Yeah, THIS. As a Jewish person, I did feel uncomfortable reading Act 6 of Homestuck. I mean, I also felt very uncomfortable before that- Act 5 was difficult for me to get through because of how Tavros was treated. And Homestuck has so many insane things about gender and race and the slurs throughout it. Generally during my readthrough I decided to just take it as edgy internet humor- Unfortunate, uncomfortable, and unavoidable.

And then I read the Skaianet files! And I was like. Wow. Holy shit. Because like, that's more than just calling your villain sea hitler (because the comparison sort of fits and mostly it's outlandish and funny in the absurdity). It is incredibly just awful to write a joke story about the holocaust being caused because Einstein, a Jewish person, pissed off Hitler. Fuck that. Hussie writes a lot of real person fiction. Cool. It does tend to be funny with current figures. I think it gets a lot less funny when it is not current commentary and when figures who committed genocides are not the butt of the joke.

It made me reexamine the jokes that made me uncomfortable, and I think it made a lot of Homestuck feel clearer to me. A lot of the shit that was in there wasn't just an additional joke because that was in at the time- I personally feel like a lot of it comes across as having been done without any empathy for the people or marginalized groups affected.

Phew, that sections over with. It might be a little more emotionally charged than I usually am, so I do want to clarify that this is all my personal opinion. It is affected by who I am and I am biased and have a lot of emotions about this stuff! So thank you for making this post because. Honestly I needed to get some of this out???

My last few notes:

Vriska dogwhistle - This one seems like an unfortunate accident to me. Like, I agree Vriska should not be frequently tossing out the word bait- That seems like the best course of action. That being said, it does genuinely seem like it was intended to be an accident to me. Like Deep Dive Devin said- Eridan's the neonazi, not Vriska. It sort of reminds me of Spamton. Yeah, he can be read as an antisemetic caricature but it was pretty clearly unintentional and just a result of combining spam ads and pincchio. It sucks. I wish people talked about it a little more (so thank you again for creating this thread and the space to talk about it!!) but at the end of the day I don't think it was done with malice.

Vriska did nothing wrong - I was unaware of the origins of this term. Wow. It's sad, but I'm also sort of glad I only knew it as a lighthearted meme up until now? I suspect it would not be a very effective dogwhistle in the Homestuck community because of how widespread it is, but I honestly have no clue.