#all this time dave thought it was just karkat's lack of sleep
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definitely just friends
wordcount: 2.9K
tags: fluff and smut, semi-public sex, living together, crossdressing, biting, highschool bathroom sex, fingering, human/troll society, they're mature in Troll years but in human years they should be in school, porn with some plot
synopsis: Eridan and Karkat are roommates, they go to human school, they share a bed, they're perfect friends, a little bit of spiked punch probably can't change the just friends bit.
note: erikar go brrrrrrrr, i love it when a twink in a dress dominates a short dude, it makes my brain happy. hope ya'll enjoy and if ya do considering dropping a like or checking the Ao3 port.
https://archiveofourown.org/works/42964926
Eridan Ampora and Karkat Vantas have been living together for three months now.
They shared a small apartment, the rest of the Trolls on the same floor as well. It was in the middle of a small city that a lot of Trolls have integrated into. The locals don't seem to mind them at all, some are willing to learn tradition and display it in small ways as well. The four humans that had moved there with them would've acted as ambassadors if not for cousins of Trolls already existing there.
Of course, tension is high as the need for quadrants slowly dissolves for Trolls and desire to learn about it intensifies for humans. Its awkward as the Trolls explain why the quadrants ever existed to the humans, some of them are disgusted, others intrigued. A good deal of them try so hard to find a way to accommodate for lack quadrant fillers for Trolls, and most succeed.
Which resulted in Sollux finding a new partner to be his Kismesis, leaving Eridan behind completely. Eridans flush crush, who he really says he didn't have one for, has also left him behind for Aradia who has flesh again and can forgive and love. His second choice of Kismesis is already out there vacillitating with Tavros, and he can't handle the lack of concuspicent romance in his life. And even he doesn't really hate Vriska, he wouldn't fuck her if he got paid to do it, and his flush crush, well, that one is already taken by someone.
Eridan hasn't been doing very well since joining earth.
And Karkat has to deal with his stupid brooding the entire time he goes through it even as he deals with his own problems.
Dave and John have started dating, giving thanks to him for closing the gap and that they could still be friends. His Kismesis and Matesprit alike now lost in an endless romance between each other and hes a third wheel onxe again. His second idea for flush crush and hated rival have also found new partners, flush crush with Equius and hated rival with Feferi. He didn't really hate Nepeta, or flush for Aradia when he thought about it, he just told himself that he did to make up for lack of intense romance.
Karkats life hasn't been treating him very good either.
And Eridan feels he has to deal with his annoying brooding throughout all of it even with his own problems in his life.
But they wouldn't take a different roommate for anything.
All of their friends keep on saying that if its tense they should just get a different roomie and switch with someone. They always say no in a fierce tone, a hiss of protective obsession in their voice as they do so.
They've shared an apartment for so long it would be impossible to just stop at this point.
The soft vibrating hum emitting from gills whenever Eridan sleeps that soothed Karkats insomnia riddled nights. The nubby horns digging into his back because of Karkat being impatient for affection. The sheer terror on Eridans face whenever Karkat starts cooking anything on the stovetop. The sleep talking declarations of loving each other after getting blankets yanked or kicks in the back. And the teasing jokes and jabs at how stupid their crushes are for leaving a Troll as perfect as the other.
Without any of that…
There would be nothing worth waking up for.
And they can't see that.
It took their friends a while, but eventually they noticed the subtle signs even they are ignorant to.
During parties they always idle at each others sides or even go so far as dancing together sometimes in non formal areas. When they all go eat out only one needs to order as they know for each other and get defensive if an order is messed up. If they ever head to a big city on vacation or just for a short visit their arms are always intertwined so they don't get lost.
Sure, it isn't subtle, but they don't realize just how important they are to each other.
Misery loves company their friends supposed.
And they still all had one last year of human school, so they attended it for the last few months. None of them learned anything they didn't already know, except for Terezi who learned about the legal system. It was a very stressful place on earth and their four human friends helped them coast from class to class day to day as the survived.
Then prom was revealed.
A big ass fucking dance that was formal, it had a dress code of something nice and a ruleset of no alcohol, drugs or sex.
All the Trolls where beyond sure that at least two of those rules got broken each year, Dave nodded solemnly at the statement. Dave explained prom to the best of his ability with the help of his human friends and the Trolls all nodded along.
And then Dave explained that a partner was a necessity, that had Karkat and Eridan freezing, the rest already had one, and they didn't. Sure they could go as friends as a last resort, but they were two guys, that still isn't really a thing on earth. They bartered with Dave and the principal and teachers alike as to allowing gay couples into the prom, or a pair of affectionate friends at least, they all said it was unheard of.
Fine then.
Be that way teaching system.
Eridan was a lot more furious than Karkat who was fine not going cause they had no partners, Eridan wanted to go so bad though. They couldn't say they were gay, not allowed, and they couldn't go as friends either. Luckily, Eridan made a very convincing lady, all it took was a change of glasses and a purple dress and he was golden, effeminate already.
Now, shockingly enough despite all the time they spend together, Karkat had never seen Eridan in a dress.
So when the Violet blood walked out of the bathroom, he had Karkat sputtering.
"Well, pretty convincing right?" Eridan asked, this specific dress a deep purple form fitting at his waist but looser everywhere else, especially his chest, which on the dress he had sewn a small amount of fluff into.
Karkat was speechless, he could barely form a thought as his face burned a bright red. By the time was getting close to forming a thought Eridan did a few twirls to make sure it wouldn't start riding up or the streps start slipping down. It took Karkat a whole minute to form a single sentence.
"You have hips?" Was what Karkat said, it had Eridan grinning.
"Of course I do, I just don't show it off like some whore on their nineth sweep," Eridan stated, rolling his eyes just a little bit as he did so.
"Right, right, quick question," Karkat said, Eridan raised a brow between now almost oval glasses, they were a lot less square and more rounded and sharp at the top corners, like cat eyes, "how come I've never seen you in a dress before?"
"You have, I wear them all the time in public, you just never realized it was me," Eridan explained as he began searching for his extremely short coat, it had three quarter sleeves and was black with his symbol embroidered on the chest pocket.
"Ah, ok, do you know where my suit is?" Karkat asked, looking to the floor, noticing Eridan was wearing light purple lace up sandal-esque shoes that had heels at least an inch thick.
"Yes I know where that pathetic item is, look in your closet, it should be there," Eridan said as he slid on his coat, he made his way to the bathroom next to start doing some light makeup.
"Thanks!" Karkat shouted through the walk to Eridan as he changed, thinking real long and hard about that dress, gog he would look amazing in one of Kanayas old skirts.
Fifteen minutes passed full of witty banter and Eridan correcting how Karkat tucked in his shirt and did his hair and so on. By the time they were finished preparing, Karkat was still a scuzzy little fuck with an effeminate friend who was absolutely slaying. Eridan was a bit disappointed he couldn't convince Karkat to use a single layer of black lip stain as it would make his lips pop more.
But alas, time was up and the clock was ticking and they were on their way down, finding a seemingly fine Bro Strider who was freaking out on the inside as Trolls piled into his truck with extensions. Most of them were in dresses and suits, except for Gamzee who found his cleanest shirt and nicest pants and called it a day, Kanaya just wearing what she always did with a different shirt. Five humans and two Trolls sat in the front end of the truck, ten Trolls piled up and compacted in place like Tetris in the back of the truck.
The drive may have been externally short, but the mix of country, ska and punk blasting from the speakers made it feel longer. The entire ride Bro was gripping the steering wheel beyond tight, if he accidentally fucked up, he could he held accountable for how many deaths? More than he could normally imagine being held accountable for, so he tried to silence chitchat with music.
When they arrived, Bro opened the trunk and a group of Trolls fell to the pavement, rebounding instantly. Everyone gave their prompt thanks to Bro before heading inside, Dave leaving with a short squeeze of a hug.
Now, the dance in itself was chaos.
People fucking everywhere, music so damn loud, the amount of movement, oh fuck it was crazy. All of the Trolls stuck together, most of them breaking into smaller groups until they were separated into pairs of two. Their was dancing, and they danced hard, they were what, eight songs in when two headed to the punch table.
Eridan and Karkat, they each grabbed a cup and poured one for each other, clinking glasses. They drank swiftly, and it almost burned on the way down, oh yeah, this was spiked. That fact alone had Eridan going for seconds, Karkat as well, it was fun, it was breaking the rules, they didn't care.
And then, at this point Eridans gills were fluttering as a telltale sign he was starting to get a hit tipsy, a slow song started playing.
The two made eye contact, Karkat holding out a hand that Eridan grabbed as they made their way to the center of the room where every other pair was.
"Can I have this dance?" Karkat asked, it was a stupid question.
"Of course, my good sir," Eridan faked a curtsy as he spoke, giving a soft giggle as he took Karkats hands.
Sure, the song was slow, but it was picking up, and with it, so did Eridan and Karkat. Where most stayed slow even as the song called for flair, the two started going faster. Eventually they had their chests flush against each other and were practically sharing breathes, arms splayed out. Then they continued after a short moment, hitting John and Dave who were trying not to get caught, they didn't make a deal out of it. By the end of it all, Eridan had Karkat dipping to the ground, he was burning up, feisty bitch of a Violet blood. Eridan was grinning as he pulled up Karkat, nearly giggling, he was so flustered, it was just a simple move he learned.
"Oh fuck me," Karkat muttered as he gripped Eridans hand tightly, dragging him away from the crowd, the sight of his face peppered in a booze blush of Violet to much to handle.
"We should tell, one of our friends first," Eridan said as they traversed to the exit of the gymnasium.
"They know someones gonna fuck, this years its us, where did the stalls go?" Karkat questioned as he pulled Eridan out the door and into the near vacant halls where they could find Rose and Kanaya chatting, they almost went to speak before seeing the two of them heading for the washrooms.
"Hook a left," Eridan said as though it was fact.
And Karkat did hook a left, he hooked a left so hard Eridan nearly tripped on his sandals. Karkat threw open the washroom doors, finding some poor fool making use of one of the urinals, they saw and didn't say a word about it. It was Eridan who threw Karkat into the stall, slamming the door shut and their backs pressed against either side with a very small amount of wiggle room.
"I'm sorry," Eridan mumbled, this felt so wrong and so right, a mutant with a Violet, he was saying sorry but why, instinct, a reflex, on Alternia both would be culled.
"Fuck me," was what Karkat said, unable to produce much more as he yanked off his suit pants, bulge staining underwear red already, Eridan hiked up his skirt, tying it in place with a belt and safety pins, his bukge also coming undone.
Eridan gripped Karkats middle, gently lifting him off the ground, Karkat pressed his feet to the wall across from him as he was pressed to the other wall. Oh fuck, this stall is gonna be wrecked, his bulge writhes and oozes red that drips to tile floor below. Eridan grips it, claws digging in slightly, and Karkat moans his sweet moan, so, so perfect. Eridan continues to run his claws along sensitive flesh, dipping barely into the nook as he presses kisses and marks along Karkats neck.
Claws threaten to tear open the black tuxedo as they go to undo buttons and get more skin, its smattered in red due to the amount pumping through Karats blood. Karkats hands are pressed against the stall wall as Eridan fondles him and traces fangs along the soft flesh of his neck, biting and suckling to make a point. He'll be covered in bruises by the end of this, he releases another moan as the base of his bulge is gripped. He cums on the spot, a copious amount of slurry escaping him and staining the floor below.
Eridans bulge is writhing, livid it hasn't gotten any attention yet and the Violet blood is panting as he marks his lover in bites. He digs two fingers into Karkats nook, he nearly shrieks as claws threaten to tear but don't. His insides are velvet soft, and they ooze red, Eridan pumps his fingers and more red slips out between them. The scent alone is delectable, so sweet and intoxicating it has his gills fluttering as he presses closer to Karkat until their chests are against each other again.
Karkats panting and hot breath washes over Eridan as he brings his slurry coated fingers to his lips and sucks off the material. The taste is fine to him, rich and fruity with a hint of metal, he supposes not many others would find it delicious as well. He doesn't care, he brings Karkat in for a kiss, one tongue forked the other not, one of his hands keeps Karkats wrist pressed to the stall, the other guiding bulge into nook. Karkats eyes flutter shut for a moment as he moans into the kiss, Eridans bulge thick in his nook and oozing Violet that drips between their legs to the floor below.
Its perfect, all of this.
Sure, Karkats just a little bit tipsy and not thinking along the lines of Kismesis and Matesprit, or any of those. He doesn't really care though, he just knows this moment is perfect. He's sure Eridan feels the same way as well, but Karkat is mentally blanking to much to make a snide remark.
Getting railed by a femboy in a school bathroom.
His life has peaked.
Eridans grinding into him, hitting deeper and deeper into his nook each time their pelvises meet. And the kiss only gets fiercer, Eridan starts giving bits of bite into the kiss as fangs trade tongue and lip. Karkat, he's fine, his bulge is fucking flailing uselessly, unable to find the nook waiting for penetration, or for a bucket. Eridan ends up gripping Karkats bulge again, this time much more gently as he picks up the pace of his thrusting. Eventually Eridan starts panting as well, velvety tightness, beautiful sounds, glorious sights at his face its all to much to handle.
With a strangled moan, even more Violet and Candy Red slurry gushes to the tile below.
Karkats legs are limp, he's panting like a whore as he tries to regain balance in the stall and pull on his pants. Eridan has a bit more class, he takes a wad of single ply and uses it to clean up his thighs, bulge retreating. The two stumble out of the stall giggling a little bit as they make there way to the sink.
As they wash their hands just for the sake of habit and splash water on their face John and Dave walk in. They're flushed, kissing and biting at each other barely able to keep it together as they stumble into a stall. The stall they stumble into is not the one Eridan and Karkat ruined, they stare at gelatinizing slurry and floor and one wall of the stall, that is a janitors nightmare. The two share a quick look of remorse for the poor janitor whose gonna have to clean up that mess before leaving.
They'll have to do something like that again.
After working out what quadrant they're in.
It's gonna be hard explaining the slurry running down Karkats legs on the ride home.
#homestuck#erikar#eridan x karkat#karkat x eridan#smutfic#smut fanfiction#lemon#writing#fanfic#fanfiction
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> karkat doesn't understand why the human lathering solution burns his eyes
> dave finds out why karkat's eyes are always bloodshot
#davekat#dave strider#karkat vantas#homestuck#davekar#all this time dave thought it was just karkat's lack of sleep#but the reason is 10x funnier#karkat is NOT amused#this was a 4am brain worm rofl had to draw it as soon as i woke up#my art
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okay humanstuck thoughts under the cut
i owe a lot of this to @/rhythmic-idealist's kankri/vantasposting bc holy shit theyve got such a big brain (ill link to their individual posts when im on desktop since im using this to keep all my thoughts straight and i agree with most of what they say wholeheartedly)
general status quo stuff:
signless works in an extremely demanding career involving helping others (i'm leaning towards an attorney who works with organizations and does pro bono work), and is also extensively involved in social justice work outside of his job... he is very rarely home
he loves and cares for his children deeply and tries to express it whenever they're face to face, but the couch in his cramped and messy office has seen far too much use over the years for him to have been able to say it enough
his habits of working himself to the point of exhaustion are handily passed down to his kids btw
the kids had to grow up quickly because signless was out of the house so often and so consistently—kankri, who was already pretty high-strung, has to learn to take care of himself and karkat
they grow up near ms firuzeh maryam, who's their pseudoaunt/grandma (she took in a nine year old kavana vantas when she was about twenty), but they just call her ms rosa
they spent a lot of time in the maryam house growing up, with miss rosa's two nieces. porrim is a year older than kankri, while kanaya and karkat are the same age
kankri grows kinda sensitive to people trying to mother him since it rubs against the notion that he's the "adult of the house" and that he can take care of himself and karkat just fine
(and it also kinda underlines the fact that kankri has no idea what he's doing at the best of times)
and ironically enough, kankri becomes overbearing and naggy towards karkat in his own right, which forestalls them becoming close in any brotherly sort of way
they grow up really just... unable to communicate with one another clearly
karkat develops his ornery exterior in response to kankri's constant stream of opinions and frantic attempts at making up for the presence of a guardian in the house
i think there would actually be some really interesting parallels with rose in this au.. maybe i'm drawing from my own experiences as well but i think he'd begin to assume that every time his brother opens his mouth, he's going to criticize karkat
but instead of reacting like rose with the "making yourself more of a puzzle"/passive aggressive stuff, he gets a more defensive/hackles raised/"argue with you before you can argue with me" approach
and the thing is that they do love each other and would take a bullet for the other etc etc etc.. but they don't know how to express it because they've fallen into these shitty patterns
and it really doesn't help that kankri has grown somewhat resentful of signless over the years... that mix of resentment and fear and love gets more extreme and more polar every time signless gets injured during a political demonstration
i think kankri and signless would also be slightly closer than karkat and signless, as signless' job really only started to ramp up when karkat was less than years old and kankri was in his early double digits
kankri autistic btw its word of god (i am god)
karkat has a pet crab. its name is also karkat. he vents his frustrations to it.
i feel like the vantases exemplify both the best and worst parts of their aspects with one another as well... the strength of their bonds keeps them together and grounded, but TOO grounded. [insert Blood rant here]
the Blood rant:
i define Blood as bonds, responsibility, and the "core". if Life is the fertile soil and everything living on a planet's surface, then Blood is the gravitational core of the planet keeping everything together
i also think Blood, Heart, & Mind work in tandem to define a person just as blood serves to connect the pieces of the human body... Heart is the soul and the self, Mind is the application of one's self through active choices (agency), while Blood defines both the self and the choices one makes in greater detail [and, as an aside, Life provides the physical spark of life needed to keep the heart pumping blood]
OKAY wow that got tangential anyways
SO BASICALLY! too much Blood makes you stagnate, so for example:
kankri is split between staying home with karkat or going to college across the country and being truly unbound for the first time in years
another crisis of Blood: signless is caught between his empathy and responsibility to the whole world and his responsibility to his own children
okay so here's more status quo stuff:
the maryam and vantas kids grow up together and its hilarious because you'll see them all together and its just like (girlboss) (girlboss) (physical manlet) (emotional manlet)
the maryam girls are actually miss rosa's nieces but she took them in when they were both pretty young
the pyropes know the vantases well enough considering pyrope senior and sign have known one another from their respective legal practices for years, but they live on the other side of town
the leijons lived in town when kankri and meulin were very young, but they moved and travelled for a long time before coming back and reestablishing their roots
the captors (psii being one of sign's oldest and closest friends) move into town with the peixes family pretty early on though
the condesce is.. a horrible spouse and guardian, to put it plainly. she's very emotionally manipulative and isn't averse to smacking people around, including her own family. she moves herself and her perfect little family into town so she can properly oversee a new business venture close by
feferi is one of the best young swimmers in the country and has a pretty good shot of getting onto the olympic team.. a lot of this drive to be perfect and to be better results from the condesce's unrelenting pressure and thinly veiled resentment throughout her whole life
so yeah psii, )(ic, feferi, and sollux all live together and it's really not great for anyone involved. (meenah ran away years ago, and crashed on aranea's couch for a pretty long while—mituna moved out with latula for college before psii and the condesce got married)
it gets bad to the point of sollux staying with the maryams for two months while the adults try to sort out that absolute clusterfuck and get the divorce proceedings going (meenah finally convinces feferi to get out and come stay with her and aranea for the duration as well)
in terms of relationships i think latula and porrim were really really close in high school, and probably had some kind of unacknowledged thing going on for a while that never actually turned into anything because latula and mituna were going steady
kankri has had a crush on latula for years but never acted on it for similar reasons
meenah still carries a lot of that give no fucks attitude (it's developed moreso as a defense mechanism here) and can't understand why feferi refuses to leave the condesce with her
okay back to VANTAS MANPAIN i also think that karkat feels the weight of a lot of expectations on his shoulders as well
he feels responsible to live up to the example his dad and his brother set, even if it's to his own detriment—and kankri's oblivious rambling about his grades and his teachers and all his clubs certainly aren't helping the matter
kankri is one of those overinvolved kids taking a million AP's while simultaneously shitting on the collegeboard at every single step
hes this super overachiever anal retentive perfectionist type dude and (just as karkat preemptively criticizes others to forestall their criticisms of him only to harshly criticize himself) kankri subconsciously holds the people around him to the same expectations he holds for himself
so karkat also develops this sense of lacking which, in combination with everything else, culminates in self loathing and thinking he has to solve everyone else's problems and getting horribly mad at himself for every little mistake
GOD i have a lot more but lemme post this before i accidentally close out of the app and lose it all
more little details:
vriska's mom and terezi's mom HATE each other like HATE HATE HATE one another it's so bad
karkat wrote a ten page review of my immortal in middle school
jade is one of nepeta's best online friends
sollux can't raise one eyebrow at a time.. karkat gives him so much grief about it
the vantases eat a lot of shitty renditions of persian dishes until karkat learns to cook because literally the only person in the world with a CHANCE of getting KANKRI VANTAS to make an EDIBLE DISH is miss rosa
kanaya is really good at persian dance too but is VERY VERY embarassed to perform in front of people.. however porrim definitely is not
karkat has insomnia while kankri just stays up stupidly late for assignments that really shouldnt be taken that seriously.. but they both have the same rumination/sleep anxiety thing where your brain goes insane with horrible and depressing scenarios as you try to sleep
and more ideas that i thought were interesting but idk how to fit in the context of this au:
signless and disciple getting married pretty late in life after having been in love for years, the vantases move in with the leijons and karkat suddenly has two sisters
nepeta and karkat are both juniors at this point, meulin is probably in her third year at a local college nearby while kankri is about to start his second year at a university pretty far away
the kids in general honestly but ill figure it out
more random hcs this time with kids:
kanaya and rose get into a flame war online that gradually settles into elaborate courtship rituals
also nepeta + jade online besties
also bec can inexplicably still teleport
the first sbahj movie comes out and the next six months of dave strider junior's high school career are absolute hell
actually hc that dave senior goes by d strider professionally. the d stands for a lot of things
aradia and dave frequent a lot of the same forums but never end up really interacting
meanwhile karkat and john frequent a lot of the same forums and DEFINITELY end up interacting. this turns into grudging (at least on karkat's part) friendship after they find themselves fighting for their lives defending an objectively shitty movie together on the same thread
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Day 13: Double Mobius Reacharound
https://homestuck.com/story/2073
Of all the characters in Homestuck, Sollux’s self-hatred is probably the most exaggerated, exacerbated no doubt by his role in the death of his girlfriend and his psychic brain. I like him, he’s an alright guy, and I wish I had more to say about him to be honest. I guess if there was one thing I was going to say about him, I think I said it already - Sollux serves as a mirror image of Dave, and Sollux’s decision to bow out early probably foreshadows the way that Dave will eventually decide that fighting is not for him.
More after the break.
https://homestuck.com/story/2082
How does Paradox Space know which angel to use? This is a bit of an odd moment. Maybe I’m missing the refrance, but I’ve never quite understood why Terezi reacts this way, with all of the additional periods. Sollux seems quizzical, but Terezi doesn’t react.
Also, this is the first in a serious of lines I’m going to be examining in relation to Aradia. Keep that on the back of your thinkpan.
https://homestuck.com/story/2085
Sollux and Aradia have a very sweet, tragic little relationship, and even though it doesn’t last into the longterm, I’ve always enjoyed these two together.
https://homestuck.com/story/2101
Whether retroactively, or intentionally, the sensual scantily clad fairies in Tavros’ room are a lot more noticeable on re-reads. Tavros has a pretty unassuming demeanor, and I’m not here to trash him pointlessly, but I think that Tavros has some pretty troubling patterns of behavior that can go unexamined because of the fact that he’s a victim. More on that as we go.
https://homestuck.com/story/2112
Far from a passing fancy, Tavros’ interest in animals does seem to be genuine. I wonder if he had a little farm with a bunch of these critters. We never get to see much of his other Fiduspawn if he has any.
https://homestuck.com/story/2114
Karkat and Tavros both do this, which I think is interesting because of the fact that they have opposite relationships with sleep and dreaming - Tavros spends most of his time in game asleep and dreaming of Prospit, Karkat has horrible insomnia.
https://homestuck.com/story/2122
Our very first conversation with Vriska has her tune in pretty much entirely to bully Tavros. The interesting thing is, while Vriska’s treatment of Tavros is pretty objectively bad, the way that she harasses him is actually pretty closely in line with the way that other trolls treat their friends, mutual aggression and nastiness. Vriska’s aggression isn’t addressed at someone who’s responding in kind though - Tavros is gentle where other trolls are vicious, deferential where other trolls are assertive. It’s this contrast that makes the shamefulness of Vriska’s behavior obvious to pretty much everyone but her.
https://homestuck.com/story/2123
Gamzee and Tavros are a ship tease that didn’t really end up going anywhere, but one of the things I think is interesting is the way Gamzee’s language goes from extremely lackadaisical and chill to kind of energetically violent around Tavros. Most of the time, Gamzee’s pretty laidback, but there’s a lot of language relating to murder in Gamzee’s enthusiasm here.
https://homestuck.com/story/2127
While Terezi’s Dragon doesn’t really have much of a choice in terms of its relative absence from her life, the sparse communication between the two and emotional distance is, I think, a parallel with Rose.
https://homestuck.com/story/2128
Because of the fact that we don’t get as much of a look into the Trolls’ home lives, it’s less easy to narrow down what their “finer” anxieties are, but it’s clear that they follow the same pattern of having their sleeping selves wake up as a result of internal synthesis of some kind - confronting their subconscious anxieties, and consciously accepting a part of their reality that they’ve been deliberately shutting out.
There’s probably a number of things that were instrumental to waking up for Terezi, not the least of which is accepting that Vriska is not the friend that Terezi thought she was - waking up to the fact that she was being used by an abuser in a co-dependent relationship. Coming to terms with her blindness could represent growth into a healthier sense of self, one where she finds validation internally and in healthy friend and family relationships. All that being said, her relationship with Vriska is still her most important relationship, and realizing that a problem exists is only the first step in solving it.
https://homestuck.com/story/2134
Time to stop being cagey about it, I guess. I have long viewed Aradia’s story as being one that is about surviving depression, which I say as a depression survivor. I relate heavily to the language that Homestuck uses to describe Aradia’s lack of passion and lack of enjoyment of things that she used to enjoy - especially the way that she lashes out destructively to try and alleviate her boredom and frustration.
https://homestuck.com/story/2137
On an unrelated note, Aradia has the Crosbytop. I believe I’m starting to remember how it got into her hands.
https://homestuck.com/story/2139
I’ve always thought that it’s interesting that Kanaya’s language directly mirrors Karkat’s from when he was harassing Jade, but their sentiment is almost precisely the opposite. She borrows another Karkatism almost immediately. So pretty much from the word go, we’re clued into the fact that Kanaya and Karkat have some relationship with each other that goes beyond the purely familiar, in the same way that Dave and John’s tendency to mirror each other’s language helps us to understand their friendship.
For a girl who doesn’t feel too many emotions, Aradia can be pretty sassy.
https://homestuck.com/story/2144
I have a friend who’s a bit of a Vriska kinnie (and feel like I’m pretty Vriska-esque myself), and one of the things that we both do that I’m seeing in Vriska here is fill dead air with chatter. I could be reading into it a little, but I think it should be a clue that Vriska is an intensely anxious kind of character.
https://homestuck.com/story/2145
In a parallel to Sollux’s introduction, we can’t immediately be Vriska. We couldn’t be Sollux because he was too busy stewing in his own self-criticism. There’s a push and pull going on between Vriska’s narcissism and her over-the-top self-deprecation.
https://homestuck.com/story/2150
I might be pulling this out of my ass, but I feel like there’s a case to be made for Aradia and Vriska actually being pretty strong parallels to each other - the only two trolls to get the tiger, faciliitators of destiny, devil-may-care grave-robbers. I don’t actually have a fully formed thought to really draw the two together, but I feel like there’s really something there. The way that Aradia puts Sollux to sleep here in order to ensure that the Right Disasters befall him is parallel to the way that Vriska puts people to sleep at clever points to make sure that Jack is created, and so on and so forth.
Maybe in the same way that Sollux serves as a parallel to Dave and helps us to understand what the right decision is for Dave, Aradia parallels Vriska and helps us to understand that roughly the same things are good for the two of them. Much later, (Vriska) basically chooses the same path of staying out of harm’s way and trying to enjoy the rest of her relatively eternal existence.
https://homestuck.com/story/2161
As soon as Karkat talks about Kanaya with anyone else, he further reinforces there is a friendship between the two of them.
Another quick note, as long as we’re here, I’ve kind of been putting this off, but I suppose with the one and only use of “autistic” as an insult in the comic, it’s finally time for me to bring this up:
Homestuck has a pretty problematic relationship with victims of abuse and people suffering from mental and physical disabilities. While on the one hand like, almost all of Homestuck’s main characters are disabled and abuse sufferers in some way or another, there are a lot of ways in which it’s not so charitable to them.
Some of it is stuff like this - early Homestuck uses the word retarded a lot as an insult, and has this single instance of autistic - all in all, that kind of language is problematic but in and of itself, not too egregious - Homestuck is a product of its time in that respect.
Stuff that I take issue with is more subtle - mostly stuff surrounding Jake and Tavros. I’ll have more to say on it later, but I wanted to find a good natural time to bring it up, and now seemed like a fine time.
https://homestuck.com/story/2162
Nepeta and Equius give us some information that helps grow our understanding of troll culture. We’ve already had some conversation about whose blood is better than whose from Sollux, but Equius starts to help us understand that some trolls take blood color extremely seriously.
These kids may not replicate the social anxieties of earthlings 1:1 but they still have plenty of things to be anxious about. The more I read Hiveswap the more I become convinced that most of these characters were never people we were meant to become terribly invested in - a lot of the function of the trolls, from a narrative perspective, is to give us parallels to the human main characters and insight into their lives, as well as to give us exposition on just how Sburb works exactly. And then most of them are pretty promptly killed off or put on a bus once their purpose is served (or in order to serve their purpose!)
Back to the subject of the social anxieties that the trolls have to deal with, Alternia is all about hierarchy baby.
https://homestuck.com/story/2173
Vriska may be a born cheater, but I’ve always sort of gotten the impression, based on the killer nature of FLARPING which is alluded to plenty in other situations, that if she’s cheating here, it may be the kind of cheating that is encouraged.
Between that and the way that Tavros and Aradia were discussing the “True Spirit of Flarping,” I can’t help but remember a description of the way propaganda works from some time ago. Propaganda doesn’t usually follow the story arc we are accustomed to, where we start with a character or characters who do not yet possess the tools or abilities they need to succeed, grow to overcome their weakness, and then overcome the problem that they couldn’t before.
Propaganda, instead, introduces us to characters who are already strong, facing enemies who are weak, or problems who are easy. They are strong because they are the heroes! Their enemies are weak. And the function of it is to intimidate the enemies of the person putting out the propaganda, and to rile up aggressive sentiment in those who are on the side of the propagandist.
We’ve already talked about how, in Homestuck “roleplaying” in both its more figurative and literal uses, is a way in which characters act out society’s expectations for them. In that way, I can’t help but view FLARPING as something of a propaganda tool itself, and one that’s pretty integral to Vriska’s way of thinking throughout the comic.
You’re either someone who is strong, or someone who is weak, and if you’re strong, you’re one of the victors, if you’re weak, you’re one of the losers, and you deserve whatever the victors decide what to do with you.
What I guess I’m building up to here is that there are real world societies that Troll Culture seems like an exaggerated parody of - particularly the more militaristic aspects of the Romans, and the Spartans. I’m going to wait for another time to write down all my thoughts about them, because this is turning into a bit of an essay, but suffice to say, it’s probably going to coincide with the one about Patriarchy whenever I get around to it.
https://homestuck.com/story/2175
There’s an interesting thing going on here between the way that Tavros is drawn (nearly identical to his imagine spot about flying around on Prospit), and the way that his erratic behavior isn’t actually all that different from the way characters normally do absurd and dangerous things here.
I’m by no means excusing what Vriska is doing here, but I think that between the fact that Tavros already wants to fly anyway, and the fact that again, characters do this kind of self-destructive thing in Homestuck all the time anyway, although to less of an exaggerated degree, Andrew is drawing a parallel between the narrative prompts from the Exiles, Vriska’s manipulations, and the intrusive thoughts that we already have on our own anyway.
Vriska manipulates Tavros the way that Doc Scratch manipulates her, although considerably clumsier, by getting him to do what he already wants to anyway.
https://homestuck.com/story/2177
That’s really all there is to say on the matter.
It’s like poetry, they rhyme.
In the same way that Bro manipulates Dave by imposing an idea of what it means to be a man on him - someone who can be beaten within an inch of his life, or beat someone else to within an inch of his life without batting an eye - Vriska tries to manipulate Tavros throughout his arc, and this kind of so-called “tough love” is just the start of it.
There’s a lot of supplementary material that delves deeper into Vriska’s rationale for her mistreatment of Tavros, but she makes it clear herself as we go through the comic that she at least justifies her mistreatment of Tavros by telling herself that the purpose of it is to toughen him up (so he can be one of the strong people, a winner who gets the girl.)
https://homestuck.com/story/2178
As he often is about what’s going on with other people when he’s distracted from thinking about himself by his own agitation, Karkat is probably right about Vriska - girls like her are a dime a dozen in the upper classes, and that’s the point. The point of troll society is to produce people like Vriska amongst the highbloods.
https://homestuck.com/story/2195
Let’s dig into Vriska’s self-stylization as an apocalypse buff for a second because it’s not something I think gets talked about a lot.
Apocalypticism is, in my estimation, kind of a form of generational narcissism. There are doomsayers in every generation, who claim that this is it - this new catastrophe, this new social situation, is the most important thing in the world to ever happen. The end is here. All of world history culminates in this.
I don’t mean to downplay the actual existential threats of our generation of course; climate change, late capitalism, that sort of thing. But I think Vriska’s Apocalypse Buffery fits pretty well into her need to be the most important person in Paradox Space all the time.
On another note, Luck in Homestuck is very closely related with a few concepts like Agency in Homestuck through the Aspect of Light. Terezi will later assert that luck doesn’t matter at all. What’s up with that?
Maybe Luck and Karma are two sides of the same coin (ha!) Both of them are pieces in the puzzle of Theodicy, that is to say, the metaphysics question of why there is bad in the world.
Someone like Vriska (at the beginning of her arc) would say that it’s happenstance - bad things and good things can happen to bad and good people, there’s no greater meaning behind it. Vriska has a hard time taking responsibility for her own actions - her locus of control is external, for the most part.
Terezi on the other hand mostly attributes everything to a person’s actions, hence the need to punish bad people, and reward good ones. Terezi would say that good things happen to good people, and bad things happen to bad people. Her locus of control is internal.
Maybe the answer is both motherfuckin’ things.
https://homestuck.com/story/2202
Just as Vriska’s introduction is through a conversation with her victim, so Doc Scratch’s introduction is through a conversation with his victim. Or at least, his most immediate victim.
It’s like poetry, they rhyme.
https://homestuck.com/story/2204
Kanaya pretty well sums up here what I was getting at when talking about Terezi and Vriska’s different locuses of control.
There’s no real good or bad luck here. Good luck for someone is bad luck for someone else, often enough. What “good luck” means to Vriska is that events go down the way that she personally wants them to.
And so, by seizing control and power in situations where she is helpless, the Thief of Light ensures that she always has all the luck.
Kanaya might not be right, by the way, not 100%. I’m not a stoic. You can’t just magically wish away suffering by deciding that actually, you’re 0k with it, anymore than Aradia can. Like I said, the truth probably lies somewhere between Luck and Karma.
https://homestuck.com/story/2207
While the terrifying violent monitor and the emotionally abusive manipulator are bifurcated, Vriska has a lot of the same emotional responses to her guardians as Dave does to his singular guardian - notice the similar, self-soothing language that Vriska’s narrative employs compared to the way that Dave self-sooths when trying to convince himself that the way Bro treats him is just fine and normal.
https://homestuck.com/story/2211
Equius to me is a super interesting character, because on the one hand, he’s a joke character Andrew uses to antagonize the audience by being gross but Andrew also uses him to say the quiet part loud - Homestuck is already, to begin with, a pretty lewd webcomic full of horny characters whose emotional hangups and destructive relationships with societal norms sabotage their chances at happiness. That’s all Equius is. His entire function from start to finish, aside from a source of ribald humor, is to draw attention to the fact that everyone in this comic is looking for comfort in someone else’s body, comfort from the way that unrealistic societal expectations and their attempts to live up to them don’t match up to what’s inside of their heart. Equius is a parody of Homestuck inside of Homestuck. Absurdly overpowered, ridiculously horny, all twisted up inside.
https://homestuck.com/story/2220
The language here that Equius uses - degenerate - is evocative of the sorts of right-wing authoritarian hate mongers that Equius’ ideology stands in for. Equius, of course, has doubts about said ideology, which he starts to express through transgressive relationships pretty much as soon as we meet him, like the one with Aradia. The fact that he can’t make sense of the warring ideas inside of him almost literally kills him.
https://homestuck.com/story/2221
Except that what kills him literally is a shitty clown.
I think what’s going on here is interesting, because if you want to read Equius as like, Homestuck in a nutshell, Equius’ ideological hangups are co-morbid with his sexual hangups, and resolving one set would probably go a long way toward resolving the other set. Equius is, for lack of a better term, a deviant. The sorts of things that excite him (here, viscerally) don’t match up with his idea of how troll society is supposed to be.
Equius and Gamzee are confronting each other with a different vision for what Troll Society is supposed to be like.
https://homestuck.com/story/2222
In stark contrast to the shallow and insincere hostility of Trolls who are actually friends with each other, Vriska and Equius maintain a veneer of social grace as they mutually plan to backstab each other.
https://homestuck.com/story/2237
Vriska is pretty clearly projecting here, but she’s also 100% right. I guess when you know somebody, you know them. Or it could be happenstance.
Her view of redemption is also transactional. “I will make things the way they were before, and things can go back to being the way that they were,” she seems to say. It’s a very legalistic view of it, and while it might have a place in a justice system, even the extremely legalistic Terezi can tell that that wouldn’t actually fix anything. Maybe the physical and emotional damage could be repaired in theory, but if the actors in the situation don’t change themselves in fundamental ways, this is all just going to recur in the future.
Forgiveness isn’t something an abuser can earn - nobody has the right to claim that they have restored a relationship that they destroyed in the first place by demonstrating token repentance.
https://homestuck.com/story/2238
If Andrew already had in mind that Equius should in some way be a part of the gestalt of souls that is Lord English, he’s foreshadowing it early here by comparing Equius’ voyeuristic habits to Scratch’s.
https://homestuck.com/story/2244
I’ll lay my cards on the table and say I think that Doc Scratch can present the facts 100% and still be dishonest. I’m a compatibilist - I think that Free Will and Accountability are compatible with the idea of a deterministic universe. Doc Scratch doesn’t have to talk anyone into anything, but the material conditions that led everyone to the decisions that they chose to make were orchestrated by Lord English. Scratch may not be making any decisions here that effect the outcomes, sure, but the game was rigged in his favor from the start.
Again, I’m not excusing Vriska’s actions here. But for the same reason that we wouldn’t blame Tavros for jumping off of a cliff just because trying to fly is something he already wanted to do to begin with, I think it’s clear to anyone with eyes that Doc Scratch is at least partially responsible for creating this little monster.
Vriska’s complicated. Let’s move on so this whole post doesn’t turn into more Vriskourse. That’s the last thing anyone needs.
https://homestuck.com/story/2258
You know you’re going to anyway.
I guess what intrigues me so much about this section is the gradation between manipulation and coercion.
https://homestuck.com/story/2263
Vriska might be a born cheater, but Doc Scratch is a sore loser.
She’s pretty easy to root for when she’s against him.
https://homestuck.com/story/2269
Man, Act 5 Act 1 is just absolutely lousy with conversation about choice and luck.
https://homestuck.com/story/2276
Part of what creates ambiguity in terms of how much Vriska’s choices are her nature versus the conditions that shaped it is on display here in her conversation with Aradia.
Vriska doesn’t really know how to interact with people positively, like, at all. Nobody’s ever taught her. She doesn’t know what it means to be a friend to someone. She doesn’t know what it means to help someone. She doesn’t know how to be loved or forgiven.
Is this like the scorpion and the frog? Or does she have free will? (I’ll give you a hint, it’s the second one.)
https://homestuck.com/story/2280
This whole sequence is just a delight. The trolls are really just such disaster people, and if I can be excused, it’s easy to put more emotional distance between myself and say, Equius, than it is between myself and Vriska and Terezi. Like I said, Equius says the quiet part out loud, so there’s really nothing much to analyze there.
Aradia’s inability to control the ribbits is part of a general mood of a lack of control that she has as a character. Vriska’s lack of control causes her to rage at the heavens and lash out at the people around her. Aradia is just 0k with it, and neither is a healthy coping strategy. The result is that the two of them break a lot of shit.
https://homestuck.com/story/2305
For the first time in his life, Karkat is not alone.
https://homestuck.com/story/2319
I could really be mistaken here, but the way this whole sequence is presented here really feels, on an archival reread, to be telling me, “You do not need to care about these characters.” Certainly they serve a function in the story, but with the exception of a few of them (literally only a third of them), they serve as tools in an authorial toolbox to help flesh out the setting - not so unlike the Carapacians actually, but with a lot more personality.
https://homestuck.com/story/2323
Kanaya is threefold one of the few of her kind, making her extra special. While she is closest with Rose, she’s a clear parallel to Jade, who if memory serves, suffered frequent accustations of being a Mary Sue early on. Kanaya’s level of specialness (in terms of combined rare factors) outcompetes even Jade’s. Probably a part of the playfully antagonistic style of Homestuck in general.
https://homestuck.com/story/2338
It slipped my mind earlier that the honey on Sollux’s hands was being directly juxtaposed with Dave’s blood on his own hands, and here Kanaya’s. All three of them are, to some extent or another, contemplating their mortality. As Kanaya said just a few panels ago though, death is confusing without the finality. Just another way that Homestuck plays with the nomenclature of endings and beginnings and intermissions and brings into question the usefulness of those categories.
https://homestuck.com/story/2343
I have always enjoyed the dynamic that Kanaya and Eridan share with each other, and I wish there were more conversations of her just dunking on him.
Also of note in this little conversation is the way that Kanaya and John mirror each other’s language. This is an example though where they could not possibly be mirroring it the way that Dave and John might be when they’re talking about Bec, or the way that she and Karkat might be. They have, it seems, the same penchant for mischief.
https://homestuck.com/story/2345
Like her counterparts from Universe B, Kanaya’s preoccupation with relationships and personal contact is made manifest through her Squiddle Lunchtop.
https://homestuck.com/story/2350
Both of the main Pages in Homestuck are characters whose primary usefulness is seen through their ability to make friends and broker alliances. I suspect that being a Page in Sburb is to some extent a bit like being an ADC in League of Legends.
The ADC or Attack Damage Carry, if you’re not familiar with the nomenclature, is a character who starts the game weak, and remains vulnerable throughout such that the whole team has to play babysitter. If you think that sounds unappealing to play, you’d be right - it can be pretty hard to find someone willing to play ADC, especially with the popularity of high-risk high-reward Asassins (not so unlike a thief!) who are their direct counter.
In spite of their relative vlunerability, the ADC has absolutely dominated the meta of League of Legends for the past ten years for the simple reason that there is absolutely no substitute when it comes to controlling objectives.
Maybe Pages are a little bit like that. Frustrating to be one, frustrating to have one around, but extremely rewarding to invest in. It’s too bad nobody can be arsed to give them the emotional support they need to flourish. Too bad they have such... intractible character flaws.
https://homestuck.com/story/2356
Kanaya’s inability to stop mothering people sabotages her chance at winning Vriska’s affection - no doubt because Vriska has misread the situation as Kanaya being her romantic rival for Tavros’s attention. For the better, I guess, since Rosemary is my shit.
Trolls sure are weird.
https://homestuck.com/story/2369
Vriska has already figured out the point of Sburb, and perhaps the ultimate riddle, although she clearly hasn’t figured out the ramifications of it yet.
In any case, it should be clear how she has interpreted Sburb’s directive - authenticate your own existence through reproduction.
Being a winner, having self-worth, being able to justify your own existence means being strong enough, smart enough, pretty enough to shape the rest of existence in your own image.
She’s missing a critical detail, and its absence means she has it completely backwards.
https://homestuck.com/story/2370
We already know what is on the other side of the portal. Vriska is making herself out to be the final boss.
The final boss and the treasure are the same thing, in her mind.
The struggle is the objective.
The fighting is the point.
https://homestuck.com/story/2374
Just wanted to take a second to say that this whole sequence is so unnerving and horrible that I was sure she was going to murder, violate, and/or eat him, not necessarily in that order, the first time I read through this.
The sad reality is, this is the fucked up courtship ritual of a girl who has no idea how to be intimate with other people.
https://homestuck.com/story/2391
And that’s where we’ll pause for the night, having finished nearly 300 pages as promised.
Hope I wasn’t getting too lazy there at the end.
I’m enjoying my weekend.
Hope that yinz enjoy yours once it rolls around.
For now, Alive and Not Sober, Cam signing off.
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The Cancer King's Court ~ The Beloved Bard
Gamzee Makara/The Beloved Bard
Okay, to understand this version of Gamzee, I need to explain how a view Gamzee’s heel turn.
I don’t believe Gamzee was mind controlled, nor do I think that he was just “evil all along”. In my point of view, his mental breakdown came about as a gradual process. Firstly, he started running low on Sopor, which he was using to suppress his mental issues brought about by his lack of a proper care taker. Second, Dave had inadvertently shattered his faith in his religion, revealing it to just be some kind of ironic joke. And, third, Tavros was murdered, leaving him without one of his closest friends. He had no one to confide in. He was desperate for purpose and guidance. So, when he looked into the eyes of Little Cal, he saw the soul of his god. He saw himself inside the soul of his god. And it spoke of its grand design to Gamzee. Guiding his actions from that point torward. Allowing him an outlet for his rage and a means of achieving paradise.
This Gamzee starts out at that exact same point. He stares into Cal’s eyes, awaiting orders from his master. However, this version of Lord English has no intention of bringing about The Dark Carnival. Some other version of him was already on the cusp of Godhood as it was. He would succeed no matter what. Might as well have some fun. The doll orders Gamzee to murder his remaining friends, deeming them all heretics who must be purged. Gamzee likely hesitates before doing as he’s told, much like I imagine he does in our timeline.
Now, Gamzee is a lot smarter than he looks. He knows that he can’t fight against outright God-tiers and expect that to go well. He needs to even the odds somehow. So, he heads to Aradia. He plays up his sorrow at Tavros’ death, which is easy enough to do seeing how it is mostly genuine, and he asks her to avenge him. Gamzee’s not well liked… but he is charismatic. He easily turned imps to his side during the game, after all. People listen to him. He can sprinkle in a few suggestions. How badly has Vriska fucked over Aradia’s life? How often has she nearly doomed the timeline? How likely is she to get everyone killed if she isn’t stopped? Aradia agrees to stop Vriska.
Now, even as a God-Tier, Vriska admitted that she stood no chance against Aradiabot during one of the walkarounds. Aradia is able to shut her down before she could summon Jack Noir. After Vriska is dealt with, Gamzee controls Eridan and makes him shoot Aradia. With his two biggest threats dealt with, Gamzee is able to overcome and kill everyone else. Rainbowdrinker Kanaya gives him some issues, but even she can only do so much. Gamzee returns and kneels before his master, asking for his next command.
The doll laughs. Lord English mockingly reveals that he had lied to Gamzee. Manipulated him for the soul purpose of seeing him kill his friends. Lil’ Cal mockingly asks if Tavros would be proud before Gamzee rips him apart in a fit of rage.
Remorseful and lonely, Gamzee tries to go to the human kids for help. He admits that all of his friends are dead, but refuses to disclose how. He’s to ashamed to lie and to afraid to confess. Rose prods the issue and eventually figures it out for herself, causing the kids to cut all contact from him. While Gamzee is quietly waiting to waste away, The Cancer King appears. Gamzee nearly bulldozes him with a hug, initially believing his own Karkat had come back from the dead. Karkat shuts him down and explains his situation. Gamzee is desperate, not only to fix what he did, but to just have some kind of cause to believe in. So, Karkat takes Gamzee to a God-Tier bed, allowing him to ascend before letting him join.
Gamzee has spent his whole life hiding behind something in order to cope with the hardships in his life. His sopor, his religion, and now his King. Gamzee fully agrees with whatever Karkat wants him to do, and actively goes above and beyond in his service to prove his loyalty. Aradia brings Karkat hundreds of sacrifices, Gamzee brings him thousands. He intimidates anyone who questions the King and indirectly influences Karkat to be more ruthless. He even went as far as making a cult out of the remains of Lord English’s cult. The second names given to everyone are the names given to them by The King’s Clowns. If Terezi is the angel on Karkat’s shoulder, Gamzee is the devil.
On top of this, Gamzee is more clingy in pursuit of Tavros. He’s pushy about hanging out with him and tends to drag him along on missions. Tavros finds Gamzee’s mote instable personality deeply disturbing, which only makes Gamzee more desperate to connect. “Would Tavros be proud of you” isn’t a question Gamzee wants to face otherwise.
He generally gets along with everyone else in the Court, everyone is all about burying hatchets and righting wrongs here, so they make more of an effort to tolerate his eccentrics. Doesn’t mean they don’t find him creepy. He’s the one person who succeeded in killing them all in an alternate timeline, and seeing him in a fight or in one of his more irritable moods makes that scarily apparent. Some members, such as Equius, even regret not making closer friendships with their own Gamzees. They never knew just how many issues he had until he became a walking pile of issues. The exception to this is Vriska. Because, again, Tavros. Tavros hates Vriska, ergo, Gamzee hates Vriska. Yet again, Aradia plays team mom until the heat cools down.
It’s actually the human members of the Court that get along with him better (who I’ve been neglecting this whole time, but I swear I’m getting to it). Rose finds him utterly fascinating to look into and actually does a decent job of addressing his issues when they meet up. Jade takes an interest in his biology, as Gamzee is weirdly hard to kill even by God-Tier standards. If you thought he was hard to take down as a mortal, you haven’t seen anything yet. This being Gamzee, he doesn’t give a shit about being poked and proded with sciencey shit. Still, his relationship with Dave gets off on an awkward note. Dave’s the guy who sent him the ICP vid after all, but they’re able to bond over crappy father figures and a hatred for Lil’ Cal.
On the field, Gamzee is unfettered and capricious. When he’s not hypnotizing or smooth talking large crowds into feeding the King, he’s leading his cult into battle and tormenting armies with his powers. He brings your worst fears to life as his army of fanatics rips your friends apart. The rest of the Court can be reasoned with, talked to. Make an enemy of the King, and the Clown won’t rest until he has your head.
He is dreaded across Paradox Space as the King’s most ruthless enforcer. He is the reason that God-Tiers struggle to sleep at night. He is the reason why some doomed timelines pray to the King for salvation. He is the King’s Prophet. He is the Cult’s Head. Heed the Beloved Bard when he asks you pledge your loyalty. He will not ask twice.
EVIL JOHN ANON!!!!
you’re making a sympathizer outta me.
BUT ALSO THIS IS JUST REALLY GOOD AND I SWEAR TO GOD YOU DESCRIBE GAMZEE REALLY WELL
and don't quote me but I felt like gamzee here was completely losing it while having control the entire time and I based that faint idea on how I drew him.
that last line is killer cold btw
#homestuck#gamzee makara#the beloved bard#karkat vantas#cancer king karkat#aradia medigo#tavros nitram#vriska serket#jade harley#the red death#the pirate queen#the beast whisperer#i hope im rememberin those names right its been a while#doodleart#submitted#anon#evil john anon#hkldlkfajdlfafnabfa THIS STORY#submission
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Class and Purpose
I’ve heard a lot of people theorize about the purpose of each Class in any particular session. As you can probably imagine, I have a few thoughts about that. Let’s get into it, shall we? (Edit: this took me nearly two hours to write. It’s almost 7am. I need to sleep.)
First, we ought to start with the Witch and Heir. Now, all the Witches we’ve seen in canon seem to have a very similar beginning. They start off fairly passive (lowercase “p” this time) and have quite a lengthy maturation arc, not unlike Pages. However, once they hit a certain breaking point when they come into their powers, there’s a sort of “oh, shit” moment when everyone else is forced to reckon with one of their most unassuming players swiftly transforming into a powerhouse. With this much power at their disposal in such a short period of time, you may be wondering what they’re going to do with it. Well, historically speaking, they’re going to massively fuck things up for the session, whether intentionally or not. If the game determines that a brick shithouse of a player is required for some ultimate endgame, that means things are going to go very, very wrong. Ironically, the Witch may very well be the one to save the team from total catastrophe. It will usually work out in the end. Usually.
Now, the Heir is a bit of a different story. As one whose Aspect coddles and protects them in desperate times, the Heir is destined to become their Aspect in one way or another, for better or worse. After all, when a sullen, hungry Aspect like Void was influencing Equius, he ended up vanishing into irrelevance. Even his blood was used to obscure information in Rose’s tome. A similar fate befell Mituna, and he became the embodiment of sacrifice—of Doom. Heirs are doorways for their Aspects to affect the universe. They are the closest any living being can get to a distilled, pure form of an Aspect. If your session has an Heir, pay very close attention to the implications of their Aspect, because this will almost always determine how they’ll be used most effectively. An Heir of Blood, for example, is going to be your hard-working people-person, and you’ll want them in the center of your team, keeping everyone grounded and focused on the task at hand. Take heed: the appearance of an Heir is a sign that one Aspect in particular is going to have a strong influence on the session.
Next, we’ll discuss the Mage and Seer. A Mage’s role in a session is to unravel the mysteries of their Aspect, which means they’ll take on an advisory role. Their appearance marks a significant need for in-depth understanding of some kind. Every session has its riddles and puzzles, but those which possess a Mage need the mind of a scientist in order to parse out the most convoluted secrets. Perhaps the session is filled with difficult or confusing Aspect-related mysteries that must be taken apart and examined for an endgame victory to be possible. Unfortunately, we just don’t know enough about Mages in canon to speculate a whole lot more about what their presence in a session might mean.
The Seer has a similar purpose as the Heir, though to a lesser extent. While the Heir embodies their Aspect, a Seer is guided by theirs in subtle ways. The appearance of a Seer as an adviser ensures that the ultimate path to success will be either helped or hindered by their Aspect, and it’s up to them to figure out the extent and purpose of their Aspect’s sway in their session. This Passive Class tends to be assigned to otherwise active players who wish to exert their will over the universe, but must learn to step back and take on the role of a guide. Many will balk at this, but most will eventually realize that their true strength comes from trusting others to take their advice and push the team forward.
Now, onto the Maid and Sylph. The Maid, as I’ve discussed previously, begins their journey at the mercy of their Aspect’s most negative qualities. As you can imagine, a Maid’s purpose is to gain control of their Aspect in a way that allows them to “tidy it up” and maintain its integrity. The appearance of a Maid in a session almost guarantees that their Aspect is going to be fraying and torn, in need of their mending expertise. You can certainly expect a lot of difficulties to arise in the realm of their Aspect at the beginning, since they’ll lack the ability to smooth out those bumps for quite some time. Once the Maid realizes their potential, however, stand back and allow them to do their work. Chances are, they know what needs to be done to succeed, and you don’t want to stand in the way of a Maid and a stitch to be fixed.
Ah, the Sylph. As one myself, it’s fairly easy to imagine what my purpose in a session would be. Similar to the Maid, a Sylph’s job is one of restoration and healing, though they tend to start out with much more confidence toward their Aspect than the Maid. The presence of a Sylph in a session is a handy sign that their Aspect is likely going to be lost or broken at any given point, and therefore in need of restoration. This could be metaphorical, or quite literal, depending on the situation. As a Sylph of Time myself, it’s easy to imagine bringing back an amnesiac’s memories by “restoring” the time they lost, or healing a wound by speeding up time around it. Beware, however, as a Sylph’s energy isn’t limitless, and even the most dedicated healers need time to recuperate, or else they risk overexerting themselves and burning out. (Trust me, “Sylph Burnout” is a very real thing.)
Well, the first half is over, so now it’s time to talk about the Prince and Bard. As destroyer Classes, one might wonder what these might mean for their Aspects. That’s quite simple: both indicate an overabundance of their Aspect that must be pruned away. The Prince, in particular, is infamous for destroying their Aspect within themselves before turning their crusade outward. Too much of one Aspect upsets the balance, after all, so it must be purged to allow its opposite to rush in to fill that gap. If your session has a Prince, buckle up tight, because any semblance of their Aspect that exists is going to be an irresistible target for their princely purge. Although this is probably a good thing overall for the session, it’s going to be rather painful at the onset. Princes may “get the tumors out,” so to speak, but they’re likely to leave the patient bleeding on the operating table afterwards.
Having a Bard in your party is a little bit like inviting a chimpanzee to a D&D session: it’s exciting and unpredictable at first, but after a while, shit really starts to hit the fan and you’re left wondering “who invited this guy in the first place?” Truthfully, though, the Bard can be both a game-changing player and the one who dooms the entire session. In rare cases, they’re both simultaneously. Their Passive nature makes it difficult to predict what they’ll do next, since they act based on the whims of both their Aspect and its opposite, but it’s fairly certain your session will be rife with discord and conflict, due in part to the Bard. It’s sort of the universe’s way of throwing a curveball in the form of a player to challenge the team even further. A Bard is both a buff and a nerf to your team. Use them wisely, and never, ever turn your back on the Bard.
Well, well, it’s about time we talked about the Knight and Page. A Knight’s appearance has a very obvious consequence: whatever their Aspect is, that’s what your session will be lacking. Dave’s session was very, very short on time, Karkat’s had virtually no natural cohesion, and Latula’s was filled with big personalities with no regard for the consequences of their actions. This is because the Knight’s job is to use whatever they can get of their Aspect and exploit the hell out of it. Give them an inch, and they’ll turn it into a mile without breaking a sweat. This is especially handy when there’s precious little of their Aspect to go around.
Now, having a Page in your session may sound like a recipe for dead weight, but that would be an incredibly unfair assumption. Rather, a Page has access to a great deal of exploitative power as they reach the climax of their development. The presence of a Page is a very good sign indeed, as long as the team is willing to put up with their very slow and steep maturation arc. Their Aspect is one that will be opened up to be used by their teammates in game-breaking ways, provided they’re patient and encouraging toward the Page. Good things come to those who wait, and wasting the potential of a fully realized Page is not a mistake you want to make.
Last but certainly not least, we have the Thief and Rogue. Thieves get a bit of a bad rap in canon, but it’s safe to say that the Thief will become a powerful player in any given session. Their appearance signifies great conflict and strife, which they’ll almost certainly cause in the first place. Thieves begin much like Pages in the sense that they lack their Aspect and seek to obtain it. For the Thief, this Aspect-shaped hole is too much to bear, and their schemes to take it at any cost will likely be the source of the session’s woe. This isn’t necessarily all bad, however, as knowing your Thief well enough can help you predict the nature of this unavoidable conflict, allowing you to prepare well in advance. Remember, the Thief can make an incredible ally, but their interests won’t always fully align with those of the party.
Finally, we have the Rogue. Ultimately, the Rogue is in charge of balancing their Aspect by redistributing it from areas of abundance to those of scarcity. Too much of one Aspect upsets the universal balance, and as we’ve covered previously, there are quite a few Classes whose purpose involves tipping the scales back where they’re supposed to be. The Rogue is the most intricately tied to this delicate dance between their Aspect and its opposite, since the presence of one necessarily negates the other. Their job is to facilitate this natural order, ensuring that their Aspect doesn’t become too concentrated in one form or another, ultimately supporting a natural sense of order over chaos.
If you’ve read all the way to the end, congratulations! You’ve officially read through nearly two hours of my creative process. I’m actually really impressed.
#classpect#classpect analysis#homestuck#quick reference#witch#heir#mage#seer#maid#sylph#prince#bard#knight#page#thief#rogue#i guess i'll tag them all tbh!#wow i'm.....exhausted.
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i feel the worst part of these latest upd8s is.... 2? 3? things? firstly, it's implied dave and karkat wanted kids too - jade could've ectobiologically had a kid w dave. dave was willing and proposed to her, he did love her. rose lied to kanaya and broke her trust but she also broke her brother's trust.... and dave n kanaya will probably never get to discuss that, nor will kanaya likely be allowed to be upset bc the narrative won't let her :)
Honestly? Something I hate most about the Yiffany situation is that Jade actively acknowledges Ectobiology. Like, she outright states in the Epilogues that she and Dave can’t have biological children because of Bec fusion shit (which implies she was a cis woman beforehand, since she says it’s explicitly because of the fusion that she can’t have children anymore), and then she admits that Ectobiology is an option.
What’s her reasoning for not using Ectobiology, though?
JADE: but i dont think any of us are really interested in having a kid with ectobiology
JADE: it just feels…
JADE: well
JADE: i think weve had enough of ectobiology for one lifetime!
So... if Dave and Jade want children... but the only way for them to have a child - which, by the way, would still very much be biological since Ectobiology takes your fucking DNA - is through Ectobiology... we’re just meant to believe that they looked at each other and went “actually, on second thought, not having a child is the better option :)”
Firstly, that’s pretty shitty. The concept that a child isn’t worth the effort to have and raise if they’re not biological is outdated at best, and incredibly harmful to be read in something as popular as Homestuck, considering how young people were when they got into it, the wide range of ages it caters to, and the fact that a fair amount of people who are currently into Homestuck are LGBTQIA+ (aka, people who might not be able to have biological children).
It’s even worse when you consider that through Ectobiology, the way they’ll have that child will just mean that all they’re skipping is the pregnancy part of it. That child will still genetically be part Dave and part Jade. It just means that Dave didn’t impregnate her.
Yes, I understand that Jade might miss that - miss being able to bond with a child over 9 months while they’re growing in her womb, miss the actual act of childbirth, miss the moments she and Dave could have shared together waiting for her due date - but at the same time? If you are that desperate to have a child... that is biologically yours... with your partner... why would you not go for it?
It does bring up the question if Jade thinks her womanhood has been taken from her with her sudden lack of working womb, which feels slightly transphobic/misogynistic to write into a character who is already being badly coded as a trans woman (implying that trans women aren’t “real women” without the ability to bare children), but then. Why would her literal next option be to have sex with her best friend.
That’s the part that doesn’t make sense to me. If this isn’t Jade having a gender crisis (”my body has been physically altered against my will and now I cannot have biological children, which is affecting me psychologically”), then why does she sleep with Rose? She’s not even the one carrying the child. Hosting that baby inside her body clearly does not mean that much to her if she impregnates Rose.
So, she doesn’t care if the biological child is made with her actual partner’s DNA. This isn’t Jade finding a way around not being able to bare her own baby. This is Jade deciding that she can’t have an actual biological child without the act of sex.
Jade would rather fuck her own best friend behind both their partners’ backs, quite literally encouraging said friend to cheat on her wife, than have a perfectly legitimate, biological baby with her partner through Ectobiology. In what universe did the writers think this made any form of sense.
In what universe did the writers think that a woman who is desperate for a child with her partner would overlook something as wondrous as Ectobiology - something that would let her have a baby with her and her partner’s DNA, a baby that would be biologically theirs.
In what universe did they think Jade would view sexual intimacy as an important part of having a child, an important part of making that child biological and legitimate. When she herself wasn’t born from sexual intimacy. When sexual intimacy would require cheating on her partner.
Even if we ignore that fucking mess, you’re completely right - we’re never going to see how Kanaya reacts to this. She’s been shafted to begin with, anyway; all we hear from her about the situation is that she and Rose have talked about it. That’s it. She and Rose have talked about the situation off-screen, and suddenly she’s perfectly okay with the concept that her loving wife of several decades has cheated on her and kept a child secret for fifteen years.
It would have been cathartic to see the conversation. It would’ve been important to see how Kanaya copes with the logic, how it affects their relationship - to see Kanaya be angry, be upset, to show any form of emotion towards her wife’s long-kept secret. To see Kanaya tell Rose she loves her, and that they’ll work through it. To see Kanaya ask Rose why she didn’t just tell her, that she would’ve been supportive, that she would’ve helped, and Rose’s guilt about not telling her. To see Kanaya say she would love to meet her some day, her wife’s other child, and Rose happily telling Kanaya all about her.
As a writer, you need to add in this sort of catharsis for your readers. You need to help your readers work through their emotions at the same time as the characters do, especially if they’re as loved as the Homestuck characters are. You need to let them slowly come down from the outrage alongside the characters who are feeling the emotions, to see the logic, to see the aftermath, so they can feel legitimised and find it easier to accept what’s happened.
Instead, it’s just... sorted. It’s already done. Kanaya’s okay with it, supposedly, but we are not. We are outraged on her behalf because she has been written to not care. Because we never got our catharsis, so we can never accept hers.
That’s not even taking into account Dave. I know, in some ways, it might not matter as much to him; Dave didn’t fully love Jade, and their relationship was built on shambles. He’s also Davebot, now - and we have no idea what he does or doesn’t know, what he’s come to terms with on his own off-screen. But even that comes with its own flurry of questions.
Will he be mad at Rose and Jade? Will he be glad for them? Will he even care? What does he feel towards this child, considering it’s his wife’s child? Will he feel anything? Will he see her as partly his own?
How amazing would it have been - or be - to see Dave and Kanaya have another conversation? We’ve already seen them talk in Meat, we know their conversations can be cathartic and good for each other. Seeing a Candy conversation between them, Dave opening up about how he feels while Kanaya admits her own frustrations and feelings... it would have been a wonderful.
It would’ve been something we could compare against the two timelines, something to analyise, something theorise with, something to judge development between in a starker manner - but instead, Dave’s gone, and Kanaya is just okay with it.
It is endlessly fucking frustrating. Everything about how they wrote this reveal is just awful. It’s such horrific writing practice I genuinely don’t understand how they thought a single part of this was anything close to okay.
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HOMESPORK ACT 5 ACT 1: Mobius Double Plusungood, Part 1
CHEL: Yes, Act 5 Act 1; here begin the “act acts”. Just go with it.
FAILURE ARTIST: Welcome to Act 5 a.k.a. The Act Everyone Skipped To So They Could Get To Those Grey Demons. While I was a reader before Act 5, I wasn’t a huge fan until this part. The trolls are a great species. Different enough to be fascinating, but not different enough humans can’t relate. And what exactly is in their pants? That’s for the fandom to figure out.
BRIGHT: And fandom accepted the challenge with enthusiasm.
CHEL: Also, they’re fuggin’ adorable. It took me a while to get used to nonhumans in the sprite style and I thought they were creepy-looking at first, but we also see them in the more noodly style used in the dramatic moments with the kids, like the fall of Prospit, and that helped them grow on me a lot.
FAILURE ARTIST: The Act starts off with a grey planet with a green moon and a pink moon. A prompt box like the one for the Kids’ introductions is above it. In the box are letters in a script blatantly stolen borrowed from The Elder Scrolls games and turned 180 degrees. (Later on, when Hussie made a game that people paid money for, he couldn’t exactly use a stolen font so the team made an all-new font. But the old font is probably in the print books). Anyway, in case you’re curious, the letters spell out “Turdodor Fuckball”. This is the wrong name, and the right name is…Trollplanet. Though it’s called Alternia in the flavor text below and everywhere else.
So starts the arc called Hivebent. We cut to CG in a very grey room flapping his mouth occasionally at nothing. He’s introduced much the way John was.
This young troll stands in his respiteblock. It just so happens that today, the 12th bilunar perigee of the 6th dark season's equinox, is the day of this young troll's larval awakening, also known as his wriggling day. Though it was six solar sweeps ago he was given life, it is only today he will be given a name!
Six Alternian solar sweeps, for convenient reference, is equivalent to thirteen Earth years.
Earth, also for convenient reference, is a planet that does not yet exist.
What will the name of this young troll be?
However, like Dave, he attacks the prompt box. He doesn’t want to do all the little gags and patterns.
CHEL: Thank God!
FAILURE ARTIST: This Hivebent arc will go much faster than the four acts before it. No dawdling along for this species. There’s twelve characters to be introduced and characterized before this is done.
CHEL: That said, it’s still going to be much, much longer than the others.
FAILURE ARTIST: So, CG’s name is Karkat Vantas. All of the troll names have a 6-6 pattern and are usually named after astrological and mythological motifs. Karkata is the Sanskrit name for the constellation Cancer and Vantas...is a prostate cancer treatment drug. Don’t look at me, I didn’t name him.
CHEL: It’s also possibly connected to “vanitas”, relating to Karkat’s simultaneous arrogance and lack of self-worth.
FAILURE ARTIST: Today is Karkat’s wriggling day. Let’s meet the birthday boy. He loves movies, though the narrator says he has terrible taste. In his room, there’s edited posters of “50 First Dates”, “Serendipity”, and “Hitch” that makes them look like troll movies, including lots of small type for the title. Like John, he likes to program but he’s not good at it. In fact, he’s so bad his programs are basically computer viruses. He wants to join a military organization called the THRESHECUTIONERS when he grows up. His weapon of choice is the sickle, possibly as a counterpart to John’s hammer.
He chats with his friends on a new program called Trollian, which is a reference to the real-life chat program Trillian. Fans forget that Trollian was a new program, except for Nepetaquest where the plot revolves around the making of that improbable software.
CHEL: Which begs the question of how they communicated before. Most of them don’t seem to have met each other in real life yet. Obvious answer is a different chat program, but in that case, why draw attention to Trollian being new instead of just having it be how they communicated from the start? It doesn’t really add anything IMO.
FAILURE ARTIST: Anyway, talking with his friends drives him BATSHIT UP THE FUCKING BELFRY, which is a very human phrase.
The first prompt Karkat gets is to examine the slimy pod in his room. This pod is a recuperacoon and serves as a bed. Trolls need that slime to help assuage the terrible visions of blood and carnage that plague the dark subconscious of your species. Why do they have these species-wide bad dreams and how does slime help? It’s never said.
CHEL: The slime appears to be a form of drug, possibly a sedative. In Hiveswap we see it also has minor healing properties. Why trolls would have evolved to consistently suffer nightmares isn’t brought up here, but there are possible explanations later.
FAILURE ARTIST: Actually, after Act 6, recuperacoons aren’t mentioned. Also, oddly enough, the narration says sleeping is done nightly but we later learn trolls are nocturnal. The terms night and day aren’t used consistently in Hivebent.
WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 20
Karkat gets into the pod, but immediately regrets it. He changes his clothes (off-screen of course) into clothes that look exactly the same. This is because Trolls think fashion is stupid.
Next, he examines his movie posters. Turns out trolls have their own version of John Cusack, among other celebrities. Troll Adam Sandler is his favorite actor and one person he doesn’t want to do violence against. In his narration, he thinks Sweet Baby Jegus though Jegus isn’t actually a thing in troll culture.
WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 21
Karkat tries to captchalogue his sickle and we get some more sylladex hijinx! His modus becomes too heavy and literally falls through the floor. I thought picking up weapons was different from captchaloging stuff? We’re told these hijinx won’t last long and eventually Karkat trades his modus with his hacker friend. Good. For now, he just picks up the big black book on his dresser.
The big black book is about a programming language called ~ATH and for some reason is in Roman script. It’s a morbid little language and there’s a cartoon figure of the Grim Reaper and a fake (or real?) quote from Troll Will Smith. Karkat finds this language incredibly hard. There’s probably some sick programmer jokes I’m missing here.
CHEL: There’s one I’ve been informed of; ~ is called a tilde, so the name of the program is “tilde-ath”, or “till death”. I can’t say I recognise any others though.
FAILURE ARTIST: Karkat steps outside. He lives in a huge grey and red house (or hive) in a suburb as sterile as John’s. Trolls create their own homes as toddlers after beating the trials in the brooding caverns. First hint of how harsh Alternia is, yet everyone has their own housing which is sweet.
It's almost as if your people have placed great cultural importance on teaching children to become architecturally adept while very young. It has been this way since ancient times. No one seems to know why that is.
Hmmm…
Karkat almost has a poetic moment while looking out at the moons, but he rejects poetry. He also rejects mailboxes, which trolls don’t have because they have no mail.
CHEL: Do they mean no paper letters because they all have internet? I recall that they do receive packages.
FAILURE ARTIST: I think they have courier service but no dedicated government postal system.
So instead of poetry, Karkat talks about AMBITION. He wants to be something great but he doesn’t know what exactly. We’ll see where this character arc takes him.
We get a little detail about the Alternian calendar and it concludes with “You have a feeling it's going to be a long night.”
Karkat goes back inside. He checks out a Game Grub magazine with a disgusting image of a leaking grub and a DVD for his favorite television show. The show is THE THRESH PRINCE OF BEL AIR, which is a take-off on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air but is about a green threshecutioner cadet who sasses up the bluebloods in his flaysquad pretty good. The “green” and “blueblood” parts aren’t turns of phrases but literal. Given the strict hierarchy we find out trolls are under, it’s amazing there’s a series about a sassy subordinate. Maybe he’s only sassy in Karkat’s mind.
CHEL: Actually, that’s not too unbelievable.
FAILURE ARTIST: The title of the show doesn’t follow the convention of troll movie titles and that’s because 1) television is a newer medium and 2) it would ruin the joke.
Finally, Karkat gets down to business on his computer. His first friend to “troll” him has a purple Capricorn sign. Now, this friend is a character that though I’m now quite attached to, I didn’t much care about them in the beginning. I’ll try to be objective though.
terminallyCapricious [TC] began trolling carcinoGeneticist [CG]
TC: wHaT iS uUuUuP mY iNvErTeBrOtHeR?
CG: WHAT IN THE SWEET ALMIGHTY TAINTCHAFING FUCK DO YOU WANT.
TC: NoT a MoThErFuCkInG tHiNg BrO.
TC: oThEr ThAn I bE cHeCkIn OuT hOw My BeSt MoThErFuCkIn FrIeNd Is At Yo.
Yes, my first thought too was “that’s a really annoying typing style”. Karkat agrees and complains about TC’s typing style. TC temporarily goes all lowercase but says it feels uncomfortable. Karkat complains more about how awful TC is and wonders what he did to deserve such a terrible friend. Instead of being offended, TC says friendship is beautiful and confusingly calls it a TrOlL dIsEaSe. We’ll see some stuff that suggests trolls don’t have friendship or at least don’t consider it in high regard but mostly trolls have friends like humans do.
BRIGHT: Despite his protests, Karkat has eleven friends, in a society that is not set up to facilitate this. I’m pretty sure that when I was his age I had maybe three.
FAILURE ARTIST: TC waxes on miracles like the carbonation in a bottle of Faygo. Yeah, trolls have Faygo.
CHEL: That’s a gag, though, so no WSP point.
FAILURE ARTIST: Karkat tells him that’s just carbonation but TC rejects science as just stealing the magic from miracles.
CHEL: It comes up more clearly later, but we’ll tell you now that TC’s entire character at this point, especially that line, is basically a shoutout to the Insane Clown Posse song “Miracles”.
Watch on YouTube
FAILURE ARTIST: After some more bantering, TC gets down to business: TA is going to play a game. Karkat says he’s not interested but TC says TA is Karkat’s best friend, which is sad when you consider TC calls Karkat “best friend”.
CHEL: TA, if you don’t remember, is twinArmageddons, the computer programmer.
FAILURE ARTIST: TC gets distracted by a horn going off and even types out a surprised yell. Karkat tell TC to get rid of the horns and TC says “MaN yOu KnOw YoU wAnNa GiVe My HoRnS a GoOd SqUeEzE. :o)” which sounds really flirty. Karkat says if he meets a kid as annoying as TC, he’ll convert to TC’s religion. TC is happy about this. With that, the conversation ends.
We cut to TC and he’s a motherfucking clown, baby! But I’ve already re-capped so much and need to give someone else a turn.
CHEL: Okay, I shall step up! TC’s actual name proves to be GAMZEE MAKARA, and he’s wearing a purple Capricorn sign. The name Gamzee was picked by a forumite as a reference to another user who went by Gammy, but it may also be a reference to “Gämse”, the German name for the chamois goat. Makara is the Sanskrit name for Capricorn, and also the name for a type of creature from Hindu folklore which would include the Capricorn sea-goat. There are several other layers of possible and probably-coincidental meaning listed on the Wiki, which we’d have to bring up spoilers to discuss, so we’ll save that for later.
Beyond his name and sign, Gamzee has clown makeup, explosively curly hair, long spiral horns, and a slightly glazed expression. Nightmarish pictures of evil clowns plaster his walls, his floor is piled with bicycle horns, juggling clubs, and Faygo bottles, and an oversized unicycle is propped against the wall. When he picks up a Faygo bottle and his “husktop” computer, his MIRACLE MODUS is seen, a hideously complicated mishmash of various styles which flickers and spins obnoxiously. Even Gamzee doesn’t know how it works, he just likes to watch the colours.
FAILURE ARTIST: Gamzee belongs to a RATHER OBSCURE CULT that believes in a BAND OF ROWDY AND CAPRICIOUS MINSTRELS who are CLOWNS OF A GRIM PERSUASION WHICH MAY NOT BE IN FULL POSSESSION OF THEIR MENTAL FACULTIES. Basically, he’s a Juggalo who worships the troll equivalent of Insane Clown Posse. Though the cult is called obscure and said to be looked down upon, later it is shown to be a state-sponsored religion. I guess maybe it’s just Gamzee’s particular denomination that’s looked down upon.
CHEL: “Obscure” also means “hidden”, so the retcon could be justified in the sense of it being mysterious? Or it might be related to spoilery Hiveswap theories. We can get into those if we ever get round to Hiveswap.
Gamzee attempts to ride the unicycle, but fails - unsurprisingly, since it’s taller than he is and he attempts to ride it by standing on the saddle. He falls off into a pile of horns, and decides instead to sample the luridly green pie on the counter, which turns out to in fact be made of the same SOPOR SLIME that trolls sleep in.
You aren't supposed to eat that slime. It does funny things to a troll's head.
But you were never taught that on account of a lousy upbringing. Your custodian was always out to sea.
Gamzee arms himself with a juggling club to use against the alleged hostile SEA DWELLERS and heads out to wait for his missing guardian.
FAILURE ARTIST: His hive appears to not have a front door so I don’t know what’s keeping the hostile sea dwellers out.
CHEL: Someone contacts him online and he intends to settle down with a Faygo and answer, but he doesn’t know how to retrieve things from his miracle modus. Gamzee performs a short prayer to your beloved MIRTHFUL MESSIAHS, the faces of the two members of Insane Clown Posse superimposed over the background, and throws a pinch of SPECIAL STARDUST in his face. We never find out what exactly “special stardust” is; it appears to just be glitter, but it comes up much later. His attempts fail, however, as the modus instead launches his Faygo miles out to sea.
You wonder if you can just...
Just sort of reach over...
And...
Apparently the sylladex modus can be physically reached, so there was no need for the endless pages of shenanigans in the first place. *quiet rage* But anyway, gallowsCalibrator is trolling him.
FAILURE ARTIST: GC asks G4MZ33Z if he’d like to play G4M3Z3Z with her. He replies "hEy YeAh ThAt SoUnDs LiKe ThE mOtHeRfUcKiN sHiT's BiTcHtItS!" She says something very tsundere in reply:
GC: 1T SUR3 1S H4RD TO 1GNOR3 TH3 W31RD TH1NGS YOU S4Y SOM3T1M3S!
GC: BUT 1M GONN4
GC: TH3 ONLY R34SON 1M 4SK1NG YOU 1S B3C4US3 YOUR N4M3 1S L1K3 G4M3
GC: 4ND NO OTH3R R34SON
GC: G3T 1T??? >:]
Gamzee isn’t offended she said this and GC gets annoyed he’s always rolling with the punches. She says that’s why Karkat can’t stand him. Harsh in hindsight. GC gets down to business and tells Gamzee they are going to H4V3 SOM3 MOTH3RFUCK1NG SH1TTY B1TCH3S PL4Y1NG TOG3TH3R. He asks if they could play later because he’s waiting for tHe OlD gOaT (which happens to also be a nickname for Satan).
TC: yOu KnOw HoW iT iS wItH fAmIlY.
GC: NO, NOT R34LLY!
GC: 4DURRRR DURR DURP
TC: Oh YeAh...
GC: DURRRRRRRRRRRRR
GC: W4Y TO GO, HOW DO3S TH4T STUP1D BOTTL3D SYRUP OF YOURS T4ST3 W1TH YOUR HOOF SO F4R UP YOUR MOUTH???
GC: >:]
TC: sOoOoOoOrY.
This is the first time we find out GC has an unusual homelife. Yet it isn’t true that she has no family.
BRIGHT: And given how rarely Gamzee’s guardian is around, it’s not like he has much of a family either. Or a standard homelife.
CHEL: That’s also an... excessive response to a slip-up, but from what we see later, that’s how almost all the trolls talk to each other all the time.
FAILURE ARTIST: It’s also problematic, because she’s doing an ableist imitation of the speech of people with mental disabilities. Though I suppose trolls aren’t meant to be PC.
CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 19
Gamzee suggests GC play with Karkat instead. She rejects this idea and says she used to play with him but he got too annoying. Gamzee then agrees to play and says give him a minute. She says he’ll just space out and that’s what he does. When he gets back into the conversation, he makes a second faux pas.
TC: hAvE yOu EvEr EvEn SeEn ThE oCeAn?
TC: oR i MeAn SmElLeD iT...
TC: SoRrY.
GC: >:[
People really get on this but it’s just the regular type of mistake people make while talking to blind or sight-impaired friends and he did apologize. Other characters say worse and never apologize. Some readers who know what happens later might attribute malice but right now he’s just a guy who does a lot of troll pot and makes mistakes.
CHEL: I know when I was eleven the blind kid in my class and I had a sort of running gag of “see you later”. It also isn’t very clear whether either of them is actually hurt by anything the other is saying. They don’t seem to be.
This is also probably a time to bring up certain things about Gamzee’s cultural coding. Even though we later find out he’s one of the highest-ranking trolls, certain cues about him would make people think of a lower-class human, namely his syntax, his eating semi-inedible substances (lack of access to other food?) and his love for cheap gross soda. (I’ve drunk Faygo. It’s weird.) This could just be a troll thing not being exactly the same as human things and also down to his guardian not being there, but there’s more.
Gamzee’s word usage involves a lot of quirks which are usually associated with African American Vernacular English, e.g. addressing others as “brother” or “sister” and using “be” instead of “am” or “are” or just leaving them out completely. His hair is probably supposed to look unbrushed, but it can also be interpreted as textured. His religious behaviours get described with the word “voodoo” a lot, and while this is a bit of a stretch I personally interpreted his typing and syntax as a Southern drawl plus he lives close to water, thus cementing an association with actual Vodoun in my head even though his actual practices aren’t anything like it. While the members of Insane Clown Posse, the band which inspired a lot of Gamzee’s behaviours, are both white, rap is a strongly black-associated musical style, and Gamzee is later shown to be interested in rapping. Stereotypical juggalos are white, but culture considers them to be worthy of mockery because they’re white people behaving in ways associated with black people. Add in his absent male guardian, drug use, and acting “trashy” when he’s one of the richest trolls, and this all adds up to a very clear mental image of him as a not-very-flattering portrayal of a black person. Coding a nonhuman character strongly with a human racial group isn’t a problem in itself, but when it comes off as supposed to be funny, it’s not exactly SU Garnet levels of good representation, is it? The fact that Hussie, prior to Homestuck, was known for drawing some incredibly racist comics (also including rape, abortion, and drug jokes, so be warned) doesn’t help; we won’t add points for those because we’re judging HS on its own merits and it’s possible for people to change and regret prior prejudices, but it sheds new light on things that’ll come up.
Individual CP points for his language, his hair, his voodoo association, his rapping, his Disappeared Dad, his drug use, and his being coded as poor despite not being so, I think. None of these would be bad on their own or portrayed as less “look at how funny/creepy this guy is”, but...
CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 26
BRIGHT: The first time I read Homestuck, I didn’t realise that Gamzee was meant to be disliked until somewhere in the middle of Act 6. I thought his situation was sad, but Gamzee himself seemed pretty nice, if dopey and not terribly motivated. I still quite like him. Did anyone else find something similar?
CHEL: Yeah, me. I thought he was pretty adorable.
FAILURE ARTIST: Gamzee suffers from abuse in the form of neglect. Though his guardian is arguably not quite responsible, it’s still abuse. As a result, Gamzee eats a dangerous substance and it’s probably why he lets people walk all over him. This is more obviously bad than Dave’s homelife. Yet it’s not ever dealt with and is even mocked. Hussie says in the annotation for this scene that there weren’t actually hostile seadwellers and Gamzee’s guardian just said that to keep Gamzee inside because he was ashamed of him. We find out later that seadwellers ARE hostile. This bit about Gamzee being gaslit is probably a joke then about how embarrassing Gamzee is. Yet isn’t it abusive to make up threats to your children to keep them isolated? Lots of fans consider Gamzee embarrassing too and so don’t see anything in this.
BRIGHT: Not to mention that it’s pretty fucked up to say Gamzee deserves abuse for being embarrassing, when that neglect and abuse is the reason he acts the way he does in the first place!
ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 19
CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 30
CHEL: One CP for the “humorous” drug use and another each for the “joke” gaslighting and neglect, and another for the illogical justification. Wow, that count’s really starting to spike already! And I think now might be a good time to introduce another count…
IN HATE WITH MY CREATION: 1
This will be used whenever the author is clearly showing a lack of respect to the characters or situations that he himself created, in this case by setting up an abusive situation and mocking it when we’re supposed to have sympathy for another abuse sufferer.
BRIGHT: Depressingly, it gets worse later. Significantly worse.
CHEL: Not to mention, if Gamzee’s supposed to stay inside and his guardian’s absent all the time, and trolls “don’t get mail”, how does he feed himself? Even with the sopor, where does that come from? Is it just secreted by the pod or what? Does the pod need to eat? We’re never told. In Hiveswap, the sequel game, we do see that trolls can receive packages, but I would class packages under “mail”, so saying trolls don’t have it is needlessly confusing.
We cut back to Karkat, doing some coding which I’m sure would be very amusing if I knew the first thing about coding. Apparently the biggest problem with ~ATH is the near-impossibility of terminating its infinite loops.
What many ~ATH coders do is import finite constructs and bind the loops to their lifespan. For instance the main loop here will terminate on the death of the universe, labeled U. That way you only have to wait billions of years for it to end instead of forever.
You have bound a subloop to the lifespan of the code's author, which is you. Any routine at the end will execute when you die.
So apparently coding is literally magic in this ‘verse? This is backed up by a code sent by TA:
This code, when executed, immediately causes the user's computer to explode, and places a curse on the user forever, along with everyone he knows, and everyone he'll ever meet.
Not surprisingly, later on you would run this code in a fit of stupidity.
FAILURE ARTIST: The Internet is magic, why not programming?
BRIGHT: I think the coding is a pretty nifty thematic fit with the whole concept of SBURB! If you’ve got a video game that can affect reality, it’s reasonable to extrapolate that coding can do something similar, even if only by piggybacking off the Game’s infrastructure. And once they get into the Medium, it makes even more sense.
CHEL: True! In the meantime, TA trolls Karkat. Karkat’s speech pattern is remarkably similar to Dave’s, except infinitesimally less wordy and much angrier.
TA: KK dont fliip your 2hiit about thii2 but iim 2ettiing you up two play a game wiith 2ome people.
CG: WHY WOULD I FLIP MY SHIT ABOUT THAT.
TA: becau2e you fliip your 2hiit about everythiing.
CG: WELL WILL YOU LOOK AT THIS.
CG: HERE IS MY SHIT, AND YET IT REMAINS UNFLIPPED.
*snerk*
CG: JUST SITTING THERE ON THE SKILLET, GETTING BURNED ON ONE SIDE.
CG: IT'S A MIRACLE.
TA: oh no are you iinto miiracle2 now two becau2e iif you are youre fiired preemptiively from the game.
CG: FUCK NO.
TA: ok niice.
CG: MIRACLES ARE LIKE POOP STAINS ON GOD'S UNDERWEAR.
TA: eheheh makiing fun of people2 reliigiion2 i2 the be2t thiing two do.
CG: THAT'S WHY HE HIDES THEM, THEY'RE FUCKING EMBARRASSING.
CG: GOD LAUNDERS IN MYSTERIOUS WAYS.
Very Judeo-Christian concept of God for an alien species.
WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 22
FAILURE ARTIST: There’s seemingly no other troll religion but Gamzee’s cult and that has dual gods, not monotheism.
CHEL: Anyway, TA is setting up a game of SBurb, or SGRUB as the trolls call it, which he made from 2ome crazy technology AA dug out of 2ome ruiin2. Karkat hasn’t been told about this by AA, whom he deems “SO SPOOKY”, and whose full handle seen in the chat roll is apocalypseArisen - spooky indeed and thematically appropriate. Mention is made of TA’s WEIRD MUTANT BRAIN; exactly what this means isn’t described yet except that it doesn’t mean he can read Karkat’s mind. TA refuses to elaborate on what he’s discussing with AA on the grounds that it’s private, and this leads into an insult-exchanging session.
TA: nobody hate2 hiim2elf more than you iidiiot.
CG: YEAH WELL I HATE YOU WAY MORE THAN I HATE MYSELF, AND THAT'S FUCKING SAYING SOMETHING.
CG: IN FACT I HATE YOU MORE THAN I HATE MYSELF AND YOU HATE YOURSELF AND YOU HATE ME COMBINED.
Karkat calls a timeout long enough for TA to explain how they’re playing the game; he intends there to be two teams, Red and Blue, 2o that there2 a better chance of at lea2t one group wiinniing. Karkat agrees this sounds sensible, but flies off the handle on finding out that TA and GC are the team leaders, not him. Karkat spews insults and accusations of cheating, while TA snipes back. This is presumably the moment depicted in this page’s art, in which Karkat yells angrily and flails wildly at his keyboard.
CG: HOW DO YOU GET OUT OF YOUR COCOON IN THE MORNING KNOWING YOU'RE THE WORST THING A UNIVERSE WAS EVER RESPONSIBLE FOR?
CG: ALSO IT MUST BE HARD WITH YOUR HANDS TO PERSISTENTLY BOTHERING EVERY MUTATED SET OF GENITALS PEPPERING THAT GHASTLY HUSK YOU PAWN OFF AS A BODY.
CG: HAS A FEMALE EVER LOOKED AT YOU WITHOUT AT ONCE TURNING SKYWARD AND ERUPTING LIKE A VOMIT VOLCANO, ANSWER ME THAT.
As later pointed out, trolls reproduce bisexually, so why he specified females here is odd. There is a fan theory I’ve seen that TA is straight, as he’s only seen with female partners and rejects a possible male one, but Karkat demonstrates in a later conversation that he has no concept of gender preference, so if TA is, Karkat doesn’t know that. I guess he could mean that he himself has looked at TA without becoming a vomit volcano, but I doubt that was what Hussie was thinking since it isn’t clear if they’ve ever actually met face to face.
WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 23
Anyway, TA tells Karkat that he’s laughing at Karkat’s immaturity, and that if he really wants to be Red Team leader, he should talk to GC.
CG: I GUESS THESE CONVERSATIONS WE HAVE DO GET KIND OF EMBARRASSING IN RETROSPECT.
CG: ARE WE NOT FRIENDS ANYMORE BECAUSE OF STUFF I SAID.
TA: eheheheh you LIITERALLY a2k me that every tiime are you jokiing.
TA: ii cant even tell anymore.
Okay, that’s adorable. But anyway, after seeing their conversations, you can see what we mean when we say it’s apparently normal for trolls to say horrible things to each other, so why fans and Hussie himself single out some instances and not others is stupid.
ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 20
FAILURE ARTIST: It’s another example that trolls do have friendship, though possibly not the same way humans do.
Also, though he’s not doing it to her face, Karkat is insulting GC’s blindness. Which is not just problematic but also silly given that her blindness is a super-power.
CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 31
After a quick panel where Karkat worries about an encounter with a “CRABBY” someone downstairs, we cut to GC. She is in a very colorful room, unlike Karkat’s grey one, and surrounded by stuffed dragon toys. On her wall is graffiti of a dragon and disturbingly a noose. Photorealistic books are piled on her desk. She’s introduced and we finally get her name: TEREZI PYROPE.
Terezi is the word for “Libra” in multiple languages, but it also might be a reference to the gender-bending blind prophet Tiresias. Pyrope is a type of red garnet and she does love red a lot.
Terezi lives alone deep in the woods (which does raise the question of how she gets all her stuff in a mail-free planet). She loves dragons, including the plushie series called SCALEMATES.
CHEL: Her walls are also decorated in the scales of dragons, which actually do exist on Alternia. Libra. Scales. Geddit?
FAILURE ARTIST: She likes roleplaying and once did a more extreme type until she had an accident that’s not explained at the time. Her big interest and motivation is JUSTICE and she wants to be a LEGISLACERATOR when she grows up. She doesn’t need TROLLBRAILLE (does such a thing exist?)...
WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 24
... since as we know she has special powers. Alternian law is called BRUTAL and indeed it’s so terrible I have to side-eye Terezi for loving it.
CHEL: She claims to love JUSTICE, but Alternian law has very little to do with justice of any kind, as we see when she decides to start roleplaying it with her toys.
On Alternia, there is no such thing as a defense attorney, or a defense. In a courtblock, the word defense itself is offensive.
Not to mention the judge, a chalk depiction of whom adorns her wall, is known as HIS HONORABLE TYRANNY.
Also, do thirteen-year-olds regularly roleplay with their plush toys? I guess ones who are isolated from all actual life forms they could play with instead might.
FAILURE ARTIST: Terezi’s scenario this time is the trial of SENATOR LEMONSNOUT, played by a yellow scalemate. Given that Alternia seems to be an absolute monarchy, I wonder where she gets the concept of senators.
WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 25
Terezi stares down the yellow plush toy before she starts slapping it. She fantasizes about the toy crying tears. The yellow plush toy’s crime is embezzlement, using a currency called imperial beetles. Whether this is a real currency or something Terezi made up we don’t know.
CHEL: As we see later, she’s using a bag of literal beetles in the game. Not sure if they are currency, if she went and caught them, or if trolls can buy them in bags.
FAILURE ARTIST: If you are reading this comic sometime post-2015, there’s two choices. One of them is [???????] Ignore that choice. It becomes relevant only much later. For now, we go to Terezi calling a witness.
Unfortunately, said-witness is a green plush who has been stabbed by a photo-realistic dagger. Apparently, defense attorneys are verboten but murdering witnesses is expected. Alternian justice, everyone.
BRIGHT: It might be moderately less batshit if we assume that Terezi’s obtained all her legal knowledge from TV, movies, and books, and this is a dramatic embellishment rather than the way Alternian trials actually function. She does live on her own in the middle of a forest, after all.
On the other hand, this planet is inhabited solely by children, the over-the-top cruelty is entirely in keeping with Alternia so far, and I don’t think we ever see any of it contradicted.
FAILURE ARTIST: Terezi finds a bag of beetles and that’s all that’s needed to sentence the “criminal”. Her method is to flip a coin called a caegar that has two-heads on it, one of them with a cut on it. The narration says this is like Two-Face from the Batman comics and the villain of the movie No Country for Old Men, though those media don’t exist in the troll universe. Still, trolls have the same trope. She flips the coin and though the result is favorable to Lemonsnout, Terezi declares she can’t see the coin because
SHE'S BLIND, REMEMBER?
She “kills” the stuffed toy by hanging it, like she’s done with many of her stuffed toys. We see now she lives in a tree house (or hive) in a blue and purple forest.
CHEL: In most media, a character being set up like this would be a villain or set up for a heel-face turn, or at least a massive source of conflict over the differing moralities of the different societies. We’ll see if anything ever comes of that.
FAILURE ARTIST: She finishes up by licking her chalk portrait of His Honorable Tyranny. Weird kid.
She gets her weapon (a photo-realistic cane as used by real-life people with vision impairment) and gets down to recruiting members for her team. Her first target is AC, short for arsenicCatnip, who appears as a speech bubble with the Leo sign in olive. The narration says Terezi likes to roleplay with AC, but only facetiously. Terezi and AC roleplay as a DRAGONYY'YYD and some type of big cat. Terezi tries to eat AC’s cub but AC bribes her with an animal called a BULL CHOL3RB34R.
CHEL: AC types with a symbol like this at the front :33 < and with a heavy spurrinkling of cat puns. From what she says about her character, the type of cat in question has two mouths, and it’s later stated that :33 is in fact supposed to be a cat face, one mouth atop the other. The evolutionary or indeed anatomical usefulness of this feature is unclear. Perhaps it’s so they can bite down on prey and vocalise to communicate at the same time? That would be more useful for a pack hunter… Anyway.
FAILURE ARTIST: That done, Terezi asks AC to play a game and has to clarify she means outside of the game they are already playing. AC is interested but she says she has to get purrmission from a certain guy. Terezi thinks it’s ridiculous AC is scared of him because she kills big animals with her bare hands and lives far away from him. AC knows it’s ridiculous but she still wants to get permission. The relationship looks bad now but we later find out it’s part of troll society and it’s odd that Terezi thinks AC is motivated by fear. Anyway, AC says she’ll ask the guy and the conversation ends on that.
CHEL: I don’t know if Hussie either had come up with the relationship system or even decided if those two were going to have a relationship at this point. If he did, he might not have meant them to be in that relationship yet at this point, they could have started it later. It’s not really clear. Not a problem, though, serial writing develops that way sometimes.
FAILURE ARTIST: Terezi trolls Gamzee but thankfully it cuts off before we have to re-read the entire conversation. Next, Terezi has to deal with Karkat. She doesn’t want to ask him to play except as a last resort.
However, Karkat trolls Terezi to tell her he’s the leader of the Red Team now. Terezi doesn’t care though since she just wants to play the game. Karkat says she’ll be second-in-command but Terezi’s sarcastic reply turns him off the idea. The two insult each other and Terezi mock-flirts with Karkat.
GC: 4NYTH1NG TO G3T YOU TO STOP B31NG SUCH 4 B4BY
CG: WHAT'S A BABY.
GC: OH
GC: 1TS L1K3 4 MYTH1C4L L1TTL3 P1NK MONK3Y
CHEL: Once again, babies only come in Caucasian, apparently. Also, doesn't the word "baby" apply as an adjective to non-human species all the time?
WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 26
FAILURE ARTIST: We find out that Terezi is not supposed to have a LUSUS and if she did, the world would come to an end. Karkat is also confused by this statement. Karkat blames the trees for her weirdness and offers to move her into one of his neighbor’s hives. One of his neighbors has been CULLED (killed) and Karkat is blase about this. Terezi turns down his offer. Karkat excuses himself to DEAL WITH THIS GRUMPY CUSTOMER.
We cut to a little later. Karkat’s hive is covered in colorful paint and in the middle of a lake of red. This is the LAND OF PULSE AND HAZE and Karkat is the KNIGHT OF BLOOD. Karkat now has the weapon HOMES SMELL YOU LATER, a sickle in 90s colors. He trolls Terezi and complains about how she wrecked his home. Another running gag: girls ruining boy’s homes. He says she messed with his LOAD GAPER. Terezi (and us) call that a toilet. Toilet is blue blooded vernacular. Later on, highbloods use the term load gaper so I guess Hussie forgot this interesting world-building. Karkat is also upset by the paint job that wasted lots of grist. Terezi calls his fighting adorable and Karkat says it’s ADORABLOODTHIRSTY. He wants to be the next one to connect to a client and she says it doesn’t work that way. It’s only at the end he brings someone in. The priority now is to save her from the meteors by getting her in the game. Karkat hadn’t heard of the meteors until now and is very alarmed. Terezi tells Karkat to talk to apocalypseArisen, twinArmageddons, AG, or CT. There’s a conspiracy going on with those four people. With that, Terezi says she’s got to go.
CHEL: Also, an important point comes up in that conversation; Terezi demands to know what colour Karkat’s blood is, and he refuses to tell her. In case you haven’t picked it up by now, troll society is in fact supposed to be stratified by the colour of their blood. Literal blue blood is towards the higher end of the rankings; Terezi’s on the greener end of blue, so securely middle class. Karkat types in and wears grey, which is not a natural troll blood colour, and the other trolls consider this weird and suspicious. Looking at the list of names on Trollian, we see they range through the rainbow, except for some reason the greens, blues, and purples are split into several layers. I was confused by this at first; I knew he needed twelve colours instead of seven, but it seemed weird that they weren’t more spread out. Then again, social stratification does get a lot stricter up at the top. I thought perhaps the reds, browns, and yellows also come in other shades but just get lumped together because they’re peasants and no one cares? It’s not discussed in canon, but someone actually does have an explanation for it; it’s what you get when the RGB and CMYK colour wheels overlap.
A little while ago, a spooky-looking young troll lady with glowing white eyes and a maroon Aries shirt sign - this being the colour of apocalypseArisen, so this is presumably her - hovers over a frog-topped temple extremely similar to the one on Jade’s island. With a wave of her hand, the frog’s head breaks off and crashes to the ground.
You're not sure why you did that, really.
There'll probably turn out to be a reason. There's a reason for everything. Understanding this lets you be reckless.
Somewhere else, Gamzee’s Faygo bottle, now photorealistic, lands at the feet of a mysterious someone who is wearing striped pants and what appear to be blue and purple bowling shoes, of all things. This person complains about Rubbish from the LAND DWELLERS and picks up the bottle with a hand wearing a purple ring emblazoned with an Aquarius symbol; the name in that colour text in the chat, should the reader go back to check, is caligulasAquarium.
FAILURE ARTIST: How fucked up was troll Caligula? Maybe he just broke troll taboos.
CHEL: The implication of him having an aquarium is making me picture Troy McClure.
We go back to Karkat’s hive and rewind a little, to see him deal with the earlier-mentioned crabby customer…
And we need to provide the text from this page in its entirety so we can discuss it.
FAILURE ARTIST: If you want to know why Homestucks go so crazy over buckets, read this and weep!
You go downstairs and confront your custodian, which is another term for a frightening beast known as a LUSUS NATURAE.
Your lusus has looked after you since you were very young in lieu of any biological parents, whom you have never known. No young troll ever knows his or her blood parents, nor could such lineage ever be accurately traced. Adult trolls supply their genetic material to the FILIAL PAILS carried by imperial drones and offered to the monstrous MOTHER GRUB deep underground in the brooding caverns. She then combines all the genetic material into one diabolical incestuous slurry, and lays hundreds of thousands of eggs at once.
The eggs hatch into young larval trolls which wriggle about to locate a cozy stalactite from which to spin their cocoons. After they pupate, the young troll with his or her newfound limbs undergoes a series of dangerous trials. If they survive, they are chosen by a member of the diverse and terrifying subterranean monster population native to Alternia. This creature becomes the troll's lusus, and together they surface and choose a location to build a hive. The building process is facilitated by CARPENTER DROIDS left on the planet to cater to the young. But only for building. They're on their own otherwise.
The vast majority of adult trolls are off-planet, serving some role in the forces of ongoing imperial conquest, besieging other star systems in the name of Alternian glory. The culture and civilization on the homeworld is maintained almost entirely by the young.
Trolls sure are weird!
CHEL: “Lusus naturae”, to start with, is Latin for “freak of nature”. Probably it means something else in Alternian.
FAILURE ARTIST: The lusus system is so bizarre. How long have they been using it? When we see what could be called a Bizarro Alternia, they also have lusus, so it’s not just because adults can’t raise children.
CHEL: Naturally-evolved symbiosis and parasitism are hardly unknown among animals on Earth, though no real ones really work like this. The closest I can think of among vertebrates are cuckoos and similar birds, where the egg is laid in another species’ nest and the hatchling kills or starves out the original offspring. This isn’t what’s happening here, as the lusus doesn’t have offspring of its own and wouldn’t appear to have any particular reason to let a young troll latch onto it, not to mention young trolls presumably look nothing like the offspring of a creature like that, and lususes/lusi (I don’t think there’s an officially accepted plural? The fandom latched onto the very non-Latin but suitably alien “lusii”) come in wildly varying species, so it’s not a case of a specific two-species symbiotic bond like clownfish and anemones. However, trolls do have psychic powers, so it could always be handwaved with a form of mental link.
BRIGHT: Bizarre as it is, the lusus system is nicely alien! I think that in this case, the lack of explanation actually works in its favour -- there’s nothing to point to and say ‘but that explanation doesn’t make sense’. I do like a good explanation, but in the case of background worldbuilding I think it’s fine to chuck something in and move on.
Also, we now discover that Jade had a perfectly normal childhood by troll standards. (Er, minus the murderous neighbours.)
FAILURE ARTIST: The narration says the “vast majority” of adult trolls are off-planet. This implies some small percentage of adults are on-planet. In the spin-off series Hiveswap Friendsim, there are characters on Alternia who get into, well, adult situations. The writers on Twitter clarified that there are trolls who are over eighteen Earth years but under the age of expulsion on Alternia. In one game, there’s adults who should be off-planet but aren’t, though how many trolls risk that is unknown.
CHEL: The age of majority in numerous Earth cultures is or has been twenty or twenty-one, so that’s probably what the writers were going for. Or, of course, just trying to avoid backlash from the Tumblr anti-shipping population. There are also cases where adults really should be on-planet but don’t appear to be, but we’ll get to that in the Friendsims.
I have to say I’m rather concerned by what appears to be a serious bottleneck in the reproduction system. According to everything we see, there is only one Mother Grub for the whole planet. What happens if something happens to her? Replacements are bred in the same way as queen bees or ants, but destroying the cavern where she resides would put a major crimp in troll society for a long time even if there was a replacement around. With ants and bees, there is generally more than one hive per species.
BRIGHT: We do meet one Virgin Mother Grub later on, and she’s acting as a lusus. I always assumed that there were at least a few around, otherwise having one potential backup breeder taken out of the pool should have raised a lot more fuss than it apparently did.
Moreover, while the Brooding Caverns aren’t described in Homestuck, they are described in Friendsim, and it is literally a single giant cave with the Mother Grub in the middle, surrounded by grubs, young trolls, and lusii. In one of the game routes, the Mother Grub is in fact injured by a distressed lusus, which would be easily prevented by having her in a separate room. There are apparently no barriers to an outsider just wandering in, and given that this is Alternia, said outsider could probably do quite a lot of damage if they so chose.
CHEL: Particularly since most lusii are extremely dangerous, and there are a hell of a lot of them there. It’s also been brought up in the Tumblr parts of fandom that it would be incredibly easy to rebel against the dystopian regime by taking the Mother Grub hostage or destroying/damaging the caverns.
FAILURE ARTIST: Karkat fights his lusus like the human kids fought theirs, but without a cool animation. It’s just a gif and a link to a 38 second tune. You’ll notice in the background on the fridge there’s a crude drawing of the crabby creature: a callback to John’s drawing.
We cut to TA, the troll we saw earlier get bonked by a key. TA has his glasses off and under them are a red eye and a blue eye. He puts them on dramatically in a reference to the CSI: Miami meme everyone has forgotten. After a long Dave-like block of text describing how this dude is cool but not cool, it turns out we won’t be introduced to him.
Cut to a troll with a green Leo sign on her shirt and horns that look a lot like cat ears. She looks cute but there’s blood on her walls. The narration is unnerved by her so we go back to TA.
TA’s name is SOLLUX CAPTOR.
CHEL: The name is taken from the mythological twins of the Gemini constellation, Pollux and Castor. The combination of sol-lux could also be read to mean “sunlight”.
FAILURE ARTIST: Behind him is what looks like a computer mainframe but covered in a yellow substance. On the wall, there’s red-and-blue writing. His recuperacoon has two openings, though it’s never even brought up why.
You are apeshit bananas at computers, and you know ALL THE CODES. All of them. You are the unchallenged authority on APICULTURE NETWORKING. And though all your friends recognize your unparalleled achievements as a TOTALLY SICK HACKER, you feel like you could be better. It's one of a number of things you SORT OF BEAT YOURSELF UP ABOUT for NO VERY GOOD REASON during sporadic and debilitating BIPOLAR MOOD SWINGS. You have a penchant for BIFURCATION, in logic and in life. Your mutant mind is hounded by the psychic screams of the IMMINENTLY DECEASED. Your visions foretell of the planet's looming annihilation, and yet unlike the typical sightless prophet of doom, you are gifted with VISION TWOFOLD.
I used to think “imminently deceased” meant “recently deceased” and not “going to be deceased”. Either way, it’s really a Blessed With Suck power.
Lots has been made of Sollux’s BIPOLAR MOOD SWINGS but I don’t think Hussie was seriously thinking of bipolar depression. Still makes for good fanfiction.
CHEL: Please don't use "bipolar" to just mean moody, Hussie.
CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 32
You have developed a new game, adapted via CODE PARSED FROM THE RUNES AND GLYPHS IN AN ANCIENT UNDERGROUND TEMPLE. You believe this game to be THE SALVATION OF YOUR RACE, though you are not sure how yet. To ensure success, you will distribute the game to two teams of friends, a RED TEAM and a BLUE TEAM. You will lead the latter group.
One guess what this game is. We also see “friends” being used in the normal human sense.
WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 27
The prompter tells Sollux to equip ninja stars, but it turns out he has psionic powers that allow him to move objects with a purple aura. However, in moving the ninja stars, he messes up and slices the BEEHOUSE MAINFRAMES. Little purple bees buzz around him and send him messages in beenary code. The prompter tells Sollux to taste the honey but he refuses.
You do not under any circumstance eat the MIND HONEY. The consequences are highly unpleasant.
Remember that. The mind honey is only supposed to be a soporific for his lusus.
Sollux snaps his fingers (spelling out 2NAP in his quirk) and the bees fall asleep.
CHEL: I only just noticed the “2nap” = “to nap” pun.
BRIGHT: Also, while Sollux does have psychic powers, those powers are not related to animal control. So this is a little strange.
FAILURE ARTIST: Sollux goes to his computer while stepping over video games, which in this world are colorful grubs. He first talks with Terezi. She knows about his game to save the world and immediately picks the Red Team. He wonders how she knew there would be a red team but she says it’s easy to guess he would make a red team and a blue team. This observation annoys him and he goes on a rant.
TA: maybe iim more of an aubergiine guy plu2 whatever that putriid color is you type wiith, what ii2 that, turqoii2e?
I have a headcanon he can only see red and blue and that’s why he doesn’t know what color Terezi types in. Considering his society is based on color this would be quite a disability.
CHEL: I’ve also seen headcanons he’s colourblind and struggles to remember which colours go where on the hemospectrum, as at one point he complains about how yellow is the lowest on the totem pole apart from something he can’t remember, while talking to someone who’s lower. (It’s actually third from the bottom.)
FAILURE ARTIST: They then talk about how this game will save the world. He isn’t sure how but he says AA can back him up on this. Terezi thinks he’s right...mostly. He says before this is done he will die twice and go blind, but he figures that’s what happens to a prophet of doom. He compares this to an angel getting its wings and we find out trolls consider angels to be feathery demons. Terezi wonders if this doom-and-gloom isn’t just part of his brain problems. He is offended by this reasoning and compares it to clown pieing, which in retrospect is scarier on Alternia than on Earth. He tells her to talk to AA and Terezi says AA hasn’t been the same lately. Sollux and Terezi say they’ll take the game seriously but they also goof around about it.
We cut back to the spooky troll from before. She kicks the frog statue so hard it all breaks off.
The prompter tells Sollux to deal with apocalypseArisen, the spooky troll we just saw. AA asks Sollux if he set up the teams, but without a question mark. He says he’s working on it. He asks if she’ll be happy to get out and leave the voiice2 behind. He says it would suck to have them stay until death, a statement which will become very ironic. AA says she’s 0k with a l0t 0f things...including their failure masquerading as victory. Sollux is angry at her pessimism. He gets more angry when he finds out the game will actually wipe out their people. He says he refuses to be team leader, but she says he was never going to be that. He threatens her with psionics and says he could do things that would make [her] head 2piin liike dervii2h iin a fuckiing blender which makes me wonder how trolls have Sufism.
CHEL: How many humans know where the term comes from? I could buy it as Translation Convention regarding, say, a clown cult thing, although everything seems to imply the trolls are speaking “English”. Still, the idiom comes from human Western culture, so...
WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 28
FAILURE ARTIST: She says she’s coming up, which only confuses Sollux.
He goes and tells Terezi and then Karkat that the Game has been aborted. Terezi is confused but doesn’t say much. Karkat accuses Sollux of trying to kick him out. Karkat declares the friendship cancelled, showing again trolls have friends. Karkat insults Sollux’s programming skills and threatens to run ~ATH. Sollux tells him not to be Karkat doesn’t listen.
TA: KK DO NOT RUN THAT CODE.
TA: hello??????????????
carcinoGeneticist's [CG'S] computer exploded.
TA: oh my god.
That is some amazing chat program.
The explosion kills Crabdad. Turns out that code causes the death of ALL of Karkat’s friend’s lusii. Each lusus gets prototyped, which seems heartwarming but turns out very bad for their session. We see Gamzee mourning his Goatdad’s death by harpooning in a moment that’s very sad, even considering how terrible a parent Goatdad is.
CHEL: And here I want to go back to Gamzee for a bit. The commentary, as we mentioned, says that Goatdad “told” him to stay indoors and was ashamed of him. However, in the actual comic, everything is set up to show the lusii as being non-sapient, i.e. not able to talk to their charges and not in possession of a concept of shame. They behave like regular animals, Sollux says his is dumb enough to walk right off the roof if not tethered, and the trolls go on repeatedly about how happy they are to have prototyped their lusii because now they can actually communicate verbally with them for the first time, as Rose did with Jaspers. This is similarly inconsistent in the later-written Pesterquest games, which we’ll get to eventually. So either Hussie forgot that lusii aren’t the same as parents…
WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 29
… or he claimed they were sapient when they weren’t before, solely to use them to bash Gamzee.
IN HATE WITH MY CREATION: 2
FAILURE ARTIST: Back to Sollux. He tries deleting all his computer viruses, but there’s one he can’t delete. It has a flashing billiard ball next to execute. It’s set to go off after the universe ends and even Sollux doesn’t know what it does. The narrator does know.
When executed, the subprogram will summon an indestructible demon into the recently voided universe. This monstrous being with the power to travel through time is inconvenienced very little by his arrival upon THE GREAT UNDOING. He has the entire cadaver of the expired universe to pick apart at his whim. From its birth through its swelling maturity and tapering decay. In a reality he is known to have marked for predation, he will go about assembling followers through various epochs, even going as far as personally establishing the parameters for his future summoning.
Sollux couldn't know that the virus is essentially a formality.
The demon is already here.
Sollux hears grumbling noises coming from the ceiling. His lusus, a BICYCLOPS, is kept chained to the roof of his COMMUNAL HIVE STEM and regularly fed and fought.
CHEL: A bicyclops, later also referred to as a biclops, is a roughly humanoid being with two heads, each with one big eyeball. A hivestem is basically a block of flats, made out of a giant hexagonal tube-like structure with small grey hive-homes built into the sides. I can’t tell if it’s supposed to be the literal stem of some kind of gigantic plant or not. Pretty cool if it is.
FAILURE ARTIST: In the night sky, there’s a few meteors. Turns out AA is floating outside.
We cut to GA wielding a chainsaw while riding a moth-like lusus against a colorful background. She lives in the middle of the desert in a home like Jade’s. However, we aren’t introduced to her.
BRIGHT: There are giant colourful sails attached to the towers. I’m not sure how practical that is, but it has definite flair.
FAILURE ARTIST: Instead, we are introduced to AT. His name is TAVROS NITRAM. He turns out to be a wheelchair user. I think this was ascended fanon based on his love of flying. How well Homestuck treats this disabled character we’ll see. His lusus is a little bull with wings. He’s surrounded by playing cards, stuffed animals, and posters of fairies. A lance is leaned against his wall.
CHEL: “Tavros” obviously derives from Taurus, and might also be from Davros, a wheelchair-using Doctor Who villain. Nitram is “Martin” backwards, which according to the wiki might be connected to Mary Martin, an actress who played Peter Pan, or Martin McGuinness, an Irish politician whose planned prosecution was codenamed Operation Taurus. It might also derive from nitrate, which causes “brown blood disease” in fish.
You are known to be heavily arrested by FAIRY TALES AND FANTASY STORIES. You have an acute ability to COMMUNE WITH THE MANY CREATURES OF ALTERNIA, a skill you have utilized to CAPTURE AND TRAIN a great many. They are all your friends, as well as your warriors, which you pit in battle through a variety of related CARD AND ROLE PLAYING GAMES. You used to engage in various forms of MORE EXTREME ROLEPLAYING with some of your other friends before you had an accident.
You like to engage in the noble practice of ALTERNIAN SLAM POETRY, possibly the oldest, most revered, and certainly freshest artform in your planet's rich history. You have a profound fascination with the concept of FLIGHT, and all lore surrounding the topic. You believe in FAIRIES, even though they AREN'T REAL.
The name of his lusus may be ascended fanon too, if I’m remembering correctly. Its name, mentioned later, is Tinkerbull, and it’s the cutest thing ever I want a million of them.
Tavros is prompted to Cut to the chase and play card games immediately, and picks a Pokemon ripoff called FIDUSPAWN. He deals himself a favourable hand and lobs an OOGONIBOMB, a jelly-looking blob, at the HOST PLUSH. The Oogonibomb hatches into a terrifying face-hugger-like monster, which latches onto the plush, then scuttles out of the way in time for a larger monster to explode out of said plush.
BRIGHT: Alternian card games sure are something!
HORSARONI, I CHOOSE YOU!!!!!!
CHEL: Horsaroni devours the fidusucker face-hugger in preparation for battle, and Tavros uses his awesome bestial communion abilities [to] bend the ferocious stallion to [his] whim while Tinkerbull looks on nervously. Tavros succeeds in getting the beast under control, and… gets it and Tinkerbull to take a nap together. Everybody wins.
FAILURE ARTIST: He plans on making Horsaroni have sex in the future. Whoa boy.
CHEL: The prompt tells Tavros to roll up the ramp which leads to the top of his rather high recuperacoon, and to hop in, which he does, followed by much reasonable complaining about how it’ll take an hour for him to change his clothes, plus the four-wheel device rolls back down the ramp without him. Also, it’s noted that his horns make it impossible to get fully inside the cocoon, which makes it hard to get any solid shuteye. So, wait, trolls can breathe while fully submerged in the slime? There’s no elaboration as of yet, but it’s possible Hiveswap will discuss that.
FAILURE ARTIST: This slapstick with a disabled character is unfortunate. Terezi never had to deal with this bullshit.
CHEL: Not to this extent, anyway.
CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 33
After much cleanup which we thankfully don’t have to read through, he gets back in his chair and picks up his JOUSTING LANCE.
FAILURE ARTIST: We get a look outside of Tavros’ hive as he thinks about his future plans. He lives in a windmill by a cliff and in his yard he has a practice dummy with...is that a pail???
CHEL: Considering trolls’ opinions of pails, I hope it’s a trashcan, but the bucket thing might be a retcon for the sake of humour.
FAILURE ARTIST: Anyway, he hopes to be a CAVALREAPER when he grows up, if he isn’t culled (aka murdered) for his disability. Rather optimistic of him to think there’s a chance he won’t be culled. I think this is when we first find out about Alternian eugenics. Odd that it didn’t come up when we were introduced to Terezi.
BRIGHT: Terezi’s disability doesn’t really impact her ability to function, though. Her smellovision is accurate enough to let her read and she doesn’t have any trouble moving around. Tavros’s disability is clearly an actual disability that hinders him in a lot of ways. Given Alternian society as we’ve seen it so far, Terezi might be fine. Tavros would need assistive measures and that makes him a write-off.
There’s also the matter of personality. Terezi tends to be confident; Tavros generally isn’t. Add in Terezi’s midblood status to Tavros’s lowblood position, and it makes sense for it to come up now.
FAILURE ARTIST: Tavros admires his fairy posters, including one saying “ Pupa Pan” with a silhouette of a winged troll. This is the troll version of Peter Pan and their one also includes “indians”, just they are “weird aliens”.
CHEL: Can’t say I’m too pleased about that, personally.
CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 33
FAILURE ARTIST: I don’t know if Andrew Hussie read Peter Pan but when I read it it felt very Hussie. Anyway, Tavros keeps his bedroom window open for Pupa Pan and splashes SPECIAL STARDUST on his face. The same substance Gamzee uses? Hmmm.
Andrew Hussie takes a jab at the fanon he decided to ascend:
You have had this interest [in flying] far prior to your accident. Being paralyzed isn't what made you want to be able to fly. That would be dumb and would make no sense.
Being paralyzed does sort of make you want to be able to walk, though.
CHEL: Uh… haha? Are we supposed to laugh here, or feel bad, or what?
ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?:21
FAILURE ARTIST: We find out in Friendsim that terrestrial flight is verboten, though Hussie probably didn’t think of that until much later.
We cut to the future briefly to see Tavros has robot legs. Because it would be terrible to have a disabled character just remain disabled! /s
CHEL: To be fair, they’re in a world which has the technology to make near-perfect robotic limbs and he wants to be able to walk again. One could argue that having that technology is problematic in terms of it being an easy handwave, but since they have intergalactic spaceships it might seem somewhat weird if they didn’t have robot parts. The existence of prosthetics in a society which kills its disabled as standard is a bit odd, but not impossible if they have whole robots. Though it begs the question where he got the wheelchair.
BRIGHT: Well, it could be that prosthetics aren’t standard, this is just a special situation. He doesn’t get them until after he’s entered the Game, after all.
CHEL: Disturbingly, and perhaps more fittingly for troll society, the legs were fitted after his real ones were removed via chainsaw, apparently sans anaesthetic.
GORE GALORE: 11
BRIGHT: It kind of looks like he got chainsawed through the waist. If that is the case, then a lot of important organs would have been mangled and would need replacing — at least if he was human. We don’t know anything about how troll guts are laid out, but there’s no reason to believe they’re radically different to the human setup.
CHEL: None of the troll gang appear to be medics, either. How is he not dead?
FAILURE ARTIST: The legs were built by an unnamed male character who likes to break as well as make robots.
Occasionally though, he will allow philanthropy to override misanthrobopy.
Misanthrobopy. I didn’t notice that until now.
GA was the one to chainsaw Tavros, with the male character watching in the shadows. That character has the Sagittarius sign and a broken horn. We learn his name later but never how he broke that horn.
BRIGHT: Which is also a point in favour of getting prosthetic limbs being somewhat unusual — Tavros only gets his because an acquaintance with specialised knowledge takes an interest.
FAILURE ARTIST: So, back to the present...of the past. Tavros is being trolled by both Gamzee and someone known as AG. He deals with AG first. With this, we get our first dialogue from Homestuck’s most Homestuck character. AG, or arachnidsGrip, brags about being on the Blue Team and mocks Tavros for being on the team full of 8lind girls and lame 8oys and cranky iiiiiiiim8eciles. Tavros says they’re probably right, but then says he promised someone not to talk to them. This person turns out to be Tavros’ imaginary friend Rufio, the personification of his self-esteem. GA was the one who gave him the advice. While that’s not a bad coping mechanism, he really shouldn’t be telling AG about it. AG complains about GA’s meddling and says GA was just making fun of Tavros with that advice. AG complains about how long it’s taking for the Blue Team to get going. In the end, AG says it will be like old tiiiiiiiimes and gives a winking emoticon.
After that conversation with a frienemy, Tavros raps with his friend-friend Gamzee. Gamzee apologizes for zoning out, but unlike everyone else who talks to him Tavros isn’t angry. Awww…
Tavros shares the good news that they are both on the Red Team, though Tavros says it came from someone he doesn’t want to talk about. Gamzee had already heard and he’s very excited. Tavros does an }:o) emoticon and Gamzee is tickled pink that Tavros “stole his nose”. That might be flirting among trolls. They make plans to “slam” but first Gamzee explains the Game plan. Terezi has connected to Karkat and now Gamzee has to connect to Terezi. However, she’s off in the woods doing something. For now, Gamzee has to get Tavros connected to him. He says something that I’ve seen people point to as a sign he’s bad to the bone.
TC: sO jUsT dOwNlOaD tHiS mOtHeRfUcKeR i'M sEnDiNg YoU sO wE cAn KiCk ThIs BiTcH dOwN tHe StAiRs.
This is probably a callback to Dave getting kicked down the stairs and not a conscious callback on Gamzee’s part. Really, usually when Gamzee says “bitch” it’s just another way of saying “thing”. He’s not kicking anyone down the stairs. Not yet.
Then again, he later says:
TC: JuSt LeT mE sNeAk Up On ThIs BoTtLe Of FaYgO aNd SnAp ItS nEcK lIkE iM a FuCkIn LaUgHsSaSsIn.
So he is a little sinister.
CHEL: Hardly any more so than Terezi the hanging fetishist, though!
BRIGHT: Or the guy who codes viruses that blow up his friends’ computers.
FAILURE ARTIST: After all the foreplay for their rap session, the dialogue ends with:
You both then proceed to have one of the worst rap-offs in the history of paradox space.
Only much later do we see this rap-off. We also find out Gamzee’s feelings towards Tavros. Yet this conversation alone was enough to sail that ship.
We cut to Terezi in a burning woods. This is where we find out what the deal with Terezi’s “family” is. Her lusus is a giant teal egg on an even larger DOOMSDAY SCALE. Inside the egg is a blind dragon. The dragon can communicate telepathically via dreams. It was how Terezi learned to “see” after the accident. This answers some questions while leaving so many unanswered. Like why does Terezi sleep in her street clothes?
CHEL: Balanced on the other side of the scale is a gargantuan skull with troll-like horns and a sort of goat-y shape. We’ll see the kind of creature it comes from later.
FAILURE ARTIST: Terezi dreams of Prospit, and we see it as she “sees” it: gauzy and throbbing.
Her lusus hatches from the heat, but is immediately killed by a meteor. A sympathetic ally puts it in the kernelsprite and that sympathetic ally is clown boy. So put that on his scorecard.
With the egg hatched, the doomsday device displays 6:12. The arc number for this arc.
CHEL: Karkat’s “wriggling day” is 6/12, which actually makes him a Gemini rather than a Cancer. Guess it’s different for trolls.
FAILURE ARTIST: Finally, we are introduced properly to AA. The one with the inconsistent horns.
Your name is ARADIA MEGIDO.
CHEL: “Aradia” is the name of a “messiah” of witchcraft in Charles Godfrey Leland’s “Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches”, effectively a piece of paganism fanon. “Megido” is derived from Mount Meggido, the place from which the word Armageddon is derived and where the final battle of said event will supposedly occur, and a powerful spell in the video game Shin Megami Tensei. It might also be related to “Meido”, 冥途 めいど, the Japanese equivalent of Purgatory, and “meido”, メイド, meaning maidservant, relevant to her low blood status and later her game class.
You once had a number of INTERESTS, which in time you have LOST INTEREST IN. You seem to recollect once having a fondness for ARCHEOLOGY, though now have trouble recalling this passion. It nonetheless has led you to find your PRESENT CALLING, which came through the discovery of these MYSTIC RUINS on which you presently stand, and which you recently DESECRATED OUT OF BOREDOM.
Guiding you to this calling were the VOICES OF THE DEAD, which you have been able to hear since you were young. The voices have become louder as THE GREAT UNDOING approaches. This trend in escalation began after an ACCIDENT involving a CERTAIN KIND OF ROLE PLAYING, which might have been another of your interests once upon a time. It doesn't matter much anymore.
The accident resulted in the DEATH OF YOUR LUSUS, which prompted you to leave your home and take up these ruins as residence. On the instruction of your ANCESTORS, you have recovered MYSTERIOUS TECHNOLOGY from the ruins, and convinced a friend to adapt it into a GAME THAT WILL BRING ABOUT THE DESTRUCTION OF YOUR CIVILIZATION. And by convinced, you suppose you mean tricked.
CHEL: She chooses to try to take something from her sylladex, but it works on the OUIJA modus, which means she can only take what the spirits allow her to take.
BRIGHT: This has to be the weirdest, most senseless modus yet.
CHEL: They produce a card with the Crosbytop, which she found on a dig a while ago. GA’s trying to contact her.
She's always bugging you. Bugging and fussing and meddling. What's her deal! You guess it's flattering that she wants to talk to you so much though.
You're ok with it. You're ok with a lot of things.
She answers, with an “0h n0000000” on seeing GA, who asks if this is “The Night You Blow Everything Up”.
GA: Is There Nothing I Can Do To Change Your Mind
AA: n0
AA: 0r yes
AA: yes theres n0thing
AA: and n0 y0u cant
AA: but y0u sh0uldnt pretend as if y0u believe this has anything t0 d0 with the state 0f my mind
AA: 0r the decisi0ns it will make 0r has already made
GA: Yeah I Guess Not
GA: I Thought Id Be Friendly Though
GA: And Remind You That You Do In Fact Have A Hand In All The Terrible Things That Are About To Happen
GA: Because Thats What Friends Are For
GA: And The Fact That What Ensues Will Be Terrible
GA: Is An Immutable Fact I Am Stating For The Record
GA: And The Fact That We Will Not Be On The Same Team Is Similarly Immutable
GA: It Does Not Mean That Teamwork Is What Isnt Taking Place Here
AA: s0rry i didnt f0ll0w that
GA: Ill Be Here To Help
GA: If You Need Me
AA: 0k
AA: thanks
Honestly, this is giving me shipping ideas which will only make sense once more about trolls has been explained. Pin in that.
BRIGHT: How does GA know it will be terrible?
CHEL: Stay tuned. We’ll find out.
Aradia checks on Sollux and has the conversation we already have seen, which is linked back to instead of copied, thank goodness. Huss seems to have mastered that part of the timeline. Aradia arrives at his hivestem and levitates the Bicyclops, while meteors begin to fall, and AG trolls her. AG is revealed to be female and seen in silhouette; she has a blue Scorpio symbol, one pointed horn, one forked one, and long hair. Remember this character for later.
AG: Do you have Mr. Two Eyes all 8efuddled and flustered in your we8 of lies?
AG: Or Mr. Four Eyes?
AG: Hmmmmmmmmm.
AG: I don't know. Which nickname do you think would 8e suita8ly derogatory in this case Aradia?
AA: h0w ab0ut
AA: eight eyes
AA: minus seven
AG: ::::P
FAILURE ARTIST: God, I love Aradia. Though I guess if you’re reading this for the first time you won’t get her jab here until later.
CHEL: Aradia protests that she didn’t trick him. AG says it doesn’t matter, and declares that once the game starts she and Aradia will be the Blue Team co-leaders, only asking afterwards if this is okay with Aradia, who doesn’t care. She tells Aradia she has a present for her, “Just from me. From me alone and no8ody else”, and wants a special team name for just the two of them, which Aradia doesn’t want to bother with.
AG: I just thought it would 8e really fitting.
AG: Kind of like a fresh start, you know?
AG: I don't know, what are our shared interests? I guess I never really thought a8out this! I guess I'm used to thinking of you as the enemy. There must 8e some overlap in profiles.
AG: Come oooooooon, let's 8rainstorm!
AA: 0_0
AG: Man, it'll 8e great. We'll 8e unstoppa8le. Surely you must admit it will 8e nice to re8ound from the Team Charge de8acle!
AA: i never think ab0ut that anym0re
AG: Oh maaaaaaaan, I'm so dum8! Here I am running my mouth and opening up old wounds, while at the very same time trying to make amends! What an idiot.
I hope AG’s fans are not stupid enough to assume she was sincere on that last line, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
FAILURE ARTIST: I think that AG thinks she’s being sincere.
CHEL: She asks if Aradia’s “loser” male friend will be on the Blue Team, which Aradia says he isn’t, calls him dead weight (messing up her own quirk in the process, which would usually be “dead w8”), ignores Aradia’s declaration that she didn’t exclude him, and heads off to “give him a hard time” despite Aradia’s protest. From this we can presume said friend is Tavros.
We see AG’s face in the next page; she has blue makeup, one blackened lens in her spectacles, a cyborg arm, and a nasty grin.
FAILURE ARTIST: It kills me that we can’t just say who she is now. I’m sure she’s broken through cultural osmosis. However, instead of an introduction, we go to Sollux and Aradia.
Sollux apologizes for flying off the handle. He says even though he quit as leader, he’ll still play and do his best. In his self-degradation, he says something very odd.
TA: liike 2ome low cla22 guy wiith... whatever color blood ii2 lower on the hiierarchy than miine.
TA: what2 wor2e than yellow?
TA: fuck thii2 confu2iing ca2te 2y2tem.
You’d think he’d know by now, especially given how important the hierarchy is supposed to be.
CHEL: Especially since the person he’s talking to is not only lower on the hierarchy than him, but also one of his closest friends and (minor spoiler) possibly his love interest. This is where the “colourblind” theory for him comes from.
FAILURE ARTIST: Aradia tells Sollux to come to the window because she’s outside. He complains that he can’t see her and she tells him to look closer. He does so while grumbling about psychics. Aradia snaps her fingers and he falls asleep...in the dangerous mind honey.
CHEL: How does she do that? I don’t think she has mind control abilities, does she? All I remember is her throwing boulders around… did she Force-choke him into unconsciousness?
BRIGHT: Maybe she did it the same way Sollux knocked his bees out.
FAILURE ARTIST: Cut to much later. Meteors are falling furiously and all the teammates except Sollux are in the Medium. Sollux wakes up but with mind honey in his mouth. We find out what mind honey does to trolls like Sollux: it causes him to do an OPTIC BLAST , destroying the roof of his apartment and killing yet another lusus. Which just raises the question of why he let the mind honey flow on his floor.
Now, we are introduced to my Zodiac troll.
Your name is NEPETA LEIJON.
CHEL: Nepeta is the Latin genus name for catnip, and Leijon is the archaic spelling of “lejon”, the Swedish word for lion. It should be pronounced “lay-on”, but Hussie said “pronounce everything in the least affected manner possible, from an American perspective”, so I’ve always mentally heard it as “lee-jon” or possibly “lay-shawn”.
You live in a CAVE that is also a HIVE, but still mostly just a CAVE. You like to engage in FRIENDLY ROLE PLAYING, but not the DANGEROUS KIND. Never the DANGEROUS KIND. It's TOO DANGEROUS! Too many of your good friends have gotten hurt that way.
Your daily routine is dangerous enough as it is. You prowl the wilderness for GREAT BEASTS, and stalk them and take them down with nothing but your SHARP CLAWS AND TEETH! You take them back to your cave and EAT THEM, and from time to time, WEAR THEIR PELTS FOR FUN. You like to paint WALL COMICS using blood and soot and ash, depicting EXCITING TALES FROM THE HUNT! And other goofy stories about you and your numerous pals. Your best pal of all is A LITTLE BOSSY, and people wonder why you even bother with him. But someone has to keep him pacified. If not you, then who? Everyone has an important job to do.
So the dangerous kind of roleplaying is more dangerous than taking down wild beasts.
CHEL: Which is already pretty damn dangerous!
You never know when you might encounter some unsuspecting prey. Or when some prey might encounter an unsuspecting you!
On Alternia, everything is considered unsuspecting prey by everything else.
FAILURE ARTIST: Also just noticed her “hive” has windows even though it’s a cave and the windows don’t actually seem to open to anything? We never get to see any of her cave outside of this so who knows how it works.
CHEL: Maybe she painted them on?
Her lusus is a big cat, with the double mouths already mentioned in her roleplaying. I still don’t know what evolutionary purpose this serves. However, her trolltag is arsenicCatnip, and the double mouths are depicted as two threes; arsenic’s atomic number is 33. It’s little references and in-jokes like this that keep me loving HS despite its worst parts. I can’t get enough of these things.
Said cat is named POUNCE DE LEON, a reference to the explorer Juan Ponce de Leon, seeker of the Fountain of Youth.
You and she go on adventures together in search of the FOUNTAIN OF CUTE. You ride your sure-pawed mount into the rugged frontier. And sometimes she rides you when she gets tired, which is frequently.
It sure will be sad when she dies. But who knows when or how that will happen. We might not even really have the time to find out!
Later there was a cave-in.
Note the cave paintings on her walls, which are in red, black, and pale grey, and large black animal corpses in the foreground. It’s not clear if the animals themselves are black or they’re just in silhouette, but they contrast with the lusii, which are all white. These beasts also bleed mammalian red, which Nepeta uses for paint, while the lusii bleed the same colour as their respective troll charges. What precisely the lusii are and how they’re different from a regular animal is never really made clear. They could be separate species, or they could be regular animals psychically or biologically bonded to a troll and metamorphosing because of that. Or Hussie might not have thought it out that far.
Karkat’s trolling Nepeta on her DRAWING TABLET COMPUTER. She wishes she could adapt it to a fetch modus because her own one is frustrating, and answers him. She has to handwrite what she says on Trollian, and surrounds it with doodles of cats.
AC: :33 < *ac perks up curiously*
AC: :33 < *she wiggles her rear end a bit and then chases something she s33s bounce into one of karkats shoes*
CG: KARKAT CAN'T BELIEVE HE HAS TO SINK THIS LOW.
CG: KARKAT CAN'T BELIEVE HE'S ASKING AN AUTISTIC GIRL IN A CAVE TO JOIN HIS TEAM.
CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 34
Thanks, asshole. I’ve seen fans assume this means Nepeta is literally autistic, and she could be, but either way Karkat is clearly using it as an insult here, not a literal description.
Anyway, Karkat explains to Nepeta what’s going on. He, Terezi, Gamzee, and Tavros are already playing; Tavros needs a server player. GA is lined up for the Red Team, but doesn’t want to connect yet for mysterious reasons, so Nepeta’s the best candidate. Nepeta agrees, but wants to talk to someone else first.
CG: HOW CAN YOU BE BEST FRIENDS WITH THE ONLY GUY ON THE PLANET WHO'S A BIGGER ASSHOLE THAN ME.
AC: :33 < hes not so bad!
CG: HE'S SCUM.
CG: BUT DO WHATEVER YOU'VE GOT TO DO I GUESS.
CG: TAVROS IS WAITING.
This seems quite a distance from Nepeta declaring that the guy she needs to talk to “scares her” earlier on. May be a retcon.
Said friend proves to be the blue Sagittarius boy, still in shadow. I think here it’s time to add on a point we brought up but did not count when observing the Pesterchum Trollslum: his handle is centaursTesticle. I remind everyone the trolls are supposed to be thirteen. What a charming child. I guess maybe it’s excusable because he’s not a mammal himself, but still.
CALL CPA PLEASE: 9
He says hi, but becomes frustrated when Nepeta roleplays at him. He types in dark b100, is e%cessively formal, and precedes each line with a D→ emoticon, the significance of which will be explained in a moment.
CT: D --> This is f001ishness upon one hundred thousand prior, equally unsolicited f001ishnesses
FAILURE ARTIST: It’s weird that his first word is “hi”, considering how formal he usually is.
CHEL: Could be because he knows Nepeta well? A concession to her mannerisms?
He expects Nepeta to follow his orders; she stops roleplaying, but complains about him being “so lame!” and never roleplaying with her, even though he will go out of his way to find words with “x” or “loo” in them so he can use his quirk. He tells her off for using foul language at things as mild as “what the hell?” and she apologises.
CT: D --> Your fraternization with the base classes have 100sened your morals, can't you see this
AC: :33 < no! i dont care, they are fun
AC: :33 < and i dont know anything about classes or bases or blood color, it doesn't matter!
AC: :33 < what does gr33n blood even mean! it doesnt mean anything to me and it shouldnt mean anything to anyone else!
CT: D --> Well, green b100d is ok, but it's not great
CT: D --> But that's why you're lucky to have me to 100k out for you
CT: D --> Because you don't know better, and you can't fight the role the mother had in store for you
This relationship looks rather worrying from a human perspective, I must say. Still, Nepeta seems to be holding her own in the argument, and he’s not physically present so there’s little he can do to actually harm her if things go south.
FAILURE ARTIST: Yeah, early on this relationship looks bad, but this relationship is one of the more popular ones in Homestuck.
CHEL: Did he plan their relationship, or ascend the fanon? Do we know?
FAILURE ARTIST: I would say there wasn’t enough time for Equius/Nepeta to be fanon, giving the quick update rate for this arc, but fandom does work fast.
Nepeta doesn’t seem to be just against the hemospectrum but rather ignorant of it, which is odd considering how important it’s supposed to be. Then again, she does live in a cave.
BRIGHT: Considering how important the hemospectrum is supposed to be, a surprising number of characters don’t understand it or care about it. That’s two out of nine so far. And while the hemospectrum does add a layer of complication, it’s not that complicated. There are only (spoiler) eleven colours in official use, and most readers pick them up pretty quickly. Characters living in a society which violently enforces it should have a working grasp of it, even if they think it’s stupid as all get-out.
WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 26
CHEL: Nepeta points out he always puts his bow and arrow symbol at the start of lines, which she considers a sign of playfulness and he considers “highly dignified symbols”. Nepeta asks if he’s ever successfully fired a bow, and he refuses to talk about it.
CT: D --> The topic is making me
CT: D --> Sweat
He does this a lot. Here it seems to be a sign of feeling awkward and embarrassed, but later on it will be the source of CALL CPA PLEASE points.
They argue; Nepeta calls him a “weirdo and a cr33p!” and says it’s good she’s there to watch out for him in turn because no one else likes him, and he tells her off for eating animals. So trolls aren’t fully carnivorous? Their teeth suggest they should at least lean more strongly that way than humans do, but I guess eating vegetation wouldn’t be impossible for them.
CT: D --> You're wrong about me, Nepeta
CT: D --> I do like to play games
CT: D --> But they must be e%tremely important games with very high stakes
CT: D --> Not the kind played by trans100cent green wigglers who let 100se an e%cremental surge hard in their wiggler-bottom diaperstubs
Nice callback, though I’m kind of surprised he said “bottom” since he draws the line at “hell”. Also, why the hell would trolls have diapers? They’re raised by literal animals, most of which don’t have hands to change them with!
WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 27
FAILURE ARTIST: What we see later of troll infants, they don’t have bottoms to diaper.
CHEL: Equius informs Nepeta he’s leading the Blue Team; she’s already on the Red Team, but he forbids her to join it and says she must join him.
AC: :33 < *ac rolls her eyes almost as hard as she is rolling around in this really interesting smell*
CT: D --> The thought of you fraternizing with and abetting those stink-b100ded h001igans strikes me as scandal beyond measure
CT: D --> I'm afraid you're too delicate to withstand that sort of corruption
Didn’t he also forbid her from associating with the people on the Blue Team on the grounds of them being too dangerous to hang out with? There’s no pleasing this guy.
Nepeta tells Tavros she can’t join him. She’s angry at her friend, though she’s still obeying him, but Tavros thinks it’s for the best.
AC: :33 < *ac curls up in tavroses lap*
AT: oKAY, *i,
AT: fOR THE TIME BEING, aND,
AT: fOR THE SAKE OF THIS FANTASY SCENARIO, i PRETEND,
AT: tHAT MY CAT ALLERGIES AREN'T THAT BAD,*
[...]
AT: wELL,
AT: iF YOU DIDN'T LISTEN TO HIM BEFORE,
AT: yOU MIGHT HAVE PLAYED GAMES WITH US BEFORE,
AT: aND SOMETHING BAD MIGHT HAVE HAPPENED TO YOU,
All very well, but notice what’s wrong with this picture?
I am… not particularly happy about more wheelchair slapstick going as far as to cause what I guess could be called either pet death or parent death. Most people in wheelchairs are able to not do that. Wouldn’t he at least notice it going over the bump? The “lol the weak wimpy kid has allergies” thing isn’t marvellous either; Tavros’ supposed wimpiness isn’t a huge deal yet, but it will be.
CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 35
BRIGHT: Uh...okay, wow. I somehow didn’t notice Tinkerbull dying like that the first time I read this, and WTF, Hussie?
Tavros reminisces about his role-playing days. We get a flashback to him standing in his room pre-paralysis, dressed in a green Peter Pan outfit and wielding a very short lance he calls a ‘daggerlance’. He is preparing to play FLARP, an EXTREME ROLE PLAYING game which can have serious real-world consequences if played without caution. Tavros is part of Team Charge, and they will be playing against Team Scourge.
The other member of Team Charge is Aradia. Tavros starts a chat with her, and Aradia sounds a lot more animated in this one. She actually seems pretty cheerful and enthusiastic! They talk a bit about Tavros’s choice of class, the Boy-Skylark; apparently it’s not very strong early on, but picks up some powerful abilities once you reach a high level. Put a pin in that, it’s not directly relevant but it does echo some Class traits later on.
Tavros’s FLARP grub lays some eggs ...
CHEL: Troll technology is disgusting.
BRIGHT: … which hatch into neon pixellated bats called GAMING FLAPSTRACTIONS. These contain the data used to provide the roleplaying scenario, and will also follow live instructions provided by the ‘clouder’. One member of Team Scourge will act as Tavros’s clouder, creating a challenging scenario for him to adventure through. Aradia will be the clouder for Terezi, the other member of Team Scourge. The flapstractions are tied to the player’s vital attributes, which is what makes this sort of role playing so dangerous. It’s interesting that apart from SGRUB, trolls have video games which physically affect the real world, or at least some of the players.
CHEL: Which brings up a comment we made on an earlier Act; does everyone in John’s version of Earth have sylladexes, and do all their videogames affect reality? We never see.
BRIGHT: A little way into the game, and Tavros has been backed up to the edge of a cliff by a couple of FLARP monsters. His clouder contacts him to ask why he’s not moving; turns out it’s AG. Tavros tells her that the monsters are too strong for the level he’s at. AG responds by mocking him, calling him weak, and urging him to either advance or abscond. Tavros asks her to hold on, and tries to contact Aradia for help, then Terezi.
We get another glimpse of AG! She has a blue sign, has one hooked horn and one with a crescent tip, messy hair, and here is wearing an eyepatch with seven red dots over one eye. She appears to be standing in the field with Tavros, which clearly isn’t possible.
CHEL: Holograms, presumably.
BRIGHT: Tavros can’t get through to either Aradia or Terezi. AG starts messaging him again, telling him to roll the dice. Tavros, entirely sensibly, declines to do so, as he’s run the numbers and the monsters are too strong to beat no matter how well he rolls. AG says that if he won’t move, she’ll make him move.
AT: i THOUGHT,
AT: yOU COULDN'T USE POWERS,
AT: i MEAN, rEAL LIFE POWERS, nOT GAME ONES,
AT: iT'S AGAINST THE RULES,
AG: 8ut if you are going to 8reak the rules and refuse to roll, what choice do I have!
Using her psychic powers, she then takes control of his body.
And walks him off the cliff.
AG: Fly, Pupa!!!!!!!!
AG: Flyyyyyyyy!
CHEL: This is our introduction to the most controversial character in the whole fandom, and quite possibly one of the most controversial in any fandom. So much as mentioning this girl can start huge flamewars, and there was an entire section of the official Homestuck forum set off for talking about her so it didn’t taint the experience on the other boards. We’ll see more of this behaviour from her later, and discuss the fandom’s opinion of it as we go.
AG types out a long string of mocking laughter, with eight exclamation marks. I believe five is the point Pratchett deemed to be a sign of insanity, what does eight signify? Anyway, Tavros takes out his phone and texts the first person he thinks of; Karkat.
adiosToreador [AT] began trolling carcinoGeneticist [CG]
AT: aG JUST JUMPED ME OFF A CLIFF,
AT: wITH MY BRAIN,
AT: aND, uHH
AT: mY LEGS, aLSO,
AT: aND NOW, tHEY FEEL,
AT: iNVISIBLE,
AT: wOW, i'M SURE THERE WAS A BETTER WAY TO SAY THAT,
AT: aNYWAY,
AT: tHAT'S REALLY ALL THERE IS,
AT: tO REPORT ON THE SUBJECT,
AT: oF ME GETTING HURT,
CG: HEY ASSHOLE, STOP PLAYING GAMES FOR GIRLS.
carcinoGeneticist [CG] ceased trolling adiosToreador [AT]
It’s times like these I wonder if we should have stolen the RP1 spork’s “Why Are We Meant To Like You, Again?” count. Let’s tally up the ones we have…
First off, Karkat, you’re a sexist dick and a bully, and the narrative never calls you out on it, nor do the other characters.
CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 36
Second, two SLAMMER points, one for the sexism, and one for hanging up on a clearly injured person, when Karkat is supposed to be portrayed as “prickly but caring”, which is not consistent with this even if he doesn’t much like Tavros or know him well at this point.
SEND THEM TO THE SLAMMER: 3
And third, what the hell is the point of the “GAMES FOR GIRLS” comment? Karkat’s phrasing implies that this is a contemptible, weak thing to do. Considering the incredibly dangerous nature of the game, that makes no sense at all. Fandom likes to charitably interpret it as meaning that female trolls are expected to be more violent than the male ones and Karkat’s telling Tavros not to get himself hurt, but that doesn’t work either because in every other situation Tavros is socially punished for not being violent, forthright, and traditionally masculine, and as I said, Karkat’s phrasing and immediate hanging-up on Tavros implies contempt, not concern. If it was meant the way a human boy would put it, what the hell are games for troll boys like?!
WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 28
One way I’ve played it in fanfic is that female trolls are expected to be the strategisers, while male ones just barge on through, but that’s just my personal idea, not canon.
BRIGHT: Really the only way this could be read as not completely awful is if Karkat thought Tavros was role-playing the injury. But there’s no reason for him to think that; Karkat’s made his lack of interest in it abundantly clear, and we never see Tavros initiate a role-playing chatlog with anyone, even one of the other FLARPers. In fact, all the FLARPers seem to confine their role-playing to the game itself; the only person who role-plays in chatlogs is Nepeta. (And after this, it’s easy to see why CT didn’t want her FLARPing.) So Karkat’s being a real dick here.
FAILURE ARTIST: There’s not really any charitable explanation for this. The fandom is just content to prove Karkat wasn’t sexist on human terms.
BRIGHT: Also, this is an impressively coherent summary of events from Tavros. If I’d just walked off a cliff and broken my back, I’m not sure I’d be up to texting anybody, let alone explaining things that clearly. Tavros gets short shrift for being weak, but he’s really pretty tough.
We jump back to Karkat in the Medium, having just finished the conversation with Terezi we saw earlier. AG starts messaging him, and Karkat is really not impressed.
AG: Hey 8rave leader.
CG: OH MY GOD, WHY ARE YOU TALKING TO ME.
AG: Can I join your team?
CG: YES I'M GLAD YOU ASKED, BECAUSE THERE IS A WIDE OPEN SLOT FOR THE MOST VILE BACKSTABBING SOCIOPATH WHO EVER LIVED.
CG: YOU REALLY HELPED ME OUT OF A JAM BY STEPPING FORWARD.
AG: Vile 8acksta88ing sociopath? Karkat, did you copy and p8ste that phrase directly from your personal ad descri8ing what you are looking for in a lady?
CG: HA HA HA!
CG: MORE CAGEY CUTESY BULLSHIT.
CG: LIKE I'M NOT UP TO MY LOBE STEM WITH THAT ALREADY HAVING TO DEAL WITH TEREZI.
CG: YOU BOTH MUST HAVE BEEN INSUFFERABLE WHEN YOU WERE A TEAM.
CG: YOUR OPPONENTS PROBABLY ALL JUST TRIED TO COMMIT SUICIDE AFTER A FEW MINUTES OF PUTTING UP WITH YOUR FANGY GRINNED DRIVEL.
CG: THAT'S PROBABLY HOW IT ALL WENT DOWN WHEN THE SHIT HIT THE THRESHER.
AG continues to mess around and Karkat continues to be adamant about not wanting to be friends with her. He warns her not to use her mind control abilities on his teammates, and finishes up with something that actually seems to hit home.
CG: I'VE GOT THE BETTER SCOURGE SISTER ON MY TEAM AND IF YOU BREAK YOUR TRUCE YOU'LL HAVE TO ANSWER TO HER.
CG: THE FUNNY THING IS SHE WAS ALWAYS WAY BETTER THAN YOU EVEN WITHOUT ANY POWERS.
CG: YEAH THAT'S RIGHT, I KNOW YOUR WHOLE STORY.
CG: YOU WERE ALWAYS JEALOUS SHE COULD MANIPULATE PEOPLE SO WELL WITHOUT RESORTING TO CHEAP MIND TRICKS.
CG: HAHA, I CAN TELL THIS BURNS YOU AND I CAN'T EVEN PAW THROUGH YOUR DUMPSTER!
CG: CHALK IT UP AS ANOTHER INFURIATING VICTORY FOR GUTTER BLOOD OVER ARISTOCRACY.
It’s interesting that although Karkat is extremely cagey about his blood colour, he identifies himself here as a lowblood. Granted, that’s the most logical conclusion to make -- a highblood would have no reason to conceal their blood caste -- but blood colour wasn’t even being discussed until he brought it up.
Karkat ends the chatlog, and then immediately starts messaging AG again.
AG: Oh, 8ack so soon! Did your thum8 slip on the 8utton????????
AG: I guess you can't get enough of me.
AG: ::::)
CG: YOU MADE ME DO THAT.
CG: AND YOU KNOW IT.
AG: You 8n't got nothing on me and you can't prove shit!!!!!!!!
AG: Anyway, Karkat, I just wanted to say.
AG: <3
...okay, I assume she’s using that in a mocking way, because we never get any other indication that she’s romantically interested in Karkat, but man, that threw me for a moment.
FAILURE ARTIST: AG says she can read Karkat’s mind and it’s implied she made Karkat slip up, but you’d think even with Karkat’s mind being a dumpster she’d still find it impossible to resist finding out his blood color.
CHEL: Impossible to not find it, in fact! It must be pretty prominent in his thoughts if it’s important enough to hide.
BRIGHT: The narration then hops to the blue Sagittarius boy, and...uh.
Wow, those sure are a lot of weirdly sexual posters and dismantled robots.
Let’s not beat about the bush here: Teens are (generally) interested in sex and very good at getting hold of depictions of it. On the other hand...thirteen is kind of on the young end for that. Also, most people don’t display their pornography proudly on their walls, although as I type this I remember that cheesecake pin-ups used to be a thing. Heck, maybe they still are. Either way, this is kind of disturbing.
CALL CPA PLEASE: 10
CHEL: Then again, I was never very close to any teenage boys when I was that age; for all I know, maybe they would stick their porn on their walls if they didn’t have parents to stop them.
I’d like to point out the unfortunate implications in having the narrator sound as disturbed as they do in conjunction with all his posters being of male characters. There are plenty of other reasons to be disturbed, plus his interactions with girls are even more disturbing, but as we proceed we’ll see hints that that possibly was meant to be part of the disturbance. Hussie has a real discomfort with m/m attraction, and it shows more than he meant it to.
CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 37
Since the trolls aren’t mammals and their anatomy isn’t necessarily anything a mammal would recognise, fandom’s occasionally had some fun with interpreting this as him not realising the posters are so explicit and just having them because he thinks they look cool, but that’s obviously not the intended meaning.
BRIGHT: I think the reader is also meant to be bothered by the posters being furry art. Honestly that part doesn’t bother me, but furries were the butt of a lot of jokes back in 2009 -- and possibly still are, although I haven’t seen any for years.
FAILURE ARTIST: Personally, when I saw this panel, I was peeved that he wasn’t introduced yet. I liked the cut of his jib for displaying such “art”. Of course, there’s also the shiner his lusus sports which may play a part in the narrator’s discomfort.
BRIGHT: The narration is as disturbed as I am, although possibly for different reasons, and promptly switches to a brief glimpse of the last troll we have to meet, who has dark pink goggles, a Pisces sign, and is prodding a cuttlefish with a trident. Before we can learn anything more about her, off we go again!
This time we return to Aradia, who is flying across the countryside atop the severed head of the frog statue. Her hive, when she reaches it, is in ruins and overgrown by vegetation.
You haven't been here since the night of the accident. On that night you found your CALLING. The voices of the dead grew louder, urging you to return to the ruins you discovered not long before. You left so abruptly, you didn't even have time to bury your lusus.
But that's fine, because trolls don't typically bury their dead. Leaving bodies to be consumed by wild animals is more customary.
We’ve already seen that role-playing accidents on Alternia can be pretty damn extreme, and given that Aradia has telekinesis it’s not a stretch that property damage could get involved, but this is still very effective build-up to the reveal of What’s Up With Aradia. On my first read-through I was really curious about what had happened, and I still think it holds up well.
Aradia starts up the game and allows her co-leader to enter first, since she always intended to enter second. She then has Nepeta connect to her as her server player, and starts setting up the equipment. Since she doesn’t have a dead lusus to prototype the kernelsprite with, she uses the head of the frog statue instead. The dead have assured her that this is critical for later success.
Compelling your nonplussed server player to perform this task might have proven difficult. Luckily your telekinesis, an ability greatly magnified through your CALLING, would be sufficient to move the massive object, whereas the game cursor likely would not.
Your server player simply watched in mystification.
Sprite sorted out, Aradia enters the Medium. Her classpect is MAID OF TIME, and her planet is the LAND OF QUARTZ AND MELODY, which is very pretty. It was important for her to enter second because her client player, presumably AG, has a present for her which can’t be replicated with grist, so they’re going to have to travel through the Gate above their house to get it to her.
Nepeta, meanwhile, is watching in befuddlement, because she can’t see Aradia on the screen...up until Aradia merges with the Frogsprite.
She couldn't see you up until the moment after the sprite's second prototyping.
Because you were dead all along.
HOLY SHIT.
The first time I read Homestuck, this reveal blew me away. (Granted, I was a bit confused by all the hopping around between characters and time points. It makes much more sense on the second read.) It probably wasn’t intended as much of a surprise, given the next page…
We are all completely blown away by this stunning revelation.
Fair enough.
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HS^2 bloggin’ upd8 2020-01-17
Alright, morningblogging yesterday’s 2020-01-17 upd8 to Homestuck^2 let’s go! Spoiler-free again. I kinda don’t want even the next chapter names image-spoiled above the cut anymore so I’m going to have to figure out WHAT to put above the cut in these liveblog posts for visual reinforcement... a unique silly icon? Going back once I’m done with the upd8 and posting something non-spoilery but weird-looking out of context?
Eh, can’t be assed. Just know that after this I’m going to pony up for the Patreon commentary and skim it for anything plot-useful to y’all (in a separate post). Let’s get started.
Okay, what’s next: Any bonuses? Oh, none! Phew. Unless those are coming faster too and just staggered differently, which would mean I gotta overcome my irrational pre-Homestuck-reading anxiety even MORE often. :T
No Homestuck you don’t GET to ask how my-- ah, right. :P
(FYI, HS^2 has been good to my emotions so far, quite a balm for the epilogues, so once I START reading I’m usually fine; but after being hurt so badly how could I possibly convince my lizard brain to trust it until it’s right in front of me? Seriously, just hearing that the upd8 has landed messes me up a bit until I come fix it by reading w/ y’all here.)
Okay, so whose feelings? As much as I’ve been waiting for Jade, I hope this isn’t about Jade.
> ==>
Ah fuck, we’re finally with the Pursuit Crew. Bracing myself. That means we get to see probably sleeping Jade ( :C ), full-swing DaveKat (approving nod), the first canon onscreen look at masculine-mode Roxy (<3), a probably pretty pissed off Kanaya (possibly either the feelings target, the one Saying How Are Your Feelings, or both), and uh... did they drag Callie along? Or leave her back there with her meta freakout? Probably left her back there, but... hm.
Let me turn up the brightness on this screen to sear these next pages into my retinas. (Also, it feels odd to still be using a four-person “==>” for these, although if Jade is still asleep the numbers might fit on both ends... :c )
> ==>
I don’t think Dad is in the spacefaring business, so this is probably one of Jake’s shittier spaceship designs.
> ==>
...well that’s a touch disturbing. Is that a Jade-occupied bed or are those just pillows?
Oh what the fresh fanfic’y heck is this command.
> i enter.
Okay that’s great. I got a kick out of that.
JADE [in calliope red]: the prince’s power grows.
--but that’s not. That explains the narrative command text, it’s alt!callie talking through a still conked-out Jade. Please let her wake up between speak-throughs, please tell me you’ve learned that trick?? I already know you’re gonna pull an “oh she was asleep pretty much all of those THREE YEARS OF TRAVEL” thing on me and that’s hard fucking enough to deal with.
KARKAT: JESUS CHRIST!
He’s actually using the full curse correctly, huh?
...These commands. Guess part of the puzzle is how much alt!Callie is being typically morbid and how much she might actually be wising up enough to get a kick out of this.
> the knight of blood falls.
DAVE: dude can you chill for like even a single fucking second
DAVE: also are you ok
Has CallieJade chilled for even a single second this entire trip?? Is he asking just if Karkat’s okay or Jade too???
--yeah I’m overblowing things out of nervousness. Just wait and see a bit, boots.
Alt!Callie has at least learned to be more of a smartass:
> karkat is characteristically appreciative of the alarm call.
Shirt trade Karkat, nice. And uh, Jade’s dress sure is a... dress. Hm.
(Did alt!Callie alchemize adjustments to did she just luck out to have a red-symbol’d Bec belt and accent leggings? I’d prefer the former, because as much as it would be acceptable within Homestuck proper, using the transition between the epilogues and this new-author’d work to just HAPPEN to give her a fitting outfit without an excuse via providence is kind of lazy.)
KARKAT: OH, PARDON THE FUCK OUT OF ME FOR OVERREACTING A LITTLE WHEN MY GOOD FRIEND "POSSESSED JADE" BUSTS INTO MY RESPITEBLOCK AT 5 AM!
KARKAT: NEXT TIME I’LL JUST PULL THE COVERS BACK AND LET HER CLIMB IN!
JADE: i am uninterested in that scenario.
KARKAT: GREAT! POSSESSED JADE ISN’T EVEN HORNY! HOW FUCKED UP IS THAT?
...please let that mean he’s not used to her being possessed all the time and she wakes up sometimes. PLEASE.
DAVE: but im pretty sure i locked that door
JADE: i unlocked it with my mind.
DAVE: fuck
KARKAT: FANTASTIC.
JADE: the prince’s powers are growing, but so are mine.
Dave, I’m pretty sure regular-ass no-Green-Sun Space powers can flip a few lock tumblers too. (--though, I guess from context this was a Jakeship technolock. Confirmation on the ship’s bad taste in design. --I think I’m foggily remembering it said in the Epilogues that they took one of Jake’s ships just like Dirk did, too... man, being depressed so much by the Epilogues sure took a lot out of my ability to recall them decently.)
KARKAT: LIKE YOU DON’T FLOAT AROUND LIKE A CREEPY PIECE OF SHIT ALL DAY AS IT IS?
God DAMN IT she’s been asleep and possessed the whole fucking time.
> sleep is abandoned, coffee sought.
More obligatory DaveKat being cute, somehow only emphasized by the embarrassing glowing-with-power observer who doesn’t really get any of it.
Ah, here we go:
> the rogue is also awake.
Oh huh. Cool!
Hero outfit, understated... her his choice of heart-shades color-coded to stand out from Dave more to avoid further mistaken identity cases. Works well! (Holy shit I only JUST remembered at the end to go back and correctly gender Roxy as him, that was close. I blame the epilogues for a lack of visual reinforcement; I shouldn’t have as much trouble soon enough. Seriously, I don’t remember ANYTHING without visual reinforcement, I think that’s why I remember so much of Homestuck proper so clearly.)
KARKAT: OH SHIT, THERE SHE IS! I DIDN’T EVEN HEAR HER FOLLOW US!
ROXY: sometimes a girls just got to get her drift on i guess
ROXY: it be like that
ilu roxy.
I missed Roxy so much, you guys. I need more of him remarking on all this crazy shit if I’m gonna stay sane though all this. (And I need more of him and AWAKE JADE kicking ass independently or together if I’m going to continue to believe there’s justice in the world.)
> ==>
We rarely saw Rose drinking anything but the rare coffee in canon, but I think Kanaya would have gotten her plenty into tea, yes. Or at the very least, wanting the aesthetic of drinking tea with Kanaya would have gotten Rose into tea even if it never crossed Kanaya’s mind to try the stuff.
ROXY: well i mean who knows what she drinks now
ROXY: dirk probs tossed the coffee machine out the space window right away
ROXY: dude doesnt "believe" in "substances"
> the prince is contemplated for a moment in silence.
FUCK, Dirk can see the narrative all the way out here??? No wonder alt!Callie’s forced to have possession turned on 24/7. That’s fucking disappointing. How the hell are we going to get any proper Jade time with THAT hanging over our heads? She’d only be able to do anything when Dirk’s knocked out, and maybe not even THEN!
I was virtually promised more of actual non-asleep Jade getting shit done in HS^2. Now there’s an even longer wait on it than I expected. This sucks.
(EDIT: BOY did I misread that link line. Thinking “is contemplated” meant is sitting contemplating, when it meant "is being contemplated by everyone here". That was dumb of me.)
*clicks that next link*
Oh my goodness, Roxy joined the Bird Hair Crew. It makes him look like a fucking asshole but I kind of love it.
KARKAT: IS THERE MILK?
I can’t believe Karkat is okay with drinking milk. --yes, culturally Trolls are more comfortable with animal excretions than we are, but you would’ve thought years of railing against Equius would have purged any tolerance the idea of milk from his psyche.
I guess Dave introduced him to cereal, and it was all over from there.
DAVE: this is more like a castle
DAVE: a castle of idk
DAVE: twenty something ennui
Sounds like a relatable mood. Especially considering Dirk probably decided to conquer reality out of almost nothing but twenty-something ennui.
Alright. You aren’t going to turn Kanaya into an alcoholic or anything on us are you?
> the knight of time seeks a sylph...
--this is the shittiest shipboard starship aesthetic.
> ...and finds her, momentarily.
WOW that looks fucking depressed. :(
> ==>
...okay you know what? Never mind. That outfit has wrapped straight back around into Trying Too Hard and is now hilarious.
DAVE: you ever feel like our whole lives are eventually gonna end up like this
DAVE: just blasting through space on a sweeps long journey to ""somewhere"" chasing after or running from some vague enemy thats sometimes a god modded pet dog and sometimes your dad
DAVE: without the faintest fucking idea of whats going to happen when we get there
DAVE: thats a little specific but you know what i mean
Why do you think the epilogues upset us so much? We thought we’d won free of that bullshit.
> ==>
Oh jesus christ that’s the most depressingly sad I’ve ever seen Kanaya drawn. :C
--Karkat got you to watch Serendipity? That’s amazing, Dave.
KANAYA: You Arent Reminding Me Of Her As I Rarely Think Of Anything Else
KANAYA: I Close My Eyes And I See Her
KANAYA: I Keep Them Open And I See Her
Fuck.
Y’know how little showing these two in love and actually HAPPY together we’ve seen in this entire comic and its subworks? Despite them having spent at least a few happy years together we only saw in tiny screenclips? And how Candy alluded super hard that they most likely couldn’t get that in this real timeline where shit’s going down?
Seriously, FUCK. You could at least pretend to give us some hope, here.
Oh no, don’t ask for the nursery story, Dave. Unless it turns out to be a funny one or a Rose twist on an old story or something. Which it probably is, I should stop worrying.
> ==>
KANAYA: Oh Its A Wriggler Story About A Young Prince And The Beloved Flower He Loved And Lost
DAVE: flower
DAVE: like a plant
KANAYA: Its A Fairytale Dave
DAVE: right
KANAYA: A Singular Wild Rose He Failed To Cherish When He Had Her
KANAYA: And His Journey Of Discovering What She Meant To Him All Along
KANAYA: Culminating In A New Quest To Find Her And Win Her Back
Dirk you PIECE OF SHIT did you rewrite the narrative of the fucking STORIES SHE TOLD CHILDREN?!?? Does the fact that alt!Callie is only in the present mean he can rewrite ANY past event we didn’t literally SEE??? FUCK you. Seriously fuck all of this.
Please tell me she was kidding just then, or realizes there’s fucking something wrong with what she’s saying and getting angry or.
(EDIT: shoutyourporpoise replied: "Hey, idk If you picked up on this, but the 'nursery story' Rose told to the wigglers is just The Little Prince, which is maybe a BIT early for them to read, but I don't think that's a case of Dirk changing the narrative; its just Rose being Too Adult as usual." Oh, damn, I didn't even CATCH that it was that story. That makes all of this a lot more forgivable, even if pretty unforgivably leaning into the fiction that Dirk used to brainwash and kidnap her. Maybe that's exactly why it worked -- fiction, a story so blazed into the public consciousness? Hm. Thanks, shoutyourporpoise.)
KANAYA: But In A Way I Feel As If It Is the Greater Universe Trying To Tell Me Something
Mother fuck I’m even going to have to see our protagonists warped by Dirk when they’re ostensibly FULLY SHIELDED aren’t I. There’s only so much of that I would be able to take, you know.
KANAYA: It May Simply Stem From My Longing To See Her Again And How Much Is Indicative Of Something More Sinister
KANAYA: She Is A Goddess Of Light And The Only Of Her Kind We Know Is Alive After All
KANAYA: Maybe Shes Wrested Dominion Of The Entire Concept In All Its Appearances Within This Frame Of Reference
Hm. Well, it being a product of Rose’s ascension instead of Dirk’s is possibly a more charitable take, with Ultimate Rose projecting the delusion enforced on her backward, visible to past Rose’s Sight when she isn’t paying attention and thus paving the way for Dirk to paradoxically exploit that “ideal” as something Lighty and Important and “Perfect”. I still don’t fucking like it though.
> ==>
DAVE: sorry i know you say you got your badass monster powers but kanaya you look tired as hell
DAVE: not that im tryna psyche you or whatever but youre waxing poetic in the dark which i guess is maybe on brand but still
Yyyep.
DAVE: unless terezi is lurking in the vents somewhere and now that i bring that up its actually not out of the question so im kind of gonna be thinking about that one for a while
Pffff.
DAVE: youre the only person i know whos still basically the same as when i met you
--Which is kind of going to have to change, right? She’s got some other cosmic purpose ready to change her a little more than she changed pre-human-troll-meetup, you’d think.
> ==>
Cute as hell.
> ==>
KANAYA: How Are Your Feelings
There’s the title drop. I’d think Dave’s doing pretty well, considering? Still fucked over by Dirk betraying and tricking Rose away who he’s been close with all his life, but.
> ==>
DAVE: except sometimes your best friend disappears and your other best friend goes into a ghost coma and your third best friend fucks off to space with your dad
DAVE: the dude youve spent the last 7 years convincing yourself isnt an egomaniacal anime villain
DAVE: and who isnt actually lying in wait to completely decimate your life and your emotions and shit
Ah... yeah. A little worse than my casual list, huh? Forgot that Jade vanishing into a possession-coma for THREE FUCKING YEARS is going to be hard on people inside the comic too, fuck.
DAVE: maybe it was naive to think that a bunch of twenty something trauma victims could run a society
I was honestly surprised they TRIED to run society at all. Jasp even just highlighted a big reason why not in the bonuses.
DAVE: cool how earth c existed for centuries then we show up and manage to ruin society in seven fucking years
:(
Well, the trolls got THEIR lesson on why they didn’t deserve to rule over their new universe like gods; I guess some of y’all needed that lesson too?
DAVE: every serious conversation i have inevitably falls apart into riffing on a casual acquaintances ass
True.
Dammit, Dave didn’t feel like he could just be Some Guy even on Earth C. :(
> ==>
...don’t think I’ve forgotten that nursery story, though. I don’t want to think that it was something that ACTUALLY past happened, especially not without manipulation. Like maybe past Rose was foreseeing the false purpose that Dirk wrote for her or the like, a cooperative misunderstanding between the two instead of Dirk or Rose literally reaching back in time.
> meanwhile...
KARKAT: WAIT, WHY THE FUCK AM I EVEN ASKING? HE’S OBVIOUSLY NOT FINE.
KARKAT: ARE ANY OF US? ARE YOU?
ROXY: not rly
KARKAT: EXACTLY.
:(
--Oh right. I remember that Callie and Roxy were going reasonably steady in Meat even though it was only alluded to, she didn’t freak out and stay awol or what have you. That’s good to remember. But it means Roxy deliberately left her behind to go on this dangerous quest, for years. :C
KARKAT: KANAYA BARELY EVEN TALKS, CALLIOPE WON’T LEAVE THEIR CABIN, JADE JUST FLOATS AROUND LIKE A CREEPY BALLOON THAT’S MOSTLY MADE OF HAIR.
Oh, SHIT. I should have read one line further. They DID bring her. Alt!Callie being here too must really FUCK with her. ...maybe she can actually learn to accept that alternate way her life might’ve played out, though?
KARKAT: THE REALLY FUCKED UP THING IS I MIGHT BE THE MOST OKAY OUT OF ALL OF US, WHICH IS HOW YOU KNOW SHIT HAS REALLY GONE GLOBES UP.
Quite true.
ROXY: ur kinda an intense dude anybody ever tell u that
KARKAT: NO.
Pff.
> ==>
KARKAT: AGAINST PRETTY MUCH ALL ODDS, AND DESPITE ME NOT DESERVING ANY OF IT, I ENDED UP GETTING PRETTY MUCH EVERYTHING I WANTED.
KARKAT: OVER AND OVER AGAIN.
KARKAT: SOMETIMES IT ALMOST FEELS LIKE WHATEVER SLATHERING MONSTROSITY OF A COSMIC HELLBEAST THAT PUT ALL THIS SHIT INTO MOTION...ACTUALLY LIKES ME?
Well, if you want to blame Lord English for instance... we never saw Caliborn and Karkat interact much, but the parallels between the two were drawn so severely that Caliborn was basically the idealized, multiverse-threatening Ultimate Kismesis that he’d always dreamed of. And operated against him without him even ever quite realizing it.
If a level of “respect” went from Caliborn to Karkat, too, from his Lord-Englishy vision nigh-omnipresent, then this outcome isn’t very surprising at all.
> ==>
(I don’t quite feel I get why Roxy shifted to this exasperated-Dave expression, but I get logically that he’d been waiting for Karkat to make a breakfast choice... Homestuck proper rarely pulled a “last line said corresponds to next-panel’s expression” without either leaving the conversation blank or having the NEXT lines of the conversation reinforce it, to prevent this inelegant misunderstanding. Andrew was really damned talented in getting his point across visually, in that regard. Just like, that careful visual intent delivery.)
Alright, I guess that’s it for this short upd8! Meeting the pursuit crew was both more and less difficult than I expected. Hopefully I get desensitized a bit as the characters continue to feel semi-almost-sorta-fine.
I have NO idea how this group is gonna work as a proper crew when we get to whatever weird other-players’ session this shit is going down in, though.
#Homestuck#hs2#Homestuck Liveblog#upd8#bladekindeyewear#blastyoboots#spoiler#spoilers#shoutyourporpoise
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Time for more Homestuck 2.
Well, we’re back in space and with a ship (that seems to be crashing), but it isn’t Dirk’s ship. Is this the Rose Rescue Squad? The Dirk Demolition Crew?
Why would you design your space craft like a sea vessel with smoking pipes on the sides?
Well I certainly didn’t expect the interior to be so stark or purple.
WAIT WHAT? FIRST PERSON? WHO IS CONTROL OF THE NARRATIVE RIGHT NOW? Given the lack of capitalization I should be able to pinpoint who it is, but I’m too discombobulated by the first person and too interested in continuing to stop and ponder it much further.
Oh. Hello Jade. Or should I say, Calliope? Yeah, I guess the first person narration should have been a dead give away that it was you since we’re clearly not dealing with Dirk right now. So what are you up to, being all spooky and junk?
Why are you scaring poor Kark- IS THAT DAVE WITH HIM? Right. Right, yeah, they are officially a couple. No maybe we’re dating, maybe we’re not and hiding their feelings, they came out as a couple. Right. Still, it’s so weird to see them just sharing a bed and not being 20ft apart in obvious romantic tension.
I’m sure this was 100% critical information you needed to relay in the spookiest manner possible while Karkat was trying to sleep.
Karkat is wearing Dave’s shirt.
Jade’s outfit is so freaking cute. How is it that she always got the most fashionable outfits?
The black eyes with a green glow actually looks really nice.
Yeah, non-possessed Jade tried to pull a similar situation and we’ve seen the three-way relationship just doesn’t work out.
You know, I always thought dead!Calliope and Dave had the same text color, but now that I’m really looking at it I think Dave’s red is slightly darker. Huh.
Seriously, what was the purpose of this wake-up call?
Oh hey! Our first visual representation of Roxy after their change in gender identity!
Oh, and I just realized I think Dave is wearing Karkat’s shirt.
Roxy’s short hair is cute.
Oh my god, you two!
Dave continuing to strive for familial labels and correcting himself with Roxy and Roxy continuing being chill with whatever gives me life. I really love when these two interact.
Either Kanaya grew out her hair or she’s wearing a cloak. In either case it’s making me really sad seeing her sitting alone in the dark. I’m sure she’s been dealing with a lot of emotions since Dirk took Rose away and also messed with her own perceptions of the event.
Cloak it is and OH MY GOD SHE’S WEARING A LITTLE PURPLE ROSE MY HEART CAN’T TAKE THIS.
Never change, Dave.
Nice to see the return of the purple sash, though now more a Rose shade than an Eridan shade. I also appreciate the jade side panel.
You really think the only person who would do that is Karkat? Not John or Jake? Granted you never really hung out with Jake and as far as I’m aware you think John is missing, but still.
This line just hit me really hard and is pretty much exactly what I expected. Can’t have someone make you think of something when you’re already thinking about it and it’s really the only thing you ever think about anymore.
Oh no, I should have kept reading. It keeps punching me in the good writing feels.
Wow, that’s a concept I hadn’t considered before. When you’re in love with a literal god of relevancy are your affections truly your own or simply a symptom of their powers? When something reminds you of them is it really your own perception or is reality forcing you to be reminded of them? Such contemplations must be doubly so for Kanaya since she’s already experienced a different god warping her own sense of reality and self to his whims.
Good guy Dave coming in to roundhouse kick that navel gazing.
Dave is just... such a good guy, you guys. I am so glad he exists to be friends with Kanaya.
DAVE IS SO SWEET AND GOOD.
Dave are you... are you seriously going to start rapping about all this? Of course you are, and that’s just another reason why we love you.
These characters’ collective situation is really fucked up when you stop and think about it.
This is simultaneously heartbreaking and hilarious.
Hey, Terezi didn’t die!
It’s kind of funny how not interested Roxy is in this conversation with Karkat. Karkat’s just rambling on and Roxy is just doing a tick above verbal grunts and ends with “yeah, so do you want breakfast or not, dude?”
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Steph Talks For Way Too Long About Sollux’s Harry Potter House
I havent been able to stop thinking or talking about this topic for like 60+ hours
first wanna say that it’s really hard to interpret how people are sorted because JK Rowling is apparently shitty at writing. So people seem to have wildly different opinions on why people are in the houses they’re in because they view the houses and their qualifications differently.
I’ve also never read a harry potter book and havent watched a movie for like 5+ years maybe so i had to talk to like 3-4 people who went though huge harry potter phases and we talked for over 3 hours cumulatively for me to make up my mind.
I think it’s really important to say that because Sollux isn’t really a main character, there’s a lot we have to make guesses on. Hussie didn’t make a big sheet full of Sollux’s Dreams and Ambitions, Morals and Beliefs, so we have to fill in a lot of blanks on what we think those are based on a few things.
Who he talks to, and associates himself with
and what he does
The point being we don’t have a lot to work with.
It’s also pretty important to say that Sollux puts on a LOT of fronts and facades. He’s only truly mean and cruel to people he doesn’t like or care about Plus Karkat. He plays Fake Mean a lot, and if you dig even a centimeter under it, we see time and time again that he’s just pretending and does actually give many shits.
Sollux is also really passive in most things that he does. He doesn’t really question anyone’s authority or make a point to fight something out very often. The only time we ever see him resort to action to solve his problems are when dealing with Eridan. And even then, the first time we ever see them talk, it’s Eridan walking up to him and Feferi privately having a conversation and Sollux telling his gf to “make him go away.” And then after Eridan doesn’t go away, we see him resort to fighting. His PQ arc also has him antagonize Eridan and then drop a building on him, so like, yeah.
Usually, when presented with conflict, Sollux either removes himself from the situation quickly, or if he’s unable to do so, makes it extremely clear that he doesn’t want to engage. In most cases, Sollux is by himself, sitting alone and not making attempts to talk to anyone else. It’s totally possible that he’s more social at other times and we only see him when he’s at his worst, but we dont see that so we can’t really speculate much on it. Point being, he’s very passive and self contained/oriented.
What i really want to put emphasis on is the people he associates with. His main friends we see him talk to willingly or at least show fondness for are Aradia, Feferi, Kanaya, Terezi, and Karkat. Three of these are considered main characters, or are at least given character arcs to some extent. These are the good guys. The guys who at least try to do good, and show compassion, and care about others.
The characters we see him either avoid quietly, avoid loudly or vocally hate and commit violence against are the rest of the characters. Namely Vriska, Gamzee and Eridan. (im kinda gonna gloss over Vriska because his distaste/hatred/unpleasantness towards her doesn’t have to be a moral statement on his part. It’s pretty easy to assume that anyone with his past to her would have a similar if not identical stand point) These are characters that actively do bad things, they murder and harm others at worst and are gross nasty incels at best. And even the best case in that scenario is still blabberingly racist and, treats sollux and the people he cares about like shit. Sollux doesn’t associate with people that the comic have established are villains, or at least do things that are pretty unambiguously wrong or evil.
In Sollux’s pesterquest, Kanaya tells MSPA reader than when The Thing with Aradia first happened, Sollux refused contact with Kanaya because she didn’t cut off Vriska. He was upset at her for being associated with someone who traumatized him. This is very telling of sollux’s personality and his relationship with his friends, and it’s a side we don’t see of Sollux any other time in the comic or in his PQ arc. It’s only when she tells him that she doesn’t cut Vriska off due to romantic feelings for her does Sollux change his mind. He doesn’t bring up Vriska, Aradia, his grief or his trauma at any point while at his visit with her that we see. He doesn’t appear mad or reluctant to be there, he makes jokes, smiles, and reminisces memories with her fondly, even almost sleeps over at her place for the day. It’s like he’s completely forgotten about being upset at her at all, or is at least choosing not to bring it up out of respect for her.
Again, it’s unclear how much time has passed. But when you start his arc, the reason youre talking to him is because he’s been reclusive out of grief. He hasn’t been talking to people lately and his friends are worried about him. So clearly enough time has passed for him to be okay with seeing Kanaya, as that’s his sole purpose for leaving his hive that day at all, but not enough time for him to be fully recovered.
This moment in his arc showcases his loyalty that he has for Kanaya, and possibly his other friends. He seemed quick to forgive her, or at least bury whatever resentment he may have been harboring. One may say that his cold shoulder to Kanaya would be indicative of a lack of a loyalty trait at all, that if he were loyal to her, he wouldn’t be ready to possible end his relationship with her over this. But i kind of view it as a sort of bluff? Like Kanaya essentially told him that his trauma did not at all change the way she feels about her, Kanaya still has a crush on Vriska after hearing about what she did to one of her good friends. To some, this may have been a slap to the face, an entire dismissal of his trauma in it’s entirety. But instead, he sees it as a valid reason for not cutting her off, he shrugs it off. I feel like if he were serious about not wanting to be friends with Kanaya while she was talking to someone who hurt him greatly, her crush wouldn’t have been an excuse.
I also wanna touch on his loyalty to Aradia very quickly because you dont need me to tell you that he cares about her. Once again for like the third time, we have to make guesses on how much time has passed between events. From the time Aradia dies on Alternia, becomes a ghost with an entirely new personality, a robot with another personality, and then finally her alive Godtier self, Sollux’s feelings for her are very consistent. He seems to not really care for the ghost or robot versions of her, he even sits a chair away from her during Openbound on the meteor, and doesn’t talk to her much, is very cold towards her, and even tells her that she’s incapable of feeling when she tries to tell him goodbye when she explodes (it’s also worth noting he cries after this, which i think is the first and only time we see him do this). When Aradia comes back to the meteor, alive and herself again, Sollux immediately leaves the rest of his friends to go hang out with her. Even with Karkat begging him to stay, he just peaces out, without even really thinking about it.
We have to assume that if it’s not written in the dialogue, it isn’t being said. So he doesn’t discuss wanting to leave with Aradia or with anyone else. He just decides he’s leaving, and then does. And he stays by her side for almost the rest of the time we see him. He ditches later for other reasons, but don’t worry, they’re back together by the time Collide is happening.
Point being, for the most part, he sticks by his friends unless they’re doing something he disagrees with morally. If he’s not down for what’s happening, he’s not down for sticking around. He even seems to be better friends with Nepeta now that this version of her isn’t really hanging out with Equius that much, someone Sollux would no doubt not get along with for many reasons.
Some of my friends pointed out that him sticking by his morals so strongly is something a Slytherin would do, coupled with the fact that he’s kind of a dick or something idk that much about Slytherins. But I think Huffliepuff is very much about comradery. We can tell a lot about Sollux based on who he surrounds himself with and what he does and doesn’t participate in. He doesn’t participate in trolling humans, he doesn’t participate in helping Vriska do something he doesn’t feel good about doing, he doesn’t participate in any of the relationship melodrama happening around him.
But he helps his friends. He helps Kanaya open the viewfinder to see and talk to Rose, he helps Kanaya do little errands in his PQ route, he helps Terezi find out who Dave is, and he sacrifices himself to save the remainder of his group (which btw only contains the people I’ve previously stated he associates with minus feferi not that that means anything i just thought it was kind of fun to point out). I mean, he got better but its the thought that counts.
Someone could make a point that “If Sollux is so loyal, why didn’t he mourn Feferi even a little bit when he found out she was dead?” And yeah, that’s a good point to bring up, and i don’t really have anything to say about it other than….maybe he knew by this point that death doesn’t really mean anything? Maybe his euphoria of finally being lifting of the voices was happening at the same time? And also that he predicted he’d go blind like a million pages ago and now he can finally stop worrying about it? Is he happy that he’s talking to Terezi and right now that’s more important? It’s hard to tell. Sollux doesn’t really explain himself apart from “missing being her matesprite” when in Erisolsprite form talking to Fefetasprite form. It’s hard to tell what their relationship was at the time, or what his feelings truly were immediately afterward. I kinda think it was the foremost of those explanations, he probably knew that she’d come back as a ghost, or something?
Anyway, those are all the reasons i can think of at the moment for why I think Sollux would be Hufflepuff. A lot of his personality revolves around his friends, who he considers friends and who he doesn’t consider friends. Send me asks, message me, and do that shit if you wanna talk more, but i probably won’t have a whole lot to say lmao. Or ill just restate a lot of what i said here.
Props for getting this far. For the record, if Sollux for some reason was unable to be in Hufflepuff, I’d probably put him 50/50 Ravenclaw or Slytherin. I really don’t think he’s a Gryfindor because as I understand it, that house is very much about being courageous, and standing up for yourself and i went off for way to long about how he’s a little weenie man who does nothing mostly.
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I have always been confused about Nepeta being a Derse dreamer, she looks more like the creative and optimistic type, is it only because she was on the blue team? (Cuz all the members from the red team were from Prospit and viceversa)
Let me recall something Hussie himself mentioned regarding Prospit and Derse dreamers.
What exactly determines whether a person is a Derse or Prospit dreamer? Or is it just random?
I wouldn’t say random, but it’s certainly vague. I guess it’s a little like sorting hat logic in Harry Potter (which I have a really halfassed understanding of because I haven’t read it), but even more vague, and more binary.
You get some sense there is rhyme and reason to it when you look at the personality types of the two groups. John, Jade, Jake, Jane vs Rose, Dave, Dirk, Roxy. And the troll groups were divided by their teams, red vs blue. Blue team (Derse) was generally stocked with more scheming members. Red team (Prospit) had some more straightforward heroic types, at least as far as trolls go. But then there can be oddball designations that don’t seem to make sense by such simplistic parameters, like Vriska being on Prospit. If she and Nepeta were swapped the criteria might seem more clear cut. See again, sorting hat logic. Like I think Harry was supposed to be in Slytherin because he could talk snakes and was kind of moody and shit but he was just SO BRAVE and loved friendship SO MUCH he got put in the other one. But for real, my fanfic where he was a Slytherin all along is so much better. (he is naked in most of it)
You could also look to the passive/active nature of the classes in making some retroactive sense of the Derse/Prospit dreamer duality. Passive/active classes are also a pretty vague thing, and don’t resolve so easily into simple dualities like defensive/offensive and such. Those are the guidelines for understanding them, but there is clearly a lot of flexibility within that system. They seem to suggest tendencies rather than absolute capabilities. Like there isn’t a rule that says a passive class could never use an offensive technique. The system is meant to be very flexible, and in the story, classes suggest a little more about a hero’s path and role in the greater quest than what their battle capabilities are.
But if we’re saying active/passive literally translates to offensive/defensive for the sake of this topic, then Derse would be very active and Prospit would be very passive. Derse’s job is to attack. Prospit’s is to defend. This seems to carry over to the roles of the dreamers too. Dave and Rose turned out to be very active players. Dave time traveling all over the place, making a fortune on stocks and such. Rose went on her crazy solo mission to break the game and fight Jack. Jade and John had more passive roles through most of that, players who were “acted upon” by other players and circumstances. John was always being led around by trolls this way and that, drifting around wherever the wind took him. Jade was especially passive for a lot of the story, spending a lot of time falling asleep (or being put to sleep) at key moments. It wasn’t until she reached god tier as a Witch (said to be a highly active class) that she became extremely active, making lots of stuff happen, rounding up planets and all that. Rose may have been a similar case, being excessively active as a Derse dreamer, but then flipping over to a passive role upon reaching god tier as a passive class.
Being from Derse means you are from a culture of offense and aggression. Being from Prospit means the opposite. You could argue that these are qualities that either rub off on the dreamers, or they are designated as those dreamers in the first place because of those qualities. You could take the view that these are innate tendencies to overcome, as seemed to be the case for Jade and Rose. Or maybe sometimes they are tendencies that are resisted, and need to be understood and embraced. As a Prospit dreamer, did Karkat struggle because he was actually passive in nature, but had a very active self image as a leader and conqueror? Was Vriska an even more extreme case of misplaced active behavior from a Prospit dreamer? These are yet more things to consider when looking at everything contributing to the hero story of an individual in this game.
Perhaps you could look it as a tug of war, between Nepeta’s more… ‘Wild Huntress’ nature, her confidence issues, and her Morailship with Equius. Is Nepeta naturally more active and is better off being held back from going too far? Or is she more happy being active, and needs to overcome a state of passivity from Equius, and her lack of confidence to tackle things such as her feelings for Karkat? Food for thought.
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the ultimate form of dave getting left in the dust is jade running away with karkat. jade is significant other now!!!
jade is all ‘i like both dave and karkat!’ then later goes ‘i actually like karkat a bit more so i’m just gonna take him and leave. thanks for the food dave!!!’ karkat goes with her and dave can’t do anything about it. he’s just standing/sitting there with empty hands
JADE AND KARKAT START DATING AND DAVE’S THE THIRD WHEEL AND IT’S A NIGHTMARE FOR DAVE THE WHOLE TIME. dave’s glad for the sunglasses because no one can see him just staring into space in stony silence the whole time
JADE AND KARKAT GET MARRIED AND THEY ASK DAVE TO BE THEIR BEST MAN. dave says yes, of course he does. jade wears a suit and karkat wears dress and dave thinks they both look good-karkat especially-but he’s mostly Suffering. dave cries at jade and karkat’s wedding and everybody thinks dave’s overcome with joy. and dave is happy for them! but he’s mostly crying because well you know, you know
the kicker is rose looks dave in the eye and says ‘sucks to be you’ and kanaya says ‘as known artist avril lavigne said “chase two loves, lose both.”’ dave cries and kanaya pats his back comfortingly and rose hands him tissues
dave spends his time during jade and karkat’s wedding reception hovering near the buffet table and a drink in his hand. dave shoves food in his mouth and drinking juice aggressively and when jade and karkat and everybody else asks him if he’s okay, dave says that he’s appreciating the catering
IMAGINE JADE AND KARKAT (AND ROSE) HAVING A KID AND DAVE IS THE GODFATHER AND UNCLE. dave loves the kid of course, almost cries when holding them and is violently protective of them and dotes on them but somewhere in dave’s mind, he is always going :’(
jade and karkat date and marry and dave deals with it. sometimes with a surprising amount of grace and sometimes with unsurprisingly lack of grace
one day, jade tells dave ‘i know you’re in love with karkat’ and jade can see dave’s mind blue screen. jade reassures dave that it’s okay and she’s not mad at him at all! and all dave wants is to get away from this conversation, fuck, this world. he doesn’t want to have this conversation with karkat’s spouse!!!
dave goes ‘i’m not in love with karkat’ and rose, kanaya and jade stare at him incredulously. is dave fucking shitting with them right now??? is he denying being in love with karkat even though he’s spent fucking years pining for him??? dave what the fuck why are you so stupid. jade gets so fed up with dave that she tells him ‘this is why karkat married me instead of you’ and jade knows it’s a low blow okay but it has to be said!!!
dave goes ‘i’m in love with karkat’ and jade stops drinking her coffee to look him in the eye and say ‘dave, i’ve been married to karkat for over five years’ and jade continues sipping her coffee. jade loves and cares for dave but she’s really is done with all of this. ‘congrats on your epiphany dave!!! i’m gonna go smooch karkat!!! my spouse’ then leaves. dave is just sitting there with his heads in his hands. at least dave’s hands isn’t empty this time!
jade figures out dave and karkat’s feelings for each other. she has known for a long fucking time. when jade kisses karkat, she expects dave to do or say something. dave doesn’t. jade kisses karkat again, asks karkat out and sleeps with karkat and she goads dave by telling him about all of that but dave still doesn’t do anything. jade’s thought of ‘you’re actually just gonna let me have karkat huh’ gets progressively more frustrated. do something dave!!! dave doesn’t and jade’s thought of ‘you’re actually just gonna let me have karkat huh’ turns into annoyed resignation then later into matter of factness
when karkat tells jade ‘i love you’, jade is overjoyed and more than a little bit smug. take that dave!!!
when rose and kanaya bring up dave’s feelings for karkat, dave denies it and rose and kanaya give each other this Look. they don’t bring it up ever again until dave has the Epiphany. jade brings up dave’s feeling once and never again. after she marries karkat, it really isn’t jade’s problem anymore
when dave gets the Epiphany, jade takes a pic of dave processing it and sends it to kanaya and rose.
‘can i get an f in the chat’
‘f‘
‘f’
jade puts her phone back in her pocket and goes to find karkat. ‘call me after you feel better dave!!!’
jade back then: dave loves karkat and he’s never gonna say it :(
jade later: maybe dave will confess karkat is i help!
jade when dating karkat: dave still in love with karkat and he still hasn’t said anything >:(
jade when she marries karkat: dave’s still in love with karkat and that’s how this just goes now ��
jade after she marries karkat: dave’s still in love with karkat. cheers i’ll drink to that
dave tells jade that he’s in love with karkat and jade just goes ‘so do i! that’s why am i married him.’ jade and dave stare at each other and jade asks dave if he wants more coffee and dave can only weakly say yeah he does want more coffee
jade tells dave to get over karkat because she cares for him and actually wants him to be happy and dave thinks the whole thing is really fucking weird but appreciates it
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Stress
Sometimes Dave has...problems.
(Read it in ao3 here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12856728)
He gets like this sometimes.
Dave’s been keeping weird hours for the past few days, by which you mean he isn’t fucking sleeping so far as you can tell. He’ll come to bed with you, but you wake up, halfway through every night, and he’s not next to you. Sometimes he’s hunched over his laptop across the room; sometimes he’s just gone to somewhere else in the hive that you both share. If he sees you awake, he comes back, but as soon as he can he’s gone again.
He won’t tell you about it. Or maybe it’s that you don’t know how to ask. He doesn’t want to talk at all, lately, and he’s wearing his shades all the time, indoors as well as out…has he even left the hive in the last week or two?
You don’t know. This whole state of affairs makes you uncomfortable, makes you worry about Dave more than you have in a long time, and you fucking hate it. He’s on edge, and you’re on edge, and neither him nor you should have to be like this. Not anymore. That you don’t know how to fix him is driving you up the fucking wall.
Maybe this is a human thing.
It’s not one of the good human things.
Maybe it’s a Dave thing. Honestly, there are a lot of those—ones you love, ones that are just weird, and ones that you can only put up with by gritting your teeth and reminding yourself that yes, you love this idiot more than you love life. This would be either one of those last or a fourth category, the kind of thing that you’d give your right hand for him to be free of. There’s only a few things on that list.
Mostly, you’ve been working around this new strangeness and hoping Dave works it out, or lets you help. When you figure out that he’s been stashing the meals you thought he was eating in the fridge, though…at that point you give up on the awkward dancing around pointing out that he has a problem, and start searching the hive for him. His not sleeping right will iron itself out in time, not talking to you is…well, worrying but understandable—but he’ll hurt himself like this, and you can’t stand still and let that happen. You know Dave almost always hates it when you go into full lusus mode on him, but you’re worried and a little scared, and you can’t think of any other way to do this.
Still, you didn’t expect to find him at the kitchen table, staring at his laptop and not making the slightest move to wipe away the tears streaming down his face. Either he doesn’t hear you come in or he doesn’t care, because as you come up behind him, all he does is twitch the computer mouse slightly, adding a few more lines to whatever he’s working on.
He’s working left-handed, too. He almost never does that anymore, unless it’s for Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff. One more wrong thing to worry over.
"Oh, Dave.“ He jerks when you say his name, cursor darting up to minimize the window, but other than that he doesn’t move. "Talk to me? Please?”
Dave just shakes his head, but when you move behind him and put your hands on his shoulders, he reaches up to wrap his fingers around your wrists, pulling until you’re leaning closer to him and your arms are circling his chest. He’s still quiet for a good few minutes, just holding your wrists as if he’s afraid you’ll let go of him otherwise.
"Dave—"
"Karkat.“ He leans back a bit, glancing up at you. His face is still wet, but his eyes are dry for the moment, if very bloodshot. ”…love you.“
"I love you too.” Dave won’t let go of your hands, so you lean over to give him a gentle, upside-down kiss on the forehead. “You’re making me worry, though—”
"Damn. ’m sorry.“
"Shoosh. I know this isn’t something you mean to do. Dave, all I want you to do is talk to me. Tell me how things are wrong, so we can fix them.”
Dave’s got his eyes closed now, has since you leaned in to kiss him, and he doesn’t seem to want to open them. If it weren’t for his grip on your wrists, you’d think he fell asleep between one of your sentences and the next. You wish he had. That might be close to the best thing for him.
It’s at least another minute or two before he sighs and says quietly, “I don’t know, man. ’s all piling up on me again, you know?” He shifts a little, hands tightening on you for a second. “The old shit. The fuckin’ game.”
"That’s over, Dave.“ When you kiss his forehead again, he relaxes just enough to let you slip one hand out of his grip. Dave flinches when you touch his face, but he goes still after that, letting you wipe the tears away. "I know it doesn’t feel like it sometimes, even after all this time, but I swear. It’s done.”
"Yeah. I know. Half of me, anyway.“ He swallows, shakes his head, and keeps talking even though his voice gets a touch hoarser with every word. "It's—always there, you know, we’ve talked about this shit? I can—tell myself I’m out, I’m done, that shit’s over with, but there’s times I just—every fuckin’ moment I keep thinkin’ I’ll turn around and—it w-won’t be—”
Dave’s voice cracks and he stops talking, biting down on his lip hard enough that you worry he’ll make himself bleed, clinging to your arm. He’s crying again, pretty much soundlessly other than his uneven breathing. Those small noises that he does let out hurt as much or more than if he’d been sobbing. There isn’t much you can do for him right now, though, other than come around to squeeze between him and the table, whispering shooshes at him and wiping at his face as gently as you can.
Eventually his breathing evens out again and he relaxes. A little. He lets go of you with one hand, letting his head drop to one side and rubbing at his eyes.
"Come here,“ you tell him, and he nods, letting go and waiting just until you take your hand away before he leans forward. If you weren’t there, he would’ve ended up on the floor.
"Tired,” he mumbles into your shirt, wrapping his arms loosely around your waist. “God, I’m soft…used to be able to deal, go longer'n this, no problem, but ’m so fuckin’ tired…’m sorry.”
"Shh. It’s okay.“ He’s mostly limp, not heavy enough to make picking him up difficult; he curls against you when you lift him off the ground, not opening his eyes. "Here’s what’s going to happen: you’re going to lie down and I’m not going to let you up until you’ve had at least a couple hours sleep—”
"Couch.“ Dave shakes his head slightly, tightening his grip on you a bit. "On the couch, okay? Please?”
"Okay, of course—as long as you sleep. And when you wake up, you’re going to eat.“
"Not hungry.” He won’t let go of you when you try to put him down, so you just sit down on the couch and lean back, lying down with Dave curled up on top of you. “Don’t want—”
"Dave. Shoosh. You need to eat, babe.“
You’re not sure what he mumbles back, but it kind of sounds like him questioning the logic of your calling him a human endearment that doesn’t actually have any meaning or equivalent in your culture. Even when he’s tired, he’s a snarky asshole. A sweet snarky asshole.
"Go to sleep.”
Actually, you think he’s out already. Good.
Dave’s got his head turned to one side, pressed against your chest as if he’s listening for your heartbeat, at just the angle for you to be able to see his face. You brush a lock of his white-blond hair away from his eyes—fuck, but his skin’s barely warmer than a seadweller’s; you’ve lived with him for sweeps and that still surprises you sometimes. The shadows under his eyes are purple, too, even though you know his blood’s as red as yours. He might as well be royal, so far as you care—even though he’s outside the hemospectrum and the game gave him the class of Knight rather than one of the nominally more important ones, he’s better than any highblood or prince in your eyes.
It kills you when he falls apart like this.
At least you’re okay at putting things back together. You’ve gotten him through the first step—sleeping, resetting some part of the cycle he gets set in of feeling like shit from lack of sleep and not sleeping because he feels terrible—and right now all you need to do is wait.
You’re not often a patient person, but this is for Dave. And honestly, you haven’t been sleeping all that well either, without him. It’s very easy to doze off with him curled loosely across you. You just hope your purring doesn’t wake him.
Over the sweeps that you’ve lived with Dave, you’ve learned that he has an innate ability to keep track of the passage of time, whether or not he has any reference points. Either it’s something genetic, or part of his relationship with his aspect, you don’t know; either way it’s a part of him. Unfortunately, you don’t have that talent, so you haven’t the foggiest idea how long it’s been when you come awake again.
Long enough for your neck to be sore. Damn couch.
That becomes less important almost immediately when you realize that Dave is, actually, awake, despite the fact that he’s barely moving. “Barely” is the key word, though…he’s trembling, both hands clenched in your sweater and face pressed against your chest. Crying, pretty much silently.
You’ve already got your arms around him; that’s how you sleep when you can. Dave gasps a little, a wet sound that could be called a sob, when you shift under him to hug him a bit tighter.
"Dave, are you—"
"Uh-uh.“ He shakes his head as much as he can without raising his face from your sweater. "A m-minute…give, give me—”
"Shh, yeah. Okay.“ That’s an answer to the question you didn’t quite finish, even if he didn’t mean it that way. "It’s okay. We have time.”
Dave doesn’t respond to that at all, but maybe his shaking eases a little when you reach up to start running your fingers through his hair, trying to calm him. That’s harder to do than you expected; his hair’s messy, as tangled as if he’s been ignoring it for days. He probably has been…deal with that later.
It takes what seems like a long time for him to stop shaking and relax enough to let go of your sweater. Once he does, you let him just lie there for a minute or so before you ask the same question again.
"Are you okay, Dave?“
For another second he doesn’t answer. Then he raises his head, blinking blurrily at you and forcing a small smile. "Got you all gross, Karkat,” he says, almost softly enough to disguise how rough his voice is. “Sorry…”
"I’ve had worse,“ you tell him, and pull him up enough that you can kiss him gently. He’s damp, and tastes vaguely of salt, and chuckles weakly against your lips before you pull back to look at him. "Besides, that’s what washing machines are for, right?”
"Mm.“ Dave sighs, leaning forward to rest his forehead against yours, blinking slowly. "You’re an angel, you know that?”
"Am not.“ Damn but his eyes are perfect even when they’re sleepy and half-focused. "Human angels have wings. And stupid floating crown things…did you have a nightmare?”
"Nah.“ He shakes his head without moving his forehead away from yours; the answer’s quick but you still think he’s being truthful. "No dreams…woke up awhile ago…I was thinking, y'know? ‘Bout everything that happened and, uh…stuff that didn’t, not for you. And Karkat, fuck, I know that it’s all over and that shit was—was years ago, but sometimes I just—”
Dave stops. Takes a deep breath and holds it for a few seconds, closing his eyes. You don’t know what to say right now; you just have to hope that holding him is enough. He isn’t crying now, at least. That’s something.
"Time works different in your head, huh?“ you ask softly after a moment, and he nods without pulling back or opening his eyes. "We’ll work this out, Dave. Promise.”
Another nod, and he sniffles a bit and pushes himself up, rolling off you to sit on the edge of the couch and rubbing at his eyes. You want to pull him back, fold him up in your arms and talk him into believing that he’s safe—fuck, not even talk, just hold him and tear the shit out of anything that thinks it can come after him—but instead you sit up next to him, rubbing at your neck for a moment.
"Love you, 'Kat,“ Dave says before you can say anything, leaning against you.
"I love you too, dumbass.” Dave laughs at that, like he does almost every time you use insults as sincere terms of endearment; you wait until he stops to continue. “So. What do you want to eat? And if you say 'nothing,’ I’m going and programming the alchemizer to spit out one of every even vaguely edible item in its database.”
He literally had his mouth open to say just that, and now he’s trying very hard to stifle a laugh, almost choking on it. “Would that be edible by your standards or mine?”
Laughing is good.
"Terezi’s,“ you say as seriously as you possibly can.
"Oh god no.” That comes out as dead serious as you were pretending to be, and then he’s just laughing, whacking your shoulder gently with one hand. “F-fucking pickled egg and chalk pizza, goddamn…”
He’s destressing, it’s not funny enough for the reaction he’s giving it, but you’re still smiling and trying to swallow the purr in your chest as you watch him. Dave doesn’t laugh for as long as he cried, but he stops almost the same way, tapering off slowly as he wipes at his eyes.
"You didn’t answer the question, babe,“ you prompt him when you’re pretty sure he’s done. "Unless you wanted pickled-egg-and-chalk pizza.”
Dave snorts, shaking his head. “Let’s not. But yeah, pizza’s good. Or something from Earth…y'know, hot and fast, really good but gonna be really bad for me in the long run, tastes like not caring about the long run.”
"Food poet.“ He rolls his eyes at you when you lean over to kiss him. "Human fast food, got it. Go wash your face, put on a clean shirt, and meet me in the kitchen when you’re done, okay?”
"Oh.“ Dave blinks, looks down at himself, and nods as he gets to his feet. "Oh, yeah…give me, like, ten minutes. Think I need more than a quick face-wash.” He glances at you as he says it, like he’s not sure that’s okay.
"Take your time. It’s fine.“ You watch him, and wait until he shuts the bathroom door before you get up off the couch. Time to see exactly how much Dave-comfort-food is in the memory bank for the alchemizer…if there isn’t enough, you’re fully prepared to get online and pester every other human who remembers old Earth for more codes.
Actually, though, the alchemizer has a lot of codes for what you need. Like. Fuck. A lot. You don’t bother to consider the choice you’re making for more than a second before you start queuing every item that fits your criteria.
…oh wow that’s a lot.
You’re absorbed enough in moving food that you don’t hear Dave come up behind you until he reaches up to wrap his arms around your shoulders. "Holy shit,” he says softly. “I know I’ve got a rep for being able to eat everything in sight, but I think you might be overdoing it, Karkat.”
A container of fried potato sticks—they don’t look like french fries but you guess they might be—materialize on top of the fried burrito thing that you haven’t moved yet. Not that there’s anywhere else to move it to.
"…yeah, I think you’re right for once.“ You shrug, careful not to shake him off, and reach over to cancel whatever else the machine has left to dispense, snagging the weird fries and popping one into your mouth before pushing the packet into Dave’s hand. "This is what happens when you give me vague instructions, Dave. Pure chaos.” Holy fuck those potato sticks are spicy.
"Chaos,“ Dave repeats, letting go of you and examining what you’ve handed him before tasting one of the fries. "Oh my god, I haven’t have these in ages…” Apparently he’s immune to whatever spices are currently burning your mouth. By the time that you’ve filled and drained a glass of water four times, he’s eaten the full container and is considering the remaining selection of food. “Uh…want to pick something else, split out with me?”
"Sure.“ If it gets him to eat, definitely…there’s a few things you’re curious about, mostly ones that you couldn’t quite identify. You’d set those aside, and now you pick up one of the plain white takeout boxes—some kind of round fried things, with a smaller container of dipping sauce. "How about these?”
Dave stares at them for a second, then looks up at you. “You have no idea what those are, do you?” he asks, grabbing one and dunking it in the sauce.
"Uh…mushrooms?“ They look kind of like fried mushrooms, you think. You pick one up and bite into it—no, that’s definitely meat. Good, but…"Never mind, not mushrooms.”
"Oh, yeah, not mushrooms.“ Dave’s already on at least his third fried meat thing, talking with his mouth full. "See, these’re like a Texas thing, Texas an’ around there. Southwestern, maybe? Call 'em rocky mountain oysters.”
You have had oysters, several ways, including raw and fried. “Dave, these aren’t oysters.”
"Nah, course not.“ Him laughing with his mouth full is several orders of magnitude worse than him just talking, but at least he’s got the common sense or courtesy to cover his mouth. That grin is almost certainly for a joke about the tasty meat orbs that you’re not in on.
You’re suddenly not sure you want to put the one that you’re holding into your mouth. "So…what are they?”
Dave doesn’t answer for a minute, probably because he’s chewing, so you decide you might as well eat it while you’re waiting, though. The result of this decision is that your own mouth is full when he oh-so-sweetly says, “You know earth cows, right? Bulls are male cows, rocky mountain oysters are fried bull testicles.”
He has the grace to catch the container as you drop it and make sure that it only sounds like you’re choking to death before he starts laughing.
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Chapter One: That Suffix is Greek For Destroyer.
Equius was dead to begin with. No, that’s a stupid beginning. Let’s start somewhere happier.
John, Dave, and Karkat were playing Mario Kart. They were in Dave’s house. Dave, being a Hero of Time, could easily use some time travel to make sure the place stayed clean, but no, junk littered the area. The mess spanned from a stack of dinosaur fossils next to the tv, to an impressive tower of cups and plates in the sink. Dave’s sword, Caledfwlch, was plunged in the wall. Three boys sat on the leather sofa. Man, this sofa is comfortable. Karkat sat on the right. He was the Knight of Blood. He’s pretty shouty. Dave, the Knight of Time, sat in the middle. He wore sunglasses, and liked making raps and archaeology. What a cool guy. John sat on the left. He was the Heir of Breath and he liked Nick Cage movies.
Image 1: The Boys
“YOU BETTER NOT BE AIMING THAT RED SHELL AT ME, JOHN EGBERT.” Karkat whispered, not daring to release his eye contact from the screen.
On the tv screen, Yoshi crept behind Bowser, a red shell a way from causing personal destruction.
John showed no mercy. “Hehehehe.”
Karkat growled. “I’M WARNING YOU, EGBERT.”
John threw his red shell.
Karkat threw his joy-con. “OH F*** YOU, EGBERT. YOU KNOW HOW STUPID YOU LOOK IN YOUR BIDDYBUGGY? WHY DID YOU EVEN THINK YOU COULD FACE MY LANDSHIP? YOU THINK A RED SHELL WILL STOP ME? YOU ARE ONE LAP AWAY FROM YOUR JUDGEMENT DAY, GOT IT? ONE. LAP. AWAY.
Roy zoomed on his Yoshi Bike, right past Bowser and crashed right into Yoshi, completely wrecking him.
Image 2: Roy
“Hoisted by your own petard, John.” Dave said. “It’s pretty stupid that Roy is the only character who wears shades in this game. Like, who even cares about Roy. He’s like one of Bowser’s kids, and even though he looks more like Bowser, we all know Bowser Junior is the best. Phenotype vs. genotype I think. Anyway, get wasted, boys.”
“Dude, you’re being a total butt,” John said. “And Karkat, you know this is just a game, right? Wait, are you driving backwards?”
Karkat was hoping 8th place would let him receive the blue shell. It didn’t. But he did not let that phase him.
“I’m doing what I have to,” Karkat said as he got the lightning bolt power-up. “I’m scratching the session.” Gauging their position on the map, he released the storm right as Dave and John were jumping across a chasm, causing them to fall in, destroying their chances for first place. The boys cursed.
“HAHAHAHA,” Karkat laughed. “JUDGEMENT OF BLOOD. ARE YOU BUTTHURT, JOHN? ARE YOU BUTTHURT, DAVE? I HAVE DECIMATED Y’ALL.
“Karkat, you made us fall in 4th and 5th,” Dave said bitterly. “You were in 8th.”
“I BASE MY SUCCESS ON THE EMOTIONAL IMPACT, LIKE A WRITER OF A STORY LOVED BY A DEDICATED AND VULNERABLE FANDOM. I MEAN AUDIENCE” Karkat said, making his way to the kitchen. “YOU THINK WHEN WE DEFEATED LORD ENGLISH AND INHERITED THE NEW UNIVERSE I WOULD JUST SETTLE DOWN? THERE WAS A TOTAL OF 12 TROLLS IN MY SESSION, AND ONLY THREE OF US DIDN’T DIE, WHILE ALL 4 HUMANS IN YOUR SESSION SURVIVED, AS DID THE FOUR HUMANS IN THE OTHER SESSION. I MEAN, TECHNICALLY WE ALL DIE IN OTHER TIMELINES, THE SAME WAY WE ALL ACHIEVE GOD TIER IN ONE REALITY OR THE OTHER. FUNNY: NEITHER KANAYA, TEREZI, OR I ACHIEVED GOD TIER IN THIS TIMELINE THOUGH. HOW ABOUT THAT? IS THAT CONVENIENT? IT’S LIKE MY STORY ISN’T OVER YET. HMMM. BUT SEE. I DON’T NEED GOD TIER. I’M THE KNIGHT OF BLOOD. I AM DESTINED TO DESTROY MARIO KART. THAT MIGHT AS WELL BE CANON. I DON’T NEED GOD TIER, I AM ALREADY A HIVEWRECKER. YEAH, THAT’S CANON NOW TOO. KNIGHT OF BLOOD EQUALS MARIOCLAST. YES. THAT SUFFIX. IN FACT, FORGET ABOUT ASPECTS. FORGET ABOUT BLOOD AND BREATHE AND TIME AND SPACE AND LIGHT AND VOID AND HOPE AND RAGE AND LIFE AND DOOM. THERE ARE ONLY THOSE WHO DESTROY AND GET DESTROYED. BOOM BOOM, MOTHERGRUBBERS, THAT’S CANON AGAIN. THERE ARE THINGS OUT THERE THAT CAN’T BE EXPLAINED. LIKE WHERE DID SGRUB COME FROM? OR SBURB, I GUESS THAT’S THE HUMAN WORD FOR IT. THE NAME FOR THE GAME WE ALL PLAYED. SBURB. AND I DON’T REALLY KNOW HOW WE BEAT LORD ENGLISH. I DON’T CARE THOUGH. WHAT I REALLY WORRY ABOUT IS THE HORRORTERRORS. THOSE SPOOKY TROLL-LOVECRAFTIAN ANCIENT GODS THAT SPEAK TO US IN DREAMS FROM THE DEEPEST REACHEST OF PARADOX TIME AND PARADOX SPACE. BUT I WON’T GO INTO THAT. WHO WANTS SOME RUFFLES.”
“I’ll have some Ruffles,” John said. Karkat took some chips and threw them at the Heir of Breath. “Thanks, Karkat.” John was used to Karkat’s rants. This one was pretty short, really.
Dave took an apple juice from the fridge. “Dude, are you talking about my dreams again?” he asked. “Don’t worry John with that stuff, it really doesn’t matter.”
“What dreams?” John asked.
“HE KEEPS FLINCHING IN HIS SLEEP AND WAKING UP AND NOT TELLING ME WHAT’S WRONG.” Karkat said, throwing chips at Dave. “DID YOU KNOW HE SLEEPS WITH HIS SHADES? I CAN’T EVEN LOOK HIM IN THE EYES AND KNOW WHAT’S WRONG. ALL I GET IS THE DOUBLE-REFLECTION OF A CONCERNED FRIEND AND PARTNER. ME, IN THE REFLECTIONS OF HIS STUPID GLASSES.
Dave drinks his juice.
“Wait, do you guys sleep together?” John asked, unwittingly entering a touchy subject. Neither troll or cool dude responded. It was pretty awkward. John started to feel stupid and blush, so he made an excuse to go home and get his phone charger. Then he dissipated into wind, because that’s the sort of thing you can do when you’re a Hero of Breath.
The John molecules regathered in his house as he jumped on his bed to get the charger he left between it and the wall. He really did forget it. What was he going to do about Dave and Karkat though? It was obvious they liked each other. Honestly, a lot of people he knew were together. Sheesh, Kanaya and Rose got married and they never went through anything like this. Maybe he should text them. Wait no, he needed some experienced with the internalized homophobic behaviors and messy relationship, not something perfect. John called Jake.
“Well if isn’t my dear grandson in some timey-wimey something or other.” Jake crowed.
“Um, yeah? Listen, I need some help with my gay friends’ relationship and I thought you were the most qualified to help me help them.” John said.
“Crikey, John, you could not have made a worse call on judgement.” Jake chuckled.
“Haven’t you been dating Dirk for like a year now?” John asked.
“Ha ha, just because I’ve been blessed by Lady Luck doesn’t mean I fathom how it occurred. When it comes to relationships, my wisdom is nil, I’m afraid.” Jake apologized.
“You sure?” John asked. “Because I think Dave and Karkat’s problem is that they don’t want to admit their gay. Or, I guess that’s normal on Karkat’s planet. Not that that planet exists anymore, just that maybe Karkat might have a problem with dating a human. Like, they like each other but they’re afraid there’s something wrong with that.”
“Mm,” Jake intoned. “I think I know the shot you’re shooting for. Your comrades are afraid of not fitting the shape society made for them, even though we inherited a new universe and our traditions are being built from the ground up, from random chance and foggy memory. The culture they were born into is ingrained in their beings”
“Yeah, that,” John said.
“Well, if I am to dispense any council to you, by true-blue friend, is that a lack of communication can leave both parties feeling culpable, and the silence will just force them into roles that only demean them and show them in the worst light. Blood can spoil in someone’s heart, John. It can sour someone’s spirit. The old blood can kill you if you don’t do anything to replace it. They just should come clean with each other, because if you don’t respect your partner enough to tell him the truth, then how do you expect him to spend his life with you?”
“Jesus Christ, what on earth are you talking about?” John asked.
“By asking forgiveness. Because we all want to be forgiven, and people are really more sympathetic then we realized. At least, in my opinion. Anyway, I should get going John. It was a joy hearing from you.”
“You too, Jake. Thank you so much, this was really helpful.” John said, hanging up. Man, he just forgot everything Jake told them. Maybe he should’ve texted Rose, she would have a mature way of handling this. John aeroported himself back to Dave’s place. Yep, aeroport, that’s the word for when John turns into wind and transports somewhere. It’s CANON now.
“Hey guys, I found my charger,” John said walking into the living room. Dave was sitting at the table alone, staring at an incomplete game of Connect Four and several empty juice boxes.
“Karkat went home,” Dave said, completing a #red!Six-In-A-Row. “We had an argument, I guess.”
“What?” John said. “Did he leave while playing Connect Four. That’s unlike him. He would’ve thrown it to the ground.”
“Nah, dude, he stormed off with my Nintendo Switch and remaining bag of chips. I sent this game up post-argument, and I’ve been playing by myself ever since.”
“Dave, do you want to talk about something!?” John yelled.
“Well, yeah I had something in the old thinkpan. A real thought omelet. It’s not even an omelet any more, it’s a scrambled egg of contemplation, transfigured by the a worryspoon. It’s been in the thinkpan so long it’s starting to dry. The spoon keeps it from burning, flipping it indefinitely. But if this thought had any less moisture it would beat the Saharan desert in levels of dryness. Heck, it would beat a sandwich without any condiments. It would beat all the jars of peanut butter in the world if you even could conceive such a level of dryness of existing, and there’s no cup of milk or seasonal rain or hand turning off the oven flame that could change these levels of dryness. S***, I need another apple juice.”
“Yes. Please keep talking,” John said in a manner which was not desperate.
“Like, if this was a frog it would probably die. I just would. I mean, it just would. I’m not a Kermit, John. I just have some things I’m concerned about, and maybe Karkat flew off the handle because I was unreasonably keeping the door locked.” Dave said.
“Uh, yeah. You know if you ever need to talk to me, Dave, I’m here,” John said.
“I know,” Dave said. “That’s why we’re talking.
“Yeah, John said. “We’re talking.”
Dave: …
John: …
Dave: …
John: …
Dave: …
John (in pain): “So if you need talk about your relationship with Karkat—"
Dave: “What.”
John: “What.”
Dave: “I’ve been having these terrible nightmares, dude.”
John: “…”
John: “What.”
Dave: “John, I’ve been having nightmares about a figure with a burning skull. It rode a badass™ motorcycle and had knives for claws. It was a freaking Freddy Kruger demon, man. A dragon and a demon. And the sky was full of fireworks but I couldn’t tell what color they were because everything was black and white. It looked at me with its burning eyes and horns and it was holding a puppet. But the puppet was me, John. And then the skeleton changed and it had broken horns and cracked glasses and it told me to go back into the Game. John. I was the puppet.”
John: “…is this another metaphor.”
Dave: “No John. There are ghosts out there that want me to go back into Sburb. It said I needed to return, for my sake and his, and for everything that we had to let go of when we lose someone we loved. And then he wasn’t holding a puppet. He was holding a carton of eggs.”
John: 0 :
Dave: Karkat says I should forget about, but that’s because he doesn’t want me to leave him. Can’t blame him though. It’s a fool’s errand. But I’m that fool. Every fiber of being is telling to go on this errand. Do it, my fibers say. Be the fool. Not that know where I’d begin. But he said he wouldn’t help me and we started arguing and he ran out. That’s when I started to drink away my sorrows with apple juice.
John scratched his head. “So, you’re saying that you got a dream from… the Ghost Rider?”
“Yeah,” Dave said.
“Except he was probably a troll, since he had horns?” John asked.
“Troll Ghost Rider, yep, it appears so,” Dave said.
“Ghost Rider was a Nick Cage movie,” John said.
“Hm,” Dave said.
“Unless it asks you to make a deal. Wait, no that was Mephistopheles. You haven’t sold your soul to the devil, have you, Dave?”
“Hey, John, how about we don’t talk about Nicolas Cage, okay?” Dave asked.
“I mean, we could.” John said.
“Please. Could you do me a favor and breeze us to the Monument?”
“Sure,” John said, and he
“Wait,” Dave interrupted. He walked to his sword, unsheathing it from the hole in the wall. “Alright, now I’m ready. John held on to Dave’s arm as he areoported them to the Monument.
The sun had not yet set, but it had painted the sky pink in preparation for its departure. The sky is so pretty.
The Monument was shaped as the Sburb logo, a white house the size of… well, a house. They had opened the door from the other side, stepping into the new universe and out of the game. They were able to take the inhabitants of the game’s planets with them, although the door of the house soon vanished, leaving only a white expanse of sleek material.
Dave put his hand on the surface. He tried kicking it. He tried hitting it with his sword. Nothing worked. John watched him. This was not going as he planned. John tried making the breeze open the Monument. Nope, that was stupid.
“But Dave, don’t you have time travel powers?” John asked, lying on the grass.
“I can’t time travel into the game. It’s locked somehow,” Dave replied.
“Oh,” John said. “That’s a bummer.”
Dave sat down next to him. “I guess this was a waste of time. It’s like time is chocolate wrapper, and opportunity is a just a golden ticket you’re searching for. Look at all the time in the trash, and no golden ticket to show for it.”
“That’s pretty good, Dave. You should put it one of your rap songs.” John said.
“No, John, it was cheesy. Which is why you like it,” Dave said. “You know what I want to write about? All the people we left behind. Not just the dead but like movies and books and our human culture. I want this new culture to know about Snoop Dog, John. I want them to know about Texas, and CoolMathGames4Kids and the Great Wall Of China. This are all things that would’ve matter in a historical context but now it’s personal. I need people to know these things because things that existed should be cherished. Maybe. I don’t know. I feel like I need to prove something. This is irrelevant to anything that occurred today, though. “
“How long have you had these dreams, Dave?” John asked.
“Hmmmm I guess I’ve known the dream demon for a week now.” Dave said, taking off his glasses to clean them. “Crap, I forgot how bright the world is. “I’m putting these back on.”
“Hey, Dave.” John said.
Dave leaned backward until he was on his back. “Yeah, John?”
“How about we visit the cemetery?”
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Snow
a little davekat ficlet just cause i had a burst of inspiration! includes descriptions of an accident and hurt-comfort. enjoy!
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All four legs pound into the earth as you run, and leap, and dive, and roll in the banks of white. God, the shit is everywhere, and it’s so bright, and exciting. Your fur isn’t even damp, the layers bold and fluffy against the blank backdrop. Claws dig into the fluff, and you jump do dive into the biggest, freshest bank you can find.
You’re a wolf. A proud wolf. A wolf who definitely always has no fun and has an absolute reason for everything.
But for this? You don’t.
You burst from the snow, specks flying everywhere and hitting everything in the soundless pink of the morning. A crow caws nearby and you twist to bark at it, running for the tree and skidding along through the thick blanket covering the ground.
Oh, and it’s such bliss to run. To run, and to feel the ground under your feet. To feel the ground grip under the pads of your toes and shift as you dig in to change directions. To run through the blisteringly cold air, to feel as if ice is forming on your nose, to feel warm inside your winter coat, panting to let out some of that heat.
You have freedom as you wind through the trees, hearing the call of your pack. Freedom and a chorus of yowls as you join them, bursting into the group to tackle maybe one or two to the ground. They yip and cry out jubilantly as you tumble across their straight line, the leader of the hunting group giving you an exhausted snort before you get to your feet and manage to shake off the bits of ice that have clung to you.
“Karkat!” you hear, as the leader’s mouth opens. You tilt your head, ears perking forward, confused. One of your packmakes, Attila, licks your face. You shake him off, and turn back to the leader, who opens his mouth again.
“Karkat, wake up!”
Violently, you’re flung from the world of dreaming and into your own.
Dave is shaking you awake.
Next to you, your newfoundland, Attila, is nuzzling your chin. His nose is freezing. Ah, he must have been outside already.
Dave’s leaning over you on your shared bed, and when he leans in to give you a peck on the nose, you spit a raspberry at him. He’s wearing a coat and scarf. And… are there gloves in his hand?
“You’re not a child, Dave, you don’t need my permission to go outside,” you grumble at him. Attila sits up, a full three feet at the top of his head. For a second, you consider the notion of telling him to lay back down. But you did that at five this morning after letting him out the first time, because he was so warm.
It got really cold last night, and Dave was out with his brother at the emergency room. That was the hospital where you used to work, where you met him. He was there with his best friend, who was a surrogate giving birth to twins (willingly somehow, god knows why), and you were her main nurse in the maternity ward. At first you had thought he was the father.
Needless to say you were happy to be wrong.
Attila whines, bringing you back to the present.
Right, okay.
“It’s snowing, ‘kat! Snowing!” Dave says. And he’s… so goddamn excited.
No wonder you were dreaming of snow.
“And?” you ask.
Of course, the snow is making your legs hurt.
“Well I wanna build a snowman!” Dave says. Like it’s so obvious.
You stretch your arms, flexing your back, and pushing yourself to sitting.
“Okay, you absolute child,” you complain. But Dave is smiling a lot. It helps.
You know how eager he is every time he gets you to go outside. And he knows that you know. And he knows that you know that he gets really excited every time the sky decides to shit clumps of white, because he grew up in a state where snow wasn’t really a thing. At least where he was from, you gather.
The bed creaks as you throw your million layers of blankets off of your legs. Attila perks up, bounding off of the bed at his designated spot. He’ll be excited for the snow, too. Cold weather is kind of his favorite thing.
“How is Dirk?” you ask. Dave snorts as he comes around, making sure your chair is in the right position.
“He’s fine. Freaked out about nothing, you know him.”
“Yeah. John’s helping him with that hypochondriac business, right?” you ask, stretching your hands out, flexing them and making sure they’re awake. Falls aren’t really any fun. Your physical therapist, Porrim, is kind of the queen of making sure that you understand that. She’s allowed you to fall a few times when you were being too stubborn. It was mean, but it worked.
“Yeah he is,” Dave says. “I was iffy about them at first but it seems like a good thing.”
You grunt, and then turn your nubs toward the edge of the bed. Trans-tibial is what they call your amputations. Trans-tibial, BK (below knee), bilateral. Means you don’t have shit below the five inches of shin you still have.
It was actually an accident that fucked up your legs. A motorcycle accident. Well, not so much an accident as like… you were on the side of the road, fixing up your bike. And a truck hit you. It ran over both of your legs. It sucked.
Luckily they were able to save your knees.
Dave snaps his fingers in front of your face, and you blink drowsily before growling at him.
“Sleeping beauty need more sleep?” he asks, snark on his curled lip. And you scowl.
“I’m fine,” you mutter, and Attila comes over. Dave moves and in a few easy snaps, the harness is on. Good. The dog waits patiently, set in his helping mode, still and strong as can be, and you brace one hand on him, and the other on the bed, and lift yourself into your chair.
It took a good deal of struggle and abdominal workouts to handle it at first. And you used to need the dog a whole lot more. He still does things for you when you need it, like opening the fridge before you get to it, or supporting your weight from the couch to the chair and back. And so on. It’s very useful when you don’t have feet and you still need to get around.
Crawling is humiliating, even in your own home.
“Good boy,” you tell Attila, scratching his ears and handing him a treat from the small bag in your bedside table. He doesn’t always need them, but positive reinforcement never hurts.
You’re a really devoted dog parent. It’s ridiculous.
The harness can come off now, and Dave removes it with the same easy motions as before. He beams widely at you as you unlock the brakes on the chair, and moves to the side so that you can move to get some clothes on.
“I’ll get your coat for you!” Dave calls as he trots from the room.
“And a cup of coffee too, please!” you shout after him. “Dear.”
You can hear dave snort from the other room.
Attila opens the closet door for you on command, pulling on his rope to get it open. From the dresser by your side of the bed you grab a pair of snow pants that you tie off on the ends of the limbs. First goes on your compression socks, and then the pants. Then a nice woolen sweater over your sleep shirt, and a scarf from the inside of the closet door.
Each thing is checked off absently in your mind.
One day, you won’t have to tie off the ends of your pants.
Hopefully soon, you’ll get an approval from your insurance. And then you can get fitted for at least one prosthesis. Hopefully both. And hopefully it’ll be an easy fit.
“You ready yet?” Dave asks from behind you. You huff, and lean forward so that he can put your jacket around your arms. Even though you don’t need it, he still does this one thing for you. It’s chivalry, or something.
“Yeah. Coffee?” you ask, turning your chair around.
Dave hands you the cup, and leans down to give you a sweet kiss on the forehead.
While he’s down there, you use your free hand to pull him in for something better. He knows you don’t like being treated with quite so much care as he wants to, especially now. But he does. He treats you so kindly and gently, like you might break. You’ve talked to him about it, and he’s working on it.
You know it’s hard for him to forget when he was called in from the museum, to come and see his fiancee in a hospital bed, smashed and bloody and fresh from emergency surgery.
Dave makes a muffled noise into the kiss, and when you let him go, he has a huge blush on his cheeks.
“We had enough of that last night,” he says, and makes sure that the coffee is in both of your hands before wheeling you out of the room.
While you’re still drinking your warm beverage, Dave stuffs a blanket around your legs. This is something you’ve made him do before, when he insisted that you go out into this fucking cold right after waking you up. It’s approved. Dave drops your hat and gloves on your lap, though, and opens the door wide into the backyard.
Attila speeds out into the snow, frolicking and making merry before you can even put on your gloves.
He’ll maintain an alert for any noises from you, but he deserved to have fun.
“And you’ll be giving him a bath later, right?” you ask.
Dave actually laughs out loud at that. His eyes are tired, ringed with darkness from his late night out and lack of sleep. But he has a spark in them.
“While I’m napping, YOU can give him that bath,” he says. “Make sure to rinse the tub.”
And you nod. Fair trade.
“Well come on, steed,” you say, once your gloves and hat are donned, and your coffee is firmly back in your hands. “Push me into that wild yonder.”
Dave grins, and does just that. He pushes you down the ramp and into the frozen back yard.
He throws snowballs at both you and the dog, who tries to catch them fruitlessly even as they fall apart mid-air. You try to get him a few times, with little success. You get him to toss you into a snowbank, and you make a snow angel.
And then together, the two of you make a snowman. Dave does the bottom, while you get the head and pat it all together from your chair.
Just when your stumps start to feel a little too frosty, Dave turns to you. He’s smiling, obviously exhausted and out of energy. But he’s smiling so wide.
“What?” you ask him, rubbing ice from your eyelashes. Attila rolls around nearby. He’s in heaven.
Dave just bends over, and kisses you.
“I love you so much.”
“I love you too.”
#davekat fanfiction#homestuck#davekat#my short fics that i write#yeah im gonna probably keep making karkat a nurse until i die#so screw you pgp lol#im probably going to delete that tag later or in a bit
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