actually quick note my favorite part of hiveswap was when joey claire was like ‘I’m going to raise your standards of friendship’ because it’s such a good vibe that I’ve never seen expressed in fiction before but DAMN if it isn’t A HECK OF A MOOD
joey: aesthetic blog that runs on queue. doesn’t use it, ever. instagrams filtered photos of pointe shoes and dancing in weird places
jude: doesn’t use tumblr. is on reddit. still hasn’t figured out that /r/nosleep is just scary stories and not like, actual reality. also probably used wrongplanet at some point ngl
xefros: fanfiction dot net. doesn’t use tumblr. writes exclusively haikyuu or w/e fanfic. yknow the one with volleyball? yeah. he writes K rated fics about friendship and love. and holding hands.
dammek: insufferable politics blog which is cool or whatever except he also reblogs like, weird fucking porn on it so his arguments about communism generally fall flat
god joey claire is so fucking good. i love that funky little lesbian
like. i didn’t grow up in the nineties. i was hatched in the nineties. but i sure remember being a lesbian in middle school and early high school and having limited access to the internet as well as the world around me and thinking that my friendships with boys was clearly romantic love. never mind the feeling of closeness and my heart swelling whenever i talked to my best friend who was a girl. that was just friendship, right?
anyway i can’t wait for joey claire to continue living her best life and maybe realizing that she’s okay and that it’s normal.
Somewhere outside of the frame Jude is sitting and watching.
A gift work I’m giving my grandma for her birthday, for once I’m using my skills properly and not drawing porn. And since this isn’t for me, I got a little bit experimental and tried an odd color palette and finally coloured skin too. Figured I could make her look a little less sickly than normally, sometimes it’s necessary to tone down my misery and suffering aesthetics. Except ballet IS suffering.
I used to dance ballet when I was younger and my goal was to get pointe shoes. So I trained until I got to the point we were allowed to get ones and get on our toes. …Aaaand after that I quit, I reached my goals. :’9 Still love the aesthetics.
Somewhere out there the Anon that wanted more Striders is grinding their teeth together in frustration.
this is going to be the Hiveswap Destroying My Alternia Headcanons masterpost. and I am so happy about that, by the way. smash my headcanons into the ground. I’m eating this stuff up.
1 – Rites of Maturation happen at 7. Is that why Dammek has a title, or has he just assigned himself one to sound grown-up enough to run a revolution? None of the alpha trolls have taken titles, so it’d have to be an Alternia exclusive thing.
2 – Drones just… kill you? They just kill you for, like, being a rustblood and existing…? You don’t gotta be a mutant or traitor or anything they will just straight up kill you if you’re outside, but if you hide in your hive they don’t know what a hive is and keep walking.
Is there… a….. a curfew? Is that is are we talking about being culled because you’re out past curfew? Because it’s about the time Xefros would usually go to bed apparently?
They’re….. assuming the nearest rustblood is responsible for the explosion??
I’m going with “it’s a curfew and I missed something” because I can’t imagine killing your citizens for stepping outside, but also building your economy around their ability to work for you and do things like pick up deliveries of butler supplies from their front porch, would be a very useful policy no matter how vicious you are.
3 – Not Hiveswap specific, but it’s occurring to me that (while brutal and wrong and ew) if Alternian technology is and always has been organic, based on living things like bugs (game grubs, the bug tablet thing, I should have had this thought long before playing the game tbh) the Helmsman as a concept was probably seen as the next natural step in the evolution of technology – it wouldn’t be weird to use a living thing as an engine, it’s just brutal that it’s a troll, and brutality has never been a problem for Alternia.
tl;dr the concept of the Helmsman is much less weird/novel on Alternia than it is to us, in terms of some particularly awful person thinking to invent the technology. More like making the leap from “I can have a horse pull my vehicle” to “I can have a person pull my vehicle.” I should have put this together before.
Ugh. I feel all gross whenever I talk about Alternian brutality. It’s so gross.
I think it’s very important that Joey was sent to Xefros and Dammek was sent to Jude.
It’s been stated a few times that Joey was bullied by the others at school and never really had any friends. She sees that same thing in Xefros- except his only friend is the Billy that hurts him. Xefros is probably Dammek’s only friend as well.
Likewise, Jude is stated to have a clique of friends that allow Joey to hang with them. Joey’s shown to even be a bit jealous of them. Jude’s success in healthy relationships, and just how supportive he is, will be important in his interactions with Dammek- showing him how friendships and healthy relationships are, and even making him realize how shitty he’s been to Xefros.
Because in the end, Dammek is a protagonist in a 10+ game. This won’t end awfully- at least, I’m hoping not. I think Xefros and Dammek’s relationship is going to be repaired, along with Jude and Joey’s.
On the flip side, the trolls are important to Jude and Joey’s development too.
Joey’s shown to be jealous of not only Jude’s friendships, but Jude’s confidence as well. She’s been partnered up with a troll who has VERY little confidence in himself, making it so that she has to be the one to step up and lead, while also helping Xefros grow to be more independent and confident. Having a friend and more confidence in herself will help amend Joey’s relationship with Jude.
Jude’s paranoia over his conspiracies is shown to get on Joey’s nerves. He may have been right this time, but this behavior can still be harmful towards Jude and his relationships with others in the future. But, if Jude’s paranoid, then I don’t even know how to describe Dammek. Dammek’s paranoia-inspired cruelty will show Jude the worst parts of his behavior, and will help him learn to trust others besides himself and his sister, letting him open himself up to reparations.
Homestuck has always dealt with dysfunctional relationships- on both sides of them, and how people’s behaviors can create these situations and obscure them. This is a new iteration of that- this will be a story of change for the better.
Casual reminder that Hiveswap is set in 1994 a.k.a. in two years Pa will find Jade in a crater and move to the remote island he’ll die on.
FUCK DUDE this means the Roxy in this story is only 2 years off from finding Rose too, she was so damn young GOD
catch moxy goin from this to this in just about a year and a half (??/??/94(?)) — 4/13/96
Roxy is already and adult in ‘94.
In that picture where she looks like a teenager Jude is only a toddler at most so it’s been several years since then.
Not to mention Jude and Joey talked about it being to late to reach her at ‘the lab’, implying that’s she’s old enough in ‘94 to be working in a lab environment which they probably wouldn’t let her if she wasn’t legally an adult.
We do actually know how old she was, since her meteor and Bro’s came down at more or less the same time (within a few days of each other), which we know was around 1980 from the meteor timeline.
The most telling fact though is in Dave’s conversation to Dirk right at the end of Homestuck, where he tells him he’s “barely cleared the halfway mark on getting there”, age wise. And since Dirk is 16, that means that they were most likely 31 in 2009, at the most 32, aka they were born around 1977/78. Which means that as of Hiveswap (11/11/94), Roxy is around 16/17 (which is a pretty average age for a babysitter, and there’s no reason why she couldn’t have had a side job in a lab at that age), and her and Dirk were around 18 or 19 when they became parents.
Which probably contributed to the fact that they were less than great.
Cheloneuniverse 