#Homestuck Commentary

[one-strugling-bean]

Why is no one talking abt this?? It was so sweet and random omg

[mmmmalo]

I'm reading one of the textbooks for my hip-hop media class, called "Prophet of the Hood." It analyzes the political and literary art form of hip-hop (It's extremely insightful, and I recommend it).

In the chapter, “B-boys, Players, and Preacher,” Imani (the author) breaks down black hyper-masculinity and white American's contemporary media “obsessions with the size of black male genitalia show us that an earlier era’s paranoid fixation on black male sexuality and the fear of black humanity” (Imani 120). It made me think back to how you explore Homestuck’s anti-black imagery in Slurquest.

Spectically, Gamzee serves as its manifestation (or at least Karkat's manifested envy for Blackness). Homestuck's BBC obsession can be applied to Gamzee’s Codpiece from reactions of ridicule, aggression, and sexual fixation.

Like one of the Myststuck with Jane; if you click on Gamzee’s codpiece, she becomes transfixed by it and expresses her inability to look away (4827). Karkat and Dave's conversation centers around it for a bit, to laugh at the sheer absurdity and joke about gamzee sexually defiling the Utopia.

KARKAT: I DON'T KNOW!

KARKAT: I DON'T THINK EVEN HE KNOWS.

KARKAT: MAYBE TO MAKE A "GOOD IMPRESSION" ON HIS FAKE ASS RELIGIOUS IDOL, AFTER HE THRUSTS HIS SACRED COD PIECE THROUGH THE GATES OF SHANGRI LA.

DAVE: ahahaha the best thing we ever do together is slam this assholes dumb religion (5937)

I apologize for the length and quality, and I'm wondering about your opinion on this? Or if you have made previous posts regarding the subject? I’m still new to exploring your blog.

This racialized reading of the cod piece def works in the Epilogues, where trolls face discrimination and Gamzee plays the stud to Jake's cuck under the cover of blackrom... But I needed some time to assess whether race is central to the codpiece's symbolic function in Homestuck proper. I think I basically agree, though I have some qualifiers

1 - To your point, the Myststuck appearance is sandwiched between two anxious fantasies of phallic inferiority: Hussie's empty wand/pistol losing to Lord English's staff/AK-47 (declaring magic fake is here a sour grapes expression of the loser's impotence) and Tavros remarking that he "attacked [Vriska] with [his] bogus self-esteem... and paid the ultimate price." No clear racial polarity in the latter encounter, but the first could pose Hussie's whiteness against the blackness of LE's pimp/pharaoh affectations. I also think that scene might reference Drop It Like It’s Hot lyrics? But anyway, these being on either side of the Gamzee's appearance could imply that the codpiece itself is rhetorically positioned as an object of envy (as with Karkat) -- most likely envied by Jane (a transmasculine sentiment like her mustaches), but perhaps also envied by the reader, who gets positioned as the cuck by dint of watching Jane express interest in the package.

2 - But before we get ahead of ourselves, we should also note that the codpiece itself could be the link between the "fake" phalluses on either side. The story later dwells on how Gamzee's godtier costume and his wings are fabricated -- this also calls his codpiece and its contents into question. This preturns us to the eternal question of whether Gamzee "is" (or represents) a black guy or if he "is" (or represents) a white guy affecting blackness... and I don't have an answer for that! Sometimes he seems to occupy both terminals of that binary at whim.

I had a similar problem apprehending Karkat post-Slurquest -- does he represent a trans dude with his Bloody gash aspect symbol and blood-covered planet insulting his efforts to conceal himself, or does he represent a white cis dude who is being ruthlessly feminized by the racist porn tropes that inform the story? I'm not sure that question can be resolved, but both perspectives are useful in apprehending the story around him. The story is engaged with the gendering of race, and narratives around race bleeds into the presentation of individuals' genders.

3 - Bonus: if we narrow our scope for "codpiece" parallels to Myststuck itself, the closest in form (and rhyme!) are probably the "seedpods" that litter Jane's planet. Karkat jokes about thrusting the codpiece into Shangri-La, while seedpods fly up into heavenly Skaia. The pods shoot out water/seeds to fertilize the ground as they fly. The name "seed pod" was earlier applied to Demon Mobster Kingpin's weakpoint, which was some sort of thorny baby/penis.

The potions Gamzee sells are ALSO shaped like the seed pods, but troll "genetic material" is linked to blood so the implicit sexualization of blood vials doesn't really surprise me at this point. And I have a whole other post dealing with the decapitation motifs that involves, but we don't need to get into terrorism theming here I think...

4 - More bonuser bonus: worth noting that the initial penis to haunt Jane was on the Dr. Manhattan poster that Jake gave her. One of Gamzee's functions was to sell love potions to Jane (to coerce Jake into returning her feelings), so his codpiece feels loosely connected to the GIANT MUTANT PENIS jokes that Jake gets from Manhattan and Hulk. If the ambiguities of attraction/identification seen with Gamzee apply, we might infer Jake gives Jane gender envy.

[lime-bloods]

Not an Enigma, and Certainly Not a Curse: the "Ultimate Self" in Hussie's Own Words

I've found myself, lately, in several conversations in a row where the other guy and myself weren't on the same page about what the Ultimate Self meant; and though I welcome the opportunity for discussion, explaining my position over and over again has cost me minutes of my screen life that I simply won't win back. So this post is a departure from my usual fare in that it's more for my own benefit than that of anybody else.

I've been over Davepeta's "superceding bodyless and timeless persona that crosses the boundaries of paradox space" enough already, so if you're interested in the Ultimate Self as it is in Homestuck, I recommend you read "Homestuck's Gnosticism: The Conflict", and then, if that piques your attention, you continue with the follow-up "The World/The Wheel". For the purposes of this post, though, I want to keep analysis, interpretation and hypothesising to a minimum. As the title indicates, this is the Ultimate Self not as I describe it, or as characters describe it, but - so to speak - straight from the horse's mouth.

In Andrew Hussie's commentary on Homestuck: Book 6, p. 312:

Oftentimes, when characters lose certain qualities that came to define them, there's this sense of liberation they seem to experience. They become a happier, more relieved, easier-going version of themselves. When Aradia ditches a defining quality we came to know her by (being dead), she becomes a much happier and self-actualized Aradia. Sollux also seems to be chilling out now that his defining properties (bifurcation, etc.) have been KO'd. He had a mouth full of gnarly teeth that gave him a wicked lisp (gone), eyes full of nasty laser beams (gone, along with his eyesight), and a brain full of doomsday visions and bipolar disorder (also gone—well, maybe not the bipolar thing, because that's probably not how that works, but whatever). You get more of this kind of thing in even higher degrees with some of the fusion stuff that happens later (Arquius, Davepeta), where characters become almost euphoric versions of themselves for having been completely liberated from certain self-limitations which previously defined them. The concept of an "ultimate self," which appears much later, probably has its roots way back to stuff like this, which got the ball rolling on the idea that a more complete or fulfilled self is one that becomes free from mortal limitations, or the idiosyncrasies which comprise a specific instance of one version of yourself. Hence an ultimate self is an aggregate of someone's full potential. It's not just doing away with negative traits, but summing up all iterations of yourself, including ones without those traits, allowing you to move beyond them. Or maybe more accurately, to view them as insignificant in the grand totality of what a person really is.

Importantly, what Hussie does here is draw the conceptual line from the themes of Acts 1-5 to what are often interpreted by some as radically different, even left-field themes through Act 6. Think of this as an extension of one of Homestuck's meta-themes, where the comic undergoes a series of escalations that take simple conflicts to their logical extremes: we start the story worried about a Reckoning which might destroy the Earth, then end up with the more pressing concern that a Rapture is about to end reality as we know it. The Ultimate Self is the end result of the exact same kind of escalation; where the God Tiers are a method of becoming a better version of oneself by merging with one's "ideal" dream body, the Ultimate Self is the logical conclusion that one can become the best version by unifying with every body.

To draw my own conceptual line back to Homestuck: Book 5, page 409:

This connects to the basic question of whether to embrace the regimentation of a heroic path conveniently laid out for you (the expectation), or to reject it as the shallow and rigid confinement of personal destiny (the deviation). These issues are expressed through the fundamental language of platonic idealism: perfect ideas of things, and then specific, imperfect instances of those ideas, or varied permutations, evolutions, or hacks of those ideas through alchemy. The way Sburb "should" go is an ideal (expectation), but the disastrous, chaotic way it actually goes is an imperfect instance (deviation). An "idea" of a person, such as Rose, along with her regimented heroic quest for growth, and all the great things she might imagine herself to become if she followed it, is an ideal (expectation). The messy, flawed, yet more genuinely human individual she does become resulting from her errant choices and rejection of formalism, is an imperfect instance of an ideal (deviation). What's the bottom line here? This is a lot. I know it's a lot. Homestuck is, in fact, a lot.

I've added some of my own emphasis there again, but that whole extract is worth reading. The reason I bolded that part is because this "Platonic idealism" is something Hussie talks about a lot in his commentary, and I think that commentary is essential reading for anyone who wants to even get their foot in the door on this topic. Again, this is something I've blogged about extensively already, so there's more than just Hussie's word to take for it if you're really interested; but for the sake of this post, I'll finish off with, again, what Hussie himself has to say on the matter, all the way back in Homestuck: Book 1, page 123:

With things like Athenums and Perfectly Generic Objects locked and loaded, Sburb architecture seems to be circling widely around a game abstraction-based systemization of Platonic idealism. Homestuck deals with what I am going to roughly characterize as THEMES.

[mmmmalo]

I remember my first meta post that really had people looking at me sideways was me seeing Karkat manifest with his enormous hatecrush right after a montage of John (with a big spade shirt on) growing up with Dad and wondering, hey, does this mean John is spades for Dad? And while I don't think I subscribe to that anymore**, it is still interesting that prior to hearing about the kismesis, our foundational picture of conflict/STRIFE is the parent-child relationship. Your "fated nemesis" is your guardian, Vriska even poses herself as Tavros's final boss (ie "fated nemesis") while pitch-flirting with him by "toughening him up" with hardship like the world's worst tiger mom. She and Bro could shake hands over the violent rearing of Tavros and Dave.

** looking back at Troll This Worthless Human now from a manifestation lens, I'm more inclined to view Karkat as like, the vengeful ghost of Nanna? His anger towards John started with his killing of Nanna, he ends with "FUCK YOU AND THE JOKE BOOK YOU RODE IN ON" (which killed Nanna), and there are odd parallels posed between Karkat's "hate" and like, breast milk. "IT IS A HATE THAT TO FATHOM MUST BE PUT INTO SONG. // SHRIEKED BY THE TEN THOUSAND ROWDY SHOUT SPHINCTERS PEPPERING THE GRUESOME UNDERBELLY OF THE MOST TRUCULENT GOD THE FURTHEST RING CAN MUSTER," Karkat says. "Sphincters peppering the underbelly" is a grotesque picture of an udder, with hate squirting from the teat. Hussie actually painted Horrorterrors as mothers in an anniversary post that same year, describing a squid-orphan who will "never know the taste of its dead mother’s heinous teatbrine" -- Karkat echoes this angle, it seems to me. So when Karkat poses his "pure and hot" hatred as a gift to John I'm sort of imagining Karkat aggressively trying to put his tit in John's mouth.

The milk angle explains the phrase "WHY WOULD I GIVE A PUNGENT WHIPPING LUMPSQUIRT WHAT YOUR NAME IS." -- Karkat is conjuring a teat (lump) whose milk (squirt) has soured (pungent) into (whipping) cream. That this replaced the standard phrasing "give a shit" I think recolors Karkat's next major gross-out, "YOU ARE SUCH AN IGNORAMUS I COULD SHIT MILES OF RAGE SNAKE TO CHOKE YOU TO DEATH." It sounds kind of like baby fever talking again, like Karkat is threatening to clog Egbert's throat with white hot "hate" straight from the blubbery faucet. Pacify that boy! Pap pap papillary. Anyway

i have a broader thesis abt this that i want to write about more cohesively at some point but it feels very crystal clear to me that kismesissitude is like. the literary concept of conflict deconstructed as a form of romance. and i hate being the guy who says "lol people don't understand a story needs conflict" because 99% of people who say that kind of shit are insufferable wankers but i do think shipping minded people have let the concept of "healthy relationships" get in the way of the obvious fact that a relationship founded on conflict is sometimes going to involve someone getting their arm blown off or shot in the chest because well um that is kind of what conflict sometimes leads to. like maybe people are actually looking at it TOO deep to see the forest from the trees with this one

[homestuckteam]

November's Patreon content (including concept art and behind the scenes commentary) is now public!

To see more bonus material as it's released https://www.patreon.com/homestuck

[gendertrickster]

hussie is so fucking curt about the fact that it is very literal domestic abuse being dealt to dave. AND that the training wasn't even good or worthwhile!!!!

[fruitytooty]

something something under appreciated guardian angel

[bluejewel5535]

From the formspring:

Is Kanaya a Lesbian?

Hussie: I think this was pretty obvious a long time ago.

But then, homosexuality in a society where bisexuality is the norm is kind of a different thing. Rather than being a swapped preference, it is a more exacting preference. Somewhat like a fetish for a particular gender. When Karkat was talking to John about it, he indicated trolls don't even have a word for the orientation. It's not something that appears to have any cultural significance to them. Which might seem odd, but then, they're aliens. Maybe a way to view it is how we view people with more exacting preferences, like certain fetishists. We don't actually have common words to describe most people like that, and their presence doesn't have nearly the same social ramifications which homosexuality does. Humans seem to make a very big deal out of homosexuality, while treating other forms of preference as barely worth noting. When Karkat was <3< hitting on John, the reasonable human response was to say "I am not a homosexual." But the troll response would be more like "Sorry, not interested," without invoking orientation. Very much like a guy with a fat fetish isn't too likely to reject a thin girl by saying "Sorry, I am just this HUGE chubby chaser, so I must decline." (CUE FAT VRISKA JOKES AGAIN)

Not that any of this changes how we view Kanaya. From a human perspective, she's an unmistakably gay character.

Since the ashen quadrant doesn't really have any equivalent in human society I guess it would be technically correct to call her a lesbian? But then again, boiling down another cultures experiences to an easily consumable equivalent is a generally gross practice, even if they are fake aliens?... I dunno.

to 8e fair (and this is coming from someone who id's moooooooostly as 8isexual), i think hussie did allude to kanaya 8eing a les8ian in a formspring post at one point. forgive me if im wrong! however i do see people insist on rose 8eing canonically les8ian despite there 8eing more (word of god) evidence to the contrary. i dont want to put too much stock into hussie's word 8ut i figure its relevant in a convers8ion on canonicity. (and apologies for the typing quirk.)

I think the way he put it was her having, like, a fetish for women or something. I don't quite remember. Either way, she's only truly stated to experience some romance towards men in one quadrant, and only shows attraction to women in the other ones.

You know what this means? Kanaya is Homestuck's newest bi lesbian icon.

[ghostedtea]

All designs for my Lifestuck Au (Homestuck/Life series)

Full sheet of em'

[spideypawz]

mrow

[caligvlasaqvarivm]

Why The Ending Sucks

Ok I figured it out. Hear me out:

The entire comic has a running theme best summed up as "who is controlling the narrative, and why are we listening to them?"

Hussie plays a caricaturized version of himself that he describes as "buffoonish" and "oafish". Caricature!Hussie is well-meaning, but a dumb idiot who's incredibly biased in favor of certain characters and in disfavor of others (the most obvious example being his "love" of Vriska, but there's also the way he constantly disparages Eridan). As a result, you have to be VERY SKEPTICAL and VERY CAREFUL when approaching Homestuck's narration, because even when the "best" narrator is at the helm, he's not 100% trustworthy and incapable of giving the readers an unbiased view of the story.

I say "best" because, importantly, Hussie isn't the story's only narrator. He and Doc Scratch explicitly fight over control of the story - Doc Scratch, the child abusing predator who engineered Alternia's fascist murder society, whose shaping of its history is explicitly described by character!Hussie as "fanfic". He is then killed by Lord English, who is described by Hussie as embodying the "toxically masculine" and by extension, the patriarchy, and Caliborn explicitly takes control of the story. John even grapples with Caliborn's version of events, calling out how sexist and misogynistic and shitty it is.

So if we're keeping score: control over the narrative is LITERALLY wrested away from Hussie (who was already struggling to be unbiased) by fascists, abusers, and the patriarchy. It's stressed multiple times that Caliborn/LE are responsible for literally everything that ever happens; the reason the Game Over timeline ends the way that it does is because the alpha timeline is, in essence, the narrative LE is telling: the forces of fascism get to claim the new universe, thereby propogating itself, while friendship dies and all hope is lost.

Who's in control of the narrative, and why are we listening to them?

There are other minor examples of this, too: Aranea is an exposition fairy, and she's biased as fuck and wrong ALL THE TIME about her own teammates. Karkat's explanations and rationalizations are constantly tinged with his own self-loathing and self-blame. Sollux and Meulin are both prophets as per their Mage class, but are both so bogged down by their own emotional issues that the futures they pick out are actively harmful. So on and so on. At nearly every turn, you have to interrogate who's telling the story, what their motivations are, and what they're overlooking or deliberately obfuscating.

So given that this theme is so prevalent, and so thoroughly weighted toward "well, actually, maybe you shouldn't take narration at face value and should interrogate it and come to your own conclusions," it would be Really Weird for the story to go "actually, you can totally trust the narrative now because everyone gets a happy ending".

So, I know that it makes me sound like a conspiracy theorist, but here's my genuine take on Homestuck's ending:

The ending is shitty on purpose because the viewer is intended to take it as a dare to refute the narration and make something better.

Why are we letting character!Hussie tell the story? He's a biased idiot. Why are we letting the various avatars of LE and Caliborn tell the story? They're fascist, misogynistic, predatory assholes.

And - because Homestuck is a story about life - why are we letting idiots, assholes, abusers, and creeps dictate the story of real life? The world is full of forces that would try to take control of the story and make everyone else play along, represented in microcosm within the text of Homestuck. We cannot let those forces win.

So please go out and do something kind and hopeful and loving in the world today. Thanks for reading.

[one-strugling-bean]

Reading the Homestuck Epilogues for the 1st time and like......

What the ever loving fuck is happening with Jade Karkat and Dave???

Omfg its so awkward to read, whyyyyy

Jade they are so obviously uncomfortable??? And DaveKat, shes clearly not understanding your discomfort how have you not had an intervention yet???

^ accurate representation of me reading that "heheheheh.... positions too!!!" line

I dont even know man its so awkward, and im sure its only gonna get worse...

Im gonna continue reading. Hopefully my next post abt this will be a bit less painful

[mmmmalo]

I think an improved Slurquest would do well to dwell on the echeladders for a bit... some of those rungs are quite mean. Like for Jane on 4269, BRITCHES RIPPER and BREACH HEALER are complementary references to tearing/repairing pants, plus what might be sneaky reference to whales via "breach". BATTERLASS seems less like a mere reference to Jane's love of baking in the context of the weight comments, and SODAJERK'S CONFIDANTE seems to imply overindulgence in the sarsaparilla fountain. SNORKBAIT SPORKPLUG is plainly an excuse to call her a pig, as Caliborn later does outright. And, to pivot a bit, OVERBITE RESTART uses her status as a rebooted John to sneak in a veiled r-slur.

Insults on the registers of weight and intelligence are misogynist motifs that can be found throughout the story, but since the echeladders are understood as a medium for passive-aggressive ribbing in a way that the broader story isn't, they might be a good starting point? In terms of persuading people that they should be on the lookout for sneaky invective elsewhere.

[lime-bloods]

Doc Scratch is an exercise in trust between reader and author. when he takes over Homestuck's narrative it's natural for us to distrust him on instinct: we were used to the other guy telling the story, who's this new guy and what are his credentials?

but by that point we already know that "the other guy" was just a fallible human; one locked in an attic by bullies and tormented by stuffed wolf heads, no less. the only reason we have to "trust" the first guy is because he's the devil we know. when Hussie calls Scratch's version of events "troll fanfiction" there's no real reason to believe that Hussie is "right" and Scratch is "wrong"; whether we choose to believe one author over the other is ultimately arbitrary. indeed, out of the two, Scratch is the only one with any real claim to "omniscience", even if it is partially compromised omniscience; so in all possibility we should believe him over the human one, right?

probably Scratch's main qualification for reliable author is that he does not lie. but if you already distrust this guy, what reason is there to necessary believe him when he says this, right? he could be lying about lying. so in truth whether we believe what Scratch says or not is, once again, totally arbitrary. like Rose's inquiries as to whether the Horrorterrors are evil or not, this is a fruitless line of questioning that ultimately achieves nothing. more important questions present themselves; why might Scratch be lying or telling the truth? what reason do we have to believe - or disbelieve - the things he says?

I've pointed out before that Scratch's policy of honesty reflects less on himself and more on Homestuck's narrative as a whole. Hussie's own commentary makes the exact same point: "...this is where some of his views as a nefarious alt-author figure start leaking out. If you imagine that his spiel here is being applied to a philosophy on storytelling, it tracks pretty well. [...] He isn't even that much worse than me in terms of things like authorial sadism, jerking the reader around in certain ways, self-indulgence." (Homestuck: Book 6, p. 388) So in deciding whether or not you "trust" Scratch, what you are really being asked to do is decide whether or not you trust Homestuck itself; you're being forced to either engage with Homestuck on its own terms, on the merits of its own themes - or to disregard the text entirely!

[homestuckteam]

October's Patreon content (including concept art and behind the scenes commentary) is now public!

To see more bonus material as it's released https://www.patreon.com/homestuck

[gendertrickster]

wait. fuck

roxy did not just live here. she fucking grew up in this lab.