there are so many fucking trolls this is such a tiny sampling i got trolls comin outta my ass over here. its wall to wall trolls. trolls as far as the eye can see. you kill one troll nine more take its place. its like teens say they’re in “homestuck hell” because its like he he i faved a picture of gamtav guess im back on my homestuck bullshit 🙂
Thanks! As for your question, uh. I don’t really know? It’s sort of a custom setup at this point, and I got help from some cool friends figuring out some details. Also its still kind of a work in progress!
I’m happy to like, idk, export the settings or whatever, except that I don’t know how to do that either. But if anyone’s interested and has the know how, shoot me an ask? Otherwise I’ll figure out how to do it eventually! Thanks 😀
An important thing to know about this gif is that Dirk doesn’t know who the fuck that is. The only Dirk that had met Neenah was Dream Ghost Dirk, and Alpha Dirk does not have the memories of that Dirk
Dirk just… Did this. He’s that cool
You have to realize that the Condesce exists in his world so he just randomly high fived someone who looks like the tyrannical ruler he wants to take down as a teenager
Which just makes this extra wild
I think just as important is why he did this, bcuz the context to this scene makes it one of the most understatedly beautiful parts of the comic.
We see the lamps light up like this again, sort of, in that the lamps eventually explode and take out the building holding them…but that happens when the kids God Tier. So Dirk’s feelings are being portrayed as roughly equivalent to that.
The High-Five itself drives this link in further. The High-Five as a gesture comes from a closely intertwined overlap between mainstream American culture and LGBT history, as it was started by Glenn Burke, and I quote “the first and only MLB player to come out as gay to teammates and team owners during his professional career and the first to publicly acknowledge it”–Wikipedia.
And as for the High Five itself:
After retiring from baseball, Burke used the high five with other homosexual residents of the Castro district of San Francisco, where it became a symbol of gay pride and identification.[9]
So yeah, high fives are literally gay dude culture. Considering the conversation that serves as the lynchpin of Dirk and Jake’s relationship is all about Dirk telling Jake about the fall of American civilization and that Dirk’s biggest role-model is Texan, I think it’s fair to say this is probably intentional.
Puts a neat spin on Dirk’s other gay high-five jokes about Jake, too. And we don’t even really need to bring all this High-Five history in to read Dirk’s feelings for Jake into this sequence.
Dirk spends a shitload of this flash Breaking glass windows. If we can understand Dirk’s suicide as Dirk Destroying his “Self”, it pretty clearly parses through his Prince of Heart title as Destroying Heart.
The window breaking, then, would be Dirk destroyingthrough Heart–using both his feelings for Jake and his cool-guy Persona to smash through the obstacles in his way and save himself and his friends from certain death.
And the final shot of window breaking, the one immediately following his high-five with Meenah?
Positions Jake’s green directly at Dirk’s back, as though pushing him onwards. Jake is, in a sense, the wings on Dirk’s back. In essence, Unite Synchronize is half desperate, heroic effort on the part of a gay teen to save himself and his loved ones.
That kind of attention to detail and symbolic impact is why I keep coming back to Homestuck. I want more stories about gay teens who love their friends to be celebrated as heroes, in all their painful messiness. And that’s why I deeply hope characters like Dirk and his ridiculous rocketboard high-fives stay with us for years to come.
Windows are made of glass, which is reflective, so Dirk is literally smashing through himself, and shattering that himself into a bunch of smaller reflective surfaces. Which connects rather well to his whole “splinters” thing. Just some more Prince of Heart imagery.
ffffffffffffffffffffff it never stops from keep going deeper
An important thing to know about this gif is that Dirk doesn’t know who the fuck that is. The only Dirk that had met Neenah was Dream Ghost Dirk, and Alpha Dirk does not have the memories of that Dirk
Dirk just… Did this. He’s that cool
You have to realize that the Condesce exists in his world so he just randomly high fived someone who looks like the tyrannical ruler he wants to take down as a teenager
Which just makes this extra wild
I think just as important is why he did this, bcuz the context to this scene makes it one of the most understatedly beautiful parts of the comic.
We see the lamps light up like this again, sort of, in that the lamps eventually explode and take out the building holding them…but that happens when the kids God Tier. So Dirk’s feelings are being portrayed as roughly equivalent to that.
The High-Five itself drives this link in further. The High-Five as a gesture comes from a closely intertwined overlap between mainstream American culture and LGBT history, as it was started by Glenn Burke, and I quote “the first and only MLB player to come out as gay to teammates and team owners during his professional career and the first to publicly acknowledge it”–Wikipedia.
And as for the High Five itself:
After retiring from baseball, Burke used the high five with other homosexual residents of the Castro district of San Francisco, where it became a symbol of gay pride and identification.[9]
So yeah, high fives are literally gay dude culture. Considering the conversation that serves as the lynchpin of Dirk and Jake’s relationship is all about Dirk telling Jake about the fall of American civilization and that Dirk’s biggest role-model is Texan, I think it’s fair to say this is probably intentional.
Puts a neat spin on Dirk’s other gay high-five jokes about Jake, too. And we don’t even really need to bring all this High-Five history in to read Dirk’s feelings for Jake into this sequence.
Dirk spends a shitload of this flash Breaking glass windows. If we can understand Dirk’s suicide as Dirk Destroying his “Self”, it pretty clearly parses through his Prince of Heart title as Destroying Heart.
The window breaking, then, would be Dirk destroyingthrough Heart–using both his feelings for Jake and his cool-guy Persona to smash through the obstacles in his way and save himself and his friends from certain death.
And the final shot of window breaking, the one immediately following his high-five with Meenah?
Positions Jake’s green directly at Dirk’s back, as though pushing him onwards. Jake is, in a sense, the wings on Dirk’s back. In essence, Unite Synchronize is half desperate, heroic effort on the part of a gay teen to save himself and his loved ones.
That kind of attention to detail and symbolic impact is why I keep coming back to Homestuck. I want more stories about gay teens who love their friends to be celebrated as heroes, in all their painful messiness. And that’s why I deeply hope characters like Dirk and his ridiculous rocketboard high-fives stay with us for years to come.
i say this a lot but these are two of my absolute favorites
Tagora seems like the exact kind of planned-for-everything shitheel I love in like, death note and stuff so I’m resigning myself to loving his shitty little grin preemptively
Back in 2010, I was a young college student. I was massively depressed and confused about my identity. My mental illness had isolated from me from my friends and family, and my life felt hopeless. So, as many young people do, I channeled all of my heart and soul into creating fanart, fanmixes, cosplay, fan fiction, and meta posts about my favorite webcomic: /Homestuck/, by Andrew Hussie. I was SO prolific in the fandom that in 2012, Andrew asked me to do the canon art for a fangirl parody character, “Calliope”. Of course, I accepted right away! It was so much fun getting to put a lot of myself into this character through her art.
Calliope is an alien character that shares a body with her “brother”, Caliborn. Together they live in complete isolation, chained up and only allowed to talk to people on their computers. Caliborn is a raging misogynist who is determined to break down Calliope’s will to live and ultimately kill her. Calliope’s goal was to reform her brother, to make him more like her, so that their personalities could integrate into one powerful being, with her as the dominate force.
Throughout 2012 and 2013, my popularity and following in the fandom grew due to my insanely prolific nature. (Seriously, my mental health was so bad that Homestuck was the ONLY thing I let myself think about. I lived my entire life in a dissociative haze.) I became, as they are called, a “big name fan”, and as such, I started to receive a hell of a lot of harassment. A lot of it was misogynist in nature, and a lot of it came from my own blunders and mistakes as I tried to figure out my identity and sexuality while in the public eye. (I made a lot of mistakes in my early 20s, as pretty much everyone does!)
Online fame has a way of making you lose yourself in the hatred. I related more and more to Calliope, and grew increasingly attached to her character and fictional plight as a coping mechanism to deal with all the abuse and isolation. The more I isolated myself, the less people online treated me like a real person. It was a vicious cycle!
At some point though, the constant harassment became too much to bear. I stopped allowing myself to enjoy my hobbies, and I focused hard on building my life again. I started writing original fiction! I killed the part of myself that enjoyed fanwork, because at a certain point, she was bringing me nothing but misery. I became afraid and ashamed of how deep I was into my coping mechanisms, and several toxic people around me just reinforced this view over and over again. I retreated into obscurity, leaving my fandom days behind me and trying desperately not to think about the kind of person I was in those days.
I never left Homestuck behind, though! I continued to do freelance work for the comic, and became increasingly involved in What Pumpkin Games, where I now work full time on the Hiveswap series. But I told myself over and over again that this was just a job, that I had left behind my embarrassing fandom days that in my mind, had brought me nothing but misery.
But… here’s the thing: I was lying to myself.
Through the Homestuck fandom, I met my amazing wife! I had so many opportunities to share myself with an audience, I found inspiration and meaning in my life, and it launched me into a promising artistic career! A LOT of good things have blossomed from that strange coping mechanism. to think that it brought me nothing but pain was nothing but my distorted, PTSD-addled brain telling me that I was garbage.
So, why did I let myself stop enjoying something I loved SO MUCH? I don’t have any one good answer, but I do know one thing now: I’m done living like that! I am a queer person, I’m an abuse survivor, and I am a writer and an artist and a cosplayer and god dammit, I fucking love Calliope and Caliborn. So, this mix is for them, but it’s also for everyone out there in this awful culture that makes women feel like shit for daring to speak, for daring to like things and have opinions, and for being weird fangirls.
I have news for everyone, though. Weird fangirls are amazing, and we are going to win!
i dont remember writing a big takedown about it but me and some friends did meme about it a whole lot, which is what that tag is SUPPOSED to be housing, tumblr’s inability to function aside.
I tried to express this point back in the Force & Flow essays, but I’m not sure I succeded, so I’m glad for the chance to revisit it! I think I can answer your first question with the second. The range of a “miracle” is essentially the same as the range of “magic”, a concept that canonically applies to Heirs, Witches, Maids and Sylphs.
Jesus’ story is imported into Homestuck in the story of the Signless–a Seer. When Jesus comes up, John describes him as magic–just as he later describes himself, Jade, and Rose in the midst of her Witch roleplay. (And yes, this does mean the Jegus meme had a payoff in the form of classpect exposition.)
Later on, Rose seems to more or less figure out how to roleplay a wizard. But when Dave thinks to ask, she makes it clear what she’s doing isn’t exactly casting spells in the typical sense.
Which makes sense, because Prophets aren’t typically thought of as being magic per se. If you think about it, the miracles Jesus performs aren’t really that different from what we might imagine wizards could do.
What makes them different is a matter of emphasis. Wizards are regularly linked to knowledge, just like prophets are. Hence the concept of the “wizard’s spellbook”. But for magicians, knowledge is typically a means to an end, it’s an answer to “how” the magic is performed.
Prophets also do magic, but for them the emphasis is on the knowledge itself as opposed to the spellbook. A Prophet like Jesus or Moses would typically claim their magic wouldn’t happen at all, but for their faith in and knowledge of their divine Source–God.
Just trade in the figure of “God” for the Seer/Mage’s Aspect (the Aspects are inherently divine-coded anyway, given that they’re basically Aeons), and there you go. Any kind of magic you can think of a Prophet doing through their Aspect is something I believe reasonably falls under their purview.
I’d simply put just as much of an emphasis on what the Prophet might end up saying as a result of their Aspect’s influence, which is probably even more interesting. Do their prophecies concern/affect/benefit primarily themselves or others? How does their Aspect influence what message they have to give, and how they deliver it?
A particular nuance to the pair might be a penchant for resurrections/raising others from the dead, particularly in ways that might otherwise seem impossible. Sollux pulls this off for himself by half-ghosting, while Terezi pulls it off for Vriska by guiding John’s choices.
Does this answer your question, anon? It’s a pretty dang good one, btw.
Flying through Storytelling 