jake morph homestuck analysis thread

hello, big fan of your analyses :) thank you very much for joining us

oh my god ... the real Dingo Dag from tumblr?

Woot!! It's def an oldie but I do think fondly on the green-slime-in-homestuck-is-an-obvious-symbol-of-the-patriarch :) I think it was one of your first posts I read...

WE ARE SAVED

thank you everyone :) great to be here

re:alexis; superlative choice of vintage... a real oldie for a real old head

https://lime-bloods.tumblr.com/post/167062680454/jakemorph-green-slime-in-homestuck-is-an-obvious

possibly the first lost

possibly the fjrst

someone get me off of here I just accidentally pressed post too early three damn times in a row... JAKE MORPH YOU'RE DRUNK

YAY DINGODADS HERE shit just got real

my theory: due to genetics, june egbert probably possesses a sizeable caboose. is anybody considering this? this could change everything. Let me know.

sorry slime miami but june inherited all the crocker real estate up front but with the jake english hank hill special at the rear... and I know this because of theory

You've made a powerful enemy today, Reverend Father Canis Familiaris.

yay i'm so glad you got your account to work 🙌 the schools have been opened!!!

YAHOOIE my faborite Homestuck blog is here. Haven't been interacting at all because I hate using social media (forums and Discord dont count) but rest assured I am listening and learning.

I really enjoy your posts on gender in Homestuck, they've gotten me thinking bigtime about gender in other works of literature and in my own writing.

I've read a couple of your posts on gnosticism in Homestuck too, but I feel like I don't get it yet. My question is thusly:

How much background research have you done on gnosticism? Is there any reading you recommend beyond your posts and like wikipedia?

Every time I think or talk about gnosticism in Homestuck I pretty much just come to the conclusion, "Well, Dingodad says it's in there and they seem right about that but don't ask me what that means or how it relates to anything in particular."

hi :) i love your analysis. i think it's super interesting. i know you have made posts about Quadrants before and the way that they mimic heterosexuality (i will never be over the "sounds like she started beating his ass back" kismesistude joke. that was just real). the moirallegiance discussions of how moirallegiance mimics real life heterosexual norms has really got me thinking before and i've incorporated it a lot into my analysis of meowrails. my question is: have you sort of thought about how auspisticism factors into this model, and do you have any thoughts on the role that it plays?

I know that ash romance is relatively... rare in where it appears in homestuck, so i understand if not. me personally i think of ash romance as a way to more directly instrumentalize outside parties in order to preserve the mechanisms of society, specifically in romance. i will never forget how rose, for example, becomes a party to gamrezi's relationship that is paralyzed between preserving that relationship or intervening because she is too focused on if this romance is 'normal' on alternia, to the exclusion of understanding that it doesn't matter if it's normal, it's still deeply fucked up. given that this is one of the few examples of auspisticism that we see, it feels important that this is part of it, but i'm still unsure. thoughts?

Re: miniQuiny one major theme of Gnostic theology (at least as people understand it now) is that the world has a flawed creator: the Demiurge, which means "craftsman". The Gnostic seeks to escape this flawed/false reality and seek out the True reality. Homestuck sometimes uses this framework when getting at the idea that people are stuck inside of a story -- John wanting to get out of the Candy timeline (which is on some level Calliope's fanfiction, making her the Demiurge) and experience something REAL was a Gnostic impulse. To the extent that the Gnostic story is like a cosmic escape room, all of the MSPA stories (where you try to get out of your jail/office/house while the higher power responsible for you and your world's existence messes with you) are Gnostic in their very format

... is how I would summarize things

thank you mmmmalo :3 helpful

I have grasped that Lord English is the author of the universes we see in Homestuck, so he'd be the Demiurge in that context? Very cool. It sounds like it'd play nice with Homestuck's metanarrative themes. I will microwave this in my mindscape

thank you everyone for the lovely comments and great questions :)

I don't want to talk about how long I just spent writing up my own reply to miniQuiny's post when I accidentally refreshed the page. So I'm going to address Alary's question and hopefully get back to you tomorrow if not sometime within the week. 😅😅😅 (😭😭😭😭😭)

Auspisticism is a really interesting one because to me it wears its social purpose on its face. so many readers dismiss it as a weird outlier because they think the fact that it's all about bizarre and alien systems instead of physical or emotional intimacy makes it intrinsically less ""romantic"" (totally meaningless buzzword as far as this discussion is concerned) than all the other quadrants, but I think they've got it totally backwards - auspisticism's weird arbitrary constructedness is supposed to be what clues you in to the fact that ALL the quadrants are about weird constructed systems over physical and emotional intimacy! it gets less of my attention because like you say it's without competition the rarest form of romance in the comic, but also because the way I see it, where all of the rest of the quadrants' introductions are at least a little bit coded in how fucked up and imaginary they are, everything you need to know about auspisticism is right there on the first page. sometimes trolls feel so strongly about each other that it could become a problem for their other relationships, and someone has to step in. isn't it so delightfully messed up that Alternian society has made that into some kind of aspirational social opportunity for young trolls? I once described the purpose of auspisticism as "to give characters a reason to call kanaya a slut", and that's exactly it; just like all this other heteronormative nonsense, the point is to encourage youth to make sacrifices for their country by making them lame gay prude outcasts if they don't.

i'm glad you mention the bit with Rose because I did make a very small post about it once. even though I've always been especially fascinated by the ashen quadrant as a worldbuilding gimmick, reading this exchange (on p. 5414) is i think the first time i ever really GOT IT got it, as part of the broader toxic machine that is Alternian romance:

ROSE: This could create a schisasm in our group, that we could all be torn apart.
ROSE: And I don’t wand that!!!!!
ROSE: I want us all to stay friends, and jus be… peaceful togehter. :(
[…]
KANAYA: The Feelings You Are Having Are Actually Perfectly Normal Within The Framework Of Our Quadrant Based Romantic Tradition
[…]
KANAYA: Such As In Situations Very Similar To The One You Described
KANAYA: Where Two Parties Are Highly Drawn To Each Other Through Animosity
KANAYA: They May In Fact Be Perfect For Each Other In That Tumultuous Quadrant
KANAYA: But To Pursue The Relationship Would Be Chaos
KANAYA: Much Like The Scenario You Laid Out The Two Kismeses If Left Unchecked Would Devastate All Their Other Relationships

as you can see, this ashen pursuit has NOTHING to do with how Terezi and Gamzee feel about each other or how healthy their relationship is - as far as Rose or Kanaya are concerned, everything going on between those two is a perfectly run-of-the-mill kismesissitude, if not an especially romantic example of it!! what the girls are worried about is that Terezi and Gamzee's whirlwind abusemance is going to disrupt the social cohesion of the group. Rose's end goal as a hypothetical auspistice is not to make sure Terezi doesn't get badly hurt when Gamzee beats the crap out of her, like the quadrant romanticists have tried to insist for so long: it's to make sure Terezi never gets hurt so badly that she can't show up to work on time, and that Gamzee never gets so distracted beating his wife that he stops being an effective patriarch. it's the damn making the trains run on time quadrant!

totally digressing at this point but the bit with the auspisticism really gets at a consistent personal bugbear of probably a decade now, which is the fandom narrative that Gamzee and Terezi's relationship was only bad because it was an "abusive kismesissitude", and that if Gamzee had just beat Terezi up less then it would have been a "healthy kismesissitude". Dave and Karkat's attempted intervention on the rooftop is framed as Karkat recognising that a troll quadrant is being 'done wrong' and thus attempting to fix it, but that's never really what's said. it's not a problem to Karkat that Terezi hooks up with a known killer clown. it's a problem to Karkat when Terezi's tangentially-related drinking gets so bad it becomes a problem for everyone else. auspisticism is just leveling up from being a neutral party to this violence to being an active participant in making sure that violence goes ahead in a way that is acceptable within the culture.

most everyone in this thread so far is a returning dingodad loyalist, but after that last reply any newcomers lurking will have now got a taste of just how longwinded I can be sometimes... haha... SO, RE:miniQuiny: I wrote a LOT last night and I'm going to use this fresh start as an opportunity to see if I can force myself to be a liiiittle more succinct. firstly, thanks malo for stepping in to answer the stickiest part of the post.

but to answer your question: my journey into Gnosticism started with simple Wikipedia surfing! And while many may disagree with me on this passionately, that's exactly where I'd recommend any newcomers to the topic - as far as it relates to Homestuck - should start as well. Because the aim is not necessarily to know everything about Gnosticism, or even to necessarily 'understand' it; the Homestuck reader's aim should be to recognise Gnosticism as an umbrella under which a WIDE variety of Christian philosophies have historically fallen under, so they can identify what about Homestuck places it under that same umbrella. One new to this area of analysis can easily become intimidated thinking that they need to know everything about all the myriad and varied mythologies that have been called Gnostic in the past to understand how Gnosticism applies to Homestuck, but all you're looking to find on that first Wiki walk is enough to figure out what Homestuck has in common with those mythologies. See Malo's great summary above for a good rundown of just what those commonalities are.

To use some more recognisable strains of Christianity as an example: in practice, there are hundreds upon thousands of minute differences in the ways Orthodox and Catholic Christians experience their religions. But you don't actually need to know every single one of these, or even most of them, to be able to identify what makes something "Orthodox" or "Catholic". You really just need to understand that at some point at the turn of the second millennium there was a big split in approach, and that Orthodoxy exists on one side of that split and Catholicism on the other. Figure out which side of the split your webcomic belongs to, and then you can spend the rest of your time learning about the thing you actually came here to learn about, which is your webcomic.

(DO NOT TAKE THIS AS ACTUAL THEOLOGICAL ADVICE OR ANALYSIS. I AM SIMPLIFYING FOR THE SAKE OF A HOMESTUCK POST. I'M SORRY GOD)

Caliborn's denizen is a case in point. "Yaldabaoth" was a name used by certain sects of Gnostics at a certain point in time to understand the demiurge by, and these sects had a whole bunch of complex mythology surrounding Yaldabaoth and his place in the cosmos. But knowing or understanding that mythos isn't required to actually get why Yaldabaoth is in Homestuck. For the most part, he acts as a big signpost saying GNOSTIC THEMES HERE: because, as you correctly identified, Homestuck's main demiurge figure is Lord English, who gains his powers from completing Yaldabaoth's quest.

A great example of someone NOT following this advice and getting too bogged down in the specifics of the mythology is me, in my own first post in the list! In some versions of the Gnostic myth, the demiurge had a kind of female counterpart who was trapped within the false world he created, and it was Christ or some equivalent spiritual figure's job to save her. This version of the story was so compelling to me that it totally coloured my understanding of Calliope's role in the story, and as a result my first "Homestuck's Gnosticism" essay - which was intended to treat Gnosticism in such basic and simplistic terms that anyone, especially a new convert such as yourself could follow along and begin to understand - was totally bogged down by my fixation with this male-aspect-versus-female-aspect narrative, to the point that it muddied the real key points I was trying to make. You can really tell, I think, that my last paragraph is a clumsy attempt to reconcile two interpretations of the text that are sort of related but don't quite actually fit in with one another.

This is a big part of why I eventually moved away from Gnosticism as my main angle and instead used it as a springboard toward loftier and meatier ideas - another being that Beyond Canon started to deconstruct Homestuck in a new way that opened my eyes to a lot of stuff I had been ignorant of. For instance that Calliope - the demiurge's "female counterpart" - isn't necessarily just some innocent victim of English's whose soul needs to be saved for the good of all people, but another face of the demiurge in her own right, exactly as Malo explains in his post. But I include the post in the list partly because I still think the essay can work as a springboard for other readers trying to embark on the same journey, and partly because the second part - about black holes and time loops - remains a bit of writing I'm still really proud of, not least of all because it basically became kind of pretty much canon in HS2?

As a total aside, I will say that reading about Gnosticism for the purpose of understanding Homestuck did eventually inspire a real fascination for the topic within me, and I graduated from Wikipedia to niche homebrew sites looking for English translations of ancient Gnostic texts. If anyone gets the time, I would really recommend even just glancing over the fourth and fifth books of the Pistis Sophia, which can be easily found online via google. There's a point at which Jesus starts instructing Mary on, like, an intricate series of dungeons located in the darkness outside of the universe, each one ruled over by a demonic tyrant with the head of a different animal? It's some crazy shit. Very much like if there was a total cultural victory of anime & manga but it happened back in the 3rd and 4th centuries A.D.

WOW! Thank you for giving it another shot after your first post was so cruelly snatched from you. #LostMedia

Good stuff. I'm never opposed to a good ol Wikibinge but I was curious if there was anything additional that was strongly coloring your perception. Much to think about. I don't think I realized on my first glance at the Wikipedia page how closely gnosticism is tied to Christianity cuz im like a fake fan i guess lol.

OMG tumblr user dingodad you're on here!!! long time reader first time, saying-anything-er, but, i really love your writing!!! genuinely fundamental in how i look at homestuck, and a lot of texts as a whole, it's genuinely all so impressive to me.

onto my actual question: the auspisticism discussion here has put me in the mind of how classpects work, particularly, the "retaining the social cohesion" of the group as a reflection of how passive classes prop up the others. viewing them as analogous to gender roles, with the masculine time and feminine space being the two required for a session to bear fruit, and the other aspects as optional building blocks that all support this creation, feels similar to reproduction being the focus of troll romance, which the other social structures violently direct trolls into the act of. for example, auspisticism maintaining social order amongst a group is somewhat like blood or passive heart abilities that keep the dynamics in a session together, a kismesis fundamentally leading to extreme violence reflects hope/rage or life/doom players who act as an antagonising or instigating force being an inclusion, etc. are all parallels between the two restrictive systems; ultimately the dichotomy between pairs of aspects or passive and active mirror the way an enforced difference between the male and female role is a load-bearing brick of the patriarchal system. ALL THIS TO SAY, i think the link between how both of these affect the cast could be a really interesting one to explore, and i'd be interested to hear your thoughts on what the two can say about how to look at one-another, and the potential meaning of including the both of these in the comic! ok thankyou love urwork