You know, for all the drama the W*W community gets itself embroiled in, I’m glad - in a way - the only controversy I caused was pissing off the Sylv*ina community and bringing their wrath down on my head by making that crit - not hate - post and bringing up the succession crisis regardless of how in good faith asking that question was. Was I sort of happy about the response? Kind of, but really I was bummed out - and blindsided - by the reaction it caused; I never intended to anger and shock that many people (I still remember a comment someone made in another person’s post that, last I checked, got 100+ notes on “hey, look at this person writing up several paragraphs’ worth of a ship she doesn’t care about“ and another that read “it’s like stopping to look into the window of a restaurant you’re passing on the street and deciding on the spot you hate the food that’s inside” - and this isn’t a call-out or meant to rag on that person, it’s just something that stuck with me).

I still feel bad about making that post to this day; it’s long since been deleted (although you’ll certainly find my response on that other person’s post if you look back far enough) but with the knowledge I have now I would not have made it. I even considered writing a Sylv*ina fic as a sort of olive branch to the community for angering them so viscerally. But then I remembered thinking to myself I’d probably get bullied for trying to make amends or shit on even more and decided it wasn’t worth the hassle; if there was any ragging about it on Twitter as there was here on Tumblr, I’d understand, I deserved that. I can think of a couple certain big-name WLW writers that like that ship that certainly wouldn’t be too happy seeing my name plastered with that ship tag; I’m not always nice to the girls I write about let alone always talk nicely about them. And, you know, that’s fair.

Honestly that was the first instance where I sat back and thought ‘you know, maybe I oughta step away from the fandom’ because the whole point about shipping is having fun with stuff that doesn’t even make sense, and who’s going to want to have someone around that doesn’t like 99% of W*W’s ships? But the W*W fandom has always been volatile, and a lot of other things non-ship related happened that finally got me to back off from it, but. Yeah. I still think about this now and again. And I think it’s for the best to just keep my distance and do my own thing (and I know I’ve said this a lot in the past, but it’s true).

Not going to tag this for obvious reasons, but mainly because I have a certain streamer friend that’s notable in the community who is going through a very rough patch (if you know you know, but I’ll leave it at that) and it got me thinking about the aforementioned bit the past couple of days. That’s all.

I love your analyses, they're like good food. Especially the one about vriska and gamzee's parallels, because it makes so much sense and it's SO obvious once you compare them, but also so easy to miss because hussie never went anywhere with it. ALSO the fact that gamzee subtly controls the meteor trip before the retcon (very passively, but clearly in control and manipulating in the background) whereas when vriska is brought back she steals that role right out of his hands (we even see a sequence with him trying to explain to kurloz that vriska took control, or something along those lines) it's like they're two sides to the same coin, one always losing if the other one wins (also interesting to consider gamzee representing lord English too, with the whole vriska vs fate thing.) Which brings me to terezi as well bc terezi and vriska are obviously the ones that have the most coin imagery, but it's interesting to note that while terezi THINKS she wants to be the one to oppose vriska, what she ACTUALLY wants is to be on the same side (and weren't they all along, anyway?) I also like how you can contextualize a lot of things with this framework too, with the ppl associated with vriska being those who are usually heroes or want to be heroes (terezi, John, tavros) and the ppl associated with gamzee being those who don't consider themselves heroes or fail at it in some way or another (dirk, equius, karkat.) Which also brings me to the idea of light vs rage, or certainty/clarity/luck vs doubt/chaos/pessimism. Both aspects seem to intersect at what they believe to be 'truth' which is interesting considering gamzee and vriska are both very fixated on their goals/idea of how things should be, and to them anyone who doubts that is weak and needs to be 'fixed' (tavros, terezi.) This was mostly me rambling, but I guess if I were to have a request it would be what you think about the Light vs Rage thing, especially in the context of the story. Rage seems to be the hidden enemy that nobody realizes is the true enemy at first (which is why nobody realizes that hope is the true hero all along against lord english) and light seems to be the force that dictates whether or not people notice these things at all before it's too late? But idk, that's just off the top of my dome. I would love to hear your thoughts on it!

hi, sorry to say this but i think you have the wrong person??? the gamzee-vriska post is by @hemoanarchists i just reblogged it from my own blog after finally getting around to reading it, oops

if you still want my two cents on the light-rage topic anyways, i honestly hadn't thought about it until now but yeah actually that does make sense. narratively it seems like light and rage are more viscerally opposite to each other than even light and void- light and void work in concert with each other in the context of how homestuck's storytelling functions, where pockets of information are hidden from us at all times to be backfilled as the story demands and that is part of how the story advances itself in a coherent way.

but rage and all its associations seem to be more about the absurd, that which inherently repels light and meaning and fills in for it, eg how in the hussie-caliborn conversations hussie states he really has no idea of what gamzee's deal is. gamzee is not godtier and yet he is inmortal, and while this is later backfilled to be basically plot armor because he needs to be alive at the point of the big melding of components for lord english's creation, at the moment the actual reason gamzee cannot die is Rule Of Funny. he is a force of the absurd and yet is used as a tool for filling in the needs of the story in a way that vriska fights tooth and nail to loudly claim for herself and yet never fully grasps. vriska, like gamzee, always exists tangentially to the main cast and never by her own merits, but unlike gamzee, she constantly tries to worm herself into the main story, affording her constant presence in the narrative so long as she keeps deliberately fucking with it; meanwhile gamzee is carried throughout the story and given increasing plot relevance purely due to how absurd and funny it is for him of all people to be central to the entire plot of homestuck