#gem liveblogs

The first four lines Karkat says here literally sound like they could be a disgruntled Homestuck fan talking smack about me as they scan backwards through the story. Which sounds like a funny thing for me to say—and it is—but it's also not that remarkable, since at any given moment Homestuck is full of surrogates for various factions of the readership. Basically any character who is viewing the actions of other characters on a screen can be seen as a consumer of that story through some form of in-canon digital media. Whether they type in character commands like the exiles, or use Trollian to skip around the "archive" in a nonlinear way like the trolls do, for the sake of "adventure analysis" or to heap scorn on those involved, every narrative-viewing character is temporarily filling the role of the Homestuck reader from a certain angle. Later, cherubs become the ultimate distillation of the idea.

There's something kind of eerie about these stable time loops when it comes to the absurd, bitchy conversations the characters have with each other. There is literally no discernible origin to this prank John is playing. It's pasted to him from the future, he thinks it's a great prank, and he decides to play the prank in the future because of it, exactly as typed here. And yet, the whole exchange appears to be perfectly in character and in full alignment with their personalities. So entire exchanges between two individuals can be totally without origin, yet still sound exactly like them. This opens up a whole bunch of creepy possibilities. Ghosts or afterimages of their personalities seemingly can emerge from pure void in a convincing way, like bodiless simulacra. Echoing time loop mimic-wraiths, intruding on their conversations.

While I know about the Cherubs as a reflection of readership (Callie being a parody of Homestuck lovers and Caliborn of Homestuck haters), and the Alpha Trolls as a caricature of people (Porrim of feminists, Kankri of Tumblrinas, Horuss of systems, etc - a writing choice I'm not a fan of), I admittedly never thought of the Beta Trolls and exiles as fulfilling a similar purpose, albeit more subtly. The trolls often echo or mock our thoughts on what's going on in the story, and provide meta-commentary while still being IN the story.

And then there's commentation on the unsettling nature of time loops and, seemingly, dream bubbles. Stable time loops police characters into having perfectly replicated conversations with no origin, a deviation from which would get them all killed. Creepy shit.

Also, apparently, the concepts of Ancestors and the hemospectrum weren't present/fleshed out at this point. Also, this:

From my perspective, the great thing about this stupid backwards conversation was that any time someone wanted to know the answer to an obvious question, like "What's the point of the game?", and I didn't think it was time to reveal that info yet, I could just have this jerk say "I ALREADY TOLD YOU THAT" and justifiably be reluctant to repeat himself. But he would indulge in other details of lesser importance, like the material here about the Veil. He hasn't mentioned that yet, so he can take some time to cover it now. It's a totally organic and logical way of concealing critical story information so that it flows in an order of least critical to most critical.