When I was drunk one night and watching the Jellyfish livestream, I reached out to the Monterey Bay Aquarium with a dumb question about their jellyfish… And they actually emailed me back.
(yes, these are actually my own screenshots, I am in tears laughing)
DO YOUR ANIMAL EXPERTS HAVE TO UNTANGLE THE JELLYFISH
AND THE ANSWER IS FUCKING YES, THE JELLIES GET TANGLED SOMETIMES LMAO
homestuck gradually exaggerating and pushing against gender roles, especially in the nuclear family, is such a fun joke within the comic but also speaks a lot to the kids’ struggles.
dad and mom form the groundwork for it. their designs are so archetypically “male and female” it’s like looking at a bathroom sign. and then you’re like oh, mom has a bronzed vacuum, that’s pretty weird. oh, dad has an account on an app entirely dedicated to fatherly figures whose main interests include pipes and fedoras and formalwear and shaving, that’s a pretty funny exaggeration of manhood. then you get to bro, who is basically an experiment to see how far you can push the “messy and irresponsible prankster” archetype of the big brother until the audience actually recognizes his actions as abuse and not sibling banter (you can push this incredibly far, it turns out). then you get to the trolls’ parents, who are literal animals and monsters. and by the time you reach the alpha kids, ¾ of them don’t even have monster parents around and, for the most part, grew up completely alone. and then there’s the whole meteor and ectobiology thing, where none of these characters technically had parents in the first place but still, in a weird way, have relatives…
homestuck gradually warps of the idea of family to the point where it is barely recognizable to the viewer, and even then, you can feel how important family is to these deeply lonely children. in the case of trolls, “true” family (notably, defined by genetic relation) is basically understood by their culture as a fairy tale. despite this, they cling desperately to the razor-thin connections they have to their ancestors, even if those connections lead them down a path of suffering and self-hatred. and even when these kids are completely isolated from “birth”, they still manage to repeat the sins of their guardians in a twisted infinite time loop of causality and generational trauma, across timelines and across universes.
SHIVERS - All around you, rain falls on the great city of Revachol. Rain drips from the eaves and floods the gutters, washing the filth away.
SHIVERS - Winter’s grip on the city is loosening. The spring thaw is here.
YOU - Finally. What now?
SHIVERS - Your shirt sticks to your chest. The shoulders of your disco blazer grow heavy. The cold finds its way in under your skin. You shiver, and the city shivers with you.
YOU - What is in the west?
SHIVERS - Sheets of rain over the water. A flight of stairs leading into the ocean. Wave after wave washing the coast of Martinaise, with its motorboats and gently swaying reeds.
SHIVERS - The ruins of a half-sunken seafort crumble on an inlet. Beyond the Bay of Revachol, ghosts rise into the sky.
YOU - Who are you, ghosts?
SHIVERS - The skyscrapers of La Delta, the financial district. Faint golden light seeps from the office windows.
YOU - What is down the shore?
SHIVERS - Urban coastline, rain dripping off eternite-covered roofs. Cinder blocks left over from half-finished construction. A defunct research and development building once seized by revolutionaries. An old wooden church stands on stilts above the water.
YOU - And beyond that?
SHIVERS - Coal City, end of all lines.
YOU - Run your fingers through your dampened hair.
SHIVERS - Your hair is an oily mess flecked with ash from neighbouring coal plants. Smoke stacks rise somewhere in the distance.
YOU - What’s in the east?
SHIVERS - The great gates of the industrial harbour are locked. A chill runs down your back. You shudder like an animal trying to shake water from its hide.
YOU - Clench your teeth to stop shuddering.
SHIVERS - Behind the gates – heaps of supply crates. Red and blue metal shipping containers slick with rain. The Greater Revachol Industrial Harbour is an artificial mountain range. Immense wealth resides within, and immeasurable poverty in its shadow.
YOU - And beyond that?
SHIVERS - La Drisienne, King Dris’s Passenger Harbour. Cruise ships flanked by dock arms. Cranes watching over the mouth of the river distributary.
YOU - What is across the distributary?
SHIVERS - Couron, the lower middle class. Distributary after distributary cuts the city blocks in half. Seven-story buildings trail off into the rain.
YOU - What is beyond the Couron?
SHIVERS - A silvery curtain of rain over the houses. The class divide.
YOU - What’s in the north?
SHIVERS - Capeside apartments – tower blocks crowd one another, 4.46 mm bullets still lodged in their war-torn stone walls.
SHIVERS - Hallways collapsed from the mortar hits of a war that was lost long ago. Clotheslines go to waste in the rain. Radios play.
YOU - And closer to here?
SHIVERS - A yard. Rain falls onto the roof of a woodshed. Filthy water pools around a body. Droplets of rain slip from the dead man’s cold cheeks.
YOU - What’s in the south?
SHIVERS - A traffic jam. Rain thrumming on the roofs of motor vehicles. Inside, drivers watch water streaming down their windshields. The statue of a king shudders, he too is cold. The canal bridge has been raised.
YOU - What’s on the other side?
SHIVERS - The road ascends; a raised motorway loops above the ghetto. Beneath its concrete columns – a sea of rooftops, woodwork, and tar stretches northward. Four-story buildings as far as the rain can fall. The snows melt in Jamrock.
YOU - Why am I not there?
SHIVERS - To be in Martinaise, where no one goes. At the run-off point of a long-forgotten canal, in the whitest part of town. In the shadow of the day the Revolution failed.
YOU - What am I doing here?
SHIVERS - Standing in the rain, looking north, where Jamrock Rock City stretches inland.
YOU - Where do I live?
SHIVERS - On a street there that flows like a muddy river in the snow, with fire traps rising on either side. A film rental opens its doors to the rain, an armoured motor carriage rushes past the corner where you used to walk together… Suddenly, the hair on your back rises.
SHIVERS - YOU CANNOT RETURN.
YOU - Shudder, look further…
SHIVERS - In the rain-swept distance above the rooftops of Jamrock, a re-purposed silk mill stands perched above the motorway exit. Precinct 41 hunches in the rain.
SHIVERS - Your vision blurs. You wipe your face with your hand. The rain stings your eyes, making you look up and blink.
YOU - What’s above?
SHIVERS - More coalition aerostatics. Way up there – where rain forms – rotors flutter silently. Your sight clears.
YOU - What’s below?
SHIVERS - Collapsed storm drains. Old sewage systems flooded with rainwater. Hidden weapon caches from the Revolution. Doors leading down to Le Royaume – the catacombs to which, for three centuries, they delivered the blue-blooded dead.
YOU - “Motherfucker.” [Finish thought.]
SHIVERS - These spring thaw will not last. The winter will return to Revachol.
need me a t-shirt that says “THE TOOKS SHOT FIRST”
Tom Cotton: So there are Men all over the Shire, menacing people, locking them up, tearing down trees and good hobbit holes…all through Hobbiton, Bywater, Buckland…
Pippin: What about Tuckborough?
Cotton: Your father initiated guerrilla warfare and they’ve been at a military impasse for months.
Pippin: I love my family so fucking much.
it’s just, you spend much of The Hobbit and parts of Lord of the Rings with the narration periodically being like, “and then his Tookish heritage reared up and said, “don’t you want to just go feral?” But it’s narration, background. We’ve never met Belladonna Baggins née Took and we never do. Pippin repeatedly follows his friends into inane danger despite being repeatedly told not to, or sometimes just goes by himself, but so do Merry, Sam, and Frodo, and hey, Pippin’s the hobbit equivalent of 17. Maybe it’s just Pippin.
And then you get to the Scouring of the Shire and it’s like, oh. Oh no. They’re all Like That.
huge fan of the depth of a good purple but another area that draws me is definitely around aquamarine/turquoise/seafoam. you can not go wrong once the green starts getting just a tinge more blue. a gal could certainly do worse than to pull over there and stay a while
Can’t wait for, like, 2025 when we look back on the 2018/2019 era and say “hey, remember when we were all really freaking depressed? That was a crazy time! Glad we aren’t like that anymore”
