#or when their trauma is just 'oh he's crazy/evil/mentally ill bc he's sad about not having a boyfriend'

[lord-squiggletits]

The thing about the fandom headcanon that calls Pharma Ratchet's crazy ex and treats him like some sort of stalker or intrusion on Ratchet's love life (usually with Drift) is that

On one level, it's already annoying when a perfectly fine/interesting character is reduced to nothing but "bitter ex getting in the way of The Actual OTP" because it simplifies the character to only exist as a satellite to someone's ship (the bitter loser who can't let go/doesn't deserve person A/etc) instead of having their own life going on.

But when it comes to Pharma it's particularly annoying because it reduces Pharma to "the crazy stalker/bitter ex", framing Pharma as if he's the villain ruining Ratchet's life with his inability to just let go,

When in actual canon it was Ratchet who was best friends with Pharma their whole life (they're even shown together in the Functionist Universe). Ratchet who ditched Pharma with barely a word of goodbye (before Delphi, and ironically the same conversation where Pharma asked Ratchet if he should accept the station at Delphi). And it was Ratchet who asked Drift if he was scared of going into DJD territory as an ex-Decepticon, but treated Pharma like scum for killing patients under threat of being murdered by the DJD. And Ratchet who stole Pharma's hands. And Ratchet who tried to manipulate Pharma by using his deepest insecurities against him on Luna-1.

It's not like Pharma is some rando who Ratchet barely knew. They were BEST FRIENDS whose friendship was severed on a really messy note. Pharma has every right to be invested in a relationship/friendship that almost literally lasted he and Ratchet's entire life. It sucks when people implicitly treat Pharma as if he's obsessed and should just move on when the reality is that it was Ratchet who first terminated their relationship with no explanation or even a goodbye (pre Delphi) and then with leaving Pharma to die and then stealing his hands (post-Delphi). So is Pharma really "obsessed" or is he just understandably upset about being betrayed by the person who should've known and cared about him the most?

So like, it's really annoying when Ratchet has so many flaws in canon and questionable ways he treated Pharma, but the fandom just calls Pharma a crazy stalker ex as if Pharma is the freak who's overreacting and mentally insane while Ratchet is just some guy who was only minding his own business. To me it's not even a matter of shipping, it's just the fact that Ratchet DID handle his relationship with Pharma super fucking poorly. And I really wish more people in the fandom acknowledged that instead of framing Pharma as the evil/crazy/overly attached one for being upset about being ditched. Pharma has reasons to be pissed off and driven to get revenge on Ratchet, and even if his romantic feelings towards Ratchet might play somewhat of a role, Pharma is way more than just some stalker ex who's evil because he's crazy and wants Ratchet to be his boyfriend.

I mean Pharma literally says on the page that the reasons he's angry at Ratchet are for ruining his plans at Delphi and for stealing his hands. Even though Pharma-as-Adaptus orders Drift shot later in LL, it's not explicitly framed as some romantic jealousy and could also just as easily be construed as Pharma getting revenge for Drift cutting his hands off. I don't think Pharma ever even talks about or mentions Drift in the entire story. It's very clear that Pharma's beef/obsession with Ratchet is entirely between him and Ratchet and Drift is only a footnote in all of the reasons Pharma is pissed off.

#squiggposting #pharma apologism #not to mention it also sucks when a character is deeply traumatized and psychologically scarred #and theyre dismissed as just being fucking crazy lmao. as if they ended up that way for no reason at all #or when their trauma is just 'oh he's crazy/evil/mentally ill bc he's sad about not having a boyfriend' #i killed the functionist pharma headcanon and by god i will kill the stalker ex pharma headcanon too #the whole thing is just a peak example of protagonist centered morality honestly #ppl cant handle the idea of one of the good guy fan favorites being flawed and culpable for his mistakes #so instead it's the other unpopular barely existent character who gets tacked with the blame #it's sorta like how ratchet canonically has way more internalized functionism than pharma does #but for the longest time the fandom made pharma the posh elitist snob of a functionist

[landofquartzandmelody]

ok i finished hiveswap act 1 lmao. i actually liked most of it a lot i think? and there’s a lot to talk about and there’s also a few things which were like.. Incredibly annoying. my overall impression was good tho! i’m going to dump my thoughts under a readmore though so no one accidentally gets spoiled

obvious warning for that !!

the setting is actually incredibly detailed and i occupied myself for a long time clicking on everything in the background? the art was really pretty and the actual gameplay itself was really smooth and not glitchy at all.

the video cutscenes didn’t play for me at all lmao. I had a few tabs of text-only websites open, and join.me, and that was it. i couldn’t easily lower the settings to make it run smoother either? which was really annoying, and i don’t see why the cutscenes were sooo much harder for my computer to get through than the actual gameplay.

the only other glitch i had was a framing glitch in jude’s treehouse i think

i liked most of the puzzles a lot and it all seemed very organic and fun. using items on other items was pretty cool, and i only got stuck like once or twice.

i really did not like the snake game mainly because i had to swap to using my keyboard for that and that alone lmao.

the monster fights were REALLY fun, i thought. they had a really classic homestuck feel.

it was kind of hard to walk up and down the stairs, actually. there wasn’t enough room to click where you needed to go and that was a bit irritating

i really really really loved the harleyclaire mansion!! everything about the first part of the game was REALLY good!!!

there’s so much to get into with jake and joey and jude and anna claire that it’s nuts tbh. but i really liked everything about that. imo it dealt with parental issues in a lot more depth than hs ever did, and surprisingly nuanced parental issues is definitely an hs thing. but joey’s problems with jake are a lot more fleshed out and realistic.

definitely one of the themes is that the adults in joey’s life have never been there for her. her mom isn’t there because she’s dead, roxy isn’t ‘there’ because she’s irresponsible and is already developing drinking problems, and jake isn’t there because he’s always been somewhere else. so there’s something interesting when xefros talks about parents there

i think i was expecting jake to be a decent father so i was definitely really sad when it became obvious that he was kind of.. not? and it’s evident that he’s really screwed joey up, but i think that it’s also very in line with how canon portrays jake. like his biggest flaw was being unwilling to put in the emotional work and commitment that his friends needed.

sometimes he was definitely scared of those, so i can easily conceive of jake taking the easy way out and heading out to trawl the pacific for a meteor baby.

the line about how ‘having a second thing which is sort of like the first thing but somewhere else is exactly the same as having the first thing’

it’s interesting that jade and joey both do the same thing by projecting on their dead guardians. jade’s thinking is a lot more magical than joey’s, but it really shines a light on how everything we assumed about grandpa harley was through the eyes of a girl who never really got to know him.

and like he died well before he could disappoint her, so.

it was REALLY really sad but i don’t think i actually have a problem with it.

part of the reason i don’t have a problem with it is bc it made joey claire’s characterization SO much more compelling

because she’s very angry at her father for doing the things he did, and is openly disparaging about him, and even chooses to use her mother’s last name instead of his? but she’s not angry or hard or bitter

i love my hard trauma girls but it’s really nice that joey just gets kinder and better in the face of a childhood full of neglect- without being pushed to forgive or minimize the damage that was done to her

the detail about joey absolutely refusing to use guns because she doesn’t want to be like her dad, and choosing to love animals and heal them was so good. and how that’s framed as an act of rebellion?

like the idea that kindness can be radical but that =/= forgiveness.

we didn’t see a lot of jude but i loved everything about him so much

like it was pretty subtle so i don’t know if y’all would consider it ‘canon’ but the bit where joey says that ‘when things got bad with my brother, our babysitter took him to see a doctor, and he was better for a while’ seems like it’s saying joey is being treated for a mental illness of some sort?

which seems completely in line with his character! he almost falls into the trap where it’s like ‘we all called this person crazy for seeing all these conspiracies but he was right all along’ but he doesn’t and that’s nice. it’s very subtle and pretty respectful imo. (also, fox mulder)

he and joey are the cutest siblings in the entire universe, and he was so sweet to her. he seems very earnest about wanting to protect her and caring about her.

the part where his birds left him made me SOOOO SAD. it was so sad. i felt so bad for him. I named dammek’s catdeer Frohike to pay my respects even though frohike was the worst gunman.

i’m really worried about him tho. i hope he’ll be okay without joey around

joey claire is such an obvious lesbian

honestly i know a lot of people were nervous because it seemed like it was setting her up to have a relationship with xefros but i absolutely don’t think that’s the case, just because she’s definitely gay.

every time she looked at a picture of a girl in the harleyclaire mansion she had one gay thought or another, and her entire room was plastered completely in images of pretty girls. not ONE guy.

there was also a lot of dialogue which implied she felt guilty or ashamed of how she felt when looking at girls, or like she wasn’t sure if she was allowed to, or if people would judge her for having pretty pictures of girls on her walls.

also her password being the name of a boy she has certainly never met or talked to, and who we never saw an image of (despite said guy being an actor? i think) or heard mentioned before

the scene where xefros mentions he is a boy who likes boys and joey is like ‘oh. huh’ seems to me like it’s very obviously from the pov of a lesbian who had absolutely no idea what a lesbian is, or that she is allowed to be one. 

i think joey is definitely going to realize she is gay at some point in the future acts

i didn’t expect to like or care about xefros as much as i did?

he was obnoxious at first but basically as soon as we figured out what was up with dammek and that xefros thought he’d been speaking to dammek he became 100% less annoying and i started liking him a lot lmao.

he and joey had a really sweet friendship, actually.

homestuck breezed over a lot of the more horrible things about troll civilization, but hiveswap did a very good job of making it patently obvious how horrible troll civilization is for xefros and other lowbloods, and i think it has a redeeming effect on the Other Stuff.

i like that they made it obvious what’s happening is horrible and needs to like, stop or whatever, and don’t like... condemn the revolutionaries.

his situation isn’t really played for laughs or mocked.

that being said a lot of the writing for dammek was really really annoying and dumb.

people like dammek definitely exist and i think hiveswap does a faaairly decent of not conflating dammek being a shithead with the rest of the movement? the joke about personal property was very very annoying lmao but the movement itself is portrayed as legitimate and necessary. it’s a dumb reactionary type of joke but it doesn’t ruin the game for me

i do think he’s going to Learn To Be A Better Person while he’s hanging out with jude. i don’t think he’s going to get a vriska type arc at all but i do think he’ll learn the error of his ways.

i wish that we’d gotten to see a bit more of his personal motivation for being so intense about revolution.

i ALSO wish they hadn’t used like actual symbols of movements in the bg that was really annoying and crass imo. and if they had to, i wish xefros had had an anarchist flag or whatever.

abuse / neglect are big themes in hs so i’m not really surprised at all that they came back? they definitely shouldn’t have advertised dammek and xefros as being cute moirails though because it’s kind of scummy to do a bait and switch like that.

i don’t think the game’s going to be hetero though. xefros and joey would be incredibly ugly and i doubt it’ll happen

i also think homestuck the original thing is actually pretty on the nose about class stuff, even if it does feel the need to like couch that in Fake Alien Racism? at the very least i’d be surprised if hiveswap tried to pull the You’re The Same As Your Oppressors thing

i’m still annoyed that there was so much promo art of xefros and dammek being cute together when the actual game condemned every interaction they had. i think that it would have been possible to say the same things as they wanted to while also not making dammek a crazy leftist stereotype and grounding him in reality like a real person.

to be fair, we are going to get a sequel game with him, so he’ll probably be fleshed out a LOT better then.

trizza is somehow so much more evil than expected? how evil she is feels a lot more real than like, the condesce, tbh. she feels like a real person

i’m SUPER curious about cridea now and i can’t wait to see what she’ll be like