September 2021

I’ve never understood this widespread refusal to accept that Lord Noir / Union Jack / whatever name you want to give him IS Lord English. Lord English is a character that travels from reality to reality using objects like Lil Cal as vessels, and B2′s Jack Noir was one of those vessels

lime-bloods:

I’ve never understood this widespread refusal to accept that Lord Noir / Union Jack / whatever name you want to give him IS Lord English. Lord English is a character that travels from reality to reality using objects like Lil Cal as vessels, and B2′s Jack Noir was one of those vessels

Maybe I’m feeling a touch dramatic about this after encountering it again and again over the years, but there’s this attitude that’s obviously common in Homestuck fandom that something needs to be sufficiently “obvious” in-text for it to be considered “true”, any form of analysis beyond the surface level be damned… (maybe because the “lore” side of Homestuck analysis has always kind of been “for boys”, which comes with its own predetermined set of rules and assumptions, but maybe that’s being dramatic)

…and this particular instance sticks in my throat because it’s really such a tip of the iceberg topic. Like, I can obviously understand that someone might be reluctant to take a statement like “the denizens represent aspects of Caliborn, and John cleaning the oil from LOWAS is just a symbol of removing Caliborn’s corruption from the comic” for granted, because once you start cutting that deep the potential interpretations become too myriad for there to really be any one “correct” interp. But when you’re faced with facts like “Lord English travels from reality to reality using Lil Cal as a vessel” and “Jack Noir becomes empowered through possession by Lil Cal, with no other explanation provided”, the same guys who throw terms like “Occam’s Razor” around suddenly don’t see the obvious answer anymore.

I guess a more current / relevant example of this Type of Guy would be the crowd who continue to insist that the Ultimate Self stuff doesn’t make any sense, or is yet to be explained, is unanswered in some way… when the Ultimate Self I think is probably one of the most fully realised, easy to understand parts of the whole Homestuck mythos. But it’s something that so inherently relies on philosophical thinking, rather than scientific thinking, so the people who approach Homestuck like a scientific experiment that can only be solved with objective facts and empirical evidence see it as this huge, insurmountable rock formation in their path

God, and the entire mainstream of “classpecting” is built around this same philosophy of treating symbology as an objective science, which I think pretty well explains why I have such a hard time grasping it. The whole point of something like Homestuck’s aspects is that they are purely abstract matter that can be shaped into any form required of them, but so often we see people describing the aspects by what they “are” rather than what they “represent”. Blood doesn’t “represent” bonds and consistency, it “is” the aspect of bonds and consistency, and a Hero of Blood “does” certain things with bonds and consistency, rather than relating to bonds and consistency in a variable way

@mmmmalo
I mean the appeal of classpect for me was that it suddenly made the concept of symbolism click, that characters were interacting with objects that could represent concrete idea-categories… but maybe that sense of immediacy you describe is what made it feel so uniquely revelatory, even religous? Funny enough it was a growing sense the system’s mutability that made me give up on it and look for other interpretive lenses

Or maybe, for the same reason you see people waiting for Ultimate Self stuff to be confirmed, it was that classpect gave symbolism a degree of authorial sanction, so that within the scope of classpect, the usual Maybe The Author Just Likes Blue Curtains fare is inadmissible…

Well, less admissible at least

to me the absolute mutability of classpect is what gives it its appeal… the aspects are more like the unknowable image of the puzzle you’re trying to solve, rather than the pieces you use to solve it. when I say I dislike or disagree with a certain mainstream of classpect analysis, I mean this specific kind of analysis I’ve seen dominate the scene over the years that hinges on things like “Rose Lalonde will do these things and have this character trajectory because she is a Seer of Light” or “your character must live in this specific way if he is a Bard of Doom”. analysis that, like you say in your tags, has the opposite problem to Jack English denial; rather than refusing to accept that “patterns” can be considered “evidence”, it’s the insistence that something intended to be a pattern must be scientific evidence.

to use the blue curtains analogy, a lot of classpect to me seems like the equivalent of watching a character die in front of a blue curtain and then another character dying in a blue car, and coming to the conclusion that “blue things literally emit deadly radiation”. it’s this paradoxical mindset that tries to force logic onto a symbology to such an extent that its conclusions become intrinsically illogical.

or to use another comparison that pushes the farcical nature of this kind of analysis even further, it’s like the joke theory that wearing the pork pie hat is what causes Walter White to perform evil acts. Rose and Vriska do everything they do while wearing a Light aspect hat… so the hat must have a direct causal relationship with everything they do!

at risk of turning lime-bloods into a full blown capital d Discourse blog, the thing that made me think it was about time someone said something about Lord Noir was this comment on the latest vinesauce Homestuck video, which I can probably get away with reposting here:

this kind of thinking just makes me wonder how one thinks writing works. does Andrew just add new characters to his comic on a whim? does nothing have meaning?

at the end of the day whether things were added to the comic “on a whim” or not is totally irrelevant to how much meaning they have anyway. any piece added to the story, no matter what the intention with which it was added, serves to expand upon an existing piece. there is nothing in Homestuck that stands totally on its own with no connection to anything else. was it “necessary” for Jack English to be introduced for us to further understand Lord English’s process? no, but his presence still carries that additional information on his back, and is therefore not a meaningless detail.

as long as I’m here getting meta about the history of Homestuck meta, I think it also deserves to be talked about that the comic’s sheer chronological length has bred a very particular kind of confirmation bias into the discourse surrounding it. when it’s been four thousand pages since something was relevant, it’s very easy to just forget the details, and when it’s been years since you started forming a hypothesis, it’s understandably difficult to just let that hypothesis go when new information comes to light years down the line. I can understand, for example, why someone who spent years expecting something totally new to come out of the Lord Noir plotline might find it hard - physically difficult, given the sheer page count that sometimes needs to be sifted through - to look back on the whole comic in retrospect and accept that yeah, actually, that was just supposed to show us another potential manifestation of Lord English.

this happens a lot in regards to Alternia’s worldbuilding, the quadrants being a good example, because for a period of time for whatever reason (I think the reason is called “shipping”) it was considered a favourable interpretation for moirallegience to be a healthy, symmetrical relationship between two people who love each other very much. so it could be quite disruptive to look back at the text and reanalyse it and find that, actually, this moirallegience thing is just another cog in Alternia’s big mincemeating machine. the fact that Alternia isn’t really the gender-liberal matriarchal paradise a lot of people made it up to be in their minds also kind of slots into this same vein.

and again this plays heavily into a lot of what people don’t Get about the Ultimate Self, and I can speak confidently on this one because I was caught up in the same trap as everyone else when Davepeta suddenly began insisting that every version of someone in every timeline was really just the same person. when you spend so many years thinking of “Bro” as a totally different character from Dirk, “the Condesce” as a totally different person from Meenah, it can feel very much like a copout to suddenly be told you’re wrong, and to see Andrew referring to “Grandpa” and “Mom” as Jake and Roxy so casually in the commentary of the books. and that is very much how we felt when the retcon happened and this weaksauce glue paste was used to paper over what we saw as gaps. but it’s important at times like those to look back at what has come before and realign your understanding based on these new ideas, because as it turns out, waking yourself up to the kind of Platonic ideas central to the Ultimate Self opens so much more of Homestuck up to you! I swear when I call myself a revisionist reader it’s not just to make myself seem clever. in a work that’s this fucking big, it is essential to be revisionist.

you seem like you are only mad because you are angry

a little thought, I’m certain it’s been articulated by someone smarter than me already, but I suppose the confusion regarding the denizens and whether you’re supposed to kill them or negotiate with them is a macrocosmic version of the conflict the kids have with their parents?

okay, this was meant to be a single thought before i went to bed, but since i’m thinking about the denizens as mirrors of the parents, and the fact that the word strife was deliberately chosen to evoke both violence and misunderstanding, it occurs to me that maybe the trolls ignorantly killing their denizens somehow connects to their lusii necessarily passing away (vs. the kids’ parents being able to come back in a new form)…

and strife being called ‘grief’ in the alternian language is obviously a play on 'griefing’ as a synonym for trolling and to 'give someone grief’, but maybe it also hints in a way at the 'grief’ associated with the loss of a parent?

I wonder if the concept of threshecutioners (and by extension cavalreapers?) as grain-flayer/soldier hybrids could also act as a reference to the fact that grist, literally speaking, is grain separated from its husk? Like Karkat is being trained to thresh his enemies into grist the same way Alternian society teaches server skills through architecture…

lime-bloods:

I wonder if the concept of threshecutioners (and by extension cavalreapers?) as grain-flayer/soldier hybrids could also act as a reference to the fact that grist, literally speaking, is grain separated from its husk? Like Karkat is being trained to thresh his enemies into grist the same way Alternian society teaches server skills through architecture…

#implying I suppose that Alternians systematically use the remains of their enemies as crafting materials?#which would kind of explain everything about their technology… right down to the frequent use of ‘husks’#works doubly for cavalreapers who are presumably involved in monster creation if we take fiduspawn at face value…

there’s something about the synonymity between blood/genetic material and grist in this, too, but it’s an incomplete thought

GRIEF

Certainly if humans are a race in constant strife with their parents - brought to physical mock-combat by misunderstandings about things as simple as wizards and harlequins - then it follows that trolls are a species defined by their grief. Being systematically separated from their genetic forebears and forced into the custodianship of hostile monsters by a ruler who resents the very idea that a child might know their parents, scattered into the stars as far away from their biological mother as possible by an absentee queen under the thumb of the evil stepfather Lord English, defines who they are as a people.

So where the humans’ conflicts with their denizens represent the strife between themselves and their guardians, the relationship between the trolls and their denizens can represent only that same grief. It’s why Karkat believes that HUGE UGLY MONSTERS ARE FOR KILLING, PERIOD, and Vriska thought it was for the best that they all be rid of them as fast as possible. The trolls’ denizens are cursed to die for the same reason the lusii are; the denizen is a manifestation of the parent, and to a troll, the parent is dead.

new mspawiki article on the immortality clock. always thought it was weird when people said aranea’s lucky 8r8k!!!!!!!! was somehow her “manipulating” the clock. seems to me like a really flippant misunderstand of what “luck” is

replayed the first chapter of deltarune. something i must have missed the first time around was all the references to “ACTing” as a verb, alluding to the make-pretendness of everything that goes on in the world of darkness…

it always catches me off guard that ralsei’s backstory for the world of darkness starts off with “a long time ago there was a legend”… it’s very peculiar language, and not the way stories are usually told. “a long time ago” is when events happen that become legends, not the birthplace of legends themselves… legends are the storystuff that forms between the past and the present… but by basing the entire history of the world of darkness on a legend, ralsei again emphasises that the world of darkness is itself a legend. “events” do not take place there; only stories do.

lime-bloods:

replayed the first chapter of deltarune. something i must have missed the first time around was all the references to “ACTing” as a verb, alluding to the make-pretendness of everything that goes on in the world of darkness…

presumably this has something to do with the game’s self proclaimed theme that your choices don’t matter; it doesn’t matter whether you defeat an enemy through violence or through ACTing, because when you “act” you’re only “pretending” to make a difference. but supposedly this implies that violence is the only “true” choice? (something about violence being an expression of the “flesh” versus the world of ideas and stories and make-believe)

with this in mind, deltarune has a recurring bit about how humans have blood and monsters don’t; this was a thing in undertale of course, with monsters being made of magically animated dust rather than organic tissue, but i don’t recall the topic of blood, specifically, being brought up nearly as much, if at all… meanwhile kris is said to have pulled pranks in the past where they pretend ketchup is their blood, and a monster in the epilogue asks if it “hurts to be made of blood”… and when kris, with appropriately bloody imagery, tears the soul, presumably representing the Player’s influence? from their body in the final scene, violent tendencies seem to immediately emerge within their “true” self… again implying that the “truth” is violence, and that “acting” or “pretending” only serves to suppress this violent truth?

darkners also seem to know what blood is, though given that they inhabit a world of legends it would make sense for them to know about blood without necessarily having it themselves… but the moment where lancer produces the spade-marked bucket and says it’s for filling with blood definitely set off alarm bells in my head

saw evangelion 3.0+1.0.

I definitely picked up on the fact that the Anti-Universe represents the border between fiction and reality - and even that the Godlike “people who were not human” who sent the angels and the spears to Earth may have been in fact the authors of Evangelion itself. But in my post-win evageeks trawl I found an interesting interpretation that certainly deserves acknowledgement on this blog:

Blockio: […] the events in the negative universe are from an elevated state of consciousness, that they have transcended their own reality and are looking from the top down into different ones (in a similar fashion to how EoE Instrumentality transcends reality and looks into different ones). On a meta/multiverse level, the different versions of Eva are connected, but the timelines are seperate.

I’m personally inclined to disagree that the films are on a totally separate timeline from the anime, since to me the Impact events are more about resetting physical evolution and growth (being instigated by fruits of Life and Knowledge) than literally reversing time itself, but there is certainly some merit to viewing the Anti-Universe sequence as the characters literally looking upon the Evangelion franchise as ascended characters.

lime-bloods:

I definitely picked up on the fact that the Anti-Universe represents the border between fiction and reality - and even that the Godlike “people who were not human” who sent the angels and the spears to Earth may have been in fact the authors of Evangelion itself. But in my post-win evageeks trawl I found an interesting interpretation that certainly deserves acknowledgement on this blog:

Blockio: […] the events in the negative universe are from an elevated state of consciousness, that they have transcended their own reality and are looking from the top down into different ones (in a similar fashion to how EoE Instrumentality transcends reality and looks into different ones). On a meta/multiverse level, the different versions of Eva are connected, but the timelines are seperate.

I’m personally inclined to disagree that the films are on a totally separate timeline from the anime, since to me the Impact events are more about resetting physical evolution and growth (being instigated by fruits of Life and Knowledge) than literally reversing time itself, but there is certainly some merit to viewing the Anti-Universe sequence as the characters literally looking upon the Evangelion franchise as ascended characters.

Blockio also asserts that since “Yui and Gendo left the Earth for good in 01, it doesn’t make sense for them to be back on it” given the revelation about the Book of Life and the permanence of souls… but since souls come from the Doors of Guf, which is the portal into the Anti-Universe in the first place, would souls not be exempt from this kind of worldly logic? It seems more like the soul is the Platonic ideal version of a person, being projected down through the Doors of Guf into the Evangelion universe as however many incarnations of that person throughout history.

Another really good observation I’m plucking from evageeks is that angel cores act as gateways to the Anti-Universe; that plug depth can be dangerous because it puts the pilot at risk of disappearing into the Anti-Universe completely, and Yui’s disappearance during the early days of Eva development was an example of this exact phenomenon, explaining Gendo’s comments in 3+1 that he travelled to the A-U in search of her. And it follows, then, as this poster points out, that Shinji’s strange absence between 2.0 and 3.0 would be another disappearance into the Anti-Universe.

It’s particularly interesting that Wille operatives in 3.0 consistently refer to Shinji as a copy of the original generated within Unit-01, rather than the same Shinji retrieved from 14 years of stasis. Even inorganic objects, like his father’s tape player, have been “restored”, rather than just recovered. Which makes sense; Instrumentality is the process of breaking everything down and building it back up again, and the Anti-Universe seems to be the stage on which Instrumentality takes place.

But it also seems worthy of note that this process of dissolving into LCL then being born again from LCL as a perfect copy at the exact same age is exactly the process the Ayanami and Shikinami series of clones go through. Which has to cause one to wonder; is the so-called “Curse of the Eva” that causes pilots to stay forever children actually just a symptom of being constantly dissolved and reformed at the age of 14 every time they enter and exit the core of their Eva?

And if the Anti-Universe doubles as the gateway to a higher plane of “reality” above the plane of “fiction”, then could it be that every time the souls of the pilots are “projected” back down into their flesh bodies at the age of 14, it’s because their “true” “real” selves are 14 years old? Or perhaps more likely, since this physical immaturity seems to represent mental immaturity that must be overcome, the “Curse” is such that so long as the pilots continue to be reincarnated over and over in the world of flesh, they will never grow; and the only way for them to finally move past 14 years of age is to emerge into the “real” world, a world without Evangelion, just as they all do at the very end?

immediate overarching thoughts on Deltarune chapter 2, spoilers obviously:

It seemed really clear to me by the time I approached the end that this Knight character was just Asriel; the unfinished game on Asriel’s computer at the beginning obviously implies that Undertale itself is Asriel’s creation (which follows on from the whole of Undertale just being a “game” Flowey was playing with us), so it would make sense that the game worlds that make up Deltarune would also be Asriel’s creation. But the final scene basically debunks all that… it’s possible that Kris and Asriel are both going around opening fountains, and Kris did just have the mechanics of the fountains explained to them earlier that day… but it seems less likely.

Regardless it does still seem to me like the dark worlds represent Undertale the game. The scene following Queen’s defeat where the kids express how much they prefer the escapist adventure where nobody can tell them what to do to real life struck me as a reflection of the personal relationship people formed with their Undertale save files… the fact that the whole game is sort of an expanded version of Undertale’s epilogue, where all the characters you collected over the course of the game get to hang out in a peaceful utopia-slash-zoo you’ve built for them, only reinforces this hunch.

it seems like Ralsei isn’t a Darkner after all, which was probably hinted at with the fact that he’s only called a Prince from the Dark… but it sort of throws the prophecy about the three heroes off-balance if it’s actually about a human and two monsters, rather than a representative of all three races…

do monsters still have the ability to do magic in deltarune…? obviously they can do magic in the dark worlds, but noelle laments not actually having healing magic once she’s left, and it’s just occurred to me that kris’ house doesn’t have any of the “toriel doesn’t need a stove because she uses fire magic” flavour text that kept showing up in undertale

I have to admit my knowledge of the secret NPCs in Undertale isn’t exactly up to snuff, but is it totally out of the question that the Suzy mentioned by the NPC in Waterfall has some connection to Deltarune’s Susie? I found it really strange that during the chapter 2 epilogue segment you can read all of the gravestones except the grave for the Shyren-related monster (maybe the amalgamate Lemon Bread?), which prompts Susie to try to hurry you out of the cemetery, preventing you from reading it at all… implying she has some kind of Waterfall family history?

now that we know Kris is responsible for the creation of (some of) the dark fountains, the fact that the save file in Ralsei’s kingdom is under the name “KRIS” before you save over it tells us not only that we have taken over Kris’ life, but also possibly that Kris has actually been down there before…?

if Kris has attended that school since youth, it certainly makes sense that they’d have known about it beforehand… if darkness and light both need to be in balance to stop chaos from taking over, then there must be a capital F Fountain that existed before all the others, and that seems to be the supply closet fountain. so it must have been there for a long time.

in that same line of thinking, if the fountain is so ancient and/or integral to reality, the people who founded the school around it must have been aware it existed. and if we can assume Toriel is founding faculty at the school, she too must be aware.

which makes me wonder if Ralsei and Kris underwent some kind of fairy changeling baby swap early on in their lives? the circumstances are certainly lined up for Toriel, a kindergarten teacher, to have adopted a baby from a mysterious room in the school she teaches at…

I wonder if the year 1997 is important at all? the virus monsters repeating “happy new year 1997” seems like a joke about outdated content on the internet on its own, but Spamton also has a line about muttering the number 1997… with Undertale specifically taking place sometime in 20XX, it’s fully plausible to place it loosely on a timeline…

lime-bloods:

I have to admit my knowledge of the secret NPCs in Undertale isn’t exactly up to snuff, but is it totally out of the question that the Suzy mentioned by the NPC in Waterfall has some connection to Deltarune’s Susie? I found it really strange that during the chapter 2 epilogue segment you can read all of the gravestones except the grave for the Shyren-related monster (maybe the amalgamate Lemon Bread?), which prompts Susie to try to hurry you out of the cemetery, preventing you from reading it at all… implying she has some kind of Waterfall family history?

it didn’t occur to me the first time I played through chapter 2, but it seems like Dess is Noelle’s older sister… which makes both Kris and Noelle members of the town’s second generation of kids.

the same is also true of Catti, whose older sister is Catty… two names that presumably sound exactly the same, just spelled differently.

so if Susie had an older sibling too, Suzy might be a logical name for them…?

lime-bloods:

immediate overarching thoughts on Deltarune chapter 2, spoilers obviously:

It seemed really clear to me by the time I approached the end that this Knight character was just Asriel; the unfinished game on Asriel’s computer at the beginning obviously implies that Undertale itself is Asriel’s creation (which follows on from the whole of Undertale just being a “game” Flowey was playing with us), so it would make sense that the game worlds that make up Deltarune would also be Asriel’s creation. But the final scene basically debunks all that… it’s possible that Kris and Asriel are both going around opening fountains, and Kris did just have the mechanics of the fountains explained to them earlier that day… but it seems less likely.

Regardless it does still seem to me like the dark worlds represent Undertale the game. The scene following Queen’s defeat where the kids express how much they prefer the escapist adventure where nobody can tell them what to do to real life struck me as a reflection of the personal relationship people formed with their Undertale save files… the fact that the whole game is sort of an expanded version of Undertale’s epilogue, where all the characters you collected over the course of the game get to hang out in a peaceful utopia-slash-zoo you’ve built for them, only reinforces this hunch.

doing my second playthrough (trying to go the evil route and not doing a very good job of it). some more thoughts

“Killing” a darkner is actually “losing” them, and Ralsei talks about how losing your bonds with people can actually sometimes make you stronger… considering that darkners are actually the personifications of objects (particularly objects with personal value; toys that kids used to play with, devices Noelle uses to access the internet), losing your bonds would seem to represent letting go of objects you’ve formed attachments to…

so the whole recruitment mechanic in Deltarune is a form of escapism through hoarding; less about “spare” or “kill” and more about choosing whether to surround yourself with pretend and fantasy, or to let go of your sentimental attachments and live in the “real world”.

Undertale itself seems to be one of these objects we are being asked to consider leaving behind; again, Ralsei’s castle town acts as a reflection of Undertale’s end state, and examines our desire to save every character possible and keep them all in one place for all eternity. the exact quote has been lost to me, but I remember a comment Toby Fox once made about how surprised he was at the personal connections people formed with his game… specifically he cited that some players were saving their pacifist files to hard drives, and putting them somewhere for safekeeping. i think the castle town full of old toys is that hard drive, and the central question to Deltarune is whether or not that kind of personal attachment to a toy is healthy.

a common consensus on chapter 2’s evil route seems to be that (spoilers) getting noelle to kill your enemies for you is a way of getting around the “your choices don’t matter” rule… but at risk of sounding like a pedant, isn’t the choice to manipulate someone else… still a choice you’re making? and perhaps more importantly, “your choices don’t matter… but other people’s choices do matter” would be a bizarre moral position for a game to take.

i think it may be more helpful to view Deltarune in terms of what is “real” and what is just “acting”. choosing to kill a chess piece doesn’t “matter” because a chess piece is an object. the very nature of the darkners is as NPCs; their “purpose” is to assist lightners and nothing more. the dark fountains cause these objects to take on more meaningful forms, because some objects can have profound meaning to the people they belong to; but at the end of the day, destroying an object is just destroying an object.

but Noelle isn’t an object; she’s not from the world of fiction and “acting”, she’s from the “real world”. causing mental anguish to Noelle has real consequences in Kris’ day to day life, at school, around town… and it seems to have been established early on that “your choices don’t matter” doesn’t apply in the world of light. the real world has ongoing arcs that you play a part in; you can choose whether or not to help Alphys and Undyne connect with each other, and whether or not you decide to become friends with Onionsan in chapter 1 carries over to chapter 2.

perhaps the reason chapter 1 doesn’t have an equivalent evil route is because those toys belong to Kris - it wouldn’t be out of the question for Toriel to have raised her young child in the school at which she is employed - or are long abandoned and don’t really belong to anybody. but the cyber world is Noelle’s world. being connected to technology and the internet is important to her, personally. while destroying objects may be generally a morally neutral act, destroying something that has sentimental value to another person can have a real impact on that person.

it may be relevant that Kris’ acts of violence aren’t actually crimes against the person, but rather property damage; stealing food, slashing tires, transforming the landscape by literally stabbing the ground…

Something I missed the first time around; in Ralsei’s story about the roaring, among the titans who “take form from the FOUNTAINS”, we see one “main” titan, decorated with the same eye symbols found in Ralsei’s dark world - i.e, the “main” dark world - flanked by two titans of lesser stature, presumably spawned from the Knight’s fountains.

when the Queen talks about the “roaring knight,” the homophony with “roaring night” struck me as intentional for some reason… Seam’s post-chapter 2 warning that we don’t want to be caught out at nighttime seems to reinforce this hunch.

“the Knight” as synonymous with “the night” makes sense given their role as bringer of darkness, and the dark worlds being essentially dreams… Kris’ transformation into the Knight after dark when they should be sleeping also fits.

it’s hard to interpret Spamton as anything but a kind of dark authorial stand-in, ala Lord English… but that “ala Lord English” is carrying a lot of weight on its shoulders. is the “it’s just like Homestuck” explanation the cheap & easy way out? (malo’s “undertale as homestuck midrash” comment has got itself stuck lengthways in the folds of my brain, especially after my musings about Homestuck being the first one to do “combat-as-social-conflict” the other week)

it did come to my attention during recent Jevil attempts that the “secret boss locked away in the basement” thing could be a reference to the popular story about Toby developing Undertale in a basement…

I’m obviously biased by having just experienced the two in close succession, but as long as I’m here comparing Deltarune to other stuff, it’s interesting that it essentially occupies the same literary niche as Rebuild of Evangelion; it’s not a “true sequel” to Undertale in terms of following on from the events of Undertale, but it’s a story built using Undertale’s established visual language. Toby describes it as “a game you can play after you complete UNDERTALE, if you want to”, in the same way the Rebuild of Evangelion ultimately won’t make any sense to you unless you’ve seen Neon Genesis Evangelion first…

lime-bloods:

Another really good observation I’m plucking from evageeks is that angel cores act as gateways to the Anti-Universe; that plug depth can be dangerous because it puts the pilot at risk of disappearing into the Anti-Universe completely, and Yui’s disappearance during the early days of Eva development was an example of this exact phenomenon, explaining Gendo’s comments in 3+1 that he travelled to the A-U in search of her. And it follows, then, as this poster points out, that Shinji’s strange absence between 2.0 and 3.0 would be another disappearance into the Anti-Universe.

It’s particularly interesting that Wille operatives in 3.0 consistently refer to Shinji as a copy of the original generated within Unit-01, rather than the same Shinji retrieved from 14 years of stasis. Even inorganic objects, like his father’s tape player, have been “restored”, rather than just recovered. Which makes sense; Instrumentality is the process of breaking everything down and building it back up again, and the Anti-Universe seems to be the stage on which Instrumentality takes place.

But it also seems worthy of note that this process of dissolving into LCL then being born again from LCL as a perfect copy at the exact same age is exactly the process the Ayanami and Shikinami series of clones go through. Which has to cause one to wonder; is the so-called “Curse of the Eva” that causes pilots to stay forever children actually just a symptom of being constantly dissolved and reformed at the age of 14 every time they enter and exit the core of their Eva?

And if the Anti-Universe doubles as the gateway to a higher plane of “reality” above the plane of “fiction”, then could it be that every time the souls of the pilots are “projected” back down into their flesh bodies at the age of 14, it’s because their “true” “real” selves are 14 years old? Or perhaps more likely, since this physical immaturity seems to represent mental immaturity that must be overcome, the “Curse” is such that so long as the pilots continue to be reincarnated over and over in the world of flesh, they will never grow; and the only way for them to finally move past 14 years of age is to emerge into the “real” world, a world without Evangelion, just as they all do at the very end?

thinking back on this as I do some reading. it feels pertinent to point out that the “Guf” referred to by the “Doors of Guf” that lead into the Anti-Universe is, in Kabbalistic tradition, the chamber wherein unborn souls reside; in essence, it’s a womb, and indeed the “Doors to Guf” in the original Neon Genesis Evangelion appear as vaginas:

and though the New Theatrical Version seems to have for the most part dispensed with the idea that the Eva represents the pilot’s mother, it is still explicitly true that Unit-01 is Shinji’s mother Yui. it makes perfect sense for Unit-01’s entry plug to take Shinji to the very same cosmic womb that the Doors of Guf lead toward, and for him to be literally re-born every time he emerges again.

though it may have been implicit the first time around, I think it bears emphasis that the “Curse of Eva” is in fact a microcosmic version of the problem faced by the whole Evangelion universe; “so long as you continue to pilot the Eva you will continue to be born again and again into the same fourteen year old body” is merely a synonym for “so long as Eva exists everyone in the world will continue to be born again and again into the same sequence of events”.

this could be even more literally true than at first glance, too… since the cosmic mother of all reality is an Eva herself, Evangelion Imaginary, the universe of Evangelion could in fact be in the process being born again and again from the womb of an Eva? it’s certainly relevant that 14 years is consistently the length of time between each Impact that causes the rebirth of humanity; the whole world, just like the pilots, is being reborn at 14 years of age every time, ad infinitum…

forgive me for knocking another hole in the wall to see evageeks through; but if the world of Evangelion is a macrocosmos of the individual pilots, then it follows that the individual pilots are microcosmoses of the world of Evangelion, and the metatextuality of Asuka being a clone takes on a particular new meaning. Shikinami being directed very emphatically as a different character to Soryu reflects the very worlds they live in; Rebuild of Evangelion is Evangelion in the same way Asuka is Asuka is Asuka, and though they have differences on the small scale, they make up constituent parts of a continuum; literally parts of a “series”.

another missed detail: King’s advice to Lancer is to “not get too attached” to the Lightners, and when Lancer fails, King tells him that he has been “poisoned by their sentimentality”, alluding to Deltarune’s use of pacifism to represent sentimental attachment.