2023-09-20 16:33:27 ¶ ●

The theory used to be that Caliborn was his own dad. Thematic echoes ring around the story; his followers’ obsession with “MOTHERFUCKING” evokes the Oedipal undertones of Yaldabaoth imprisoning and corrupting his creatress Sophia. And Aranea, often misinformed but rarely, if ever - in spite of the school of red herrings surrounding English - intentionally misleading, seems to hint at such a possibility: Caliborn and Calliope’s home planet is the former home planet of their father, which is in her words “a loc8tion now conspicuously occupied 8y a truly massive 8lack hole”. Now that the comic’s over, and we have a more comprehensive idea of English’s life and times - he was born, he fucked with the trolls, left to try to kill his sister, and then died - it seems pretty unlikely that he had the opportunity to go back to the era of his birth and spawn himself… in the incarnation we’re most familiar with, at least. We’ve known from much earlier on that there were Englishes in “countless universes”, and that the “mobster Hulk” menacing Homestuck itself would never be fully representative of all of Caliborn’s crimes. And now that I’ve spent some more time looking over the mechanisms by which Caliborn is able to exist in so many countless universes, I’m not totally convinced that he isn’t his own dad?

Cherub romance is chiefly two things; it’s caliginous, and it’s incestuous. One way in which it is widely understood to be incestuous is by way of being masturbatory: in its mate, a cherub looks for “qualities its other half once had”, seeking to replace the aspect of itself it once referred to as brother or sister. But increasingly, I also think cherub mating is incestuous by way of being cyclical. Indeed, it’s difficult to draw a line between ‘cyclical’ and 'masturbatory’ for a race who couple by forming an ouroboros; but as touched upon already, the planet around which Caliborn’s father intertwined with his mother was also the planet around which his father’s father intertwined. Because cherubs always mate around black holes.

It’s easy to fall back on the simplest, most surface-level observation of the black hole, that it’s a symbol of Lord English. I have described the singularity in the past as English’s mouth, the orifice that swallows suns in the same manner the god of time Cronus swallowed his own son. But once more, English is ouroboros; the mouth that swallows his prey is also the mouth that swallows itself. The number of times I’ve pointed out the significance of white and black holes in Homestuck could be aptly called ad nauseam: but for the comic’s metanarrative purposes, being a gateway out of the story also makes the white hole a gateway forward into progress, and by contrast, the black hole is necessarily a pitfall into regression. Just as the black hole is where the god of cycles is swallowed by his own cycle, and is therefore a signpost of Lord English’s resurrection, it is also where cherubs go to enact violence upon their sibling-spouses because that is where their parents, and their grandparents, and their grandparents’ grandparents, enacted violence upon each other.

Bruce Banner was transformed into the monstrous green Hulk halfway by radiation, halfway by a brutal childhood at the hands of his own monstrous father. Cronus devoured his son, black hole-like, because he received prophecy that his children would overthrow him the same way he had overthrown his own tyrannical progenitor. Even Oedipus was an early victim of the time loop; had prophecy not deemed him at the moment of his birth to be responsible for his father’s death, his infamous transgression upon his mother could never have taken place. Whether we choose to believe English literally stepped through that black hole in some winged incarnation to commit the Oedipal sin, or if the rift through space and time is simply a symbolic wound - the bleeding hole left by generations of fathers traumatising wives and sons - the end result is the same. By becoming the Lord of Time, that god of cycles, and embedding himself in the very story structure cherubs dedicate their lives to upholding, Caliborn must embody that cycle; and the Oedipal is in the cyclical just as much as it is in the incestuous. Whether or not Caliborn’s dad is him is irrelevant to the simple fact that Caliborn is his own dad.