KURLOZ: THERE IS NO NEED TO APPROACH THE YOUNG MISGUIDED EMPRESS
KURLOZ: SHE REMAINS BLISSFULLY UNAWARE OF THE MACHINATIONS WHICH TRANSPIRE BETWEEN THE HEROES OF RAGE
KURLOZ: LET HER TRY TO RAISE HER PATHETIC ARMY OF SOULS. SHE WILL BE DOUBLE SLAIN BY OUR LORD LIKE ALL THE OTHER MIRTHLESS HERETICS
KURLOZ: HONK
KURLOZ: *HONK*

it probably goes without saying that Kurloz’ dialogue here is another looksee at the behind-the-scenes dynamic between the Condesce and the Highblood; it’s easy to imagine how this dialogue could have come word-for-word out of Kurloz’ mouth post-scratch!

i guess you could call the part about “machinations […] between the heroes of rage” a sticking point, but I get the feeling Kurloz’ comment that he and Meulin need to work with Gamzee “SO THAT HE MAY CONTINUE OUR MIRTHFUL MOTHER FUCKIN WORK” might be another beat that reflects his role on Alternia? Gamzee having things set up for him by his ancestor as both a family tradition (something he later does for Caliborn) and a dark reflection of the works of the Signless

generally when we think of the Beforans mirroring their Alternian lives, Meulin’s devotion to Kurloz is assumed to be the other side to her devotion to the Signless… but Kurloz living out the role of his Alternian counterpart almost to the letter gives me pause. knowing what we know about Nepeta being a character who cannot stop herself from roleplaying at all times, the Heart aspect being one about conflicts with the facets of oneself, and recent discussion of the Rage aspect as one that allows for the manipulation of facets, it’s hard not to feel conspiratorial about the potentiality of a Judas in the Signless’ inner circle. but that’s one of those lines of questioning that’s hard to see having an end. just what exactly is the Disciple’s impact on the story of Homestuck, such that we might read so deeply into it?

if the Disciple was a clown double agent the whole time then that makes the whole ordeal basically one big prank to get Horuss exiled. which is funny if nothing else

Not an Enigma, and Certainly Not a Curse: the “Ultimate Self” in Hussie’s Own Words

I’ve found myself, lately, in several conversations in a row where the other guy and myself weren’t on the same page about what the Ultimate Self meant; and though I welcome the opportunity for discussion, explaining my position over and over again has cost me minutes of my screen life that I simply won’t win back. So this post is a departure from my usual fare in that it’s more for my own benefit than that of anybody else.

I’ve been over Davepeta’s “superceding bodyless and timeless persona that crosses the boundaries of paradox space” enough already, so if you’re interested in the Ultimate Self as it is in Homestuck, I recommend you read “Homestuck’s Gnosticism: The Conflict”, and then, if that piques your attention, you continue with the follow-up “The World/The Wheel”. For the purposes of this post, though, I want to keep analysis, interpretation and hypothesising to a minimum. As the title indicates, this is the Ultimate Self not as I describe it, or as characters describe it, but - so to speak - straight from the horse’s mouth.

In Andrew Hussie’s commentary on Homestuck: Book 6, p. 312:

Oftentimes, when characters lose certain qualities that came to define them, there’s this sense of liberation they seem to experience. They become a happier, more relieved, easier-going version of themselves. When Aradia ditches a defining quality we came to know her by (being dead), she becomes a much happier and self-actualized Aradia. Sollux also seems to be chilling out now that his defining properties (bifurcation, etc.) have been KO’d. He had a mouth full of gnarly teeth that gave him a wicked lisp (gone), eyes full of nasty laser beams (gone, along with his eyesight), and a brain full of doomsday visions and bipolar disorder (also gone—well, maybe not the bipolar thing, because that’s probably not how that works, but whatever). You get more of this kind of thing in even higher degrees with some of the fusion stuff that happens later (Arquius, Davepeta), where characters become almost euphoric versions of themselves for having been completely liberated from certain self-limitations which previously defined them. The concept of an “ultimate self,” which appears much later, probably has its roots way back to stuff like this, which got the ball rolling on the idea that a more complete or fulfilled self is one that becomes free from mortal limitations, or the idiosyncrasies which comprise a specific instance of one version of yourself. Hence an ultimate self is an aggregate of someone’s full potential. It’s not just doing away with negative traits, but summing up all iterations of yourself, including ones without those traits, allowing you to move beyond them. Or maybe more accurately, to view them as insignificant in the grand totality of what a person really is.

Importantly, what Hussie does here is draw the conceptual line from the themes of Acts 1-5 to what are often interpreted by some as radically different, even left-field themes through Act 6. Think of this as an extension of one of Homestuck’s meta-themes, where the comic undergoes a series of escalations that take simple conflicts to their logical extremes: we start the story worried about a Reckoning which might destroy the Earth, then end up with the more pressing concern that a Rapture is about to end reality as we know it. The Ultimate Self is the end result of the exact same kind of escalation; where the God Tiers are a method of becoming a better version of oneself by merging with one’s “ideal” dream body, the Ultimate Self is the logical conclusion that one can become the best version by unifying with every body.

To draw my own conceptual line back to Homestuck: Book 5, page 409:

This connects to the basic question of whether to embrace the regimentation of a heroic path conveniently laid out for you (the expectation), or to reject it as the shallow and rigid confinement of personal destiny (the deviation). These issues are expressed through the fundamental language of platonic idealism: perfect ideas of things, and then specific, imperfect instances of those ideas, or varied permutations, evolutions, or hacks of those ideas through alchemy. The way Sburb “should” go is an ideal (expectation), but the disastrous, chaotic way it actually goes is an imperfect instance (deviation). An “idea” of a person, such as Rose, along with her regimented heroic quest for growth, and all the great things she might imagine herself to become if she followed it, is an ideal (expectation). The messy, flawed, yet more genuinely human individual she does become resulting from her errant choices and rejection of formalism, is an imperfect instance of an ideal (deviation). What’s the bottom line here? This is a lot. I know it’s a lot. Homestuck is, in fact, a lot.

I’ve added some of my own emphasis there again, but that whole extract is worth reading. The reason I bolded that part is because this “Platonic idealism” is something Hussie talks about a lot in his commentary, and I think that commentary is essential reading for anyone who wants to even get their foot in the door on this topic. Again, this is something I’ve blogged about extensively already, so there’s more than just Hussie’s word to take for it if you’re really interested; but for the sake of this post, I’ll finish off with, again, what Hussie himself has to say on the matter, all the way back in Homestuck: Book 1, page 123:

With things like Athenums and Perfectly Generic Objects locked and loaded, Sburb architecture seems to be circling widely around a game abstraction-based systemization of Platonic idealism. Homestuck deals with what I am going to roughly characterize as THEMES.

yet another blatant sign that I just need to put some time away to reread the whole comic instead of doing quote-by-quote analysis ad nauseam: the Davepetasprite quote I’ve used in about a dozen posts now literally includes “that stuff all happened to you, its just you dont have access to the memories […] but they all played a role in helping like "greater jade” grow if that makes sense". not 50 pages post-Remem8er we’re explicitly assured that ‘just because you don’t have the memories of something doesn’t mean it didn’t happen to you’.

long been intrigued by the fact that Terezi and Latula’s lusus/es seemingly have the same suite of powers as Sollux, those being laser vision and psychic precognition (Terezi’s lusus dreams about a “MYTH1C4L L1TTL3 P1NK MONK3Y” called a “baby”: she has no way of knowing this, but the egg can tell the future)… actually it only occurred to me the other day that the reason this species “remains blind until maturity” is almost definitely because as adults their eyes are deadly weapons, which we find out another thousand and a half pages later. so just like Sollux is, these dragons are very much Scott-Summers-Cyclopses!

now that I really think about it: as of Hussie’s print commentary, if there was ever a clear idea as to who exactly Terezi’s “blind prophets” were going to be, it’s gone now, and the remaining dregs spell out “it was probably just some psychics” - and while it’s absolutely true that there is a straightforward correlation drawn in Homestuck between blindness and prophecy… Terezi’s blind prophets, specifically, had to have been dragons, right? her whole life was shaped by the tutelage of this blind, fortune-telling creature; who else would have taught her the “numerals of the blind prophets”?

there’s almost definitely something more to be said about dragons being blind as children and having a harmful gaze as adults, but idk if I’m equipped to delve deeper into that right now…

lime-bloods:

long been intrigued by the fact that Terezi and Latula’s lusus/es seemingly have the same suite of powers as Sollux, those being laser vision and psychic precognition (Terezi’s lusus dreams about a “MYTH1C4L L1TTL3 P1NK MONK3Y” called a “baby”: she has no way of knowing this, but the egg can tell the future)… actually it only occurred to me the other day that the reason this species “remains blind until maturity” is almost definitely because as adults their eyes are deadly weapons, which we find out another thousand and a half pages later. so just like Sollux is, these dragons are very much Scott-Summers-Cyclopses!

now that I really think about it: as of Hussie’s print commentary, if there was ever a clear idea as to who exactly Terezi’s “blind prophets” were going to be, it’s gone now, and the remaining dregs spell out “it was probably just some psychics” - and while it’s absolutely true that there is a straightforward correlation drawn in Homestuck between blindness and prophecy… Terezi’s blind prophets, specifically, had to have been dragons, right? her whole life was shaped by the tutelage of this blind, fortune-telling creature; who else would have taught her the “numerals of the blind prophets”?

also to keep in mind: Sollux Captor’s name meaning “sunlight capturer” versus Pyralspite as a creature whose gaze is openly compared to the rays of the sun (Mindfang being blinded by the dragon prefigures Terezi’s blinding by the daylight sky) by the use of the Texan sun motif in Seer: Ascend:

…and then the third piece, which I had totally forgotten until right now as I write this; Scott Summers’ powers are also solar-fueled??

Sollux’ name is a really interesting case because the record suggests it’s basically the one character name, save Jake’s, that Hussie created completely on his own: there were suggestions for the character to be named “Castor Pollux”, but it was seemingly the author’s decision alone to rearrange the letters into something that so transparently has the word “captor” in it. makes you think!

all of this is just underlined by something I mentioned on my other blog a week or so ago: Pyralspite is basically the one hanging plot thread left over from the ancestor narrative. most everything else about the Aranea/Latula conflict is picked up, in some way, by their descendants, but we never find out what the end result of Aranea’s plan to tame the dragon by way of the Summoner is. Vriska seemingly uses this as inspiration for her double-reacharound attack on Terezi, but the fate of Pyralsprite herself is left open, and Act 6 seems to keep reminding us of this fact; the dragon is still around all those hundreds or thousands of years later on Jake’s island, and later still took part in Rose and Dave’s last stand against the Condesce!

The theory used to be that Caliborn was his own dad. Thematic echoes ring around the story; his followers’ obsession with “MOTHERFUCKING” evokes the Oedipal undertones of Yaldabaoth imprisoning and corrupting his creatress Sophia. And Aranea, often misinformed but rarely, if ever - in spite of the school of red herrings surrounding English - intentionally misleading, seems to hint at such a possibility: Caliborn and Calliope’s home planet is the former home planet of their father, which is in her words “a loc8tion now conspicuously occupied 8y a truly massive 8lack hole”. Now that the comic’s over, and we have a more comprehensive idea of English’s life and times - he was born, he fucked with the trolls, left to try to kill his sister, and then died - it seems pretty unlikely that he had the opportunity to go back to the era of his birth and spawn himself… in the incarnation we’re most familiar with, at least. We’ve known from much earlier on that there were Englishes in “countless universes”, and that the “mobster Hulk” menacing Homestuck itself would never be fully representative of all of Caliborn’s crimes. And now that I’ve spent some more time looking over the mechanisms by which Caliborn is able to exist in so many countless universes, I’m not totally convinced that he isn’t his own dad?

Cherub romance is chiefly two things; it’s caliginous, and it’s incestuous. One way in which it is widely understood to be incestuous is by way of being masturbatory: in its mate, a cherub looks for “qualities its other half once had”, seeking to replace the aspect of itself it once referred to as brother or sister. But increasingly, I also think cherub mating is incestuous by way of being cyclical. Indeed, it’s difficult to draw a line between ‘cyclical’ and 'masturbatory’ for a race who couple by forming an ouroboros; but as touched upon already, the planet around which Caliborn’s father intertwined with his mother was also the planet around which his father’s father intertwined. Because cherubs always mate around black holes.

It’s easy to fall back on the simplest, most surface-level observation of the black hole, that it’s a symbol of Lord English. I have described the singularity in the past as English’s mouth, the orifice that swallows suns in the same manner the god of time Cronus swallowed his own son. But once more, English is ouroboros; the mouth that swallows his prey is also the mouth that swallows itself. The number of times I’ve pointed out the significance of white and black holes in Homestuck could be aptly called ad nauseam: but for the comic’s metanarrative purposes, being a gateway out of the story also makes the white hole a gateway forward into progress, and by contrast, the black hole is necessarily a pitfall into regression. Just as the black hole is where the god of cycles is swallowed by his own cycle, and is therefore a signpost of Lord English’s resurrection, it is also where cherubs go to enact violence upon their sibling-spouses because that is where their parents, and their grandparents, and their grandparents’ grandparents, enacted violence upon each other.

Bruce Banner was transformed into the monstrous green Hulk halfway by radiation, halfway by a brutal childhood at the hands of his own monstrous father. Cronus devoured his son, black hole-like, because he received prophecy that his children would overthrow him the same way he had overthrown his own tyrannical progenitor. Even Oedipus was an early victim of the time loop; had prophecy not deemed him at the moment of his birth to be responsible for his father’s death, his infamous transgression upon his mother could never have taken place. Whether we choose to believe English literally stepped through that black hole in some winged incarnation to commit the Oedipal sin, or if the rift through space and time is simply a symbolic wound - the bleeding hole left by generations of fathers traumatising wives and sons - the end result is the same. By becoming the Lord of Time, that god of cycles, and embedding himself in the very story structure cherubs dedicate their lives to upholding, Caliborn must embody that cycle; and the Oedipal is in the cyclical just as much as it is in the incestuous. Whether or not Caliborn’s dad is him is irrelevant to the simple fact that Caliborn is his own dad.

naturally this makes the Alternian incestuous slurry the ultimate sign of a stagnant race incapable of evolving, though that much was probably obvious already: but the quadrants, too, whose association with “romantic destiny” and the “one true pairing” makes them the perfect tool for recreating the same conflicts generation after generation, play into this exact same structure themselves.

supposedly this is why love “beyond the four quadrants” is so important to breaking free of these cycles… though how exactly the First Ship differs from the concept of a one true pairing isn’t clear to me. is it because Meulin and Kankri never cared for each other on Beforus? is love that “transcends the grid” not the same as love that transcends selves? it would be certainly interesting if the Ultimate Self was purely nature while the Ultimate Quadrant was purely nurture.

on a barely related point, I’ve been wondering if the Disciple being a double agent would mean that “transcending the grid entirely” actually indicates love and hate simultaneously, making her both the Signless’ lover and his worst enemy all at once?

seemingly the consequence of being separated from ones forebears is being deprived of the opportunity to learn from their mistakes? something enforced on Alternia by way of the space war, but which is the natural state of cherubs; “an asocial species” which “scatter their num8ers throughout space, each staking a territory spanning many lightyears”, resulting in a neverending cycle of violence generation after generation.

in both cases, each generation continues to use a single planet as a breeding ground, leaving upon adulthood and only returning to perpetuate the spiral… I suppose cherubs “scatter[ing] their num8ers throughout space” may be intended to call back to Meenah having “scattered all but the children throughout the galaxy”, a decision which ultimately served to shape the trolls into a race more like Lord English’s own!

so long as I’m selling the Beforans as direct reenactments of the ancestors, I guess it is odd that the Signless takes the supposedly “correct” position of advocating for Beforus where Kankri takes the “incorrect” position of trying to make it out to be a shithole. like what we’re being told is that the core personality of the “Ultimate Kankri” actually has nothing to do with justice at all; the thing driving Kankri forward is that no matter where he lives, no matter what privileges are thrust upon him, he’s never going to feel like he fits in. or even, perhaps, that the Seer of Blood’s power has nothing to do with seeing alternate truths, as we might have been led to believe, and everything to do with only being able to see suffering wherever you go?

i think to say the Brain Ghost Dirk can only exist because of a unique interaction between Dirk and Jake’s powers is misrepresentative of what being a Hero of the Heart aspect really means. while it’s true that the power of Hope is what allows the imaginary to become real, it’s important to keep in mind aspects aren’t just facets of the self, but facets of all reality; in much the same way anyone, Hero of Time or not, can have other selves in other timelines, splinters too are just a fact of existence. the Hero of Heart is just one whose quest is confronting and interacting with those splinters directly.

the very idea of the “Brain Ghost” is a demonstration of this fact. “ghost images” of people and things are sort of recurring characters in Homestuck, usually following an attempt to captchalogue or appearify something that’s not practically available at the time. but what’s important about these ghosts is that even if they’re not “actually”, or physically, real objects, they still carry the same essence; from Hussie’s own commentary, “This is another indication of the fact that [the scribblepad / sylladices in general / Paradox Space as a whole] is dealing in ideas, not material constructs.”

dream bubble ghosts are a further elaboration on this same idea; though they vary in the minutiae of timelines and alternate selves, each ghost contains the memory or idea, and thus true essence, of the “actual” physical body they are the image of. the only difference between this kind of ghost and the “Brain Ghost” is right there in the operative word; these memory-forms exist not as psychic bubble projections, but within the brain of the observer. but the key concept remains identical: just as alternate timeline ghosts may remember events differently but at remain the same person at their core, Jake’s “subjective” perception of Dirk may differ from Dirk’s own “objective” view of himself, but both of them are simply different iterations on the true idea that is Dirk.

which is probably why Heart and Mind form such a close but enigmatic pair! while the Mind aspect concerns itself with the “subject” who alters reality with every thought, the splinters of the Heart aspect are the “objects” which are altered every time they are observed. which is, in turn, probably the reasoning behind the infamous Schrodinger’s Nepeta, the close to 300 pages between Gamzee’s attack and the reveal that the cat is dead. (to take this particular train one station further; this, I suspect, may have also been partial inspiration for Meulin’s mysterious double nature). in a very real sense, the “soul” that the Heart aspect is so concerned with is just another word for an “observation”; a ghost is just one particular “observation” of that character’s life and death. but again, what’s essential here is that just as you don’t need to be a Hero of Mind to alter reality with your thoughts, you don’t need to be a Hero of Heart to be altered; it’s just that these Heroes are the ones with the most potential to observe these phenomena in action!

I guess that might also go some ways to explaining the link between the Heart and Void aspects? someone who is particularly vulnerable to being damaged by the gaze of others might seek out another whose power is obscuring the gaze…

lime-bloods:

so long as I’m selling the Beforans as direct reenactments of the ancestors, I guess it is odd that the Signless takes the supposedly “correct” position of advocating for Beforus where Kankri takes the “incorrect” position of trying to make it out to be a shithole. like what we’re being told is that the core personality of the “Ultimate Kankri” actually has nothing to do with justice at all; the thing driving Kankri forward is that no matter where he lives, no matter what privileges are thrust upon him, he’s never going to feel like he fits in. or even, perhaps, that the Seer of Blood’s power has nothing to do with seeing alternate truths, as we might have been led to believe, and everything to do with only being able to see suffering wherever you go?

I figure this is probably supposed to be in direct contrast to Karkat’s subsequent “ALTERNIA WAS FUCKING GREAT. / I DON’T EVEN CARE THAT MY BLOOD MADE ME A PARIAH”? possibly see also: Kankri having been executed and Karkat wanting nothing more to become an (thresh)executioner