I HATE DIRK STRIDER

Have you ever seen a character who’s just all of your worst qualities shoved in your face? Yeah. This is that.

All posts have now been fully tagged with all the proper labels for characters and ships, the year they were posted, and the post type (#txt #gif #mp3 #mp4*).

Special Tags:

#hatingdirk — Self explanatory.

#dirkposting — Posts that remind me of Dirk that don’t have to do with Homestuck.

#upd8 — Panel redraws or art that explicitly references a specific point in the comic.

#dirkapitation — Also self explanatory.

#trivia — Posts containing Homestuck lore or fandom history.

#hs posting #notdirk — Posts about Homestuck that are not related to Dirk.

There’s a couple niche tags that I threw in there just for fun like #pony!dirk for fanart of Dirk as a pony or with ponies or #t!dirk for posts depicting Dirk as transgender.

PS: June and her ships are only tagged when explicitly mentioned or depicted.

character who is not allowed to kill themself

related: suicidal character who physically can't kill themself

alive character who has successfully committed suicide

character who hasn't died but has committed thematic suicide of the Self

Prospit: promises glory

Derse: promises a challenge.

Prospit has the clouds of skaia giving (edited and censored) hints at the future, but prospit itself is a glorious golden kingdom that cares for its heroes, building them up with promise of glory and heroism. It is a place of optimism, even if the dreamers themselves are not optimists, they still are those who thrive under in prospit's optimism.

While Derse is an immediate hostile challenge. Derse dreamers wake up to a shift shadowed city of secrets to be discovered at their own peril. Horror terrors whisper promises not of glory, but of power. Derse entices players not with a promised reward, but with a challenge. It is for those who thrive under that environment.

Examples:

Jade is enticed by the cloud of skaia promising a chance to be with her friends, it tells her she is the witch of space with a grand destiny and she follows it.

Dirk spends his time on derse fighting assasins and engaging in political battles. He reacts to the hostility of derse with action, rising up as the prince of heart.

Karkat is no "optimist" but he does strive for glory. His reaction to being a mutant on alternia is to cling to an unreachable goal of somehow impressing the Empress with his power so much she doesn't cull him.

Where as Feferi reacts to the inevitable day she will be culled by the Empress is to take the challenge, fighting off assassins and dreaming of the day she might win her duel against condy and become the Empress. The threat on her life is a challenge she gladly accepts.

Nepeta as well, she is a hunter and a fighter and she is always juggling ships and figuring out who is hooking up with who but she doesn't dare dream of actually having her otp become canon. For all she embraces the challenge of matchmaking, she doesn't even try to aim for the ultimate reward, hiding her feelings.

Jake loves the promise of heroism, of glory, but crumples when challenged, reacting to conflict with avoidance.

Dave doesn't like the challenge, but he reacts more to the responsibility of time travel then he does to any promise of glory. He groans and crashes the stock market when told to.

Calliope dreams of the reward of skaia, of playing the game and having fun, of having friends.

op dont hide some of the best details on the tags!!

MORE OF WTF-FUN-FACTS are coming HERE

of course, sorry about that. here is a censored version!

dad and mom form the groundwork for it. their designs are so archetypically "male and female" it's like looking at a bathroom sign. and then you're like oh, mom has a bronzed vacuum, that's pretty weird. oh, dad has an account on an app entirely dedicated to fatherly figures whose main interests include pipes and fedoras and formalwear and shaving, that's a pretty funny exaggeration of manhood. then you get to bro, who is basically an experiment to see how far you can push the "messy and irresponsible prankster" archetype of the big brother until the audience actually recognizes his actions as abuse and not sibling banter (you can push this incredibly far, it turns out). then you get to the trolls' parents, who are literal animals and monsters. and by the time you reach the alpha kids, 3/4 of them don't even have monster parents around and, for the most part, grew up completely alone. and then there's the whole meteor and ectobiology thing, where none of these characters technically had parents in the first place but still, in a weird way, have relatives...

I tried doing a little animation again after not doing it for two years.

Spiders go fairly well with two of the four classical elements: Earth, because they're creepy-crawly, and Wind, because spider webs have that wispy ephemeral aesthetic (and also because of ballooning). Water is a fresh approach, but still intuitive if you remember that some spiders do swim.

In terms of less orthodox elements, I think spiders go well with Nature/Plants/"Green" but can't articulate why. A Lightning Spider may as well happen - though you can make it more meaningful in a modern setting if you compare a power grid to a spider's web.

Spiders don't pair well with fire. If the memes are to be believed, it's their natural elemental nemesis. That said, I guess there's nothing fundamentally wrong with a Fire Spider. Same with Ice - I guess I can see it, but it's not their natural element.

That raises the question of which element is most natural to a spider, and the answer is simple. In the public view spiders are creepy, so they would most naturally belong to a creepy element - Darkness or Poison or Death, depending on what's available.