borrowed from a black gay porn magazine*. Snowman seizes Spades Slick’s arm with the whip and leaves him humiliated. This scene functions as a violent repetition of a prior humiliation, in which Snowman does no more than observe Slick goofing off: in this instance her very eyes are the Black Inches**, and the embarrassed Slick relieves himself of the horse hitcher between his legs in the emasculating gaze’s wake.

*The magazine Black Inches shows up in Jail Break (50).

**Since the zigzag of a lightning bolt is used to represent the scratch of a disk, and the tendrils of the Red Miles represent tears in the fabric of reality, it seems likely that Black Inches would in some sense be yonic as well as phallic – but one thing at a time.

A still earlier example is found in Problem Sleuth, where the massive eye of a horrorterror peeks through the 4th wall, its massive tendrils probe Ace Dick, and the violated AD walks away in shame, recalling the shame he was made to feel for being fat in his youth. The idea is that the probing tentacles ARE the judgemental gaze. The outer gods in Homestuck are similarly racialized. The brown skin of the Duttle (alchemical fusion of Charles Dutton and Squiddles) perturbs Jade because the tentacles now look like black dicks. Rose borrows a fear of water from Deep Impact*: Rose’s “avarice for the inscrutable”, her interest in drowning amid the Deep Ones, becomes associated with Charles Barkley via the “Chaos Dunk” John performs in her slumber. Later, the reference to tentacle rape in Rose’s chumhandle is made manifest when Doc Scratch “smothers [her] with surprise noodles” (3632), his barrage of inscrutable question marks teasingly sexualized, after which the now-darkened Rose gets rendered as the basketball player from SBaHJ. Again, both Brown Charlies are associated with the Peanut gallery. And the gaze of the Horrorterrors is further racialized by a name: “Oglogoth” as in “gothic ogle” as in “dark leer”.

*Is the aversion to water also part of Rose’s cat motifs? The phobia was initiated by Jaspers’ apparent drowning after all…

The etymology of Darkleer is our path back to Kankri: the omnipresent glare of the red sun is synonymous with the dark, leering ogles of the 4th wall. This is likely why Gl'ybgolyb has the title “the Rift’s Carbuncle”, the carbuncle being a mythic, glowing ruby. Latula’s black affectations are referred to as “rad” to emphasize the link between redness and blackness. Porrim tells Latula to stop performing and be herself, but the red blooded Kankri (who finds fault in all) embodies the judgemental gaze to whom performance is addressed, a point underlined when Kankri informs Latula that he is ALWAYS WATCHING HER, even in moments she believes to be totally private. This gaze is, again, phallic: Dave, the first to be haunted by the red glow of endless webcams, rejects the criticism of the readership by slicing apart the phrase “insufferable prick”. This literal reading of “prick” (and its connection to judgement) is one justification for transforming the Kankri’s mythic title of the Sufferer into the Insufferable – he is the prick. For this all these reasons, we can assert that all the terms emphasizing the length of Kankri’s judgemental red diatribes (“prohibitously loquacious harangue”, “enormous in progressive virtue”) are coded references to Big Black Cock*. Poor, innocent Karkat takes the brunt of it.

*One wonders if Horuss’s usage of “Trigger” as a minced oath retroactively casts the n-word over all of Kankri’s meticulous content tags. “Nigger warning”

3. The elimination of the limebloods was white genocide*.

The blood of the cherubim establishes that lime is the opposite of candy red, so if red=black, lime=white. The racial element of black/white is emphasized by Caliborn affecting black speech (eg KNIFE A BITCH, eg MONEY AS FUCK)** while Calliope is an avowed teaboo (how convenient that the chief pejorative for English people is “limey”). Caliborn kills Calliope, breaks his chains, and escapes to a freedom encoded by decayed Statues of Liberty, lying in the sand – a reference to the Planet of the Apes, yet another movie about black ascent in the social order (and the fear that this consigns whiteness to oblivion). It follows that the elimination of the limebloods, retroactively framed as Lord English repeating his predomination over Calliope, his “mating” her, likewise encodes a triumph of black over white (which again is also a central paradigm of Alternian sexuality: miscegenation).

*At the risk of contradicting myself, I should note a reservation here: if Caliborn relishes painting his words in Calliope’s blood, and ICP is characterized a white affectation of blackness, would it not be sensible to regards the death of lime as a black genocide, after which black speech was appropriated? As though, in the spirit of the “I LOVE NIGGERS” comic, laying claim to group-exclusive language and asserting dominance over that group go hand in hand? I suspect that the lime-as-black account might be superimposed on lime-as-white, as though the reversal of Halloween’s Michael were here bi-directional – colonization likely being the framework in which masculine-white acts upon feminine-black. But we’ll talk about bivalent cocks and James Cameron’s Avatar shortly.

**Caliborn-as-black grounds his claim (leveled at Jane) that “bitch” and other pejoratives are actually terms of endearment in a distorted understanding of AAVE, as though the use of “bad” to mean “good” were a universal principle. Jane listens to rap music and cries dot jpeg.

Part B: Homophobic Slurs

THEY’RE ALL MEN. BECAUSE I SAY THEY ARE. AND I WANT THEM TO BE.

IF I BELIEVE HARD ENOUGH IN THEM BEING MEN.

THEN THAT FACT BECOMES ABSOLUTELY INDISPUTABLE AS A PERMANENT MAN REALITY.

(Caliborn, concerning the Felt)

If the paradigm of miscegenation dictates that men are “black” and women “white”, it follows that the white genocide of the limebloods was also a mass femicide – yet another retroactive repetition of Caliborn killing Calliope. Every motherfucker on the planet submits genetic material to the Mothergrub, not a soul gestates, and therefore everyone on Alternia is “male”, just as Caliborn desires. The castes adjacent to the missing lime might gesture at the womb (Nepeta’s bloody cave, Kanaya’s midwifery), but all reproduction occurs via “gay sex”. Male-on-female miscegenation is abstracted into a paradigm of gender relations, only having any bearing on material relations by way of analogy. The world has been overcome not only by blackness, but by gayness.

A consequence of the above is that EVERY GIRL ON ALTERNIA IS A TRANS GIRL. Roleplay is coded as a feminine activity not only in replication of real world perceptions of rp communities, but to associate Alternian women writ large with performance. FLARP is a “game for girls” not (just) because girls are more dangerous but because girls roleplay, categorically. Feferi describes her cuttlefish rescue as a roleplaying scenario, Nepeta is Nepeta. Kanaya… is perhaps best approached by contrast with Karkat.

Karkat is likely the only exception to the all-male rule: his status as a mutant lime blood implicates him as Alternia’s only surviving female, and thus its only trans man*, red concealing lime. His aforementioned race envy would then double as gender envy, blackness being the Alternian paradigm of masculinity. Karkat chose his sickle in imitation of Troll Will Smith, later emphasizing the connection with the sickle HOMES SMELL YOU LATER, likewise a Thresh Prince reference. Kanaya’s love of fashion (of “the aesthetic over the utilitarian”) is a statement of her transfemininity, while Karkat’s utilitarian insistence that trolls think fashion is stupid becomes an anxious assertion that his masculinity in non-mediated, as though a hint of performance in his demeanor would out him. The nubby horns, the suggestion of menses from the Blood aspect symbol, the jokes about hysteric fits, & the love of romcoms… they all begin to seem like tells. Does Porrim insist Kankri wear a sweater in order to censor the female presenting nipples, I wonder.

*I’ve heard Sollux was presented as a trans man in his Pesterquest route (I haven’t played Pesterquest). I think Vriska route’s presentation of her as a trans girl was correct, so the Sollux route makes me wonder if this approach is wrong-headed. OH WELL

Karkat shoosh-papping Gamzee (the sound effects are in lime) becomes an image of “white female” soothing the “black male” – “pap” as in pap smear, mother’s offering the baby milk. I’d even guess the entire “pale” quadrant is a pun on the pacifying power of whiteness (dairy and racial, but they’ve been equated through the paradigm of white motherhood) – this becoming the reason why Equius, our leading example of moirallegiance, loves milk. Does “filial pail” mean “white mother”? Is the powerful horseman shattering the milk container a violent miscegenation joke, as though he breaks the mother? Is that why Karkat (potential white mother) of all people voices the concern (twice!) that contact with Equius will shatter him? DON’T TOUCH ME. Anyway

1. “FAIRY” IS A SLUR

In the wake of Vriska’s pesterchum route, tumblr user abraxasgrip posited that Karkat referring to Vriska as FAG (the seemingly accidental acronym of “Future arachnidsGrip”) and Vriska’s general status as a blue “fairy” should be considered parcel to a trans narrative*. She was right! The entire notion of trolls pupating into butterflies upon ascension is in part a trans allegory, not unlike the modern designation of nascent trans people as “eggs”, waiting to hatch.

*For that matter, I half-wonder if “Vrissy” was chosen for its proximity to “sissy”.

Earlier I mentioned a racial dimension to the paradigm of birth in Fiduspawn, but here we can focus on the gender. The fairy girls on Tavros’s wall are an extension of the urge to fly, as though fairy girls are the butterflies unto which Tavros intends to pupate. Tavros being unable to sink into his cocoon (ie unable to iniate metamorphosis) because of his HUGE HORNS functions as metaphor for bodily dysphoria. Vriska is introduced as one of Tavros’s poster made manifest, the fairy ideal to which he aspires, and she denigrates Rufio because his red hair represents a bloody stump, a point of castration*. The ideal feminine dismissing Rufioh as fraudulent and fake emulates taunts that trans women, even following bottom surgery or what have you, will never be “real women”. It bears repeating that this Alternia-as-paranoid-fantasy is arose from a homophobic/transphobic world view (one that slurs together all it would describe as feminine men), so characters tend to express the prejudices that drove their own creation.

* In Openbound, Rufioh attempts to “break up” with the dick-faced Horuss 8=D in service of a dysphoria metaphor. Damara, taking a role akin to Vriska’s above, locked away Rufioh’s “happy thought” to illustrate the corresponding lack of euphoria.

Also, if Karkat is female, “STOP PLAYING GAMES FOR GIRLS” functions not only as one of Karkat’s defensive assertions of masculinity, but as yet another example of “real women” denigrating “imitations”.

It should be noted here that chasing after the butterfly entails chasing after the cocoon, which bears connotations of death (eg the cherubim use a magic tomb, the sarswapagus, to turn from boy to girl and back). In some cases the objective (the feminine) collapses into the mediator (death), such that femininity is construed as intrinsically morbid. Mommy becomes a mummy, pregnant with scarabs. Jake’s interest in blue girls intersects with his love of skulls: When Aranea asks “Do you want me to talk until I’m blue in the face?” Jake gulps not only because of the thought of literal blue skin, but because exhausting one’s Breath means death.

We’ll talk more about Jake later, because the narrative insinuation of necrophilia that follows him is channeled into a very particular homophobic/transphobic construction, but for now let it suffice that the butterfly Grandpa shoots has the colors of the trans pride flag.

2. HIS HONORABLE “TYRANNY” MEANS “TRANNY”

The Condesce attempted to recreate Alternia on Earth, implementing blood castes and installing (black-tainted) clown presidents in imitation of the Grand Highblood. What then is Guy Fieri supposed to emulate? The cursed lore alleges the name to be a mispronunciation of “guy Feferi”, but what does that have to do with his position as a Supreme Court Justice? How is Fieri related to His Honorable Tyranny? The answer is as simple as the names: “Tyranny” means TRANNY*, and “Guy Fieri” sounds like GAY FAIRY.

*I talked about Kankri as a figure of judgement earlier – I wonder if his status as a trans man has anything to do with the nickname “Kanny”

Terezi is likewise a trans girl, and her kangaroo court functions as a castration fantasy: dragons are phallic, she strings them up. “LEMONSNOUT” means “PISSNOZZLE”. (“Lemonsnout represents Vriska!” you protest, “we see Lemonsnout on Terezi’s desk when she informs Doc Scratch of the cueball!” To this I reply, “The design of Vriska’s dotted eyepatch is lifted from the Goonie’s 'One-Eyed Willie’, who represents a penis!”)

Terezi wishes she could have a baby, you see. When Terezi says her lusus dreams about babies, Karkat says “I thought you didn’t have one”, and Terezi replies “I don’t yet, I’m not allowed to.” The omitted subject is doubled: Terezi is allowed neither a lusus nor a baby. This motif plays out again in Terezi’s roleplay with Nepeta: the phallic dragon (Terezi refers to the dragon head as her “alarming and splendiferous girth”) attempts to steal and consume the child, representing the assumption of pregnancy. Cronus (named after a god who consumes children) similarly has a seahorse lusus in reference to male pregnancy.

Earlier still, this wish is encoded in the crime of Senator Pissnozzle, dipping his snout into a “beetle coffer”. The invocation of scarabs implies that the Pissnozzle poked into a mummy, meaning that Terezi (whose name invokes Tiresias, the blind prophet of the play Oedipus Rex) is simultaneously punishing incestuous access to the death-mother and the intrusion of the masculine into the domain of the feminine. As with Terezi and her desire for baby: NOT ALLOWED. This society is at least as homophobic as it is gay.

To wit: when Terezi notes the “unmitigated cheek” of the Senator strutting around with pilfered scarabs beneath his clothes, she is complimenting the Senator’s ass. Terezi then recommends the court take recess to puke. This is a compliment of sorts, because vomiting blood is one way trolls produce genetic material: the conversation prior to the trial feature Karkat summoning the image of girls “erupting like a vomit volcano” at the sight of Sollux; this image of bile and fire is followed by a dragon drawn by Terezi, who retches with a BLAR; and the phallic status of dragons informs us that vomiting amounts to ejaculation. Anyway,

When Karkat responds to Terezi’s cryptic baby talk with “WE NEED TO GET YOU OUT OF THAT FUCKING TREE AND INTO A PROPER GODDAMN LAWNRING,” what we should hear is “GET YOUR HEAD OUT OF THE CLOUDS.” It’s an early iteration of the infamous “STOP PLAYING GAMES FOR GIRLS” that accompanies Tavros’s attempted flight. (Another instance of Blood pulling down an ascendant trans girl: Dave offering bloody bro fistbumps to keep John from blasting off.)

3. “HUMAN CIGARETTE” MEANS “FAG”

Cronus ostensibly couches “human cigarette” in quotation marks to signal that he is introducing new terminology to the conversation, but in much the same way as Caliborn would describe his King as “Queen”, readers can take the quotes as indication that some manner of substitution is afoot. The suggestion of euphemism (and the fact that Cronus doesn’t smoke the cigarette) doesn’t just offer a joke about how Cronus likes putting sticks in his mouth – it’s a comment on Mituna.

“Human cigarette” is a rephrasing of TROLL CAEGAR, Terezi’s two headed coin. The precedent of G substitution in TROLL JEGUS allows the cigar pun to slip by unnoticed. The two heads of the coin, and its scratched/unscratched eyes, are quickly embodied in the form of Sollux, who likewise has alternated eyes and two-headed motifs. He even carries on Terezi’s abuse of the pissnozzle by slicing through his BEEHOUSE MAINFRAME tower – the yellow MIND HONEY represents piss. The taste of piss turns Sollux into a vomit volcano, a grandiose iteration of the (imagined) spittake resulting from John drinking pee disguised as apple juice. BLUH! The eruption of lasers from his hivestem resembles ejaculation, again pointing to the reproductive function of disgust.

Now we need to superimpose several points:

a. The blast also signals that “Sollux Captor” (sunlight capacitor) can function as a store of energy, a battery. This was the use to which HIC put the Psiionic, using him to power her ship, a cruelty that Cronus (speaking to Meenah) deploys to defend his own abuse of Mituna. This is one point of convergence between batteries and cigarette/cigar: posing a person a fuel, a resource to be burnt out (hence the emphasis on Mituna being brain-fried).

b. Rose has a small tirade in early act 6 about cigars being a phallic symbol, and we should take her word for it: when Meenah goes to take a bathroom break during the interfission, its not until a newly blind Sollux stumbles into the ship’s hold with Meenah that her bladder meter starts to decrease. This is another reference to the Psiionic, posing the yellow-blooded Captors as a pissnozzles awaiting depletion. Meenah quips “like captor like captor” afterwards to underscore this parallel (though she formally only refers to Sollux falling down, as Mituna is prone to do).

The dick is a synecdoche of the boy, and as the GameGrl theme tells us, GIRLS RULE & BOYS DROOL. Which is to say, girls and boys are posed as defacto mother/child pairs, because children (being black boys) are all “motherfuckers” in the Oedipal sense. But on Alternia, access to the mother is mediated so the little gay babies (to borrow Meulin’s turn of phrase) all have to fuck eachother instead. Hence, “human cigarettes” (ie troll caegars, ie batteries) are fags.

4. “FAYGO” ALSO MEANS “FAG”

Drinking Faygo is synonymous with kissing a dead head, such that Gamzee’s soda habit prefigures his attempted revival of Tavros. A shot of Aradia decapitating a frog statue (2065) cuts directly to Eridan picking up a red Faygo. Later, Gamzee advises Eridan to “chug that shit like you and the bottle was reunited lovers”, invoking a passionate kiss. Eridan does so, upon which we see Feferi revive Sollux (the Caegar) with a passionate kiss. Eridan demurs on the spittake, but Karkat gags, and Spades Slick consummates the gesture with a reference to puking blood.

Later on, the most dramatic boy-on-boy kiss of the story replicates this structure: Jake takes the bleeding head of Dirk and kisses him to life. Onlookers gag, and a vomit volcano erupts in the background. Bluh.

But hey, on the subject of Jake breathing life into dead people,

5. “WINDBAG” ALSO ALSO MEANS “FAG”

Here we’ll need to be familiar with an aspect of Homestuck’s metaphysics again, so let’s proceed from Jade’s fear of lightning:

a. Jade’s first imp manifests after she spies a yellow aurora coursing through the sky in the shape of a lightning bolt. Since imps appear in response to psychic turmoil, this establishes that for whatever reason, lightning is a source of fear for Jade. Furthermore, the imp arrives in a reproduction of Bec’s introduction, associating Bec with this fear of lightning.

b. Elaboration on the phobia arrives in the form of 1. the image of Johnny 5 being struck by lightning and assuming consciousness and 2. the corpse of dream!Jade being animated by the infusion of Becsprite, after which she immediately requests death. What Jade fears is no less than life itself: life is regarded as a coarse intrusion upon the serenity of death.

c. Another way to put it: in conceiving of her very life as originating from a numinous elsewhere, Jade becomes terrified that the will coarsing through her body is not her own, that she is an automaton, a puppet. But the terror is selective. Note that during her introduction, Jade only attributes her failures to alien wills: the discordant flute play and botched memory game are framed (by Jade) as reader interactive segments, while kickass bass solos and success with the modus are framed (by Jade) as a consequence of Jade assuming total control.

d. The flute example is instructive: another name for the spark of life, the divine pneuma, is Breath. Hence when Tavros attempts to revive Vriska, we see the Breath aspect symbol flow from his mouth. For whatever reason, Jade seems to regard Grandpa as the source of her (unwanted!) Breath, despite his being dead: she disparagingly refers to him as a “bag of wind” while recalling one of his old tirades. When Jade nearly shoots herself but instead shoots Grandpa, suicide and murder are rendered synonymous insofar as Jade is striking out at (someone presented as) the source of Breath. The puppet cuts its strings and is motionless forever.

e. Corpse kissing arises from more than necessity: rescuscitation has apparent overtones of necrophilia. Caliborn illustrates this when he claims Calliope will leave a truly “breathtaking” corpse. Jake’s intro drags him into this paradigm with a joke in which the phrase “beating a dead horse” is twisted into the visceral “assaulting the mushy carcass of a horse who passed away long ago”, playing upon the sexual dimension of “assault”. Blue girls are beutifully dead and the pneuma is seemingly phallicized. Grandpa had Jade’s corpse sitting around for a long time.

f. So it came to seem that Jade’s relationship with Grandpa had undertones of sexual assault. It became unnerving that Jade seemed to go grimbark at the sight of Jake’s banana hammock, that Jade’s corpse fell from the sky in Candy at the mention of rape, that another will takes over Jade’s body when Meat!Roxy muses that ectobiology did not require their consent to make them make babies. Jadesprite’s desperation to die, to empty herself of Pneuma, obtained a connotation of uninvited semen, the memory of which could trigger extreme responses. It seemed frivolous that Jade’s dreambot beat up Grandpa’s effigy while dream!Jade pummeled the Courtyard Droll, but the association turned ominous when CD killed Jade with an explosion of white goop as a lightning aurora coursed overhead… in short, all signs seemed to indicate Grandpa was a rapist. I’m still somewhat convinced this is true.

But its also true that Homestuck is a conspiracy theory, self-consciously depicting homophobia. A nudge towards a paradigm shift arrives when Jane compared Jake to Arrested Development’s Tobias Funke: “How could he not see the pain he was causing with his oblivious demeanor, his repressed feelings of attraction toward men, and his total inability to understand other people’s feelings in spite of his credentials as an analrapist?” The message being, much as ICP is framed as evil by dint of being “tainted” with blackness, a Grandpa might be framed as a rapist by dint of being gay. Suddenly the ominous pneumatic dimension of Jade calling Grandpa a “bag of wind” seemed to be a consequence of the more readily apparent contempt Jade has for Grandpa’s overwrought manner of speaking. Jade (or else the narrative to which both Grandpa and Jade are subjected) uses “bag of wind”, and the elaborate metaphysical assault narrative it invokes, to call Grandpa a faggot.

This filter can superimposed on much of what seemed ominous. The impression that grimbark Jade was triggered by traumatic memories of Jake’s groin wraps back around to her open contempt for the garments: she responds negatively to Jake’s undies because they’re REALLY FUCKING GAY (derogatory). Jade spurning the gift of Ahab’s Crosshair (a symbol of lightning, and thus phallic life) becomes inseperable from Eridan’s contempt for human reproduction (ew! pussy is gross!)… and speaking of lightning, we’ve discussed the pneuma’s relation to life but less so it’s relation to will.

6. “COLONIZER” MEANS “SODOMIZER”

Emphasis on “colon”. The gist is that fags, in their femininity, are conceptualized as tresspassers upon the virgin land of womanhood. Recall a dream Jake had, remixing a scene from James Cameron’s Avatar, a film in which a colonial soldier is able to assume the body of the blue skinned natives. Jake speaks exploitation and condescension: “Ooh Neytiri, I’m learning so much about myself through your primitive culture.” Jake awakens to find Neytiri replaced with Aranea, another “blue girl” upon whom the fantasy of bodily possession is transferred, presumably possessing as much sexism as the quote had primitivism.

A more involved example would be Damara, and her apparent possession by arch-colonist Lord English:

a. Rufioh’s use of “doll” in reference to Damara implicitly compares her to the host plush of Fiduspawn, suggesting that she is in some sense a lifeless vessel through which some other thing perpetuates itself. (Which applies to literally everyone in the story, this being fiction, but it becomes a point of focus here.) Damara speaks in staccato bursts like Caliborn, which in light of the above could suggest she is literally “possessed” by Lord English, being puppeted around by an alien life force that moves through her (again, Fiduspawn)

This sense of possession is compounded by Damara being “fake” Japanese – per tumblruser fishmech, her Google-translated speech is likely diegetic, meaning Damara’s sloppy Japanese is acquired and she’s what might be called “Japanese kin” in the context of Openbound’s various otherkin characters and internet archetypes. Alternatively, we have the standard understanding that Beforan Japanese is intrinsically a “fallen” form of the Japanese that exists as-we-see-it on Alternia, with the caveat that Caliborn is the demiurge responsible for the generation of this degraded form – and that Caliborn is the one who kins sexy anime girls (his admiration of the self-creating girl on the How To Draw Manga Cover comes to mind), making Damara his avatar/self-insert, and leading us back to the motif of possession.

But this could be folded back into the subjective experience of a Japanese-kin Damara, as though she perceives her seeming inability to be “authentic” as the fault of a cruel and/or incompetent God – or rather, it is only through the eyes of God (the reader) that Damara’s language is degraded, but since Damara sees herself through our eyes, the apparent inauthenticity of Damara’s Japanese communicates a subjective sense of inauthenticy which Damara feels towards her own speech. Sometimes the gap between character and authorial voice in Homestuck is brought to attention to underscore a feeling of profound alienation in a given character, a sense of not belonging in their own skin… dysphoria, in other words.

b. As mentioned earlier, the paradigm of colonization also has a racial element to it, seemingly reversing the black/white coding of masculine/feminine as explored elsewhere. “Damara is Japanese tho” you say. “Ninja means nigga” I remind you.

Conclusion

God I wish I knew how to conclude this. The organizing principle of offensive puns is all that kept this profane intersectionality together. My only real thesis is that I believe we’ve been pranked, and that the ability to recognize the discursive twists that constitute the deception (or rather, our collective misreading) seems broadly useful. Beyond that, I don’t know. I’m not even certain I’ve done an adequate job separating the metaphorical from the literal on Alternia, to whatever degree those two things are distinct. My head is swimming. I believe some things of substance have been expressed here, but time will tell what details survive subsequent sifting.

I guess as a closing note I’ll just mention that before June clicked, I was pretty convinced John was gay. Now remaining traces of that gay reading seem to have been slurred into superposition with the trans reading? Feels kinda nice somehow