When one really thinks about it, Homestuck is stuffed with social commentary, even in the really silly things like that image.
Skating Towards Oblivion: A Marxist-Existentialist Critique of Man on Skateboard (Hussie, 2012)
The shirt is red, signifying the pain held by the skater. This pain is both internal and external. His hat and pants are black, the color of death and mourning. His shirt, prominently bearing the logo of the "Element" clothing company, has a dual purpose. Not only does it display the skater's fatal flaw, his acceptance of consumerism, but its title, "Element," is a corporatist repurposing of a once-pure symbol, the tree. Therefore, it communicates the idea that a consumerist society poisons all that it touches, and transforms even life itself into a commodity.
This theme is further elaborated upon in the idea of the skater being stuck. Although he is vibrating in place, he cannot move towards the food, which, according to the energy bar at the top-right, replenishes his "hunger." His hunger, then, grows with each vibration, slowly killing him. So why does he vibrate? Well, the answer is within both the "fake" and "real" media of the picture. The "fake" medium, the one depicted by the picture, is that of a video game. It is a simulation, something that is not real. But unlike most video games, there are pictures instead of computer graphics. This realness is further shown by the energy bar; hunger in people constitutes a sort of true energy bar for people in general. So, the first layer of the media present here represents the blurred distinction between real and unreal places.
The second medium, the one of the picture itself, is that of an animated gif file. It continually moves because that is what constitutes the constraints of a gif file, continuous motion. In essence, technology has conspired against this skater to keep him in place and force him to starve. Much as David Byrne used African tribal dances as inspiration for movement on the stage, the skater here communicates his hunger through a seemingly random, but actually deliberate, movement. However, the realness of the skater itself is called into question; is it not the skater, but rather, the one who made the picture him/herself, that defines the skater's movements? Indeed, we can say that a statement on the nature of human control is present here, that people are willing to not only view but to actually create suffering for their own amusement.
To conclude, the skater himself embodies a type of decadent consumerism, which has led him to be trapped in an endless cycle, slowly dying of hunger. The larger picture, then, represents the struggle of the proletariate against its bourgeoisie and aristocratic oppressors. The oppressors themselves are the ones who created the image. The symbolic blurring of the line between reality and fiction by depicting the skater as a "real" man embodies and even augments the blurring of the line between the person responsible for the creation of the image and the oppressors. And so, the grand message of this gif file is that we should always examine our own actions on the Internet, because it continually degrades us and stoops us to levels we never believed we could fall to.
Comments
i get so angry sometimes i just punch plankton --Klinotaxis
i get so angry sometimes i just punch plankton --Klinotaxis
大學的年同性戀毛皮
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