2024-10-18 9:29:18 ¶ ●

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I've been really enjoying your posts on black holes and homes as sources of gravity (as I understand the posts so far). Out of curiosity, what do you make of page 5404, where Drunk Rose describes in drunk babble that Gravitation itself is somehow related to "the intrinsic nature of nothingness"? Combined with a few of the screenshots you've taken, it feels like you're hitting on something close to Void as a thematic presence in Homestuck to me, but bugger me if I know what it is!

My instinct is that Rose has reached the same conclusion I have: that ‘gravity’, as a metonym for the influence of a black hole, is just the inevitable pull towards oblivion. I think she’s using “nothingness” as a euphemism for “space”, over which gravity has dominion, but through this we can start to appreciate how the concepts of Space and Void weave into each other (“nothingness”, “space” and “void” all being functional synonyms).

Understanding that Rose’s lapse into alcoholism is her own way of succumbing to 'gravity’ - a pull towards toxic familial cycles which not only evokes Vriska’s own “addiction” to breaking 8-balls but also literally surrounds the drinker in a dark pocket - her allusions to the Void and gravity here are also tinged by her own experience and outlook as a Seer of Light (who heavily relied on a magic cue ball as her source; a fountain of information which is symbolically opposed to the information-consuming black hole). In particular, the idea that the gravity/knowledge contained within the apple was “for BIDDEN..!” feels like it harkens back to Rose’s own quest for forbidden knowledge, which led ultimately to her first foray into the dark. (Like a sun collapsing in on itself, in her hunger for information Rose becomes the black hole in a simultaneously Biblical-and-Newtonian fall-from-grace-cum-moment-of-inspiration. Oh, hey, exactly like Kanaya said would happen!)

But through allusions to Adam and Eve, and the plucking of primordial ideas “from the void” or “the abyss of coinsciousness”, we also get the sense that nothingness is the substrate from which things are born - in a manner of speaking, “the Void” here is an ideological incestuous slurry. Just as the void consists of the aspects of creation so “closely woven together […] that they are barely separable”, all things are eventually pulled by forces of gravity (or inevitability, or Time, or whatever name suits them in the context), manifested as a black hole, into nothingness… just to be mixed up and recombined again in Paradox Space’s great masturbatory cycle of life and death, like English being born again and again in countless universes. And what Rose “take[s] for granned”, about the ease of creating complex objects and the difficulty of creating simple ones, is the exact opposite problem to what the Rogue of Void experiences.

I don’t know if I’m HAPPY with these answers, per se… Rose’s rant is so rich with imagery I feel like I should be able to give you one, cohesive answer rather than 2-3 smaller fragmented ones. Perhaps that’s sort of the point - in her drunkenness, Rose has access to this veritably spaghetti heap of interwoven ideas, but lacks the vision to line them up into a unified Point? But I can’t help but feel like that’s a cop-out.

Thanks so much for asking though!