🎱 don’t bleed on the suits ♠️

will have to make a pt2 for eridan + fef

living together

but we can tell just from the framing device, the setup, that this is not... precisely.... true. we get allusions to real events that have happened within meat as we know it (the script, the existence of candy as a text), but everything is tinged through a lens of happiness that the narrative begs us to question- especially in regards to jake.

jake is monologuing intensely (likely actually speaking to brain ghost dirk, who we know is also present in meat). jake is staring forlornly at the screen during movie nights. jake puts a gun to his head during a game night. karkat is injured (and it's heavily implied that jake is the cause- "the ship's windows aren't bulletproof", and of the cast, only jake both uses guns and is unstable enough rn that he might do such a thing).

this, plus other factors (jane and kanaya still seem really tense, and obviously the "love how we reconciled offscreen" bit for jade and dave) AND the zoom in and droning noise at the very end make me think the narrative wishes for us to question to what degree this is an accurate emotional picture of what is happening, and to what degree it's a presentation that jade has curated.

this ties deeply into themes surrounding narrative that HSBC has brought up. allie and dirk are obviously large scale controllers of narrative, as is represented by their text color control and their large scale ambitions. but their impulses of narrative ownership are not unique. here, jade is doing the same thing, by rewriting the narrative of what has been happening on the ship in meat in order to present a happy-go-lucky tale of a group of friends all together. it's not unlike what people do in their own lives, after all, presenting their best face to the world.