The Homestuck fandom has a bit of Nazi Joke problem.

Oh i did not know that about the Vriska did nothing wrong thing T_T I thought people were just saying it as a joke unrelated to...that...

Casual references to Hitler and Naziism are pretty strange and definitely never a sign of anything good. You're either understating the threat by colloquialising it, or outright signaling that it's not a big deal to you (and I say this as someone who has been guilty of this in the past). Casually invoking it for fun and jokes was way, waaaay too normalized even as recently as the 2010s.

This makes it pretty unsurprising from Hussie. An edgy white dude forumite in the early 2000s? Slur it ain't so! Of all the things I blame them for, I do believe they're sincere in their apology when they mention that they wrote the Skaianet lore years and years before they actually posted it and didn't do a good job reviewing.

That being said, I will defend the references in the comic, and the invocation by the readerbase, because the parallels being drawn are deliberate. Homestuck is telling you things about fascism, genocide and eugenics. It'd be like saying it's wrong to call the stormtroopers in Star Wars "stormtroopers". Where my problem with that series lies is that it's watered down the fascism into generic bad-guys that the series still wants you to think are at least a little bit cool. It's a good thing Darth Vader doesn't really dress like a nazi like some of his officers do, otherwise a lot of children's halloween costumes would have faced some serious controversy.

ADDENDUM: When I say "I will defend the references in the comic and the invocation by the readerbase" I mean for Condesce and Jane specifically, to be clear. The Vriska thing I have no defense for. Eridan is the teenage neo-nazi, not Vriska.

Slight tangent, but I'm in the Stormlight Archives fandom, and from now on I'm going to look at all the "Moash did nothing wrong" comments in a different light. Especially as some of them aren't even joking.

I found the Skaianet Files when I first read Homestuck, but I don't think I made it all the way through. It struck me as a not very funny parody of conspiracy theories that was a bit too close in style and content to actual conspiracy theories, with results that were tedious and a bit queasy.

I sincerely apologize for the way I have unintentionally contributed to these problems, and I should have realized sooner, and I know that being sorry doesn't make it okay. But I still want to say that I never intended to contribute to fascism and anti-semitism, and I hope to be able to change.

to be clear, spintress, a vast majority of people ARE saying it without any relation to the other thing. I don't think it helps anyone to suggest that any large number of people are using it to deliberately dogwhistle fellow neonazis

Jeez what is this, nazi germany?

Yeah, I want to be clear about something because now I realise I wasn't clear about it before: The whole "person did something wrong" format did basically get laundered by the casual re-use on the internet so much that it did get basically completely normalised to most people. Even I forgot about the origins until recent events reminded me.
To reiterate: It isn't a personal or moral failing of any kind for someone to have used it when they had no idea about what the origins were.
(and to be honest, even if someone knew, use won't active perpetuating it any more than it already is, it's already fused both into the general internet and Homestuck internet lingo that it's likely never going away.)

i didnt know about the "did nothing wrong thing" :/
i should study up on dogwhistles again sometime (unfortunately it costs a lot more brainspace than other things due to the upsetting nature)

otherwise i think skitis and moebiancruxtruder both make good points

i think it is very important to talk about these topics, even or maybe especially in fiction, and the sillyness of homestuck does not subtract from it i feel

but i too am uncomfortable with the willingness of society to make nazism the punchline of "jokes"

and ie ive always disliked that everything must include nazis specifically

but i also think that sometimes it is my responsibility to work with these feelings bc again: its important not to be silenced and forgotten either

the skaianet files for sure are extremely poor taste tho and im glad that hussie acknowledges that

the "bait" thing... i feel is mostly just unfortunate

sometimes things truly do not have a connection to it (which is p much the point of dogwhistles i suppose) and while i can absolutely understand discomfort with it i think it would have to be part of a bigger pattern to actually become concerning

(for example i see HH everyday bc... its part of the local license plates (not USAmerican, we have standardised ones) but context is key)

RE: skitis
Even if you don't think it is a moral failing, I still feel incredibly guilty for inadvertently perpetuating nazism, especially when I am (viewed as by most of the world) a white man in america, so I feel like i should try especially hard to look out for this shit, and overall I just sincerely apologize, and hope everyone knows that I'm aware of how much i messed up.

@the1woomy

I've found that when you do something that has some previously unknown connection to Bad Stuff, the best course of action is to just kind of go "oh wow that sucks" and then move on from it and not do it again. it's virtually impossible to know every connotations of every single thing you say or do, and feeling guilty about it isn't really productive. better to just acknowledge it and adjust going forward. better for your mental health and better for the world imo.

all this to say, don't worry about it too much. you're a sweet kid, you didn't mean anything wrong by it, and you're not going to make the joke again, so it's no big deal. it's inevitable that you and everyone else here will end up in this same situation a bunch of times throughout our lives, and that sucks but it's also just how it is

i'd be earnestly curious when the last time she said bait like that was. because if i feel like if it was ~pre-2016, it's definitely a bit more of an understandable accident.

anyway. re: "x did nothing wrong," i totally understand feeling guilt, but as op said, it absolutely isn't a moral failing, and i might even argue there's a lot of other things that evoke similar phrasing that've all kind of melted together into the cultural osmosis melting pot. like i personally think of that parks and rec bit "ive never done anything wrong, ever, in my life." something like that is a lot more vague than something like "reject modernity, embrace tradition" which is a lot more obviously fascist and perpetuitive. is that a word. who gaf.

i always feel awkies coming into conversations like this with my mod hat on. theres no real way to be like "guys im speaking as alex and not as alex the mod." hey guys. dont be scared. i'm just chatting.

hi alex the alex

RE: duckbuster Thank you for your kind comments about me, and I definitely know logically that this doesn't make me a bad person, but emotionally, it just, along with so many things, makes me feel incredibly guilty for no real reason, and sometimes even just for existing.

i could have sworn i remember "x did nothing wrong" originated elsewhere before the nazi version of the joke existed? i cant find a source for this though, but I could have sworn i heard that was the case. even if this is the case, its a generic enough phrase that i feel like people trying to draw that association back make it feel like there's a bit of an eagerness to problematize. it also could be likely that vriska did nothing wrong sprung up independently of the other usage of the phrase.

it reminds me of when people get up in arms about the use of "gay panic" to refer to someone being gay and flustered, because it shares a similarity to "gay/trans panic defense" (a legal defense of "oh its ok because the killer was so caught off guard by the fact that the victim was gay/trans that they killed them", which is obviously very ghoulish) when its Highly unlikely that the former has anything to do with the latter and were likely coined independently with no relation to each other. it feels like people are trying to take a thing that's mostly normal and harmless and go "don't you know that's actually Bad because History?" as a thought terminating cliche.

its pretty hard to learn and grow if you never make mistakes yaknow? We grow up surrounded by people and things that talk and act a certain way and absorb that. Sometimes thats good, and sometimes its a thing to be unlearned.

And 2000s internet sure was A Place. If you were to find and dig through my deviantart and see the things my friends and I said.. woof.. rough... but we were like 14 and what ppl dont tell you about the "rawr XD" era is that one of the most popular memes was "pedobear" and every third joke was some kind of rape joke. And when you get steeped in that during very impressionable years it takes time to unpack and unlearn. I remember when a close friend of mine was like "hey. another friend told me that the rape stuff makes her uncomfortable we should stop" and we did! it was actually very easy to stop. All this to say no one should feel bad over making "x did nothing wrong" jokes. because now you know, youve learned! it might be a learning experience that hurts or upsets you, but you'll bounce back a better person (^.^)b

more on the original topic: the gunk of the internet era that homestuck first came out of clings to it hard. It tries to shake it off as it goes on but whats done is done. Ive actually done a lot of thinking about like. If a lot of that stuff should be tweaked/changed or if it should remain as it is like those old cartoons with the disclaimers that they are unedited because its better to acknowledge the faults than to pretend they simply didnt happen. Like because its still there we can look directly at it and have this conversation yaknow? idk i know some people swear by that one UHC mod that replaces slurs and stuff but like i said im conflicted. is it better to file off rough edges? or should we face the reality of the mistakes head on?

You know what? Lots of people talked, so rapid-fire response time:

@elegantspinstress - To clarify most people were saying it as a joke unrelated to anything truely bad. Just the bad luck of the internet for the origin of such phrasing.

@mobiancruxtruder - Oh I absolutely agree that it is fine to compare fascists in stories to fascists in real life. Though obviously we have to be careful we don't trivialise stuff, so it is a fine balance to strike at time.

@tavroscrocker - Whilst I do not know the specific situation, knowing the internet it may not even be a deliberate reference because of how time and constant reference laundered the origin point.

@the1woomy - to reiterate if I wasn't clear before, yeah, it kinda sucks to learn, but you didn't do wrong in this case, and you shouldn't feel bad for it. In this case I'll be honest, it doesn't actually do much harm because most people have forgotten the origin, and the original meaning is basically lost, but the origin is unfortunate (and I am personally surprised at how I forgot it).

@jakemorph - I agree. Maybe I was a tad too hyperbolic, but I just wanted to point out the unfortunate origin of the phrase in that example.

@griseousaconite - Yeah, the "bait" thing is unfortunate, but it shows that you sometimes do need to be careful with things whenever you run into a conincidence. In this case, it doesn't mean that Vriska's quirk is bad, but that when using said quirk, you should see if there's other options to phrase what you want to say. On the topic of Nazis and jokes, I think they should be mocked relentlessly, but people should avoid accidentally making them sympathetic or anything like that. Idk if I make sense, I'm getting tired now as it's approaching midnight.

@duckbuster - Basically yeah what you said here is what I think about this.

@alex - <joking>eep scary mod!</joking> I did some searching and last time she said it was Act 6 Act 6 Intermission 5 in 2015, page 7830. And yeah, that's true, there are probably other things that have less nasty origins that kinda got merged into the phrasing through the passage of time and the internet. <joking>I wonder if any could be repurposed for modern Vriscourse.</joking>

@stagelights - Honestly, if it has an origin before that, then I'd be curious to know. It's definitely a case that the 'edgy version' seems to have become the loudest by the time I had heard of such phrasing initially. And, maybe I am being a bit too eager to go "wait that's kinda bad"! Still definitely feels kinda unfortunate. and even if the Vriska version is basically innocent, on a personal level I will avoid the phrasing in the future. Though I guess I'm not gonna be like "you're a bad person to say that!" to anyone lol.

@autumnwyvern - Yep, I agree with your first pont lol. and yeah, Homestuck is full of the gunk of the 2000s to 2010s internet. Personally I think we should leave that as-is, but give people the right warnings and context for it, because in some ways, I find that part of the value of Homestuck? It is a flawed but also a time capsule in some ways.

@skitis

oh yeah i didnt mean nazis shouldnt be mocked, i specifically tried phrasing it differently than "nazi as punchline" bc i meant jokes where the punchline is the cruelty, or the "its just a joke" type

for me its probably a bit of a mix of various exhaustions as well bc its extremely common and... ngl disheartening how often media has characters or factions or whatever who are ""german"" and its always nazis

and it is a certain kind of fucked up when you grow up with that conflation
(i dont want to imply that its as fucked up as the actual history of the Nazi-Reich, please dont read this in bad faith)

but it really does fuck with you when part of your identity (here national) is constantly conflated with these horrors, especially when you are part of a group that was (attempted to be) eradicated during them

idk i fear i have gotten sidetracked with this now and i dont want to distract from the original topic
bc like this overall is a bigger topic than my personal extension of it

i agree that in internet spaces (and especially wester internet spaces) where the actual dogwhistling is unfortunately more common it is sensible to think about different phrasing possibilities to avoid them
(the tainting of anything the extreme right adopts and if one automatically should drop those things or if that is seen as conceding ground to them is, while related, probably a different topic, and one that i do not feel equipped to make definite statements on)

guy's im literally normal i'm literally the alex...

but yeah 2015 makes sense. i feel like knowledge of dog whistles really only started spreading in like 2016/2017? obviously it sucks but yknow. shit happens. once or twice a year ill do the Okay hand gesture until i remember