Black Hole Theory posits that things in Homestuck that enter black holes invariably end up on Earth C, Caliborn’s earth; making Caliborn’s session a sort of temporal doldrum where everything that crosses the event horizon is eventually becalmed. I compared this aesthetically to Kingdom Hearts’ End of the World; a void made up of the pieces of everything that falls into the darkness.
But if Caliborn’s session is the End of Time, then in the Ouroborosian fashion typical of cherubs, and in the paradoxical sense that is Lord English’s trademark, could it, should it not also be the Beginning of Time?
One thing never made clear in Homestuck is what form the Battlefield evolves into after receiving 12 kernels of data. I hesitate to call it one of the comic’s “mysteries”, because I think it’s exactly what it looks like on the surface: an unimportant piece of worldbuilding that never got its time in the light because it never became relevant to the story being told. Andrew puts it plainly in the commentary on page 330 of Book 5:
What did the Battlefield look like after twelve entries in the troll
session? That’s anyone’s guess, but I wasn’t about to tie my brain into a
knot trying drawing that out for you.
Yes, the trolls’ Battlefield would have had its own look after 12 prototypings, but no, it’s not important enough to go into.
What I think is important about this angle of questioning is that it obscures a much more important question behind it. That old chestnut in particular: “Why?”
Why does the Battlefield need to evolve into a three-dimensional form to be fertilised by the genesis tadpole? Why a four-dimensional form? Why a twelve-dimensional form? If the Battlefield is just a shell to hold a frog in, what’s wrong with leaving it at the cube stage? Even in a session of twelve players, each and every kernel must deliver data; so why does it vary from session to session how many prototypings the Battlefield requires?
[…] that sun there of course becomes an important recurring symbol, notably
one Vriska commandeers, as she does with much of the plot later on. The
sun has many meanings in this story. In retrospect, we might view it
here as a sigil representing a mischievous god, who happens to be a
female troll, always watching over him and meddling with his life in
subtle ways. He didn’t know it at the time though, and neither did I.
Homestuck: Book 1, p.48
There must be something fundamentally different about a universe created by twelve heroes and a universe created by just four.
Both are facilitated by the Hero of Space; a necessity in any fertile session. By implication we can glean that the Hero of Time is a constant as well. And we know that the heroes collectively involved in the creation of a universe will leave some kind of imprint on that universe; asterisms bearing the heroes’ legacies,
at the very least.
So does it not stand to reason Heroes of Space and Time are both required to create a universe because Space and Time are two things that a universe fundamentally needs to exist? The elaboration from here is obvious; Light exists in a universe with a Hero of Light among its creators; Breath is bestowed by a Hero of Breath, and so on.
The idea that things like Light and Breath can be considered “dimensions” in the same way Space and Time are is hardly even a speculation; the Dead Cherub all but states that this is the case:
Things like Light and Void and Breath and Blood can become entangled and difficult to navigate in exactly the same way Time and Space can; it’s just harder to see for the exact same reason it’s difficult for a human to conceptualise objects in higher dimensions than three.
The conclusion from here is obvious; a four-player session needs a four-dimensional Battlefield because their goal is to create a four-dimensional universe; twelve players, aiming to create a twelve-dimensional universe, would need a twelve-dimensional Battlefield to do so. This idea that a session with more players creates a universe that is somehow “more” makes total sense even surface-textually; more players in a session means more grist hoards in the centers of their planets, which means more substance going into the Ultimate Alchemy. That grist has to be going toward something; and that something is the dimensions of the universe being created.
Where I’m going with this should be obvious. Caliborn’s session clearly was not building up towards the normal goal of creating a universe, but Caliborn was not the normal player either; is it possible that as the Master, the Lord of Time, something he achieved in his session resulted in the creation of the dimension of Time itself? It has long been discussed that the nature of timelines, and the mysterious force that decides which timeline is the Alpha and which are merely doomed offshots, seems to serve only one purpose, the very same goal every one of Lord English’s servants works toward: his own birth. Could it be that things that cross the event horizon are so drawn to the Dead Session because it’s a place outside of time, existing not after its death but in fact before its very birth?
Something I’m ashamed to have totally missed is the consistent treatment of post-scratch Earth as an afterlife realm. Not just in the obvious sense that when the Condesce appointed her Mirthful Executives it became the “paradise planet”
inhabited by the “band of rowdy and capricious minstrels” foretold by the Highbloods, or that thousands of years later in Earth C it was being directly called a paradise planet; thousands of years later still, Caliborn calls the place his Dark Carnival, something Gamzee implies to also be connected to the paradise planet and its minstrels.
Just like the Mirthful Messiahs, the paradise planet and its Dark Carnival seem to shift identity “depending on at what point in the story the idea is discussed, on context, and on whichever particular interpretation happens to be most convenient at any given moment” (Homestuck: Book 4, p.49), but being based on that version of Earth seems to be a constant.
Despite Karkat’s constant derision of Gamzee’s religion and insistence of its fakeness, he approaches John as if the prophecy about the paradise planet is fact… which has to make you wonder; did John’s clown scribbles make Karkat think that this really was a world of wicked minstrels and dark carnivals? Could anything else have possibly made Karkat more angry than thinking he just found out Gamzee was right all along?
An unrelated thought to finish off the night; I stumbled across this apparently infamous theory earlier tonight while doing some research on the process of frog breeding, and while the bulk of the analysis is totally insane even by my standards of literary breakdown
(TL;DR Davesprite and Jade had a baby and it was a frog), there’s a tiny snippet that the author dismisses as “a stretch to be sure” that to me was one of the more eye opening Homestuck analyses I’d ever come across:
Thinking back on the idea that sprites represent the Platonic “geists” of their associated heroes, when we consider that both Roxy and Calliope contain “Nepeta-ness”, it starts to look a lot like the theory put forth in Plato’s Symposiumthat humans, having been created with two heads and then split into two, search for a romantic partner who literally completes them; Roxy and Calliope both contain different parts of Nepeta, and they attract each other because these different aspects of Nepeta-ness want to join together into a whole Nepeta.
Which makes complete sense in Homestuck, because that’s exactly what the cherubs are: “two-headed” beings who split in two upon reaching maturity, and spend their lives seeking out a mate who matches their missing half!
Thinking back on the idea that sprites represent the Platonic “geists” of their associated heroes, when we consider that both Roxy and Calliope contain “Nepeta-ness”, it starts to look a lot like the theory put forth in Plato’s Symposiumthat humans, having been created with two heads and then split into two, search for a romantic partner who literally completes them; Roxy and Calliope both contain different parts of Nepeta, and they attract each other because these different aspects of Nepeta-ness want to join together into a whole Nepeta.
Which makes complete sense in Homestuck, because that’s exactly what the cherubs are: “two-headed” beings who split in two upon reaching maturity, and spend their lives seeking out a mate who matches their missing half!
My first follow-up thought to this was that it makes perfect sense for characters like Equius, Gamzee, and Caliborn to be drawn to each other, because they are fated to be components of the Lord of Time, and could therefore be considered splinters from the same whole: but as I read through Homestuck: Book 6, on p.69…
Much later in Act 6, we see Lil Cal is a juju vessel containing the
splintered souls of various controversial characters in the story:
Caliborn, Equius, Dirk, and yes…even Gamzee, which means he’s actually
here watching this ball drop in TWO forms. But all these figures are,
in some manner, highly exaggerated negative manifestations of author
avatars, who have amalgamated themselves within the body of English to
wreak havoc on the story/reader. This is the galaxy-brained
interpretation of the line. The most important character in the story is
me, or more specifically, the most villainous, destructive
splinter-composite of the author’s presence in the story.
Equius, Gamzee and Caliborn are not splinters of Lord English; they’re splinters of the author Andrew Hussie, attracted to each other by this exact force: the different parts that make up Andrew-ness want to reform into a new, whole Andrew, or rather a shadow of the original Andrew. Lord English is the pieces of Andrew Hussie disassembled and put back together again in a new shape.
We don’t have all the info yet, but that was a subtle prompt to consider
the question, which I’m doing here. Mainly by “reassuring” everybody
that I’m not going to turn out to be LE himself and become the supreme
villain that my fictional heroes all have to gang up on and defeat in
the end. If that were literally true, then yes, I would be right in
describing that here as “dumb.” But then again, you can never totally
trust me, can you? This is just some farcical
misdirection-slash-admission in plain sight, which is a frequent tool of
the story. LE arguably is me, but detached from the literal AH persona
by several layers of symbolism and exaggerated, shithead, in-story
avatar composites, to create the ultimate anti-narrative, anti-reader,
anti-Homestuck monstrosity.
The fact that “imigrants” made the conksuck boots is also in reference
to [a SBaHJ] comic. So it’s not actually Dave just randomly being racist out
of nowhere. It’s just him being racist by proxy of his ironically
crafted comic about a shitty buffoon. Which is actually a comic I made,
and assigned credit to him. It’s not me being racist though, since I’m
now impeccably insulated by two fictional characters’ worth of deferred
accountability.
Homestuck: Book 6, p.34
Like Lord English exists as a sort of “excuse” for Andrew Hussie to enact his more evil and destructive authorial tendencies on the comic. Which is of course, from a real-world perspective, literally true. When we find out that Alternia is a hellhole “because Lord English made it that way”, that’s just code for “because Andrew Hussie wanted it to be”; something I’ve always thought was a really pertinent example of Homestuck’s metafictional form of storytelling in action, but which also gets frequently criticised - and quite fairly, i think - as flat-out lazy worldbuilding by less forgiving critics.
Thinking back on the idea that sprites represent the Platonic “geists” of their associated heroes, when we consider that both Roxy and Calliope contain “Nepeta-ness”, it starts to look a lot like the theory put forth in Plato’s Symposiumthat humans, having been created with two heads and then split into two, search for a romantic partner who literally completes them; Roxy and Calliope both contain different parts of Nepeta, and they attract each other because these different aspects of Nepeta-ness want to join together into a whole Nepeta.
Which makes complete sense in Homestuck, because that’s exactly what the cherubs are: “two-headed” beings who split in two upon reaching maturity, and spend their lives seeking out a mate who matches their missing half!
My first follow-up thought to this was that it makes perfect sense for characters like Equius, Gamzee, and Caliborn to be drawn to each other, because they are fated to be components of the Lord of Time, and could therefore be considered splinters from the same whole: but as I read through Homestuck: Book 6, on p.69…
Much later in Act 6, we see Lil Cal is a juju vessel containing the
splintered souls of various controversial characters in the story:
Caliborn, Equius, Dirk, and yes…even Gamzee, which means he’s actually
here watching this ball drop in TWO forms. But all these figures are,
in some manner, highly exaggerated negative manifestations of author
avatars, who have amalgamated themselves within the body of English to
wreak havoc on the story/reader. This is the galaxy-brained
interpretation of the line. The most important character in the story is
me, or more specifically, the most villainous, destructive
splinter-composite of the author’s presence in the story.
Equius, Gamzee and Caliborn are not splinters of Lord English; they’re splinters of the author Andrew Hussie, attracted to each other by this exact force: the different parts that make up Andrew-ness want to reform into a new, whole Andrew, or rather a shadow of the original Andrew. Lord English is the pieces of Andrew Hussie disassembled and put back together again in a new shape.
So paradoxically, in the story Dirk is shown to be a seed for Doc, but outside the story it’s closer to the opposite: Doc was somewhat of a prompt for Dirk’s profile.
[…] I’ve also talked about splinters in a different context, which is
that any collection of characters in a story could be viewed as
compartmentalized, somewhat exaggerated splinters of the author’s total
personality. Everything an author is capable of conceiving is recorded
through the characters they create and the words and actions they assign
to them, which includes good and evil things.
That last comment from Hussie on p.387 of Book 6 also uses the term “Persona Alchemy”, which he’s used before but I never really picked up on; it sort of explicitly ties it back to the concept of Platonic idealism used within Homestuck’s “actual” alchemy, and therefore to the sprites, which operate on the very same philosophy. It just ties everything together neatly.
And then there’s this comment on p.382, which I can’t really think of a way to incorporate into any other post, but definitely feels like it needs to be included somewhere for posterity:
I remember Aradia whispering to her past self being a cagey way of
implying that she was the one responsible for her own ghostly
communications
[…] it’s kind of an interesting idea that this is demonstrating the
mechanism which allows for her to receive messages from dead people. It
would mean that ghosts are actually communicating with their memory of
Aradia. And ghosts in their bubbles whispering to the memory of a
psychically gifted person may serve as a conduit for actual messages
being delivered to the real person. It opens up some deep questions. Is
your memory of someone linked to the truth of that person’s existence in
some way? The topic isn’t explored much beyond this one cagey whisper.
But we do know that in Homestuck, ideas of people and things have a lot
of power. Would it be unreasonable to think influencing the idea of a
person might hold some sway over the physical instance of that person?
It’s an interesting angle to see inhabitants of the dream bubbles not just as the ghosts of dead timelines, but as memories of those timelines; literally the “versions” of people that live in their own or other people’s heads, yet another kind of reflection of the “true” Platonic idea of someone. Which I suppose is also literally the domain of the Mind aspect;
I think basically anything with a built-in hierarchy or order can be made to fit within my fantrolling philosophy. I’ve seen all sorts of themes turn into really interesting sessions ranging from horror movies to the olympian gods to pokemon to the norse tree zodiac. Probably the session of mine that best fits the philosophy is my most recent one based on the major arcana of the tarot, which we split into two spectrums from the Fool to Justice and then from the Hanged Man to the World. It’s a really old blog but I talk a lot more about ocs over at my general homestuck blog @dingodad if you’re looking for inspiration or wanna ask more questions on the topic :)
When you consider the ways in which Lord English is obviously descended from Mobster Kingpin as a character, it’s a little interesting that the Problem Sleuth never touches on the idea of the Kingpin as an alt-author character? Or even just Problem Sleuth as a whole on a metanarrative level; beyond it kind of just being a beta version of Homestuck, the Kingpin’s particular method of keeping the other characters in miniature houses and watching them through electronic windows (retroactively fourth walls) screams storyteller-villain. Problem Sleuth also has Imagination in its arsenal, which allows characters from the “real world” to shape the “imaginary world” through will alone, which is arguably a stronger, or at least more explicit, metafictional mechanic than anything appearing in Homestuck before the last few sub-acts.
Imagination’s equivalent in Homestuck would seem to be the chucklevoodoos, which we don’t get a lot of mileage out of… I suppose we can assume Lord English also has those powers, since he’s part Gamzee? He is supposed to have a HYPNOT1C GL4R3 after all.
That last comment from Hussie on p.387 of Book 6 also uses the term “Persona Alchemy”, which he’s used before but I never really picked up on; it sort of explicitly ties it back to the concept of Platonic idealism used within Homestuck’s “actual” alchemy, and therefore to the sprites, which operate on the very same philosophy. It just ties everything together neatly.
And then there’s this comment on p.382, which I can’t really think of a way to incorporate into any other post, but definitely feels like it needs to be included somewhere for posterity:
I remember Aradia whispering to her past self being a cagey way of
implying that she was the one responsible for her own ghostly
communications
[…] it’s kind of an interesting idea that this is demonstrating the
mechanism which allows for her to receive messages from dead people. It
would mean that ghosts are actually communicating with their memory of
Aradia. And ghosts in their bubbles whispering to the memory of a
psychically gifted person may serve as a conduit for actual messages
being delivered to the real person. It opens up some deep questions. Is
your memory of someone linked to the truth of that person’s existence in
some way? The topic isn’t explored much beyond this one cagey whisper.
But we do know that in Homestuck, ideas of people and things have a lot
of power. Would it be unreasonable to think influencing the idea of a
person might hold some sway over the physical instance of that person?
It’s an interesting angle to see inhabitants of the dream bubbles not just as the ghosts of dead timelines, but as memories of those timelines; literally the “versions” of people that live in their own or other people’s heads, yet another kind of reflection of the “true” Platonic idea of someone. Which I suppose is also literally the domain of the Mind aspect;
I also like this suggestion from a manifestation angle… if alterations of the past we see in death-dreams can be superimposed upon the original event, if Aradia can retroactively become the ghostly whisper in her own ear, then it’s not much of a leap to think that intrusions upon dreams might more generally function as an elaboration upon the underlying motive forces of a given memory, the intruders retroactively embodying the psychic forces which were always already whispering to you.
There’s always been a long running confusion among Homestuck readers about Aradia’s initial ghost form; along the lines of “what’s the difference between the spirits who wander Alternia and the ones who go into the domain of the Horrorterrors?” and the follow up “why wasn’t she in the dream bubbles like all the other dead people?”
The answer to the first question has always been obvious to me; there is no difference. Homestuck’s very structure is founded on patterns and repetition; if we can’t assume that anything that looks like a ghost and quacks like a ghost is therefore a ghost, how can we possibly begin to understand any of Homestuck? It’s the second question that really poses the obstacle, because on first reading the comic doesn’t really seem to bother with explaining this discrepancy.
But could it be that the answer to that question is actually… “Aradia was in the dream bubbles like all the other dead people”?
At first, it seems that something differentiating the two “different kinds” of ghosts is that those without psychic senses aren’t able to see the spirits that wander Alternia…
…but given that just about anybody can sense ghosts in the dream bubbles - even Terezi, whose ability to sense people relies on their having some kind of “substance” to smell or taste - is it not just as easy to assume that Nepeta was unable to see Aradia on her screen because Aradia wasn’t actually there?
(This only stands out more when we take into account The Homestuck Epilogues, where ghosts are able to roam the real world and interact with the living just like they were regular people.)
Possibly the one “problem” that arises from this interpretation is how Aradia manages to prototype herself in a kernelsprite some thousands of voidyears away from her. But given that a kernel really only contains the “idea” of someone, is it such a stretch to imagine that the “memory” of something could also count, in the same way a ghost image counts as a solid object when used in alchemy? To put it in other words; if, as Andrew suggests, Aradia can literally transmit information at a (spooky) distance by whispering into the ear of a memory, does it not follow perfectly that Aradia could also digitally transmit information at a distance by placing herself in the memory of a kernelsprite?
There is even precedent in the comic for a ghost to be sucked into a kernel from the dream bubbles at a distance; because that’s exactly what happens in the creation of Jadesprite!
I think where this theory is the strongest isn’t just in the pure mechanics of it, though, but in how it plays into the story and the way Homestuck is told, as a series of questions followed by a series of answers. This whole “mystery” regarding the nature of ghosts becomes so much clearer when we recognise Aradia’s introduction as a ghost as the question - “there’s an afterlife in Homestuck? how does it work?” - and the introduction of the dream bubbles as the answer. Which is basically how Andrew phrases it in the commentary; Aradia whispering to her past self is a “cagey way of implying” something we didn’t already know and have been wondering about, i.e. where Aradia’s instructions have been coming from.
It has to be admitted, of course, that this conclusion is a little more obtuse and takes a little more digging than most of Homestuck’s question-answer revelations. It could easily be said, in fact, that this conclusion would be literally impossible to reach without the author’s commentary from nearly a decade later. But if Andrew’s print commentary has told us anything, it’s that Homestuck is full of details that the author fully intended to make clear in the text but was somehow just unable to before it became time to move on. For a prominent example; in what world has it “been implied that the mutual result of the red or black concupiscent ritual is the prodigious vomiting of genetic material”, as Andrew claims on p.312 of Book 4? “[…] to be perfectly honest, I can’t remember at all if this was implied anywhere in the text, or just in my imagination at some point over the last eight years.“
It’s impossible not to be tickled by how apt the concept of “spooky action at a distance” is to the situation of ghost Aradia, or indeed ghosts in general; not even just in the sense that, as evidenced by the Vast Glub and the Battleship Condescension, psychic messages are able to travel faster than the speed of light and telekinetics (which is in itself literal “action at a distance”) are able to move objects at FTL speeds; but in the sense that I suppose all memories of a person are also “entangled” with that person’s waking self…
On the topic of persona alchemy, whose event horizon we seem to be pretty much perpetually struggling to escape from, rereading this little tidbit about Caliborn’s transformation from Doc Scratch to Lord English reminded me of something out of the alchemy of the ancient Greeks (the Platonic philosophers in particular) and the Islamic thinkers; the idea that all substances contained various measures of certain fundamental “natures” - hotness, coldness, wetness and dryness - some external and some internal; and that therefore a substance could be transmuted into another substance by rearranging these natures, or by turning the external natures internal and vice versa.
Ergo, just like how in classical alchemy we can transmute lead (cold and dry externally, hot and moist internally) into gold (hot and moist externally, cold and dry internally) by switching the external with the internal, we can transmute Doc Scratch (cueball externally, puppet internally) into Lord English (puppet externally, cueball internally) by doing the exact same thing.
And it seems to me that this scope can very easily be widened to encompass Homestuck’s library of alternate selves as a whole. In one timeline, Dirk Strider’s manipulative tendencies might be exterior while his compassionate tendencies are interior (Equius externally, someone like Nepeta internally?), while in another timeline, the latter comes to the fore and the former recedes.
Which to me implies that the true meaning of the Ultimate Alchemy may actually be something to do with the Ultimate Self… but you might have somehow guessed that already.
The main problem with tying the Ultimate Alchemy to the Ultimate Self is that we basically already know exactly what the Ultimate Alchemy is; it involves hordes of grist being pumped into a little frog to make it into a really, really big frog. Now normally there’s little problem in saying that something in Homestuck means motherfucking BOTH THINGS, but in this case it definitely feels like a link in the chain is missing; if Ghost, Frog, Robot, Fairy means anything at all, there’s some connection between creating a universe and reaching the Ultimate Self that I still haven’t managed to figure out.
The main problem with tying the Ultimate Alchemy to the Ultimate Self is that we basically already know exactly what the Ultimate Alchemy is; it involves hordes of grist being pumped into a little frog to make it into a really, really big frog. Now normally there’s little problem in saying that something in Homestuck means motherfucking BOTH THINGS, but in this case it definitely feels like a link in the chain is missing; if Ghost, Frog, Robot, Fairy means anything at all, there’s some connection between creating a universe and reaching the Ultimate Self that I still haven’t managed to figure out.
Had a think about this, thought of some possible answers, then immediately had a cold shower, so I’m fully aware I’m wandering into that wasteland of tensegrile theorycraft for the sake of theorycraft now. With that being said…
When the kids stepped into their new universe (read: capital F Frog), that was their Problem Sleuth “the world is real” moment, stepping out of the pages of the book and into real life. Which does make sense as a step toward becoming your Ultimate Self; even the most powerful supercomputer (read: Robot) can’t comprehend beyond the bounds of the universe it exists in, or the role it serves in a story. In alchemy (ugh, I know), the vessel the reaction takes place in is always included as one of the most important ingredients, to the point that it was sometimes suggested a special container would be needed to contain any reaction involving the universal solvent, lest the container itself be dissolved.
But does this mean anything unless we can universalise it? When the trolls move from their universe into the humans’ domain, is that also a “stepping up” to a higher dimension of reality?
There is perhaps some merit to the idea that even though Karkat and co. literally “created” Earth, Alternia and the trolls are in fact “fictions” emanating from Earth: to the humans, the Midnight Crew who live on Alternia are fictional characters; Lord English, the man responsible for “authoring” Alternia’s history, is a product of earth; and in becoming the Earth’s zodiac and mythological creators, the trolls did, in a sense, become human creations.
One quirk of this interpretation would be that it implies the more “real” a reality is, or the closer it is to the real world, the fewer dimensions it is made up of. In other words, the dimensions of Mind, Doom, Rage and Blood are somehow less “real” than Space, Time, Breath and Light. Though perhaps this makes more sense than the alternative, if we view fiction as an elaboration on reality, rather than an isolated slice of reality?
People have always argued over whether the death of the guardians was a direct result of Karkat’s “cursed code”, a built-in mechanic of SBURB itself, or just coincidence / “circumstantial simultaneity”; which to me is a silly argument, because in Homestuck those are always going to be the same thing, but I digress… it’s occurred to me that if paradox space has a habit of cleaning doomed persons from the timeline by killing them off, would the kids’ guardians not fall under this umbrella by virtue of being doomed versions of their post-scratch iterations?
