Vriska : )

i actually sketched a few as kind of a joke, but then the team was like "wow you should really do these" but they're not actually very good. i wanted to try cleaning them up a bit, but then other things sort of took priority. here are some of the sketches.

this approach is most evidently seen in stuff like the "decoding symbols" approach to homestuck i read recently, which is a qanon-focused reading of homestuck (yeah, that's real, fuck it, why not)

if you're not familiar with qanon, one of their many premises is that mass media is a means to disseminate the conspiracies - they speak in code so that those who are not in on the code may not notice the message at all, but those who do can take coded instructions from it on how to like, i dunno, steal babies and do blood libel or whatever it is qanon guys believe now

this is obviously bullshit, but that decoding idea - that all things are encoded, that nothing is what it is - is super prevalent in a lot of homestuck "analysis" posts when it's actually, analysis's opposite. the difference between interpretation and decoding is that you go in with the mindset of thinking there is a hidden meaning you want to find in the text. you want this end result to be true, so anything that could stand in its way becomes mutable

and since your results are obviously horseshit, you continue justifying it and building up infinite false premises that stack atop each other forever until you're not even really talking about the same story. you've built a second story in your head that uses the same pages but you've decided none of that actually refers to itself, just its coded meanings