All I can really say in terms of assurance is that the POC who’s “content to be servile” is one of the most complex and nuanced characters in fiction imo, and most of those other characters don’t slack far behind.
My friend recommends ep. 4 as the beat that got him hooked. I’d say give it til 7 because that’s where my favorite character arc comes into focus for the first time.
That said, I know I talk Utena up a lot here and I am completely genuine about it but I also feel a certain obligation to make something clear.
I can’t promise you’re gonna like Utena, because Utena’s not a show for everyone. It happens to speak to my sense of aesthetic visually, so it’s got one up on me that might not work for you at all. But thematically and content-wise it just really, really is not for everyone.
Because Utena deals almost exclusively with themes of abuse–social abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse. It’s a show about fucked up people hurting each other in fucked up ways. It explores the complexities of incest and incestual abuse quite a lot.
As an incest survivor that’s always been interested in archetypes, apocalyptic imagery and stories about abuse’s effects on human psychology-largely due to personal reasons-all of that naturally proves pretty resonant to me. It might be absolutely horrific to some other folks, and just kinda boring for others.
I think the way its handled puts it on about the same level as Homestuck, in some ways. But Homestuck focuses on more systemic and physical/fantastical violence, in a lot of ways. It’s rarer that it gets into more explicitly sexual territory.
Utena, on the other hand, is visually a lot cleaner-it’s pure shoujo, no blood or gore to be had, most of its conflict rendered symbolically and through character performance.
But the subject matter it deals in is just closer to social, grounded reality, and the kinds of violence it deals in are I think more likely to be…personally triggering? So I really can’t be sure everyone will enjoy the experience. I just know I’m a big fan, processing stuff through it did me a lot of good, and the story gets better the more it adds to the layers of interpersonal drama and symbolic meaning.
Did you like, not watch the new episode yet? Spoiler talk below
Rose Quartz is also pink diamond, which means she’s the same as the callous girl Stevonnie dreamed about wanting a colony for her own like it was a plaything.
Rose Quartz still initially treated Greg kinda like something to keep in a zoo even after millenia of loving humans, and it never occured to her to remove the VICIOUS command she gave pearl across millennia even AFTER the war was over and she had ample opportunity to face the truth and talk things out, which is every BIT as cruel as crippling tavros even if it was more careless than thoughtless.
She left Pearl alone to help raise Steven without doing so on her whim, leaving Pearl to deal not just with the grief but also with the silence of never being able to tell her friends or STEVEN the truth. Forcing her to be alone with Rose’s lie. Forever.
And i’m not really here for reducing Vriska’s complexity like this, either, because you’re throwing (Vriska) down the same hole. Yeah, Vriska was like that initially, but the entire point of (Vriska)’s character is that she has the potential to grow and change, and (Vriska) actually did that and ended up having the personal connection Vriska wants but can’t conciously face.
The point of the Pink Diamond reveal is that Rose Quartz was complicated and messy and deeply hurt people she cares about even if she was trying to do the right thing.
It’s a message of redemption and hope, that even the worst people can put in the effort to grow and change and do good for the world, even in their imperfection. That’s exactly what Vriska’s arc is about, too. I made the joke not because it’s laughable, but because its true. Sorry if you don’t agree, but that’s genuinely how I see it.
2/3 So I can’t imagine that the game is for Hiveswap fans – this is about as far from lovable Joey and Xennos as one can get. Is it for the people who loved Jailbreak an only Jailbreak, because I can’t imagine they’re still around. It doesn’t have any references to please the Old Homestucks (the Never Hiveswap crowd). Content wise it seems to reject marketability, so its certainly not to please Viz execs. It’s like Hussie decided to make an hour-long piece of content
3/3 designed solely for Homestuck theorists, in the sense of ‘let’s throw them the craziest curveball imaginable.’ But even then its strangeness is one of tone more than lore or weird plot shit. WHO IS THIS GAME FOR, RD? (I’m not saying I didn’t like it, but nor am I saying I did like it. I laughed a lot, but it also disturbed me. I don’t know how to feel. Help me, RD. Help me understand the Friendsim)
I agree with you that the Friendsim doesn’t seem immediately marketable, so I find it sorta comforting. It feels like something Hussie would do, not something he was assigned to do via corporate agenda, which I wasn’t too worried about anyway but its nice to be reassured.
As for the rest, uh. I dunno, I think it’s pretty indicative of what I was expecting from Hiveswap itself, so I kinda think its just meant for hiveswap fans lol. People like getting to know trolls, and trolls have always been fucked up.
But that’s because Alternia society is fucked up, not because trolls as a race are awful. Personally, I thought Diemen was immensely lovable, and I am fairly goddamn swooned. Not really sure there’s much a Hiveswap fan will take issue with there.
Ardata’s definitely, uh, a vriska. but I’ve always liked Vriska more than not, and Ardata was a really interesting showcase of the pressures highbloods get put under. She ain’t exactly happy with her brutal responsibilities, so theres about as much room to make her sympathetic as there was with Vriska.
Nothing in the friendsim stuck out to me as particularly worse than whats in the comic, it was just delivered in a more jokey and over the top style. The people who are scandalized or shocked by the way trolls are fucked up will get over it, just like they got over how Vriska/Eridan/Gamzee were fucked up.
And hopefully that will be to all our benefits, since as people get more excited about getting to meet more trolls via friendsim, prospects for Homestuck and Hiveswap will grow brighter as well. Personally, I’m quite pleased with the game so far. The tone’s pretty jailbreak, but the characterization and soul are all homestuck.
I don’t really know enough mythology to say. I think Vriska MIGHT draw some inspiration from Lilith, who by some accounts is maybe described as a blue butterfly, if I remember right?
If any troll is a Satan figure though it’s definitely gamzee. I don’t really see much about Vriska that resonates with the archetype.
I would say there’s nothing really Lillith-like about Vriska. My memory is admittedly hazy, but Lillith requires an Adam and an Eve, or at least just an Adam, to play against and I think pointing to any set of Homestuck characters and calling them the A/E archetypes would be a stretch. Well, Classic ‘Lillith-as-Adam’s-First-Wife,” anyways. Further back she becomes an abstraction to the point where any comparison is too reductionist to be of value. (As Joseph Campbell discovered, cherry pick enough examples and you can connect any one entity to any other and claim causation.)
This might well be the case, too! See the other post for the rest of the stuff I had in mind when I posted this. I’m still learning about christian mythology as I go along, so it could well be nothing or actually quite apt once i really dive into that particular subject. I don’t really feel ready to commit to a stance on it.
2/3 I mean A. Claire affects the narrative indirectly, being The Dead Mom trope, but it really stands out to me the way we let our knowledge of the alpha universe affect our understanding of the Beta. A. Claire is one of the few human ‘things’ in Homestuck to have no counterpart in the Alpha timeline that we are aware Jake is aware of. Joey and Jude never drew breath on Alpha Earth. A. Claire and J&J fundamentally separate Jake English and Jake Harley into two utterly different individuals 2/3
¾ Which is why I still have to disagree that the Beta Guardians are de-facto the ‘incomplete’ versions of the Alpha kids, unable to ever reach their true potential – because where does that leave the life that Jake built with A. Claire? Even now Grandpa remains the outlier among the Guardians – from my standpoint I can’t but see him as a man who couldn’t handle the loss of his wife, for who his children were the most painful reminder. So he runs – again and again and again and again 3/4
4/4 (Sorry this is all splintered like this, Asks suck). None of this condones him being a shitty parent, but it does change the context in which we can view JE and JH as mirrors. I’d love to know what JH was like as a husband to A – kind, carrying, attentive, devoted? Maybe he wasn’t, and your original argument stands – the absence of his alpha friends ultimately stunts him as a person. But maybe when A was still around this ceased to be true – but once she was gone, he fell apart again.
I mean, my main post was never that Jake was shitty because of a lack of Dirk specifically. Jake Harley struggles with the exact same issues that detonate all of Jake English’s relationships with his friends growing up. Toxic masculinity, heteronormative ideology, and most clearly, escapism and neglect of those he cares about because of fear of confrontation.
It is through his relationship with all his friends–Dirk, Jane, Roxy, and others–that Jake manages to learn to get over those issues. All we can say for sure about Jake Harley, then, is that he most definitely does not overcome his neglect and escapism habits by the end of his life the way English does.
MAYBE he made progress with A. Claire on that front? It’s definitely not impossible. But we just don’t know, and in the meantime he continues hoarding behavior that suggests his alternate friends are very much still a part of his psyche. It’s also possible A. Claire was his partner in uncovering the secrets of Lord English and Sburb, given that she apparently painted Joey’s mural of a Green Star–in other words, the Green Sun–and was the original owner of the Cherub Key.
I certainly agree that Jude and Joey are unique, though, and A. Claire won me over hard enough that I would be happy to know she was at least a genuine comfort to Jake if he was struggling. I honestly don’t know what their relationship was like either–but I’m very curious.
it’s sort of a mix of stuff. I pretty much think the biggest contributing factor to AR’s descent is the absence of his connections to the other Alphas, and I think that’s true of Bro as well.
I mean that’s pretty much explicit. All four of the Beta guardians are unsatisfied, unhappy, or a wreck in some way, and the unifying thread between them is the lack of the others. This is particularly pronounced for Bro, who is not just barely-functional like Mom and Grandpa are, but profoundly destructive to others and himself when lacking their companionship.
This isn’t JUST about Jake, I could say things as relevant about the ways Dirk needs Roxy and Jane, but I wanna keep this short and you all know what I’m about so let’s use Jake as an example.
Dirk explicitly fears his own potential for darkness and hates himself for it and the reason he falls for Jake in the first place is because of Jake’s *faith* in him, in his kindness and caring and potential to do good.
Dirk is drawn to Jake because Jake sees the value in him and sees the good in him and Jake being able to do that makes it easier for Dirk to see it in himself, too. So without that influence in his life at *ALL*, even less than what AR got?
It’s easy for me to see how Bro would fall apart to the degree he does. For the most part, that’s all there is to say on the matter.
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but. let me complicate the narrative for you a little.
I used to be firmly of the opinion that Bro’s actions had nothing to do with Lil Cal and were all on Bro, and the latter’s still true. However, @jadedresearcher kinda turned my world around when they pointed out a simple fact:
There are explicit, demonstrable influences that Lil Cal exerts on Bro, in terms of his personality growth at least. Namely, Bro and Dirk have a divergent interest.
Namely, the SAW-inspired snuff film/”I want to play a Game” stuff. Bro expresses an interest in it, but Dirk really never so much as mentions it. The Jigsaw aesthetic is Caliborn’s thing exclusively, and the only real narrative explanation it has in the story is Lil Cal acting as a transmitter for the interest.
So having this in mind I think there is an extent to which Cal’s influence can be implicated in Bro’s descent. Not that it excuses any of his assholery.
Lastly, here’s a bit of rarely indulged speculation:
We do already know Grandpa raised Mom, suggesting Grandpa may have raised Bro as well. Hell, Hiveswap even has a blurry as hell picture that may be of Bro facepalming that i can’t for the life of me find right now so i guess ill just post it later who cares, the point is
if it’s true Grandpa remembers the Alphas in some way, or if it’s true *Bro* does– given that he’s a Heart player, that seems plausible too–those could also be factors that isolated Bro and made him vulnerable to Cal’s influence?
That is, of course, purely speculative. It’s just one of many potential questions I’m excited to see if Hiveswap will explore.
Hey hey hey – @revolutionaryduelist, I am normally 100% behind your point of view but I take serious umbrage at the implication that the WORLD RENOWNED EXPLORER-NATURALIST-TREASURE HUNTER-ARCHEOLOGIST-SCIENTIST-ADVENTURER-BIG GAME HUNTER-BILLIONAIRE EXTRAORDINAIRE lived anything less than a radical and amazing life.
“This is particularly pronounced for Bro, who is not just barely-functional like Mom and Grandpa are,”
Dude – it’s a stretch to begin with to call Mom barely-functional, given that despite being afflicted by one of society’s most misunderstood and poorly considered diseases, she was still able to succeed as a scientist and a mother (and I’d argue she was a lot better at being a guardian than Bro was – most of Rose’s tribulations about her mother were entirely projections on Rose’s part), but it’s outright absurd to call Grandpa Harley barely functional. Given what we know about him, he seems to have functioned better than 99% of all humans in ecorded history.
And, hyperbole aside, I think you’re hard pressed to speak with any kind of textual authority about what kind of interior life Grandpa may or may not have had – we see far too little of him. Other than expressing grief at DreamJAde’s death, we don’t know anything about him other than his known actions (unconditional love and support for Jade, including building her a magnificent dreambot) and what was filtered from Jade’s earliest memories. We’ve got no reason to think Grandpa wasn’t riddled with depression and deep-seated anxiety, but then we have no reason to think that he was, either. Either-way, calling the man who plundered every tomb and beauty parlour on the planet, invented a dozen wonders, and slew monsters like it weren’t no thang “barely functional” is just… incorrect.
To clarify: I meant emotionally. Mom and Grandpa are definitely successful, don’t get me wrong? I guess I just default to including the ability to enjoy life and engage with it in a like, balanced way…in my definition of functional?
As for Grandpa’s inner life, I don’t feel that’s correct. Grandpa’s inner life is laid out for us about as richly as Mom’s, I think. It’s just told almost entirely through environmental storytelling and context clues.
For starters, the man is a chronic hoarder. We see his hoarding all throughout Jade’s house, and it litters his manor in Hiveswap, too. Hoarding is commonly understood as a symptom of anxiety and depression.
Mom and Bro hoard to some regards too, but with Grandpa I feel it’s particularly notable just through sheer volume of stuff. And he doesn’t just hoard, he arranges his hoards in a way that’s deeply symbolically meaningful to him.
He sets up the Distinguished Houseguests in his living room and remembers enough to, somehow, sort them by Moon. He places himself by the fire in the center of all their attentions. He sets up entire rooms like shrines to each of the Alphas. He remembers Dirk not as a Prince, but as a Knight.
And, in my view, more tellingly, this is a guy who seemingly just…up and leaves his house and his two kids to raise Jade on an island? And while he’s doing that, he lets Jade play with flintlock pistols she almost shoots herself with a pistol:
Though I don’t doubt Grandpa loves Jade a lot (and I don’t particularly buy the more damning accusations going on about him right now) the dude is still guilty of serious neglect. Which, you know, kind of coincides with Jade’s Aspect pretty strongly.
And when you look at what Grandpa is doing while, you know, not taking care of his Granddaughter who is playing with guns, things become telling.
The dude is literally playing pretend. We established through Hussie that the blue dolls represent Jane in his head, which means he’s literally making believe he’s with his friends on some level.
This is Jake “Aggressively ignoring his problems” English at his worst. Just like you can see glimmers of Bro in AR at his worst, so too can you see a version of what Jake COULD become with no hope and no support network in Grandpa.
Which honestly I can’t blame him for too hard since the entire rest of his life at this point is “wait for the fucking Apocalypse and to die.”
And also, he’s alone. Jake relies on his sense of camaraderie to get by, and without his friends’ (perceived) approval his sense of place and self falls apart completely. This is a Jake who never had a chance to grow into a healthier attitude to his self worth, because he never had those friends to depend on.
Even if he did know Mom and even Bro, he would have been in a position of power and responsibility over them. It would not be the same dynamic at all, now matter how much he cares about either.
I think Grandpa is an excellently crafted tragic figure, basically. The fact that Hiveswap not only kept this consistent, but also successfully built upon it through enviromental storytelling alone is maybe the biggest reason I’m excited for it.
Sorry, not feeling it. I have a hard time conflating his collections with hoarders – the hoarders I’ve known (a few, not many, mind) were compulsive in their hoarding, almost indiscriminate. Grandpa. by contrast, is meticulous – he’s a collector, a connoisseur. Someone who collects art and builds a gallery to house their art collection isn’t a hoarder, they’re an enthusiast – in a series full of kids who stuff their rooms to bursting full of the junk that most delights them, Grandpa is simply the only person lucky enough to have the resources to build a space large enough to house them all. You say “he arranges his hoards in a way that’s deeply symbolically meaningful to him” as if we should take that as a bad thing – come to my house and see my My Little Pony collection; I assure you it’s not symbolic of my personal misery.
I don’t see Granda’s dolls as sad or evidence of loneliness – the man spent his entire life having glorious adventures and now, as an old man, he’s content to withdraw into relative seclusion. Sure his hermitage is a bit grandeur than most of those outside Saint Petersburg, but that doesn’t make it less of one.
“the entire rest of his life at this point is “wait for the fucking Apocalypse and to die.”
At the time of his death Grandpa Harley was pushing ninety of not over it – his meteor landed in 1910, he was definitely dead after 1995 and before 2009, making his time of death anywhere upwards of 85+. If you’ve ever spent a lot of time with the very elderly, you’ll know that that they don’t consider ‘waiting to die’ a bad thing. Sure, not everyone wants to go gently into that good night, but for many they start to slow down, do less, and spend a lot of time in their own heads, getting ready for whatever the next step of their life may be. To borrow a phrase from Stranger than Fiction, Grandpa lived his life– and now, at the end of it, he’s happy to be a kooky old coot. He looted all the tombs, toppled all the urns, stole all the mummies in a dreadful display of imperialist presumption – and now he’s retired, enjoying his hobbies, and knowing that one day he’s going to die – just like everybody else who ever lived.
In order to see Grandpa at the en of his life as a tragic figure you have to believe that eighty years of adventure were unfulfilling, and there’s zero reason to do so. I hesitate to go even half as far as you in considering anything in Grandpa’s house as a ‘shrine’ to the Alpha Kids – it’s far more likely that Hussie went back to Grandpa’s house when finding themes for the Alphas than the house being an anticipation of the alphas (though your line “We established through Hussie that the blue dolls represent Jane in his head” intrigues me – care to elaborate or source?). You say “This is a Jake who never had a chance to grow into a healthier attitude to his self worth, because he never had those friends to depend on” but we have no reason to believe that just because he didn’t have Dirk or Roxy he was incapable of finding friendship just as meaningful – there’s a good seven decades of this man’s life that are an unknown country about which we know next to nothing and from which any firm inference is impossible. To be an elderly eccentric is not to b unhappy, lonely, or unfulfilled – Grandpa lived the life Jake only ever dreamed of having, and I think you do him a grave disservice in presupposing his life was unhappy just because the Derse guardian’s live were unhappy. Take Nanna, for example, the only guardian whom we ever get to see say anything meaningful about her own life: it had a rough start with an evil woman, but over-all it was happy: she met a good man, had a son she lived, lived the quiet life she largely wanted. Not perfect, but not a tragedy. I think it’s far too big a leap to say call an elderly man enjoying his weird hobbies in secluded retirement an “excellently crafted tragic figure,” because even if he did miss his alt-universe friends, that’s at best sad; hardly tragic.
(As to anything about Hiveswap it’s my policy that, since it’s a WIP, nothing about it I canonically ‘true’ until the game is out and in our hands and no-longer subject to revisions.)
Fair enough re: the hoarding, but my biggest reason for noting his unhappiness was his negligence towards Jade and aggressive self-delusion anyway. It’s behavior that we see with Jake when he’s stressed or dealing with things he doesn’t like.
I don’t really think it’s much of a stretch to link the two this way, either. Mom is pretty blatantly unhappy, which feeds into her drinking, which feeds into her co-dependence with Rose. Bro is Bro, and has downright suicidal undertones in his pursuit of the Scratch.
Nanna lived a relatively happy life, but repeatedly said that she felt unfulfilled and didn’t push her limits, and mourned the infinite possibility of life that she lost due to the batterwitch–which is the exact problem Jane has to work against indulging in her interactions with her friends, too. Nannasprite explicitly sees Jane as a way to move past her regrets in that regard.
I don’t think you’re obligated to think the way I do on this, though. Ultimately, this is me reading into the symbols and implications we’ve seen in the canon so far, and part of the fun of Hiveswap will be seeing whether my readings hold up, and if not, what changes.
No, I pretty much always assumed it was referring to Davesprite himself. Whether they grow back on their own or not isn’t super relevant, I don’t think–the point is Davesprite was in pain and really hurt and chose to prioritize the session over himself. There’s a lot of questions to answer about Homestuck, but I never considered this one of them, tbh.
Baaasically I don’t think Homestuck is anti-materialistic in the sense that it hates the possession and use of material goods. I think Homestuck is anti-materialistic in the Gnostic sense, ie: In the sense that suggests Material reality isn’t necessarily True Reality, and that the world of ideas and thought is the world of spiritual good.
Pop-Culture isn’t just a series of material possessions. It is, by it’s nature as culture, a collection of Ideas about reality. Some of those ideas are fun, useful, or empowering to the characters. Some of those ideas hold them back and diminish them.
Homestuck suggests that while plenty of stuff in the Material world CAN be good and can reflect the true world of ideas in beautiful ways–filling it with Light–a lot of the Material world contains false information that should be disregarded, and that includes oppressive social constructs like Heteronormativity or the Hemospectrum.
Material reality is best experienced when guided by insight from the world of true ideas–the world of Light–basically.
Notably, the Hemospectrum is a physical time loop. It doesn’t occur as a byproduct of any one person thinking it’s a good idea. It’s established top-bottom by LE, in service of his quest for power and dominion over all things, including Trolls.
And LE gets the information about the Hemospectrum from Equius and Gamzee, who inherit and enforce it respectively–meaning his understanding of the Hemospectrum had a physical source. So the Hemospectrum is sourced in physical reality, and coded to some extent as Void and Rage.
Whereas true ideas, like Vriska and Terezi or Dirk and Jake or Rose and Kanaya’s feelings of romantic love for each other, are coded as Light. They aren’t taught these feelings–they discover them by thinking things through for themselves.
And the acquisition of Light involves casting aside that false information taught to the kids from their physical worlds–whether it be heteronormativity, gender essentialism, the hemospectrum, or troll ideals of violence.
Am I making any sense? Explaining this stuff as it exists in my head is really, really hard.
Flying through Storytelling 