HONSE REVIEW
you begin to hear sirens blaring in the distance, their pulsating tones piercing your ears to emulsify the load-bearing wax within with your flesh. it is a sound you have never heard, one that is unbearably raw, carrying an emotion you have never experienced and an alert for something truly unfathomable. whatever this is, it's something unprecedented, it's something new, it's something unthinkable. but it is so incredibly cognizable that it is impossible to avert your attention. it clops in front of you, its gait standard. it does not cry in pain. it does not say anything. it merely remains. it merely Is.
so who the fuck is this asshole? well, we must first take the literal interpretation. it is a picture of Twilight Sparkle from the show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (2010-2019) superimposed with the facial structure of Karkat Vantas from Homestuck (2009-2016). this itself seems simple enough to describe, but there is more to be gained here: not only is it a picture of Twilight Sparkle, it is quite possibly the picture of Twilight Sparkle, the reference from which all Twilight Sparkles are drawn. all of her hooves are firmly grounded, her expression (if you were able to see it) not overly excited or depressed, but merely content. this is the Twilight Sparkle you think of when i ask you to picture Twilight in your head, one not especially emotive but merely being.
similarly, the Karkat from which this image is derived is the reference Karkat, it is the symbolic rendering of Karkat (though this “render yourself symbolically” is only present in the context of Aradia, subverted in Homestuck² with Rose). it is the sprite from which Karkat is created, likely the initial conception of Karkat. again, when i ask you to think of Karkat, it is the Karkat you picture. if we take as given the notion of a platonic space of ideals behind reality, it is the platonic ideal of Karkat: though taking that as given is, like Wittgenstein's idea of the World being all that is True, fucking stupid.
ergo, when considering these as references, this is not merely a distortion of Karkat xor Twilight: it is a great distortion in the Marxist sense of both, one that asks you to discard your conceptions of either original ideal in the pursuit of an unholy synthesis, the result of attempting to move in dialectical contradictions when no true dialectic is present to move against. it is a mixture of not just a picture of either, but the concept of both. it is designed to force you to conceptualize this not as a mixture of Twilight and Karkat, but as a new entity altogether: Twilight Karkle, the great distorter, the tear, the Godhead Eternal. it is designed to recontextualize your relationship with both Twilight and Karkat to make you view them as one and the same. it's designed for you to look at it and go “oh god, Jacobson, you're kind of right” while engaging in cordial conversation with your compatriot over a messaging app in the evenings.
but we must not give into this temptation, for we must first analyze not merely the existence of Twilight Karkle but the reason for its being. it is difficult to extrapolate the moral character or intention of the author from a piece of art (see Davey Wreden's The Beginner's Guide), though we must.
the term “post-irony” is derived from the latin post (meaning “after”) and the greek εἰρωνεία (eirōneía, meaning “feigned ignorance”). it is the thing that occurs after feigned ignorance. by all means, the very notion of irony implies a post-irony, for it is merely the state in which you put an end to your bit, impaling it on your sword for it has ended its usefulness. but when interpreted as a state of commentary in its own right, the notion of being after feigned ignorance implies a double negative, or at the very least a dissolution of the feigned: under non-constructive logic it would result in a double negation translation into mere non-ignorance. if we assume Wittgenstein's ideals of the World being all that is True, the notion of transitioning into post-irony is then a change in the state of what the World is by definition. but that would be fucking stupid, because Wittgenstein is wrong about everything, especially that.
it is seemingly obvious that this is both an ironic and post-ironic lens to both characters. Twilight is often read as having Blood as an aspect by people who seem to care about classpecting characters from My Little Pony. her very arc is being reminded continually of the importance of friendship. Karkat is very similar in this notion, though friendship comes much more naturally to him in his own way¹. while the ironic notion is obviously present in the pixelation of Karkat's face versus the smooth lines of Twilight's mane and hooves, designed to point out this contradiction, there is a post-ironic — nay (neigh?), sincere aspect to it, designed to point out this similarity.
but in this case, the creator engages in a distinct conflation of the ironic and the post-ironic. if we again engage in the analytical lens, we have ironic and post-ironic, we have ironic and sincere in one — we have a contradiction. again, engaging in the practices of non-constructive logic with the presence of excluded middle, we are unable to maintain this contradiction and we engage the rule ex falso quodlibet, in which we put up our metaphorical hands and say “this is wrong! our assumption is wrong!”.
it is wrong, though. this being should never have been created, its existence is a sin in it of itself. by now you've noticed the (intentional) mistake in the argument here, that being that despite my refutation of Wittgenstein's ideals by merit of their obvious wrongness, i continue to engage in an analytical lens in which the World is all that is True. this is not a call to the non-constructive logics in which (A → ⊥) → ⊥ does not necessarily imply A, nor is it a call to the paraconsistent logics that allow for the admissibility of contradictions. it is instead a call to destruct the very notion of the analytical lens, for it is fucking worthless. indeed, we have a thing that the analytical lens cannot account for in the form of Twilight Karkle.
the primary crime of Twilight Karkle, then, is that it exists at all, not anything it could possibly do. it is the crime of the Creator that opened an image editor to create this. while a masterpiece of subversion, even a deep, penetrating deconstruction, it remains that this is still a contradiction, one that cannot be remedied, one that begs to be split. if Twilight Karkle were to walk up to you, you would regard it with pity. this should never have happened.
this never can happen again.
SCORE: three identical clones of Sigmund Freud out of 27 cans of Monster Energy
¹ credit to an unnamed non-Dirk individual of the spiralcomp system ² [DATA EXPUNGED]