Damn, I’ve only just finished HS for the first time. And, damn, was that a ride. I love Terezi, I love Dirk, I love Roxy, Tavros and Rose and Jade and, Goddamn, I didn’t know what a juggalo was before but now I do and I’ve not sure if I’m better off for it. I love the relationships, I love Dirk and Jake, and Vriska and Terezi. I love these dysfunctional self loathing gay folk. So, er, any blog recommendations?

hm. Blogs? It’s kind of hard for me to say without knowing what you like, but off the top of my head I guess I’d mention some like Fandom Favorites or people I think are pretty cool. But like, it’s hard for me to say without knowing who you are, baasically because I don’t know if you’re a minor and there’s quite a bit of nsfw stuff out there I wouldn’t risk sharing.

@moonpaw17 and @dyonoi are good peeps to start with if you’re into davekat and cute comics and stuff. I’ve always enjoyed @heir-of-puns ‘s blog because it tends to have a pretty even distribution of homestuck fandom content. Ditto @sometipsygnostalgic who’s done some really funny post-canon comics tho im not sure if theyre as active recently.

I guess without knowing you and what you’re looking for better that’s about what i’d say?

Ayy, love your classpect analysis. I’m new, so I’m not sure if you mentioned it, but in Dirk’s history lesson about the alpha timeline, he mentions that Guy Fieri is considered the third and final anti-christ. And alpha Rose killed him, and rode his ass into a volcano (hell). I just like that it supports the seer = prophet (Jesus) thing.

Fuck I really need to brush back up on all my old Catholic teen-self’s nightmares, I wouldn’t be surprised if there IS referencing to Jesus in the Book of Revelations there but I don’t remember my Bible stuff well enough to say.

I’m choosing to believe it though because fuck yes Rose Lalonde is lesbian Gnostic Jesus and I love her?? Homestuck is good thanks.

honestly am i imagining it or do you write dirk as good at figuring out how people are feeling? cause i love it

I think it’s demonstrable that Dirk is good at picking up on the true nature of his friends–he gets at the “Heart” of them so to speak. Dirk knows Jake is smart and aware and playing dumb when it’s convenient to him. He intuits Jane will come around on her own terms, through her own experience, and prefers not to alienate her in the meantime. So on.

Where I think Dirk struggles is in knowing how to react to people’s feelings, where his own romantic feelings and guilt tangle him up to the point that he decides the best approach is to completely bottle everything up. Dirk actually takes pretty much no action on anything because he pretty much thinks he’s poison no matter what he thinks to do, as I read him.

But yeah as long as it doesn’t DIRECTLY INVOLVE Dirk where he’s given to the most self-crucifying, self-loathing interpretation of everything possible, Dirk is pretty insightful about his friend’s feelings. He’s no Karkat but emotions do sort of come with the domain of Heart. Once Dirk and Jake talk out their issues with each other and Dirk’s view of Jake isn’t overwhelmingly colored by childhood trauma, self-loathing, and anxiety this is particularly true of Jake, since Jake relies on Dirk for pretty much everything and Dirk has crafted a personality out of trying to be helpful to Jake.

I dunno if I specifically write Dirk as good at figuring out how people are feeling, though. I mostly only write Dirk in the context of the Alphas and the Alphas know how the others are feeling because they all desperately love each other and are each other’s entire worlds for years. Then there’s Dave, who Dirk got to know pretty damn fast and loved just as intensely, and Karkat, who Dirk has an astounding amount of similarities with when you get right down to it.

have you read any of theworstpersonintheworld and crisesofsanity’s classpect analyses? personally i’ve always found their interpretations the most convincing, but it’s interesting that you also gave Knight/Page the “Serve” verb. i’d like to hear what you think of their ideas on what aspects are, too.

Mako @theworstpersonintheworld deserves undiluted credit for pointing me to the Serve verb, as a matter of fact. And by association he also deserves credit for putting me on the path that led me to understanding Homestuck’s Classes in terms of Unifying Myths/Archetypes, and by association the roleplay system with the classes. I don’t agree with him on all the pairings and verbs but I agree with him on a lot and he’s great to talk to about all of it.

crisesofsanity I’ve never heard of but I’ll check them out soon!

“I’m honestly REALLY doubtful the Caucasian joke was meant to mock his progressive fans at all, given that there are ways Trickster Mode’s presentation lines up with Homestuck’s Gnostic and philosophical themes” are you shitting me. Hussie was/is racist as fuck and he never apologizes for any shit he does. I love HS and yes, the fact that it has gay couples is super important to me, but it’s so horrendously racist to act like LGBT characters erase Hussie’s racism and make him a “good person”.

So full disclosure: I’m expanding on this point substantially cause all this convinced me it was worth writing an essay on the subject.

Fuller disclosure: I’m latino, and I kinda bought into these criticisms for a long ass time? So it’s not exactly that I think you’re unreasonable in holding this conclusion. And yeah, there’s definitely parts of Hussie’s writing that aaaren’t the best on racial terms–can’t say I’m fond of the depiction of Damara, for example.
I can understand people taking issue with the Condesce, too, though that’s assuaged for me by the fact that Meenah is cast in a pretty dang sympathetic light.

There have also been some references to the kids as white over the course of Homestuck that undercut the claim that they’re meant to be Aracial, though I think it’s notable that the only unambiguous one–Bro being referred to as white like, one time–is also the only time I can recall that Hussie deliberately chose to retcon the story in a non-diagetic, plot-driven way. So I think it’s worth simply working around the vaguer instances, since…Word of God is pretty firmly with us there.

And no, I don’t really think that was what the Caucasian joke was ever meant to be. I think Hussie was actually always quite serious about presenting the kids as Blank White and leaving them open to interpretation, and while that’s something of a cop-out in execution just given the realities of representation, I do think he was genuine about it. I also think it was a pretty damn successful move, artistically.

The Tricksters, in contrast, employ Whiteness as a horror-movie monster aesthetic. They are also literal presentations of definite physical forms, where Homestuck ALWAYS philosophically favors symbols and possibility spaces for interpretation. Both literally and thematically, Tricksters represent things Homestuck as a story is actively repulsed by and condemns, and the denial of our ability to imagine the kids in different skin tones is part of what renders them repulsive.

Feel free to respond to my presentation for this idea once I present it in detail, or like, follow up with sources if you want to talk about it. I think it’s a conversation worth having, but like…I’m not white, and you’re not going to intimidate me out of talking about what I think by claiming I’m racist on anon and raising a lot of really dramatic intense claims with no sources or context, if that’s what you’re trying to do. That’s just not how I roll.

If you actually want to engage with stuff and have a conversation, though, I’m looking forward to hearing from you. See you around.

Keep rising, btw.

thinking about utena now. What are your thoughts on the movie? It made me fundamentally question if I liked the show for a bit. (I remember liking just what they did with Touga kind of. But the ghost thing was also dumb too)

My thought on the movie is that it’s an absolutely amazing ride to experience if you’re not sober and it was very, very surreal and pretty to watch which is all I am about.

On any kind of plot or meaningful enjoyment level it’s literally nothing and a completely disjointed experience from the show, so it’s easy for me to seperate them out from each other. It’s not as well-written as the show, not as godawful as the manga, but it’s got some of the best lesbian romance scenes ever animated and Rose and Kanaya would watch it and cry and cosplay Utena and Anthy and that’s all I want or need from the movie honestly?

really cool to see a combination utena and homestuck fan

It genuinely saddens me that there aren’t more, considering they’re both postmodern, gnostic, and gay as everloving fuck. I could write essays about Akio and Caliborn’s similarities as toxic, metatext-dominating patriarchs and I intend to someday. It seems like a natural area of overlap???

reminds me I need to reblog my whole Anthy’s Malice tag back from my friends, gotta have that on this blog. Maybe I’ll do that tonight and pretend it’s productive action. Thanks anon

Tips to help me convince my friends to get their shit together and actually read homestuck like I’ve been telling them too for the past billion years?

My honest opinion is that Hiveswap is probably going to bring the fandom back and then some because it looks….really really fucking good? But it depends on what your friends are interested in. I’d suggest holding out to start them off with Hiveswap, or mmaaayybe trying my youtube series and seeing if those videos strike a chord with them? I don’t want to come off self-shilly or presumptuous, but that’s…what I’m making this series for, is for non-fans who would like to get oriented/interested in Homestuck in an easier, accessible way. I hope I’m succeeding at that and I’ve received some positive responses, but I’d be interested in hearing how your friends respond to them :B

Past those suggestions I honestly dunno what to tell you! My own track record for getting friends interested has never been particularly great.

that vrisrezi post confuses me so much. I don’t know where the reading of them as matesprits comes from at all, and just because one of the artists for the remem8er flash drew a kiss panel doesn’t mean the kiss canonically happened, especially when it wasn’t in the flash itself. I’m not opposed to shipping it, but that person’s reading of canon just seems remarkably off

I’m not like, super convinced? But I haven’t like, revisited Act 5 in detail quite the way I have with Act 6, and considering how hard people misread…everything about Jake (and Tavros), I’m willing to think it’s possible we missed some pretty obvious stuff with Vriska and Terezi, too. I’d personally like to see more references to canon to back up that ideas, but even if it’s not LITERALLY TEXTUAL I think it’s fine for someone to read the story in that way, since again, it seems to me the FEELINGS were there–if too repressed to manifest into an actual relationship per se.

For the most part though I just find myself collecting takes on Vriska and Terezi to consider in preparation for the Epilogue. I didn’t claim the kiss canonically happened, I just don’t think it’s really that much of a stretch since the (Vrisrezi) sequence is already explicitly flushed and romantic–they literally meet on a bright red flushed quadrant.

I don’t always 100% agree with the views I reblog/boost, but I do think that new/varied opinions on the comic are valuable in an of themselves so I try to reblog a wide variety of viewpoints. This is to an extent–there are of course readings I think straight up hurt understandings of the canon, and I wouldn’t really reblog those without voicing criticisms. (The obvious place to go here is stuff like “Dirk is bi” or “Calliope’s Malice” or “Gamzee did nothing wrong” or “Pages are a Passive class”) This particular one I think is worth having a conversation about, and since it only adds a sense of romance to an already explicitly romantic relationship, I don’t really see the harm even if it isn’t drawn 100% from the text, if that makes sense?

Could you explain what you mean when you said Karkat “almost always exerts his impact by “Allowing” his aspect”? That seems… at odds with everything Karkat does, to be frank. (–passive pages anon)

If you haven’t read them already, I’ll say read my essays on Knight/Page as Butlers as well as the Steal/Serve essay, because I advance my arguments for Karkat there.

To “Allow” basically means to give permission or entitle X to act through you, “As if through the Will of the Aspect”. I describe it as the counterpart to “Exploit” in Class theory, which means “to make use of or harness”.

Karkat’s Blood impact usually come without him being directly cognizant of it, as if Blood were acting through him. If you don’t have the time to read those essays and see what i mean send me another ask and I’ll answer you tomorrow, but I really think it’s kind of redundant effort all things considered. I’m happy to answer any questions or counterarguments you have for those essays, too.