“allegory – a story, poem, or picture that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning.”
Like all good games, Homestuck tries very hard to teach the reader how to engage with it. Homestuck cues the reader into how to read some of its narrative vagueness through the use of literary allusion. This includes allusions to anime, games, books, movies and entire cultural and philosophical movements.
In this series, we’ll go over some of the biggest examples of Homestuck using references to clue the reader into what it’s doing. Hopefully, you’ll come away from these essays with a new insight into Homestuck’s logic–especially later on, where Homestuck outright finishes character arcs and thematic climaxes through this approach.
I’m numbering these posts from simplest to most complex, and roughly from least to most plot impact, too.
[4. The Gnostic Creation Myth – Literally fucking everything. A Non-Exhaustive review.]
[All of these essays are finished, and accessible to Patrons. They will be released once a week, every Monday from now on!]
This post exists for introduction purposes and as an easy link once all of them are uploaded, but please reblog the individual essays instead, as old reblogs of this post will be outdated and lack the correct hyperlinks!]
[EDIT: Updated this with the source for the artist.]
I don’t have like an essay for this or anything but my furry friend is reading along the comic now and he just got to Jade.
He reached her furry exposition page, so I informed him those reader commands were from actual readers back in 2009 who wanted Jade to drop the furry stuff as soon as it was introduced, and Hussie responded to this by doubling down on it hard as hell with that Jade speech.
But anyway that’s not the point. The point is my friend laughed and mentioned he found the furriest shit in her room. I figured it’d be like the SBAHJ poster or something but I asked him to show me. He posts this
And um, guys, I don’t think I’ve ever seen this fursona anywhere. It’s not a notable character anywhere I can remember. But like, giving it some thought…isn’t that a green furry dog girl?
And her eyes are blue, just like…Jade’s shirt. And her gills suggest amphibious qualities, linking her to Abraxas, suggesting she–
Nah i’m fucking with you. I guess I COULD link her to Gnosticism at length but I’m not sure there’s anything there and it’s not the point, I don’t really feel the need to argue in favor of this blatant truth
You can pretend this isn’t Jade’s canon fursona all you want but i think we all know the truth deep in our hearts
EDIT: Thanks to cool Tumblr user pankaeks we know who the artist for this girl is! The image can be sourced to this (only BARELY SFW, so tread with caution) art piece by tsampikos, and the character depicted belongs to Furaffinity user selucilia.
Here’s a shot of the original piece:
You’ll notice the character still has the cute cheek scruff I misidentified as gills in the green pallette, making the Jade->Abraxas link the definitive total horseshit it was the whole time. I’m heartbroken.
Of course, the picture seems to have been edited to reflect Jade’s color scheme, so it still seems pretty definitely to represent Jade in some way. I’m still willing to call it Jade’s canon fursona inside the context of Homestuck, though I’m obvs a little more reserved knowing it’s someone’s character.
But yeah Jade’s fursona…I fucking love it…I might actually work up the will to get the old tablet out and draw her. Earth C Fursona drawparty, Jade. Make it happen. I believe in you.
Reblogging this updated version since I added the artist and owner of the character respectively. Would appreciate it if peeps reblogged this one! Thanks.
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.
Notably, the material reality of the game is often by design something the players can’t meaningfully change (or shouldn’t be able to in a non glitched to shit session). The white king loses. The homeworld gets pelted with apocalyptic meteors. Timeloops remain stable. And so on.
The key to making progress is through the revolution of the self. It’s idealistic, in that sense, as opposed to the materialism of a Marxist approach.
I think there’s definitely ambiguities to this but personal enlightenment really seems to be the core of how things get done in Homestuck.
hey remember how much hell I went through in school because I was in a wheelchair? well my friend @alotofmomos made his senior engineering project, a project his degree depended on, about how to improve accessibility because of my experiences.
he is going through a lot of financial trouble and needs help!! please help him he is an AMAZING friend and the ideal ally. he is using his career and his future to help people based off of my struggles. he battles ableism and takes ACTION!!
he always puts others in front of himself and deserves to be the one helped for once!!!
Momo stays on the line with me till sunrise listening to my stories and struggles and took notes and not only listened to my problems and tried to help me but is trying to help people like me where he lives and explore how life can be made better and how change can be implemented
how fucking good a friend is that. how fucking good an engineer is that. does research to make effective change for others. this is the ideal situation where the people designing and crafting spaces take input from others on how to make it effective and functional for people who depend on it
You probably weren’t expecting an essay length answer to this question. So like let there be no doubt at all from this point onwards this is exactly the kind of content you can legitimately expect from this blog. This is who I am. I’m sorry.
Also, you’re welcome.
Yes, Dirk is a furry. And his relationship to furries shows us a lot about his parallels and similarities to one Rose Lalonde. Who is also a furry.
Flying through Storytelling 