20/11/2017 19:00:49 ¶ ●

## Time and the Alpha

So here’s a thing about Time that I’ve been thinking about but I don’t know exactly how to put. Heroes of Time in Homestuck all exist fundemantelly entangled with the Alpha timeline, and in the case of the two ‘good guy’ heroes, Dave and Aradia, are positioned as a sort of caretakers for it, driven to maintain the existence of the alpha in order to protect their friends. And they do this in their own idiosyncratic ways, Dave threading together an intricate tapestry of careful loops and Aradia just kinda save-scumming whenever anything goes wrong. The way they interact with the Alpha says a lot about them as people, it is a key part of defining who they are, to the point that Time itself in many ways seems to be About the nature of the Alpha, a natural feature of reality.

But there’s hints the Alpha is synthetic, a construct of Lord English. OptimisticDuelist says it better than I do, but there’s precious little of his writings on the topic publicly available. https://medium.com/@RoseOfNobility/apotheosis-and-creation-myth-2257d7bf5854 will have to suffice for now.

So where does that leave us, vis-a-vis the fundamental nature of Time? What is the Aspect, exactly, absent the influence of this immortal demon? Is there an Aspect at all absent his power? Certainly, both Dave’s and Aradia’s arcs involve overcoming symbolic representations of LE and the Alpha, Dave by coming to terms with his abusive childhood, tightly linked to the presence of Lil Cal, who is actually Lord English, and Aradia perhaps more symbolically by overcoming her death and largely leaving the Alpha-defined story entirely thousands of pages before the rest of the main cast manages to. And, of course, Damara, more of a failed hero of Time, is in many ways defined by her allegiance to LE, and her desire to see him hurt her former friends, while Caliborn, well, I don’t think I need to explain how Caliborn relates to Lord English.

But, well, I’ve gotten a couple questions from people making, like, fan characters or defining themselves in terms of the Aspects (and where the line between those things goes I do not know nor particularly care) about what the nature of Time is, and, uh, this is part of why it’s tricky to answer. Lord English is a dominating influence upon the story of Homestuck, but in terms of Paradox Space as a whole, that vast, nebulous existence of countless other stories to tell using the same basic mechanics? In terms of the Classpect system as used separately from Homestuck itself, to label fictional characters or even yourself? I’m not entirely sure how to position Lord English and his themes and nature in relation to Tumblr user Anonymous asking me about what it means for them, specifically, to be a Seer of Time. Like, where do you go with that?

Maybe it’ll get clearer for me in time, I feel like it kinda did already just writing this.