#very normal things

oh and also whatever this is

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Inside Cub's mind, the thing he shares his skin with drives its claws frantically into the walls of cage he'd locked it into. He doesn't have long, before it'll be back, policing his actions. Poisoning his thoughts. The summoning, the week of- It had become too strong for him to overpower. Too strong for him to drown.

This brief burst of panicked fury will only carry him so far, so Cub knows that he has to make the most of it.

Outside of his mind, Cub drags the dazed Grian partially back up onto the bed, shoving his magic into Grian and grasping like a fist. "Return his voice to him. Completely." Cub speaks confidently, calmly.

Grian's hand jerks a little, but he reaches out, tapping Scar's throat, undoing the damned lock, pulling the magic entirely out.

As if it were that simple. As if Cub hadn't spent minutes pouring his magic over it and not finding a single crack he could exploit to unmake it.

Well, that's why going to the source works better sometimes.

With that done, Cub can feel that he still has one more command in him. He turns Grian to face him, hands spread clutched across Grian's temples. "You will allow me to claim him. You will not ever stop me from claiming him." Cub's stares hard steel into Grian's lax gaze.

Again, Grian gives a few twitches, more than the previous time. Grian's shoulder jerks forward, before Cub floods Grian again with his magic, every scrap of boosted power from their bond injected icicle-sharp directly into Grian's brain.

"You will never stop me from claiming him." Cub repeats, slow and serious.

Grian sags, nodding as much as he can in Cub's grip. The magic takes root, sinking greedy claws into Grian. Grian passes out.

Cub laughs, feeling the defenses in his own mind crumble, feeling that thing spread through him again. It's too late. It's too late. The magic is done. They don't have it in them to undo it right now, and Cub will fight tooth and nail if they do recover that much. If there's one thing they know how to do, it's gridlock one another.

sooo true, anon. unfortunately we live in a world where people hate women 😔 but i will say you're right, it's gotten a lot better recently. i think it has to do with a combination of me really curating my audience over the past year, and in general things are very different now compared to when i started in 2020. more genderlocked companions, more trans characters, and it's pretty common now for games to have poly romance options, as well as love interests that will pursue other characters if the player doesn't show interest in them. (the last 2 being things people really hated Merry for in the beginning)

society hates women, and it especially hates trans women

for context, there were three main camps around Jax that had formed by the release of episode 8

1. "Jax is a tumblr sexyman/lovable asshole". this is the most surface-level understanding ergo the most populous. these are the people who either took their read of ep. 1 Jax and never adapted it (or else adapted it very little to fit their "poor little meow meow" viewpoints), or who primarily engaged with the show through memes. these people did not care in the slightest how much Jax's "trolling" resembled harassment. little to no feminist awareness.

2. "Jax is just an asshole and also probably sexist". these people are, strictly speaking, not wrong. they figured out at one point or another that Jax's slapstick funny guy routine wasn't nearly as funny as he seemed to think it was and, whether they interpreted it as a flaw on the level of the character or the show, were somewhat perturbed by the majority's tendency to write it off as cartoon antics. they are aware of Jax's inner turmoil but find it broadly uninteresting. overall fairly lukewarm feminism.

3. "Jax is a closeted trans woman". those of us who knew. see, those of us with a modicum of analytical skill saw the signs pretty quickly and watched our argument reinforced with every episode. and by the end of episode 8 we started holding our breath. we couldn't be certain that the finale would confirm anything but we were hoping, and we were anxious of that hope. trans women have understood for a long time that mainstream media does not like us and that it also fundamentally cannot handle complicated women. what we wanted was a bombshell. advanced feminism i.e. transfeminism.

so. episode 9's theatrical release happens (something that was stupid and that we all knew was stupid) starting a two week timer during which a spoiler embargo was mostly respected. there was, however, a steady enough trickle of information that we could sorta tell that something was up. we all heard it was bad, but no one would say why it was bad. I at least had an awful strong suspicion that I knew exactly why shitheads might think it was bad.

turns out I'm half right. it's bad but that's not the important part. the important part is that suddenly one of the most controversial characters in the show is implicitly confirmed to be a. a trans woman and b. even more fucked up than we thought, and everyone loses their shit. camps 1 and 2 have a lot of reshuffling to do. Jax is no longer a character you get to pretend is "just a silly little guy" and the only way to maintain that stance is through even more willfull denial of the show you just watched than even what was previouslyrequired. "poor little meow meow" people go either into hard reverse, walking a very precarious line of acting like Jax is an appreciably complex character but definitely not a woman, or full throttle into camp 2. camp 2, having previously been filled with bad feminists and Bechdel types, is broadly having a full-on transphobia attack, all somewhere between denying any transfem elements to Jax's character at all because they know it makes them look bad, or outright devolving into nasty, hateful ideologues who say troon unironically.

camp 3 is largely unchanged as people who already understood Jax to be a painfully honest depiction of a trans woman who has been hurt very badly and is not better for it. we see what we expected to see, people who are fully incapable of accepting that a woman can be at once sympathetic and kind of awful.

and it's that last line that should be ringing bells in the heads of people who remember why we're here. sympathetic and kind of awful are perfect descriptors for Vriska Serket, and you do not have to look hard to find other similarities. the old Vriska party line is that people who decry Vriska as a monster tend to be much more forgiving of Homestuck's male characters who are similarly reprehensible. Jax is in a trickier spot, being in a show with only two men, but fortunately one of those men is as much if not more of a hot mess than Jax is.

I'm going to assume that anyone with a brain is capable of rationally comparing the actions of Caine (in episode 8 especially but also on the whole) and Jax (all of it really), and weigh all the contributing factors of reality and power and quantity and extent and judge the amount of harm caused by each of them to be roughly equivalent. after episode 8 released we saw some humdrum about people being dense wrt how sympathetic Caine was, but it was fucking nothing compared to Jax.

it's the turnaround that really makes it stick out. imagine a world where Jax's status as a trans woman was either much much subtler or never expressly shown at all. Jax's actions never exist outside the context of Just Some Guy and he passes seamlessly into the Edgelord Hall of Fame, defended mostly by people who are adjacent to MRAs and a small subset of trans women who see the metaphor but are, as always, rolled over by the willful ignorance of the online conversation. it almost happened too.

it has long since been understood that men can get away with murder if they're sad enough about it. arguments will inevitably happen but it will all be restricted to "respectable debate". a male character who does awful things is a tragic figure. and for a long time that's how Jax was treated. you ever notice how Gangle never got singled out as the object of abuse until the discourse started in full? the people who liked her liked her a lot, and her victimization by Jax is a facet of that, but the people who like Jax as the archetype he paraded around as or as the Still Totally Cis Tragic Jokester mostly regarded her as incidental. she didn't become the cudgel by which people argued Jax deserved everything she got and more until people had a reason to scrutinize Jax. and that's because those people don't actually give two shits about Gangle. same mostly goes for Ribbit (though that one is harder to verify due to timing). all this much in the same fashion that people who want to drag Vriska across the rocks don't actually care about Tavros or Aradia.

the main difference we see is that people hated Vriska immediately. Jax took time. Jax was quirky and silly and in the running to be the new tumblr sexyman right up until she wasn't. Vriska has always been the spider8itch and Jax was just kind of annoying right up until she wasn't.

let us now consider the other half of the Vriscourse. Eridan Ampora makes for a very useful point of comparison because for a long time Jax was shaping up to be just like him. spends the majority of the narrative being just kind of annoying (with audience reception mostly downplaying their worst behaviors as less individually shitty in context) but having their characters recontextualized by seriously hurting other characters the audience cares about.

now, Eridan apologia is a fascinating phenomenon on account of he was basically a 13 y/o fish nazi, but the key here is that there was apologism. hell, there was a lot of it. and towards the beginning Jax apologism took a very similar shape. and it all but vanished as soon as episode 9 dropped.

it's the heel-turn, the immediate change of broad reception from treating Jax like Eridan to treating Jax like Vriska, that proves, to me, that it was always about hating women.

disconnected thoughts under the cut