You gotta decide for yourselves whether people in the year of our lord 2017 should be judged entirely by the words and thoughts and ideas they put out into the world years ago in different life stages. Like. This isn’t a problem that’s going to go away. Increasingly now the history of people’s entire life journey is accessible via some social media snap shot in the wayback machine or some ancient chat log sitting on someone’s hard drive out there. We don’t all start from the same place. A lot of us start from positions of privilege, from systems learned from parents or other family or institutions with power over us that influence our way of thinking when our brains are first developing the capacity for empathy and understanding.
And we grow. And we create. And we experience things. And we talk with people. We make friends. We read feedback. We listen to some and we disregard others, and years later, some (but by no means all) of what we disregarded we might think about again and realize was good feedback and helpful advice.
Our opinions change. Our understanding of our own privilege changes. Our understanding of media and propaganda and narrative and power structures and justice change. Our biases shift. Our politics change. Our worldviews are shaped by our conversations and our experiences and the things we take to heart and the things we lock outside.
Hussie used to interact heavily with the fandom. There is so much text from him out there saved in archives that has been pored over again and again and again by people with axes to grind, people with their own agendas, people who feel wronged and hurt and ignored by someone they maybe once respected and looked up to.
Anyone with that much text over that long a period of time has something fucking problematic out there waiting to hang them, I guarantee it. Back in 2012 the r-slur and the a-slur were common slang used by elementary school kids, let alone ppl frequenting the various rancid asscracks of the internet. Then awareness campaigns took root and opinions and language shifted for the better and suddenly a lot of text written without that mindfulness started looking really nasty, didn’t it?
We as a society are going to have to make some hard decisions in the very near future about how much rope we need when we’re eyeing those gallows for people we feel wronged by. How much someone’s opinion now means when their opinion five years ago might have been the exact opposite. How much good faith to extend to people who grow and change and understand their younger selves had some Bad Opinions about the world, but can’t erase the words they said, and have to live with them for the rest of their lives because people looking for ammunition can find it in ample supply. How much someone’s actions now count for weighed against their words in another fucking life.
There are quotes out there where Hussie said some stupid shit. There are a million words of Hussie quotes out there. I don’t know how old you are, but if you’re an adult, I can almost guarantee you that you can go back some number of years and remember a version of you that you’d be terrified of the internet finding today.
The dude gave us one of the most queer-positive, transformative and engaging pieces of media of all time. It wasn’t perfect and he wasn’t perfect because nothing and no one is. The queer community is always so goddamn hypercritical of its prolific creators, in part because we’re desperate for the things we want and never get and it’s so frustrating to find people who *almost* give you what you want – and god knows the mainstream media isn’t listening, so where else do we have to turn but inward? We’re a stymied, frustrated group desperate for representation on all sorts of underrepresented axes of oppression and no one story is ever going to satisfy everyone. But Homestuck was so big, so expansive and meant so much to so many – of course there’s a lot of bitter disappointment out there.
How much rope do we need to hang someone? How much history do we need to build a gallows out of plank by fucking plank to feel morally justified?
Yo, yall, I saw someone in the cherubplay tag asking about a guide for this and I like to think I’m pretty good at Dirk roleplaying, so let’s go.
I was going to try and keep this away from most “fanon vs. canon” stuff, but as a heads up, with both Striders it’s fairly impossible to avoid talking about that because they put up such fronts that get read as their actual character. (More on that in a sec.)
While on the one hand you have the misreadings of Dirk that result in desperate, clingy, whiny “looking for doms” bed starfish, on the other hand, you have the suave, domineering, puppeteer Dirks who control literally everything their friends do, are always in control, and definitely never panic in a bad situation. While both of those misreadings are bad, I’d actually argue the second is more OOC than the first, and this is a post about why.
Anyway, this is gonna be a really long post because I like talking about Dirk and his complexes way too much, so hit the readmore.
My first impulse would be Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine, previously discussed here and here.It takes a fair bit of text to describe the mechanics and conventions of play, so I won’t rehash it all here – you can check out the linked posts for the details.
CMWGE is admittedly still pretty cerebral, though; if you want to dial things down even further and don’t mind glossing over a lot of the flavour, Fate Accelerated Edition is a good general purpose option for wacky YA fantasy adventures with just a hint of metatextual wankery. (And really, would it be Homestuck without at at least a little bit of metatextual wankery?) The way it handles character building is pretty flexible on that front, ranging from straightforward “I get a bonus when I roll to do the thing” all the way up to “my character sheet is literally a list of memes”.
(On the flip side, if you wanted to dial the cerebral bullshit all the way up and break off the goddamn knob – and I’m only adding this because I know somebody will – the only possible answer is Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist [warning: direct PDF link]. See this previous post for a discussion of its mechanics– for all the good it will do you! – and this post for some brief remarks on running it in alternative settings, including Homestuck.)
balencia said: Technically, Dad Egbert/Crocker is also born normally.
See, I don’t know about that. If Dad Egbert was the biological son of Jane + random person and Dad Crocker was the biological son of John + someone, why would he be identical in both universes? And it’s not just the symbolic artstyle – John recognizes him immediately. The Nature Of Dad is a mystery to me.
Hmmm…
Some Headcanon Possibilities:
John and Jane are genetically identical? And so were the people they had Dad!Crockerbert with??
Was gonna suggest Dad might also be an adoptee, but isn’t it mentioned canon that Jane and John are his bio parents? Looking at the wiki just now maybe not, so he could be. 2a. It just occurred to me for the first time that, John and Dad!Crocker was not only John being given Jane’s Dad reunion, but also Dad!Crocker meeting his own long-dead father, but as a kid? Who he’d probably recognize pretty easily since Crockerberts keep photo albums and family mementos everywhere?? That makes the whole sitch even weirder, even if it does -partially- explain why Dad!Crocker would be so happy to see him.
John and Jane are genetically identical, and there’s something particular to paradox-goo-based-genetics that is overriding, ensuring that the offspring of Players are exact reiterations of themselves across all timelines and continuities, just like their parents.
Dad’s a Guardian and Guardians, due to the role they play in Players’ lives Pre-Game, are kept consistent across iterations by The Game. 4a. The prob with this would be that we see part of the Players’ responsibility in The Game is to create themselves, so presumably if this were the case John would have also been asked to carry out the tl engineering needed to create Dad in both Timelines.
Dad!Egbert and Dad!Crocker aren’t actually identical, just close enough in appearance to fulfill the same archetype in John’s mind at the moment of their “reunion”. John seems to be living in his house alone at the very end, so it may be that, with time, John noticed the differences, physical and otherwise, between Dad!C and his Dad.
Total story convenience and there actually is no textual, non-meta, explanation for it.
Yeah! I think it’s really interesting how Hussie textually represses things the kids themselves repress – it says it right there in the text you ARE John, you ARE Jade, etc etc. If that character is repressing it, it’s obscured from the reader as well, encoded in symbols and manifestations and word associations. Keeping things hidden really gives a sense of how resistant the kids are to certain ideas – the only thing is that since the 2nd-person artifice is ultimately false, you don’t always get to see what happens when the kids learn what you learn.
y’know, now that homestuck is relevant again, i think we as a fandom can really take things we’ve learned in the past few years and put them to use in the context of old issues from back in the day. i think there’s a lot of important concepts and ideas that come from newer fandoms that can solve age-old debates about aspects of homestuck.
what i’m saying here is that john egbert’s voice definitely sounds like griffin mcelroy
just moving along like everyone else 