Category: Uncategorized

The power of anxiety

arrghus:

Karkat Vantas can not stop fucking thinking. It seems that every moment of every night his brain is running at full capacity, constantly calculating, contemplating, considering. One might consider such a mind to have trouble sleeping, and indeed he is said to have spent his entire session in a state of wakefulness.

Karkat does, of course, have a lot to think about. His blood colour makes it all but impossible for him to survive adulthood under the violent Alternian regime, and this fuels his paranoia with keeping himself clean and unblemished, his fixation with emulating the proper behavior of an upright Alternian soldier, his love of the Thresh Prince, a story about a member of the (relative) underclass breaking into highblood territory and proving himself worthy.

But these habits make themselves known in other places. Notably, Karkat is one of the teenaged protagonists possessed of the unusual ability to keep his room clean, which he does with such extraordinary proficiency that it can perhaps even be called spartan. He keeps track of his team, too, and in the middle of the endless, uncontrollable noise he constantly spews at himself and others, there are orders, directions, and general coordination. Karkat, generally speaking, has a decent grasp of what the things are that need doing, and roughly who needs to do them, and he’s not afraid to tell them so.

But his powers are not merely situated in the present. When left alone, Karkat mulls over things, turns them again and again in his head, and occasionally hits on surprising revelations, like his understanding of Jack Noir as a metaphorical cancerous tumour in the universe frog he and his team created, aimed squarely at the frog itself (or his considerations on the nature of free will in a universe with an Alpha timeline).

It is Karkat who finally breaks the code of silence regarding the pre-retcon meteor’s plethora of growing issues. It is Karkat who figures out that chairs are handy to have, so you might as well keep one on your person at all times. It is Karkat who patiently tries to work countless others through their problems, with his mind always buzzing, spinning, and turning with the countless little details of the world, all the myriad little sticky details of life, all the endless ways things can go wrong.

And yeah, it’s unhealthy. Homestuck is full of people pushing through difficult situations by applying their mental problems and maladaptive coping methods best they can.

Hey! Really like yor work on the aspects. Made me rethink Pages entirely. I saw that you were wandering about the whole unifying mythology of Knights and Pages as surrounding Warriors and Lawgivers through the serve effect. But I thought a real neat way to tie it all together is with the “Protect and Serve” motto used in law enforcement organizations, which ties both Serve (and Protect, which also symbolizes those classes a lot) and the Law and Code of Honor parts :) . What do you think?

yep! I pretty much agree. I’ve been trying to figure out exactly how to parse the motifs of the classes in a comprehensible way, and the Protect and Serve motto reads really well with Knights and Pages. I’ve never seen canon reference it–the closest would be Dave’s repeated references to Obama, I’d say. But it’s definitely been taking up my thoughts as I consider how the classes all fit together thematically. Sweet catch!

mamoru:

mamoru:

mamoru:

hey folks general statement: people know each other and if you are an ass to someone’s friend everyone else is going to find out. if you really want to be friends with anyone just be nice. stop being mean. to everyone. be a nice person. that is all you have to do

if you want to get into an industry or a skill or a niche or any sort of group, just be nice to everyone. word gets around if you are and word gets around if you are not. why would anyone want to work/be friends with someone who hates their friends

some discussion has been going around and I want to clarify: this is not saying be nice to people because you might work with them, this is saying if you are an ass everyone is going to find out and people need to stop being shocked by that

have you watched sailor moon? if so, thoughts on mamoru/usagi and haruka/michiru?

I love sailor moon it owns

usagi/mamoru is pretty good, I guess? they never did a ton for me either way but they’re cute.

I typically read Usagi as poly and bi and in love with all her inner senshi girls but especially Rei, so thats kinda where im at there. 
Sometimes Rei is ace in my head, sometimes she’s into usagi and minako.

Chibiusa and Hotaru are otp but like in a childhood best friends way where i want them to grow up and be happy together. they’re gay but also too young to really think about shipping yanno? 

Haruka/Michiru is the otp to end all otps and whenever i post about them they’re likely to have a character tag. they’re like up there with my hall of fame ships: Utena/Anthy, DirkJake, Davekat, every other canon HS ship…they vibe with vrisrezi and rosemary in a particularly interesting way for me i guess? 

anyway michiru’s probably a mage of void, haruka’s a thief of breath, they’re in fucking love and im gay about it 

Time and the Alpha

arrghus:

So here’s a thing about Time that I’ve been thinking about but I don’t know exactly how to put. Heroes of Time in Homestuck all exist fundemantelly entangled with the Alpha timeline, and in the case of the two ‘good guy’ heroes, Dave and Aradia, are positioned as a sort of caretakers for it, driven to maintain the existence of the alpha in order to protect their friends. And they do this in their own idiosyncratic ways, Dave threading together an intricate tapestry of careful loops and Aradia just kinda save-scumming whenever anything goes wrong. The way they interact with the Alpha says a lot about them as people, it is a key part of defining who they are, to the point that Time itself in many ways seems to be About the nature of the Alpha, a natural feature of reality.

But there’s hints the Alpha is synthetic, a construct of Lord English. OptimisticDuelist says it better than I do, but there’s precious little of his writings on the topic publicly available. https://medium.com/@RoseOfNobility/apotheosis-and-creation-myth-2257d7bf5854 will have to suffice for now.

So where does that leave us, vis-a-vis the fundamental nature of Time? What is the Aspect, exactly, absent the influence of this immortal demon? Is there an Aspect at all absent his power? Certainly, both Dave’s and Aradia’s arcs involve overcoming symbolic representations of LE and the Alpha, Dave by coming to terms with his abusive childhood, tightly linked to the presence of Lil Cal, who is actually Lord English, and Aradia perhaps more symbolically by overcoming her death and largely leaving the Alpha-defined story entirely thousands of pages before the rest of the main cast manages to. And, of course, Damara, more of a failed hero of Time, is in many ways defined by her allegiance to LE, and her desire to see him hurt her former friends, while Caliborn, well, I don’t think I need to explain how Caliborn relates to Lord English.

But, well, I’ve gotten a couple questions from people making, like, fan characters or defining themselves in terms of the Aspects (and where the line between those things goes I do not know nor particularly care) about what the nature of Time is, and, uh, this is part of why it’s tricky to answer. Lord English is a dominating influence upon the story of Homestuck, but in terms of Paradox Space as a whole, that vast, nebulous existence of countless other stories to tell using the same basic mechanics? In terms of the Classpect system as used separately from Homestuck itself, to label fictional characters or even yourself? I’m not entirely sure how to position Lord English and his themes and nature in relation to Tumblr user Anonymous asking me about what it means for them, specifically, to be a Seer of Time. Like, where do you go with that?

Maybe it’ll get clearer for me in time, I feel like it kinda did already just writing this.