#momestuck

[momestuck]

Hi! I seem to have some new visitors in these parts recently.

I’m afraid to say, if you’re looking for an active Homestuck blog, there is none to be found here. It has been some years! But I can heartily recommend @thewertsearch, who is doing a very entertaining blind liveblog with a lot of astute commentary. Mind you, if you’re here, there’s no way you don’t know about her is there?

If you’re looking for my liveblog of Hiveswap Friendsim, you may find it here in chronological order. Despite promises, I never got around to commenting on the sequel.

If you’d like my at-the-time commentary on the Homestuck Epilogues, there is an index here.

And... if you enjoy liveblogs of enormous, complicated visual novels with a quirky metafictional mystery, I am currently about 3/8 of the way through Umineko no Nako Koru Ni. If you like Homestuck, I highly recommend it. However, it is literally a million words long, so you might prefer to read my summaries. Which are... not actually much shorter, once all the commentary and tangents are totted up. But hey! If you like what I had to say about Homestuck and friends, I hope you’ll find I have even more interesting things to say about this one~

#momestuck #time for a pinned post

[mmmmalo]

Mallek uses the equal sign as the word "is", a quirk which, when enacted upon the parallel lines in his name, begets the word Maizek. I'd previously thought this referred to magic, given the motif of disillusionment in the story, but now I suspect the point is "maize", as in corn. Couple points potentially to that effect:

One of the cereals in his apartment is FURY POPS (ty to @momestuck's old liveblog), a curious distortion of Corn Pops

Your hard landing on the asphalt in a Bad End is titled "Sweet Plant"

On the off chance that "Adalov" functioned as a distortion of "idol of", I ran a search for maize gods and found the paired (or else blurred) Aztec gods Centeotl and Chicomecoatl, whose names mean "dried maize on the cob" and "seven serpents", respectively. The latter maize god might explain Mallek's snake lusus.

More free associative: Native American connotations of the mohawk aside, Mallek's wisp of hair made me think of the silk atop ears of corn. So the matter of his ears being pierced, and his candy corn horns being pierced, gave me the sudden impression that Mallek's horns themselves were a piercing, looping through the ear of corn that is his head... the reading of horns as psychic antennae would color his interest in an underground space without a strong wireless signal, maybe

The "exploding buttery kernels" bit from Polypa's route also points towards to a weird cageyness around corn... as does the name "Konyyl", if we can read that as a distortion of kernel. Her last name Okimaw is also a Cree word for Chieftain, so the Native American connection to corn would persist... also weird how if you take her first name as Colonel it becomes two leadership titles in a row. Master Chief ass

#hiveswap commentary #mallek #konyyl #native motifs #corn

[canmom]

@momestuck

[solarianradiance]

Some posts on the “Caliborn wrote the retcon” headcanon; the similarities to his work are really creepy.

http://turntechgodoka.tumblr.com/post/143983508368/momestuck-elanorpam-novatoast-turntechgodoka

https://krixwell.tumblr.com/post/152428967679/theory-caliborn-wrote-the-ending-with-proof

https://bitterstucker.tumblr.com/post/151167991805/tanoraqui-elanorpam-jumpingjacktrash

Not to mention actual Tricksters being presented positively: http://commonsensus.tumblr.com/post/152289003083/i-am-going-to-throw-up And the girls being pushed aside: http://commonsensus.tumblr.com/post/142642704858/wtf-is-jane-doing

I know the actual reason is just Hussie being sloppy, but do you think this is at least a fun/soothing theory?

It does raise a good question about Caliborn and his nature, along with Calliope for that matter.

Why would he give his sister a happy ending?

Maybe the Epilogue will be where John discovers this or something

[darlidigivolve]

I wanted to say something for momestuck day but it’s like the whole thing is largely wiped from my momory which sucks because it was a n important phase of my life, if we experience d homestuck together in any way small or big i love you

#darliTalks #i'm life three quarters dead right ndow so i'm leaving tyopes because it's funny rn for some reason

[act8official]

momestuck reblogged your photo:Act 8 has updated with Act 2: Panels 1-2 Act 8...

hey jsyk the previous page doesn’t yet link to this new upd8

Make sure to hard refresh the browser; it’s probably loading the old version of the page. But thank you!

#momestuck #posted by gamzee #you did some really hardcore analysis of the first flash that I thought was super cool! #it made me wish I'd been able to be a bit more exact with things #i'm still learning the ropes of the program myself #anyway I hope you enjoy this one as well

[cm-gunnerkrigg]

Chapter 10: Doctor Disaster versus the Creepy Aliens from Outer Space, featuring the Gunnerkrigg Spacemonauts

there’s not much to say about this chapter since it’s kind of a non-sequitur. there’s a teacher at the Court who takes the kids on wacky hologram adventures in haptic feedback suits.

Annie is initially boring and refuses to get into it but learns a Valuable Lesson about having fun and not being a critic all the time.

#momestuck

[mihirahira02-blog]

イヤッホー！！！ようやく読み始めました。 読むのがものすごく遅いですが、少しずつ楽しんでいきます。 とりあえず現時点までの感想：

アンフォラの名を持つ者の安定のクズ感。

底意地の悪さが凄くて　もう　可愛いな！！！！！！！！！！！

(※「クズ野郎」＝「motherfucker」)

んー、もしくは「asshole」のほうが近いかな？

#momestuck #ampora

[mmmmalo]

I ended up on @momestuck again for her old Friendsim commentary and this bit about the effects of Faygo stood out:

"For real though, what is in this stuff? You got high with Cirava and Tipsy with Chixie (hah that rhymes she should put that in her next rap) but this is different."

This explicitly calls back to two different contradictory branches in the same sentence! Ha. The branch where she raps is the branch where we don’t get drunk with her…

I like the idea that Faygo causes things to mix. Here it's memories of divergent timelines... Marvus route also learns into the idea of stoned clowns having unworldly meta knowledge. For Gamzee, dropping Sopor Slime caused his speech to disambiguate into upper and lower case blocks -- insofar as soda is a soporific for trolls, this could implicate Faygo as something that causes mixing to occur. Attached to the abstraction of "mixing" cause it plugs a hole in Slurquest: it makes sense for "Faygo" to be treated as a slur if the drink invokes fears of various things (black/white, masculine/feminine) occuring in combination, becoming amphibious. Linking that to ascendant knowledge is sort of like how Feferi's enlightenment tiara came from an ambiguous joke about Karkat perforating his bone bulge with a culling fork (removing genitalia conflated with putting 3 holes in your skull, opening your 3rd eye)

A serendipitous bar of gratitude, from back when I was focused on Lacan:

I sent a check to Žižek for all the knowledge, gotta... thirsty ego // Gay frog water from the Balkans make me wanna... mount-a-negro, // talk, and put a point to my... personal paralysis // Placing parenthetics inside of psycho(anal)ysis

#i was never able to summon enough material for the full gay psychoanalysis rap so enjoy this fragment #eat your heart out Van Halen #homestuck commentary

[mmmmalo]

Haven't revisited Lanque myself yet but there was a screenshot on momestuck referring to him as a "briary primadonna" that makes me suspect the flower crown from the sarcastically unproblematic route is a mis-represented crown of thorns. So. Looking forward to that

#not ironic I love V

[momestuck]

oh god there's another one

#momestuck

[momestuck]

Man, comparing Dave to Kankri and Zebruh hurt in the soul but, yeah, it is an apt comparison. And it highlight how it is not always awful to be "like that", if you are actually being sincere about your attempts of improving, instead of being a disingenuous fuck.

to be clear I was contrasting dave with Kankri and Zebruh :p

i do not think they are at all similar characters - just that, they touch on the ideal of being ‘woke’, but from opposite directions.

like it’s good to be conscious of the existence of social forces such as gender white supremacy and capital which shape our lives. Kankri embodies one very maladaptive response to that, which might be called an exaggerated stereotype of ‘vulgar identity politics’, which views every possible interaction first through the lens of a list of identity markers, and judging what is ‘problematic’ according to a list of rules of ‘forbiddens’, rather than relating to ones’ friends as actual people who one can personally know and form meaningful connections with.

among other things, this approach forestalls any serious reflection and understanding of interpersonal relations and social forces, and turns the process of like “learning to relate to each other in a less cruel way” into a particularly warped game of jockeying for status by learning the rules, and spectacular ‘punishment’ of people who can be presented to have transgressed regardless of whether it’s actually a good resolution to the situation. what it does not lead to is a substantive material change in these social relations.

homestuck doesn’t manage really get into like, the conditions under which this pattern formed in the first place, and why it’s ultimately a self-defeating strategy if our aim is genuine liberation - it just contrasts ‘annoying sjw kankri’ against ‘good liberal feminist porrim’! but that imo is what kankri is ‘about’, in a positive reading.

kankri never got the time to become anything else because SGrub happened, but in time, at best he’d have learned how to separate bullshit from the shit that actually matters and some better interpersonal skills, to internalise not-easily-spoken principles rather than lists of problematic things; at worst he’d be lurking on some anon meme talking about he’s ‘ex social justice’. or he’d get caught up in some horrific cultish trot/maoist/etc. party, that would know exactly how to exploit him and turn him on people for their own gain.

zebruh represents an entirely different form: an abuser who is a position of extreme social power, who’s recognised that he can exploit the machinery of ‘social justice’ to help build up his own image. talk to him for even a few minutes and you realise how completely full of it he is - but he’s completely insulated from the harm he causes, which falls always on the more vulnerable people he’s supposedly advocating for. he’s a true ‘bad actor’, who ‘cares’ only insofar as it furthers his own ability to have power over others.

such people do exist, of course. any ‘instrument of violence’ such as ‘call-outs’ has to recognise how it can be exploited in such a way, or it’s worse than useless.

dave might be kind of full of himself, but he doesn’t do any of that!

he comes across as someone who like, knows about social violence in a pretty abstract way, rather than having lived it. (personally i headcanon dave as Black, but the comic never really shows him facing any of that shit on Earth). he does obviously genuinely care about Karkat and the other trolls, not in a chaser-y way - and he’s willing to take personal risks for their sake. he’s like, i guess, a truly well-meaning but naive young activist - but someone who will ‘get it’, in time, as he gets more of a direct, personal experience of how shit things are outside of his old bubble (or in this case, in an entirely new cultural context that he invented).

#momestuck #heattth

[momestuck]

Calliope is obsessed with aspects of human/troll romance that are not natural to Cherubs, so I think this fascination extending to reproduction would make sense. This also extends to Caliborn interestingly enough. When he ask for "Porn" from Dirk, he explicitly asks for marriage and babies.

yes that’s a good point!

in this regard, taking Candy as “Calliope’s story”, and previous observations of Calliope and Caliborn representing opposed ‘sides of Fandom’ - Calliope represents a side of fandom that wants everything to be very neat, of consummated ships producing babies and living happily ever after. insofar as this work emerges from a side of Fandom that wants to like, dive into the angst and struggle, perhaps Candy is a repudiation of that - though not just shitting on it, but trying to present some kind of alternative, in a kind of ‘life is messy but that’s good’ way or something

#momestuck #heattth

[momestuck]

Epilogues: liveblog archive

intro chapters

candy route

Epilogue 1 and a little of 2 [ch 1-5]

The rest of Epilogue 2 [ch 6-13]

Epilogue 3 [ch 14-15]

Epilogue 4 [ch 16-21]

Epilogue 5 [ch 22-26]

Epilogue 6 [ch 27-28]

Epilogue 7 [ch 29-38]

Epilogue 8 [ch 39-40] + postscript

meat route

Epilogue 1 [ch 1-8]

Epilogue 2 [ch 9-13]

Epilogue 3 [ch 14-17]

Epilogue 4 [ch 18-27]

Epilogue 5 [ch 28-32]

Epilogue 6 [ch 33-37]

Epilogue 7 [ch 38-42]

Epilogue 8 [ch 43] + postscript

final review

#momestuck

[momestuck]

Epilogues

Oh boy, we’re back.

So if anyone’s not heard The News this 13/4/2019, Homestuck’s gone and done its epilogue(s) at last.

I am now several hours behind the hype curve, so no doubt the kind of person who reads this blog has already read the upd8 and developed an Opinion. Nevertheless, the duty falls upon me to liveread this.

So, it starts with an AO3 joke. Obvious comments out of the way:

“oh hey it’s well known fanfic author Cepheid_Variable” (which answers my question of whether Hussie’s still the only author: no)

“damn that’s a hefty content warning”

“this is a nice way to repeat the theme that ‘canon’ is less important than the personal and collective understandings developed by each reader, by presenting the ‘canon’ ending as just another fanfic”

of course, not every interpretation is created equal in terms of its social reception. Homestuck has already touched on discourses of ‘good fandom’ vs ‘bad fandom’ with the Calliope/Caliborn dichotomy; no doubt, with Hussie inviting a fanfiction writer on board, he took care to make a choice of a generally respected author

It continues the joke by being straight up prose. Physics terms are thrown about like a series of slightly dubious similes. The prose gets purpler and purpler until...

Your name is John Egbert, and you have just had a terrible, deeply pretentious nightmare. You snap out of bed, soaked in sweat, your heart hammering like a fire alarm. It is just as you feared. You’ve been dreaming in anime again. And you have no idea what it could mean.

Haha, got you again, suckers. Cake: had, and eaten. (Also, act 7 was literally anime so... yeah, sure thing.)

[ @drc4ble tells me there’s another level to this troll, in that Cephied_Variable is quoting a part of her own fic in this intro.]

You’ve always been confused about what, exactly, they contribute to the global economy. But it’s pretty cute how much they love playing at being suburban businessmen.

“cw: capitalism” indeed

So, in the idyllic world we saw in the credits upd8, all is not so well for the beta kids. John is 23, which means it is now, in canon as well as out, 10 years since the comic began.

Rose starts dropping some exposition, drawing on her Seer of Light abilities; of note is the ‘breakdown of boundaries’ between the different incarnations of the kids she describes:

ROSE: It’s not about gaining additional power, so much as the gradual dissolving of the boundaries between your own awareness and that of your many doomed selves who perished in other timelines.

ROSE: It’s a slow and apparently rather uncomfortable accretion of knowledge. Perhaps I’m the only one to notice any change, since my aspect explicitly relates to knowledge.

Jade has apparently detected that godtier!Calliope destroyed the Green Sun, ‘from this frame of reference’.

In much more important news than the end of the universe(s), we get confirmation of Jadedavekat OT3, or something like it:

she’s been gallivanting around with Dave and Karkat under whatever perplexing social arrangement they have settled on.

Another interesting turn of phrase:

ROSE: You will need to travel back into canon and defeat Lord English.

‘Canon’ is certainly a choice of words, given this is being presented as a fanfic. This is spelled out, which I’m going to quote at length:

ROSE: In other words, there is an important distinction between events which can be considered to occur inside canon, outside canon, and those which are not canon at all.

ROSE: The day we went through that door and claimed our reward, we passed a threshold between continua marked by differing degrees of relevance, truth, and essentiality.

ROSE: Those are the three pillars of canon.

JOHN: what?

Rose shoots you an irritated look. You know what that look means. It’s reserved for the sort of bozo who just said “what” once too often.

ROSE: Any event said to take place inside canon will have nonzero values of relevance and essentiality, while maintaining an absolute foundation in truth, by definition.

ROSE: Whereas events outside canon have diminished values of relevance and essentiality. Or, for the most part, can be considered neither relevant nor essential at all.

ROSE: But such events can’t be said to be untrue either. Instead, it’s better to regard their truth value as highly conditional.

ROSE: Are you still following?

In short: what happens in the ‘C’ universe, stays in the ‘C’ universe; it is not ‘essential’, either in the carefully-constructed-timeline sense, or, I think it’s implied, in the development of plot and theme in the story. This is one perspective on how John, Rose etc. choose to return to ‘canon’, but we are implicitly invited to come up with our own.

More precisely, everything after ‘today’ is declared non-canon, which is to say we have completely free rein; everything before ‘today’ is outside of canon, meaning we have explicit invitation to decide what happens ‘off screen’, but I presume we need to accept such things as, e.g. Rose and Kanaya getting married and the rest of the credits upd8.

But because they’re about to enter the 無 state of non-canon, they must tie up the comic’s major loose end, and deal with Lord English - since their ‘escape’ depends on that being canon.

It’s exactly as dumb-clever-convoluted as I want Homestuck to be, at this stage.

Further caveats on this whole ‘canon authentication’ gig: by reaching the ‘victory state’, Rose and all the other main characters have relinquished their ability to play a major role in canon, so John - who retains his retcon powers - has to go it alone. Or not quite alone - he has to pick up different versions of the MCs, from different points in the timeline.

So this is going to be a total fanservice fest huh. But then, I mean who would come back three years later to read a Homestuck epilogue but the kind of nerd who cares very very much about minute details of canon?

Anyway, that aside, back to shipping discourse. Roxy and Callie’s relationship is underlined, while being explicitly vague about the details of that ‘weird, ambiguous’ relationship. The narration has John dwelling on unrequited feelings for Roxy. Also there’s a mention of the ring of life, which is a plot detail I had totally forgotten about. Three years, huh.

Going to highlight this quote:

Suddenly, Calliope bolts upright.

CALLIOPE: of coUrse! what was i thinking.

CALLIOPE: this decision is far too important to be made on an empty stomach.

Callie is exactly right to check if her friend has eaten when he’s suffering an anxiety attack :) :)

Unfortunately she then makes him make another decision... which might imply Homestuck is going to return to a reader-prompted format, or at least a poll, which they’re testing out here. I don’t know. Anyway, the ride never ends, etc. etc.

#momestuck

[momestuck]

My interpretation of the text is that Calliope in the neutral black text voice she adopts at the end of meat is the narrator for all of candy (perhaps excepting the section where Dirk kills himself). She claims to be merely relating the true thoughts of the characters but her biases still lead her to choose which thoughts are truer than others and therefore she exerts just as insidious an influence as he does. Kids and marriage and "redemption" are all her cherub ideals - so sweet they're poison

oh yeah that’s a good thought. once I got to that point in Meat, I did wonder if ‘ordinary’ Calliope was the one writing it, given that they were putting stuff about it on the walls, but either way it makes a lot more sense as Calliope’s vision of a ‘happy ending’ not working out as they intended.

that would go a long way to explaining why the characters constantly exclaim why they’ll be “so happy” etc. though i’d be a little bit surprised that Calliope is so concerned with reproduction. it’s such a traumatic experience for cherubs! But perhaps that’s why they’re so interested.

#momestuck #darkveracity