Curiously recurring anime pattern

Spoilers for “Neon Genesis Evangelion” (1995–1996), “Rebuild of Evangelion” (2007–2021), “Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair” (2012), and Homestuck (2009–2016).

Spent quite some time thinking how to present what essentially is 3 slightly different versions of the same text in a way that would allow to easily compare the versions and see similarities between them. Thought about maybe doing an interactive switch to cycle through the 3 versions with their common parts highlighted in the same color, but that sounded like too much pain to implement and fit into the unconventional color palette of this blog, while not giving a very good overview for the reader. Decided on a table instead.

So, who stole from who(m)?

I think Homestuck’s Dirk & Jake were heavily inspired by Evangelion’s Kaworu & Shinji (maybe some Gurren Lagan influence there too, but IDK, haven’t watched that). The parallels between Evangelion’s Rebuilds & Homestuck’s Epilogues also exist, especially in regards to the series’ self-awareness. Though, in Homestuck’s case we are still yet to get the reboot (in the form of the new SBURB session).

Danganronpa and Homestuck? Probably not that related. They came out more or less at the same time (consider that Dirk & Jake has made their first appearances in 2011, when Danganronpa 2 hasn’t been released yet so it couldn’t have influenced Homestuck that much, I think, but probably was already too late in development to get influenced by Homestuck, of all things). After all, Minecraft & Homestuck both started in spring 2009, and look how similar Minecraft & SBURB (the game in the center of Homestuck’s plot) are, but they were clearly conceptualized independently.

On the other hand, Jake’s powers as the Page of Hope, as well as his title itself, got first introduced a bit after his own first appearance, probably closer to somewhere in 2013 or 2014 (can’t check for sure, the website is down, lmao; thanks, VizMedia), so it is technically possible that some Dangranronpa influence has happened. After all, Homestuck lasted for 7 years. Long enough for Undertale to come out in 2015 with a ton of location concepts clearly taken from Homestuck, as well as some references (Pyrope, for one), and then to get referenced in Homestuck’s final pages in 2016.

Danganronpa and Evangelion? Probably not that much. There’s only two similarities they share that Homestuck does not: the fact one of the guys is the main character and the fact that gayness is never stated explicitly. The latter can easily be attributed to the fact that they both come from Japan, unlike Homestuck. The former is not too surprising, I think. As a main character, Hajime and Shinji both need to be somewhat inert, and average-looking, so it’s not really a big surprise they are that similar in their looks and behaviors.

Not to mention, Jake is somewhat of a main character himself. While he is not the main character of Homestuck (that would be John), he is somewhat of an alternative version of John (and Jade) in his universe, and that part of Homestuck that he is in heavily revolves around the teenage drama that Jake just so happens to be the center of. His powers are also very typical for an anime MC (very OP, but dormant and need to be mastered), and he has a huge influence on Homestuck’s main villain, Lord English.

As for the similarities that all three pairs share, I guess it boils down to just common anime/comics/shonen/gay/whatever stereotypes. I’m sure if you dig more, you’ll find other gay-ish couples in anime, where one guy is the main character, one has white hair while the other has black, the gayness isn’t stated explicitly and might as well just be a very strong friendship, the main character has something to do with hope, hope has something to do with bright light, people with white hair have red pupils of their eyes, and the main character is oblivious to the romantic attention he gets.

Now to a completely different topic.

Markdown: too limited to be useful for humans, too human-like to be parseable by computers

Markdown is so ass. I can’t even.

To begin with, the table syntax is horrendous:

| foo | bar |
| --- | --- |
| baz | bim |

Looks cool, but this is a pain to type. Thankfully, this is also accepted and will produce the same result:

| foo | bar |
|-|-|
| baz | bim |

I would probably be ready to put up with it (like I put up with the painfully verbose LaTeX) if, at the very least, it was flexible and allowed me to do what I want.

But nope. Wanna do multi-column cells? You’re out of luck.

So this post was typeset directly with HTML, which also has a painful syntax (just like XML, the markup language stuck in the suboptimal middle-ground between human- and machine-friendliness), but at the very least allows me to do what I want:

<table>
<tr>
<th>foo</th>
<th>bar</th>
<th>baz</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="3">Look, mom, three columns!</td>
</tr>
</table>

Another major pain point for me is the inability to arbitrarily number items in numbered lists. Markdown just ignores the numbers you write and renumbers everything starting from 1. Because “this way you won’t have to renumber all the items when you remove one from the list.”

Maybe not a very bad idea in theory, but in practice having no escape hatch for this… unorthodox behavior is sad.

This is probably the reason (or at least one of them, and a major one at that) for the success of C++. As awful as it is in many places, it rarely ever takes away your freedom to descend as many abstraction layers down as needed and do what you have to.

Its ancestor, C, also rarely ever takes away your freedom. Admittedly, the language is very bare-bones and weird in many places. The static inline extern stuff is tiring and the standard library is tiny by modern standards. But still, this language allows you to do practically anything you’d ever want. Yes, you will have to re-implement half of STL & Boost every time you try to do something, not to mention having to dodge all the memory management bugs and accidental O(n) & O(n^2) complexities where O(1) & O(n) would be possible if strings stored the length explicitly. But at the very least you can do things with it.

Actually, pretty much all of the annoyances mentioned above (ridiculous simplicity of the language, the mess of header files and linkage, NULL terminators instead of explicit lengths) were necessary to make it possible to compile and run programs written in C on the very limiting hardware of that time.

This is not the case with Markdown’s limitations. They do not make the language easy to parse by a computer. They only make the language look misleadingly simple to the human eye and limit the user in what they can do.

But I guess being conceptually simple and powerful enough to at least do the very minimum can be all it takes for a language to blow up, if it appears at the right place at the right time. (Looking at you, PHP.)

A loosely related anecdote to end this post.

Apparently Markdown is not as ancient as you might think. It was created in 2004 (well, that’s 21 years ago already, so maybe it is somewhat ancient) and one of its creators even has a web blog, which is active to this day (and presumably powered by Markdown).

Anyways, back in November 2024, when the USA presidential elections ended in the victory of the orange man, a good portion of tech bloggers I am subscribed to (not on social media, but with plain old RSS) started making political statements.

For me, as an outsider from a country where protests have to be sanctioned by the government, the hysteria over the “literally fascist Trump’s regime” seems to be slightly blown out of proportion.

Not to say Trump is good (he is a politician after all), even in comparison to other US politicians, but some people’s negative obsession over him is just hilarious.

For example, the creator of Markdown (who I am not subscribed to, but whose blog was linked somewhere, so I’ve read some of it, not even knowing it was the creator of Markdown) managed to have a meltdown over the fact that some rich business executives, when sucking up to Trump after his victory, wrote “president Trump” instead of “former president” or “president-elect” (because technically he was elected in November, but wouldn’t become a president until January).

My best guess is that he attributed to malice what can be easily attributed to, well, not even incompetence in this case, but rather just the informality of the language used. The thought process here was probably “they write president because they are insinuating that he (and not Joe Biden) is the current president, because they believe in the conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was stolen.”

Even now, when I opened his blog to leave a link to it, the latest post there started with the word “Trump.”

Well, that’s about it. See ya.