May 2023

since i’ve been talking a little bit about game mechanics elsewhere… I brought up on this old post, which seemed to pique people’s interest, the possibility that the planets in the incipisphere could have their own breeds of frog that all contribute something unique to the universe they ultimately create - e.g. a session like B1 with a cave planet and a lava planet might produce a universe with the unique traits of a cave frog or a lava frog. Dave’s “ruby contraband” was the obvious impetus for this, but the fact that Hussie calls this “frog-themed treasure” in his commentary threw me off the scent and i turned to focusing on grist instead.

AG: John! Is that a frog I see there?

so I was pleasantly surprised to stumble back upon this page, which explicitly tells us that yes, there are in fact frogs to be found on every planet. John’s calling up that this is considered “illegal contraband” even implies that Dave’s ruby frog really is just a frog - possibly its crystalline complexion is even one of its adaptations to LOHAC’s inhospitable surface? in any case, this clinches it - the universe a group of gods aims to create is born from the genes of all of their lands, in more ways than one.

perhaps more crucially, Vriska’s pointing out that finding frogs on the heroes’ other planets is apparently something for the later stretch of the game calls to mind the final frog, which Kanaya spent the final stretch of the game searching tirelessly for but could not locate, and which notably comes from a planet very far away from the incipisphere indeed. so does the fact that the Genesis Frog descends from frogs from a variety of planets, who need to feed on particular kinds of grist, offer us some clues about this white frog, which remains possibly the greatest of Homestuck’s unsolved mysteries? perhaps a frog from the old Earth was what our heroes needed to recreate the Earth in another universe and to break the old cycle of death and rebirth? and does Karkat and Kanaya’s failure to find a frog native to their own world speak to the inevitability of Alternia’s demise and the futility of their quest to recreate what they had?

if the world of a frog’s origin is significant, that adds some new food for thought; but while i’m on the final frog, since it’s such an important mystery that i’ve yet to weigh in on as far as this blog goes, my basic assumption has basically been thus. knowing that the trolls’ session was a perfectly engineered performance with an intended and planned-for outcome, it seems ridiculous to think that Karkat and Kanaya really did look as hard as possible for their final frog and somehow just fail, causing something to be wrong with the universe they created.

in a similar vein, with the kids’ session being the rush job that it was, it doesn’t seem to track, logically, that Jade should be able to locate the frog she needed so quickly and incorporate it into her magnum opus tadpole so inconsequentially. and indeed, we know the story isn’t so simple, because someone deliberately sent the frog where it would be easy to find. so the question is just who and when.

it also needs to be considered that despite all of Karkat’s bellyaching about giving the universe cancer, nothing really seems to be intrinsically wrong with his creation - even calling it “his” creation is a stretch. he’s being egotistically fatalistic. Karkat thinks Jack is the cancer, but we know that guy had nothing to do with him, and while we may be tempted to draw connections with the kids’ “cancerous” battlefield, we know with hindsight that the involvement of a self loathing teenager isn’t at all a necessary component to the growth of a game-breaking Tumor.

so the question begs to be asked; if you can create a completely functional - if a little dysfunctional - universe without this oh-so-special final frog, what is the point of the frog at all? the unique extracanonical nature of Jade’s pearly white frog suggests this final piece of the puzzle was what allowed our heroes to finally break free of English’s ouroboros of sex and death; but then why do Karkat and Kanaya seem to think they needed this frog, and why did it only show up when Jade needed it?

it’s obvious to me that Kanaya’s disappearing frog and Jade’s appearing frog are one and the same; the key to the escape hatch in reality was snatched away from the trolls because escaping the cycle was never in the cards for their session, and bestowed upon the humans by an unknown but presumably sympathetic party. the question just remains, as it has for over ten years now, who exactly is this party supposed to be?

i was going to make a whole post about how you can’t talk about the final frog mystery without also asking what the hell this light was; but that’s literally just the light of Skaia, isn’t it? Prospit doesn’t normally have clouds like this; what we’re seeing is Jade’s earliest memory of an eclipse, where Prospit’s moon rakes through the prophetic clouds of Skaia. that lotus spirograph she’s looking at is the same one that appears in the doorknob-bubble to a new universe and under the doorway platform, in the universe’s throat sac and even on Homestuck’s final page, the heroes having entered one. as @mmmmalo points out, it’s also the “SEED” of a lotus time capsule, making its symbolic value as a vessel for life obvious. but most obviously, that spirograph is what’s at the heart of Skaia. that’s what Jade is being drawn to, here, which explains the attendance of Prospit’s natives as well.

so, knowing that this is Skaia showing her a vision, supposedly Jade’s statement that she “saw something in the light” takes on a more crucial meaning? does the question become “what was Skaia showing her?”

or are the specifics of the dream not important - did Skaia lead Jade here just to wake her up before she could get close, so she would find the frog waiting for her in the waking world? there is a dramatic irony at play in this flashback sequence; when the frog suddenly dies in Jade’s arms, framing makes it obvious it was cooked to death by Becquerel, but Jade makes no comment on it, seemingly unaware, seemingly not finding the detail of how the frog died important. here, Jade is totally at the whims of not just one but multiple narrative forces operating on levels completely unfathomable to the mind of such a little girl, leading her to a seemingly inconsequential frog just so it can die and she can make clones out of its ghost. the question once again becomes who sent the frog; with Skaia waking her up and Becquerel making the kill, who is the third co-conspirator?

lime-bloods:

i was going to make a whole post about how you can’t talk about the final frog mystery without also asking what the hell this light was; but that’s literally just the light of Skaia, isn’t it? Prospit doesn’t normally have clouds like this; what we’re seeing is Jade’s earliest memory of an eclipse, where Prospit’s moon rakes through the prophetic clouds of Skaia. that lotus spirograph she’s looking at is the same one that appears in the doorknob-bubble to a new universe and under the doorway platform, in the universe’s throat sac and even on Homestuck’s final page, the heroes having entered one. as @mmmmalo points out, it’s also the “SEED” of a lotus time capsule, making its symbolic value as a vessel for life obvious. but most obviously, that spirograph is what’s at the heart of Skaia. that’s what Jade is being drawn to, here, which explains the attendance of Prospit’s natives as well.

so, knowing that this is Skaia showing her a vision, supposedly Jade’s statement that she “saw something in the light” takes on a more crucial meaning? does the question become “what was Skaia showing her?”

or are the specifics of the dream not important - did Skaia lead Jade here just to wake her up before she could get close, so she would find the frog waiting for her in the waking world? there is a dramatic irony at play in this flashback sequence; when the frog suddenly dies in Jade’s arms, framing makes it obvious it was cooked to death by Becquerel, but Jade makes no comment on it, seemingly unaware, seemingly not finding the detail of how the frog died important. here, Jade is totally at the whims of not just one but multiple narrative forces operating on levels completely unfathomable to the mind of such a little girl, leading her to a seemingly inconsequential frog just so it can die and she can make clones out of its ghost. the question once again becomes who sent the frog; with Skaia waking her up and Becquerel making the kill, who is the third co-conspirator?

I also can’t help but wonder, if the frog flashback is supposed to be Jade’s first eclipse, are we supposed to interpret the rather eventful eclipse that happens in 2009 as history having come full circle? does the frog dying in the young Jade’s arms somehow prefigure John in her arms, and her frantic attempts to shake him awake and save him from death?

@dudesrock makes the good observation that, in contrast to the healthy pond around Jade’s temple, Kanaya’s desertified locale provides another pretty good reason why she might have had a hard time locating a frog anywhere near where she lived. as @mmmmalo rightly points out, the surrounding “HEINOUS BROODS OF THE UNDEAD” also suggest a post-apocalyptic setting; i’ve discussed Alternia as an apocalyptic planet before, but it certainly warrants re-analysis as more than just prepping the trolls for an apocalyptic game.

Scratch is an obvious culprit, which makes me think back on an interesting Scratch tidbit I’ve never really taken anywhere until now; despite our obvious view of Scratch as a doctor of precise, surgical manipulations, the first chronological appearance of his cue ball is as a bomb. Scratch is, in essence, built from a bomb Caliborn found: and despite his image, he continues to influence the narrative in this way.

so if Scratch’s seeds are also bombs, it stands to reason that his manner of laying claim to a world involves bombing it? making the land uninhabitable to all but the hardiest warriors in the process…

(though we learn in this exchange that Scratch has been watching over Kanaya since her youth, we’re never explicitly told what that actually meant. Scratch’s enigmatic comment that “a dutiful girl raised in the daylight was protected by a bulb-headed guardian, and learned to glow in the dark after death” seems to imply he had a hand in her transformation, just as he had a hand in Rose’s, but again, there’s little indication as to how these two things are related.

Kanaya’s Land of Rays, though, seems to draw a connection between rays of light and the radiation prevalent on Jade’s planet. so is Kanaya’s undead glow, then, supposed to tell us that she, too, is irradiated? a product of nuclear zombification?)

Aradia’s temple sits in a crater filled with mud, which certainly could be a livable habitat for frogs, but is just surrounded by dead things instead…

the idea of human reader bias as a narrative force is certainly compelling to think about… there is of course precedent for the reader stepping in to move something from one place to another, but I’m not convinced that’s enough

when thinking about who would be most likely to conspire with Bec and Skaia to deliver a frog to Jade, Echidna quickly comes to mind; but Echidna’s various dealings suggest she is particularly invested in the continuation of the troll race, so if we’re sticking with ‘someone took the frog from the trolls and gave it to the humans’ that doesn’t really seem consistent with her motives

the intention of that post was not necessarily to imply Scratch literally bombed Alternia. rather, I think the fact that dropping bombs, planting seeds and irradiating the landscape are all such potent symbols surrounding Scratch means that whether he “literally” dropped nukes on Alternia or not is irrelevant, because the end result is the same.

(this is basically the default position of the Storyteller-Character; if Scratch tells a story in which Alternia is nuked, does that make him the one personally dropping the bombs, or not? it ultimately makes no difference. bombs were dropped and it was his design.)

with that being said, here’s a panel depicting Scratch literally setting off a radioactive weapon on Alternia

indeed, since Caliborn uses his cue ball bombs to conquer the planets in his session, it is true in a very literal sense that detonating a nuclear device on a planet is how English demonstrates his domination over something. the “seed” is always a bomb

the (uncharacteristically green, for Alternia) trees around Kanaya’s hive have supposedly been cut to the shape of the clouds Kanaya watched from Prospit, but the radioactive nature of Kanaya’s awakening on Prospit gives an added layer of meaning to their green cloud shapes. especially since, as long as Scratch is involved, we’re talking about “seeds” and “bombs” being the same thing

wait. the Matriorb is literally just a The Tumor isn’t it

ROSE: But Skaia is a very passive entity. It only “knows” and “sees,” but it never quite “acts.”
[…] it has control over exactly one thing. The defense portals.
ROSE: It can decide to send important meteors to different points in time than originally planned, thus creating alternate realities.

occurs to me that choosing to lay a descendant’s egg thousands of years after their ancestor died is also pretty much the extent of the mother grub’s influence on Alternia, too. up until now I’ve been putting that on the Condesce and her obsession with separating her subjects from their forebears, but it could also feasibly have been a deliberate act of protection? (or maybe the Condesce just made her do it.)

Though dormant on the surface, the volcanic activity deep underground provides your house with a source of GEOTHERMAL POWER. You are not sure why your grandfather decided to draw from this source of energy when he had the UNLIMITED POWER OF THE ATOM at his disposal. But it has been this way for as long as you can remember.

Here’s what seems like a weird little throwaway from within the first thousand pages that doesn’t get answered until Act 5; the reason Jade’s house runs on geothermal energy and not Skaianet’s advanced fission technology is because Jake didn’t build it at all!

The seed of your [Kanaya’s] hive was deployed on the volcanic rocks beneath the sand with the assistance of your lusus and her remarkable burrowing skills, and you have lived there happily together since.

the building is organic technology that grows out of volcanic rock, presumably feeding on the magma to do so; a product of eco-friendly Sburb architecture rather than Skaianet’s careless abuse of physics.

I wonder, does that imbue the building with any of the same mythical qualities found in other items crafted from the lava of the Forge, like Dave’s cueball sword?

yesterday I came to the conclusion that a cue ball is just a black hole looked at from the other side, and now I’m saying that the Forge’s lava is what cue balls magic is made of. could it be…? no… nobody wants that. nobody even wants to hear the phrase “Mount Saint Lardass”

lime-bloods:

yesterday I came to the conclusion that a cue ball is just a black hole looked at from the other side, and now I’m saying that the Forge’s lava is what cue balls magic is made of. could it be…? no… nobody wants that. nobody even wants to hear the phrase “Mount Saint Lardass”

and I’ve already once before likened Echidna’s home at the molten core of a planet to the singularity of a black hole. so something could be there? but it seems totally incongruous with what i’ve been saying black holes are up to this point…

to summarise the other day’s insane rambling, distilled into a coherent thesis: it seems to be that the cue ball is in essence a black hole viewed from the other side. while Act 7’s black hole is the grave Calliope digs to condemn Lord English in, the cue balls are the seeds from which he is forced to be born again in a neverending cycle, punishing him by forcing him to live out the horror of narrative he put John and friends through.

this follows conventional wisdom that Homestuck’s black holes are the equal opposites of white holes; while a black hole is a portal back into the cycle of death and rebirth that is Homestuck, a white house is your door out of it - it just happens that English, being cursed to only be born when Scratch dies, only ever gets to see the back of these white doors.

to look at it another way, just as a black hole is a dark pocket from which no information can escape, the cue ball is an endless fount of information - sometimes to the point of detriment.

possibly this also offers an alternate explanation for my similarly old view that what goes in through a black hole - a Gamzee, a crowbar, a set of magic pool balls - must come out through Caliborn’s immortality clock (just as Slick uses it as a gateway to the Furthest Ring, and Meenah uses the gateway in reverse to enter the black hole universe). because of course, the active component of that clock is itself a cue ball.

so when Scratch calls the cue ball a “seed” is he actually supposed to be hinting at these seeds?

making cue balls reverse time capsules, shells grown around the debris that falls into black holes to safely restore them backward in time?

dingodad:

fancandy:

UNTOUCHABLES is a simple ongoing anthology that asks you to rethink the relationship between life and death.

In this episode: follow Ucvius as they introduce their cooler blooded friend to a whole new perspective.

MSPFA is back! check this out if you haven’t already and see if you need to give it another favourite if you were following it already :)