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Also congrats to NYC for getting Mamdani in the primary, hope y'all can push him through the race proper

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Scored a gorgeous print of Fallingwater at work that will make for some choice plausibly deniable Lalonde memorabilia

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saw your post from a while ago about dragons and horses being conflated in hs, and i have to ask, have you heard of longma? (dragon horses) i don't think they're super relevant but i figured i would throw that out there in case you've never heard of them before

Oh, that post connecting Zahhak to Azdaja! I never did end up getting much out of that... and like you said, it doesn't seem like the Longma are pertinent either. I'm not really sure Homestuck contains references to Chinese spirituality/philosophy beyond the abundant yin-yang imagery? Most of the comic's references to Eastern religion focus on India and the Middle East... I suppose somebody's probably written on the subject back in the era of myth-oriented approaching to Homestuck, I should look into that.

Still! Nice to know there's precedent for the dragon-horse, ty

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For a doodle request : how about rose with the one ring?

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The clown twins rotated the "N" in BARNUM 90 degrees to make the Sindarin word for darkness BARZUM, so I wonder if Tagora Gorjek got his nickname Gorgor from Mordor's northern region "Gorgoroth", which seems to translate to "extreme horror" or similar. His story doesn't have anything to do with the LoTR afaict, but the same is true of the clown twins

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PM and WV literally destroyed the rings in the volcano so this isn't exactly new but I'd missed how Jade's house is positioned as the tower hosting the Eye of Sauron

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I remember back when a lot of fandom energy was devoted to sussing out the Canonical class pairings there were a lot of arguments pushing back against the Seer/Mage pairing advocated by BKEW, even without reference to character actions people seemed to take strong exception to the suggestion that those concepts could even overlap. And while I don't like that argument on its face (Prince/Bard went uncontested after all) if I wanted to go back in time and humor it for funsies, I think I would suggest that Mage acts as an abbreviation of Image. BOOM, problem solved

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Do you think that pipeorgankind could be considered a funeral dirge? Likewise the scattering of fireflies, oil, candy dust as analogous to the scattering of ashes?

My working theory is that by completing the quest, John Egbert inadvertently cut off her transition at the knees - which is paralleled by the dead John Egbert (the Egbert that had to die) in order for John to retcon to safety

Unfortunately even though I reread the section with your thoughts in mind, I couldn't get out of the Calliope mindset of giggling about dicks. Roxy cracks a That's What She Said joke when John mentions the Huge Organ at play and I'm inclined to take the phallic humor seriously: both the pipes pouring oil on John and his decision to splash that oil all over the comic strike me as bukkake jokes. Especially since Alt-Callie (via Jade) describes the scattering of oil as an assertion of "mastery over his confining reality" -- retcon powers aside, that resonates with the story's engagement with feminist critique of pornography as a venue to assert patriarchal dominance. Like the time when Dirk (the GameBro > PlayBoy) offers to "annoint" Jane from shoulder to shoulder, introducing oil into what was supposed to be an image of knighting someone with a sword, the implicit suggestion of bukkake is affirmed when Jane take a "rain check" on the proposed splashing. We juxtapose this with Dirk asserting mastery over the confining reality of Jeanne Betancourt's Pony Pals by splashing his text all over it. In the same way way that Rose's quest to play the rain seems to be a ploy to have her embrace a traditional feminine role, I'm gathering that LOWAS is here presenting John with an abstracted ideal of masculine conquest.

On the other hand, part of the reason Dirk "The Gay Guy" Strider is the poster child of this line of thought is that the feminist critique of pornography above is often presented as a piece of homophobic/transphobic rhetoric, in which any instance of Masculine becoming Feminine is treated as a sexual violence. Hence my confusion with Grandpa/Jake, where scenes that seem to imply a history of assaulting Jade are also just calling him a f*ggot. So it does stand out to me that after the grand ostensibly patriarchal pornographic display, we see John walk by the wreckage of Dad's car, a symbol of death/rebirth from masculine to feminine... that bit of imagery makes me sympathetic to your funeral dirge reading.

At the end of the line John meets up with Roxy, and I can't tell if this is 1. the narrative's requisite heterosexual pairing as outlined in Wizardy Herbert, furthering affirming John as ascendant patriarch or 2. Roxy acting as the image of femininity with which John is merging, in line with the car imagery. Even the reference to the end of Con Air ("hello hummingbird") as they hold hands doesn't disambiguate it, since that movie had some implicit gay stuff going on too (eg Poe's prison buddy being a diabetic who gets his sugar through needles, making him overlap with Poe's "hummingbird" wife). Maybe it's a messy admixture of both -- we also see Roxy claiming Bro's highly phallic sword in this section, so perhaps John is likewise acting symbolically as the image of masculinity with which Roxy merges? I really can't tell

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naya learning crochet/evil from rose

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since it's generally agreed that Elnina and Lanino's relationship represents Toriel and Asgore's divorce in some way, who or what does Rouxls represent? In your opinion

That perspective's been kinda weird to me cause in what world does Toriel wanna get back with Asgore. I guess if you're parsing Chapter 3 as Kris's dream world it could express a HOPE that your divorced parents still love each other and will get back together any day now... but the end of Chapter 4 indicates that a new party to the relationship isn't exactly welcome, so it's hard to parse Rouxls as part of the wish in that capacity.

Because there's a societal narrative around divorce where parents stick together for the child's sake, I briefly humored the idea that the throuple misrepresented the family unit, with Rouxls/Kris acting as the child... but there's no sense of Kris imposing themself upon the family like with Rouxls. You could argue for Rouxls as Asgore, a 3rd party trying to squeeze into the middle of a perfectly contented mother/child pairing, but I don't see anything else in common between Toriel‐Kris and Elniña-Laniño (besides a loose commonality between their mixed gender names and Kris' gender neutrality -- but trans stuff is all over this game, so that doesn't say much)

Shrug! If there's a way to make that paradigm work idk what it is.

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This is clearly a rendition of O Holy Night and nothing more.

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Wall mosaic from the Mosque of Al Burdayni in Cairo, produced in the 17th century. Via.

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Very much liked the Phoenician Scheme.

Visuals were great as usual but predictably I'm mainly latching onto the rhyme between the small Egyptian funerary urns and the many hand grenades being passed around -- between this implicit association of THE ORIENT and DEADLY EXPLOSIONS, the plane bombings, the revolutionary militia, and the symbolic destruction of a public works project by Benedict Cumberbatch and his "Biblical" beard, I'm gathering that the phrase "Phoenician Scheme" is probably a cheeky euphemism for "Terrorist Plot" on some level. Feels like a return to the political intrigue of Isle of Dogs, where Anderson was messing around with media distortion (e.g. the reporter's blond afro echoes the yellow bead of wasabi poison that kills Science) and vaccine paranoia (e.g. a brief joke about the dog flu vaccine doubling as forced sterilization)...

Zsa Zsa's numerous fiery flight-based deaths/rebirths also lend themselves to reading "Phoenician" as "Phoenix-like", but I think that adds to the above: his ultimate decision to forego his personal stake in the (earthly) utopian project in order to ensure its success strikes me as a sympathetic depiction of the logic of a suicide attack. Which would give another edge to Zsa Zsa's increasingly urgent reflections on the possibility of afterlife... the suicide attack was also an implicit motif in Isle of Dogs (e.g. Spots' false-tooth missiles being an aggressive variation on a cyanide capsule concealed in one's mouth), so the motif wouldn't be new to Anderson's work.

A while back I had hit a wall wrt misrepresentations of the middle east in Homestuck, so it was a pleasant surprise that the Phoenician Scheme seemed to be conceived on a similar basis. Ideally Anderson's methods will make it easier to discern Hussie's.

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