#they just get scrambles sometimes

[miaoqing]

there's something in my brain that sees "shidi" and for some reason wants to apply latin grammatical rules to it. several shidi one shidus

[densitywell]

Marisha's comment about how Relvin is one of those parents who ended up with a child they didn't know what to do with really gets to the heart of it, i think, and is such a good way to tie the fantasy element of Imogen's powers into things more tangible. because there are really a lot of parents like Relvin in real life, who have a child with the person they're happily married to and never expect to be left alone with the kid. or who expect a ""normal"" (read: cisgender and heterosexual, able-bodied, relatively neurotypical and obedient, etc.) child and end up with one who's ""difficult"", who demands more or different of them than what they believe they signed up for. and that's not entirely entitlement on a parent's part- many cultures' common frameworks of parenthood and child-rearing do not include space for these children. it makes sense that Relvin was unprepared. raising any child is difficult, and raising a child whose needs you were never taught how to accommodate, who the world is so cruel to, is even more challenging.

and yet. and yet, the person who bears the brunt of the harm in these situations will always be the child. they're the ones who have to live every moment of how the world treats them, without the support that their parent is supposed to provide them. and when asked to care for his child even when she turned out to be ""difficult"", Relvin couldn't. for entirely sympathetic reasons, of course. he tried, in his own way. i don't think he's a bad guy. but he's let his own broken heart bleed onto his daughter. he hasn't been able to give her much else.

[edenfire]

🌸💘"were you expecting prince charming?~"💘🌸

what if akira is hit with a status effect that turns him into a mouse, and the only way to change back is a kiss from a prince?👀💘💞🌸

I doodled the sketch for this a few years ago, and I'm super happy that I was finally able to color it🥰💗

[icewindandboringhorror]

................ he 

[softcryz]

Still can't draw but I've been thinking about when people put their own little twist on a character's design. Make up and add their own little things. It genuinely makes me very happy

[belethlegwen]

General li'l update

So, things have done anything but slow down for me in the real world. To keep it as vague as possible, there's a chance I'll be losing my job within the next month or so, though we're all currently working on possible solutions to this. Hoping for the best.

I've already done my panicking and preemptive grieving. 18 years in a single career is a hell of a run for someone my age, and if it has to come to an end then I've made at least some peace with that idea.

Still though, working every day to find solutions. To fix things. To keep surviving. It's exhausting, I will not lie. We're doing what we can over here.

There's so, so much good to look forward to this year. These are just bumpy patches of road. And some of the bumpiest roads I've driven on have taken me to the best places I've ever been. I'll be alright. I know I'll be alright. I'll be more than alright, by the time this is all said and done.

Been doing more reading of late, which I've been loving. You all are putting out such amazing work and I love bouncing in to read even if it takes me 3 attempts and a couple of hours to get through a posted chapter. Lovely escapes, all around.

My sister turned me onto a game ("game" kind of seems like an odd word for it but either way) on steam called Spirit City: Lofi Sessions. You customize a character, you have a little room, it plays lofi music at you and you can poke at a few playlists, build soundscapes around it (rain noises, thunder, wind, birds chirping, crackling fire etc etc) while your character mills about in spots doing things as just a beautiful little vibe-generator. You can collect spirit pals to vibe with you. It's just really cozy and nice, I love it. Highly recommend.

It has an optioning for in-app journaling, and I've been meaning to get back into journaling regularly just for the sake of my memory and everything else. That's been a huge boon over the last 2-3 days. It's got a productivity timer, to-do list, daily task/habits tracker.

Anyway, I've been making progress on writing but it's slow, staggered. Hit a bit of a wall last night with some of The Stranding where I wrote 8.5 pages of a scene and then just felt... unhappy with it. I had clearly lost the thread of why I started writing it, and needed to walk away to see if a fresher mind could find a place to rewind to and pivot so I can salvage it, or if I'm just gonna carve the whole thing out and set it in the Cut Scenes doc. The other 20 pages I've got waiting? Fine. Good, even. Proud of those. This one, I'm proud of what I'm writing but again... just feels more like floating aimlessly and bouncing. It was clear I wrote it while heavily distracted or with gaps between focus, so it jumps.

I'll see what I can salvage. Can't promise an update and am avoiding making it feel like I'm 'back on schedule' just to find something I can reduce pressure from in my life for the time being. But: I love you all. The Kudos, the views, the comments, the everything. It means a lot. You're all great.

If I do any generic vent/vibe writing, not necessarily attached to anything, I'll consider sharing it here for y'all. You guys deserve a bit of fun and sunshine <3

Have a great time everyone, love y'all to bits <3

~ Belle

[johnconstantinesdick]

Crucially I think Tarvek’s internal feelings of his love for Gil are so tied up in Doomed Romance and Tragically In Love With A Straight Guy that if he ever found out Gil could be attracted to men he would have a full mental break

[porto-rosso]

brother where is the charles appreciation

[dyketubbo]

deleted a few posts mostly because after thinking about it some more i do still think that theres a focus from many of these creators on having a sort of clapback response where they denounce wilbur but dont actively support shubble (i dont know if shubble is fine with people who arent her friends using her actual name so im just saying shubble) and while its good to denounce wilbur i dont think they should be praised when they havent put in the effort to publically show support to shubble.

at the same time, shubble is clearly touched by the responses and they clearly feel supported by their friends who had also, on a surface level to us, seemed to just be responding to wilbur without uplifting shubble. i do think theres a need to stay critical. some of these creators do very likely care more about dunking on the abuser than they do actively supporting the victim and making sure you dont fall into blindly supporting anyone who can make a snappy comeback is good

at the same time being critical means realizing theres a lot more to this than "anyone who waited for wilbur to say something must not have believed shubble and mustve been complicit" considering responses like billzos and sophies, as well as shubble themself saying that "not wanting to" is not why she didnt name wilbur. billzo admits to being scared of wilbur. sophie said wilbur made her feel small. theres clips of wilbur hurting and scaring his friends and making light of how he does so

a part of what sophie talked about was how wilbur would make light of how he abused her. he wasnt worried that he was hurting her, and he even pointed out that it looked like abuse. shubbles incredibly brave for speaking up. but that doesnt mean anyone else who didnt until now was complicit.

a lot of wilburs "jokes" look worse in retrospect because.. thats what happens when you go through abuse, or when you have a shitty friend. you start to realize more and more how they were hurting you and got away with it because they shrugged it off either as a joke or just as part of who they are (shubble actively pointed out that wilbur would dismiss his behavior as "just who he is")

those who just want to get a dunk in shouldnt be praised. those who really do stay quiet or do the bare minimum should be scrutinized. always keep an eye out for suspicious behavior no matter where you go. lexie talked about her own abuse within that circle of creators and the very fact that there were two people being abused within the same circle is horrible. but keep an eye out for any creator. keep an eye out within any community, even your own. its not just the men in brighton. its not just minecraft creators. abusers and toxic friends are everywhere, and silence can be complacency but it can also be fear

dont blame yourself if you didnt see the signs before. but take it as a sign to keep an eye out. and remember we cant see everything behind the scenes. you never really know everything going on. its getting increasingly clear that wilbur mistreated a lot of people in his life and like. idk im making an emotional post because this shit sucks a lot and like weve said before this is a topic very personal to us as an abuse victim and one whose had many toxic friends

shubble feels supported. she has a community and ultimately it is still amazing to see how many people are denouncing wilbur and its amazing to see the people who do show support to shubble herself. support for lexie is slowly but surely getting there as well. i think this is a sign that while horrible things will always happen that the community is slowly but surely getting better at responding. and i hope anyone else who was scared of or mistreated by wilbur is able to think back on that and realize it was awful and find their peace as well.

i think its good to be critical to anyone who may have genuinely been complacent, especially those like phil and tommy and even quackity who have been extremely close to wilbur and as of writing from what i know have yet to publically respond. but i dont think there should be a place for outright cynicism and accusing everyone who didnt speak until now of secretly being complicit. theres more to it than that. theres always more to it than that

[sanjisboyfie]

i feel like what u said about using male terms in male reader imagines is SO important like it makes me so happy when im reading something and it has a 'pretty boy/my boy/my man/my boyfriend' i think its really importanr to have it there and im so glad u do it

:.)))

on a really super genuine note : it makes me feel so affirmed in myself to see masc terms being used in x male readers. because ive been so used to only feminine tersm being used bc i used to have to just read x fem readers (ltr like years ago since i dont think x male readers were that "common" as they are now) as a source of [character x reader] content. and the plot and writing of the story would get me so wrapped up in it id forget the readers gender!! but then i'd see "she/her prns + baby girl/princess/any other fem term" and i'd just remember that what im reading is not for me and it never will be (and thats not the writers fault, they were doing what was fitting for their story. it was definitely at my own discretion to b reading fem reader stories -- im not blaming the writers at all LOL just giving my experience w reading ffs and stuff). and now that i write for male readers, i just really wanna assure my readers that i write specifically and especially for them. i dont know; smth abt seeing masc terms being used in x readers makes me really happy, and im v glad i can spread that happiness to u as well <3 and ofc everyone else that may agree and feel the same ! <3

[asterchats]

'how do you function with the type of memory where you forget things exist if you can't see them and sometimes forget what you're saying literally in the middle of saying it' well. badly

[barkingangelbaby]

I feel like such a broken fucking person lol

I talked way too much in the tags don't read them

[primus-why]

Sad Old MegOp

Downer feels ahoy! (I'm sorry 🥺 but this just came to mind all of a sudden...)

Basically... what if after an extremely long war, and even longer peacetime between factions, after bringing everyone back home and rebuilding and thriving...

... one of our beloved OTP (or possibly, even sadder, both of them??) is starting to get processor glitches similar to alzheimers in humans. There are gaps in memories that get harder and harder to jog each day, and some days they wake up disoriented, thinking they're somewhere they're not.

On the worst days, they think they're still fighting the other.

[starrsbby]

raw dogging eating hot chips bc idk where my water bottle is— this is what life’s about

[applestorms]

been reading through some of the author commentary from the patreon post archive for HS^2 stuff & writing notes on certain quotes from it and i think i've come up with (slightly) more distinct reasons for why the epilogues/homestuck^2 feel so off and/or frustrating to me. not gonna post the full thing + i'm only about halfway through reading it all, but here's a few points (warning this one gets kinda political):

It’s possible “Ultimate” Dirk’s presence was suppressing other splinters of himself from manifesting.

Wait, so... Ult. Dirk is just suppressing the other splinters? But I thought the entire point was that he subsumed all the other splinters to become one Ultimate Self? Weird, but I guess that plays more into the narrative powers side of things that they put a lot of emphasis on. That, or the creators don't have a very clear idea of what actually makes an Ultimate Self, which would. also work lmfao

Unlike the other victors of the game, Jane threw herself into the world the kids made together. She grew up preparing to take over a major company, and has the confidence to show for it.

Gonna get more into two ideas here in a bit related to this quote, the first being HS^2's Trump Era politics & the second being Jane more specifically. Here's the first connection:

I don’t know if you noticed, but everything is terrible right now. And I don’t mean just in Homestuck’s dumb fake earth. I mean in our dumb real earth. Our planet is burning and folks go to bed hungry just so twelve guys can have more money than Croesus could have ever dreamed of. The concept of “truth” is at its most tenuous – political divisions involve contradictory interpretations of basic facts. I’ve been playing a lot of Death Stranding recently. Basically any media that you’re making in 2019 has to either address what’s going on around us or come off sanitized, sterilized, with its head in the sand. Kojima offers a simple power fantasy: Through Norman Reedus’s sweaty, urine-filled labor, the things that divide us can be banished. America can be unified again.

HS^2 is kind of agonizingly pessimistic when it comes to its (not at all subtle) political messaging, which I suppose you can in part attribute to a Trump-era leftist/liberal culture, but I personally also attribute to a specific flavor of white person existential pessimism. What frustrates me about HS^2's politics in particular though is just how much it talks down to the reader, acting like their (frankly, imo, pretty fuckin basic) reflections on the flaws of capitalism, gender constructs, and contemporary American politics are these revolutionary ideas that nobody other than them truly understands. It's really aggravating to read, honestly, and reminds me a lot of the perspective reflected on in this video by F.D Signifier about Bo Burnham's Inside & white performative liberalism, though in this context the creators are much more insufferable about it than Burnham ever was. (This is NOT to say every creator working on HS^2 was white or even ascribes/d to these kinds of politics, but that's one of the voices that I feel comes through the strongest.)

Edit: Re-watched that whole video and he really does get at the exact idea I'm thinking of. However, I would add that the thing that makes HS^2 feel especially insufferable to me is the fact that it doesn't feel like the authors are engaging in their politics as genuinely or personally as Burnham does. Where Burnham's look into these issues is self-reflective, the existential dread coming from the ways in which he himself plays a part in perpetuation of systems of oppression, I feel like HS^2's creators were unwilling to look at the ways in which they themselves might've benefited from the same kinds of privileges. It's just- it's egotistical, honestly! And it's a vibe that I get from a lot of heavily queer, young, white fandom spaces, which presume that because of their own experiences with queer and trans-based bigotry they understand everything and don't have to examine their own biases or any other nuances to their social position/the privileges they might personally have & continue to benefit from. I don't know- Homestuck was never going to be a good medium for examining the nuances of race and privilege, that was determined by the very first page or whenever Hussie decided non-canon races were a thing, but that doesn't make it any less agonizing to watch such a ham-fisted, pompous attempt at "social commentary." Ugh.

I guess I can understand the desire to get HS^2's politics to be more up to date and with it, again considering what the Trump-era American political landscape looked like (and what HS proper looked like, let's be real), but the way they approach this just makes the authors seem that much more immature to me. I hesitate to even call this political commentary, it's just pointing out that things are bad and then complaining about it. There's no hope here and it shows, and I personally have very little patience when it comes to that kind of perspective. I don't want to be too harsh to the creators or completely undermine the ways they might've faced structural social challenges (yes, trans people have it fucking bad right now! And there was absolutely some bigoted shit directed at the creators that was more reprehensible than anything here, I was there when this shit was coming out, I saw it all too (alongside the genuinely good criticism that they wrote off just as easily, but I digress)), but this shit is just bad, I'm sorry.

Privilege, safety, and inherited wealth do funny things to the brain. People justify to themselves why they have what they have. If you have enough for long enough, you start to convince yourself you deserve it. Jane won the game, lost very little, and as god of a new world decided to dominate its markets as a corporate mogul. Her conception of what was possible with her capability and god-like reason was shaded, limited by the world she grew up in. She is not a goddess of fantasy, a semi-mythical trickster creature like Jasprose, or a meta-aware marionette master like Dirk. She saw a new world and chose, simply, to replicate the power structures of the 21st-century America she was raised in. Boardrooms, power pantsuits, formality and professionalism.

(Longer quote here justifying the horror they did to Jane's character but let's add one more before I elaborate further)

But in the end, isn’t that what every story is? Trying to untie knots that you put in the rope yourself?

This quote is very telling and gets at my issue with the Jane quote from above, really one of my main issues with the all post-canon shit just in general: when the authors were creating a bunch of problems and inserting them into the story, something that is (typically) necessary for any kind of meaningful storytelling, they went about the process of introducing that conflict totally wrong.

In the original story of HS, problems for the characters primarily originated from Sburb, which acts as both the game they're playing and, as is demonstrated throughout Act 1, the world itself. Problems in the story thus often feel at least kind of true to life because they either originate directly from the game & its constructs (which the characters have no control over, parallel to how you can't usually control the world irl) or individuals responding to those circumstances w/ their own set of unique characteristics (Vriska being an active character and creating villains to become a hero but also Rose deciding she has to go through with a suicide mission in response to the game/Doc Scratch and Dave in turn responding to her actions, etc. etc.).

This is not necessarily true for all of the story or every single plot point/character arc, but I think it generally follows, and so for as meta as HS gets, it never really felt to me like you could see the hand of the author when it comes to how major plot elements are introduced, outside of a few very overt examples. Problems are able to crop up fairly naturally through characters responding in what they think to be natural/rational ways to their circumstances, but may or may not be due to the limitations on their understanding. The situation and environment of Sburb and the world of HS itself may be absurd and stupid and crazy and very obviously created by an author, but the characters typically feel consistent and true to themselves as people in how they respond to the absurdity and confusion of their world. It's one of the reasons why I think HS is so appealing as a coming of age story actually, since stepping into adulthood (or even just your teenage years) does often feel like entering a world that is crazy and cruel and unknowable with all of these malicious, far-away forces that know way more than you could ever possibly understand controlling every detail of the world around you and deciding your fate before you even get the chance to know it's coming. These are kids, they really don't have a lot of power even once they ascend to godhood in comparison to the forces they're dealing with, and the story & world reflects that.

The problem w/ HS^2 & the Epilogues is that the authors don't have the same game construct to work with, barely have a world at all to begin with actually, and so they instead twist pretty much every single character into the worst possible versions of themselves in order to try and recreate the same HS absurdity. But it just doesn't work, because there is no real explanation for why every character is suddenly at their lowest point and acting like a fucking idiot all the time other than "ooo adulthood makes everyone worse!" and vague gestures to capitalism and privilege (or what I would call structural ignorance, though I don't think they ever call it that), so the story just comes across as incredibly cruel and uncaring and unabashedly pessimistic in a way that's just miserable to read.

Yes, Jane grew up privileged, it makes sense that she would be sympathetic to capitalism and try to recreate the same social structures that fucked people up on the original Earth- but that is not nearly enough justification for why she has suddenly gone full fascist dictator endorsing troll eugenics and trying to murder people, and it doesn't even work well as social commentary cause it's so extreme right from the start that it couldn't possibly reflect real life issues or the development of actual fascist/bigoted ideas. Yes, Trump's ties to the alt-right are fucking terrifying and conservative politics in general in the U.S. nowadays are incredibly fucked, but there's still logical people and seemingly rational explanations being utilized to justify the bullshit that many people genuinely believe in and HS^2 fails to meaningfully reflect or comment on any of those, at least from what I can tell. Everyone is consistent with how they are terrible, I'll give them that, for Dirk and Jane and everyone else the flaws that are being emphasized are ones that are generally kind of consistent with canon, but I simply cannot get behind why they suddenly decided to be the worst possible versions of themselves other than that the authors realize they needed plot and decided that the best way to make Candy and Meat the Bad Timelines:tm: was to spontaneously make everyone as insufferable as possible.

I think a part of the problem is the time skip, honestly. And the fact that Earth C as a location itself is surprisingly underutilized when it comes to creating problems for the characters. The characters are gods ruling over a world where they can be dictator of the globe at the end of a single election. Without the game and the lack of distinct outside villains, there is nothing stopping them from having full agency over everything other than each other, so in order to create plot, instead of going through the effort to create a world or social structure they just made everyone worse and called it a day. It's like the epitome of white liberalism's inability to understand bad systems vs. bad individuals- there are no real systems here, nothing that actually functions past a name, so everyone is just fucking terrible.

(Honestly, I think the fact that there are no overt outside villains could've been a good way of transitioning to the fact that these characters aren't kids anymore- if Dirk and Jane didn't have to be transformed into fucking caricatures of themselves in order to do it. Really the problem is that so many of the characters that used to add interesting nuance to the social conflict are fucking dead now. RIP trolls.)

Since this is turning out to be the political astronaut ramble I guess I'll just keep going for a bit: one of the most meaningful insights a professor has ever given to me came is the idea that we "haven't earned our pessimism yet," as the younger generations, or haven't faced The Shit directly or long enough to justify having as little hope as we do. Many of us have looked at the problem and given up before even trying to solve it, and are, in fact, not really justified in making such a decision.

For me, there's an additional layer to that idea as well: one of the ideas that Beauvoir talks about in her feminist philosophy is that of agency, wherein social privilege allows for certain groups to decide which meaning-creating projects they want to or to not take on where others are not allowed to make the same choice. If you sit in any kind of position of social privilege, that historical role has continually been the one to not only benefit from the rules, but make them in the first place. This kind of pessimism is thus not just unearned, not just frustrating to listen to, but actively harmful to the creation of meaningful change. Who really benefits from inaction? From a lack of change to the status quo? And who are the privileged to make decisions about whether or not we're allowed to fight for this shit in the first place?

[arolesbianism]

Wendy 💥