#presumably all my old piss meta folds into this

[mmmmalo]

If I ever finish my book, its subtitle will be "A Paranoid Reading of Homestuck" I think. Describes both form and content

Mobster Kingpin (whose bust is depicted by a mosaic of urban murals, who lords over the dollhouse world the heros inhabit) is located, like many of Hussie's villains, along the 4th wall, and his career of moonshinery seems related to a characterization of perception as the distillation of the perceived objects' essence -- Roxy's orange pumpkins give way to Dirk's orange soda, as one of the little ways their early relationship s premised upon a division between simplicity and abstraction. In Homestuck abstraction kills the simple (RIP Jaspers), and Dirk becomes a Daunting Text when he "sucks the fun out of shit. like a turd hungry dracula" -- a phraseology that returns us to the liquid conception of essence and points us to Kanaya, "rainbow drinker" being among other things a euphemism for the eyeball, which takes in color -- and insofar as troll reproduction is vaguely judicial in tone, the drones holding their buckets like scales, the Mother Grub seems posed in part as yet another threatening paradigm of viewership, demanding of you your essence. The earliest instance of this is in act 1: John's allusion to being allergic to the scorn of the peanut gallery is followed by a commercial for Hi-C Ectocooler -- a weirdly obtuse seeding of Her Imperious Condescension, whose character is downstream of a more general racialization of the 4th wall. Act 1 drags the sylladex into the fear of abstraction, first by having the narration express apprehension toward alien lingo like "captchalogue", and again when John drops the cat-killer, causing his arms (both fake and real) to be locked away in a box. Right? Right.

Dave shouts/throws his NINJA SWORD at a sticky fingered crow (crows would later, in a dream, act as Dave's personal 4th walls) and implicitly hurls an N WORD at a black figure, contributing to the comic's general air of racialized paranoia. A stupid pun, yes. Prior to this incident, there was a collision in Dave's hash map between NINJA SWORD and JUICE which, given the pejorative status of the former, suggested the latter might be an implicit JEWS. A stupid pun, yes. But as point 1 indicate, we actually have a pretty broad pattern of paranoia surrounding "juice"

The first time I became aware of possible antisemitism in Homestuck was a scene where Jack Noir commands all the Felt to get in the oven -- a couple readers wondered if it were a coincidence that the page had been published on Holocaust Remembrance Day, like a sort of hostile spin on the Christmas alchemy binges, or the New Years ball-drops at Jade and Jane's towers. With point 1 in mind in strikes me as curious that the (tentative) archetypally antisemitic archetype of the story would be the locking away of "juice" in a container, here invoked by the genocidal antisemitism of the Nazis. Likewise the way Lord English's manic glare often resolves into an 88 -- a number twice invoking the 8th letter of the alphabet H and thereby Heil Hitler -- would be consistent with the eye's general depiction as that which distills "juice". I had some anons wondering if the hints that the Mother Grub collects the blood of Alternia's children amounted to a blood libel smear, and I still don't know tbh, but we've apparently problematized rainbow drinking from another angle, so cheers to that

That the hostility towards abstraction might be among Homestuck's ciphers for antisemitism casts a different light on John's sharp rejection of psychoanalytic paradigms and "psycho-babblery"...? Like Freud is being invoked partly for his Jewishness... and that Freud's widely considered indefensible is utilized to let the antisemitic antiintellectualism pass through smoothly, I guess...