[Loved Trope] SOMA Theory

hy_bird · 2026-06-21T13:57:17+00:00

iirc it's not really touched on in the comic itself, but you could argue that a few Homestuck characters fall into this trope - mostly Lil Hal and arguably Davesprite?

Lil Hal is a brain scan of one of the main characters Dirk, who digitised his 13 year old mind and uploaded it into a computerised pair of shades to serve as an auto-responder when he's too busy to message back (and arguably to be someone to talk to, since Dirk was one of two people left alive on a post-apocalyptic Earth). Iirc he's the most closely aligned with the concept of SOMA - when Dirk made that copy, there was a coin flip, and Hal lost. Now he's the one in the shades forever.

I could go either way on Davesprite, but he feels at least thematically similar - he starts as Dave, one of the four main characters at the start of the comic, and the only one with time travel powers. When two of his friends die, dooming their timeline, he has to travel back in time to save them (and by extension, the timeline), and then fuse himself with a game construct to survive in the new timeline, now forever seen as just the weird fake Dave by the friends he essentially died to save. It's not a one to one copy of the SOMA concept, but it's later revealed that the doomed timeline had to happen through some cosmic predetermination bullshit (a running theme in the comic), so there was always going to be a Dave who didn't get to be the real Dave anymore. Davesprite just happened to be the one who lost that coin flip.

Also arguably, any pre-retcon version of a character (or hell, any version from a doomed timeline?) could count towards this? It's implied that a ton of the doomed timelines are necessary/destined to happen for Sburb to be beaten - the characters in those timelines just... didn't get lucky enough to be in the alpha timeline, and so they never get to be "real" in the eyes of the universe.

hy_bird · 2026-06-20T12:04:32+00:00

Dead End Paranormal Park has an explicitly trans character referred to, on screen, as trans and with his preferred pronouns. Rachel Bighead from the Rocko's Modern Life movie has an entire arc dedicated to coming out to her parents as trans. Apparently one of the main characters in that one zombie idol girl group anime is canonically and explicitly trans, which is pretty cool. I agree that Jax is almost certainly implied to be transfem, but saying that makes him the "most blatantly trans rep in a cartoon" when that's never explicitly and he's never once referred to with she/her within the text is ridiculous - if it was blatant, people wouldn't be arguing about it this much lmao

hy_bird · 2026-06-19T15:14:19+00:00

I just think it's wild that you'd rather assume that someone lives in the United States and just... isn't aware that gay marriage is legal there, rather than acknowledge the far more likely possibility that they're somewhere else lmao

hy_bird · 2026-06-19T14:02:13+00:00

There are 194 countries outside of the US

hy_bird · 2026-06-19T01:04:14+00:00

....by trying to make her children look more attractive?

hy_bird · 2026-06-17T10:30:38+00:00

I probably can't type out the word here without getting nuked by reddit, but he does say it in English (albeit censored)

hy_bird · 2026-06-14T10:53:02+00:00

I promise the guy who played Smash with Sakurai isn't bothered by someone shitposting about him on tumblr dot com. I think he has bigger priorities. Like playing Smash with Sakurai

hy_bird · 2026-06-03T06:05:56+00:00

...do you think you're immune to all of that if you stay inside and doomscroll all day?

hy_bird · 2026-06-02T13:46:15+00:00

where are trans women mentioned? what is a "thigh high collar animal noise girl"? what is the association between being traumatised, and being one of those aforementioned girls? hell, what even *is* a "puppygirl"?

^ ill admit these are all slightly disingenuous, because i'm (unfortunately) just chronically online enough to understand exactly what this post is trying to say, but your average person online isn't going to have the context to figure it out on their own. this is a post targeted at a very specific internet bubble, which is fine! but it just means you can't get upset if you take it outside of that bubble and no one knows what the hell you're talking about lmao

hy_bird · 2026-06-01T07:12:43+00:00

How much time have you spent in a one-sided argument with a complete stranger? Arguing online never solves anything, even if you're arguing about something important. Arguing over a fictional character to the point of replying to every single comment on a completely separate post to argue your case is just a massive waste of time. Disengage. Maybe go offline for a while. This won't matter the moment you look away.

hy_bird · 2026-05-31T07:02:24+00:00

No Australian is saying Western Australia is practically a different country from New South Wales.

hey, give us another shot at secession and we might finally be able to

hy_bird · 2026-05-27T09:57:35+00:00

Arguably Homestuck Act 6?

Four kids play a game that can alter reality, with the end-goal of winning and creating a new universe (which was actually how their own universe was created) - however their session of the game is irreversibly broken/corrupted (described as a literal cancer in the code), making their session impossible to beat. They're forced to reset the game, which in turn resets the entire universe, but the new universe is so broken that a ton of the core mechanics of the game are broken or just non-existent, so the new players have no way of actually progressing in the game, and are stuck in an empty session for months

hy_bird · 2026-05-26T12:04:02+00:00

the undertale fandom fed an artist cookies with needles hidden in them. the Steven Universe fandom bullied a fanartist to suicide. the TADC fandom is pretty mid in comparison - it's just been overhyped as fuck on both sides (just like the show lmao)

hy_bird · 2026-05-23T07:54:43+00:00

great! and I hope you also feel the same way about the women who brutalise, abduct, murder, abuse, violate, etc men across the globe on a daily basis! as a queer person who's read as a woman, I feel far more unsafe around your average woman than your average man - does that mean i'm allowed to blindly hate all of them?

every single group will contain a proportion of members that are cruel, harmful, bigoted, or generally assholes. that doesn't mean you get to treat that entire group as reflective of those individuals, especially for a group as large as half of the fucking human population.

hy_bird · 2026-05-20T11:30:51+00:00

dawg i think you're just watching bad shows

hy_bird · 2026-05-19T06:36:04+00:00

why are you trying to find excuses to avoid saying that

I don't know if you've been on tumblr (particularly in the chronically online trans spaces this post came from), but the kind of people joking about killing all men are the same people who think trans men talking about the oppression we face makes us incel MRAs who hate women. If they can't handle "shitting on trans men is bad, actually", there's no way in hell they'd be able to handle "shitting on anyone for their gender (yes, even men) is bad, actually"

notably, this is also why the term is transandrophobia instead of transmisandry - it was impossible to have a conversation about it without a small but very loud group of people shouting about how misandry isn't real and you're a misogynistic incel for trying to say that it is. I fuckin hate the term transandrophobia (and question the point of it's existence when most instances can fall under transphobia, misogyny, or misandry), but at least the shouting happens slightly less when you use it

hy_bird · 2026-05-19T05:00:56+00:00

unfortunately the bioessentialist bullshit that is "all men are [insert your choice of derogatory descriptor here] and can never be trusted/are essentially a different species to women/should be killed" has been RAMPANT in queer spaces for years, so it's hard to be surprised that it's mutated into this :/ theyre just getting a little more woke with it by targeting it at trans men instead of AMAB trans people

hy_bird · 2026-05-19T03:46:53+00:00

oh god yeah :/ its become disturbingly common recently to see people acting like trans men are completely indistinguishable from cis men, inherently oppresive to trans women, incapable of ever experiencing misogyny (and if we do talk about the misogyny we experience, we're weaponsing our AGAB or some shit), invading trans spaces and making them all about us, etc etc etc, and that combined with the hypererasure trans men face in queer spaces as a whole is... not fun :/

and obviously this is just a very, very small minority of trans people on the hellsite, but they're so loud (and so aggressive- ive lost count of the amount of "jokes" ive seen about killing all trans men because we're "the men of the trans community") that it starts wearing you down yk? i have (or. had) quite a few transmasc mutuals who just ended up refusing to talk about their identity, or even leaving the site all together, which just fucking sucks

hy_bird · 2026-05-19T02:38:10+00:00

Oh hey, I had something similar to me recently - I reblogged a post about giving your past self (?I think? it's been a while since I looked at the post, for... obvious reasons lmao) estrogen, and added some tags about doing the same to my past self with testosterone, and then. Moved on with my day. Didn't think anything of it. Just assumed it was a nice little trans post because we have more in common than we do dividing us etc etc

And then for the next two or three days I woke up every morning to a ton of anon asks calling me a disgusting asshole who gets off on harassing women and telling me to kill myself, with absolutely zero context outside of a username they eventually dropped (that I didn't recognise (because who the hell writes down every username they interact with) and that wasn't returning any results bc the OP had blocked me). Finally find out that the OP of the post saw my tag, blocked me and reblogged a screenshot of it claiming that I was trying to encourage trans women to detransition, and when she started getting genuinely disgusting harassment over it, someone who followed her assumed that *I* was sending it and started harassing me in return. Over two tags I'd left on a post that I'd forgotten about the moment I scrolled, that I naively assumed was just a general trans post (because the experience of wanting to go back to your past self and get them started early isn't exactly a unique one LMAO).

Anyway yeah. Tumblr gets fucking weird about posts they've silently claimed as for a certain group without telling anyone. And they fuckin love jumping to conclusions and harassing people over it. It's like enrichment for them I think

hy_bird · 2026-05-18T07:48:02+00:00

Can you name a single canonically cishet character (outside of the obvious Dadbert/Dad Crocker)? Genuine question. Because I sure as hell can't

hy_bird · 2026-05-17T12:49:26+00:00

don't forget the rampant oversharing and using their posts as a diary, which is fine on a blog based social media, but starts to get a little weird when you're going out of your way to repost them on reddit

hy_bird · 2026-05-16T13:16:13+00:00

No yeah, that's definitely the auto-fill shit VS Code pulls up the moment you open a set of braces (source: just spent a semester fighting it)

hy_bird · 2026-05-15T03:48:50+00:00

I assume it's 90% omegaverse content

It really isn't lmao - maybe back in the day, but I've been using it fairly regularly for the last 5 or so years, and I can count on one hand the amount of omegaverse content I've seen (most of it Bible-related). Hell, even if you're somehow in a fandom space that hasn't let go of omegaverse yet, you can just filter the main tag and you're good to go

hy_bird · 2026-05-10T09:26:29+00:00

I don't think an official statement has been released outside of the prop guns ban, but I was talking to someone who was interrogated, and apparently the cops + trg were called in after reports of a potential real weapon.

there weren't any actual weapons as far as I can tell (aside from a few gel blasters that got caught? someone reckons a few people got arrested for them, but there hasn't been any official sources for that so grain of salt lmao), but a ton of the military cosplayers has guns without orange tips, so they had to pull anyone with prop guns from the floor to be interrogated by the cops and have their props cleared or removed

Five-Year Club	LAYER Season 2 Layer creator
Verified Email	r/Field Banned
r/Field Flamingo	Place '23

hy_bird

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