I’m gonna have to dissagree with you on the whole “Eridan is irredeemable” thing. Simply because he did have his reasons for doing things(they were just bad/misinformed reasons), and wasn’t as much of a Nice Guy(TM) as everyone says. Here’s what happened, according to what I remember: Eridan tries to convince everyone(or at least Feferi) that there’s no hope if they don’t join with Jack(not realizing that there’s no hope with Jack either). 1/4

Feferi’s like “Ew, you’re just doing this cause you like me.” Eridan goes “Ew bitch, no. I am so far over you, I literally don’t care about you except you’re also technically the Empress now.” Sollux challenges Eridan to their Hate Duel and Eridan goes “Ugh fine”. Sollux gets Rekt, and Feferi gets pissed that her new “pet”(because that’s what Sollux seemed to be to her) didn’t win and tries to kill Eridan. 2/4
Eridan kills her first, destroys the Matriorb to distract Kanaya when she looks like she might go for him next(arguably the only uncalled for action, as I don’t think she’d actually attacked him yet), kills Kanaya, and then leaves poor Karkat alone and goes to find somebody to go with him to join Jack. ¾
So he didn’t just go on a murder spree, he was either winning a duel(Sollux), or defending himself against (percieved) threats(Feferi and Kanaya). If he was really gonna go on a murder spree, he would’ve killed Karkat, too. Also all of this probably wouldn’t have happened if A: Feferi had done her job as his Moiral; or B: Present!Karkat hadn’t called it off with Past!Eridan. (Sorry if this all sounds rude, I just really hate when people don’t actually pay attention to Eridan’s character) 4/4

You have some serious issues with women, anon. From the top:

A) Eridan was cruel, ungrateful, judgmental and unpleasant to everyone who had the misfortune of talking to him from his first appearance. Also, he’s a fucking Nazi. Feferi was forced into a position of trying to cool the temperament of a literal genocidal nazi asshole. Nobody owed Eridan further emotional labor once he was no longer a threat.

B) Your view that Feferi viewed Sollux as a ‘pet’ is as uncharitable as it is based on absolutely nothing. If you’re going to make statements that dramatic at me, be prepared to back them up with the text and have your reading put under scrutiny. I’m not here to indulge the validity of everyone’s pet headcanons. I’m here to talk about Homestuck.

C) You’re forgetting the part where Eridan tried to get Feferi SPECIFICALLY to join Jack with him. The offer was not open to Sollux and was not made to anybody else. Eridan considered her worthy because she’s ruling class, because oh have I mentioned, Eridan is a fucking nazi.

D) I literally do not care to what extent Eridan was personally out to go on a murder spree. He’s still a gutless coward who abandoned all his friends and took dim views of even the ones who went out of their way to show him kindness, like Karkat, on account of his ***LITERAL SPACE NAZI IDEOLOGY***

E) Andrew Hussie himself talked about him in the dimmest of terms, calling him the worst kind of bastard Homestuck has to offer in the context of Act 5–harsher words than I’d use, considering LE and Gamzee exist. But like. You’re gonna have a hard time finding evidence for your pet reading, bud.

F) Maybe when you’re expressing virulent misogyny at a female character don’t LITERALLY call her slurs? It’s kind of on the nose. You might have noticed part of my aesthetic is valuing the effort it takes to read between the lines, so like give me a little room for doubt here as to where you’re coming from ok thanks.

G) I didn’t even call Eridan completely irredeemable in the grand scheme of things, for fuck’s sake. My point was that actually just the opposite: That no matter how bad Eridan was, you still have to read him while weighing the agency of a child trapped in an exploitative system with the literal quasi-Adult GOD that set up that system in the first place.

Eridan is shit, but there’s potential for him to be not shit somewhere in his character. The two statements are not contradictory.

jetisthemoon:

WLW and MLM solidarity doesnt exi-

anotherwitchofbreath:

ok so i REALLY dont wanna involve myself in fruitless direct argumentation here but id like to maybe nip this mentality in the bud for anyone who has already seen arguments to this effect.

so mspa and homestuck were, for a long time, the projects of one guy with like, a tip jar, some limited merch and other sources of income to rely upon. to even reach the scope of what “homestuck the work” is pre-epilogue, hussie had to go full time with the project, find people to contribute to the comic, expand its scope, pay astronomical monthly hosting costs, travel to events, expand merchandising so as to pay for all this, etc. and even still it took years and years to get up to this point.

in this era, artists who create truly expansive works are taking on an unimaginable amount of financial risk, for themselves AND for anyone who they bring onto their team. there’s no socialist art patronage via the state, theres no guaranteed housing, income, healthcare etc that allows one to work at art without worrying for personal or familial survival. since our world is very much a bleak capitalist hell, even choosing pursuit of art means taking ones survival into ones own hands.

do i know corporations have suspect motives? hell yes i do, they literally are defined by a sole existential commitment to profit seeking and expansion, which overrides any other consideration individuals in the corporation might have. do i know that corporations that patronize art can become very meddlesome? absolutely. but without a stabilizing financial basis that corporate patronage provides, there was never going to be more homestuck to begin with.

homestuck is a historically unique work, an incredible one at that, but its appeal is somewhat niche, and the costs of even keeping it alive, let alone continuing it, have been very daunting. hussie’s decision is, ultimately, i think, very wise if survival of this saga is to be ensured. it is up to hussie and the WP crew to struggle for the independence of their work within the context of a new source of patronage, but yknow what? ive got a funny feeling like they’ll succeed in that struggle if they have enthusiastic enough fans supporting their work, to demonstrate that the homestuck saga, in its unaltered form, is populae enough to benefit viz.

so, let the works stand for themselves. for the love of god, dont decide that you think that homestuck is “too corporate” now because it has a strong financial backer instead of always being in a state of uneasy existential risk. because if you make a prior judgment and move to other stories, what are you going to do? are you going to make sure you dont touch any other corporate properties? because i hate to say it, but narrative media is pretty well under the corporate thumb nowadays!! is there nothing published by another company that you like? do you see anything that isnt independent of corporate influence and say, “this is superwholock to me”?

capitalism and the corporate structuring of industry, media, services etc need to be done away with. maybe some day the arts will be fully emancipated from capitalist control and truly belong to the people once more. but that is a huge, protracted struggle that will require massive coordination–a heavily individualized aversion to consuming anything tainted by the corporate is not a significant part of that struggle.

in the meantime, ill keep believing in the people who made the best artistic work ive ever seen, and be glad that their survival has been guaranteed for that much longer with thos latest move.

this take also kind of presumes that Viz has no interest in innovating in their approach to media, which is unlikely given they knew and appreciated what Homestuck even was in the first place. That can’t be said for, say, Marvel and DC.

Snzzz muh what a boring cynical take. Please be less lazy about criticism guys it’s getting really boring to read. We literally know NOTHING about what’s coming and theres plenty of ways WP’s experience in media innovation could be an influence on the way Viz distributes content. This is unprecedented and exciting stuff.

Post series on this very subject forthcoming in about an hour btw.

man I don’t think you can really say bro is brainwashed but gamzee’s just evil when you can argue that gamzee’s also possessed by cal. they even have really similar relationships to how he’s formed, ie part of their souls exist inside lil cal already. which is probably a good explanation for how lil cal is able to brainwash them when he doesn’t brainwash, like, dave, who is around him his whole childhood. idk, I just think gamzee’s more complicated than “evil ass hole”

As it happens, Gamzee has a line I never gave much weight to before noticing Bro’s SAW interest that I’m more inclined to take seriously now, that suggests Gamzee and Bro’s relationship to Cal WAS intrinsically different:

But even if Bro is kind of a noble captor figure holding Cal back, I still wouldn’t think it excuses any of what he put Dave through. He’s still an awful dude.

As for Gamzee, here’s the main problem with reading him as “just” brainwashed.

Gamzee doesn’t require Lil Cal’s presence to go evil. In fact, Gamzee doesn’t seem to require ANYTHING to turn evil.
But even if like, Doc Scratch ALWAYS teleports Lil Cal into Gamzee’s presence to trigger his personality shift, I don’t think it would matter.
The weight of the sheer SCALE of Gamzee’s devotion cements his place as an ultimately willing accomplice/acolyte to Caliborn’s Dark Carnival.

And it kind of makes Gamzee fucking terrifying and a fantastic villain.

I’ll explain my reasoning here.

We know for a fact that Gamzee snaps and kills all his friends in at least one Doomed timeline. This is the source for half the code used in the creation of Doc Scratch. There’s no implication that Lil Cal is involved here at all.

But again, let’s assume Lil Cal was here again. It doesn’t matter.

Because there is canonically, explicitly, no timeline in the history of Gamzee where Gamzee ever, ever, EVER chooses to rebel. Gamzee Makara simply does not ever choose his friends over Lord English. In any timeline. Ever.
How do I know?

Lets talk about Ghosts for a minute. The fandom has historically kind of taken these guys for granted, and loose fandom consensus is that they aren’t coherent/who has what ghosts is arbitrary. This is incorrect!

Pretty much everybody in the Bubbles that should have alt!ghosts does, including Meenah and Aranea, the two characters who’s alt!ghosts are typically presumed “Missing”.

This is important. The Ghosts kind of give us very low-key character development, and contextualize the characters for us. For example, Eridan is an absolute irredeemable bastard in the Alpha timeline. But in a God Tier iteration of themselves, Eridan and Feferi seemingly come to friendlier terms. In another, there’s suggestions Eridan makes up with Feferi and Sollux. In yet another, he seems to be Trans or exploring femininity at least.

The point is, there’s a certain fluidity to Eridan’s potential. Still terrible in the comic, but it’s important to remember that Eridan didn’t CHOOSE to be trapped in the meteor with Jack, or to be born to Alternia’s power system, or to be trapped in the Alpha Timeline.

It’s important to remember these things because in Homestuck, someone with power–Lord English–deliberately and willfully chose those things FOR him. Eridan’s lives are lived in response to that imposed power structure.
These factors don’t redeem him completely necessarily

But anyway, the fact that the rest of the cast have coherent quantum expressions means there are only three real exceptions–three characters who either don’t have any ghosts at all, or should have more ghosts than they do.

The first is Caliborn, who’s timeline has exactly one deviation from the Alpha–apparently caused by John’s retcon. This riddle’s solved easily enough:
Predomination doesn’t leave a ghost to appear in the bubbles at all.
When Calliope says she ate his soul, she means that literally.
Caliborn’s cheating in the Alpha Timeline is indeed the only reason Calliope exists in the bubbles at all.

(This, by the way, explains a lot about the relationship between Caliborn’s soul and Gamzee/Arquis’ in the Lord English. He predominated over them, too.)

The second is Vriska, who only has a single ghost in (Vriska). This is really weird, because we literally know for a fact she dies in more than one doomed timeline! As with the two Calliopes, I think this is down to John’s retcon doing some weird entanglement nonsense to Vriska’s quantum existence.
The point is: Where others have a palette of possibility, Vriska has two extremely polarized halves. Schrodinger’s Vriska.

Important to mention that just like Eridan, the structure of the Alpha Timeline that limits potential Vriskas is IMPOSED ONTO HER. Vriska didn’t want anything about the way she was raised or where she was born. She didn’t ask John and Terezi to retcon her into this bizarre state. Both Vriskas, like the rest of the cast, are rolling with the punches LE has seen fit to give.

Except for Gamzee.

Hussie literally tells us Gamzee never dies. His single non-Alpha Timeline death in [S] Game Over is retconned by John, and Hussie suggests it straight up doesn’t count. But that presents a problem.

There are thousands upon thousands of Doomed troll timelines. How is it that Gamzee specifically never ever EVER dies? Well, there’s only one real way that a Non-Time player can survive a Doomed timeline, that we know of:

Dream self merger. By going to sleep as the last player present in Sburb, the Doomed Rose from Davesprite’s timeline triggers a game mechanic that ends her timeline completely and merges her consciousness with that of Alpha Rose through their dreamselves.

If Gamzee survives his doomed timelines, this is the only possible way how.
And collapsing all of his potential instances into a single Alpha identity certainly sounds like the reduction of possibility commonly attributed to the Rage aspect.
But what that means is that to move on to the Alpha, every Doomed Gamzee must inevitably either snap and kill all the other trolls, or somehow outlast them.

And it means that if any Gamzee had EVER, in the entire spectrum of plausibility the Alpha timeline affords, EVER been inclined to rebel against LE–then we would know. Because somewhere out there, that at least Hussie could see, there would be a Ghost to show for it.

But there isn’t. Similar in this respect only to Caliborn, Gamzee simply has no alternate deviations because he doesn’t want them. He chooses the path that leads to Lord English freely and willingly, over and over and over again.

And like Caliborn…

Gamzee does this because he wants to.

Gamzee doesn’t BELIEVE he’s going to become his own God–he knows it for a fact. He sees it in Lil Cal’s mangled soul. And he embraces that truth wholeheartedly, throwing himself into the acolyte role from then onwards and presumably following instructions Doc Scratch gives him throughout Act 6.

Which we can talk about some other time. The point is: Gamzee chooses all this. Whether or not Lil Cal causes him to is beside the point, because there is not and never will be any timeline where Gamzee chooses to resist.

Gamzee is the ultimate in shitty cosmic nazi religious zealots, and devoted to the very power structure that causes every other character to suffer so. There are no mitigating factors for him as there are for everyone else but Caliborn.
At the end of the day, he’s evil.
Bad clown. Worst enemy.

doesn’t joey say she’s not a maid?

She says she’s not DAMMEK’s Maid, specifically. Which makes sense, given that Maids are an active class, inclined to act for their own benefit/be driven by their own agency.