Reading Roxy and Meenah as doppelgangers: a digression on manifestation theory
A brief introduction to manifestation
Manifestation theory sounds scary - the idea that the appearance of trolls and other fantastical creatures might double as insight into the psychological goings-on of our human protagonists is not one that necessarily comes intuitively to all readers. But as blogger azdoine succinctly put it: it's basically "just symbolism". Characters in a story symbolise something, and, understanding that Homestuck is chiefly about its human protagonists, it's logical to presume that the non-human elements symbolise things that are relevant to the protagonists' human experience.
mmmmalo has written at length about what he identifies as the signs linking Meenah to Roxy's inner psychodrama - the things that make Meenah an "esoteric mirror" or "doppelganger" of Roxy. For comprehensiveness' sake, I'm going to outline from scratch what I have identified to be the key signs, and to that end this post is going to discuss the topics of reproduction, reproductive coersion and miscarried pregnancy (with text-pertinent allusions to grooming and incestuous abuse).
One big happy family
Looks like a little girl's room. This all strikes you as a bit odd.
Hussie suggests only briefly in commentary that the young Roxy's (β) upbringing was at the hands of "a younger grandpa Harley" (Book 2, p. 106), but we needn't take their word for it; the scenery here speaks for itself. Roxy grew up in a dark green basement, trained from childhood to become an agent of Harley's goals, just as Damara (β) - and then by succession Meenah (β) - would be trained as English's agents. So, by analogy, Grandpa Harley is Lord English.
This is another point mmmmalo has (in)famously already made, but regardless of your thoughts on the particulars of that specific reading, the key clues pointing to English as a manifestation of the "Grandpa" character are still plain to see. When John says "the worst case scenario" would be "[facing] our grandfatherly paradox-dad as a last boss", he's explicitly referring to he and Jade's family patriarch, but he's also implicitly foreshadowing Lord English - a character who, in the maturity of 2024, we should now all be able to recognise is in one way everyone's grandfatherly paradox-dad. He represents the same upper echelon of paternalistic power on a cosmic scale that Jake (β) represents on a familial level.
Moving this along towards my point: essentially all of Acts 1-4's adult characters form part of this elaborate Nuclear Family Roleplay - a pantomime of the 'Suburban' setting Homestuck is founded upon. In the same way Jake being known as simply "Grandpa" symbolises his arch-patriarchal position, the reason Roxy is known only as MOM for the first five acts of the comic is because this is the archetypal, impersonal role she has been reduced down into. Her relationship with the character named DAD is a direct invocation of this - the two are essentially playing house, living out the gendered roles that have societally/cosmically been laid out for them. The comic's exposition coyly brushes over this, but a deeper look at Alternian culture gives us a much clearer vision of why 'MOM and DAD' make such an iconic matespritship: on Alternia there ARE no real family units, only procreation, and therefore matespritship is understood by the planet's inhabitants as a mere expression of "mating fondness". MOM and DAD make such a cute couple because they are exactly what their assigned titles depict them as - a breeding pair.
This is basically the crux of Roxy's arc right up to the very end of the comic; though Roxy's (Α) post-apocalyptic anxieties about the extinction of the human race bring these thoughts to the forefront, her struggle within the patriarchal structures of the household / society / reality itself has always been that she is only valued as a MOM - as a breeding machine.
The problem therein is that Roxy is seemingly incapable of having children.
