#remele

In our lead-up to our volume 13 trailer at SAHCon 2024, we're re-introducing some familiar faces!

Compromised confidence hits even before the character select screen: MSPAR asserts that drifting episodically from friend to friend is "the only way to live", a phrase that to me undercuts the cool enthusiasm with a trace of resignation to a life of scrambling for survival. Remele then suggests, repeatedly, that her own air of confidence is overstated: there is an instant game over if you call her work derivative. Remele is not worried about the plagiarism charges, but she should probably get back at that reporter just in case. Her successful adaptation to new problems twice compels Remele to muse that she would switch careers, were she not so good at art -- a thought that perhaps betrays doubt about her abilities. After co-murdering a purpleblood, MSPAR wonders aloud if they can "interpret [their] adrenaline shakes as euphoric overload", and Remele replies "me too!".

So Remele and Clarice share a lingering self-doubt, doubtlessly worsened by working in an environment that constantly questions their legitimacy. Of course Remele *is* an actual plagiarizer (the moon's a pale thief), which makes this all a little funny, but in Alternia's bad-faith rhetorical context, undeniable illegitimacy can be apprehended as insult instead of fact. Moving on to Ebert's original 1991 review:

The Death's Head Moth on the SotL poster is, among other things, an emblem of such "unwanted male attention". The skull on its back composed of nude women, borrowing the arrangement of Salvador Dali and Phillipe Halsman's "Voluptate Mors". Within the film this association is drawn by juxtaposition: while the moth skull is being unveiled, a man with an intense stare hits on Clarice; the moth's cocoon is discovered in a dead woman's throat as men photograph her nude body; and of course the cocoon was inserted into her throat by a killer who skins victims to create a woman suit -- that last point, denoting a predatory female impersonator, leads to the film's lasting transphobic reputation, despite the film's glib dismissal of Buffalo Bill as a sort of trans-trender for an additional layer of illegitimacy. Anyway,

On Remele's duplicate, the Death's Head Moth is replaced by a winged purple blood. This catches my interest along two axes:

Remele's art gallery is primarily patronized by purple bloods. Their presence on the art piece could imply that their gazes trouble Remele in a manner akin to the gazes that follow Clarice? The association of the audience (via diegetic entities aligned with the 4th wall) with a phallicized gaze runs through Homestuck back to at least Problem Sleuth... the SotL reference seems a decent enough manner to pepper that motif into a Hiveswap context. Plus the audience's gaze tends to be racialized with Homestuck, so the hip-hop affecting purplebloods capture that quality as well.

Much like in Silence of the Lambs, the moth/butterfly's metamorphosis is leveraged as a transgender allegory in Homestuck. Not relitigating that here, read Slurquest. But with that in mind, and considering how deeply Remele's stereotype Vriska was interwoven with Egbert's gender question, I'm inclined to think the constant questioning of Remele's legitimacy invokes transphobic as well as misogynistic policing

if this stays in the bloodswap tag i'll be happy