#k8course

I’m admittedly torn on this, because I can genuinely see two outcomes:

- June doesn’t appear in HS^2 at all. We keep waiting and nothing happens, because they decide to pull the rug from under our feet. The writers have actively shown that they hate us, and that they’re not interested in writing something that’s actually good for the fandom. Just not having her show up at all is very likely, and will probably be done out of spite.

- They do have June appear, but they fuck it up like they did with Roxy and Jade. She ends up being a transmisogynistic charicature and isn’t treated as a transwoman so much as she’s treated as a joke. That, or she’s treated as a “well, you got your rep, fuck off now” - or they just don’t write her like a trans woman, and write her like a cis man or cis woman, because apparently the writers don’t know how to write trans people.

Admittedly, I do lean towards the latter. This is the same group of writers who canonised Vriska being trans in Pesterquest, and come from the hard junebugger setting. This is also from the same group of writers who said that June could be a bisexual lesbian, and that Vriska being trans excused all of her abusive behaviours. It’s also from the same group of people who refused to say whether or not Vriska was canonically trans, despite actively shitting on people who didn’t see her that way.

Admittedly a lot of those last parts are Kate-exclusive, but she’s still in touch with the team. Even if she’s not actively writing, I genuinely don’t trust how much influence she might have over the comic - and I definitely don’t trust how often all of them have said that they own Homestuck, and they will make it hell for the fans to read.  

My other worry is that it’s treated as a joke or that they brush over June’s transition because they can’t be bothered to figure out how it’d work for an older person to do so. That like, we get a “it’s the Candy timeline! Wacky shit happens all the time!”, and June’s treated as a wacky outcome of the fucked up timeline rather than as a person who genuinely was in a position to think about her identity. Or that like, we’ll get “man in a dress” jokes over June and then no actual talk about her and her validity. 

I want her to talk about her identity seriously, maybe with Roxy, and then later see Harry Anderson correcting Vrissy and Tav that they’re talking about his mom, not his dad, and that she’s called June, not John. And then June moves forward and it’s great because it’s actually done well and she’s real and valid and they didn’t make any transmisogynistic jokes out of her.

I just don’t think they’ll actually do that. That’s how little trust I have in them at this point. I genuinely, 100% believe that they will fuck this up. I could be wrong, and I really hope I am! But, yeah. Personally? I think this is going to be a trainwreck, because they don’t have a good track record - with Vriska, with Roxy, with Jade, even with Callie. 

also, as much as people shit on hussie as well as hussie not being that great of a guy in the first place, bare minimum he did give apologies for things he made mistakes on. whether you think the apologies were genuine or not is up to the reader, but having a fake apology & quitting the behavior is better than whatever the fuck kate's doing. bare. fucking. minimum.

The interesting thing about morally grey characters is understanding their motives and the way they perceive or understand the world, and yet still recognising that they’re doing some fucked up and harmful things that they justify to themselves in likewise interesting ways. 

For instance, I’ve seen it mentioned a few times that Vriska cannot handle the concept of being given good things, or of being worthy of good things. She hates (Vriska) because (Vriska) is happy and at ease with herself, is in a relationship she genuinely enjoys, and doesn’t hold any of that self hatred that makes up so much of who Vriska is and understands herself to be. Because Vriska does struggle with being a bad person, but of knowing that it’s expected of her; she has an entire conversation with John wherein she says that, if she’d been born on his world, she hopes she could have been better. 

She is a product of her society and she justifies her actions using that society’s law while simultaneously trying not to recognise that what she’s doing is wrong because she doesn’t want to be weak enough to question herself. 

That’s what makes her so interesting. It’s why she used to be one of my favourite characters; she was so fun to dissect and understand, and there were so many instances of genuine regret to her that she then covered up with genuine violence, and yet there’s just as much genuine egotism in her as she believes wholeheartedly in her own abilities, and her coping mechanisms, and the way she views the people around her... there’s just so much to go into with her. 

Claiming that she’s never done anything wrong takes away from that entirely. She just ends up as an egotistical bitch who plays into a lot of headstrong women tropes, which always play on the concept that women shouldn’t be powerful or bold and that they are inherently worse for it. She has no motivations, she has no consequences, she has no depth - it detracts from everything Vriska is, because the whole point of her is that she’s complex. 

You’re meant to hate her, you’re meant to love her, you’re meant to denounce her actions and yet understand where she’s coming from, you’re meant to debate about her. Refusing to see any of the bad she did - while also just inherently shitty because that lets her get away with actual abuses and attrocities without even considering why she was capable of doing them or the logic behind them (which in no way makes them better but gives more insight to her character as a whole) - means that you just destroy her and any interest in her. 

As for Hussie - oh god yeah, he’s not perfect, nor innocent. Hussie did some bad shit during the run of Homestuck, a lot of which was normalised at the time of writing (such as using “autistic” as an insult or using a LOT of slurs). But he almost always learnt from them. You can see the progression through Homestuck that a lot of things did get better (such as the aforementioned slurs being used less until they fade almost entirely), though some things did still remain an issue (one of the biggest being Gamzee as an anti-black and abelist stereotype). If fans said to him that something was wrong, he actually listened and at least tried to vaguely make it better. 

Kate just doesn’t care. She knows she’s doing wrong, she knows she’s getting criticised, and she ignores it all. The whole writing team seems to follow in this logic, actually; that the fans are just wrong and that they know what Homestuck^2 needs more than anyone else. Which apparently means bringing back some of the things that Homestuck improved on during its seven year run. 

This is the image I was sent:

Which I have several issues with, frankly.

Being trans is not a choice. You identify as trans because it is something that feels inherently right to your specific understanding of your gender expression.

I’m not trans because I woke up one day, as a cis person, and said, “capitalism fucking sucks. I’m sure the best way to counteract the oppressive system and ideology founded under capitalistic regimes is to identify as trans - which will, somehow, express to cis people that I am a revolutionary fighting against the inherent sexism fundamental to capitalist exploitation.”

I’m trans because I spent several years, since age 16, fervently researching different aspects of my identity to understand them more. Because I saw trans adults talking about what it is to be trans, and I looked at myself, and I said, “oh. That’s - That’s me.” Because I was fundamentally aware that I was not cis, and that I have never been cis - and I made the active decision to understand what I was instead.

You can “choose” to be trans about as much as you can “choose” to be gay. It isn’t a choice, it’s just part of who you are that you come to understand as you’re presented information about it. If I’d been told about trans people sooner, I probably would have identified as trans at a much younger age.

Did I, at the time, understand anything about capitalist ideology? No. Do I think, to any degree, that me being trans somehow disconnects me from captialism and the perpetuation of its culture? ... No. The simple act of being trans does nothing towards making a revolutionary statement against capitalism and its many incredible pitfalls. It quite literally has nothing to do with that.

There seems to be this thought that because she’s associated her transness with anti-capitalism that she’s somehow become “woke” compared to her trans siblings. And I cannot express how much that’s a harmful fucking ideology to have, to try and politicise the simple act of identifying as trans - to suggest that the people who identify as trans because it feels right are somehow lesser than whatever higher enlightenment she thinks she’s achieved.

I’m also deeply fucking against the idea that we’re just “trying to be cishet”. As if there’s something... wrong with that? Some trans people will try to transition as much as possible to pass as much as they can because that is what makes them the most comfortable in their own skin. The ability to not just identify as male, but to be seen as their gender, to physically and biologically be their gender - which is as reasonable a desire as any trans person who’s comfortable not doing any of that, and is content to present however they like and use the pronouns they prefer.

Trans people who transition are no lesser than trans people who don’t - and we absolutely do not need to include this into some revolutionary ideology where the act of being trans is an anti-capitalist choice. Trans people shouldn’t have to fucking justify why they’re transitioning as some bullshit political statement. Transitioning is a point of comfort. It’s the ability for someone to exist as makes them most happy.

It’s also fucked up, I think, to claim that the act of not transitioning, or not transitioning fully as we traditionally understand it, is somehow a political statement - because, again, it’s not. That’s just how some people prefer to be. That’s what makes some people the most comfortable. That’s, quite frankly, all there is to it.

https://imgur.com/a/Nc2pc5d <- source can be found here! It was part of this document, which has a very thorough rundown of the things she’s done.

This was from her time in the SCP Foundation fandom. The document also contains evidence that McTiriss is Kate.

Oh!! Yeah, I know, don’t worry! I was correcting it with the information of who actually was the writer, and then some additional information on why I wasn’t too keen on it in that situation, either (since I did some fact checking to see if there might be a reason behind why Lanque was written the way he was). 

I was going to write a comment along the lines of, “at least it wasn’t Kate this time!” but I feel like that would’ve come across as sarcastic, which wasn’t my intention, admittedly.