2019-06-04 8:11:12 ¶ ●

Checked the Homestuck credits to see if John’s Trickster Mode cheeks were still solid red circles rather than spirals, because you could argue that it’s important to John being potentially possessed by Lord English, and I noticed a detail I’d never spotted before;

The Alpha humans all have spiral cheeks, while the Beta humans have full circles.

Most likely this was just thrown in to keep John’s noncanon Trickster mode from earlier in the comic consistent with the canon Alpha Trickster modes, but with the added cherub imagery it also takes on a more symbolic meaning: a cherub with spiral cheeks is only half of a person, while a full-circled cherub is a matured adult. The Alpha kids have spiral cheeks because they’re more caricatures of people than real characters; a fact heavily emphasised in the Epilogues.