I don’t know if you noticed, but everything is terrible right now. And I don’t mean just in Homestuck’s dumb fake earth. I mean in our dumb real earth. Our planet is burning and folks go to bed hungry just so twelve guys can have more money than Croesus could have ever dreamed of. The concept of “truth” is at its most tenuous – political divisions involve contradictory interpretations of basic facts.

I’ve been playing a lot of Death Stranding recently. Basically any media that you’re making in 2019 has to either address what’s going on around us or come off sanitized, sterilized, with its head in the sand. Kojima offers a simple power fantasy: Through Norman Reedus’s sweaty, urine-filled labor, the things that divide us can be banished. America can be unified again.

Jasprose here offers a similarly compelling fantasy for what to do about the tangled mess of problems created by rapacious plutocrats: Just kind of kidnap one and fuck off.

A lot of folks were dismayed at how Jane Crocker turned out in the two halves of this story. Jasprose gives a voice and a Cheshire Cat smile to that viewpoint. She’s a child of privilege – she grew up heiress to the world’s largest company. Notably, her kind and caring parental figure is the only one of any of the Sburb players guardians to survive.

Privilege, safety, and inherited wealth do funny things to the brain. People justify to themselves why they have what they have. If you have enough for long enough, you start to convince yourself you deserve it.

Jane won the game, lost very little, and as god of a new world decided to dominate its markets as a corporate mogul. Her conception of what was possible with her capability and god-like reason was shaded, limited by the world she grew up in. She is not a goddess of fantasy, a semi-mythical trickster creature like Jasprose, or a meta-aware marionette master like Dirk.

She saw a new world and chose, simply, to replicate the power structures of the 21st-century America she was raised in. Boardrooms, power pantsuits, formality and professionalism.

Jane’s favorite comic, a noir-detective drama steeped in the pop-cultural trappings of pulp Americana, reflects this mindset.

So, our catgirl Seer of Light takes us through the looking glass, and we get to see an old friend. Hi, Problem Sleuth! I like you a lot. Sorry for using you as a metaphor for reactionary thinking just now.

Ignore all the political rabble-rousing. Funny detective man! New outfit! Outdated technology! I feel warmly ensconced in the womb of nostalgia, gently cradled on Norman Reedus’s chest. Haven did such a great job making this segment stand out.

We’ll check back in with our old friend from time to time and see what nonsense he’s surely gotten himself tangled in. But let’s check across town and listen in at the speakeasy.

(Pictured: Flinty Glasswipe)

The most important part of this segment is Jake talking to Ace Dick in the background. Truly, this is a gravitational confluence of himbos so powerful as to create a singularity. So much meat, so few brain cells. I wonder what they’re even talking about.

Jasprose raises some interesting points here, between her extraordinarily forward flirting – picking up right where she left off with Jane seven years ago. Dirk’s abrupt exit from the Meat timeline seems to have created a bit of a power vacuum, an opportunity for change.

Swifer and Cliper debate the happenings. They’re the closest thing to normal we’ve seen yet from this planet – the only characters we’ve met without any connection to the game or relation to any of those who played it. They are Earth C-born and hatched before the return of the creators. The two of them provide us an opportunity to look through the eyes of everyday residents of the world our heroes created as their return has completely upended it.

Also, they have a great banter that seems to come from a lifelong friendship. Perhaps something more? I think diamonds look very good on them. Maybe you do, too.