The Homestuck fandom has a bit of Nazi Joke problem.

@griseousaconite - Oh god those are some complex messy issues that I am not qualified to talk about at all. Though yeah popular culture (is that the right term?) really has this habit of just flattening things, which is starting to stray from what I was talking about but somewhat tangentially related. And honestly, how to handle stuff that got 'stolen' is yet another thing that I feel like we should discuss, but unfortunatly not something I feel qualified to talk about with any authority.

the @alex - Ah. As the whole of my life from 2014 to 2018 was a blur I can barely remember, I will have to defer to you on this since I don't really recall myself.

re: luna stagelights

The only place I can think of that asserted this claim was, ironically, the blog post titled "Vriska did nothing wrong, and here′s why" by Ouroborista, specifically the blog post version:

"Note: some people oppose the phrasing, because it allegedly stems from the antisemitic “H*tler did nothing wrong” meme popular on 4chan. This is false. That particular phrase was first used online in 2011, and instances of the generic “X did nothing wrong” can be found in fandom circles from at least 2006 onwards. Do not cede ground to n*zis."

To be clear I'm not presenting this as hard evidence or anything that phrases like "Vriska did nothing wrong" "X did nothing wrong" are ok. It's kind of hard to corroborate these claims considering I was barely sentient in pre-k in 2006. But considering its fandom relevance it may be possible this is where you heard it from.

Is that why that one person got mad at me for the Vriska did nothing wrong joke?

Looking back, me making that Vriska did nothing wrong meme 2 years ago was probably a stupid idea and I should never had said that, even though it was just a joke.

BTW should we abandon those jokes?

@rollypollypal - Interesting, I'm personally curious to see more information about this partly as just being an internet history nerd to some degree. Whilst my earliest time on the internet was from around 2007ish, I did only start getting into things at around 2011, so it is entirely possible that I did miss something. The thing is, I did hear the 'joke' involving Nazis in real life, from 11-year-olds trying to be edgy and subversive. I guess it doesn't contradict that timeline! Whilst I would want more information, I would rather not continue to perpetuate misinformation on the internet.

@lyndis - I guess if someone had originally heard the Nazi version of the joke, and then heard the Vriska version later, it would explain why they could be bothered. (Though also on a personal level I don't really like statements like that with zero nuance even if you remove the baggage, so that could also be why.) Either way, I wouldn't go as far as to call it a "stupid idea", because you didn't really know any negative implications beyond those of Vriska herself.

As to the general idea on if we should abandon said jokes? - Personally I won't make them, but I won't hold it against others who do. However, I suppose the history matters somewhat (which makes me worry on if I've muddled things up even more).

this joke (and at least one very very bad cosplay i've seen) centering on vriska is especially egregious, considering she's a mass murderer (of "Pro8a8ly many thousands."). i wonder if whoever made the joke first was intentionally drawing a parallel

re:dream-bubbles

its really probable that was the intention, yeah.

@dream-bubbles - I wouldn't be surprised, but to be fair I don't know how to even begin finding the origin of this, especially given it's possible some of the original sources of the time are long gone from the internet.

This will sound more than a bit odd, but I think a great deal of the story's Holocaust references are part of a broader satire of anti-feminist discourse, framing abortion in terms of genocide -- perhaps riffing on the then-popular smear "feminazi". Four points:

1. On page 6140, Spades Slick (abbreviated SS) commands all of the Felt to get in the oven. A few readers observed that this page was published on that year's Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) and wondered whether this was a reference to gas chambers or crematoriums -- like a fucked up version of the story's Christmas-time alchemy binges or New Year ball-drops (Jade and Jane's towers).

2. Assuming the above isn't a one-off joke, it becomes interesting that the Sea Hitler who exterminated most the human race is also known as Betty Crocker, a purveyor of baked goods. Meenah actually makes a point of framing baking as murder on 4755 before she tries to kill Roxy: "ever do any baking nerd // ... // then you know -EXACTLY what you do with somefin thats done // you stick a fork in it" This anecdote colors the term "grubloaf" -- Alternia culls its infants on a scale that allows them to become mass commodities like Nepeta's paints, and the invocation of baking connects their deaths to other discourses on ovens vis-a-vis genocide.

3. GAMEBRO magazine is a farcical example of hypermasculine attitudes in gaming circles, but its title is also riff on the respectable periodical PLAYBOY -- GAMEBRO's glib dismissal of girly shit therefore hints at some form of engagement with feminist critique of porn as a bastion of misogyny. This makes it less surprising that when we meet the character Bro, he seems to chiefly occupy himself with producing pornography (that it's GAY pornography complicates things but the story's engagement with homophobia is a separate discussion). The point being, we should understand that Alternia's GAMEGRUB is likewise an implicit porn magazine -- one that deals in images of dead babies. It flips the feminist critique of porn and makes the pejorative proposition that in Sea Hitler's world, abortion is the new sexual fixation.

4. Wrt to Vriska saying "88" on 5396, I think it matters that the "bait" in question is, in her own words, "dead children". The big bad has 88 for eyes whenever the black billiard balls settle, giving him a loose link to the Nazi discourse. He comes from a species of skeletons which in combination with the name "cherub" suggests dead infants with angel wings -- which we now might associate with Caliborn's (abandoned) title "Eternity's Shylock" or his reference to the Merchant of Venice via the "pound of smut" line, given the invective-based association of the Holocaust (and therefore other invocations of antisemitism) with abortion. And the name "Lord English" has synonyms in the form of variations on "large utterance" -- "Imperial Drone" (which collects the "genetic material" ie blood of children) and "Vast Glub" (which causes mass killings) are major ones, but in the context of anti-feminist discourse, I would be remiss not to include "Huge Bitch". That the Bitch's 88 would be dead children seems consistent with the joke at the core of GAMEGRUB magazine.

...is my current sense of things. Not sure if this really puts anybody's concerns to rest (or if any of you will find this persuasive), but personally I find Homestuck's absurdly abstract parodies of reactionary discourse to be fascinating.

@mmmmalo - Oh wow, that is quite a lot to think about. Honestly I can't really say, since whilst I can see everything you've pointed out there, a lot of it is sadly, well, indirect or subtle enough that it could be be a coincidence. (This sorta is the problem with trying to be sneaky, sometimes it can sneak past you, or worse it can send the opposite message.)

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.

re: mmmmalo oh my gosh okay i probably should have read the second page of replies before i left mine, because you definitely have done a lot of thinking on this topic and you are cooking up some fascinating analysis here!! if you ever write this into a full essay or something i'd love to hear.

i still sort of wonder how much of this was intentional on hussie's part. regardless though it is such a fascinating way to look at homestuck and the story and all the tiny moving parts going on and just. im definitely gonna be mulling over that one for a while... i think you could even argue it connects to sburb as a whole with how sburb can be read as a reproductive system that... just happens to also lead to the death of a fair number of its adolsecent players. the meteors that destroy the home planets and all their people are also giant firey rocks. you could maybe connect that but i think i might be stretching it at this point... ;w;

re: wolfkitty there's death/rebirth motifs all over the story tbh -- Skaia's process of destroying worlds to create anew is one, god tier ascension is another, the Mother Grub's head is a giant skull... it's a potent motif.

I find the mapping of hate speech to large plot beats plausible partly because Homestuck is referencing stories that have already done the same... like the movie Deep Impact, which John references in Act 1 to crack an Obama joke. That movie's about a giant tidal wave that floods the earth, but on an emotional level this doomsday scenario kind of represents the panicked attitudes of racists for whom the presidency of Morgan Freeman is effectively the end of the world. There's an early scene where a reporter tries to find information on the ELE (Extinction Level Event) and is instead confronted by advertisements for black musicians (Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington), sound systems ("THE WAVE OF THE FUTURE"), and beach vacations ("You've got some OCEAN coming!"). In combination, these link black sound waves (like Freeman's voice) to the coming tidal wave. The reporter's main emotional conflict is that she doesn't like her dad's new wife -- i.e. she doesn't like a new figure of authority in her life! The stepmom's advice to her unhappy daughter is the same as Freeman's advice to a country panicked over the coming flood (and therefore implicitly over his presidency): "Life will go on" ie you will get over it.

I think Homestuck kind of carries the torch of apocalypse-as-venue-for-confronting-ethnic-tensions forward when the first figure we see on the sandy ruins of Earth is a BLACK* DEMOCRATIC OFFICIAL in the form of the Mayor. Him introducing the Sburb motif where White is destined to lose to Black (in chess!) is colored by the same panicked racial anxieties that were being discussed in Deep Impact. The same goes for the Planet of the Apes references on the cherubim's post-apocalyptic wasteland imo -- all those Statues of Liberty lying in the dunes. That was another story using scifi to talk about race... oh and the stamps on PM's letters are from Rhodesia, an African state that underwent a civil war as the colonial government resisted a push for democratic rule (which would shift power from the white minority towards the black majority). Lots of references to anxiety about black leadership

Sorry that this deviates from the antisemitism topic -- I think Homestuck is engaged with a number of different ethnic tensions and inflammatory social conflicts, and I felt like attempting to demonstrate that would be the quickest way to strengthen my case for the previous post

what

I think I understand what you're trying to get at here, like I get how the obama joke is either racist or is at least referencing the sort of "woah a black president? isn't that crazy" atmosphere i remember existing in 2009, which is a thing only being said because america is so racist that a black president seemed improbable/impossible before obama. It's when we get to the stuff about the Mayor and Rhodesia when I start to get confused. Also quick point here re: abortion is the new sexual fixation. one problem with that is that trolls don't get pregnant, so they can't have abortions. Either way, abortion isn't child murder. also i am 100% sure "genetic material" is a euphemism for cum. I understand that like, you've backed up the whole blood thing with quotes of Equius talking about "blood flowing" in a horny way, but it's a sexual metaphor. it's jizz. They jizz in those buckets, mmmmalo.

also bringing it back to the main topic: re @wolfkitty42, I noticed the Hitler jokes too and winced pretty hard. hussie pretty frequently throws out words related to the Holocaust and it's very jarring. A lot of Gentiles will just throw out "hitler" as a generic bad guy name without really being considerate of how jewish people might feel about that. i think it's an education thing, but that's not an excuse because it's also a lack of empathy. i got called out on doing this once, and I'm glad i did because in retrospect it's pretty abhorrent. Hussie's apology for skaianet was super necessary and I'm glad they addressed it.

@mmmmalo i am utterly fascinated by your analysis. i don't even think i fully follow it but i do think you're, like, onto something that exists in this text. i would love to hear more of your thoughts, though probably in a context separate from this thread

wrt Vriska: think it's safe to say that both the "nothing wrong" line and the bait thing are extremely unfortunate coincidences that we should nevertheless be aware of? i wasn't aware of those things and i'm glad i am now.

but what concerns me more are things like, yes, skaianet, like @wolfkitty42 mentioned. and also everything relating to Meenah and the Condesce in Act 6. i give hussie a lot of leeway, i generally assume they have something she's trying to say and i try to look for stuff like that wherever possible, but it's hard to talk about "sea hitler" and how the kid version of her is actually aligned with the protagonists and she's also inexplicably tied up in a lot of Black stereotypes, for reasons that i'm sure made sense but i do not have and would not especially enjoy defending uncritically anyway. like there is just a lot to unpack there and i don't think any discussion that isn't aware of it will get far in any direction

@bluebootyraider the idea with the mayor and so on is that after that initial Obama joke, the comic start presenting you with more abstract versions of the racist idea that a black president means the end of the world for white people. Hussie doesn't believe this (the first command after John's narration expresses incredulity about a black president existing is "examine calendar"), but that's the viewpoint being satirized. I tend to think this is also part of why Her Imperious Condescension has black speech inflections -- her flooding of the Earth is a plot beat straight out of Deep Impact. Likewise I don't think abortion is child murder -- but insofar as the story's satirical target is anti-abortion rhetoric, which continually claims that abortion is child murder, that's the attitude we see on display is certain aspects of the world building. It's like large chunks of the story are on the wavelength of that "maybe video games DOES cause violence!" joke from SBAHJ.

This is why I think at least some of the comic's references to the Holocaust are specifically about the ways Nazism is used (and mis-used) in political discourse that isn't even about Jewish people.

that clears up a lot actually

It's unfortunate regarding Meenah; I wonder if maybe ironing out her character to be less stereotypical and just having her be a black-coded alien would be received better. The idea of a black-coded ruler of Alternia isn't necessarily doomed. It could be done well. I should read "piccolo is black". I've heard good things about it, and it talks about exactly this.

Also this isn't a Homestuck thing, but something I noticed was that a lot of fandoms have used the term degenerate, which is a word that the Nazis have used to denote people/art that they didn't like, and guess which word these fans are using to describe fans/art they don't like? And it isn't just the Nazis, but other far-right/bigoted groups such as TERFs/white supremacists that are using this term.

Also the person who got made at me over the Vriska did nothing wrong joke called me a rape, and told me if I said Vriska did nothing wrong at university, I could get caught or something like that.