jake morph homestuck analysis thread

re: JakeMorph, auspisticism

This is suuuuuch a good distillation, thank you. It does a lot to sort of cement my previously expressed feelings on auspisticism! Romanticizing the act of trying to keep the peace to an acceptable baseline. Like, the part about Terezi being an abuse victim only being a problem when everyone else has to start dealing with it is especially moving to me. That's literally how abuse gets approached in real life.

Alternia being in some ways a very exaggerated and bloodthirsty form of Earth is one of the best things about it, and as a result I think the urge to approach Alternian romance from a position of... almost cultural relativism? I think that urge is very stupid. It's literally a lot of real life romance stuff taken up to eleven, just like a lot of Alternia is.

I think Terezi's spiel on "healthy kismesisitude" throughout the Epilogues as coming from a lonely abuse victim is important. Even if all she's going off of is half-remembered fragments from another life, strict continuity isn't necessary for her kind of coherence.

The institution of kismesisitude is scary as a control and manipulation tactic, romanticizing the hatred of the victim for their captor and trapping them in the cycle. The threat of solitude is leveled against real victims for trying to leave, and what could be more lonely than hurtling through the wastes of space?

can we talk about troll gender. ive been dying to talk about troll gender all day. can we talk about troll gender?

but actually haha i think the 'hemospectrum=gender wayyy moreso than race' analysis is my personal favourite of your work, but i always struggle to like, explain it as an angle without just directly linking to ur work. so i guess this is less of a question and more me checking my work:

the 'point' of trolls being arbitrarily (at least by earth's standards of sex characteristics, lmao) gendered into 'boys and girls' is to highlight just how pointless/unhelpful many of the binaries/social systems that originated from earth actually are. like 'if caliborn just makes the felt guys because he wants them to be, why should anything be read into anyone's gender beyond "someone else wanted to call them this"'.

then, separately to this, alternia *does* have it's own home-grown variety of gender discrimination, based on assigning value to how psychic/strong/long u can live when ur one blood type or another. and *that* worldbuilding serves to recontextualise analogous discrimination in human social structures. 'tavros is stupid and weak because he's a bronze blood' sounds stupid and fake, and it SHOULD sound as stupid and fake as equivalent comments about flighty broads and their horseshit.

plus the 'THEN WHO'S FLYING THE PLANE?' nature of questioning where any of these ideas 'originated' in paradox space, along with doc scratch turning to camera and going 'yeah i made troll society suck ass to further my Evil Schemes™' also primes you to question the agenda behind how and why these systems propagate on earth. like is anything here actually deeper than some guy willing into existence new axises he can be 'better' than other people on.

...is that anything? lmao

if you guys saw me floating around other threads without replying here I'M SORRYYYYUH... i just got back from my vacay and i wanted to take the time to sit down and write down some proper responses for you guys. those other threads don't deserve me like you guys deserve me. they're schmucks. they're nothing. i kissed them but it was nothing. i promise

RE:Zadie! Thank you so much and welcome, all the rest of it ^_^

Even though I don't particularly consider classpect to be my area of study, I totally agree it shares a level of... I guess engineered cohesion? with the institution of quadrants. There is of course a fundamental logic in common to both systems: the Alternian social structure exists to maintain the perfect warrior race, while Sburb is a multiplayer RPG whose roles are designed around creating an efficient, cooperative combat experience. Meanwhile, both systems also exist with the aim of eventually creating a functional reproductive family unit - like you say, the Hero of Space's direct role in reproduction facilitated by the auxiliary roles of the other Heroes just as the conciliatory quadrants facilitate the concupiscent. And since Alternia as a system only exists in the first place for the purposes of manufacturing the perfect Sburb session, it's only natural that the institutions put in place in one would deliberately translate over to the other.

I will say that when I go about comparing Sburb and Alternia, my primary point of comparison is usually the classes and the hemospectrum; the blood castes (or blood classes) follow their own sort of video game logic, with low-magic, high-health brutes at the top and glass cannon magicians at the bottom, and this thinking is applicable to the kind of thing you're talking about as well. Thru the Muse and Lord classes we're shown implicitly that a class' activity or passivity has gendered implications, with nurturing support classes leaning female while the fighters and the leaders skew male - just as is common in the storytelling and video games of the real world - so the relationships between players of the game and trolls in quadrants will naturally tend to mirror each other in a similar way. Where the Sylphs and Seers of the world exist to supplement the more show-stopping exploits of your Knights and your Princes, women and lowbloods find themselves the preferred candidates to play conciliatory roles for their male-dominated highblood counterparts. If the whole system didn't revolve around having your role assigned to you at the moment of your birth and living your whole life with the expectation that you fulfil that same role forever, it might even work... OH WELL. Hope that addresses your question somewhat!

RE:Alary - so true! I made an aside about this in my original reply that I ended up cutting cus the whole thing was getting too damn long, but the truth is that even in our real world it has been quite accepted in a lot of cultures for a quite lot of history that some relationships will involve one party delivering a degree of beatings to the other. Is it really so shocking that an alien culture would have a name for this -- and does giving a name to something somehow make it more okay ?!?

RE:chitonousCerate - this is a really interesting perspective and one I will really have to look out for whenever I finally get around to rereading these parts of the story.

When late Homestuck and the Epilogues started making attempts to rehabilitate the concept of kismesissitude, I quickly resigned myself to thinking of it as little more than poorly executed fanservice for the fan clamouring for more shipping fuel - but I'm very interested in forming a more nuanced view on it, and you've given me a lot to think about. Terezi's relationship with Gamzee really highlights how her confidence in her own abilities - much like Rose - can blind her to the possibility that she's being taken advantage of, and it makes a lot of sense that this kind of thinking would continue to cloud her understanding even into adulthood... now that I think on it, one-half of Act 6's pro-blackrom propaganda comes from Karkat, anyway, and he's a guy desperately clinging onto the quadrants to avoid acknowledging that his feelings transcend them; of course Terezi's view might be similarly coloured by her cultural hangups!

RE:timeisrestored - I'm really excited that this read is getting more traction! it sure can be difficult to convince someone of without having them read a novel's worth of posts though, haha. I've tried more recently to boil down the key points into just a couple of irrefutable facts which anyone who's read the comic will at least be able to recognise and, if they're open minded, hopefully think a little bit about:

A) Even if(!) cherub "sex" and "blood colour" are separate, the fact that cherubs can only mate in hetero-chromic pairs clearly compares blood colour and sex to each other;

B) Porrim makes it plain in no uncertain terms that blood colour and gender are linked in more ways than just the previously-established (between jade and femininity).

After this you just gotta ask this person to imagine and then describe the two symbols they most strongly associate with the two conventional genders and if they say anything other than 'a pair of astrological symbols' or 'a pair of colours' or both then they're either lying or they're too woke to be needing to have this conversation.

The bit about Caliborn sexing his leprechauns is a powerful corollary, but beyond a certain point it just helps for the reader to have, like, a very basic class-based understanding of gender? If you can understand that class is fake and that gender is a form of social class and also fake then it's such a short and doable jump toward figuring out the specific similarities in how blood caste is fake. I think one thing that makes this train of thought difficult for a lot of readers to hop aboard is that they are already quite familiar and therefore comfortable with the interpretation of caste as an analogy for race, and as such get it into their heads that it's ignorant or inappropriate to compare race and gender in such a way...? But, like, race is fake too! At the end of the day all of these things are classes arbitrarily assigned to people against their will. It's not such a wild idea that blood caste could be equivalent to more than one of these concept at a time!

Anyway, your understanding of all the key points in solid! There's just one thing I'd like to reiterate and put emphasis on: the binary-gendering of the trolls isn't quite "separately to" the duodecimal(?)-gendering of the castes. From a strictly literalist, worldbuilding-oriented perspective, maybe it makes the most sense to think of them as if they are, but to appreciate Homestuck holistically and as a symbolic text it's important to see the ways the two things are intertwined, as demonstrated in the above points. For these purposes I'd almost go as far as saying it's best to view trolls' binary gender as, like, a literary device that exists for the convenience of the human reader?* Which isn't to say that, for instance, Sollux or Tavros are strictly women on the basis of their low blood - just that we should be open to interpreting "lowblood things" (e.g. servitude, emotional availability via psychic powers) with a feminine tint and "highblood things" (e.g. obsession with feats of strength, dominance) with a masculine one. Even though not all highbloods are "men", as we understand it from our human perspective, we can understand that the role of any highblood in society is coded, so to speak, as patriarchal, and inversely for their warmer counterparts. It's this way of looking at things that is central to my understanding of quadrants as I've discussed it throughout the rest of this thread: when I call moirallegience intrinsically hetero-romantic, it's not that I'm saying all or even MOST moirallegiences consist of a "female" troll pacifying a "male"; what I am saying is that the nature of the quadrant skews towards lowbloods pacifying highbloods, which is coded as the same thing - EXACTLY like how cherub romance is presented to us as both hetero-sexual and hetero-chromic.

*And in a roundabout, metatextual way, this is exactly the case: Caliborn binary-genders the trolls for his own convenience, because as a cherub (a kind of audience surrogate) he would have trouble understanding the social dynamics of a culture with 10+ genders.

in the interests of elaborating on the point above, I thought of another blog post that feels worthy of sharing here, about Terezi as a transmasculine character:

https://lime-bloods.tumblr.com/post/779309670535954432/love-transmasc-terezi-analysis-thumbs-up-emoji-i

not because I think this analysis is a particularly profound or foundational one, like the selection I chose for the first post in the thread, but moreso because it's an example of the kind of places you can get using the first principles established in my other posts. It's got a little bit of everything: gendered analysis, caste- and class-based analysis, using a character's alternate timeline selves as additional windows into their psyche... exactly the kind of holistic interpretation I was just talking about. I've never really cared much for Terezi as a character, but by applying the same thinking to her that I apply to the other parts of the comic I do really like, I was able to come up with a whole bunch about her that I found really compelling!

for a complete change of tack, though, since everything I've talked about so far has skewed so hard toward the gendered, here's a post that I just think is really, really good LOL. Not to toot my own horn too hard. It elaborates on some themes introduced in other posts that I've linked, but I won't introduce what it's actually specifically about. I just think everyone should read it:

https://lime-bloods.tumblr.com/post/728987658845650944/the-theory-used-to-be-that-caliborn-was-his-own