Slurquest
This is an exploratory post proposing several approaches for apprehending Homestuck (Alternia in particular) in terms of racism and homophobia. Results vary.
For various reasons, I feel the frameworks are best introduced through analogous microcosms. I have a nascent personal canon of films which are not* referenced in Homestuck, but which nonetheless function as potent paratexts for the apprehension of its narrative constructs. The foremost member is Forbidden Planet, a film involving a machine that draws the violent fantasies of a man's dreams into reality, creating monsters that enact his otherwise repressed anger. SBURB deploys a similar mechanism: the game's boot log concludes with the phrase "launching manifestation systems", and accordingly we later see that imps, ogres, and trolls are all born from psychological fissures in a given player, manifesting from the emergent anxieties of the people they target. Comparing the content of an altercation with the (apparently traumatic) event that preceded it (and therefore induced it) offers a peek into the pathologies of the triggered**/accosted characters. Eg ogres climb up the side of the house immediately after John experiences vertigo, indicating a deep-seated fear of falling.
* afaik
** No, we are not using "triggered" as a pejorative. Not yet at least. And when we do, it won't be the way you think.
Recently my canon gained another entry: John Carpenter's Halloween. It share with Homestuck a love of "misrepresentation", in both its playfully duplicitous and racially fraught senses, as well as a certain preoccupation with paranoia.
Halloween (1978) is about a masked man (Michael), recently escaped from an insane asylum, stalking and killing the suburban teens of his hometown. Michael's former psychologist (Loomis), firmly persuaded that Michael is the very embodiment of Evil, refashions himself as a hunter and lies in wait with a gun at Michael's childhood home. The home, abandoned and left to rot after a young Michael murdered his sister there on a past Hallows' Eve, has come to be regarded by locals as a "spook house"; trick-or-treaters dare eachother to brave its haunted steps. The unseen Loomis seeks to deter these tiny trespassers for their own safety. But the deterrence method Loomis chooses is strange: he puts on a Big Black Guy voice and, feigning ownership of the homestead, tells the kids to get lost. Elsewhere in the film, a bit of set dressing echoes this choice: in the midst of an otherwise pristine suburb of green grass and bleached white houses, we glimpse of a patch of black graffiti on the sidewalk that simply says EVIL. An impression begins to form that the metanarrative rationale for describing Michael as a bogeyman, for insinuating that beneath his white mask is a formless shadow, is that despite Michael's whiteness, he functions as a vehicle for racialized fantasies of invasion. The insane asylum, seen only at night, represents the chaotic city. Michael's presence brings the night to the suburbs, and with it all the urban terrors (black) from which the suburbanites (white) thought themselves insulated. Spooky!
While there might be an edifying function to this deception (I came away from the film with a deep contempt for the fear mongering psychologist, personally), I mostly tend to think of Halloween as a good, mean prank: like Caliborn disguising his king as a queen and relishing Calliope's outsized responses to its impotent threats, Carpenter crafts a black killer ensconsed in white and proceeds to giggle at the viewership's unwitting investment in a racist narrative for which Carpenter himself holds no sympathy -- or so I imagine, believing as I do that such a game would be in accord with the spirit of Halloween's mischievious namesake.
( I sometimes wonder if James Cameron was playing a similar game when he cast a white man named SCHWARZENEGGER as the face of an imminent genocidal uprising of once subservient machines. But anyway )
Betty Crocker is only the surface of Hussie's engagement with conspiracy. Homestuck, like Halloween, is built upon veiled allusions to reactionary paranoia. John's vertigo is relative; what John perceives as a "fall" can be fruitfully reframed as "the ascent of that which was once below". John takes note of an increasingly grim Rose's ascent to power and roleplays a return to gender norms ("ironically" of course), soothing the vertigo of social mobility with the image of Sleeping Beauty. Alternia, though ostensibly located in the unthinkably distant past, in turn functions as a reactionary nightmare vision of the future: it is a world dominated by BLACKS and HOMOS, and therefore post-apocalyptic. This is evinced by Homestuck's playful self-censorship: the story contains various euphemisms for n*ggers and f*ggots, through which the racism and homophobia become associated with a more familiar medium for paranoia, the casts' anxious regard toward the fourth wall. The denotation of slurs, therefore, will be our organizing principle.
