Terezi who’s well aware that she stopped growing at six sweeps and is 4’11 (150cm), but isn’t going to bring up her height if nobody else is: “Shortest person has to vacuum the meteor! That’s you Karkat!”
Karkat who accepted that he would always be the shortest when he was six sweeps old and doesn’t realize he’s 6’10 (208cm) and still growing: THATS NOT FAIR. YOU GUYS CANT SAY THAT EVERYTIME WE NEED TO GET SOMETHING DONE!
I love him because out of all the iterations of Jack Noir in the world of Homestuck, Spades Slick is the most morally upstanding. Oh, he’s still a huge fucking murderer and a caustic asshat with no regard for life or really any social skills to speak of, who thinks himself the center of the universe and won’t hesitate to get rid of anyone who gets in his way… But he’s the only Jack who ever showed empathy for another person of his own volition.
Bec Noir’s love of Jade is artificial, forced onto him from the prototyping. Union Jack doesn’t have any agency of his own at all for the majority of the time. Spades Slick goes out of his way to do this.
I’ve always believed that the strongest way to convey a scene is not through self-explanatory or long winded dialogue, nor is it through looking at still establishing shots of things that aren’t moving. It’s having the context of a scene inform the meaning behind the actions taken by the characters.
To break that down a little more, it’s about A Person the Audience Knows who Does Something with Another Person We Know that Changes Something Between Them Forever
Spades Slick is a character we know to be crass, evil, mean, angry all the time, the kind of person who calls people he doesn’t like “coffin stuffers” and feels no remorse in killing them. Karkat we know is an asshole who’s full of himself and judgmental of everyone around him.
In this scene, we learned that Karkat has been hiding something about himself that he cannot change, but that fills him with shame and makes him feel like an enormous weirdo. He overcompensates for this enormous insecurity by being a pompous asshole. When Spades Slick initially meets him, he stabs Karkat in the gut, and Karkat doesn’t even care about the wound, he just worries that this chess guy is going to tattle on him and reveal his secret that he’s been tightly guarding for all his life.
Instead, Spades Slick decides to cut open the palm of his hand and let Karkat know that he’s in the exact same boat. We never see another Jack Noir willingly, and with sound mind, comfort a child ever again. This is the only time. And that has just colored my perception of Spades Slick forever, because while he is an enormous dickwheel, he’s also the only Noir who naturally has a soft side.
karkat and sollux were basically best fucking friends with huge messy humiliating crushes on each other and i feel like somehow not enough people ever really got around to exploring the potential there even though it was one of the earliest and most obvious ships amongst the trolls
like. karkat, who already can’t separate his feelings for others into quadrants, is simultaneously envious of, worried about, and comfortable with sollux. he wants his friend to take better care of himself and wishes he would move closer so they could see each other more, but is also petty and rude and insulting in that way teenage boys so often are. he’s bitter that sollux is better at coding than he is, but also admires him for this fact, but also resents that such skill is wasted on a hot mess like sollux, but also wants the best for his good pal. meanwhile sollux teases the hell out of karkat because (1) he’s an insecure asshole to basically everyone and (2) he wants to push karkat to be better, which sollux knows he can be.
they know each other well enough that they are able to be at least kind of open with their genuine feelings, even if in a fairly roundabout way mixed with dark humor and deprecation of both themselves and one another. they’re basically always black flirting – sometimes as a joke, sometimes because they’re actually pissed at each other, and sometimes to cover the legitimate concern and affection they share. and no matter how vitriolic they get, they’re always reassured of their friendship because they’re just a couple of miserable, dorky 13-year-olds clinging to each other in the face of their uncertain but surely unpleasant fates at the hands of the harrowing world in which they live.
His friends seemed to have treated it in with a sort of don’t ask don’t tell kind of attitude. Like, Karkat’s blood color is wrong and mutant in troll society, but they didn’t want to hurt Karkat because of it, in anyway. Even beyond the obvious killing reaction that many could assume his friends wouldn’t do, none of them did anything at all, like demand he step down from being the leader or something. They didn’t try to change anything at all.
By the same token, though, they didn’t really comfort him about it. Besides Terezi, none of his friends talked about his blood to Karkat directly. No words of comfort, no ‘I don’t want to kill you’ or anything. It was like, as long as Karkat didn’t bring it up and kept hiding behind grey, nobody else wanted to bring it up and mess up whatever tenuous social order they had going.
Of course, a major factor in how this was handled probably had to do with how everyone found out. Karkat didn’t tell anyone his blood color directly, and kept pretending no one knew. The other trolls presumably found out by seeing dead alternate Karkats in dream bubbles during or immediately after the game. So not only was the timing really inconvenient (most of them weren’t going to bring something like blood color up in the middle of the apocalypse), but they didn’t actually see alpha Karkat bleeding. There was no defining moment of ‘hey Karkat’s bleeding, I can see his blood right there, guess I can’t just ignore it.’ They could ignore it, and they did.
I want to know what Karkat’s friends would have done if they found out some other way, like if Karkat told them (would he ever tell someone by choice) or if they saw him bleeding in person.
Honestly my favorite part of Homestuck is that for a solid chunk of the story amongst all of the then-disguised characters harassing the then-main characters one in specifically deals with the main-est character backwards, so he starts out knowing everything about him and hating and insulting him and as we follow the main character his harasser gets less and less mad until it turns out that during their first conversation from the harasser’s side the main character is so used to him he acts friendly and the harasser asks him out, finds out he’s straight, and promptly starts talking to him backwards in time for the sole purpose of being too embarrassed to talk to him with that knowledgeable and honestly same
just moving along like everyone else 