I finally finished that short animatic about the alphas I was working on! Here it is!!
Music: High on Humans – Oh Wonder
aaaaaaaaaaaai live for alphas content and this is so cool im going to die omg
Jade’s parental unit, as the Pattern Breaking parental unit, has a much larger variety of strange, off putting interests. Dad has FANCIFUL HARLEQUINS, Mom has EXSQUISITE WIZARDS, and Bro has RADICAL PUPPETS. Grandpa has not one, but FOUR such interests, of the same descriptive two word format. They’re all just as dumb though. One reason among several for this was to create an element of uncertainty over what kind of item Jade would prototype with . And by uncertainty, I mean misdirection, which is what I always mean by uncertainty.
Notice the colors of the lights in each room. Orange, pink, and cyan, corresponding with Dirk, Roxy, and Jane. The items have a loose correlation with the other three guardians too. Knights in that Dirk is a skilled swordsman. Roxy’s land is full of pyramids, Jane was grandpa’s long estranged blue lady. You see how the gears are always turning. Not only does everything mean something. It turns out everything means EVERYTHING. Now you know.
Andrew Hussie, Homestuck Book 3 Commentary
My pal @icel just sort of handed me the commentary for book 3, which is rad cause it turns out to confirm I’ve been right in arguing that Grandpa’s home decor reflects the Alphas for months. (Obviously doesn’t prove anything else linked there, though I stand by all of it. Just saying.)
I don’t normally argue based on Word of God cause I don’t like speculating pointlessly on Hussie as a person but hey! This is part of a product made for fans, and also it takes a lot of the legwork out of me getting to say I’m right, so like fuck it 😉
jake english is such a fascinating character. he’s a shrinking coward who refuses to deal with any level of confrontation, even if that level of confrontation is as little as a disagreement or “I’m not comfortable right now” because he’s terrified of upsetting people. but he also has a deeply selfish side of him, which is part and parcel with being a coward. jake “doesn’t want to upset anybody,” but it’s only partially out of concern for their feelings. part of it is because he doesn’t want to have to deal with it. he doesn’t want to own up to his own flaws. he doesn’t want to have to admit to wrongdoing or cowardice.
jake doesn’t know how to reconcile his selfishness – which isn’t exactly the core of his character, but it’s a factor – with his desire to help people, his desire to be liked and have friends. he doesn’t know how to get what he wants and also not upset people, so he takes the path of less resistance in quiet hopes that he’ll get what he wants anyway. he hopes jane quietly lets her crush on him drop, because he doesn’t want to be with her. he hopes roxy has let her feelings for him (which he also knows about) go, because he’s scared of how they complicate things between them. he hopes accepting dirk’s advances will lead to a relationship that’s best for both of them without much work on his part.
selfishness has a lot of forms. not every kind of selfishness is outright manipulation and abusiveness, but plenty of people are selfish in some way. they prioritize themselves over others, or refuse to listen to truths that might inconvenience them, like jane. they expect their assistance and advice to be honored and repaid and to earn them easy respect and validation, or aggressively do things their friends have asked them to quit, like roxy. they think their opinions and outlooks are the most reliable and they shouldn’t have to explain themselves to other people, like dirk.
they refuse to own up to their mistakes or to say the things they really want because they don’t want to be a disappointment. or they quietly hope things will work out despite them never saying their feelings, expecting everyone else to just put what they want aside and let his own dreams take the lead. like jake english.
I love the alphas BECAUSE they’re such flawed, confusing, frustrating, selfish people. all of them. even jake. even jake’s tricksterdom bow-to-everyone instinct is a form of selfishness, because it’s about making people happy for his own convenience. it’s about making people like him, not about really giving them what they want. jake wants to be loved in a selfish way. and that’s great. that’s part of why he’s so fascinating.
Basically, the alphas as a group all love each other SO MUCH, which is awesome, they’re this closeknit squad and they’re all so important to each other and their relationships all make me feel enormous sprawling feelings, but the sheer AMOUNT they all love each other sort of blinds them to some of their own needs. They all want to think the very best of each other, and the occasional thoughts they have about each other that aren’t like 100% positive get immediately suppressed and marinated in guilt juice and they try not to acknowledge it and go back to focusing on the good instead.
So they’re all kind of bottling things up about each other, right? But it doesn’t come from any malicious place, it comes from a place of wanting to be the best they can be because they care about everyone else’s opinion so much but also knowing they aren’t always their best selves – and knowing their friends aren’t always their best selves – but if THEY know their friends sometimes are shitty, that means everyone else might know that THEY are sometimes shitty, too.
They’re all trying so hard to downplay the bad and upjump the good, which is MUCH MUCH easier to do with online relationships.
You throw them into physical proximity and suddenly those annoyances you all tried so hard to pretend didn’t bug you that bad and never talked about because talking about unpleasant things is, well, unpleasant, start to boil over. Put that on top of the stressful circumstances that led to several relationships starting the session OFF more strained than usual, and wow. They had no fucking chance.
I love the alphas so much – they got shit on by a lot of the fandom because their plotline was so internal and cerebral, but that is the kind of shit I LOVE. The betas were all friends, but they never felt like ONE GROUP to me. The full four way group dynamic never crystallized. We always found them interacting one on one and rarely ABOUT one another, because the betas’ conflicts were more or less external. The betas’ story up to Collide was them vs the environment, the game, doc scratch, sburb, the horrorterrors. The alphas’ story is so much about THEM. Their relationships. Them as a group. Their interpersonal issues and foibles and there’s this element of nitty gritty real HUMAN-ness to their struggles that isn’t super present with most of the betas who feel like more fantastical figures that struggle against equally fantastical antagonists. (The betas KIND OF segue into something like this post-Collide, but it’s not expounded upon as much, they’re split into different groups, and also a lot of it got retconned – Jade and John had some interesting moments on the boat but that stuff was probably the biggest victim of the retcon.)
OKAY.
Here’s an example of what I mean to wrap it up:
Jane and Roxy are best friends, they love each other deeply, you can tell from their every interaction that they care tremendously about each other’s opinion of them, but. Roxy has a drinking problem. This (I think) clearly makes Jane uncomfortable sometimes, but Jane suppresses it and pushes it down because she wants to think the best of Roxy, she minimizes the issue. No one ever confronts Roxy about this very serious problem she has in any real or effective way (not just Jane, NO ONE does this) because they all want to think the best of her and oh… haha….. it’s just a little foible… just a quirk…. it’s cool…. not a big deal …. I’m sure roxy has her life under control no big deal!!
Basically EVERY alpha relationship has something like this going on. Everyone downplays how much the AR bugs them because hey I’m sure Dirk has things under control he probably does this on purpose god Dirk you’re so silly jeez Dirk we’d really like to talk to you instead of your fucking hell robot sometimes but oh well I’m sure Dirk knows what he’s doing ho hum let’s all downplay how much this actually bothers us because we want to think the best of Dirk and can’t imagine him ever creating a situation he genuinely cannot deal with or control because well gosh he’s just so capable!
Everyone downplays how selfish Jake can be because oh well Jake is just silly he’s so nice he doesn’t MEAN to be this way I mean it’s JAKE how could Jake English ever do something as vaguely malicious as take advantage of how he KNOWS Jane never really says what she’s thinking if that thing is hard to say and use that to his advantage to give him a perfectly reasonable out on having to tell her he isn’t interested in a romantic relationship with her and then, KNOWING she actually did have a huge crush on him, constantly inundate her with his issues with his boyfriend for months thereafter. Surely Jake could never be that manipulative he’s so nice!! (NOTE: I love Jake English, specifically BECAUSE of things like this, I honestly would not like him if he were actually the way fanon paints him all the time, some weak cinnamon roll that can do no wrong.)
etc etc etc
This is why I love the alphas! They are a group of fucked up teenagers who are all struggling so fucking bad but all need their friends to believe everything is ok, and who need to believe their friends are ok, who want so bad for each other to be happy that they sabotage themselves both individually and as a group in misguided attempts to pretend at and manufacture that happiness without actually doing the hard work of fixing the underlying issues preventing them from TRULY achieving it.
(The one issue, as with most things in Homestuck that I have issues with, is that we are not shown the resolution to these arcs and struggles in canon, boooooooooooooooooooooo)
i want each and every one of you to look at this every time you’re about to say one of the protagonists of homestuck is “abusive” because 11 times out of 10 you’re taking 1-4 isolated events that took place over the course of YEARS and the characters themselves have gotten over it already.
stop throwing the word abusive around so much for god’s sake. it belittles actual abuse victims when you call every single flaw in any relationship “abuse.”
think critically and actually look at the characters’ relationship.
vriska and tavros? yes, that is abuse. vriska abuses tavros for the better part of the narrative.
gamzee and terezi? yes, that is abuse too. that one honestly should be obvious.
any of the human kids who are best friends and love each other with their entire hearts? no, that’s not abuse; next time actually take the time to read into the character’s relationship beyond a screenshot of a single line of text.
my love for this post is matched only by my love for op who is now my new best friend forever
Certain sectors of the fandom ARE disproportionately mean to Jane, and there’s subsects devoted to hating on Dirk or even Jake, too. I would say Dirk probably gets it the worst, absolutely, which makes it kind of….yeah. What I don’t get is why people feel OBLIGATED to go to these extremes, like why does Jane have to be this perfect flawless buttercup who had her entire personality overwritten for you to be able to sympathize with mind control? Why does Dirk have to be Just As Bad as the AR for you to see how he sees himself in the AR and stresses out about the possibility that he COULD be?
Why does Dirk have to be An Abuser for his emotional repression and inability to reach out to be a problem (for himself as much as for his friends btw! Dirk’s problem isn’t holding his friends to too high a standard, it’s an INABILITY TO PARSE THEM AS DOING ANYTHING THAT HURTS HIM MEANINGFULLY WHILE HE DEMONIZES HIMSELF…)
Sorting these characters into capital letter Heroes and Villains is what the reductive, vaguely arbitrary game mechanic IN THE COMIC does. Is it really impossible for us to do better? Is it genuinely too much to ask for us to treat these characters like people instead of cartoons? I realize the question is silly to phrase that way but come the fuck on, everyone reading this knows Homestuck and knows what we’re here for.
I don’t see why critical thinking magically short-circuits forever once we come to trying to untangle the web of hurt (AND LOVE!!! THE HURT MATTERS LESS THAN THE LOVE AND HOMESTUCK IS EXPLICIT ABOUT THIS) between these kids. It’s frustrating.
Like Loss said, I wouldn’t say Dirk’s treatment is anywhere near calm or even sane, frankly. Dirkcourse was such a torrent of hatred, moral superiority and frankly homophobic sentiment that it has still left Dirk’s characterization in fanon in ruins to this day.
I’d say the same is true of the Alphas in general. If anyone escaped it’s probably Roxy, and people have swept a lot of the grosser shit she did under the rug as a result. Jake has “escaped” in that a lot of people chose to victimize him and strip him of any recognizable character traits in order to turn him into their blank slate Victim–whether it be Jane’s victim, or Dirk’s.
If I were to put a core cause to all of it I wouldn’t really point to homophobia or misogyny though certainly both are factors–I would point to the fandom’s seeming inability to accept nuance or shades of grey in these characters, which is also something you see a lot in, say, people’s approach to Vriska.
It’s boring, frankly. More than boring, it’s tragic. Homestuck deserves better, and the Alphas do too–because the Alpha’s story is one of flawed, flawed kids put in horrible, horrible situations and fucking up massively but figuring out how to love each other anyway. I’m not interested in pinning down any of the four–or even the AR–as the Innate Root of All The Evils of the Session. They’re all in love, they’re all lonely, they’re all hurt, and they all express those things differently.
I don’t see the need to play the game game with the Alphas–I just see the need to explore the nuances of their love and struggles and describe the nature of their happy conclusion. The Alphas are one of the most positive stories in all of Homestuck, in my honest opinion (even INCLUDING all the issues people levy at the ending), and I really hope someday the rest of the fandom can see it that way. If for no other reason than we’ll all be happier for it.
This is a compilation of all of my written work on Homestuck, thus far. This is quickly turning into an ongoing project as I think of more I want to say about the comic and universe, and I wanted to have this stuff easily accessible on my blog for those who may be interested, so this is here to essentially serve as an archive link in my Analysis tag page.
On top of working on new pieces concerning subjects as varied as Spades Slick, Davekat, Vriska and (Vriska), character analysis of characters oft-considered ‘overlooked’, such as Jane, Jade, and Jake, the Retcon, and more–I’m also working on adapting these into video format! More on that soon.
For now, the essays:
Apotheosis & Creation Myth: A longform exploratory piece on Homestucks’ themes of metaphysics, Gnosticism, spiritual enlightenment and morality as a creation myth, and how these themes are reflected in the ending sequence of Act 7.
My views have grown and adapted somewhat since I wrote it, but I’m still pretty proud of this one! I stand by pretty much all the broad points I argued Homestuck was prioritizing, though I am looking forward to the chance to revise the details when I adapt it into video form.
A Defense of Dirk Strider: A four-part essay series questioning the commonly understood fandom narrative surrounding the events of Act 6, and providing a reading of Dirk Strider that I feel is more in line with what’s depicted in canon. I was expecting a lot of backlash for this one, but surprisingly I’ve yet to even encounter disagreement, at least that I’ve seen.
Each essay tackles a different popular misconception of Dirks’ character and puts different parts of the story under a microscope. They also sort of double as a defense of Dirkjake as a ship, and the Alphas as a group dynamic worth considering and celebrating as a whole, since I feel both suffer from how fandom typically considers Dirk and Jake in particular.
HYPE ABOUT HIVESWAP: An examination of Hiveswaps’ trailer, mainly noting it’s attention to detail with regards to Grandpa, the Alpha kids, and potentially even Calliope and Cherub lore, and comparing it’s approach to Grandpa’s character with that of early Homestuck, to determine how well it connects to the comic. (Spoilers: Very well.)
Includes some character analysis for Grandpa and raises new questions about the Guardians in general, but really I’m just incredibly excited and wanted to celebrate what looks like downright masterful environmental storytelling–something that should excite anyone interested in Hiveswap for its potential storytelling value.
Fans of Dark Souls and Undertale’s secret and clever lore nods should be quite excited for Hiveswap, if its trailer is any indication of the game as a whole.
That’s all for now, though you can expect to see more from me pretty much as soon as I’m able to get it to you, because writing about Homestuck is basically my favorite thing to do.
As ever, I regard everything I write as the opening of a conversation, rather than a definitive statement. If you have thoughts or questions on anything I’ve written that you’d like to share, feel free to send me an ask! I probably won’t engage through reblogs, however. I just kind of hate the format and find it inefficient and inelegant for archival purposes.
Flying through Storytelling 