homestuck
patreon
Sketches and Commentary: Chapter 6, "A Conversation Regarding Relevance"
🕑 Added 2020-03-21 17:42:07 +0000 UTC
Page 145-146
Space, have you heard it’s vast?
Here we are, back at it again. I’m typing this to you from pandemic quarantine, which really isn’t any different than the usual quarantine being a writer puts you under. Just, now my toilet paper is worth a lot more money.
One could almost say that I’m stuck. At homea adfhkasd dadfdf
That was a visual representation of me slowly disappearing up my own ass. Where were we?
Oh, right. Space. It’s vast. I wanted to impress on everyone just how vast it is, and also to remind the audience that alt!callie has them at the same mercy that Dirk does. She can force us to listen to her pontificate endlessly if she so chooses. She’s slightly less insufferable than Dirk, if only perhaps because her text isn’t orange.
147
This is what us in the business call a “PSYCHE”. You think the possessed floating girl is looking out into the void, but she is actually looking into a fridge. Don’t you feel enriched by this bait-and-switch? You’re really getting your money’s worth.
So here she is. Jade. We find out that not only is she conscious inside her own head, she is also incredibly chatty. And not too thrilled with her current situation. I know most of the audience isn’t either, considering the fact that Jade having no agency has basically become a meme at this point.
148
That’s a pretty well-stocked fridge, considering they are on a spaceship and alchemizing all of their food. This is honestly doing better than my fridge is most of the time.
The basic structure of this section is mostly Callie narrating and Jade commenting on her narration, but every so often Callie will slip up and talk to Jade directly. As Callie told us in the beginning of the chapter, it isn’t natural for people to behave like narrative devices. Even within her own thematic framework, Callie has a habit of defaulting to behaving like a person after all.
149
Oh there it is, the void.
150
Have you ever gotten into this sort of argument? I don’t mean trapped in the void inside your own body and held there against your will by an alien skullgirl--although I’m sure you could find a support group for that online. I mean, have you done the ‘who has suffered more’ back and forth. I find myself doing it without even meaning to. I think that’s what happens when you come up under capitalism. You are convinced that suffering is noble, and that somehow enduring the most pain will enable you to become better and purer and more worthy of...what? I don’t exactly know.
Callie gets in a little jab here about Dave and Karkat. Davejadekat. Man. Jade really could have had it all. And by ‘it all’ I mean two emotionally constipated early-twenties Bernie Bros who probably don’t know how to vacuum.
Jade calls Callie out on her narrative embellishments here. I know it can be easy to think of the Dave/Karkat/Jade situation as inherently tragic. These people all have history with each other, which makes the scope of the story seem narrow. Dave and Karkat were two of Jade’s “love interests” so if she doesn’t end up with them, that’s a check in the narrative loss category for her. And it is, in a way. She definitely does love them, and she wanted to be with them, but also...Jade has a lot of other prospects. She’s actually the one character who seems to be enjoying her time on Earth c. Hitting up interspecies raves and getting around. We just haven’t seen any of that because none of those other people she boned are main characters.
151-152
Anyway Jade’s consciousness is huge.
153
Jade goes so far as to call Callie “evil Callie” here, which Callie doesn’t dispute. Probably because Jade is just a silly girl saying silly things. Also, she should probably just be quiet and let Callie use her body, since she’s very used to it and therefore couldn’t possibly have any arguments against that, right? Right.
It’s been a while since we’ve had any sort of serious meta talk about classpects. Mostly because there’s really no use for classpects outside of the game, unless, for instance, you go around referring to everyone as the Prince or the Witch because you are a dramatic alien in a hood. It does make sense that a Witch’s powers would be more useful than a Sylph’s to a Muse.
154
Callie would like to remind you that this is a story, and in a story you can’t always get what you want. There’s not enough time to chase down every thread, or have every single possibility come to pass. Jade, however, is a character in this story, and she would like to suggest that she doesn’t actually give a shit about that.
Honestly, the Jade Situation is a tough one. To be sure, she has been sacrificed to the plot again and again, something that probably began as a coincidence and then later grew into a theme. Space players are destined to be huge, cosmic forces in the universe. Big movers. Kanaya was the midwife of her entire species, transplanting it from one reality to another. Jade literally scooped up all her friends and moved them from the Pre-Scratch universe to the alpha timeline. Callie literally controls the narrative. But usually when we hear the story of big, god-like beings, we don’t think about the personalities behind them. What was it like for god to create the universe? Was he lonely? Did he regret it? Did he wish he could live in it instead?
155
I actually think Jade could have been okay with this. With being A Force For The Narrative. She’s already had it explained to her by davepeta, and like Callie says, she’s used to the loneliness. But then Callie makes it personal. I don’t think Jade likes the idea of being consigned to the footnotes of the story because she is a “silly little slut.” That doesn’t sit very well.
156
So far I have managed to avoid just saying “oh my god, look at the art” because that’s all I ever end up doing, but my god, look at the art. I love Jade’s face here. She’s just. So done.
157
Admittedly these last few chapters have definitely been “girls beating the crap out of each other” heavy, and I hope that’s okay. I mean, even if it isn’t okay, it’s happening, because girls beating the crap out of each other rules.
I think it’s easy to forget that Jade is “quite a formidable physical force.” She grew up scrapping on a desert island, hunted frogs through the game, and now is half a dog. What I’m saying, she could kick your ass. She could definitely kick Callie’s ass, unless Callie went Full Snake, and as Callie tells us, there’s nothing amorous going on here. At all. Really. Why would you ever think that.
158
God, I love this. Look at her go.
I’m not really sure if Jade is thrashing around here because she and Callie are fighting for control over her body, or if there’s just a very energetic fistfight going on in her brain. I think either one could make you flail around the kitchen.
159
Okay this is definitely a possession flicker.
160
Ah, yes. The bowl full of red things that was foretold in the prophecy. There was so much speculation as to what that bowl could have been full of that I knew I wanted to have it come back. Initially, Jade picked up a knife and held it to her throat, which I think was a little more dramatic than what I ended up going for, but also way less homestuck. Homestuck has to treat serious shit with very stupid gloves.
I gave serious thought to what sort of things were red and had peanuts in them, and eventually I just decided that it would make the most sense to have it be some mess up alchemized thing. I remember exactly when I had this train of thought--I was driving to a friend’s house and thinking about peanuts the whole fucking time.
161
I’m not sure if we’ve seen the SUICIDE THREAT anywhere else except Rose’s very first strife with Mom back at the beginning. That’s been put into interesting perspective, considering what we learned about Rose and her relationship to self-harm in her past. Several characters have a history of suicidal tendencies. Dirk has a habit of solving problems through cutting his fucking head off. I don’t know if Roxy or Dave have ever flirted with the idea, but knowing their childhoods I imagine there was a pretty good chance.
Like everything in this comic, it’s easy to forget how absolutely bleak shit is while it’s happening, because it’s just presented in such a ridiculous way. I think that can sometimes soften the blow, but also that can make it even more affecting. A threat coming at you from a direction you weren’t expecting.
And Callie, by the way, definitely isn’t expecting this threat.
162
Here we see Callie desperately trying to claw back some narrative control, seeing as how this silly, dramatic girl has yanked the reins away from her.
163
My panel description for this one was something like “Jade looking divine and terrifying” and oh man did Xam deliver. This is not the sort of girl you fuck with. Physically or narratively, unless you want to get your throat ripped out with teeth. Or like, your narrative throat.
Callie and Jade aren’t really sure who makes a decision on what is considered “just” or “heroic”. Plot twist, it’s us. We do. But also the alpha timeline does. We learned in Candy that if someone hates themselves enough, any act of suicide can be just. But that’s another bit of lore that we can’t be quite sure about, considering we’re not actually 100% certain who was narrating the Candy epilogue. Almost everything we know about SBURB is blatant speculation. It’s best to be on the safe side and assume that these things are almost entirely arbitrary.
164
And here we have our first [S] page. Very bespoke. Good ticks and tocks.
165
It’s been a while since we’ve seen a good old god tier clock. Those things really do show up at the wackiest times.
166
So now we really get to the crux of the “Callie possesses Jade” situation. Jade tells her that these actually aren’t Callie’s friends, Callie just stole them from Jade. She’s not doing this out of some benevolent preserver of the story, but out of loneliness. Like Jade, she grew up alone, only talking to her friends through a screen. This version of Callie was never able to meet her friends. And she probably thinks she’s accepted that.
But that’s the real issue here. Dirk and Calliope are all-powerful narrative figures, but when it comes down to it, they’re characters, too. They are entrenched in the story as much as anyone else is.
167
I think of this scene as the spiritual successor to Dave refusing to kill an alternate version of himself on his quest bed. Sure, he knew that a Dave would ascend to god tier, but it wouldn’t be him. It would be a different him. To the story, and even to us, the readers, which Dave we get isn’t honestly that large of a concern. Do you care about the marios who died? No, you care about beating the game.
But Dave cares, because Dave is that Dave. And Jade is this Jade. She isn’t happy with some other, greater sense of “Jadeness” being out there in the universe. She has decided that she wants her own story. Her own destiny. And I think that’s pretty woke of her.
168
More gorgeous Xam art. Initially we were going to make it more ambiguous whether or not she actually ate the peanut butter, but we decided to have it be a decisive moment of triumph. I don’t think Jade has had one of those since Cascade.
169
And here we see Calliope practicing social distancing. Good work, Callie. Flatten the curve.
Commentary on the Commentary
This commentary uses "she/her" to talk about the alternate Calliope possessing Jade, while the "other" Callie (remember them?) uses they/them. This other Calliope, presumably, has a much different relationship with her gender – and her brother – than the Callie we saw discussing the subject with Roxy and John. One of my favorite things about this update (I can say that, because I'm a second person who didn't write it) was that subtle hint about how different her Caliborn must have been to allow her to predominate in the first place. I'd be really interested in fan works exploring more about her (and his) past.
Comments
David Kligman
Good commentary! It's nice to hear that I'm pretty much completely on the same page with the writers and I understand what's going on in the story. I did raise an eyebrow, though, at the mention of 'the alpha timeline deciding' who lives or dies a Just or Heroic death. I think I know what it meant - it's emphasizing, as several things in this update did very strongly, that Dirk and Calliope are not omnipotent, that the world of the story exists beyond them and there are factors in it that are outside of their control. That said, the word choice strikes me as odd, since based on everything we know - and according to the synopsis of this very Patreon - there *is* no more alpha timeline. It was destroyed in the final events of Homestuck 1, even if Lord English himself doesn't seem to be quite dead.
Tinokel
"I’m not sure if we’ve seen the SUICIDE THREAT anywhere else " I guess here https://www.homestuck.com/story/4048
Madame Hardy
I am so happy to see your commentary on Jade, and Jade's alienation from the narrative (as personified by Callie, but in general.)
