#cocoons

TW: Weird hairy lump of silk… thing.

Cascade, part 6.

in the sense that the Green Sun - being composed of the rendered-down remains of both of Homestuck's universes - is a very literal representation of the comic's incestuous slurry of ideas, Dave and Rose emerging from the Sun's radioactive green sludge very much reads as their being reconstituted from ectoplasm. indeed: Hussie suggested years ago that to "die spectacularly in an explosion of green fire" is actually a requirement for reaching the god tiers without a dream self, and while this doesn't turn out to be exactly true, the central premise remains; the old self must be immolated completely to make way for the new self. in this exact same way, trolls find themselves gravitating toward the cocoons they were born from and are completely destroyed via explosion in the process of ascension - for Dave and Rose, the Green Sun is the figurative birth-cocoon they return to in order to be broken down into slime and built back up again.

(so it's interesting, at the very least, that the very same black hole that usurped the Green Sun's position as the center of reality is now the cocoon Vriska Serket finds herself trapped within - complete with lain-thick imagery of fire and death!)

p. 2728

compare as well the Matriorb and Tumor, obvious visual twins which also serve the same purpose as malignant growths which must kill their previous host so as to give rise to a new brood. for Rose, in particular, the gravity that keeps the suburban family unit together - the Green Sun's gravity - is also the gravity that pulls her toward the familial role Sburb has lined up for her, that of the mother. and the icons of the Green Sun hidden, womb-like, within the guts of Rose's planet tell us everything we need to know about the role the Green Sun is supposed to play in this motherhood destiny.

(from Hussie's commentary in Book 5, p. 271: "This is another one of those things that makes it feel like this quest is narratively what is demanded of her [...] it's supposed to feel that way to her, and has a strange sense of obligatory gravity surrounding it.")

Forbidden Worlds #23, November 1953. Ken Bald cover pencils & inks.