Ive read a few of your LO esaays (all of which are really well written!) But I was wondering something.
Many people talk about how Rachel loves the story Lolita, and has talked about it before, but nobody has ever shown screenshots. I was wondering if you had any or knew where to find any. This is just being curious, not doubting your statements
Ah so I actually responded to a comment just like this a while back on reddit with all the receipts (it was particularly someone who was claiming it was all "made up" because like you, they couldn't seem to get any proof of it, which is totally valid) so I just had to go and dig those back up haha
DISCLAIMER: I want to make it clear that a lot of people tend to run amok with these suspicious pieces of evidence towards Rachel either "thinking Lolita was a romance" or being a pedophile. I want to make it clear that I do not think any of this is proof towards either of these claims. I do not think that she blatantly thinks Lolita is a romance, or that she was trying to perpetuate pedophilia in any sort of way, just that she may have wanted to have her cake and eat it too by acknowledging the age gap but embracing it anyways as she does throughout LO. I think, at best, she's a terrible writer who's still using the things she liked when she was a teenager / young adult as inspiration without actually going back and re-analyzing those things with an updated 38-year-old viewpoint (as she does this with a lot of things, not just Lolita). Claiming that the following receipts is 'proof' of Rachel being some kind of sex pest / pedophile is at best not constructive at all for the real discussions to be had concerning LO's subtext, and at worst, a serious claim that can ruin someone's life if thrown around without cause. Let's please be responsible and level-headed in how we approach this topic.
Old MySpace + DeviantArt bios with her interests listed:
Her old art site where she labels herself as a "lolita vamp" artist:
Her intro post from a lolita-themed forum she ran:
She does express that it's not THAT kind of lolita, which I'd like to think she never intended in the first place, but it's really telling that LO still manages to be that kind of lolita in a lot of ways, to the point that there are many scenes in LO that feel a little too similar to scenes from the 1990's Jeremy Irons adaptation, such as seen here.
(the above image are song lyrics written about the book, Lolita)
Also despite Rachel saying it wasn't "that kind" of lolita, she still made it clear back in the 2017/2018 run of the comic on Tumblr that Hades is, indeed, a "grown ass man", and that Persephone is a teenager.
And of course the proof is in the pudding, the comic itself is well aware of Persephone's age:
(either Rachel has been using Apollo as a mouthpiece for criticism for years, or she seriously thought this was supposed to make Hades look like the better partner for Persephone because "look at how mean Apollo is" when... he's deadass spitting facts LOL)
As I mentioned in my disclaimer, I don't think Rachel herself is in any way a sex pest or a pedo or whatever you might jump to assuming. Rachel has a history of being inspired by things she watched when she was a child without ever actually going back to re-analyze it or ask herself if what she read was credible or real-
(this isn't the only proof there is of her behaving this way, there's also the fact that she was clearly a huge Disney fan as a child but never asked herself why those movies worked as a piece of written media).
So again, I think at best she's just sort of dated herself by not going to the effort of researching the things she was into when she was a child, she tends to just throw things in that she likes haphazardly without a single thought as to why they worked in the first place or whether or not they would work in LO. Though this is a bit of a saltier opinion, I think when it comes to the Lolita thing specifically, I have a feeling she never actually read the book, just sorta did that thing where she watched the movie adaptation from the 90's and assumed that counted as reading the book and so she put it down as her favorite book / Nabokov as her favorite writer.
But none of that speculation really makes much difference because the evidence is 20+ years old. What does matter is that despite her tastes being what they were 20+ years ago, they're still present in LO and it's not even subtle, there are so many times Rachel has outright said both within the comic and outside of it that Hades is a "grown ass man" and Persephone is a literal teenager. Her fans, of course, will still go to the effort of explaining it on her behalf ("they're gods! ageing isn't a thing for them!" "how old you are doesn't matter when you can be immortal!" "well she probably doesn't mean LITERALLY 19, just like, the god version of it..."), but you can't deny what's coming from the horse's mouth - Hades and Persephone are in a relationship based on an intentionally massive age gap. Regardless of what completely speculative parallels we can draw between H x P and that of Lolita's Humbert Humbert and Dolores using 20 year old MySpace bios as evidence, Hades and Persephone having a massive and intentional age gap is undeniable fact made canon by the creator herself, no matter how you try and slice it.
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How do you analyze so good I'm really impressed and honestly wonder if I can learn from you
It's a skill, so the good news is, you can practice and get better at it!
Read A Lot/Gain Context
Analysis often means making comparisons or drawing from external context - one of the best things you can do if you want to be better at analysis is to try to cram your head with as much knowledge as possible. The time period, culture of origin, and where the author slots into those are usually major influences on a work (in Homestuck's case, much of it is a direct commentary on the internet culture it emerged from, and missing that part of it can drastically influence how the story reads).
Also important are the works the author themselves are inspired by. You've likely heard some variation of "nothing is original." We're actually really lucky with Homestuck in that regard, as the work is highly referential, and you can glean a lot by looking at what it references (for example, if you watch Serendipity, one of Karkat's favorite movies, which is titledropped during the troll romance explanation, you will understand Karkat so much better). This applies to things like mythological allusions - you'll hardly know why it matters that Karkat is a Christ figure if you don't know what the general outline of the Christ story is, nor will you pick up on the Rapture elements of Gamzee's religion or the fact that Doc Scratch is The Devil, etc. The key to picking up a lot of symbolism is being aware that the symbols exist.
And last, it helps to read a lot of media and media analysis so you can get a better understanding of how media "works" - how tropes are used, what effect language has, what other entries into the genre/works with similar themes/etc. have already done to explore the same things as the piece being analyzed is doing - and what other people have already gleaned and interpreted. I've mentioned before that many people seem to find Homestuck's storytelling bizarre and unique when it's actually quite standard for postmodernism, the genre it belongs to. But you're not going to know that if you've never read anything postmodern, y'know? I also often prepare for long character essays by reading other peoples' character essays - sometimes people pick up on things I miss, and sometimes people have interpretations I vehemently disagree with; both of these help me to refine my take on the matter.
Try to Discard Biases/Meet the Work Where It Is
Many will carry into reading media an expectation of what they want to get out of it. For example, one generally goes into a standard hetero romance book expecting a female lead, a male love interest, romance (of course), and a happy ending for the happy couple. If the book fails to deliver these things, a reader will often walk away thinking it was a bad book, even if the story told instead is objectively good and interesting. We actually see this a lot with Wuthering Heights, which receives very polarizing reviews because people go into it expecting a gothic romance, when it's really more like a gossip Youtube video spilling the tea on some shitty rich people (and it's really good at being that).
There's nothing necessarily wrong with this when reading for pleasure and personal enjoyment, but it presents a problem when attempting to analyze something. There's a concept called the "Procrustean bed," named after a mythological bandit who used to stretch people or cut off their limbs to fit them to a bed, that describes "an arbitrary standard to which exact conformity is forced." Going into a media reading with expectations and biases often results in a very Procrustean reading - I'm sure we've all seen posts complaining about how fanfic often forces canon characters to fit certain archetypes while discarding their actual character traits, etc.
Therefore, when reading for analysis, it's generally a good idea to try and discard as much bias and expectation as possible (obviously, we are never fully free of bias, but the effort counts) - or, perhaps even better, to compartmentalize those biases for comparison while reading. For example, Hussie talks at length about what they INTENDED Homestuck to be, and, while reading, I like to keep Hussie's words to the side while I try to experience the comic fresh, seeing what choices were made in accordance with Hussie's intentions, or where I think Hussie may have fumbled the messaging. At the same time, I try to let the work stand on its own, set in its proper context.
I'd say this is the number-one problem in fandom analysis. For example, people hear from the fandom that Eridan is an incel or a nice guy, so they interpret everything he says and does to fit that belief, or ignore any contradictory evidence. Or they fall for the character's façade that's meant to be dismantled by the viewer. Some works are fairly shallow and accessible, wearing all their meaning on their sleeve (or are Not That Deep, if you prefer meme-talk), and problems arise when a work is, in fact, That Deep, because someone biased towards the former will discard evidence that a work is the latter. This isn't exclusive to HS - it's happened in basically all of my fandoms - which is a statement to how easy it is to fall into this way of thinking.
Even without knowing that Hussie had coming-of-age themes in mind, for example, characters will talk about being kids and growing up. Knowing that Hussie has explicitly said that that's one of HS's themes serves as extra evidence for that interpretation, but the work itself tells you what it's about - if you're willing to listen to it.
Even If the Curtains are Just Blue, That Still Means Something
This is the next biggest fandom stumbling block - thr insinuation that when things in a work are put into the work without more explicit symbolism, that that means they're a discardable detail. This one is more about making a mindset shift - details aren't discardable, even if they don't appear to have been made with the explicit intention to mean something. Everything kind of means something.
First of all, whether or not the curtains are Just Blue is often highly dependent on the work. For example, in something made in large quantities with little time, staff, and budget - say, for example, one of the entries into the MCU's TV shows - there likely isn't too much meaning behind a choice of blue curtains in a shot (although you'd be surprised how often choices in these constrained environments are still very deliberately made). In a work like Homestuck, however, so terribly dense with symbolism and allegory, chances are, the blue curtains DO hold some special meaning, even if it's not readily apparent.
However, even in cases where a choice is made arbitrarily, it still usually ends up revealing something about the work's creative process. Going back to our MCU example, perhaps the blue curtains were chosen because the shot is cool-toned and they fit the color grading. Perhaps they were chosen because the director really likes blue. Perhaps the shot was filmed at an actual location and the blue curtains were already there. Or, even, perhaps the blue curtains were just what they had on hand, and the show was made too quickly and cheaply to bother sourcing something that would fit the tone or lend extra meaning. These all, to varying degrees, say something about the work - maybe not anything so significant that it would come up in an analysis, but they still contribute to a greater understanding of what the work is, what it's trying to say, and how successful it is at saying it.
And this applies to things with much higher stakes. For example, Hussie being a white US citizen likely had an effect on the B1 kids being mostly US citizens, and there was discourse surrounding how, even though they were ostensibly aracial, references were made to Dave's pale skin. Do I think these were deliberate choices made to push some sort of US superiority; no, obviously not. But they still end up revealing things about the creation of the work - that Hussie had certain biases as a result of being who they were.
Your Brain is Designed to Recognize Patterns, So Put That to Use
So with "establish context" and "discard expectations" out of the way, we can start getting into the nitty-gritty of what should be jumping out at you when attempting to understand a work. One of the most prominent things that you should be looking for is PATTERNS.
Writing is a highly conscious effort, which draws from highly unconscious places. Naturally, whether these patterns are intentional or unintentional is dependent on the author (see again why reading up on a work's context is so important), but you can generally bet that anything that IS a pattern is something that holds significance.
For example, Karkat consistently shows that he's very distraught when any of his friends get hurt, that he misses his friends, even the murderous assholes, that he's willing to sit them down and intervene on their behalf, despite all his grandstanding to the contrary. We are supposed to notice that Karkat actually loves his friends, and that he's lying when he says he doesn't care about them.
Homestuck is very carefully and deliberately crafted; if something comes up more than once, it's a safe bet to assume that you're supposed to notice, or at least feel, it. Don't take my word for it:
Basically, [reusing elements is] about building an extremely dense interior vocabulary to tell a story with, and continue to build and expand that vocabulary by revisiting its components often, combining them, extending them and so on. A vocabulary can be (and usually is) simple, consisting of single words, but in this case it extends to entire sentences and paragraph structures and visual forms and even entire scenes like the one linked above. Sometimes the purpose for reiteration is clear, and sometimes there really is no purpose other than to hit a familiar note, and for me that's all that needs to happen for it to be worthwhile. Triggering recognition is a powerful tool for a storyteller to use. Recognition is a powerful experience for a reader. It promotes alertness, at the very least. And in a lot of cases here, I think it promotes levity (humor! this is mostly a work of comedy, remember.) Controlling a reader's recognition faculty is one way to manipulate the reader's reactions as desired to advance the creative agenda.
But this applies to less deliberately-crafted work, too; for example, if an author consistently writes women as shallow, cruel, and manipulative, then we can glean that the author probably has some sort of issue with women. Villains often being queer-coded suggests that the culture they come from has problems with the gays. Etc. etc.
This is how I reached my conclusion that Pale EriKar is heavily foreshadowed - the two are CONSTANTLY kind to each other, sharing secrets, providing emotional support, etc. etc. It's why that part of my Eridan essay is structured the way that it is - by showing you first how consistently the two interact in suspiciously pale-coded ways, the fact that a crab is shown in both Eridan's first appearance AND his appearance on the moirallegiance "hatched for each other" page becomes the cincher of a PATTERN of the two being set up to shoosh-pap each other.
A work will tell you about itself if you listen. If it tells you something over and over, then it's basically begging you to pay attention.
Contrast is Important, Too
Patterns are also significant when they're broken. For example, say a villain is constantly beating up the protagonist. Here's our pattern: the hero is physically weaker than the villain. In a straight fight, the hero will always lose.
And then, at the mid-season two-parter, the hero WINS. Since we've set up this long pattern of the hero always losing to this villain, the fact that this pattern was disrupted means that this moment is extremely important for the work. Let's say the hero wins using guile - in this case, we walk away with the message that the work is saying that insurmountable obstacles may have workarounds, and adaptability and flexibility are good, heroic traits. Now let's say the hero won using physical strength, after a whole season of training and practicing - in this case, we say that the work says hard work and effort are heroic, and will pay off in the end.
In Homestuck, as an example, we set up a long pattern of Vriska being an awful, manipulative bitch, and a fairly remorseless killer. And then, after killing Tavros, she talks to John and admits that she's freaking out because she feels really bad about it. This vulnerability is hinted at by some of her earlier actions/dialogue, which is itself a pattern to notice, but it's not really explicit until it's set up to be in direct contrast to the ultimate spider8itch move of killing Tavros. This contrast is intended to draw our attention, to point out something significant - hey, Vriska feels bad! She's a product of her terrible society and awful lusus! While it's shitty that she killed Tavros, she's also meant to be tragic and sympathetic herself!
Hussie even talks about how patterns and surprises are used in tandem:
Prior to Eridan's entrance into the room, and even during, the deaths were completely unguessable. After Feferi's death, Kanaya's becomes considerably more so, but still quite uncertain. After her death, all bets are off. Not only do all deaths thereafter become guessable, but in some cases, "predictable". That's because it was the line between a series of shocking events, and the establishment of an actual story pattern. The new pattern serves a purpose, as a sort of announcement that the story is shifting gears, that we're drifting into these mock-survival horror, mock-crime drama segments, driven by suspense more than usual. The suspense has more authority because of all the collateral of unpredictability built up over time, as well as all the typical stuff that helps like long term characterization. But now that the pattern is out in the open, following through with more deaths no longer qualifies as unpredictability. Just the opposite, it would now be playing into expectations, which as I said, can be important too. This gear we've switched to is the new normal, and any unpredictability to arise thereafter will necessarily be a departure from whatever current patterns would indicate.
Patterns are important because they tell you what baselines the work is setting - what's normal, what's standard, what this or that generally "means." Contrast is important because it means something has changed, or some significant point is being made. They work in tandem to provide the reader with points of focus in the story, things to keep in mind as they read, consciously or unconsciously.
Theme
I'm talking about this stuff in pretty broad and open terms because stories are so malleable, and so myriad, and can say so many things. There are stories where horrible cruelties are painted as good things - propoganda is the big one, but consider all the discourse around romance books that paint abusive/toxic relationships as ideal. There are stories where the protagonist is actually the villain, and their actions are not aspirational, and works where everyone sucks and nobody is aspirational, and works where everybody is essentially a good person, if sometimes misguided.
This is, again, why outside context is so important, and biases need to be left at the door. For example, generally speaking, one can assume that the protagonist of a children's cartoon is going to be an aspirational hero, or at least a conflicted character who must learn to do the right thing. However, there are even exceptions to this! Invader Zim, for example, features an outright villain protagonist - a proud servant of a fascist empire - and for a lower-stakes example, the Eds of Ed, Edd, n' Eddy are the neighborhood scammers, constantly causing problems for the other characters with their schemes.
Thus, how do we determine what any particular narrative's stance on a given topic is? It's a difficult question to answer because every narrative is different. If I say something like, "the things that bring the protagonists success in their goals are what the narrative says are good," then we run into the issue of villain/gray morality protagonists. To use moral terms like "hero" and "villain" instead runs into the problem of defining morality within a narrative in the first place. But you have to draw the line somewhere.
So that brings us to themes.
Now, as with a lot of artistic terms, "theme" isn't necessarily well-defined (this isn't helped by the way the word is used colloquially to mean things like aesthetic, moral of the story, or symbolism). Wikipedia says: "In contemporary literary studies, a theme is a central topic, subject, or message within a narrative," but this is still very broad and hard to work with, so I'll give it a shot.
A theme is what a work says, beyond the literal series of events. Sometimes a theme is obvious - the theme of Boy Who Cried Wolf is that if you become famous for lying, you won't be believed when you tell the truth. Sometimes a theme is one of many - for example, Disney's Cinderalla says that kindness and virtue will eventually be recognized and rewarded, and that cruelty is interlinked with ugliness. Sometimes a theme is unintentional - for example, how Disney's body of work tends to villainize queer-coded characters. Sometimes context and the passage of time changes the theme - for example, Snow White originally held a message of hope for wartime families that domestic normalcy would one day return, but is now seen as anti-feminist as it appears to insinuate that a woman's place is in the kitchen, and her happiness is in marriage to a man. And sometimes a theme is not something you agree with.
In any case, a theme is a meaning to be gleaned from the text, more broad and universally applicable than the text itself. After all, we humans have traditionally always used story to impart meaning; our oldest epic, The Epic of Gilgamesh, contains within it several themes, most famously that of accepting one's mortality. It's startling, really, how applicable the story is to this day, even if specific details have become obtuse or unsavory to a modern reader.
This is, again, why it's so important to engage with a text on its own terms, in its own context, with as little bias as possible. A story's themes are not necessarily apparent, and commonly implied rather than stated outright, and approaching the story with expectations can easily lead to a Procrustean twisting of the facts to fit those expectations. A theme should emerge to the analyzer out of the reading, not the other way around.
Identifying theme gets easier with practice, and largely comes down to identifying patterns within the narrative (alongside looking at context and symbolism, of course). What does the narrative consistently touch base on? Are there any references; is there any symbolism? What does the story deem "normal," "good," or "bad"? How are ideas developed, and why? Why did these events happen, and are those motivations echoed anywhere else?
Homestuck is very complex and tackles many topics at once, and explaining why it's a coming-of-age would basically require a whole second essay, so I'll use a simpler and more popular example (like I've been trying to do) - let's say, Shrek.
The most obvious theme of Shrek is that beauty does not equate goodness, that one mustn't judge a book by its cover. The opening sequence is LITERALLY Shrek ripping out pages of a fairy tale book to use as toilet paper, and the movie ends with Fiona finding that her happiest, truest self IS as an ugly ogre. Shrek's main character conflict is that people immediately judge him as cruel and evil because he's ugly, and the characters' lowest points occur because Fiona is similarly insecure about her ogre half, considering it unlovable.
But there's other stuff in there, too. For example, if you know that Dreamworks and Shrek were founded after a falling out with Disney, then the beautiful, sanitized city of Dulac, with its switchback queue and singing animatronics add to this theme of a direct refutation of traditional Disney fairytale values, mocking them as manufactured, inhuman, and even cruel in the way that they marginalize those who don't fit an ideal of beauty. Again we see the opening sequence - defacing a fairytale - as support for this, but also the way that Dulac is displacing fairytale creatures. There's a moment where Gepetto literally sells Pinocchio, which can easily be read as a commentary on the crass commercialization and exploitation of fairy tales Disney likes to do.
And then, of course, there are lesser, supplementary themes. Love being a powerful positive force is one - Donkey is able to rally Shrek after he truly reciprocates Dragon's love for him (which echoes the theme of not equating goodness with beauty, as Dragon is still big and scary), and it's true love's kiss that grants Fiona her happy ending.
And then there's stuff that's unintentional. There's all this work done about how beauty =/= goodness, but then they made the villain incredibly short, which is a traditionally unattractive physical feature. So, does that mean that ugly things can be beautiful unless that ugliness is specifically height?
Sometimes, authorial intent does not match up with result - but in those instances, I think the most is revealed about the author. Modern Disney products tend to be very cowardly about going anti-corporation and pro-weirdness, despite their usual feel-good tones and uplifting themes - and that says a lot about Disney, doesn't it. That's why I think it's still important to keep authorial intent in mind, if possible, even if they fumble what they say they've set out to do.
Obviously, Lord Fuckwad being short doesn't REALLY detract from the overall message - but it's still a weird hitch in the themes, which I think is interesting to talk about, so you can see where personal judgement and biases DO have to be applied. There are two options here, more or less - either one believes that Shrek is making an exception for short people, who are of the Devil, or one believes that the filmmakers did a bit of an oopsie. Barring an outright statement from the filmmakers, there's no way to know for sure.
We can say a work has very complex themes when it intentionally explores multiple ideas very deeply. We can say a work has shallow themes when it doesn't have much intentional meaning, and/or that meaning is explored very lightly. The labyrinthine storytelling of Homestuck, with its forays into mortality, morality, and growing up, chock full of symbolism and pastiche and allusions, is a work with complex themes - especially as compared to the average newspaper comic strip, although they ostensibly share a genre.
We can say a work has very unified themes when these themes serve to compliment each other - the refutation of Disney-esque values, and love as a positive driving force, compliment the main theme in Shrek of not judging books by their covers, of beauty not equating to goodness. Ugly things are worthy of love, and those who push standards of beauty are evil and suck.
Similarly, we can say a work has unfocused or messy themes when the themes it includes - intentionally or not - contradict, distract, and/or detract from each other. Beauty has no correlation to goodness... unless you're short, in which case, you are closer to Hell and therefore of evil blood. To get a little controversial, this is actually why I didn't like Last Wish very much - there are approximately three separate storylines, with three separate thematic arcs, going on in the same movie, none of which particularly compliment each other - so the experience was very messy to me, story-wise, even though it was pretty and the wolf was hot. This is why we feel weird about Disney pushing anti-corporate messages, when they're a big corporate machine, or why it's easy to assume Homestuck was written poorly if you don't like Hussie - we want themes to be coherent, we want context to be unified with output.
Tone
Tone is somehow even harder to define than theme. It's like, the "vibe" of a work. For example, you generally don't expect something lighthearted to deal with the realistic, brutal tragedies of war. Maybe it'll touch on them in light, optimistic ways, but it isn't about to go All Quiet on the Western Front on the reader. By the same token, you don't expect fully happy endings out of the melodrama of opera, or frivolous slice of life from something grimdark.
Tone, too, is something people often wind up Procrusteanizing, which makes discussion difficult if two people disagree. If I read Homestuck as unwaveringly optimistic, with its downer ending the result of an author fumble, I'm pretty much going to irreconcileably disagree with somebody who reads Homestuck as though it's always been a kind of tragedy where things don't work out for the characters. Since it's even more difficult to define than theme, I'm not even really going to bother; I just felt like I had to bring it up because, despite its nebulosity, it's vital to how one reads and interprets a text. Sometimes I don't have a better answer for why I dislike a certain interpretation other than that it doesn't suit the work's tone. I generally try to avoid saying that, though, because it winds up smacking of subjective preference.
In summary... analysis is about keeping everything in mind all the time! But i swear, it gets easier the more you do it. Happy reading!
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