rose lalonde, squatting like a gargoyle on top of the kitchen island, dual wielding spatulas and wearing over twelve thousand dollars worth of custom tailored children’s clothing: Mother, what were the circumstances of my birth? Were you left by a particularly wealthy husband who happened to not know of my existence and would earnestly take full custody if he knew he had a daughter, or am I merely a fry of fornication that you keep around out of spite?
mom lalonde, perched on top of the refrigerator and eating leftover sweet and sour chicken with only a carving knife, maroon lipstick smudged across the blade: ur adopted
i cant believe we watched dave’s bro kick his ass so hard that dave’s record icon (a representation of his Self) was broken in two and almost nobody realized what we were seeing for a long time
You know, it occurs to me that this works on a couple levels.
The homestuck world is explicitly a little different than our own. We take our cues on what is normal and what humorous vs. what should be alarming from the text.
John strifes with his dad over cake and does a spin roll out of the room; Rose trades escalating passive-aggressive mockery about a fridge drawing with her mom; John and Rose take the household apart and drop the bathtub in the hallway…. the narrative and the character reactions cue us that this is funny, but not outside the realm of plausibility.
Dave has swords in the fridge and gets buried in an avalanche of ridiculous sex puppets—character reactions cue us that this is aggravating, normal, funny.
Here’s the extra level that this works on:
Kids take their cues on what is normal from their environment.
Dave’s Bro says puppets are cool and ironic, so they are. Other kids complain about strifing with their parents or getting over-the-top pranks/passive-aggression dropped on them, so that’s normal child-guardian interaction. Getting tricked into participating in a “puppet snuff film” makes Dave and the audience uncomfortable, but it’s funny. Right?
We, as the audience, get to be right there with Dave, not knowing that this isn’t normal. Not knowing how much weight to place on various things. Not knowing that those uncomfortable feelings were the ones we had a right to be prioritizing after all. Not knowing that this was abuse, until much much later, when we’re left looking back on everything with this new, revelatory perspective.
That is very very true to the experience of childhood abuse. And that is some very very excellent storytelling.
Look, we all know that Trizza Tethis is going to die painfully the second she leaves the planet. Even without Doc Scratch and Paradox Space itself interfering to ensure that Meenah wins, even despite Jake’s backstory meaning we as readers know the outcome, there’s no timeline, even doomed, where Trizza wins. Meenah is millennia old, she’s killed dozens if not hundreds of potential heiresses before, she knows all the tricks, even assuming she doesn’t just use Captor Death Lasers or Serket Mind Control to end the fight before it starts.
But does Trizza know that?
There’s really only two options, and they have interesting connotations for Trizza’s characterization.
1. She genuinely thinks she can win. She’s full of herself, she assumes the rumors about what the Condesce can do are exaggerated, and if she’s lucky she’ll have a few seconds to contemplate how wrong she was before Meenah crushes her like an insect.
2. She knows exactly how slim her chances are. I find this one a bit more interesting, because it implies that she’s doing a sort of “feast, for tomorrow we may die” thing. She knows her life expectancy is shorter than some burgundies, and she’s living it up as Queen of Alternia while she can. It doesn’t justify her actions, but it makes her a more tragic figure in the classical model. She enforces the system, even as she knows it will be the death of her, because she doesn’t know anything else. She’s a villain, but she’s a victim, too.
homestuck is great cause there’s not just stellar lgbt+ representation, but there’s so many different approaches to sexuality.
Rose is obviously not straight, and never really has any deep soul-searching or personal arc related to that. She just is, and everyone (including her) just accepts that and moves on.
On the flip side, Dave’s entire personal arc is directly related to compulsory heterosexuality and internalized homophobia. He goes on a serious journey to discover who he’s attracted to and what that means to him.
Meanwhile Jake is generally questioning, and even at the end (pre-credits, idk about after) has no real idea what his sexuality is. and the best part is, he’s pretty much okay with that.
And Dirk is 100% only attracted to men, and (being dirk) has clearly thought about it before, but is really hesitant to deal with labels. he just dates who he likes and that’s about it.
Finally there’s Roxy, who is basically attracted to everyone and mostly seems like she just doesn’t care about defining what that means.
I could go on, but I really love how it showcases how different everyone is and that there’s no real ‘right’ way to do sexuality. It’s ultimately just whatever makes you happy.
Alt!Selves: Cling hard to your existence because it won’t last long. Beg, plead, find a loophole—anything to avoid oblivion or an eternity of loneliness.
Porrim is another really good example of someone whose classpect was a real kick in the teeth. On Beforus, she would have had to spend her life in servitude to the propogation of the species, which was noble, but not what she wanted to do. And then her classpect, if we’re to agree with Roxy’s analysis of Space, basically called for her to give herself more fully to the propogation of reality and the world. Maid of Space is everything she was trying to get away from.
It’s not enough to just wave this off by saying that that the disjunction between the characters’ personalities and what their roles call for is Sburb trying to challenge the players to grow and change. Because growing and changing isn’t everyone’s fucking goal, and the game doesn’t have anyone’s best interests at heart. Remember what Karkat said way back in A6I5?
The game assigns classpects to push people into becoming the people that are needed for the game to end in the predestined way. It’s not about assigning roles that are consistent with people’s personalities, and it’s not about assigning them the roles that they need to mature. It’s about propogating a new reality, and imo if any character chooses to reject their predestined classpect and arc, more power to them.
okay so back in eaaaaarly Act 6 we got this lil tidbit from Aradia
ARADIA: no need to be so modest dave ARADIA: tactically speaking a knight of time and a seer of light is a nearly unbeatable combination
and it didn’t really seem justified to me yet, considering our view of Dave as a combat entity was “he fast, and sometimes time clones” and Rose’s abilities as a fully realized Seer of Light weren’t really apparent. But in light of Collide, my god, it makes perfect sense
When Dave combined his powers with Terezi’s abilities as a (non-godtier) Seer of Mind, the two of them became able to sort through alternate timelines based on the decisions the fighters could have made, then consolidate those alternate selves into one favorable reality. Timeline selection, in short, based on decision.
ARADIA: the seer class knows her aspect comprehensively ARADIA: as a knower of all fortune she can see the circuitous path that will lead to the most favorable outcome for everyone
Rose’s powers are those of strategy. She doesn’t see possibility based on decision. She sees the most advantageous path, period. Instead of a circumspect view, Rose comprehensively knows what things ought to look like.
Combined with Dave’s powers, we can pretty comfortably speculate that Dave and Rose together could actually shift timelines based on what was already fated to happen, in effect moving from a doomed version of a battle to the alpha one with one fraymotif and combining the selves from the doomed and fated continuities. Dave and Rose’s powers in conjunction should technically be impossible to beat, as they can just change timelines to one in which they win.
it seems to be that time of year again where the “Karkat is canonically abusive I don’t make the rules” posts start up (yet another homestuck wank you could set your watch by) so I wrote a lot of words about why this is in canon demonstrated not to be true.
let’s begin! this post is mainly about the idea that karkat is prone to anger fits, yells a lot, and attacks other people.
so to start, literally all of karkat’s friends, every single one of the trolls, sees his “anger fits and yelling a lot” as amusing and harmless, and (correctly) perceive it as a defense mechanism to cover up how much he cares about you. karkat may have been angry and yelling a lot at the kids early on in his trolling the humans, but we literally witness him grow out of it. we literally see him stop throughout act 5.2. once again, in act 5.1, we already saw ALL of the following trolls treat his “anger fits” like cute diversions because they knew he was just fronting:
nepeta, who takes no offense to his rolling-eyes level “attempt” at roleplaying
sollux, whom he ends his first conversation with with “are we still cool, are you mad at me, did I take this too far”
feferi, who tells jade karkat is “pretty harmless”
tavros
kanaya
terezi, who is on record as finding it cute
aradia
gamzee
vriska, who tries to encourage the angry shit because she likes the attention, but outright tells john that karkat is too nice and is “bad” at being a troll
equius
even fucking eridan
we only see karkat and tavros interact with the “stop playing games for girls” gag (which I don’t feel you can take as an indication of karkat’s character, since it’s a callback meme) and the memo where tavros asks for advice w/r/t vriska, which is pretty tame (tavros doesn’t seem insulted at all by karkat saying “why do you assholes keep bothering me with romantic problems”). we also barely see karkat and equius interact at all outside of the log where karkat asks him to deal with gamzee. but notably, both of them have interactions in alterniabound which are fairly nice, and neither acts like karkat is a naturally angry person. it’s notable that at this point aradia is an emotionless dead robot and she still sees karkat’s shit as a front. people tend to bring up how “mean” he was in his first conversation with gamzee all the time, and yet, gamzee doesn’t care. gamzee finds it endearing. gamzee acts like this is just a cute quirk of how karkat is. karkat is outright mean to eridan at one point late in 5.2, on account of eridan just having fucking murdered kanaya and feferi and having attempted to murder sollux. and yet, eridan still thinks it’s just karkat being karkat. in fact, other people commenting on karkat telling eridan off, namely feferi, also think it’s just karkat shouting as a front for something and that this is how karkat plays jokes.
and again, even his actual anger toward the humans in late act 4 and early 5.2 is something we fucking watch him grow out of to the point of being actually embarrassed by. penis ouija is also something people like to give as proof of how “abusive” karkat is but the dude had just spent something like 20 minutes literally shouting at himself from both sides of a conversation. if there’s anyone karkat is abusive to, it’s himself. it’s one moment in time on a long 3 year journey, and in the retcon timeline, it’s replaced by, quoth rose, him and dave drawing dicks in her book while giggling furiously.
besides that, his original actions in penis ouija aren’t endorsed, but even then they’re treated like absurd desperation, not as abuse. since this time the wank is about dave: dave’s reaction to him is not “this shit is triggering me,” which, if karkat was actually being vicious, might be understandable. his reaction isn’t even “I want out of this situation because I’m uncomfortable with karkat yelling.” his reaction is “look at this fucking tool, get him out of my face.” and despite that moment where neither of them technically likes each other, they still go on to become friends by year 2, and actual bffs by year 3 of the retconned version of the meteor journey. and that’s in the version of the timeline that got erased. in the new version of the timeline, they’re already best friends (and possibly even already together) by that point on year 1.
for real, I can’t get past this: we literally watch him grow to the point that he is embarrassed by how mean he was to the humans. that happens onscreen. by the end of 5.2 he is being downright cordial to both jade and to john, who are the only ones he really speaks to in act 5 outside of that one memo with dave in it. and even if you want to talk about penis ouija, we see him disown how he was behaving then, too, in a conversation with terezi in openbound. he’s embarrassed by it. he knows it wasn’t cool. we see him grow out of that behavior, too. we even see him grow out of blaming “past me” for everything as though he’s a separate individual, and start to own up to his own behavior as mistakes he made.
karkat vantas is not presented in canon as an abusive individual. I want to stress that if his behavior bothers or triggers you, that’s fine and of course nobody should tell you not to be bothered. but if you’re making posts about how the rest of fandom isn’t reading him right because they don’t see him as abusive, or that you know how icky davekatters just want karkat to be happy or don’t care about dave (and boy could I write a whole separate post about that behavior), you’re being an asshole. especially if you shove it in ship tags and then expect people not to reply to you, or to disagree.
Like it still makes me a little sick to think that people actually believe Aranea was controlling Gamzee to make him abuse Terezi. Aranea is pretty objectively terrible but she’s not just some kind of blank slate of a villain. You can’t just pin any bad thing your fave did on her just because she has an over inflated sense of her own importance and doesn’t care about other people’s lives by the end of her arc.
Aranea Serket has a specific MO focused around using other people as tools to advance her “greater good mission” and even that was something that developed pretty late in her arc. Prior to that, she was all about the self-determination and consent, and using Gamzee to manipulative Terezi into taking her up on the eye-healing offer doesn’t fit at all with the way she initially offered it as an optional gift. Aranea sees herself as a good guy, and mind controlling someone into abusing his girlfriend is very hard to justify as “good guy” tactics.
Aranea uses people as blunt tools. She has a lot of firepower with her enhanced mind control, but is even worse than Vriska at effectively getting people to want to do things. She solves her problems by mind controlling armies of psychic ghosts to move boats and planets, for god’s sake. When she doesn’t need Gamzee for any particular task, she just has him stand there. Mind-controlling a proxy into emotionally destroying someone who wasn’t her enemy until late in the game? That’s not her style.
Aranea went through negative character development over the course of Act 6, and the things she was willing to do at the end of her arc don’t correspond with the things she was willing to do by the end of her arc. Over the course of her journey with Vriska, she becomes more and more willing to use her powers to control people, and by year 3 she even thanks Vriska for helping her finally understand the virtue in “rationalizing questiona8le decisions, and 8ehaving unscrupulously for the gr8ter good.” Those were not things she was willing to do when she started out, so it’s hard to see how she would have been willing to control Gamzee to ruin Terezi’s life from year 2 of the meteor trip onward.
Aranea doesn’t even particularly want to hurt Terezi? Like she tries to offer her advice when they first meet during Year 1, she converses with her like an equal during the big strategy meeting in Year 2, and it’s not until Terezi is actively trying to kill Aranea that Aranea has her stab herself. Most notably, if she wanted to have Gamzee hurt Terezi, she could have had Gamzee fight back when Terezi first attacked him. But in reality, Gamzee didn’t start trying to kill Terezi until Aranea’s control over him was broken. That doesn’t fit so well with a thesis of “every bad thing Gamzee has done to Terezi has been because of Aranea controlling him.”
tldr Aranea has done a lot of terrible things but even a cursory analysis of her character arc shows that getting Gamzee to abuse Terezi is not one of them, so I’m not sure why I still occasionally see this argument being tossed around.
i see your “vriska is so oblivious she thinks kanaya has a crush on tavros”, and raise you “vriska finds kanaya crushing on tavros more likely than kanaya crushing on her, because that would be ridiculous”
Cheloneuniverse 