way back when Homestuck was just beginning its long journey toward the end and I was still a kid, probably my first ever real theory was that in the climax we’d see all of the Jack Noirs somehow fuse together to make Lord English - a common feeling back then was that there was no way the mobster hulk currently tearing up the Furthest Ring could really be the “real” Lord English and the ultimate big bad of Homestuck; “x is lord English” was the bread and butter of Homestuck theories at that time. it’s an opinion I no longer share, but I suppose my idea that English might actually be a conglomerate of several constituent already-established characters turned out to not be that far from the truth?
in any case, this obviously turned out not to be true; but looking retrospectively through the lens of persona alchemy, all of the Jack Noirs representing a little “piece” of Lord English makes perfect sense. Bec Noir is, of course the Green Sun-fueled angel of destruction; Spades Slick is the mob boss in control of the Felt; and Jack English is that last piece of the puzzle, the ever-mysterious force of immortality.
and Jack is of course the proto-English, the meta-villain regarded as king of all angels and the greatest threat to reality before English eventually rears his skull; English contains about as much “Jack-ness” as it is possible to have. I wonder if this sets a pattern for the rest of Homestuck’s macrocosmos though; in the same way Jack Noir is the Lord English of the B1 session, Skaia is the Green Sun of the B1 session, so does every instance of Skaia represent a little “piece” of the Green Sun? Skaia as the seat of creation, the Green Sun as the smouldering wreckage of multiple creations…
Caliborn’s own Jack Noir is also the proxy he uses to enact his will in the session; when Jack stabs Calliope, that doubles as Caliborn overcoming his sister in their own mind, making Jack a very literal manifestation of something within Caliborn…
(presumably this also makes the Black Queen a proxy of Calliope? Jack and the Queen’s relationship is supposed to be emblematic of caliginous romance, which we of course find out is just the way cherubs interact with each other; and when Caliborn takes over the Black Queen’s planet and later paints it in Calliope’s blood, that seems like a very clear proxy for Caliborn once again dominating Calliope)
essentially it could be said that rather than combining like Voltron to make a fully-formed Lord English, Jack Noir emerged from English’s subconscious and spread throughout reality like seeds… and narrative seeds at that, Jack’s rise to power in each session “seeding” the idea that a character like Lord English could appear at some point
I wonder then if when Scratch describes the cue balls as his “seeds”, this is the kind of thing he means? I suppose characters ensuring their own creation is basically a freebie in Homestuck, but the cue ball in particular does kind of evoke a seed being planted in the story, appearing seemingly throwaway in one panel and then eventually growing into something more essential than anyone could have imagined. again, kind of a given for a detail in Homestuck, but interesting to think about nonetheless
the cue ball is a piece of Caliborn’s magic clock (presumably the clock that dictates all of mortality, the very law of time itself), broken from a branch/pendulum like the picking of a fruit, and offered up by a devilish serpent no less, but it’s also a seed… so when a seed gets broken off the magic clock and sent back in time to be planted earlier in the narrative, I suppose that implies that when that seed grows into Scratch/English, that means Scratch/English are in essence a new magic clock, a new law of time established when Caliborn smashed the first one?
it’s interesting that Caliborn would steal authority over reality from Yaldabaoth, a deity who is supposed to have already taken the authority from a long line of Gods before him; but I suppose the never-ending cyclical nature of creation is what Homestuck is about after all…
returned to the roots of my url the other day and discussed at length with @mmmmalo some of the myths and potential significance of the lime bloods…
while I’m still not convinced by the conventional arguments for lime karkat theory, the worldbuilding part of my brain in particular has always been caught by this idea that the lime bloods sit in a sort of middle ground between lowbloods and higher bloods that makes them the most “like humans”. andrew’s commentary on the lifespans of the castes in particular seems to point at the sweet spot between gold and olive having the lifespan closest to that of a human:
with rust bloods expected to survive “a dozen or two sweeps”, this puts a hypothetical caste between gold and olive firmly in the 26-52-to-100 year range. so if we were to say that Karkat’s biology did align with a troll in that blood colour range, it wouldn’t be too out there to suggest that in addition to being one of the more “human-like” trolls, his biology would also be the most similar to that of a human’s.
this is all old speculation, though… what I started to consider while we pondered the significance of Calliope’s exposition was that if the lime bloods as a caste might be intended as a stand-in for humanity as a race? the history of b2 Earth seems to map closely to that of Alternia to the point where each of them can be used to enlighten the reader on aspects of the other; ICP’s rise to power for example sheds light on the Condesce’s habit of delegating responsibility to subordinates first touched upon in Scratch’s exposition. so when Calliope mentions the lime caste being hunted to extinction just around a hundred pages after Dirk tells us that Meenah drove the human race into the ground, it seems reasonable to assume the things she says about the plight of the lime bloods should also be taken as indicative of events on Earth - it’s her own home planet after all.
Calliope’s speculation that “their extermination had to do with the extremely powerfUl abilities they tended to have, and the threat to aUthority they represented” seems easy enough to apply to humanity; humans after all are immune to troll mind control, and Dirk and Roxy had the sort of powers that would threaten and ultimately overthrow their alien tyrant. but knowing that Roxy was actually essential to the Condesce’s plan to resurrect her race, it seems that the Condesce never actually intended to fully extinguish humanity. so if we apply this backwards, perhaps it suggests that the Condesce might have left some lime bloods alive for her own purposes?
schools of thought obviously diverge here… if we take it at face value that the lime blood mystery is something for Hiveswap to explain then that’s where the trail ends. if we were to presume, though, that Karkat fit into this lime category, I suppose it would indicate that Karkat’s survival was thanks to deliberate support from the system behind the scenes… the Signless and Dirk and Roxy’s ancestors certainly share similar roles as revolutionaries who tried to set the scene for their descendants to take after them, and I’ve drawn the symbolic bow between the two groups before. and if Meenah foresaw Kanaya’s arrival and participation in the grand plan, it’s not too far-fetched to think Karkat’s involvement was anticipated too? it would also add a layer to be read into the working relationship between Karkat and the pre-scratch Meenah… and also bring us back to the curiosity malo brought to my attention that started the conversation:
Kanaya’s jade caste are never meant to leave the planet, ostensibly to live out their lives taking care of the mother grub, but plausibly also because the Condesce had particular plan in mind for Kanaya… by this same token, when Karkat spills the beans that only extraneous circumstances would ever allow him to ascend to the ranks of threshecutioner:
it could be read as implying these are not only the only circumstances by which Karkat could ever ascend to an adult Alternian warrior, but also those intended for him to take?
definitely it’s nice to have a new angle through which to view the Meenah/Karkat dynamic, which otherwise seemed to clash violently with Homestuck’s overarching philosophy that the Condesce is an irredeemable monster and that every version of a person should be treated as in fact the same person
Cronus’ bit about having been marked by an attempted spell from Lord English, “sealing the magician’s spirit away in a series of unassuming vessels”, scans differently in a retrospect tinted by persona alchemy; the line references English’s various seeds and iterations of Lil Cal, of course, but the analogy to Voldemort’s horcruxes tracks a little more literally if we think of English scattering to the wind as his constituent parts, Gamzee and Equius and Caliborn and Dirk (and to a lesser extent every single one of his children, the people of Alternia)
but the Harry Potter analogy doesn’t map completely… I’ve wondered before about whether all of the highbloods might represent a little bit of English’s influence, but neither Cronus nor Eridan is actually English in the way Equius and Gamzee are. actually, the way the whole story is phrased makes it seem like the spell in question may have been intended to pass English’s spirit into Cronus and failed?
…this magician once somehow from afar tried to strike [Cronus] down at a young age, so he would never have to face him. 8ut the evil spell was deflected, sealing the magician’s spirit away […] until he could find some other cunning way to enter our universe.
the ensuing remark about Cronus’ destiny passing on to the next Hero of Hope would certainly be consistent with any ideas that Caliborn intended to “jack” Jake English’s “swagger”, so to speak; and maybe, failing that, it would go some way to explaining why his plan would then pass on to Jake English’s next eligible Heir?
I’ve wondered privately about the way Jake’s powers of manifesting thoughts as reality seem to counter Gamzee’s ability to manifest things as thoughts; in essence, Rage puts things in people’s brains, Hope takes them out?
indulging in the idea that a Hero of Rage essentially “does persona alchemy”, this would suggest Hope is “undoing persona alchemy”. which would explain why English seems so threatened by the whole Hope line; as an alchemical amalgam himself, someone with the ability to un-alchemise things could potentially be his ultimate undoing (after all the other things that are his ultimate undoing, like cue ball weapons, and glitches in Paradox Space). if Cronus’ powers were his downfall in the past, then presumably he’s at risk of the same thing happening to him again.
I wonder if Cronus’ “dual scars” might even be the scars left behind by an attempt to remove his eyeballs, ala Caliborn’s Jake-or-possibly-John-sona? His fixation on “GLO8ES” and the number 8 certainly raises some suspicions…
fixating on Caliborn’s self insertion guy again. obviously a “full body union” with the clockwork majyyks is the act of physically replacing your eyes with cueballs, as opposed to just letting the energy flow into you.. but the phrasing is so hermetic!
I suppose there’s some cultural bias at play; in a cherub’s natural lifespan, the “traits of supreme invincibility” are attained after full body union with the sibling is achieved, so it’s natural for caliborn to associate the achievement of immortality with this kind of union… but in black hole theory I asserted that when calliope becomes a black hole/portal into the new universe, she’s essentially taking on the same role as the ~ATH server, which leads to the immortality clock, located in the center of Caliborn’s planet. so I guess it’s not that crazy to suggest that the connection between the skeletal figure in the black robe and the timepiece that shows when all living creatures will die is more than superficial, and that when Caliborn destroys the clock and absorbs its power, that is in fact yet another example of Caliborn dominating his sister in effigy? hmm.
if Calliope is immortality and replacing your eyeballs with pool balls is “fullbodied union” with immortality, then the pool balls are little bits of Calliope. (are they her eyeballs? hence the adult Calliope’s black eye sockets?) BUT
1. the pool balls are also pieces of the Skaia that collapsed into a black hole; is Calliope Skaia? (probably not too far-fetched) AND/OR, is Calliope every black hole? (what implications does it have that the entrance to Caliborn’s Dark Carnival is his own sister’s gaping maw? is this the fratriphagy that represents the alternate Calliope’s victorious predomination?)
something something something about Cronus swallowing all the gods and then spewing them back up again?
Looking at Dualscar’s mode of dress, with its arrangement of wide, spiked shoulder plates against a convergence of segmented torso plates, he actually seems to resemble an imperial drone? (Or the analogous dragon head, if we read the black section at his midriff as a mouth) Which might account for some of the swallowing and spewing…
If Eridan were by extension also a drone analogy (an alternate explanation for his aggressive pursuit of buckets), it might also account for how his imbibing the severed head (the Faygo) leads to Feferi completing a revival – Eridan delivers blood to Feferi, so she’s the Mothergrub in the arrangement. Or at least he’s “supposed to” ape the role… Eridan’s refusal to do a spit-take (with the Faygo) would align with his genocide-derived qualms about fulfilling blood delivery, or perhaps jealousy-feuled reservations about reviving Sollux (which could overlap, since Sollux becomes baby here). Or if seahorse dad is any indication, the urge for retention could have a gendered component, insofar as it allows one to be pregnant instead of the impregnator…
Anyway, in light of the drone connection, I kind of wonder if the “Dualscar” gesture at cutting your globes out refers to a sort of eunuch status, in addition to the more straightforward gesture at blindness.
Dualscar’s mantle bearing a resemblance to a drone’s silhouette is quite an ancient observation, so I enjoy seeing it rear its head again here in this context. I can definitely see a tidy parallel between a drone born from an unfertilised egg (essentially emasculated before it’s even hatched?) forced to act as a conduit for the genetic material of others its whole life, and a seahorse-titan made to cut his own balls out and play host plush to English (which plays right into my mastication the other day about Caliborn replacing his eye/balls also seeming a little bit mpreggy; but of course all host plushing is mpreg, so why wouldn’t the seahorse god be the first surrogate you consider?)
in my scan over Cronus’ dialogue this line where he talks about “messing vwith dual sawvtooth vwavweforms […] hitting on my signature sound. #if not my signature shape at the vwery least” jumped out; obviously he says this because Aquarius is a double sawtooth wave, but in the context of a part of the comic where “Sawtooth” has already been well established as the name of a character and looking at it with the view that Dualscar is the head of a dragon, can we read that as Cronus saying “my signature shape will be that of a robot with a dragon’s mouth”?
drones as victims of the ultimate cuck, barred from reproduction before their very conception; eridan choosing to reject this destiny and instead being cucked by the very embodiment of inevitability instead
The jagged profile and segmented form of this building on LOCAS give the appearance of Equius climbing into the midsection of a imperial drone in order to reach his gate. The belly of the drone becomes akin to the bucket it carries: it’s yonic imagery, like Tavros flying into a huge red X when Vriska was hating/hitting on him (x) (Though I’m not as sure about the latter half of that link as I used to be)
More interesting to me than the building’s role in hammering in the SBURB IS ABOUT REPRODUCTION theming is its re-use as Darkleer’s hideaway… or its reappearance in Roxy’s dreams for that matter.
The first time I picked up on sex/death intermingling in Homestuck was when it became apparent that the denizen Vriska wanted Tavros to fight was actually herself (linked above), and that her campaign of harassment was at least in part intended to make Tavros angry enough to kill her – which is basically synonymous with her attempts to bang him. “Too l8 to kill me, too l8 to kiss me,” says Vriska, lamenting Tavros’s failure to use his lance as she lay in her bed.
Curious to me now is that 1. the exposition on troll romance immediately follows Tavros’s visit to Vriska’s house and 2. Hussie’s commentary makes a weird comment wondering how on earth the kids are supposed to fill those buckets anyway. Hussie jokes (?) about the answer being vomit, and fanon has largely settled upon some sort of mutual masturbation for bucket filling purposes. But given the ambiguity of “genetic material”, the sheer amount of blood spilled over Vriska’s quest bed, I wonder if the buckets literally just get filled with. Blood. Which would further complicate the problem of distinguishing romantic and platonic hatred.
CCG: I CAN’T STAND TO LOOK AT YOUR DUMB PURPLE WORDS ANYMORE. CCG: NEXT TIME I SEE THAT SHITTY COLOR YOU BETTER BELIEVE IT’LL BE COMING OUT OF YOUR BODY. CCG: AND NO, FOR THE LOVE OF FUCK, THAT WAS NOT INNUENDO.
Equius’s jam session (teehee) with Dave is another good example. This first line is a reference to dominant genes in the slurry, transposed onto motifs of blood and rapping:
TG: on earth class is sorted out by who can drop the most delirious flow
CT: D –> I see CT: D –> So, in other words, a sort of b100d letting ritual CT: D –> To assess whose pulse is steadiest and thus whose flow is the most STRONG
But eventually Equius returns to sex:
CT: D –> Yes CT: D –> Those are the sorts of assertive statements which could get me CT: D –> Flowing
Tbh I’m not sure if the above really implies that trolls literally spill blood for reproductive purposes or if the interplay of fluids from sex and aggression is purely symbolic… but I think there’s more to be said of the association, at least. Equius pouring his own blood into a tin can to reproduce Aradia becomes more overtly sexual either way. As well as Karkat’s MY HATE IS THE LIFEBLOOD THAT COURSE THROUGH THE VEINS OF YOUR UNIVERSE, which bookends his caliginous entreaty to John… (We’ve already discussed how the instillation of life is sexualized in Homestuck, but this adds a more literal dimension to things)
My thought splits in several directions here.
1. I think the drone’s head (and His Honorable Tyranny, to whom they also bear resemblance) have a head shape similar to that of Homestuck’s preferred bearded dragons – though I’m not committed to the notion, not yet at least. The real driving force for a sense of parallel would be that
2. Given that sex is linked to death, the drone’s dual buckets bear a certain resemblance to the scales of justice associated with Terezi. Like Judgement Day has arrived, but instead of weighing your heart against a feather, the heart’s contents are being measured… (I once saw a post alleging that the posture of the drone invokes the skull of the Doom aspect – given that the Doom of Doomsday means judgement, that would supplement this nicely)
3. Aradia’s comments about Time players needing to die a thousand deaths to satisfy the master they serve (Lord English) suddenly (tentatively) sounds a lot the blood demanded by the imperial drones? Which if the other points stand, would further the parallels drawn between Lord English and dragons
4. Oh god I just realized something fucking amazing
If His Honorable Tyranny is effectively a dragon, the left shot not only tells us that Mindfang defeated him, but that she decapitated him? The foregrounded bloody cane acts as substitute for the severed head of the “dragon”. That’s so cool.
But then going to the drone-torso house makes it seem as though she’s returning the unencumbered head to a fresh body? Which is a motif we also see with eg Jane and Dirk, when decapitated domes are promptly impaled on spikes…
as Mindfang and Spades’ stories run in parallel to each other, Aranea’s delivery of a cane to Horuss seems to prefigure Slick’s delivery of English’s cane to the new session; Darkleer’s lair is a Void to be filled just as the Alpha session is a Void one awaiting surrogate material.
(not getting any updates on where the cane ends up after Slick gets blown to bits, we can only assume that it fell into the black hole and ended up on Caliborn’s world; making Slick’s trip literally a delivery of the cane into English’s hands. its semblance to the Green Sun also evokes Dave and Rose’s “delivery” in Cascade; what they thought would be a weapon against English only turned out to be playing right into his grand scheme.)
