Calliope reveals here in no uncertain terms the true nature of her secret furthest ring hideout; a vortex from which no information can escape* is in fact a black hole. The signature shape of solar material spiraling into a black hole probably gives it away, but this is a pretty clear demonstration of the extent of Calliope’s ability to distort space before her more iconic use of the power in Act 7.
With this in mind, the stage in the middle of the vortex makes it quite a bit more obvious that Calliope’s Act 7 black hole is in fact Homestuck itself.
Calliope reveals here in no uncertain terms the true nature of her secret furthest ring hideout; a vortex from which no information can escape* is in fact a black hole. The signature shape of solar material spiraling into a black hole probably gives it away, but this is a pretty clear demonstration of the extent of Calliope’s ability to distort space before her more iconic use of the power in Act 7.
With this in mind, the stage in the middle of the vortex makes it quite a bit more obvious that Calliope’s Act 7 black hole is in fact Homestuck itself.
Maybe more interestingly, Calliope drops a loaded phrase here; she refers to her secret black hole base using the same terminology Doc Scratch uses to describe the holes in his omniscience;
On the surface level this seems pretty literal; Calliope’s hideout is a “dark pocket” because it was designed to hide her from English’s omnipresence. But Scratch’s declaration that every dark pocket will eventually be filled comes with some implications.
Aranea, too, was aware of these gaps in Scratch’s omniscience, and sought to take advantage of them for her own means:
Again, the surface meaning of this is obvious to us; Scratch can’t see into the obfuscation field surrounding Horuss, so Horuss is a good candidate to keep things hidden from him. But Aranea seems to have a key detail missing from her own understanding; the dark pockets are not Scratch’s weaknesses. They are “meant to effectuate outcomes [he has] foreseen”. Horuss was “uniquely fit to inherit the or8” not because he would hide it from Scratch, but because he was a dark pocket that needed to be filled with English’s seed.
Don’t let this distract from how close I am to cracking Black Hole Theory wide open, but the reason I even did that little dive into “dark pockets” in the first place was because I initially wondered if it might have anything to do with this:
Rifts in “the fabric of spacetime” immediately conjure black holes to mind, after all… My initial thought was that since the Felt are what fill English’s “dark pockets” (read: empty eye sockets), maybe the common interpretation that this coat has one hole in it for every member of the Felt fits here; i.e. every member of the Felt fits into one of the “pockets” on the coat.
But really, all the clues on this page are in the commentary…
The line “any gang does well to have an in-house doctor on hand” seems to imply that the Felt isn’t all that well constructed, since judging by this intermission, none of its members are actually doctors. Until we meet Doc Scratch, that is. So I guess that makes this line foreshadowing? Oh yeah, I guess it is.
Very obvious in hindsight, but now that it’s clear that spirals = black holes and black holes = pockets to be filled, “filling a pocket” is also a pretty explicit reference to Caliborn taking his sister’s body and filling the spirals on his cheeks.
The lower part of the shattered-reality stuff left by the dream bubble’s destruction forms a stylized skull. It’s easiest to see reflected in Dave’s shades:
And I think the Terminator face on the Cairo Sarcophagus is supposed to resemble (a dead) Jake:
Look at the two front-and-center teeth. Those aren’t the Terminator’s teeth; they look more like the buck teeth of Jake English. The black area around the glowing eye-lights also suggests glasses to me, especially since we just saw red lights glowing against black on another pair of glasses. That’s more of a reach, though.
Caliborn complained that was Jake “jacking his swagger” by wearing a helmet resembling his face; returning the “favor” by wearing Jake’s likeness seems like something Caliborn might do. So does twisting it into a death mask.
i have to really squint to see the supposed Felt number of holes in English’s overcoat, but if the Felt really are made of felt then it’s not too unreasonable to figure they’re made of the same stuff the overcoat is…
not even at the very end does Eridan drop the supremacy “act”. in fact it’s his last conversation in Return to the Core that probably shows his hand at its most blatant, trying to appeal to Feferi on the grounds of sea dweller superiority:
ERIDAN: you and i are bein civvil by vvery vvirtue a the fact that wwere talkin noww ERIDAN: wwere royalty you and i and wwe belong together ERIDAN: evven if not in THAT WWAY wwhich i get that youre not into and thats fine ERIDAN: but wwe belong together as the rulin class if nothin else ERIDAN: so im gonna ask you this one last time and givve you the choice ERIDAN: im about to go please come wwith me
showing in no uncertain terms that the caste system is not something Eridan is saddled with against his will, but a weapon that he willingly uses to get his way; and maybe more damningly:
ERIDAN: i slaughtered enough angels to knoww my limits and wwhere i stand against the lord of all angels they prophecized ERIDAN: of course im not gonna fight him i stand no chance in hell against that guy ERIDAN: im goin to join him […] ERIDAN: only thing left to do is servve him and hope he spares us […] servvin under jack together wwell be unstoppable and our anemones wwill tremble before us wwhat do you say
he tips his trump card, which is his tendency to make “exceptions” to his genocidal campaigns, not because it would “make him a bad friend” as he likes to pretend, but because he knows he can make better for himself by toadying up to an enemy who’s more powerful than he is. reading Derse as a planet of actors might tempt some to interpret Eridan’s murderous nature as an act, but the plain fact is that Eridan lies about his relationship with social norms to trick people, not the other way around. probably the best example of this comes with his infamous “moirail zone” comment, where he shows he only plays along with moirallegience as a way to get at what he really wants; but he does a similar thing in this Returniabound conversation:
FEFERI: -Eridan, please! I don’t want to see any more dueling. FEFERI: Don’t try to provoke )(im. It’s not like I don’t know w)(at you’re doing! You keep trying to spark a rivalry wit)( )(im to get me to auspisticize between you two, and pull us out of our quadrant! FEFERI: It is t)(e oldest and lamest trick in t)(e book. It didn’t work t)(en and it won’t work now! ERIDAN: thats an astonishin accusation howw could you say that ERIDAN: first as if this scum is evven wworthy of a rivvalry wwith me and second as if im not totally DONE wwith you like i havve TOLD you REPEATEDLY
as shown above, he gives away almost immediately that he is not in fact “totally DONE” with feferi and is still intently interested in swaying her to his side (“evven if not in THAT WWAY”). so maybe he’s not trying to spark a romantic rivalry with the pair; but what he doesn’t deny is that he is still making a play. he’s fishing for a fight with Sollux, and as is quickly made clear, for an opportunity to kill him.
Eridan weaponising his social status reminded me that Ahab’s Crosshairs, the weapon used for hunting the “white whale”, has the captchalogue code FFFFFFWW; literally using whiteness as a weapon. Which I suppose is only made all the more obvious by his replacement of the rifle with a wand of “white science”…
malo also made a good point in the replies here that Cronus’ double lightning bolt scar doubles as an eternal reminder of Eridan’s racially motivated crimes (“Inglorious Basterds style”), which made me think about cosmic punishment in Homestuck and how being (mis)interpreted by an audience can be a form of karma…
in-universe it’s clear that the beta trolls were crafted by Caliborn in response to his observations of the alpha trolls (they’re his “troll fanfiction”). but it’s also clear that aspects of Beforus were influenced by future information echoing backward through time (quadrants, lusii, clown religion), and there’s precedent for this sort of two-way relationship between the selfnesses of two characters (“…in the story Dirk is shown to be a seed for Doc, but outside the story […] Doc was somewhat of a prompt for Dirk’s profile.”) and the reversibility of transmutation is one of the central precepts of alchemy, so it should stand to reason that this applies to persona alchemy as well.
so maybe when I refer to the act of “doing persona alchemy”, the verb I should be using is “interpreting”? in the same way way the Homestuck reader “interprets” Eridan into Cronus, Caliborn “interprets” Cronus back into Eridan… the two characters representing merely different views of the same Platonic idea?
found myself rereading over the final stretch of Act 6 for whatever reason and on an archival readthrough the part where Typhon, head haloed in artifacts, has John simultaneously rid LOWAS of oil and rid the story of special stardust does read quite heavyhanded about the Typheus playing stand-in for Caliborn. which is an idea for which credit belongs entirely to an MSPA forum user long forgotten… but what never really hit me is this perhaps even more explicit association between Calliope and Echidna that comes pretty much right after
Jade, Jane and Calliope fall into the singularity of Calliope’s vortex and end up in a memory of Echidna’s lair, which has the above weird rift in it. beyond the rift is a white void where the Dead Cherub has been hiding, and she tells Calliope that she has served her purpose merely by arriving:
the reader seems to be led to believe initially that this rift is a unique construct of the Cherub’s in order to avoid being hunted down by English…
…only for it to be subsequently revealed that the rift is actually where Echidna herself lives (in contrast to the lairs of Typheus and Yaldabaoth, which are relatively tangible-looking locales). Echidna informs Kanaya and Karkat that
as the Dead Cherub leaves her hideout to create another black hole, Echidna releases the Genesis Frog; two sides of the same doorway, the black hole acting as a gateway back into Homestuck and the new universe acting as a gateway out. the two meetings literally bookend each other.
even in connection with the Dead Cherub’s hiding place, Echidna’s void lair beggars practical explanation… seemingly it would imply she lives in the singularity of a black hole, which makes some sense for the denizen overseeing the Space aspect; and if we take it at face value that Yaldabaoth’s presence in the center of Caliborn’s earth is thanks to a trip via black hole, then Echidna being there on Calliope’s earth should have a similar explanation. her lairs on earth and LOFAF being identical would lend itself toward part of LOFAF being sucked into a black hole in the Dead Cherub timeline, but the lack of a matching rift in Yaldabaoth’s lair tells us the two timelines probably don’t mirror each other 1:1 like that.
I’m entertaining the possibility that the black hole is Echidna’s “natural” habitat (again fitting for the one who presides over the Space aspect) and that when Yaldabaoth falls into the black hole, that’s him taking over her spot? which is fitting for the character of Yaldabaoth and as a symbol for Caliborn’s takeover of the body and the session… the slit-like entrance into the womb-void (which will “Release The Frog When The Time Comes”) isn’t lost on me, either
even in connection with the Dead Cherub’s hiding place, Echidna’s void lair beggars practical explanation… seemingly it would imply she lives in the singularity of a black hole, which makes some sense for the denizen overseeing the Space aspect; and if we take it at face value that Yaldabaoth’s presence in the center of Caliborn’s earth is thanks to a trip via black hole, then Echidna being there on Calliope’s earth should have a similar explanation. her lairs on earth and LOFAF being identical would lend itself toward part of LOFAF being sucked into a black hole in the Dead Cherub timeline, but the lack of a matching rift in Yaldabaoth’s lair tells us the two timelines probably don’t mirror each other 1:1 like that.
I’m entertaining the possibility that the black hole is Echidna’s “natural” habitat (again fitting for the one who presides over the Space aspect) and that when Yaldabaoth falls into the black hole, that’s him taking over her spot? which is fitting for the character of Yaldabaoth and as a symbol for Caliborn’s takeover of the body and the session… the slit-like entrance into the womb-void (which will “Release The Frog When The Time Comes”) isn’t lost on me, either
the piercing of Beat Mesa and release of its temporal energy is actually prefigured in the intermission when Slick busts open Lord English’s safe and causes a “massive release of temporal distortion” that similarly alters the timeline. Slick then crawls down into English’s womb treasure vault and finds… Karkat. set upon a plain white background, no less, which the author commentary calls “boring and sterile” but which could equally be described as empty like Echidna/Calliope’s yonic white void.
…is it possible to read this any way other than “Karkat is Lord English’s baby”? I’m a little worried that’s the only possible interpretation.
to indulge momentarily in a spiral of true conspiracy… if the white void is in fact, for whatever reason, Karkat’s womb-home, then it makes sense that Echidna would require Karkat’s presence in her womb-lair in order to complete her deal with the heroes. and if Karkat’s presence in Echidna’s lair is parallel to the moment Slick first observes him in his room, then when Echidna says she “just wanted Karkat there” to complete the transaction, her request was probably actually that “This young troll stands in his respiteblock.”
and since we can view Calliope and Karkat’s meetings with the Dead Cherub/Echidna as mirror images of each other, when Calliope asks the Dead Cherub “what shoUld i do?”, she’s really asking the question that accompanies a young troll standing in his respiteblock; what will you do? to which the Dead Cherub responds, of course, “live.”
Calliope follows this advice immediately afterward by donning the ring of life, thus making the command to ‘live’ read more literally as 'become alive’… so in the context of Karkat, 'be born’? hrm.
right at the end of the credits there’s this bit where John’s reminiscing over his Dad and looking over various family memorabilia, and he hovers over this certificate of authenticity for the Con Air bunny for a second, which is weird, because Dave got him that bunny, not his Dad… but it’s right after looking at this certificate that Caliborn butts in.
with regards to Caliborn mocking John’s childhood, this focus on the purple clown fridge magnet (with accompanying shitty little green monster?) also feels like it foreshadows Gamzee’s appearance; which makes me wonder if Caliborn’s whole family unit - teenage son, father who clowns and bakes, and a bunny - is meant to be a perversion of John’s upbringing?
(Gamzee is a clown because he belongs to the cult of Lord English; so in essence, like John’s dad, he’s only a clown because he thinks his son likes them? while the implication of Caliborn’s behaviour in the credits is that he’s only a clown through Gamzee’s influence; another classic family misunderstanding)
there is a certain sick tragedy to the fact that John remains a huge fan of Problem Sleuth and MSPA his whole life but it’s his personal demon Caliborn who gets the personal tutelage from Hussie himself
Disclaimer: between Deep Impact and afro motifs in One Piece the spin of my race-dar has been giving me swirly eyes recently, so take this with a grain of salt and some prayers but like
In the Epilogues they had Gamzee using ‘ninja’ as a sugar free n-word right. And I couldn’t help but wonder if maybe that had always been the case, but the matter had just remained subtle until that point. So it became (hypothetically??) funny that Striders were self-described ninjas, like as a supplement to their rapper schtick. And then I see lime-bloods’s post about Dave killing the crow with a slip of the tongue and thought man, what if ‘ninja sword’ (or rather, ‘ninjas-word’?) was a mutation of ‘n-word’ and Dave involuntarily launching it at a crow (a crow!) that was stealing his shit was like. Oh No I Did A Slur. “No one must ever know about this” indeed Dave
So, humoring that
Also in the context of Rose’s fear of drowning mingling with racial motifs (Chaos Dunk), Kanaya’s description of the “Antagonism Ninja Vice Grip Pinching [Rose’s] Larynx” becomes quite cheeky
(Wrt the previous disclaimer: 1. the cataclysmic tidal wave in Deep Impact is a metaphor for the horror of having a BLACK PRESIDENT, 2. One Piece has a series of boss fights where Luffy gets possessed by the spirit of black liberation and punches slavers, he wears an AFRO and gets powered by “SHADOWS” and confronts SONG OF THE SOUTH REFERENCES, it’s a whole thing)
Homestuck though: someone brought up how the Ninja Sword thing might have to do with Caliborn’s name being treated as an obscenity, what with his named being derived from Excalibur, legendary sword. This made sense to me, though I didn’t know what to make of it. Then it occurred to me: What if the same applies to ‘Calliope’, whose name is supposed to function as anathema to Caliborn? The whole image of Caliborn breaking free from his chains on the fucking Planet of the Apes, that’s black liberation imagery,isn’t it? So Roxy screaming CALLIOPE CALLIOPE CALLIOPE to put him back in his place becomes…. slur hurling? In addition to being scifi dead-naming. Something supposed to put the wrongly liberated back in their place, as it were. Putting the Bunny Back in the Box as a repressive impulse. I’m inclined towards this because it would nicely prefigure Roxy taking out the black-coded Condy with the NINJA SWORD.
(Though since Meenah is initially presented as Roxy’s doppelganger, aiming the Ninja Sword at Condy would also carry an air of Roxy aiming at herself? So is it instead/also a gesture at re-integration, Roxy taking on her own blackness along with the ‘slavery’ entailed by her implicit assumption of the Handmaid’s curse? Hm)
I really have to ask if anyone has ever commentated on the racial undertones of this scene where Roxy is accosted by a mob of solely black chess people looking to rob her, before it’s established that Roxy lives in a mixed-kingdom neighbourhood…
i’ve talked before about how i think “the bunny” and “the box” are a metaphor for “the girl” and “the closet” especially since john is the only beta kid actually disconnected from their thematic animal. everyone else fuses with their animal at some point, and john’s comment on that is “dang you guys must all be luckier than me.”
I’ve also talked about how the progression of the bunny mirrors cali’s progression - the green eye ripped off by wv (who is a mirror for jack) and eaten unceremoniously, leaving one red eye that eventually transforms into a face-wide red visor with the added influence of dirk strider’s robotics and some time travel. the green girl killed by jack, leaving kid caliborn, who eventually becomes lord english after getting fused with hal.
lastly i’ve talked about how i think part of why john hates caliborn is his relation to gender+his violent hypermasculinity, and i’ve previously specified that he hates what caliborn has done with the bunny - he hates what caliborn has done with “gender.”
i felt like that was a reach before, but if caliborn’s upbringing is a perversion of john’s, then i think it makes sense that caliborn has a perverted authority over some version of john’s gender, and it makes sense that john would hate that. caliborn who killed the girl inside of him and became The Most Man of all time - is that what john is? is that what he looks like? - that’s what i think john is thinking. i would go on to say that this is almost on the level of intrusive thoughts, because if you ask either me or the draconian dignitary, The Most Man of all time is john’s own dad who is an awesome role model, and similarly a masculine caricature but more positive. anyway i’m very sidetracked hope i’m still comprehensible. point is, john rejects everything caliborn has done with “his” upbringing, particularly regarding the inner girl he killed and the disgusting caricature of masculinity it turned him into.
finding transgender subtext around John hasn’t come naturally to me in the past but admittedly when I first looked at Caliborn as a perversion of John’s childhood it was very hard to look past “Caliborn as the John who killed his inner girl”, and this is a really great breakdown of that. the phrasing “everything Caliborn has done with his upbringing” is of particular interest to me because it places any notion that Caliborn is going to, or already has, jack John’s body against the backdrop that Caliborn is jacking John’s entire life.
Gamzee manifesting the clown doll in John’s head, the act that makes the human universe “terminal”, is in fact the imprinting of Alternian gender norms onto human culture; just like the relationship between John’s fear of clowns and his father’s interest in clowns is circular, so is the existence of gender, given by Caliborn to the trolls, to the humans, and back to Caliborn again.
John’s planet surrounding him with imps in clown garb isn’t just thanks to some mundane coulrophobia; just as we question why the blood-anonymous Karkat’s land might surround him with seas of red blood, we should question what fundamental aspect of John’s own self scares him so much that Sburb would use it against him in such a way.
so I suppose this makes John’s freakout about his Dad not really being a clown a gender freakout in disguise? “he really just works in an office?!” = “he’s not really the paragon of masculinity i looked up to”? (though Dad’s true occupation seems to be intended as the platonically ideal job for a male father to have, his personal obsessions with shaving and fashion do lean toward the effeminate… indeed, as @shigure points out, second only to John in terms of admiration for the man is Droog; ostensibly “the gay one” of the Midnight Crew, especially when compared to Jack, who, destructive and uncouth, is a more emblematic example of Homestuck’s “masculine” characters) despite John’s inner anxiety about clowns/manhood, his father’s clown/manhood is the thing he admires about him most, and discovering that not even his Dad upholds this imaginary standard of clown/manhood causes a total collapse of the ideals keeping his clown/gender anxiety in check…
in terms of troll quadrants representing different kinds of romantic relationships in human culture, Droog being the moirail kind of makes him the “wife” of the Midnight Crew
if clownhood is masculinity I wonder what the scene where the queen tries to push the clown hat on Jack is supposed to read as. “at least pretend to wear the pants in our pretend heterosexual relationship”
with regards to Caliborn mocking John’s childhood, this focus on the purple clown fridge magnet (with accompanying shitty little green monster?) also feels like it foreshadows Gamzee’s appearance; which makes me wonder if Caliborn’s whole family unit - teenage son, father who clowns and bakes, and a bunny - is meant to be a perversion of John’s upbringing?
(Gamzee is a clown because he belongs to the cult of Lord English; so in essence, like John’s dad, he’s only a clown because he thinks his son likes them? while the implication of Caliborn’s behaviour in the credits is that he’s only a clown through Gamzee’s influence; another classic family misunderstanding)
@zenosanalytic suggests that the position of “DAD” with “AUTHENTICITY” calls into question the “authenticity” of John’s current “Dad”, who is after all a Dad from a timeline alien to his own; recalling his inability to accept Davesprite as a “real Dave”, John seems to have an anxiety that his new Dad isn’t his “authentic” Dad, and that his new friends and family aren’t his “real” family because he’s from another timeline. which I like because it again suggests that when Caliborn and Gamzee subsequently butt in, they represent a ghastly vision of a “fake version” of John and his family.
I guess the implication is that by chucklevoodoo'ing the clown doll into John’s head, Gamzee is - by way of persona alchemy - ’interpreting’ John as a boy, in essentially the same way Caliborn ‘interprets’ his favourite minions (leprechauns, clowns) as boys… Gamzee never seems to aim any animosity at John in particular, and their joke appearances together in Zillyhoo-related flashes suggest a kind of kinship, so it really seems like it could have been given as a badge of honour more than anything else
Clownhood is masculine -> rage aspect is respresented by clowns -> rage aspect is masculine -> rage aspect is contrasted to hope aspect -> hope is feminine as rage is masculine -> hope is represented by cherub/angel wings -> cherubhood is feminine -> Caliborn overcoming cherub nature and transitioning to clownhood can be taken as a transition from feminine/female to masculine/male
it feels counterproductive to label cherubs as one particular gender, and counterintuitive to say that transitioning is overcoming cherub nature when it is in fact the very core of their nature… I’m also hesitant to say any aspect has a sexual sway outside of the fundamentally feminine space and masculine time, though I can concede that clowns being men in Caliborn’s paradigm would lend itself toward Caliborn associating rage with masculinity (the same way Calliope genders certain classes based on her preconceptions?), and therefore making attempts to feminise the hope bloodline?
re: "the Cal that shows up post-scratch being a fake" **technically** by juju rules/standards pre-scratch Cal is the fake one, even though the post-scratch version is the one that doesn't get the souls. That's totally incidental to your point though, really interesting stuff.
I don’t think this is true and I’m not sure what makes you think this is true? the post-scratch Cal is “HOLLOW. NOT YET FILLED WITH BAD JUJU.” the souls inside are what make it a juju.
I guess the implication is that by chucklevoodoo'ing the clown doll into John’s head, Gamzee is - by way of persona alchemy - ’interpreting’ John as a boy, in essentially the same way Caliborn ‘interprets’ his favourite minions (leprechauns, clowns) as boys… Gamzee never seems to aim any animosity at John in particular, and their joke appearances together in Zillyhoo-related flashes suggest a kind of kinship, so it really seems like it could have been given as a badge of honour more than anything else
…c99ler castes, t9 s9me extent 9JAs, 6ut CIPs and R9yal-Vs in particular, have 6een a6le t9 use their tremend9us lifespans 9ver the millenia t9 gain a strangleh9ld 9ver the s9cial 9rder, have 6een a6le t9 c9mpletely dictate 9ur s9cietal ev9luti9n 6y ensuring 9nly their cultural agendas and narratives receive the dial9gue’s air supply, assuring the c9dificati9n 9f th9se resultant ideals and deciding what “n9rmalcy” entails… #p9st spectral w9rld #l9l #6U9Ys #9JAs #CIPs #R9yal Vs #narratives #agendas #narratives #lifespan privilege #dysfuncti9n #aweness #agendas
…and highbloods control Alternia because they have control of the narrative!!!
essentially, the highbloods are “ALREADY HERE” influencing Alternia by the time their lowblooded comrades emerge from their cocoons (so how can you expect to stop them?)
this seems to draw a pretty clear bow between Lord English’s mastery of Time and a mastery of lifespan - or maybe more like a mastery over history, since controlling lifespan seems to be more in Meenah’s domain… in any case, the Maid of Time’s short stint in the land of the living would suggest that Maid must therefore be a class of lack?
(or at least a class defined by lack in Caliborn’s paradigm where RPG class = social class? “Maid” could also lend itself toward an aristocratic interpretation but Caliborn’s sexist bias naturally points him toward the servile interpretation)
Jane being assassinated and losing her bonus Life very early on could lend itself toward Jane as “lacking a lifespan”?
a few days ago on my other blog I was thinking out loud about Jane’s general anti-troll race anxiety really being dispersed anxiety about lowbloods in particular; and since lifespan and reproduction are interconnected in troll race science, Jane’s fear of being Great Replaced by lowbloods could stem from a fear of not having long to live?
and of course Jane’s land being one where all the inhabitants died waiting for her to arrive… fantasy about outliving her subjects, fear of dying before she achieves her true purpose, both?
when Doc Scratch says his policy is not to lie, he’s speaking as an author; that’s Hussie’s policy. Homestuck doesn’t lie to the reader - every line of the text should be taken as meaningful - and “lies of omission” don’t count because an omission of information can be just as meaningful to the reader, or be filled in at a more pertinent time. an omission can also be used to mislead; which is a totally different thing to lying.
a lot of characters in Homestuck are reading the comic along with you; one common way for the comic to mislead the reader is for it to have a character come to an incorrect conclusion based on the same inconclusive information you’ve been given. in essence it offers you a theory for what might be happening in lieu of explaining itself fully (this a recurring theme in extratextual commentary, too; Andrew doesn’t lie, but frequently offers information that “could” be true). so part of the game of figuring out when you’re being misled is being able to identify when a character is being misled.
all of this is basically to say that Calliope’s “exposition” about classes and gender are not gospel truth, because Calliope isn’t a character who “knows” things, she’s a character who reads Homestuck and makes observations on it, and these observations are tinted by her personal biases. this isn’t to say that Calliope is a deliberate liar - like every character in Homestuck she was raised in a very particular reality - and it isn’t an attempt to justify postcanonically breaking the “rules” established by the comic; Calliope’s bias is something baked into her dialogue and intrinsically tied to many of the themes of her character and the comic at large.
Calliope betrays this bias as soon as she gets on the topic of “active classes” and “passive classes”; active classes “exploit […] to benefit themselves”, while passive classes allow their aspect to benefit others. this is not impartial wording; it’s informed directly by the fact that she contrasts herself, the ultimate ‘passive’ hero, with her brother, the ultimate 'active’ villain. her use of +/- for passive/active is unintuitive to most people because it’s something she made up! in her paradigm, passive classes are 'positive’ and active classes are 'negative’, because again, that is how things are in her life. as a cherub she’s trained to see things in these kinds of good/bad dichotomies; and she never makes a point of being impartial to begin with! when Roxy describes her active counterpart as “like the asshole class”, all Calliope has to say is that “if that reference to yoUr cUltUre provides a sUitable comparison, then absolUtely.”
the same scrutiny should be applied when Calliope genders certain classes; which, first and foremost, should be compared to Caliborn’s similar habit of gendering things. THEY’RE ALL MEN. BECAUSE I SAY THEY ARE. AND I WANT THEM TO BE. i’ve talked about this a million times so i’ll keep it to the synopsis: the idea of cherubs having “genders” on top of their blood-related alignments is a total fabrication of the forces controlling the Homestuck narrative. outside of the comic, Calliope is eventually able to recognise that her “ideas aboUt gender were entirely inflUenced by [her] time watching earth.”
everything Calliope espouses about gender up until this point should be read through this lens; again, in the same way Calliope is biased toward thinking classes similar to hers are 'good’ classes, she is biased toward thinking things her brother likes are 'masculine’ things, and that therefore the things she likes are 'feminine’. when she thinks of the kind of person who plays a “destroyer class”, her combination cherub/troll/human upbringing has her think exclusively of a male.
and again, this isn’t to say the gender biases to certain classes are all in Calliope’s head or that she deliberately invented them. to bring it back to the initial point, Calliope isn’t omniscient; she’s just a member of the audience. so when she makes observations on the way the class system works, that’s exactly what they are; they aren’t objective truths, but they aren’t lies, they’re observations. when Calliope says thieves and rogues lean female, what she’s really doing is commenting on patterns she sees in the characters she knows; indeed, among the thieves and rogues we know, they are mostly female; and the bards and princes we know are in fact exclusively male. so inasmuch as classes are titles or traits used to form connections between the characters in Homestuck, Calliope’s commentary on them is for the most part correct! but it shouldn’t be taken as objective fact about the intrinsic, real properties of the classes themselves.
I was fiddling with that Calliope post for a few days in my drafts, but combined with what I’ve been repeating recently about “Caliborn’s paradigm” I wonder if the point of classpect is to be interpreted?
obviously the aspects are symbols for fundamental concepts, and the point of a fundamental concept is whittling it down into something more real via interpretation (which is something we see in the comic, with Vriska thinking of Light as luck versus Rose thinking of fortune more in terms of fate)…
I suppose it could be argued that classes are the interpretations of the aspects, i.e. a Seer of Light inherently interprets “Light” differently to how a Thief of Light interprets it, but I think there’s a level of fundamentality to a class as well. they represent fictional archetypes moreso than RPG classes (RPG classes themselves tend to represent archetypes of folkloric hero, but Sburb’s classes take that a step or two further and, as such, a step or two more abstract); it’s something I’ve only lightly touched upon before, but essentially, like the aspects, the classes are ideas that are open to interpretation by their very nature; while the platonically ideal concept of a “Prince” does exist out there, each individual Prince from each individual story is a totally different iteration, a different “interpretation” of the idea of a Prince.
I guess this is roundaboutly similar to the popular existing theory that each class is defined by a kind of keyword; the Prince and Bard are “destroyers”, but it’s up to interpretation what exactly that entails (as Calliope puts it, a destroyer of x is “one who destroys x, or caUses destrUction throUgh x”). in the same vein, Thieves and Rogues are “stealers”, and so on; one major discipline of classpecting seems to be the scholarship of figuring out what the “keyword” is for every class pair.
but even that I find to be a bit too specific. because while Calliope certainly might interpret a Prince as a destroyer based on her observations of various Princes, in Caliborn’s paradigm Prince is likely to mean something completely different. to Caliborn, there are “LOWLY PAGE[S]” and Lords whose “NOBILITY IS MANIFEST”. he interprets classes as their literal meanings, the way Dirk thinks of a Prince as someone who “rule[s] over [their aspect] in a pompous, regal manner”; a way of thinking made manifest in the position of Princes in relation to Maids and Pages in Alternian society. because of course the opposite side of the “Homestuck characters are the audience” coin is that “Homestuck characters are the author”. in the same way Calliope’s interpretations of the classes are “true” because they line up with observable fact, Caliborn’s interpretation of the classes is made true when he gains control over the narrative and is able to skew the reader’s very ability to observe the facts. in Caliborn’s own words, “IF I BELIEVE HARD ENOUGH […] THEN THAT FACT BECOMES ABSOLUTELY INDISPUTABLE AS A PERMANENT MAN REALITY.”
it’s, ironically, a very literalist permutation of keyword theory - in Calliope’s paradigm a Page serves their aspect, while to Caliborn a Page merely serves, full stop - but it certainly seems to put a big roadblock in the way of the many interpretations theory of classpect.
but the fact that Alternia’s entire society is built on this idea of pompous, regal Princes and servile Pages and Maids still feels quite explicit in its implications about Caliborn’s perception of class, i.e. that he sees “class” in literal terms, as a synonym for “caste”. I guess it’s possible Calliope and Caliborn merely have different headcanon “keywords” for each caste, but it’d be hard to believe unless we had a case where they openly disagreed with each other on the interpretation of a class…
i guess it’s also worth keeping in mind that Calliope and Caliborn’s interpretative modes are still different: Calliope observes while Caliborn authors (the fact that this is sort of the inverse of what one would instinctively assume about the twins is worth thinking about). so when Calliope “observes” the Prince as a destroyer class, she’s actually re-interpreting the vision of the Prince imposed on reality by Caliborn. as long as we’re still tentatively comparing class and gender I’ll be annoying and pull out the quote for the millionth time:
