#denexustic radiation

[hms-no-fun]

This is probably gonna be a longer and potentially more spicy ask than usual so apologies for that. I've been reading through the new chapters as they've been released (great stuff by the way) and I've noted the frequent switching back and forth of jade/silverbark going by her original name (jade) or her moniker/title (silverbark/harbinger silverbark ) depending on who she is currently talking to, the nature of her relations with the person and the context of the conversation. One example being her last conversation with karkat at the end of the latest chapter. This along with the nature of deunistic radiation you mentioned previously and the theme of divergence/character divergence throughout this series so far, makes me wonder if eventually we may reach a point where she drops her original name and goes solely by her moniker/title (at least for a while anyway).

i've got two responses to this. the first is

but the second is a bit more credulous. only a bit though. yes, godfeels has given multiple characters the opportunity to change their names, and this is partially a result of my desire to get away from the iconography of homestuck so that we can focus more on unpacking the themes of homestuck while telling a more “original” story. but i’d caution against the assumption that changing one’s name is the natural endpoint of self-actualization in godfeels.

is silverbark plural? is jade a mask she puts on around other people? is what we see in A1 the code-switching of an autist or a manipulator? these are excellent questions to be asking! but on the matter of names as such, let’s remember that silverbark is thousands of years old. a name change and gender realization is one thing for 22-year-old june egbert because she’s young and inexperienced. we see “june” as the hatched egg, the evolved form, the destination. but what if we fast-forwarded another hundred years, and she’s had all that time to live and be comfortable in her own body. would she remain rooted in transfemininity? would she still feel like “june”? does one break their gender or identity once, and no more?

among the many themes in its bucket, godfeels 3 is about change. changing people, changing times, changing expectations, changing lives and homes and friendgroups... and i’ve lived long enough to see the barest jagged tip of the truth that no two people “grow up” in quite the same way. “growing up” isn’t a static thing either, it isn’t affixed to age and it’s not a one-way street nor is it a bridge you can only cross once. i tried to show this in microcosm with dare in ch8, how they keep having life-affirming epiphany after life-affirming epiphany, only to backslide and start over from a place of only minimal progress. people can get better, and then they can backslide, and then they can get better again, and on and on, and nothing is ever done until it’s dead.

all of which is to say that i’m not interested in repeatedly showing the same types of change when i’ve got such a wildly weird cast of traumatized blorbos to poke and prod at. if june’s name is her planting a flag in her own identity, then perhaps to silverbark names and titles are a means of maintaining the area around that flag? what is “mary” to kanaya, what is “risk,” what is “dare” except a shield put up around something that needs protecting? or that’s worth protecting? for different reasons, to different ends. it’s all relative.

lastly, i would also caution against looking at a character changing their name and going, “ah, denexustic radiation!” not because it’s necessarily wrong (at least according to what VV said in the ch8 epilogue), but because it’s the boring lab-coated science officer answer to a profound philosophical question. which, you know, isn’t really an answer at all. there may be times when denexus is the culprit, or at least partially, but in most cases it’s the difference between wearing a glow in the dark radon watch for a few months when you were a kid, vs airsurfing in the radiation cloud of the chernobyl nuclear disaster.

anyway, i’ll leave us on a passage from the homestuck epilogues that is very important to me:

[hms-no-fun]

what does denexustic mean?

ALRIGHT MOTHERFUCKERS LET’S TALK ABSENTIA METAPHYSICS.

to understand what “denexustic” means, we have to talk about the place beyond places, what VV calls Absentia. if we understand “reality” in this universe to be composed of the 12 aspects, that which is exterior to them must be existential antimatter. more specifically, if we understand “reality” in this universe to be exclusively that which is relevant to the narrative, the exterior of that must be narrative irrelevance. the “velvet noise” of Absentia is pure irrelevance- the carcasses of dead universes and shed timelines, drowned in what VV describes as “denexustic radiation.” let’s take a look at what VV says to acanon J- actually, hold on, let’s just go ahead and make it official that acanon June’s name is July, with full credit to Ash on the fan server for suggesting it. ANYWAY let’s take a look at what VV says to July:

first, it’s important to draw attention to VV’s final response here- “another articulation of the same phenomenon.” something i really wanted to highlight with this epilogue is that all of these terms are descriptors of observable phenomena, but the terms are not themselves the phenomenon itself. if we accept that there exists in this universe an “archetypal self” for each individual person (who is a character in a narrative), we can immediately intuit how ones might pathologize or medicalize the phenomenon of straying away from the center on your distribution of self. one man’s “divergence syndrome” is one woman’s “getting old” is the audience’s “out of character.” this is a microcosm of the process that occurs on the macro scale with frog falls- if a character becomes irrelevant enough, they cease to be recognizable as that character; if a universe becomes irrelevant enough, it ceases to have shape or form in the audience’s imagination. but we should also remember something else that VV said, back in [S] saturday 2:

i think we must conclude that there exists a gradient between relevance and irrelevance. the realityquake is the result of a violent divergence from the “relevant” path, in this case the path of the Homestuck Epilogues, but it exists purely in ideaspace. it’s a conceptual realityquake, existing more in the audience’s mind than within the fiction (but, paradoxically, it only exists in the audience’s mind because the fiction prompted them to imagine it). even within the text of homestuck itself, we’ve seen that irrelevant timelines have a limited lifespan- thinking of davesprite’s origins here. so this death isn’t instant in every case (though it certainly can be, as we see of July’s reality once she leaves it), and we can safely presume i think that in the vast majority of cases that this stray from relevance is neither noticeable nor negative in any meaningful sense. it is only from the specific context of measuring this phenomenon on the artificial sliding scale of relevance to irrelevance that we see how this can be viewed as harmful or dangerous in any sense. the point, here, is to call attention to the fact that how you conceptualize the world you observe is deeply tied to the language you use to understand it, and that we take a whole lot of things about the world for granted without realizing it simply by virtue of the language we use.

but let’s get our hands dirty and actually define some words, starting with “denexus.” the root word here is obviously “nexus,” which we can define as a central connection between two or more groups or ideas. in this case, we’re talking about the nexus between one’s archetypal self, and the self they currently embody. if a person is exposed to denexustic radiation, that nexus begins to corrode. at low levels, this can cause the kind of character divergence we saw across the board in 3.1 (for instance, catboy dave and his nascent gender arc could easily be read as an “ascended headcanon” that some readers might feel makes no sense for the character). this is what VV describes as “fabulograde dementia,” which is itself a spectacularly medicalized term for something that, again, July described as just “getting old.” at higher levels of exposure, denexustic radiation can cause “fabulograde paramnesia,” which can range in severity from remembering your own memories differently than how they actually occurred, to remembering entire other people’s lives as your own. the key thing to understand here is that this is not a problem of psychology per se, though it certainly manifests on the level of the psychological. “fabulograde paramnesia” as a term deliberately fits alongside “retrograde amnesia,” so let’s take those words apart. retro-grade in structural terms means “back step,” which in the context of amnesia refers to losing significant chunks of one’s memory- by comparison, fabulo-grade means “story step,” meaning in relationship with one’s archetypal narrative, which exists in space as a natural law of this universe. so again, we are talking about abstract ideatic connections, we’re talking about the nexus, we’re talking about being out of character, we’re talking about truth/relevance/essentiality, we’re talking about getting old. different words for describing an observable event, each of them based in alternative perspectives on and relationships with the text. as VV would say, they’re all different articulations of the same phenomenon.

obviously there’s a lot of jargon in the ch8 epilogue, but i think it’s relatively simple to sort out what it all means if you just sit and look at it and investigate some of the root words. none of it was chosen at random, and these concepts will be iterated on a lot in various ways over the course of the rest of this story. if you’re still confused about any of these concepts, or anything else that got talked about in the epilogue or elsewhere, my askbox remains open :)

[hms-no-fun]

RE the flashbacks at the start of /friday 1, in particular Vriska's memory where seemingly she's getting her robot arm lubricated by Terezi while they're all hid out in the meteor lab, and there's mention of the humans. By the time they were holed up there, she had gone god tier already, which restored her arm. So it seems like there's some... blurring of the timeline going on here? I wonder how much that's intentional unreliability vs, like, "I was going for a vibe, don't worry about it"

oh yeah so the explanation for that is uh [glances at smeared ballpoint pen scribblings on palm] denexustic radiation, yeah, that's it