![]() Hussie notes in his commentary on this page that Jade-Rose conversations are so rare throughout Homestuck that the lime-orchid color combination looks strange to him. Now, even though Jade and Rose individually are two realistic female characters with active roles to play in their story, the fact of the matter is, they pretty much never talk to one another. Nobody has to be a paragon of feminine virtue they just have to be themselves! With so many ladies playing so many different roles in the story, it frees any single female character from bearing the burden of representing her gender as a whole. Because Homestuck features a metric fuck-ton of characters, the result of the fifty-fifty gender split is that Homestuck features half a metric fuck-ton of female characters. the only major group of characters introduced that doesn't feature balanced gender representation are the Midnight Crew and the Felt, and even then, we have reason to believe that not all members of the Felt are necessarily male. Every new crop of characters introduced is split precisely down the middle: two boys and two girls, then six boy trolls and six girl trolls, then two more girls and two more boys, then one girl cherub and one boy cherub. Hussie avoids a lot of the problems inherent in trying to write a "strong female character" by doing something sort of obvious, but nonetheless pretty rare: he makes half his characters female. It's like they're walking around with big neon signs pointing to them saying "THIS IS THE FEMALE CHARACTER!!!" The ladies never feel like normal human participants in their stories. Male authors run the risk of underthinking their women- usually by excluding them from the story completely until they need a love interest to show up- or else overthinking them into some forced amalgamation of tough-girl badassery and hyper-sexualized sassery. Sometimes male authors have trouble writing realistic female characters, and Andrew Hussie is a dude. It's a web comic exploring the themes and tropes of the video game genre, and video games tend to have a poor track record with positive or varied portrayals of female characters. Homestuck isn't really set up to be any sort of victory for feminism. ![]() But there are success stories out there! And lately, I've realized that one of the feminist victories is, unexpectedly, Homestuck. You wind up talking about the lack of female role models in childrens' media, unacknowledged societal double-standards, all the subtle pressures that make it difficult to prosecute rapists, and a ton of other totally woeful shit. The thing about blogging about feminism is that it tends to get depressing. ![]() That might explain why nobody leaves any comments! Well shit, that was a hell of a mystery, that no one thought was a mystery, and didn't really need solving. ALL of them.įor those of you who really don't give a fuck about this Homestuck bullshit, could I entice you with some statistical analysis and also maybe some feminism? Because that's pretty much all I do on this blog: drone about statistics, drone about feminism, drone about feminism using statistics, etc. I suggest that you stop reading if you are a member of group C), Homestuck novices who are just beginning their incredible journey through paradox space, and wish to remain untainted by spoilers about who kisses/murders/blinds/cripples/resuscitates/retroactively brings about the existence of whom. ![]() I'm going to assume that all readers of this post either A) already know about Homestuck and keep themselves up-to-date with every twist and turn of its labyrinthine plot, or B) don't know about Homestuck and don't particularly care about spoilers for a web comic about children playing a video game.
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