I've been reading your Erikar posts and I think that they work really well with the idea that moirallegiance really doesn't work the way it's "supposed" to. It's framed in-universe as a very one-sided "stable person pacifies dangerous person" deal, but both Erifef and Gamkar, which are basically platonic ideals of that concept, failed independently because of how unstable that dynamic is -- one person is worn out doing all the emotional labor and the other is not interested in being pacified. Whereas the meowrails, despite also being framed as a "classical" moirallegiance, are much more clearly two-sided, as both parties consistently help, listen to, and advise each other, and the relationship is consequently much stabler and more enduring. I love the way you frame Erikar because it works really well with this by showing both parties taking and giving "pacification" and support in turn, instead of one shouldering all the work.
Yeah! I think this is a good way to talk about something Hussie likes to do that I'm a huge fan of, which is: unreliable narration. This unreliable narration has garnered Hussie the reputation of being a "troll" or even flat-out "wrong" about HS, and I find both of these to be very unfair because the use of unreliable narrator is both deliberate AND thematically fitting.
As part of Homestuck's post-modern stylings (and I mean post-modern in the literature sense, not vis. art, though it has shades of that too), it plays heavily on the ideas of narrator-as-character, author-as-character, metafiction, and we-all-know-it's-a-story-itis. Hussie himself, even in his external commentaries (Formspring, Tumblr, Books, etc.), is fully aware that his additions add to the metatextual texture of the work and change how it's interpreted - that, although his additions technically lie external to the "story" Homestuck is telling, they are also paradoxically part and parcel of that very story.
As a result, they deliberately play a character WRT Homestuck, both in- and out-of-universe, and this character is, by their own admission, buffoonish and oafish. It's really apparent in their book commentary, where they'll sometimes even drop the act, or "realize" they've dropped the act and hurry to put it back on (a standout moment is when he provides a very genuine, honest analysis of Vriska, before going "oh, wait, I forgot, she's literally my wife and has never done anything wrong ever in her life ever"). They also mention how their narrative voice sometimes works antagonistically to the characters, such as when it assures Vriska that she has no choice but to kill Aradia, subtly pushing Vriska towards that option.
Functionally, neither the narrator nor the author (and by that, I mean the caricaturized character of "the author" that Hussie plays) of Homestuck are entities that you can take fully at face value; they need to be challenged and interrogated as much as any other character, have their motives dissected, have their blind spots pointed out.
And why would this need to be the case? Because that's literally one of the main thrusts of Homestuck: malicious entities (in HS's case, LE, Doc Scratch, and Caliborn, who at various times struggle with Hussie for control of the story, before killing him and wresting it away entirely) will attempt to write the narrative. They'll push their version of events, their politics, their biases, their philosophies. They'll try to change the story to suit them and perpetuate their own power and ability to enforce that power. And you can't let them win.
Hussie-as-a-character/narrator himself is not particularly malicious, and, as the narrative prompt serving as Caliborn's guide, is even ultimately sympathetic, expressing that kids need to grow up and mature, achieve self-actualization, emotional catharsis, etc.
However, as a result of his oafishness, he has a tendency to play to the characters' worst instincts, to pick favorites among the cast. The most blatant example of this is his "love" of Vriska, which - contrary to popular opinion - isn't "real". Hussie is not actually in love with Vriska; the whole thing started because - due to misogyny - people accused Hussie of only giving Vriska so much plot relevance because he was literally in love with her. Why else would a female character with an unpleasant personality be allowed to be important, amirite? And Hussie clearly thought that this whole thing was so ridiculous that he 100% leaned into it as a joke. I'm not here to litigate whether or not it was appropriate to do so, just to point out that Hussie's "love" of Vriska was always an artifice - an aspect of Hussie-as-character that he played up to highlight the fact that Hussie-as-character is an unreliable buffoon, and, by extension, that Vriska is not blameless and perfect.
Since this is the Eridan blog, I'd be remiss not to talk about him. Hussie's commentary towards Eridan is especially fascinating to me, because Eridan is one of he characters Hussie-as-character is biased against, in a similar way as he's biased in Vriska's favor. Thus, his attitude towards Eridan is very dismissive, both in the book commentary AND in the comic itself. "Gamzee: Indulge emotional theatrics" and "Jade: Answer this douche bag" come to mind. He also spends the vast majority of the Act 5 Act 2 book mocking Eridan for being sad and alone, with nobody to care about him and nobody who listens to his problems.
Now, the reason I call this fascinating is twofold: the first is that his commentary in the Act 5 Act 1 book has a WILDLY different tone: while he's still biased in Eridan's disfavor, he outright calls Eridan a "good character" alongside Nepeta, and offers genuine insight into his characterization and the powers of Hope - comparing him at one point to Dave if Dave took a much darker path.
So when his attitude changes from "he's a shithead, but fairly complex, I guess" to "he's a loser idiot that nobody likes LMAOOOO", you're supposed to notice that! You're supposed to question that, to wonder why he has a change of heart, why he's suddenly so dismissive of a character he was genuinely writing whole paragraphs about before.
And the answer is multifaceted:
He's playing up his buffoonish character, to let you know that he's about to be wrong as hell. Every time Hussie starts really amping up the Hussie-as-character persona, you're about to be in for an opinion that SHOULD NOT be taken at face value.
He's reflecting a common fandom opinion, because one of his favorite things to do as an unreliable narrator is to speak on behalf of another character or entity, highlighting the biases and blind spots in play - in this case, the audience's. Again, he's about to be wrong as hell, so he's doing this specifically to indicate that the audience members who believe this are also wrong as hell.
Act 5 Act 2 is when we get the one conversation in all of Homestuck where somebody (Karkat) cares about Eridan and takes his problems seriously. During this part of the story, Hussie goes COMPLETELY silent. This is incredibly out of character, as he usually can't shut up, and the commentary is usually dense, packed with words, without pause. Compare:
In those blocks of silence are contained the conversation Eridan has with Karkat where Karkat literally tells him "I know it's hard being you" and that Nepeta's rejection of him wasn't a negative reflection of him. In other words, Karkat cares about Eridan and takes him seriously, COMPLETELY contradicting Hussie-as-character's assertions that nobody does, so utterly that Hussie-as-character has to completely shut up during that entire sequence because he has no way of reconciling his stance with the evidence presented.
Now, Hussie-as-an-actual-person is completely aware of what they're doing, or else they couldn't do stuff like this so consistently and so precisely. So I want to be very, very clear that this is not Hussie "not understanding his own story" or whatever BS the fandom likes to say in order to cast Hussie as the villain. This is masterful usage of unreliable narrator, like, I'm genuinely impressed.
By acting a clown and insisting that nobody likes or cares about Eridan, the audience is MEANT to glean from the text:
That Karkat is clearly an exception, and he quite likes and cares about Eridan,
That those who are dismissive towards Eridan and treat him purely as an object of ridicule are Wrong as Hell,
That maybe it's not a good thing for us - both audience, author, and characters - to be so quick to judge and dismiss others just because they're annoying and nasty - that doing so can have dire consequences, as we see with how Eridan's story plays out.
And I'm not kidding when I say that we have to be constantly fucking vigilant, that there's very, very little that can be purely taken at face value. Not long after this is one of Karkat's memos, where he attempts to warn his past friends about all the murders, only to dismiss past!Gamzee by saying that current!Gamzee going crazy murderclown "barely even concerns [him]." Hussie then notes in the commentary - and not for the first time - that Karkat has a Problem(TM) with not seeing past/future versions of people as contiguous with their current selves, which he does as a defense mechanism so as not to confront his own feelings of shame and self-loathing. Hussie then proceeds not to comment on the following:
CCG: YOU ARE DEAD TO ME
CCG: PAST YOU, PRESENT YOU, FUTURE YOU
CCG: AND ABOVE ALL, UGLY SCARFNECKED DOUCHEBAG HIPSTER YOU
CCG: WAIT I FORGOT, ALL OF THE YOUS ARE THAT YOU
Hmmm... interesting. I wonder why Hussie points out one of Karkat's running character traits, just to "forget" to notice when an exception happens directly after? I'll let this one be an exercise for the class.
So to tie it all back to your ask: why is the exposition on troll romance done the way it is? What are the narrator's motives? Hussie even outright states in the commentary that Kanaya/Tavros/Vriska, which is used as an example of an auspicetism, isn't even a real auspicetism, as Kanaya feels no need to commit to it, and at most is putting out mixed signals - it's just used as an example because it's the closest thing we've seen.
Well, the answer I've arrived at, personally, is that the troll romance explanation is as flawed as it is because the narrator is taking on Karkat's point of view. A movie poster on Karkat's wall, the troll version of Serendipity, is used and namedropped as the ultimate expression of meeting your soul mate in every quadrant - as well as the assertion that "every" troll believes that there ARE destined soul mates for every quadrant, which Karkat definitely believes, but isn't a sentiment necessarily shared by everybody else. Moreover, the explanation ends with a tirade about how Karkat tried to explain quadrants to John, who didn't get it because "he's an idiot".
I'm not saying that Karkat is literally narrating here, just to be clear - I'm saying that the narrator (Hussie-as-character) is relaying factual information as processed through the lens of Karkat's biases, and, as a result, we can't take the explanation at 100% face value (though we can't discount it as entirely untrue, either). It's not so much that "real" moirail pairs work because they're doing moirallegiance "wrong," but that Karkat's view of moirallegiance is simplistic, idealized, and flawed, and we see this play out when he's bitter about his breakup with Gamzee because Gamzee stops "needing" him to keep him calm, even after Karkat has failed to be kept calm by Gamzee in return.
The more I look into Homestuck, the more that I'm genuinely impressed by the way it handles its writing. I hope this was interesting to everyone, too. I feel a little like I'm peeling back a curtain, or opening up a clock to reveal all the little cogs and wheels.
No, you can't trust Hussie as the narrator, but that's on purpose, and it's on purpose because why do we trust narrators? Why do we assume people telling a story are unbiased, benevolent, and have no ulterior motives? Why do we let idiots, assholes, predators, and monsters get away with their version of the truth, when a little scrutiny will have the whole ruse fall apart? Why do we let people tell us not to care about other people, why do we let them tell us that it's okay to be cruel to acceptible targets, why do we let them go unexamined?
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On a recent trip to Hiroshima, I got fascinated by Alice Garden, a weird, eccentric and remarkably intact Post-Modernist public plaza and event space that has somehow survived more than 30 years. AFAIK, it was originally created when PARCO built their new department store in 1994. A major modernist sculpture by artist/musician Suzuki Takashi sits on an artist-designed plinth that's also used as an event stage.
Curiouser and Curiouser: Alice Garden in Hiroshima [greg.org]
📷: 2026 photo from the bleachers at Alice Garden, Hiroshima; 2022 Streetview screenshot of the Alice Garden bike parking entrance structure; Suzuki Takashi, Linear Cycle, 1994 as originally installed at Alice Garden, image courtesy the artist
Every time someone suggests a historical figure might have been homosexual or bisexual (based on evidence), ten thousand post-modernists appear out of thin air to assert that homosexuality (and bisexuality &c.) was invented in the 18th century by doctors and it is „anachronistic” to refer to someone from the past as gay.
Dan chats with Elizabeth Little about You Will Die In This Place, her new TTRPG that blends nihilistic dark fantasy with a metanarrative ins
In You Will Die In This Place, Elizabeth Little @liz-shrikestudio explores questions of design, ownership, and artifact. Check out her interview with Dan now and back the game on Gamefound:
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all of yous sit down i have a story to tell about me mishearing someone once and instead of asking for clarification going on a three year + intellectual hiatus/rabbithole
So I have always been in search of a Thing, a community – people, place, purpose. In my teens, TF2 was that thing, and as sad as it may seem, I nearly cried when I realised the game was probably gonna die right after I discovered it and began enjoying something for once.
(as of 10 years later it is still somehow alive, weirdly)
Beginning my degree I was eager for the same thing to not happen to my discipline of interest which I would quickly become far too attached to identity wise than is healthy – history.
So imagine my shock when I'm talking to a friend, right at the beginning of the degree, and hear her say, "yeah history has pretty poor philosophical foundations". The conversation cuts off afterwards. I'm like. What. What do you. wh does this mean history is somehow broken and we'll one day find out and then it'll die and I wont have meaning in my life?
So instead of asking her, or something, I instead decided to investigate myself. You know, local dumbass with no background in philosophy aside from Kind of Enjoying It at school is going to dig deep and discover whether one of the largest academic disciplines is somehow deeply flawed. Totally
SO I GO ON A RABBITHOLE
And boy, in those three + years I read the first few chapters of so many books. I look at it all. Quantitative methods – their limits, strengths, evolution into cliometrics? I take a course basically no one else does to get to grips with it, and discover that Stats Is Hard, Actually. Then I somehow get onto a conference to talk about it, because as a first year my big idea was "hey what if i make a big spreadsheet as a project" [fun fact: it turns out i am autistic]
I move away from quant into deeper philosophical waters. Okay, so history can't be automated and looked at in first principles like physics or maths, and it doesn't seem like there's discernible Laws governing historical process. But, like, *hits blunt*, what is history, anyway?
So after reading multiple books I discovered that the answer is, "The study of the past, mostly". But wait – how can we know anything about the past? Like how do we know that the evidence is even real and accurate?
So that's how I discovered what epistemic scepticism is. That gave me lots of headaches. And I wasn't really getting anywhere.
Then my profs mentioned there was a post-modern critique of history! Aha! This must be what my friend was talking about 13 months ago. Of course. This is it. I then discovered that I could not comprehend post-modern writing, and also I wasn't sure what counted as post-modern, and also I wasn't sure where to find writing about history specifically.
So I did some reading. Then more reading.
[I am very much in the middle of this chart, all the time]
I concluded that post modernism is a kind of scepticism. Phew, what a relief. Still don't know how to deal with skepticism. Doing a bit of reading on my course, I stumbled across Immanuel Kant, who actually encountered a similar problem to me while reading David Hume (who famously put forward the fact that you can't really observe causality in itself). Kant provided an explanation in the form of synthetic a priori truths, which I kind of understood at the time and decided was Good Enough. [I tried to follow up on Kant later by reading Hegel, and got precisely 10 pages into the Phenomenology of Spirit before dozing off]
By this point I'm also getting into queer theory as part of my course, which muddies the waters even further – how can we even understand categories? What the fuck is a category? How does it work? How does identity work? What even is gender?
Cue weeks of me bashing my head against a wall [old family tradition]. I thought that this bore fruit. I got one of my papers back and an essay had the single examiner comment on it of "Misunderstood Foucault" so I'm not sure I did such a good job of it.
(I have to add, my friends had to hear all about this every day for weeks on end because I am Entirely Normal)
(Like it must have looked like this:
"hey man how's it going"
*head in hands* "what is a category")
This is also around the time I discover Vico. Vico is a philosopher that believed that after the Great Flood, non-Jews got really big because they ran through the forests and absorbed nutrients through their naked skin. I read this late at night and found it groundbreaking.
Anyway, eventually after a long time of misunderstanding some of the biggest thinkers of the Western world, I met up with that friend.
"Hey remember when you said that history had fundamental philosophical issues, I couldn't find em"
"oh, no i said that historians often have a poor grasp on philosophy"
"..."
So anyway it turns out that that entire thing was completely misguided. But all of that reading did increase my overall final mark by *checks notes* less than one percent
