JHUTD: Jade Harley Universal Discussion Thread

oh hell yeah we got the person with the jade username :3 :3 :3 B) B) B)

i think jade is one of the best executions of the whole "real human being, emotionally reacting to life in a cartoon world" concepts that i've ever seen. being the world's specialest girl who got to be raised by a demigod dog on a tech billionaire's deserted island, who desperately wishes she had a normal childhood in a normal world. and is also one of the strongest people to ever exist. it's a real "what can the girl who 'has everything' do when she wants something no one can give?" arc, especially towards the end of act 6.

being a lonely/'different' child makes "becoming a normal adult" often feel like an unreachable goal. being in homestuck, it kinda literally is, so it's been interesting seeing how she handles growing up. we know that candy is generally the "worst case scenario" for all characters, but meat jade has a lot going for her, still. no mediocre marriage, freshly out of a love triangle, all the time in the world.

@takofish what does it even mean to "punish" a fictional character? She isn't real and if stories were written based on "nice" characters just having perfect and conflict-free lives it wouldn't be interesting and no one would bother reading it... Even her base character was in a situation that I think would be generally considered bad for childhood emotional development. So of course she would have behaviors later in life where she doesn't always take the "best" action for other people. it's not therapystuck. messy keeps things interesting!

i get upset when people draw jade without her two front teeth sticking out, i imagine it hurts her and that makes me very upset...

@theswordwizard
The writers seem to think Jade is real enough if someone like Miles and Haven, current writers of HS2/BC, believed she would get in the way of Davekat in the base webcomic.

re: EriRoxy Fan

Genuinely do not understand the point you're trying to make with that one boss. Dave and Karkat are also not real and are characters in a webcomic, so her "getting in the way" of Davekat doesn't really alter that. I get not liking the direction gone for with Jade (I'm not a big fan of it either) but trying to name and shame writers for it is kinda weird.

@Raffy

I'm just confused on why the double standards on some characters the writers have for some compared to others is all. You see it on the Patreon post how they glaze Karkat up a lot and put down others like John or Jade.

jades awesome.

i love jade harley more than my entire family

@eriroxy fan no, i don't think the writers believe jade gets in the way of davekat. you're talking about one of the people who made jade route, which was a commentary on this misogynistic trope with the advent of earlier homestuck 2. it's not going to happen that they recreate it unthinkingly with the amount of thought they're putting into their time at the helm. also: double standards does kinda come with the territory of being in this space, yeah? you have to decide which characters you like or don't like, i won't blame anyone for that (though i may blame them for liking the ones i don't like, heehee)

i mean yeah, not to wade into the Discourse Mires, but yeah, davejadekat was always a joke on the whole "girl getting in between a yaoi ship" thing in the same way that a lot of late-homestuck is commentary on its own fanbase and their fanfic tropes. (taking a step further, jaderoute is largely about jade ripping and tearing herself out of her Metaphysical Torture Zone, highly recommend reading it, very good story. one of the best to ever do it.)

the reason why "the joke" works is because it shows the trope in a realistic way that it could actually happen. jadedavekat in the book failed 100% because dave and karkat are idiot losers that have no backbone and can barely be honest with themselves, let alone her. they're too busy pretending they don't have emotions that they outright ignore and trample on jade's. this is their burden.

jade is honestly reacting pretty normally to being in a long term will they/won't they dynamic with a guy that refuses to date or reject her. like, can you imagine. i'd blow myself up with 5000 bombs. she can do better. but combining that with jade's general desire to live the normal, picket fence life with a partner and two kids, she really just is Trapped In Hell.

I really like Jade; she was always my favorite out of the Beta kids just because I thought her story from the comic was fascinating. She starts off as a mysterious girl character who seems to know everything, but then, when the plot starts to kick in, she is thrust into the game without any of the old tools she used to have to help other people. She has always been a very caring and empathetic person who wants what's best for other people, even if she has to put herself in serious harm's way to do so. I feel like the main issue I have with the way current Jade is written is that she lacks any of the empathy and emotional care that the Comic Jade had for her friends and family.

Comic Jade stayed on a burning, crumbling Moon because she wanted to see John wake up on Prospit and jumped out of a destroyed tower just to slap him awake at the cost of her own dream life. Comic Jade god-tiered and got everyone on a long journey through space just so they could have that second chance and not die a horrible death. Comic Jade berates and yells at a flanderized cowardly version of herself because what she fears most is becoming something like THAT or having other people view her in that way.

Because of her actions and just the general way she was written in the comic, the way she is written in the Epilogues and Beyond Canon (which do go hand in hand because Jade is the one character who unfortunately is the same in each story) feels like the writers hated her for some reason when they wrote her that way because they intentionally stripped away the main tenets of her personality just to make her a huge weirdo. And this is not to say that Jade didn't have issues in the Comic or whatever, I'm not saying Jade is perfect...but her issues in the Epilogues and Beyond Canon were never THOSE issues. It feels like the writers hastily tacked on issues she never had and then used her abandonment problems as a weak excuse to have them, even if she's just never had them before at all.

Yes, it is true that Jade has some trouble socializing with other people because she has lived alone for most of her life and has been largely isolated from society, having spent her time on a secluded island with only her Grandfather's stuffed body and a Dog for company. Yes, it is also true that Jade had issues with moving on from her ex-boyfriend, who was also a doomed, dead timeline version of her best friend.

It is also true that Jade cares for her friends and does the most and has a lot of empathy for them to the point of self-sacrifice, and has a serious fear of one day not being there for them when they need her most or being too much of a stick in the mud to get things done. She has serious impostor syndrome IMO because she accomplishes so much in the comic and then when things go awry because of things out of her control she starts to doubt everything about herself. So if she has this much care and empathy for other people, why did they write her as a boundary-crossing sexual harasser who couldn't care for anyone's perspective but her own? Why did they have her and Rose go behind Kanaya's back and have a baby the "real" way? Why even bring up that it's probably because it was another way of getting to have a family with Dave or some shit lol? None of these actions make sense if Jade has empathy for her friends or cares for them lol, you'd have to strip that entirely away because nobody who actually gave a damn about their friends like that would do this T_T And so many of her horrid actions are just tied to these singular issues that they ignore the problems she DID have, and so it's like she's an entirely new character who isn't really Jade.

I also just don't like that they make her relationship with Davesprite this weird core part of her character, like we never actually saw that relationship, mind you, it happened when she was 16 years old, and she's a grown woman now. She never dated the "real" Dave, I'd think it would be interesting if there had been an arc where maybe she does ask Dave out to see if she even really liked Dave, but that is not the arc we got and it's not even close to how they wrote her in either story. An arc like that would at least make some sense for Jade, and it would be pretty cool T_T

So I totally get what people mean when they say that it feels like the "writers hate Jade" because they really did just sort of give her problems she wouldn't have canonically. Everyone else got problems that stem from the comic but not Jade.

they're calling her jade "The Struggler" harley

Also to be more clear on what I mean when I say everyone got problems from the Comic but not Jade. I really was interested in seeing Jade handle that growing need to be there for others at the cost of her own bodily autonomy and feeling like she HAS to be there for her friends 24/7 no matter what. But we don't ever actually get that, because the writers decided her boyfriend from when she was a teenager (that we didn't even get to really see all that much) is her REAL issue as an adult.

Not the crippling loneliness or abandonment problems she most definitely would have as an adult, the need to be around other people to keep a hold of that time when she was with all of her friends for the first time in her life and wasn't just alone on that big island. I can agree at least that Jade's want for a "real family" is something that's very interesting to read about, but the way they decided to portray that just doesn't agree with me nor do I think it falls in line with canon or how she was previously written. I guess a better way to put it is that they kind of were right about what issues she'd have, but the execution and ways they decided to focus on those issues were so hilariously and ragebaitingly terrible that just thinking about it makes me want to rewrite a better Jade lol

I spend so much time scouring for other people who write her differently then there because I just cannot stand it T_T

hey, if it's what motivates you to pick up the pen, there's no shame in it. i don't think anyone that makes fanworks would be here if there wasn't some level of... dissatisfaction? with the actual work that you want to see rectified? so fuck it, get crazy, this is a pretty good place to post your own jade writing if the muse comes to you.

my perspective is obviously pretty different for a handful of reasons, but i've seen the current jade concept done pretty damn well. if you've read liminal space before, it's like 90% of the reason why i trust how things are going right now. (if you haven't read liminal space, this is my court-mandated shilling time, go check it out, it's already on fraf)

they're calling her jade "why doesn't the knowing stop the wanting" harley

Jade had been a favorite of mine since before the epilogues dropped (I got into the comic in 2017), and her depiction in the comic (along with others like nepeta, davepeta, jasprose, etc) helped me with really understanding myself as a furry. When the epilogues dropped I'd only realized I was a trans woman a few months prior, and her depiction there was very important to me in understanding myself as a trans woman. She's a character I've felt very seen in throughout the official media made of her. I really appreciated the ways that her being trans and a furry intersected and how she wasn't at any point treated like a man or some kind of "not-quite" woman for the body she had. She's a really special character to me.