#it's about time i did something for gamzee | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

red-elric · 7 months

Text

i think what a lot of ppl miss about the nuance when it comes to the retcon is that the POINT of it is that its a bad ending. homestuck is designed to be a tragedy and it was never going to end well; its frankly ridiculous to try and shoehorn in a scenario where none of the current main characters are dead when the story is ABOUT death. its not narratively satisfying at all like this! but thats not what the kids wanted (and, more to the point, thats not what the FANS wanted. newer fans DEFINITELY miss the fact that homestuck was written as a conversation between hussie and the fans, a conversation that turned into an argument halfway through and led to a lot of things being taken in bad faith on both sides. but i digress; this is a watsonian post)

the retcon powers are very VERY explicitly described as the ability to change the alpha timeline. the 'whats supposed to happen' of it all, the premeditated narrative the story was written to fill. conversely, when aranea used the ring of life to come back and meddle, she is explicitly described as 'causing a doomed timeline.' and like, the thing about doomed timelines is that theyre meant to happen as much as theyre meant to be fixed. theyre how paradox space accounts for and incorporates time travel, and the existence of the doomed timeline is often NECESSARY for the alpha timeline to function. thats how you get davesprite, thats how the aradiabot that brought gamzee's honkHONK code back from his crazy murder timeline contributed to doc scratch's creation, thats why every dead dave helped the alpha timeline dave figure out what to do. if vriska was meant to have never died in the first place the timeline wouldve been doomed long before game over. the ring went to the wrong person, and thats the kind of simple fix sburb was expecting to solve with some time travel to get things back on track

the ring was supposed to go to someone else. probably vriska! from the alpha timelines perspective, it wasnt that long after her confrontation with john that she really changed and grew as a character. that she became someone who deserved a second chance. imagine: john uses his retcon as normal time travel, the way sburb comprehended it through the limitations of its code. he takes the ring before aranea can, goes to the dream bubbles, and has another conversation with vriska. maybe she doesnt even really want the ring anymore, and thats exactly the kind of thing that would convince john to give it to her. and she agrees, because he tells her terezi is waiting for her. they go back, they have the final fight, and people die. maybe they dont come back. but its the group of characters who earned the ending, who we watched grow up for three years

but thats not what happened, and it was never going to be what happened, because as narratively satisfying as it could have been? john and terezi wanted something different. john wanted everything to be OVER and terezi wanted the chance to make a different choice, even if it was wrong. theyre selfish; theyre kids. theyre tired of being characters in a story, of someone else pulling their strings. thats what typheus's choice was about, you know? and john made the wrong choice. some other version of john could have fixed things the "right" way, had our john decided to die instead. to accept the consequences of the doomed timeline and let pardox space fix it. hell, between roxys first instinct to just sit and let the void take her and terezis pointy horns offering a counterpoint we have some pretty blatant devil/angel on the shoulder imagery! and john making the same wrong choice he did when terezi first told him to fly to the seventh gate, except this time there was no davesprite on angel wings, no one left alive he cared about enough to listen to. because as much as john felt like he was SUPPOSED to fall for roxy, the girl version of his fathers lover, someone strongly associated with his half of karkat's shipping chart but without the complication of being a lesbian, someone HUMAN to repopulate the world with cut out of his apocalypse movie fantasies...... terezis way of thinking has always appealed to him more. because as much as he pretends its not true, john doesnt like to take things lying down, and he doesnt like when other people do either. he gets bored! hes attracted to the danger and morally grey self confidence terezi and vriska exude, so. he listened to terezi, and they brought vriska back.... without any of the character development she had gone through.

and its a bad ending, because of course it would be. and thats the point :) it was stupid to think two kids could meddle with the fate of the universe and it was stupid to think that these kids could have a happy ending so easily. but can you really blame them?

#it me #homestuck #retcon #john egbert #terezi pyrope #vriska serket #roxy lalonde #johnrezi #vrisrezi #so anyway my official stance on the retcon is 'its a bad ending but i liked it anyway'

244 notes · View notes

nekropsii · 1 year

Text

More Reminders:

Karkat is a bootlicker. This is a prominent character trait. He’s rooting for the Alternian empire- yes, even though it’s ruled by a system that wants him personally dead- and really wants to be a part of its military.

Eridan has a “genocide complex” and is able to be roughly described as the troll equivalent of a white supremacist. This is one of the first things we learn about him.

The Beta Trolls are 13. All of them. This includes Equius. This includes Eridan. This includes Vriska. This includes Gamzee.

99% of Gamzee’s character is racial caricature. No, he is not intended to be a Dionysus parallel. He is intended to be a “satirization” of Black people.

Sapphic pairings have always held precedent over MLM pairings. They’ve always been more important to the plot, been handled with much more grace, and had more screen time. This isn’t a bad thing.

Doc Scratch is a child predator. This is an incredibly prominent character trait of his, and you’re way past due for a reread if you’ve forgotten. He has a particular fixation on, as canon puts it, “little girls”, and targets both Rose and Kanaya. Do I even have to bring up what he did to Damara?

Regarding the previous point, Rose and Kanaya both get very traumatized during the course of Homestuck’s story. They’re not well put together sophisticated “mom friends”, they’re 13 year olds just like almost everyone else is, and they’re going through hell. Rose in particular makes the effect all of this trauma has on her very well known. This is what Grimdarkness is.

Cronus is a child predator, too. During the course of the Openbounds and Ministrife, we see him unabashedly predate on three specific kids, and this behavior is made out to be extremely creepy. These three kids are Karkat, Tavros, and, yes, Eridan.

The Exiles were incredibly important to the plot, actually. You guys are just mean.

Almost every relationship in Homestuck is flawed in some capacity, that’s the point of a tragic drama. The main cast is literally nothing but traumatized and/or mentally ill 13-16 year olds. A good chunk of them aren’t even socialized, or grew up in an actively hostile environment. Or both. No shit characters mess up sometimes, or have unhealthy behaviors- it’s just natural in that situation. Some dynamics are substantially more healthy than others, but the main appeal of Homestuck is that everyone is flawed and damaged.

A good majority of Vriscourse was just people leaping at the opportunity to express pure, unabashed misogyny. I don’t think I have to elaborate upon this.

No, Jane is not a fascist, nor is she racist. She’s never been either of these things, that’s something that was invented out of left field by the Post Canon writing team. Being a fascistic racist was never within the scope of Jane’s character. No, it being “a result of her having grown up being fed propaganda by The Condesce” does not explain that plot thread in Post Canon for a single second, because Jane experiencing a major personality shift because of HIC literally already happened in canon with her going Crockertier, and she came out of that a stronger person. Never once has “racism” been on the list of problems she has.

Hemoloyalty is not intended to be a 1:1 metaphor for racism, nor is it intended to be a 1:1 metaphor for classism, or any other type of oppression. It’s not a 1:1 metaphor for literally anything, it’s intended to be flexible and contextual. This is not a bad thing, and is, in fact, a common storytelling method used by a lot of fantasy/sci-fi writers. Condemning Hussie for a lot of things in their writing is valid, but Hemoloyalty not being strictly analogous to only one type of real world oppression is patently not one of them. You do not know how metaphors work.

Official =/= Canon. No one is calling Pesterquest canon. You really shouldn’t be doing the same for Post Canon. The Homestuck Epilogues and Homestuck^2 are Official, but they are definitively not Canon. This is literally the first thing you learn about either of these projects. This doesn’t invalidate anyone’s enjoyment of any of these properties, of course, but it has to be stressed: Official does not automatically mean Canon.

1K notes · View notes

hms-no-fun · 2 months

Note

i just want you to know that i read... i think Most of godfeels and had to stop because i was not enjoying it. but i think its really good and i really respect what you do. i think it's all too easy for people to mix up "this is not my cup of tea" with "this is bad and/or problematic". they dont take the time to see the artistry in it, why it is what it is, what it might be saying beyond their surface level read and the kneejerk reaction to it.

i also wanted to note that ive always been kind of scared of sharing fanworks for fear of writing "out of character" - and ive also even been afraid of it in original works. character isn't real and concrete, so anyone can decide something's out of character. so your exploration of that concept gives me more confidence as a writer. i really appreciate that and everything else you do. :)

thank you so much for this message! i'm glad you tapped out rather than force your way through something you weren't enjoying, that's a very mature response and something i wish more folks would recognize as a perfectly valid option. in fact i think pushing through and reading long after you've given up on the material, so to speak, is a great way to wind up angry at a writer for having "forced" you to endure such a trying experience. as i've said before, an author can't force you to do anything. you can close the book any time you like.

as far as the tension of "in character/out of character" goes, i think a lot of people in fandom struggle with the fact that "character" is very much in the eye of the beholder. sub-groups form within fandoms based on identities, politics, sexual predilections, etc, and typically gather around the fire that is their particular interpretation of a character. but from within that sub-group, it's rarely considered "an interpretation" so much as the obvious intended truth of the text. it's that intoxicating mood of finding people who share a perspective you rarely see elsewhere, like oh my god, you GET it, finally someone GETS it!

in homestuck fandom, for instance, quite a lot of people hate vriska and think she sucks, with a vocal sub-group of that sub-group still actively beating the drum that everything about her arc after [S] Game Over is the worst part of homestuck. but i love vriska, and my corner of the fandom very much organized around a full-throated defense of her. some folks think homestuck did tavros and gamzee dirty and that this is a fatal flaw in the text; when i countenance these people, i am convinced we read two very different comics. who's right and who's wrong? there are degrees. i can pull out any number of quotes from andrew hussie about the importance of vriska and the weenieness of tavros, but then, authors love to say things, and there's plenty of stories i love in ways that directly oppose to the authors' stated intent. the debate can never end because we are only ever talking about the version of a character or story that exists in our heads, based on the things that stuck with us when we read the thing (however long ago that was-- which is important because i find a LOT of people adamantly defending their headcanons haven't read the source text in a number of years. as time passes, your perception of the media you've experienced in the past morphs and distorts. someone who was right five years ago can be wrong today and not even notice the difference).

something i've realized in the last year is how much godfeels emerged from a very specific milieu, not just in terms of how we interpreted certain characters but in our approach to analyzing and talking about the text altogether. i believe most of the important stuff in godfeels is "in character" in most of the ways that matter, but it's built on a very specific meta that centered vrisrezi and transness and radical leftist politics and experimental hypertext. really, it's a post-Epilogues fanwork even despite the fact that godfeels 1 predates their release by a few weeks. and i think to this day a lot of homestuck fans haven't read the epilogues but have read fandom posts about how terrible they are (quite a lot of which will have either been written by teens, by people who already didn't like homestuck very much, or by one of the regressive stalkery weirdos prominent in the homestuck reddit/discord), and that misapprehension keeps them in the dark about just how many amazing tools the epilogues introduce to the homestuck formula that exponentially expand the expressive possibilities of attentive fanworks. and it of course elides the fact that the homestuck epilogues are a story about being in your 30s. i think we'll be getting a big re-appraisal of the epilogues in 5-10 years. it'll be the "twin peaks: fire walk with me" of homestuck, just you wait.

so these readers see my version of dirk being an unhinged murderous dick to a newly-out trans woman and go "he would never do that." then if i point at the epilogues, they'll say "i didn't read them/they're not even canon/that wasn't in character either." at which point there's nothing really to say, because we have two completely different perceptions of the text. who's right and who's wrong is almost always infinitely subjective, a circumstance that humans are notable for being very good at handling in a mature and politely discursive manner.

so i've got an "author's introduction" to godfeels baking in my docs to provide some context about the meta this story is built on, the milieu it came out of, that sort of thing. it won't make much of a difference in practical terms, but it'll at least be something i can point to.

in any event, thanks for this message. all i ever want is for people to give it an honest shot. i hope you can continue harvesting confidence from wherever it can be found. it takes a lot of audacity and backbone to be an artist, especially when you have something worthwhile to say. remember that you're not writing for the haters, you're writing for the kind of person, like you, who wants to see more stories like the thing you're writing. they're the ones who'll get it, they're the ones who'll stick around long after the haters have lost interest.

#sarahposts #in character #out of character #homestuck #godfeels #fanworks #writing advice #headcanon #fandom #long post

60 notes · View notes

lime-bloods · 9 months

Text

Homestuck's Gnosticism: The World / The Wheel

Everyone knows Homestuck is "a Gnostic story".

Wait, why does it feel like we've had this exact conversation before...?

AH. SO NICE OF YOU TO JOIN ME.

If you followed along with the first post in this series, you'll be familiar already with the Gnostic nature of Homestuck's central conflict between the spirit world and the flesh. And even if I say so myself, I think that post is pretty definitive; if you're ever unsure what a particular character's motivations or end goal are, the Conflict will tell you. But what's conspicuously absent from the post is any explanation of what actually happens in Homestuck. We've covered the why, but very little of the how.

I left us off on the "synonymous goals" that spring naturally from this conflict between flesh and spirit; attaining ultimate knowledge, and escaping the confines of Homestuck itself. Eagle-eyed readers probably spotted what was lying between the lines, there: the comic is called Homestuck because it's about being stuck in a house, so the ending is about escaping the house. But what does that really look like? And how did they get in that house in the first place?

Let's return very briefly to a quote I used in the previous post. "[Y]our ultimate self [...] unlike god tiers or bubble ghosts or whatever, it really IS immortal". Two assumptions naturally grow out of this fact. First, and probably most obvious: when John dies, he's not really gone. The idea of him still exists out there, somewhere, and in our minds, so he still exists. Second, though: if the idea of him is eternal, John obviously didn't start existing when he was born. So again we ask, where did he come from?

How did John get here? Where does he go? The answers to these questions are like the four sides of one hypercoin, in that Homestuck is a time loop... of a sort.

To begin to understand this, we need to reiterate what was basically "the point" of the first post: Homestuck operates on two distinct levels, a spiritual plane consisting purely of ideas, and a "literal" physical dimension. What happens on these two planes often mirrors each other, and because Homestuck itself is a work of fiction which operates in the realm of ideas, they can even intersect. But ultimately, what "literally" happens to the characters in Homestuck is not the same as the ideas the comic is expressing in its spiritual metanarrative.

The fact that a physical time loop is impossible is something Homestuck inherits from real-life physics: to put it simply, John being born can't be the physical John from the end of his timeline, because that John would be way too old to be a baby! But ideological time loops are not only something sanctioned by Paradox Space, but essential to its very being; they are where it gets its name, after all! To repeat another lynchpin quote from the comic: there is essentially nothing new in paradox space. Any idea that seems new necessarily must have just come from somewhere else.

"SbaHJ has the distinction of being the symbolic language of [Dave's] subconscious." (Homestuck: Book 3: Act 4, p. 282)

Frequently we see this expressed in the rooms representing characters' dreams, which, as discussed, sort of transcend the character's physical form and represent the broad ideas that characters are made of. Dave's dreams (pictured above) are covered with drawings of Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff, characters he seemingly invented as a child after being inspired by a drawing Terezi sent to him. But Terezi's drawing was based on Dave's own illustrations she saw later on in his timeline; so which of them truly "invented" Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff? Neither of them did; SBaHJ exists as pure subconscious ideological matter floating through Paradox Space, only sometimes being picked up by a character's conscious mind. Similarly, Gamzee tries to manipulate this subconscious realm when he uses his psychic powers to place a terrifying effigy of Jack Noir in John's dreams, as punishment for the destruction of the trolls' session. But as we know, Jack Noir only took that form because of the nightmares this doll caused! So again; neither John or Gamzee thought up the demonic clown "first". It existed in the realm of ideas before either of them ever had the chance to invent it.

These kinds of ideological loops are the bread-and-butter of jujus. We're told their origins are untraceable and that they can't be destroyed, but neither of these things is really true; these superstitions exist only to obfuscate the true rule that jujus "emerge spontaneoUsly from the void." Rather than be erased from existence, a juju can only be banished to that same void of nonexistence where disembodied ideas live, and then pulled back into the world of dreams by a prospective psychic.

With these rules established, now we can really delve into with appreciation the ideological time loop that underpins all of Homestuck. And like all good time loops, the best place to start is at the end.

ACT 7 (Are you tired of seeing it yet?)

Let's not insult anyone's intelligences here: you know and I know that Caliborn's little house juju looks like the Homestuck logo because it is Homestuck; when he wins it from Yaldabaoth, he takes control of it, and when he sucks the heroes inside, he's trapping them in the confines of his material world.

What's essential to keep in mind here, though, is that the power of a juju is the power of the idea itself. It's easiest for us to think of the word juju in Homestuck as a concrete noun, referring simply to a magical object. But the word's real-life origins, referring more abstractly to magic or enchantment, are still relevant in this fictional framework. Lil Cal isn't just "a juju", but is "FILLED WITH BAD JUJU." Magic in Homestuck has always really been about the idea that believing in something can make it real, and the purpose of all Homestuck's dealings with chucklevoodoos and jujus is to evoke the anthropological concept of the "fetish"; an item whose power comes from human beings ascribing supernatural qualities to it. Jujus are all part of the "game" the cherubs play, with all its rules and quirks; breaking an enchantment is like breaking a rule, in that it changes nothing about the real world: you've just infringed upon an idea. The juju isn't the object; the juju is the power, good or bad, ascribed to the object.

All of this is really just to say one thing: Caliborn's home juju can't trap the flesh versions of John and his friends; as we established, you can't send old John back in time to become young John. But what a juju can trap is something far more important; the ideas of John and his friends. This is why it doesn't matter if the heroes who travel back to the beginning of everything to beat Lord English while he's still a kid are the "main" timeline versions of those heroes from some point in the future, or if the Epilogues' version of events is truth and they're some "irrelevant" offshoots: because all of those characters are represented by the same idea, and that's what Caliborn puts in the box. No matter what timeline John is from, he's from Homestuck, to Homestuck he must return, and as such Homestuck is what he must be forced to escape. Refer again back to the previous post: Caliborn can't create or destroy, only take pure ideas and alchemise them down into a form he can control.

And that's why Act 7 so enigmatically features two different white home-doors (above), seemingly so interconnected yet effectually unrelated. Because Act 7 takes up the hefty role of concluding two storylines simultaneously: allowing the "real", flesh-world versions of John and his friends to escape Lord English's reality through one door, while also concluding Homestuck's metanarrative by setting the ideas of John and his friends free of their prison through another door.

So far, most of this is probably stuff you'd have either figured out on your own or at least heard from someone else already. And if we set aside such distractions as run-ins with radioactive imps and omnipotent dog-gods, the "whats" and "hows" of the heroes' story are probably the easier parts of Homestuck to figure out. What's more difficult to fully comprehend on a first pass is how Lord English himself fits into all of this.

If you've been following me for any stretch of time, you'll notice in my analysis of Homestuck I've returned to the topic of black holes frequently. I've lost track of how many versions I've published of what I call "Black Hole Theory". And I won't link to any of them here, because ultimately Black Hole Theory was a corkboard to which I could pin the evidence that would eventually, piece by piece, lead us to where we are right now:

If the home juju is a white "hole" leading out of the confines of Homestuck as a story, then black holes are the doors that lead back in. An early clue to this comes in the form of Calliope's stage in the heart of a spiral: these spirals are Calliope's visions of black holes, which she uses as "dark pocket[s]" from which "no information can escape" - a literal description of a black hole - and that stage is the very same one Caliborn stages his story on when he takes full control of Homestuck's narrative. The meaning here should be clear: Calliope creates black holes, and it's the center of these black holes where stories can take place.

But for all the evidence we need to suggest that Lord English's fall into a black hole leads to something more complex than just his destruction, we need not look further than conventional science:

In the quantum world [...] information cannot be created nor destroyed.

Lisa Zyga, on the conservation of quantum information.

This rule that "ideas" are truly immortal, and that any time an idea seems to be destroyed it must have merely been transported somewhere else, holds true even in the scientific world of black hole physics. This has been played with in MS Paint Adventures before; theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking's take on black holes was that some stuff could in fact escape a black hole, contrary to Calliope's assertions, in the form of Hawking radiation. But Hussie's own version of the story was always a lot more to the point: something gets sucked into the center of a black hole, it gets shot out somewhere else. In hypothetical physics this is called a white hole - no doubt you can see where this is going.

So Lord English's final moments in Homestuck see him not destroyed, or killed, or defeated in combat in any traditional way, but sucked right back into Homestuck. What exactly does that mean?

Homestuck, p. 8105

As long as we're talking the power of ideas and symbols, possibly the most blatant a symbol can get is in the form of a gesture; and the thumbs-down is possibly one of the most ancient gestures there is. Dave gets one, Tavros gets one, and, so they say, even the Roman gladiators got them. This precedent makes the meaning of the gesture clear: "you're going down." And it makes sense, too, that Hussie, the "good author", would signal the "evil author's" demise in such a way. But some might question the effectiveness of the power of gesture at such a pivotal point in the comic. Are we really to believe that English's defeat was, even in part, the result of another author merely willing him away like a tyrant doing away with an entertainer who has fallen out of favour? Or did the Hussie-character actually have some kind of plan to deal with his Hulk-like alter ego?

Of course he did.

...now Caliborn has hijacked the property of his experiential continuum which he has reason to believe is called "the narrative". Little does he know you recently made the shrewd decision to purchase(?) the ACT 6 ACT 6 SUPERCARTRIDGE EXPANSION PACK! Just plug it into any in-universe console port to unlock a variety of exciting new gameplay features and proceed through remaining canon unfettered, while Caliborn muddles through six new sub-sub-acts of infantile "subversive parody" targeting the very tale he inhabits, none the wiser!

To allow our heroes the chance escape their narrative prison, English isn't just to be trapped in their old cell; it's to be trapped within an infinitely-recursing cell, not just reliving one story over and over again but forced to live out infinitely many different stories. Not just a narrative loop; a narrative spiral. That's what being sucked into the black hole means for Lord English.

When Roxy - the Hero of Void whose very symbol is that of the black hole - banishes Caliborn-as-Cal into the void, he becomes one of the very wandering ideas with which English plays like dolls. "Instances of [Doc Scratch] have spawned in countless universes", and they have "never once failed to complete [their] objective": whether he wants to or not, Lord English will always be born again. In a new universe, perhaps, maybe even in a different shape, but his role always the same. Caliborn thinks that by filling the supercartridge with special stardust and corrupting the story, he's won, but looking at the bigger picture the truth is clear: he's only playing by somebody else's rules.

Just as Skaia uses lotus "seeds" to store items away for later use, and employs meteors as "Seeds" to send important elements back in time to set up the beginnings of new stories, so too are English's cue ball "seeds" only a means of transporting his essence from one place to the other; the black hole and the Rapture are, after all, only Skaia and the Reckoning sized up to a truly macrocosmic scale. The cue ball is able to be a font of endless knowledge because it is the "white hole" at the other end of the black hole! No information can escape a black hole, and therefore there is no information that escapes Scratch's attention -- he is limited only by his "pockets of void", which exist only to, in time, be filled, as more and more falls into these black holes like a multiversal game of billiards. Not only is this a transparent allusion to one of the most fundamental representations of the paradoxical time loop as a concept, but it is also the ultimate insult to injury: despite having lived an infinite number of lives, and being cursed to live out an infinite number more, Lord English cannot know what his fate will be until he literally falls into it. This is what forces him to lose, over and over again for eternity, while our heroes triumphantly escape Homestuck onto greener pastures.

#homestuck #analysis #lord english #black holes #metanarrative

164 notes · View notes

controversial-blorbo-bracket · 4 months

Text

Controversial Character Tournament Round 2: Gamzee Makara from Homestuck vs Maeglin Lómion from The Silmarillion/The Fall Of Gondolin

(remember that these characters are fictional and your fellow tumblr users are real. i will block you if you harass others in the notes, please consider sending your unhinged harassment to my inbox instead)

Propaganda under the cut, may contain spoilers:

Gamzee Makara:

LOVE: - "Okay, so Gamzee is such a divisive character that I even hesitated on choosing "love". Sad clown with an absentee father raised in a fascist dictatorship. Was mind controlled into killing his friends and then mind controlled during a toxic relationship (or two). Suffers from addiction so fandom likes to go "Oh, how scary his withdraws are. Clearly being drugged up was the only thing keeping this THIRTEEN YEAR OLD from murdering his friends (who largely ignored him, insulted him, demeaned him and acted like they wanted nothing to do with him). Having one such friend gently touch his face didn't cure him of his issues (or the mind control) so obviously he is an irredeemable monster and an abuser. This is genetic." I know you've gotten tons of Vriska, so basically insert any of Vriska's apologists' points here." - "Gamzee is a complex character who is used as a puppet both by the other villains of Homestuck and by the arthur. Once someone takes a deeper look at him they might find a tragic character who had lots of chances where he could have gotten onto a better path but those chances were not able to be given or taken. On the flip side Gamzee suffers from some poor writing that leaves aspects of the character to based off poor stereotypes, he also lacks chances to show his internal character as thr story goes on and is treated like a tool by the story. He also killed some fan favorite characters and has a version of himself (homestuck is a multi timeline story) that abused a different fan favorite character." - "I know Vriska is the obvious pick for controversial HS blorbo, but consider: He is the world's shittiest boy. No one knows why he does the things he does he might just be a murderclown but he might be mind controlled or something no one knows and people have really strong opinions on him based on what they believe. He makes me very sad because I did think he was a cool character before he snapped." - "He was written so poorly 💔" - "when i was 12 i had a crush on him i was like a gamzee apologist and i was probably right i dont remember homestuck. i used to listen to icp and think wowww this is just like my clwon boyfriend and giggle and blush and kick my legs and i still do that with my fake boyfriend but hes not gamzee and its not icp and im not 12 but he kind of sounds like gamzee but thats because hes a smoker and he wouldnt listen to icp he likes techno. anyway i used to get so sad when people said they didnt like him because of the killings and i brought him up to my old therapist a couple times thats kind of funny looking back but i would do it again (but not with gamzee. with my fake chain smoker boyfriend who likes techno). anyway anyway my mom listens icp because her old friend from highschool who died was a juggalo and whenever i hear her listen to it i think about gamzee so i havent forgot about him yet. hes wasnt my favorite character thouhg my favorite character was the gemini one (i also had a crush on him when i was 12 i tried to lucid dream to see him once) (it didnt work). ok love you bye." - "-Funny clown -Cares about his friends -Absent parental figure :( -Did some murder but it wasn't his fault really he didn't have all of his mental faculties (see next point) -Got brainwashed by a universe-destroying god that is everywhere and nowhere at the same time through the form of a rapping marionette -The author(s) fucking hates him for some reason and retconned his previous characterization to make him a one-dimensional shitty villain and used canon text to make fun of fans who like him and no I'm not exaggerating -If I don't make him my blorbo who will"

Maeglin Lómion:

LOVE: - "LISTEN okay so he DID betray the city of Gondolin to the guy who literally invented evil, and that DID result in it getting destroyed and a whole bunch of people dying or being taken prisoner (which is probably worse in this instance), and also he DID attempt to throw his cousin's seven-year-old son off the city walls to his death during the attack. BUT. I love him. Also, and more substantially, a) he didn't go out of his way to betray the city, he was taken prisoner and threatened into it, b) he had an incredibly painful history with Gondolin involving both his parents' violent deaths happening like ten minutes after he arrived there, and he was legally not allowed to leave, and c) he was SO YOUNG (only 180! that's hardly anything for an elf!) and he is SO ANGSTY and INTERESTINGLY GOTH and SELF-HATING and I LOVE him. So." - "First of all he was LITERALLY CURSED TWICE OVER so there was NO WAY he was coming to a good end okay. Sure he had a crush on his cousin but he canonically didn't say anything and she only knew because she read his mind and he wasn't able to hide it from her. He had a major éowyn moment (iconic) and was trapped in cage after cage all his life and tbh after what he saw in the Nirnaeth I'm NOT surprised he voted to stay instead of go. Or just told the king what he wanted to hear. Anyway the POINT is that breaking under mental torment to morgoth, whose force and victory he'd seen firsthand, is NOT a moral failing, and idril started conspiring against him before he'd actually done anything wrong. The attempted murder was, admittedly, not great though. But he didn't even SUCCEED like c'mon he just got homoerotically yeeted from a cliff about it. In conclusion: maeglin did nothing wrong except all the things he did wrong, and the version in which he's most openly evil is also the one where both the narrative and the other elves are racist to him so like they had it coming"

#poll #round 2 #maeglin #maeglin lomion #the silmarillion #lord of the rings #gamzee makara #gamzee homestuck #gamzee #homestuck gamzee #homestuck #6 submissions #2 submissions

56 notes · View notes

cure-typhoon · 1 year

Text

I'm kinda sad how I don't see enough of the Beta trolls as a whole friend group the same way we do with the Beta and Alpha kids..

And like it's obvious it's because of murderstuck, it's kinda hard to see them as a big friend group when one of the most important part of their story is when they fucking murderer eachother like they we're in Lord of the Flies

But like, thats the thing, they still cared for eachother and that makes it so much tragic. Literally everything was against them being a normal fuctional friend group and they still tried and at the end everything just ended awfully

We know about Karkat being genuinly heartbroken about the deaths in the group but I feel like we only think of him caring for all of them in the group because it's one of the few we were able to see the grieving process he was going through and was the one who reacted more like a human when it happened = anxious, scared and heartbroken

While Kanaya was pissed the whole time after she wake up, she was angry and attacked everyone who was a danger to the group and it might be because she had a fucking whole through her stomach and the matriorb but I also feel this was her way to express the pain she was going through the deaths of her friends, like people forget but she was very friendly to Tavros and tried to help him a lot, it's probably she made him the Tinkerbull plushie we see in the videogame. She was also very to Feferi so I doubt she was fucking happy after seeing that she got killed. We don't see her interact much with Nepeta and Equius (i don't think those two even interactúe with Kanaya) but she probably cared at some level for them considering she wanted to hunt down Gamzee.

Terezi is also an interesting case because the way she reacts to Tavros death is...interesting. Tavros was one of her buddies when they played Flarp but after she discovers his body she is barely affected by it? In the text it says because she had just cried out all for the doomed Dave but I think it had something to do with Gamzee

You can barely see the honk but it's there , we know Gamzee was probably messing with Terezi so she suspected Vriska for everyone's murder so he probably started things right away after Terezi found the body and after she did exactly what Gamzee wanted her to do, he probably ley go of the whole deal in her head and we see her react to the death of Vriska (and possibly also Tavros)

We know she was heartbroken after killing Vriska and it's the only character besides Karkat and Vriska that we see grieving by the death of one of the group.

Anyway I ended up rambling and I didnt talk about Vriska's talk with June after she killed Tavros, it's a whole deal and I barely get to make a point.

Basically we barely see them interact as a friend group or even grieve eachothers deaths but I feel that was Hussie's writting more than them not caring for eachother (in their own, sometimes fucked up, ways)

#homestuck #beta trolls #karkat vantas #aradia megido #tavros nitram #he was mentioned a lot lol #sollux captor #nepeta leijon #kanaya maryam #terezi pyrope #vriska serket #equius zahhak #gamzee makara #eridan ampora #feferi peixes #god what a rambling and i barely said anything lol

537 notes · View notes

mindfang-srevenge · 2 months

Text

Homestuck Trolls and Which TMA Entity They're Most Aligned With: A List By Static, with the STRONG NOTATION that this is not a diss track, just a general summation of thoughts

Karkat— Extinction. He's the mutation that heralds the end of the world. He's the mutation that dooms the world. His existence inspires the fear of the end of society, and the question of how that society could rebuild.

Vriska— Web. A gimme. Spider8itch is gonna spider8itch. She's literally got manipulation powers that-- if she would use them correctly-- would constantly invoke the fear that her friends had no free will, and were just following her orders.

Aradia— End. She takes on the job of reaper for the entire universe, there's no way her very presence doesn't inspire at least the knowledge or vibes of death in her friends. She's the ferrywoman of this universe, and more than that, she's an archaeologist. She takes an active interest in the dead and the gone. This girl's unnerving, and I adore her for it.

Sollux— Desolation. A man who's had everything taken from him, and taken from him again, and taken from him again. First with Aradia's death at his hands, then when he's killed trying to get his friends into the game, then when he gets incinerated by Jack, then when he's blinded by Eridan, then when he gives it all up to propel the ship across the yard, then when he-- you get the point. Sollux continually inspires, rather than the fear of death, the fear of total and utter loss. It's probably something to do with the Doom aspect, y'know.

Terezi— Eye. She who knows all, she who 'sees' all. She's adept enough at this job to be able to trace both the past and the future, to understand exactly where things went wrong even if she doesn't have the power to fix it herself. Good at predicting outcomes. All of these are eye traits.

Gamzee— Stranger, both because of the circus aesthetic and because of the fear of the 'other' that he inspires. He walks like their friend, he looks like their friend, he even kind of sounds like their friend-- but is it really him? Are they supposed to trust him, especially after what he did? There's something wrong here, there's something wrong about him, and he's a Stranger aboard their ship.

Eridan— Slaughter. He's constantly fulfilling the trait of 'mindless violence', after all, whether he's killing landdwellers or shooting angels or even killing his friends. He shoots first and asks questions later. He's actively thinking about genocide at almost all times. This man is a menace.

Nepeta— Hunt, which feels a little obvious. She's the stalking purredator. She's constantly RP'ing as a creature that would like no better than to play a lovely little game of cat and mouse. If she got more screentime and/or things to fight, I'm sure we could see many more examples of this in-text.

Equius— Lonely. Nobody really seems to like this man? I mean, for obvious reasons- he's kind of a creep-- but he lurks on the edges of the friend group, moreso even than Gamzee or Eridan. If he didn't live immediately next door to Vriska I'm not sure anyone but Nepeta would know him. He probably speaks to his robots more than any other troll, and he doesn't seem to particularly want to speak to anyone but Nepeta? Every conversation is so stilted, so formal, almost as if he doesn't know how to talk to people even if he did want to.

Feferi— Vast. Look, as a seadweller, she's a little more connected to the depths than most-- but she also can't leave the depths, forcing Eridan to do her hunting for her. Her lifespan is implied to be near-endless, judging from )(IC's. She's trapped on all sides by endlessness.

Tavros— Buried. Much in the way that Feferi is trapped by an expanse both around her and within her, Tavros is trapped on the ground despite his wishes. He's buried at the back of his friend group, the butt of the jokes. He's also figuratively buried by his self-doubt, which feeds into his role as Page. I feel . . . incredibly bad for this man.

Kanaya— Corruption. It's the Fear most associated with the bringing of new life, which both as a jadeblood and the protector of the Mothergrub Egg, she's deeply in tune with. Her lusus is also a winged bug-thing (mothergrub, shut up). Kanaya herself is a parasite on the other trolls, because she's a rainbow drinker.

#now of course several of these are very mutable #and the lines between fears are thin if even existent #but this is also just an op-ed #TMA #homestuck #aw fuck gotta tag all the trolls #karkat vantas #vriska serket #aradia megido #sollux captor #nepeta leijon #terezi pyrope #gamzee makara #eridan ampora #equius zahhak #feferi peixes #tavros nitram #kanaya maryam #mindfang srevenge

45 notes · View notes

kitkat-the-muffin · 1 year

Text

For a while I rationalized the existence of the Homestuck Epilogues just cause I like Davekat and I just wanted to accept them being canon even if it also meant accepting tons and tons of character assassination and a terrible storyline

But honestly it’s time I take off the shipping goggles and acknowledge that all of the Epilogues is a mess, including my favorite ship content. They, like everyone else, are out of character and are making decisions that they’d never do

Roxy, who once threw a whole funeral for a cat, would never show disrespect at the death of one of her best friends

Jade would never prioritize invading other peoples relationships when she could be enjoying the company of her family and friends

John would never sit back and accept his fate, whether it be straight up dying or living a life of mundanity, if it meant he’d be miserable with it

Jake would never let people use him for their own gain (again), Dirk would never manipulate people (not after his character arc geez guys), Rose would never give up the chance to fix a problem herself, Kanaya would never leave her wife to suffer alone, Jane would never become the next Condesce, etc, etc.

And despite my rationalization of the Davekat scene through my shipping goggles, I have to admit that Dave would never jump headfirst into both a crush and relationship, especially when you account for his trauma. At the very least, he wouldn’t confess to having a crush without blabbering on about his anxieties first, likely coming out in the middle of a rant on accident (don’t deny it, you know he would) in the same way he accidentally calls Jane “John’s hot grandma.” He’d probably say something like “I’m going through a bisexual crisis, a bi-sis if you will- oh yeah I’m bi by the way, hahah bi-by like bye-bye which is what I should be doing before I embarrass myself further ok bye”

I can see him saying all that ^ more than I can see him downing a ton of alcohol and kissing his crush as if he was in some sort of romcom. Homestuck’s always been really good at deviating from tropes and making the characters feel more like real people, and real people don’t succumb to romcom scenarios. Karkat would smack the romcom out of Dave long before ever succumbing to his own romantic fantasies (It’s like, say you always wanted to be a fairy princess but once you actually turn into one you’re like “uhhh what this is so unrealistic and kind of uncomfortable...” Idk bad example). The point is that no one actually wants to be in a romcom, they just want some of those romantic events like singing songs and having deep emotional conversations, but not suddenly kissing each other after screaming at the fourth wall that’s for sure

Karkat is knowledgable enough in romcoms to know when he’s in one, and you know as hell he won’t give into a cheap narrative like that. Karkat’s never been one to let fate strangle him into submission, he wouldn’t have survived to 6 sweeps on Alternia if he had. Also, he has no interest in politics, not after the whole Gamzee thing anyway, and while I do think Karkat cares a lot for Dave and would want to make him happy, he surely wouldn’t do so by running for President. Karkat’s the kind of person who shows affection with little actions, like drawing with chalk or listening to music. You know, quality time

And I think it’s time that I woke up from my own romcom fantasy and realized that while I want these characters to have a happy ending, this just isn’t them in the first place

I’d like to hear some thoughts from non-davekat shippers on the subject. Nothing anti-davekat I mean, more like some opinions from people who are davekat-indifferent. How did this character development affect readers without red-tinted shipping goggles?

#homestuck #homestuck epilogues #davekat #dave strider #karkat vantas

126 notes · View notes

minu-moni · 8 months

Text

What I think is interesting to analyze when looking into a character portrayal is to notice how the author influences in the character’s actions.

Let’s compare Gamzee to Jevil, from Deltarune.

Both characters are essentially “character who came in contact with someone that gave them more knowledge than they could handle and they went insane because of it” but how Hussie and Toby run with this idea is majorly different.

While Hussie writes Gamzee to be an irredeemable monster, an abuser and overall a shitty person, Toby goes the other way with Jevil.

Throughout Deltarune’s chapter one if you’re going to do the hidden boss, you get some information from Seam about Jevil. He speaks about Jevil mostly with caution, but he never villainizes him. And while Jevil is implied to have hurt people, so much so that he had to be locked up, Seam never treats him as a villain. He treats him as an old friend and even speaks fondly of him after you beat his fight. There is no instance where Toby writes Jevil to be inherently evil, abusive or a shitty person overall, and the fandom mostly sees him on a positive light.

Gamzee however, is the opposite. His encounter with Lil Cal turns him into a villain with no redeeming qualities and strips him of any personality and nuance to the point he doesn’t even speak. He is also retconned to always have been an asshole and then Hussie goes out of his way to villainize him and treat his situation as something that turned him into a villain, instead of a character with flaws who was manipulated and used in some way.

And how does the fandom treat Gamzee? They absolutely despise him. There’s a pretty vocal bunch in the Homestuck fandom that thinks Gamzee is just a shitty person who chose to serve Lord English and kill all his friends, and part of this is because of how he’s portrayed in the comic.

Let’s not also forget about how Gamzee is written as neurodivergent and black-coded, while those characteristics are missing in Jevil’s character (at least in any major way). And while maybe not intentional, I absolutely believe that this influenced Hussie’s way of writing Gamzee. There’s too many influences of this to not be so.

People, specifically people of color and disabled people, have said this for a long time now, but this discussion goes unaddressed and recognized by the part of the fandom that hates Gamzee, which downplays these concerns, and Hussie, who doesn’t address them at all and even makes fun of people for thinking of Gamzee with more nuance on the epilogues.

Comparing those two characters and the way they’re written, we can see that it’s clearly an author problem. Hussie writes Gamzee so poorly that people have actually found instances of possible racism and ableism in him, meanwhile there’s way less of an issue with Jevil, who is written as nuanced and the fandom absolutely loves him for it.

Y’all need to stop talking about characters like they actually chose what they did. They’re not real. Someone wrote them to act the way they do. They’re not independent, they’re not conscientious, they don’t choose anything. It’s the author that chooses what they will do, and their biases absolutely influences the writing of such.

#deltarune #homestuck #gamzee makara #Jevil #writing analysis #moni speaks

58 notes · View notes

davekat-sucks · 2 months

Note

Bro vs Eridan in terms of being an awful person is tricky considering Bro was being possessed by Cal and Eridan was a 13 year who had to do Feferi dirty work his entire life so her Lusus wouldn't destroy everything. I genuinely think Bro had no choice in anything he did considering his note to Dave was something Caliborn came up with. Eridans case is a bit more complex given the circumstances of his planet, none of those things he did were ok to do but either feed the monster or have everything destroyed. He's the whole reason the trolls were alive in the first place. Considering he had to risk his life everyday for everyone else, him attempting to join Jack isn't out of the ordinary for dangerous stuff he encounters. Yea he's douchey and destroying the matriorb was dick move, but everyone on the meteor lost their minds and had or attempted to kill someone. Tavros tried and Kanaya sawed 2 people in half.

I am also on the side that Bro was possessed or mind controlled to some degree. But the fandom sees things like his strife battle with Dave as more serious because the other ones are played for laughs. Forgetting John would strike is father with a hammer and Rose threatened to commit suicide in front of her Mom. Jade's case is sadder when you remember that when Jade played with the double pistols, Tavros had used Bec to redirect the bullet to kill Grandpa English. She indirectly killed her guardian and wouldn't realize it until later on in the game. Bro's last act would be attempting to fight Jack Noir before dying. So does that mean people think Jack Noir is a HERO for killing the abuser? They forget that DAVESPRITE was present too when they both went after Jack. Bro had no reason to do anything to someone that's a brother from a different timeline. And yet, he was able to let Davesprite run away to safety and fought Jack on his own before dying.

But nobody in this nu-fandom remembers this or thinks hard about that last moment. They only care about his past actions and think it is played for straight abuse. It only applies to him and cannot be applied to other characters unless it's part of a gender arc for a character to transition. It's true Eridan would hunt lusus to help feed Feferi's. Even he admits it can be tiring to figure out when it is the proper time to hunt or not. Hinting that they can't overfeed or underfeed Gl'bgolyb. But you also can't deny he was also doing it to get closer to Feferi and be in a closer relationship with her. Which is why people label him as an incel and people flanderize that to the extreme which gave us Cronus. Then there's the line about him saying he killed marine life accidental.

If it's not sarcasm or poor flirting, it could also mean Eridan had unintentionally killed a lusus and gave it to Feferi to help feed another lusus to try and justify what he is doing is good. And overtime, he gradually accepted it and continued. Getting close to his crush Feferi would also tie in too. You know what they say about psychopaths, first sign is them killing animals. Sure the animals were parents for a troll, but they are still ANIMALS. Kanaya, Karkat, and Terezi accepted that Eridan was a piece of shit and want him to stay dead. Even if he was the reason said trolls are still around, they would never want to bring him back because of his horrid actions on the meteor. As we see when Karkat ended their friendship and Terezi talking with Vriska on who to revive back, Eridan doesn't deserve to be revived. And no mention of Equius, as being the Void player..

Nepeta may have felt Eridan had died, but it's unknown if she knew about Eridan wanting to join Jack. She wasn't even present with Aradia and others in the Vriskagram after becoming a ghost to meet up with him. Though we have yet to see Terezi and Vriska act on that promise on reviving said trolls. The reason they haven't because Terezi found out that Gamzee was trapped in the same fridge as her corpsed friends and didn't want to see him. Maybe the dead trolls will come back for Homestuck Beyond Canon, but that's just wishful thinking with how dead Nepeta jokes are still around and they only brought ghost Eridan in Epilogues for a 'redemption arc.

Eridan got what he deserved and died for his actions. But does he deserve to get brought back? How long should the punishment of his death last? To the cast and narrative, he can never be brought back to relevancy. The other reason the fandom likes Eridan recently is because of Pesterquest putting through the gender arc. Saying his seahorse dad was abusive that didn't acknowledge his gender, despite it's never shown in the webcomic he was this. And because of that, people instantly love him and ignore his past actions and stance on hemospectrum. All for the sake of making the March Eridan meme less transphobic. Nu-fans don't give a shit that he was racist, killed animals and Feferi, destroyed the Matriorb, and had killed Kanaya. All it matters is his label. Yes he is a racist asshole, but he's a NON-BINARY racist asshole. Both Bro and Eridan had done horrible things in the past. But one got more heat over the other. As one got love and attention because of a non-canon moment in a side game, despite people had hated him for those past actions. It's sort of insane about the priorities we have going on in this fandom.

#homestuck #homestuck fandom #bro strider #Eridan Ampora #Davesprite #Feferi Peixies #Kanaya Maryam #Vriska Serket #Nepeta Leijon #Dave Strider #Pesterquest #Karkat Vantas

23 notes · View notes

meraki-sunset · 1 year

Note

There's still one thing I don't understand about the concept of an absolved timeline: as alt!Calliope explained, this is a timeline whose relevance is fed from the canon, or in other words, us readers who came from the original homestuck in search of a new story. But in a completely technical standpoint the alpha timeline exist because there is no other timeline that end up creating LE, whose influence reaches far before time ever existed, and thus needs to be created to complete the biggest time loop ever existed in the history of paradox space. This timeline however, fail this exact condition on account of Gamzee regain his autonomy from LE, thus giving him no reason to remain in the battle against Caliborn, if he even raised the cherubs in the first place. So without this event, and subsequently possessed lil cal->doc scratch ->Lord English, how is this timeline not doomed 100 times and back?

What you're saying is true. According to canon, no timeline exept the alpha can exist. only homestuck canon can exist and every other timeline with even the slight variation will get doomed and everyone in it die without fail. Period. No point in arguing.

I say that's stupid and i don't like it.

SO i'm making use of what i call "the pesterquest dinamic"

Spoiler alert

In pesterquest MSPAReader, after meeting the homestuck cast and learning about their horrible fate to come, basically says "fuck you this is my timeline now" and dives into the Green sun and absorves it's powers, becoming a guardian, like Beckerel and Doc Scratch

With this power they sever the timeline they've intervined into from canon logic.

They create a "Locked timeline". a Timeline that doesn't have to create Lord English. It needs to, it should, the things that happen in the homestuck timeline are part of a big infinite loop that must create him and can't be tampered with or it will result in doom. But that's the thing with loops, they don't have a begining or end. any part of it that you sever can be the begining, the middle or the end

What i'm trying to say is, time in homestuck isn't linear, it doesn't follow the logic that changing something in the past should change the future. it doesn't it just marks the timeline as doomed when something is changed and that's the end. just a cross in the clipboard and fate moves to the next timeline leaving that one to rot

So grabing a timeline, severing a chunk of it (like the period where the kids and trolls haven't played the game), changing it for the better and letting it survive by external means is posible acording to Pesterquest.

Just imagine this. if a homestuck timeline is a book, and you rip a page, does the book change? did you changed the past? do the future events of the book change because tecnically the events of the page you ripped are no longer part of the book? No, the book follows it course. it just became a useless book. A broken book. It's now a doomed timeline. It can't no longer fullfill it's purpose. it'll be disposed of. That's how homestuck timelines it works.

That's why i always refer to CSAU as "infested with paradoxes" and "leaching from the canon timeline" because i know it shouldn't exist acording to canon. acording to canon it should be doomed.

But it's not. Because every little thing that CSAU lacks, every page that has been riped, that should doom it, CSAU steals it from canon homestuck

That's what i tryed to explain with "the river and the puddle" analogy. The puddle doesn't dry because it feeds from the river. CSAU doesn't get doomed because it leaches from homestuck.

How did The Felt get to the game in CSAU? The Felt are LE's minions and acording to canon before they got to the game they were at hussies mansion, where LE killed Hussie, and then Jack escaped with them and Ms. Paint inside of an oven and into the Alpha kid's game. That never happened in CSAU, that event of LE breaking into Hussies mansion with his minions and killing him never happened in this AU, yet the characters from it are here, with memories of it happening. they remember it happening tho it didn't. That's because they're copies, they're stolen from canon.

CSAU steals it's missing pieces from canon to stay alive, like a parasite, a harmless one in a comensalistic relationship. Canon doesn't even know we're here.

And the guardian who keeps the timeline safe, the force that gives it relevance for it to keep doing what it does and keep feeding from the river, who keeps the puddle's tiny stream of water that conects it to the river from being severed, It's us. It's you and It's me. CSAU is relevant to us for diferent reasons for every person, but that's why it exists. Because it's important to me and maybe to you and that's all tha matters. Canon it's it's sourse of missing pieces with which patches it's paradoxes and we are it's sourse of relevance. That's what makes an absolved timeline, that's all it takes.

A will to survive and people to care.

I hope there's more timelines like this one out there

#csau extra

340 notes · View notes

palestporn · 6 months

Text

Gamzee: Blow up your ancestor's whole motherfucking spot

Finding your way back out of whatever the fuck he's doing (your ghost your ancestor the grand fucking highblood, every time you think this day can't get any more motherfucking wild--) feels like stumbling your way through choking smoke. Feels like when you woke up from getting your pan rung earlier, except this time when you find your way back, instead of a fight happening over your head, everybody's all staring at you while they bitch each other out.

"KK, shut the fuck up," says Sollux, and clicks his claws in front of you couple times, and watches you twitch. "I think he's hearing us again. Hey, good evening, moonshine. What the fuck--"

"What did you see?" says the emperor, real intense, and you stare at him and feel your hand try to twitch--to touch his cheek or tear his neck open you have no fucking idea. You don't think your ghost does either. Fuck. "Focus! Look at me. What did he show you?"

A whole lotta shit, is what. Fire, death and blood. A mutant who looked only just Karkat's age--arguing long nights with him through the bars on a dark cell. A hand reaching through the bars to your cheek and how all of everything flipped to spin around that second where he touched you.

"Motherfucker's pale for you," you blurt out.

Sollux and Karkat turn at the same time and stare at the emperor, and then at you, and then at the emperor, like they fucking practiced it. Your ghost does a noise that doesn't amount to words. The emperor does much the motherfucking same.

"I beg your fucking pardon," he says.

IN WHAT MOTHERFUCKING WAY, howls your ancestor, what part of FATAL AND WEAKLING FAILURE and UNDYING MOTHERFUCKING AFTERDEATH OF SHAME did you FAIL TO COMPREHEND?!

"And he's fucking salty about it," you say, fool mouth running without you, on a laugh of disbelieving. "Oh, fuck. You just touched him the one time and he's fucking gone about it, he just, ha, hhaha, he hates it so motherfucking much."

The emperor, it transpires and turns out, goes red a whole lot the same way like his descendant does. "Fucking, really?!" he says, only half at you--to the dark, to the shade he can't see. "It's been hundreds of sweeps! You tried to execute me!"

I regret NOTHING, mutant, says your ghost in boiling furious snarl, and his hating regret sings through your horns. I linger only to see your long-delayed death and drag your soul to the messiahs' cull-pits by motherfucking hand.

"What, you're. You're just, hanging out waiting for him?" you say, and Karkat's face does some kinda SOMETHING. "Like so you can go on together? Motherfucker, damn."

"Thirsty," says Sollux, and it pushes a laugh out your mouth like a punch in the gut, especially how it makes Karkat's face do a whole different kind of something. "Ehehe--"

"This isn't funny, Mituna," says the emperor, sharp over your ancestor's howl of scouring rage and cursing on your soul.

"No, it's fucking not!" says Karkat. "Is that why you put him in the conciliatrium?! He's not the same person as his ancestor, you absolute throbbing boil on the waste chute of the empire, that's not how descendants work and I should fucking know!"

"Karkat, shut the fuck up," says the emperor. He's pinching the bridge of his scarred-up, broken-ass nose.

To REVENGE himself on my memory, says your ancestor, to my MOCKERY AND DEBASEMENT, turning a hatched subjugglator of my holy bloodline to some purring, pampered--

"Hey, if you didn't like learning pile stuff you coulda just left, motherfucker," you say, stung a little. "Not like either of us ever had to do the motherfucking job, being as how I guess you fucked up my shot at getting any action a billion fuckin' sweeps ago!"

Sollux fucking cackles about that. The emperor says "You didn't have a 'shot'! Neither of you have anything even resembling a shot, okay?! Kurloz, you dense piece of shit--"

"Don't fucking talk to him like that," says Karkat, at the same time you go "Who the fuck is Kurloz?" and then both of you stop and look confusion at the other.

Never did I give him my hatchname and never ALLOWED him to use it, your ancestor's growling, sulky now, all sorts of shit you can't get a vibe on rolling around your thinkpan, while the emperor makes lecture and scold at the air where he isn't. Speaking at me like he knows me, bossy little MOTHERFUCKER. Claiming some power to speak down at the King of Colors, the culler of a thousand worlds--

"I'm Gamzee," you say, by way of explanation, and Karkat stares at you and then says, "I'm. Karkat?" like he's not really actually all that sure right this second. Sneaks a frond out and rests it on your knee, while his ancestor's yelling at the dark and his buddy's laughing his ass off, and then whips it back again red in the ears.

...You want to touch him back. Not just to kneel there sweet and let him get up in your business, but butt rudenasty up in his. So that's. New.

"Hey, uh," you say, and shoot your motherfucking shot.

Gamzee: Get up in the Second Coming's business.

==> Courtly ==> Polite ==> Bold ==> Downright Presumptuous

[START OVER]

#CYOA: Imperial Favor #T-T-T-T-T-T-T-T-TENSION BREAKERRRRRRR lmao #I have to do a pretty lengthy drive real quick lol vote amongst yourselves

45 notes · View notes

nekropsii · 19 days

Note

I saw a lot of people recently saying they purposely skipped the entire Openbound sequence because of Hussie's self-insert alongside like Meenah being interested in Karkat and characters like Meulin encouraging it

but that like doesn't make sense to me, because if they're going about Homestuck by skipping all the potentially uncomfortable portions, then how are they going about reading the comic in the first place?

I think my favorite part of this is how those are, frankly, pussy-ass reasons to skip it. Hussie's Author Avatar sucks on purpose, always, and Meenah is textually in the wrong there. She has a very poor grasp of consequences and the concept of what is right and wrong, it's a big part of her character. It's why her whole relationship with (Vriska) exists, which is also textually immoral, is handled and addressed as such, and paints Meenah as being predatory, intentionally or not, for chasing after someone so much younger than her who is, just... So vulnerable, mentally. Honestly, if they're skipping over the entirety of the Openbounds just for Meenah's weird obsession with Karkat, then did they skip over her relationship with (Vriska), too? Because that was very solid, fascinating characterization for both of those characters. And, again, paints her as creepy for doing it, because... She is. And it was a part of the "main comic", so to speak. What did they do about that? Is that fine? Did they skip all of those pages, no matter what? What's the limit here? Is this specifically an aversion to the concept of abuse in a relationship, period? Did they skip any page circling the relationship between Vriska and Tavros, or Gamzee and Terezi? Is it specifically an aversion to abusive and predatory age gaps? Did they skip all of Doc Scratch's pages and interactions with all of the girls? Is it specifically an aversion to an adult sexually abusing a minor? So, did they skip Dave Strider's entire intro, which is thickly soaked in the fact that he's getting abused, including sexually, by his 30+ year old brother?

Everyone has a right to be uncomfortable about anything, but the author intent is clear here- Meenah is in the wrong, and anyone supporting her actions is also wrong. This kind of makes criticizing the inclusion of her actions into the storyline... Well, bullshit, frankly. Not liking the inclusion of abuse because abuse as a baseline makes you uncomfortable is not a criticism, it is a statement of preference, and with that I have to gesture towards the entire rest of the comic, because Homestuck is full of that very same kind of abuse, and it is bad and graphic every time. Criticism of the inclusion of abuse within a storyline has to be about the handling and execution of that abuse within the confines of the plot, and in this case, and all other cases, I think Meenah's abusive tendencies are outlined pretty clearly as being a bad thing. If you read her actions as an endorsement of being a violent, selfish, predatory bully with basically no concept of morality or consequences, you either are illiterate, didn't actually read any one of the pages she was in and got your opinion from someone else, or you are reading in bad faith on purpose. She is literally a version of Her Imperious Condescension, which is, like, one of the main fucking villains of the comic. Hussie's Avatar is also wrong, and you should hate him. That is the point of Hussie's Avatar. His role in the story is being annoying, weird, and wrong. Hussie's Avatar is not actually very reflective of Hussie as a person. Hussie doesn't like The Avatar. This is pretty obvious if you pay attention to him for five seconds.

So... These aren't instances of the Openbounds being written badly, they're instances of the readers being unwilling to engage with something that could even just potentially be uncomfortable despite that same thing permeating throughout the rest of the damn webcomic and also getting their opinions from other people, uncritically. Sigh. Homestuck being full of weird uncomfortable plot beats is... Literally fine. It's normal, it's handled pretty decently as a baseline, and phenomenally at other times. It's made for adult people who can think critically about these things. A lot of those uncomfortable aspects were... You know... Intentional? There's a point to Meenah creeping on people younger than her, and it's a deliberate one. Skipping the Openbounds for it is stupid horseshit. Doc Scratch already did that. Bro Strider did that to Dave and people love that guy. I ask gently for people to grow a spine. Think for yourself. Read something yourself, unbiased, before casting judgment. Good lord.

#homestuck #homestuck meta #homestuck analysis #alpha trolls #beforan trolls #dancestors #meenah peixes #andrew hussie #doc scratch #bro strider #(vriska) serket #vriska serket #dave strider #cw child harm #cw incest #cw abuse #meenah.pdf #nekro.pdf #nekro.sms

42 notes · View notes

vikkirosko · 8 months

Note

Hi there! Could I have a separate Dave and Gamzee (if it's all right) x Mage of Void reader? (gender neutral reader, please).

Headcanons Mage of Void

🕶 Dave Strider x Reader 💿

When you and Dave met, his first thought about you after an hour of communication was that you were eccentric, but not in a bad sense of the word. You didn't talk much about yourself, but what you told him seemed interesting, even though he didn't expect this when he started communicating with you. It took him some time to establish contact with you, but when you began to trust him more, he realized that your strangeness simply could not be something bad

You often told him about the books you read, and sometimes it seemed to him that you preferred to immerse yourself in a fictional world, avoiding reality, but he couldn't blame you for that. You could easily have forgotten something, because of which Dave sometimes laughed at you, but without malice. However, even when you started dating, something happened that he did not expect. You abruptly stopped responding to his messages. You weren't online for several days, you didn't reply to anyone's messages, after which you came back as if nothing had happened. Only a little later, Dave was able to find out from you that the reason for this was that your emotional calm had cracked due to everyday problems and you didn't want to load others with your problems

The more you were together, the more Dave noticed that you seemed to burn out from the inside, so he tried to help you as much as he could. You have always tried to solve your problems by yourself, albeit by non-standard methods, and because of this it was only harder for you. You didn't want to put your burden on him, but Dave took on some of your problems himself so that you could feel a little better. He didn't let you overexert yourself and didn't leave you when your emotional state was cracking

Dave knew that he himself often hid his problems from others, but he did not want your emotional state to deteriorate so much at some point that you would not be able to restore your calmness. Dave genuinely cared about you and didn't want you to feel bad. He tried to support you to the best of his ability and he hoped that it gave results

♑ Gamzee Makara x Reader 🎪

Your acquaintance with Gamzee happened thanks to your mutual friends. They often said that both of you were weird, only Gamzee was like that because of the pie, and you were just like that. He was curious to know about you, so he got to know you. At first you tried to keep him at arm's length, not trusting him, but over time you really managed to get along and Gamzee realized that you were more interesting than strange

You were interested in unusual things that he hadn't thought about before, despite your hard work, you constantly forgot something and strange thoughts often came into your head that you shared with Gamzee. He was interested in listening to you, because the thoughts you shared with him were really curious. Several times when he came to you, he saw that broken things were scattered around your room. As it turned out, you broke them yourself simply because you liked to break things and it helped you release the accumulated emotions

You were often engaged in plunging headlong into your favorite activities and doing things related to it. Because of this, you were often physically and emotionally exhausted, which did not escape Gamzee's eyes. Gamzee didn't like it when you didn't feel well, so he tried to distract you from business and help you relax so that you could feel better. You didn't want to burden him with your problems, so Gamzee found other ways to help you

He liked the way you were. You were unusual, sincere and you accepted him with all his oddities. Gamzee tried to be as sincere with you in return as he could allow. Next to you, he felt relaxed, even if the sensations of the pie began to leave him

#homestuck #homestuck x reader #homestuck headcanons #Dave Strider #Dave Strider x Reader #gamzee makara #gamzee makara x reader

40 notes · View notes