hello friends, im strapped for cash at the moment so im gonna open up commissions! 9×12 b/w inked, 1 or 2 characters, sfw or nsfw, $40 shipped! DM me for more if you’re interested!
This is why when people go “oh hey wanna look at my art? I MEAN IT’S SO BAD I DID SUCH A TERRIBLE JOB” my first instinct is to just tell them “nah, I’m good”
I really hate self-deprecation. It does you no good. It does me no good. Stop it.
I find it really interesting and a bit relieving that people are identifiying with the boy in this image set and not making the typical niceguy comments.
You’ll be happy to know that there’s more to this than what’s been shown here; behold!
TwT beautiful… Just as a note, I tend to do that same thing the boy does. I don’t know the rest of the people, but I learned to do that because, as a child, I often found not-to-good criticism when I showed my work (drawings, mostly), so I started apologyzing in advance to prevent people from mocking me or adding criticims to what I did.
tl;dr Knight of Doom roleplaying Page of Void, probably.
more under the cut, this got predictably long.
I’m thinking his true Class is likely Knight, which I see as the Passive Serve Class.
Doom is the aspect of suffering, rules and limitations, and poverty in contrast to Life’s immense wealth. I think on some level his desire to help lowbloods-who’s suffering he would be keenly attuned to on some level–is genuine.
As “Ones who serve X, or serve through X, for the benefit of others”, Knights tend to exploit/use their Aspect directly, but always in the service of other agents.
Redglare is a huge badass who parses quite Actively initially, but she is in the service of the Grand Highblood, and mostly exists to bring his will to pass-until she accidentally serves Mindfang a bunch of Minds to control on a silver platter, allowing her escape.
In the same way,
Zebruh perceives himself as being in the service of lowbloods, but ultimately serves only the agenda of wider Alternian culture.
He’s still serving another, but it matters who the other is.
They also seem happiest when they stop trying so hard and allow their innate desires to be receptive to their loved ones’ needs to guide them–Karkat is at his best passively helping others with their romance problems, Dave is happiest when he chills out and gives Karkat the companionship and time he craves so much, etc.
Zebruh perceives himself helping the Doomed, but ends up exploiting lowbloods and serving them Doom–placing them in states of poverty, limitation, and suffering–instead. Thing is, he genuinely perceives this as being to their benefit, somehow. If he chilled out and paid attention to how others actually feel like Karkat and Dave eventually do, he might actually be a pretty ok dude.
So what’s getting in the way?
Like every other Indigo Caste member so far, including Equius, Zebruh is an avid Page roleplayer. That is, “One who invites service through x, or invites the service of X, fortheir own benefit.”
Pages’ biggest talent early on is their likability and ability to get people to want to help them. (Though like Knights, they seem to reach their best when they embrace the verbiage that most closely matches their Active status-Jake is at his strongest actively exploiting/using Hope to kick Caliborn’s ass, for example.)
Equius tries to replicate this by commanding people to serve his purposes, with mixed results: Gamzee complies and voices enthusiasm at doing whatever it takes to make Equius smile, and eventually does so by, y’know, murdering him. For the most part it makes him really unpleasant and weird to talk to, though, so people want to avoid him.
Amisia makes a huge deal of getting the Reader to help her, serving her purposes by making them kill lowbloods and give her their blood and stuff. She mentions having Chahut help her previously, and the guards who bring her the Oliveblood are in her service as well.
And Zebruh literally keeps slaves devoted to serving him. Interestingly, he doesn’t seem able to perceive the dissonance between his words and deeds, and he often ends up outright ignoring what the Reader says–all of which reminds me a lot of Horruss serving himself Void to ignore Rufioh’s breakup request in particular.
Amisia and Zebruh both maintain their comfortable superiority through degrees of pretense, lies,material comforts, and confusion–all of which are linked to Void as the aspect of incomprehensibility, darkness, and physicality.
Hence why Amisia is a fake painter–her entire life is ruled by physical and social power, so she’s far away from a brain space that allows for imagination and creative expression.
And hence why Zebruh is a fake social justice advocate–he’s too concerned about physical and social consequences to commit to the ideas he espouses, or connect those ideas to meaningful physical action.
And so both of them get caught up in meaningless performance and self-serving spectacle.
phew, this got pretty long. Anyway highbloods are interesting, I’m finding the indigobloods pretty compelling in particular. lemme know what you all think!
yeah i’m gonna have to fight you on gamzee being beyond redemption, he was one of the nicest trolls in the comic before shit hit the fan
what are you talking about? I said I thought that was a possibility, I’m just not sure if the comic will actually go there textually. Waiting on the epilogue to find out.
oh my god, i’m floored and kinda delighted. its been a while since we met a character that frustrating and awful. that said im a bit weirded out that people are making him out to be irredeemable, as usual.
guys. homestuck and hiveswapdont really deal in irredeemable characters, or at least definitely not irredeemable teens (except maybe Caliborn).
zebruh’s shit, absolutely, but he isn’t meaningfully more shit than vriska, equius or eridan at the start of their narratives, and they all received varying levels of redemption in the eyes of homestuck’s narrative.
he’s also showing the same signs of corruption of identity as every other highblood thus far–his Blood Caste’s Aspect getting in the way of or messing with his true Aspect’s insight:
he sees the suffering of lowbloods on some level and obviously cares about it in some way, because he has genuinely convinced himself he wants to help (Doom), but his perception of the actual problem is obfuscated andconfused (Void).
when it comes to how his physical actions contribute to the problem, his mind simply Voids it out. If he got past his Void influence and saw the suffering and doom for what it actually is, it stands to reason it would change his perspective. But Alternia is designed to ensure that doesn’t happen.
Zebruh is awful, but he’s also a subject of a system designed to make him that way. The same is true of Ardata. And Amisia. And Trizza. The sins of any one of these characters aren’t really as relevant as their capacity for change and redemption, because the actual enemy is the system that produced them all, and those responsible for putting it into place–LE and Doc Scratch.
I think it’s pretty likely all of these characters will be redeemed in Hiveswap–hell, it may be that one of the core puzzle mechanics involves using our insight into their thoughts to figure out how to get through to them and have them join the rebel camp, in a lot of cases.
thatsnot a hard prediction or anything, it just seems plausible. certainly moreso than thinking that the narrative that gave us Vriska is suddenly interested in providing a lot of one dimensional, irredeemable antagonists.
One thing I have a hard time forgiving is that Zebruh forces his way to others while not doing any concrete action. He is a coward who acts as if he is a rebel and a savior.
I mean, he’ve done WAAAY less horrible things than Trizza (who’s taking down a suburb for a selfie), but he claims to be a great lord when he’ll cowardly not helping any of the trolls he claims to care about while taking advantage of them for his own pride (most of it consisting of getting laid basically). That is what I can’t go over for his character.
He doesn’t even have the guts to fight his battle, or even going to the battlefront. He is a coward who haven’t even recognized it (unless Amisia or Ardata).
He is an insult to the bluebloods, a predator who thinks he is a shepherd.
The only thing I can offers him is that he doesn’t publicly mock and humiliate his lowbloods unlike most highbloods seems to do. That’s a VERY LOW bar.
Zebruh’s behavior is inexcusable and unforgivable. I’m not arguing against that. I just don’t think it’s beyond redemption, provided Zebruh repents.
I disagree that he’s an insult to the bluebloods. In the context of Alternia he is not that far off from exactly what the Bluebloods are supposed to be. Really, he’s an exemplary member of his caste, even if he’d be furious to be told so. And that’s exactly what makes the hemospectrum’s systemic violence so insidious.
Zebruh only exists on a world deliberately designed to make him as awful as he is, by adults who knowingly wanted this and worse for trollkind.
Is Zebruh as responsible as Doc Scratch/LE?
Does Zebruh deserve the chance to exist somewhere other than Alternia, and could he be a better person in an environment that didn’t literally require malice of him?
Could he be a better person if confronted by the right stimuli (like say, Joey’s commitment to the truth), and then moved to fight for a truly better future as a result?
These are the questions I think we should be keeping an eye out for even with shitlords, because they were core to our understanding of the characters in Homestuck. Nobody in the comic was entirely beyond redemption except Caliborn and maybe Gamzee, jury’s still out there.
We just met Zebruh, so i just think thats worth keeping in mind.
this is hilarious because…Bayonetta is a fictional character who therefore cannot consent to anything you geeks…she “owns” her sexuality because she’s written that way??…like…yall are really so comical.
I crack up every time folk try to use Bayonetta as a counter-argument against critiques of hyper-sexualized female characters in video games. Like stop, fam.
Bayonetta is literally just the power fantasy OC of the female character designer. The director wrote the original script for a “traditional” witch, elderly, crook nose, pointy hat, shapeless robes, etc. Then Mari Shimaazaki, this lady:
stepped up and basically said ‘okay but what if instead of that dumb thing we used this awesome bitch I just drew’. Bayonetta was not designed by a man. She was directly contrary to the intentions of the men in charge. But once they saw how awesome she was, being a sexy badass totally on her own terms whilst not giving a shit what they thought, they submitted.
Today it’s generally agreed throughout the company and much of the industry that it couldn’t have happened any other way, that only a woman could have made a female action hero as successful as Bayonetta. If she’d been designed to appeal to the audience, that would have been fundamentally contrary to who she is and probably nowhere near as successful. But since she originated as a personal power fantasy, as this woman’s idealized self, that feeling of existing for her own goals and her own pleasure and not giving a flying fuck about how anybody else saw her shone through and Bayonetta became more popular than she ever could have been if she was just trying to please others.
Additional fun fact: all the frankly ridiculous dance moves she uses? Those are the result of giving the mocap actress an open stage and telling her to do whatever she felt like.
the earliest drafts were even shot down for being too overtly sexual for the director’s tastes
the MALE director, Hideki Kamiya
Also remember Japan has different ideas for femininity than the West. In Japan, the ideal woman is meant to be a submissive prude who never shows her body or wants male attention.
In Asian countries, a woman being sexy is EMPOWERING.
Always fun to see more people missing my point because of tweets that were taken out of context, what a blast.
I’m literally saying that Bayonetta sends a good message about being comfortable in your body because she was written to be so comfortable as opposed to a character that is made to be embarrassed and clearly uncomfortable when put it a sexual situation. Not that the latter character would be a bad character necessarily but that it’s bad representation. Stop writing good characters and then put them in shitty embarrassing situations for comedic effect because it makes real girls uncomfortable.
Look at it from the eyes of a young girl, not a dude and see what message it sends.
Flying through Storytelling 