ohhhhh… by mistakenly understanding the “yellow yard” as a “YELLOW LAWN RING”, Karkat is in fact positioning the crossing of the yard as the irreversible crossing of an event horizon!
oh, my god. when a house inside a black hole is the symbol of Homestuck, the inescapable gravitational pull of a black hole becomes representative of the very force that is keeping you ‘stuck’ at home
ohhhhh… by mistakenly understanding the “yellow yard” as a “YELLOW LAWN RING”, Karkat is in fact positioning the crossing of the yard as the irreversible crossing of an event horizon!
this aligns very neatly with my prior assessment on the matter - that the lawnrings separating suburban homes are emblematic of the borders separating different realities - and completes one of Homestuck’s classic chains of iterative escalation; just as each home is surrounded by a lawn ring and each session of Sburb is surrounded by the “Furthest Ring”, reality itself would naturally have an even Furthester Ring insulating it from what’s outside!
but I can’t help but think even further back to the synonymity between the “yellow lawn ring” and the comic’s other ‘yellow rings’. if the yellow brick road is a black hole’s event horizon, then seemingly we have to make the logical leap that the yellow Rings of Life and Void are also in their own ways the event horizons of a black hole. so, huh?
I sense a degree of singularness inherent to the concept of Life in Homestuck… I’ve mused before about how Heart and Life are like different approaches to the same philosophical question - while a Heart is a persisting essence which follows a character throughout multiple iterations and creates a persistent ‘arc’ across multiple timelines, a Life is exactly that, beginning with birth and ends with death, singular - and a similar sort of dichotomy emerges between Life and what we are led to believe is its counterpart, Doom. whereas Doomedness is about offshoots, and Sollux as a character is defined by his plurality, just one cog in a vast machine, one of the very first things we learn about Feferi is that she’s “the only of [her] kind known to possess [the most noble blood]”. (which it may be worth noting is not even true.)
so when we learn that the Condesce “could extend life, but never restore it”, it’s not just a unique caveat to Meenah’s abilities, but an indication of what it actually means to control “Life”? to have the ability to heal, but never to generate (hey, just like how everything Meenah gives birth to dies). Jane’s abilities are similarly “limited to a one time only use per individual” - like a Maid’s job is to flutter around fixing things that are broken, never really exerting any real power or influence for themselves.
and insofar as Life is associated with a Hero’s literal lifespan, that’s the exact same kind of trade-off going on in Alternia’s class system; the longer your Life, the less populous your caste is (and as such the less you generate), and the less psychically open you are to communion with your peers. it’s being part of a machine or it’s being lonely
something thats bugging me is what the latest chapter implies. like, are the sprites manifestations brought about by the Point to guide vriska, as per their literal reasons for existing? cuz the convo between dp and jr implies that this davepeta IS the same one, and not just a manifestation of the point. i guess like you said its not hugely important, and sort of the point, but it does make me wonder. like, were all the sprites drawn into the point, much like their supposed urge to die on the battlefield? or is this all just the Point's psychic manifestation for vriska?
this is kind of the unspoken point to that last ask i answered. the sprites ARE manifestations of the plot point, but they also ARE the “real” sprites because a “real” sprite IS a psychic manifestation. in homestuck all versions of a character add up to a single unified vision, yadda yadda, but this is especially true of sprites because sprites are just ghost images that represent a person (like how a sprite in computer graphics merely “represents” an object) rather than being living people in and of themselves. if sburb can spontaneously manifest a sprite whenever they need one to appear, and that’s always the “real” one, there’s no reason the plot point manifesting that same sprite for different purposes wouldn’t also be the “real” one, at least as far as i’m concerned.
i don’t particularly prefer the “psychic manifestation” phrasing anyway because i don’t think it’s productive to think of the plot point versions of characters as any less “real” than the people living outside of the plot point. they’re all characters living out their roles in stories; it’s just that the plot point is a highly condensed story-within-a-story with a highly specialised purpose, so it has a smaller scope than the story it’s nested within.
the plot point is a “hell” in a figurative sense - confronting vriska with her worst nightmares - but also in the very literal sense that it’s swarming with the shades of the dead. are these the “real” spirits of the people vriska killed in her youth, or just manifestations of her guilt? the distinction isn’t necessarily important; for the sake of the story being told we as readers need to treat them as real, or else vriska’s penance becomes meaningless. i think it’s wise to treat the sprites the same way - being spirit guides, an underworld-equivalent like the plot point is almost a natural sort of habitat for them.
i’ve never imagined the sprites literally being “drawn to” the singularity bc i’ve been taking davepeta at their word that they really did just manifest inside spontaneously the moment they were needed. but i do think the comparison to the Battlefield is interesting bc the black hole / Skaia have always been mirrored to each other as the cosmic centrepoints of their respective mediums… and Skaia being the fountain of all creative potential it does kind of feel like the sprites returning there is in a sense returning to the place of their creation like spirits returning to the underworld. so I think there’s definitely something to it
trapping Lord English in a black hole is poetic justice, so in retrospect it’s obvious that the narrative forces behind his punishment would be the same as those behind the punishment he gives out. but the Rapture - the inevitable gathering of characters at a black hole, a tradition dating all the way back to Problem Sleuth- should also be thought of as cosmically analogous to the synonymously-named Reckoning: so it only makes sense that when a character is sucked into a black hole, it’s analogous to being returned to the hole they were born from, just as the Reckoning sends the characters to the places of their birth (and just like how cherubs return to the black holes they were literally born from to reproduce, generation after generation).
and now that Beyond Canon’s forces all convene once more at the singularity of a black hole, setting the scene for yet another Rapture, it becomes especially clear that this meteor they’re all fighting over so intently is in fact the same meteor where the trolls were ectobiologically born. Vriska is tugged at not only by the gravity of her old toxic cycles of behaviour, the gravity of her oppressive childhood home, but by the gravity of the very literal rock that gave birth to her. the more layers we peel away, the more and more literally the Plot Point seems to be a cocoon for Vriska to be reborn from, if only she can escape that gravitational pull of the past.
remember, too, that like a cherub returning to the black hole of its birth, this meteor was once where Kanaya wished to seed the next generation of the troll race - just one small additional nuance to the fact that she must now defend it with her life from the encroaching forces of Jane’s regime.
and even Kanaya’s own Space symbol seems to take on new significance in this light. etymologically speaking, the starry arms of a 'galaxy’ are mother’s milk, befitting the aspect of creation; but the black hole that pulls the spiral arms together, too, is now the comfort of the womb. so it should be emphasised for a second time that Beyond Canon’s “constellatory quartet” - three Heroes of Space and one of Void - are convening now at their own black hole, surrounded by the spiral arms of a galaxy, pulled in by the immense gravitational influence of a monolithic entity simply called Home.
rereading this while i was looking for something re: the yellow lawn ring somehow immediately reminded me of another line in the comic about watering lawn rings, from the second part of the Meenah walkaround:
No self respecting Alternian troll kid would dare keep a dry, unwatered lawn ring. Letting the grass outside your hive turn yellow is just begging to get yourself culled.
and obviously that second line is a callback to the first (about one and a half thousand pages later) but it strikes me as noteworthy that trolls having to water their lawns even gets so many as two references in the comic. like. huh. okay. homestuck actually is, textually, satirising the very concept of a suburb. you’re telling me the grass in troll neighbourhoods doesn’t even naturally grow like that ?!?
taking colour symbolism this seriously is a dangerous road to go down, but I can’t help but wonder…
since the lawn ring is a barrier keeping people apart, is “Letting the grass outside your hive turn yellow” a warning about what happens when you let those barriers break down? after all, a yellow lawn ring looks very much like an invitation to come in, in the form of a yellow brick road.
“just begging to get yourself culled” is the paranoia that the lawn ring turning yellow means Lord English is at your door ready to kill you. the suburb/subgrub is an artifice designed to prevent interpersonal connection, and Lord English is the spectre of the homeowner’s association making sure you keep those barriers watered and well-kept
so the black hole turning green at the end of Act 7 as it absorbs the rays of the green sun is a visual symbol for Lord English being trapped in his own eternal suburban hellscape? like a figurative salt circle keeping him bound inside the event horizon
experimenting with ways to bring my more link-heavy posts over to twitter without losing all that extra information. so here’s a little bit of esoteric web weaving
I've been really enjoying your posts on black holes and homes as sources of gravity (as I understand the posts so far). Out of curiosity, what do you make of page 5404, where Drunk Rose describes in drunk babble that Gravitation itself is somehow related to "the intrinsic nature of nothingness"? Combined with a few of the screenshots you've taken, it feels like you're hitting on something close to Void as a thematic presence in Homestuck to me, but bugger me if I know what it is!
My instinct is that Rose has reached the same conclusion I have: that ‘gravity’, as a metonym for the influence of a black hole, is just the inevitable pull towards oblivion. I think she’s using “nothingness” as a euphemism for “space”, over which gravity has dominion, but through this we can start to appreciate how the concepts of Space and Void weave into each other (“nothingness”, “space” and “void” all being functional synonyms).
Understanding that Rose’s lapse into alcoholism is her own way of succumbing to 'gravity’ - a pull towards toxic familial cycles which not only evokes Vriska’s own “addiction” to breaking 8-balls but also literally surrounds the drinker in a dark pocket - her allusions to the Void and gravity here are also tinged by her own experience and outlook as a Seer of Light (who heavily relied on a magic cue ball as her source; a fountain of information which is symbolically opposed to the information-consuming black hole). In particular, the idea that the gravity/knowledge contained within the apple was “for BIDDEN..!” feels like it harkens back to Rose’s own quest for forbidden knowledge, which led ultimately to her first foray into the dark. (Like a sun collapsing in on itself, in her hunger for information Rose becomes the black hole in a simultaneously Biblical-and-Newtonian fall-from-grace-cum-moment-of-inspiration. Oh, hey, exactly like Kanaya said would happen!)
But through allusions to Adam and Eve, and the plucking of primordial ideas “from the void” or “the abyss of coinsciousness”, we also get the sense that nothingness is the substrate from which things are born - in a manner of speaking, “the Void” here is an ideological incestuous slurry. Just as the void consists of the aspects of creation so “closely woven together […] that they are barely separable”, all things are eventually pulled by forces of gravity (or inevitability, or Time, or whatever name suits them in the context), manifested as a black hole, into nothingness… just to be mixed up and recombined again in Paradox Space’s great masturbatory cycle of life and death, like English being born again and again in countless universes. And what Rose “take[s] for granned”, about the ease of creating complex objects and the difficulty of creating simple ones, is the exact opposite problem to what the Rogue of Void experiences.
I don’t know if I’m HAPPY with these answers, per se… Rose’s rant is so rich with imagery I feel like I should be able to give you one, cohesive answer rather than 2-3 smaller fragmented ones. Perhaps that’s sort of the point - in her drunkenness, Rose has access to this veritably spaghetti heap of interwoven ideas, but lacks the vision to line them up into a unified Point? But I can’t help but feel like that’s a cop-out.
Rose’s assertion that “thess stories [about Adam and Eve / Isaac Newton] are acutually bullshit. They didn’t happen in realaity.” feels pointed, and I can’t help but wonder - in view of references to gravitation and the void - if this lends itself toward my notion that the events depicted in Caliborn’s masterpiece are basically pure allegory… but it just as easily lends itself to the overall thesis that it’s ideas, and not literal events, that are Homestuck’s main characters
follow up: the line about "voids keeping neighbors apart" in particular, for example, calls to mind the Hemospectrum. You talk about SBAHJ as paradox information originating from itself, and interestingly, the Hemospectrum is another example of this. Equius inherits all his knowledge of the hemospectrum and class based society, and then in becoming part of LE, he (however unwillingly, since Arquius doesn't seem to have the same will LE/Scratch do) becomes the very source of all that detailed intimate understanding of the differences between troll castes--ie; the information that "keeps neighbors apart" on Alternia.
Totally! and Alternia is defined by these methods of keeping trolls apart; not just through a stratified society or isolated neighbourhoods, by through the vast expanses of time separating trolls from their ancestors, or the complex systems that keep them separated from the processes of their own of procreation and childrearing.
I think probably the most apt point of comparison for the circular nature of Equius’ investment in caste hierarchy, though, is Caliborn’s relationship to gender. Given that there was a version of the hemospectrum pre-Lord English - on Beforus, where it was “[t]he jo8 of each 8lood caste […] to serve the needs of all those 8elow it.” - the establishment of Alternia’s caste system represents not only the fulfilment of a self-sustaining idea, but also the corruption of an existing system which was intended to draw trolls together; just as Caliborn turns Calliope’s game of unity and cooperation into a battle of gender supremacy.
I've got a pet theory that's kicked around in my brain ever since it landed there. I believe Mituna's big event was probably the creation of the ~ath server in the outer ring. You've got some amazing analysis and writings here, so I'm curious what you might think :3
I would say nothing necessarily suggests this as far as I know, but it’s not totally implausible. my assessment of the Mituna situation is that, lacking any further information, we should probably assume it happened the same way Sollux and the Helmsman’s sacrifice happened, overexerting himself to move a vessel of some kind. But it’s also very easy to imagine that kind of power being exerted to rip information from one server to another like Rose was able to do with magic.
I always liked to think that the ~ATH server being connected to the god tier clock meant that the clock is what ~ATH software uses to determine when things are dead. so even though we know where the clock itself comes from, I guess an Heir of Doom makes as much sense as anyone to be the guy who hooked it up to a programming language. it would be funny if the reason Mituna doesn’t know if he’s a god tier or not is because his accident involved fucking with that clock in some way
I’ve previously linked Cetus’ voraciousness to the Lalonde tendency toward alcoholism (especially that of Rose’s mother, the denizens manifesting the heroes’ parents as they do), but through Rose’s treatise on forbidden knowledge it also comes across that Cetus reflects Rose’s appetite for knowledge. in Andrew’s words, Light is “about information” (Book 3, p. 181), and since the rain Rose is expected to play to repopulate the Land of Light and Rain’s seas is genetic information, it’s implicitly information that Cetus has been gobbling up.
so long as we’re saying that Cetus is a substance addict, though, and that information can be contained in water, it seems the intuitive next logical step that alcohol is also information, which seems to be what’s being communicated by Roxy’s bottle of genetic slime - even though practically speaking alcohol only seems to obfuscate information? but there are superimposed juxtapositions here; Rose’s interest in necromancy versus Sburb’s interest in procreation, the insistence that gravity is “nothingness” and yet nothingness is where ideas come from… so alcohol, like its troll “soporific” equivalent, is a medium in which information is dissolved, but not destroyed. (just like a black hole!)
in fact Rose seems to indirectly invoke alcohol’s origins in real-world alchemy - the science of dissolving, rendering and re-constituting materials - during Openbound, when she first starts experimenting with distillation:
DAVE: what in the sweet religious name of jesus h dick are you doing with all these bottles ROSE: Just a little alchemy. […] DAVE: youre a pretty good hike from the alchemiters ROSE: The alchemy I’m practicing is a little more old fashioned. ROSE: You know, there was a time on Earth when alchemy didn’t refer to a process whereby a large device used game constructs to materialize some idealized version of an object out of thin air. ROSE: Alchemists used to experiment with various substances to transmute them into something more valuable.
I’ve previously linked Cetus’ voraciousness to the Lalonde tendency toward alcoholism (especially that of Rose’s mother, the denizens manifesting the heroes’ parents as they do), but through Rose’s treatise on forbidden knowledge it also comes across that Cetus reflects Rose’s appetite for knowledge. in Andrew’s words, Light is “about information” (Book 3, p. 181), and since the rain Rose is expected to play to repopulate the Land of Light and Rain’s seas is genetic information, it’s implicitly information that Cetus has been gobbling up.
so long as we’re saying that Cetus is a substance addict, though, and that information can be contained in water, it seems the intuitive next logical step that alcohol is also information, which seems to be what’s being communicated by Roxy’s bottle of genetic slime - even though practically speaking alcohol only seems to obfuscate information? but there are superimposed juxtapositions here; Rose’s interest in necromancy versus Sburb’s interest in procreation, the insistence that gravity is “nothingness” and yet nothingness is where ideas come from… so alcohol, like its troll “soporific” equivalent, is a medium in which information is dissolved, but not destroyed. (just like a black hole!)
in fact Rose seems to indirectly invoke alcohol’s origins in real-world alchemy - the science of dissolving, rendering and re-constituting materials - during Openbound, when she first starts experimenting with distillation:
DAVE: what in the sweet religious name of jesus h dick are you doing with all these bottles ROSE: Just a little alchemy. […] DAVE: youre a pretty good hike from the alchemiters ROSE: The alchemy I’m practicing is a little more old fashioned. ROSE: You know, there was a time on Earth when alchemy didn’t refer to a process whereby a large device used game constructs to materialize some idealized version of an object out of thin air. ROSE: Alchemists used to experiment with various substances to transmute them into something more valuable.
following the visual thread laid down by the bottle-o-slime, and the conception that alcohol is a dissolving agent like a troll’s sopor slime, I get the impression that a bottle is also a form of cocoon - especially in the sense that Rose finds herself gravitating towards (her mother’s) alcoholism in the same way a troll gravitates back towards their own cocoon.
it might feel a bit like I’m starting to tangle up analogies given that I’ve already previously suggested a mailbox is a cocoon; but given that Roxy uses bottles as part of her MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE MODUS, could it not also be suggested that a bottle is a KIND of mailbox?!?!? someone let me know if i’m going a bridge too far here.
Jaspersprite, lacking the presence of mind to properly understand the physics of Rose’s quest, very sweetly articulates it as a web-weave of vague, tangentially-related concepts - which I can’t help but compare to the drunken Rose’s ramblings about gravity and apples. like maybe I was right, then, when I suggested that the incoherence of the apple rant was part of the point - she’s expressing a tangle of ideas that she lacks the sobriety to properly make sense of, and thus it’s up to the reader to figure out what all these disconnected ideas have in common?
“A beam of light [is] a long piece of yarn” / “And the way that it shakes is the same as what makes a song” is also a pretty ham-handed allusion to string theory, and while I lack the advanced quantum physics background to properly parse what THAT could possibly be about - surely it can only lead us back in the direction of gravity?
so long as I’ve been talking gravity, it feels like I’m obviously missing something by not talking about the Green Sun, which formed the gravitational center of Homestuck’s cosmos long before black holes became part of the equation. it’s emblematic of Lord English, obviously, the villain who keeps our heroes gravitationally bound to their homes, but that felt too simplistic… I think I’ve hit on something more solid, though.
Cascade, part 6.
in the sense that the Green Sun - being composed of the rendered-down remains of both of Homestuck’s universes - is a very literal representation of the comic’s incestuous slurry of ideas, Dave and Rose emerging from the Sun’s radioactive green sludge very much reads as their being reconstituted from ectoplasm. indeed: Hussie suggested years ago that to “die spectacularly in an explosion of green fire” is actually a requirement for reaching the god tiers without a dream self, and while this doesn’t turn out to be exactly true, the central premise remains; the old self must be immolated completely to make way for the new self. in this exact same way, trolls find themselves gravitating toward the cocoons they were born from and are completely destroyed via explosion in the process of ascension - for Dave and Rose, the Green Sun is the figurative birth-cocoon they return to in order to be broken down into slime and built back up again.
(so it’s interesting, at the very least, that the very same black hole that usurped the Green Sun’s position as the center of reality is now the cocoon Vriska Serket finds herself trapped within - complete with lain-thick imagery of fire and death!)
compare as well the Matriorb and Tumor, obvious visual twins which also serve the same purpose as malignant growths which must kill their previous host so as to give rise to a new brood. for Rose, in particular, the gravity that keeps the suburban family unit together - the Green Sun’s gravity - is also the gravity that pulls her toward the familial role Sburb has lined up for her, that of the mother. and the icons of the Green Sun hidden, womb-like, within the guts of Rose’s planet tell us everything we need to know about the role the Green Sun is supposed to play in this motherhood destiny.
(from Hussie’s commentary in Book 5, p. 271: “This is another one of those things that makes it feel like this quest is narratively what is demanded of her […] it’s supposed to feel that way to her, and has a strange sense of obligatory gravity surrounding it.”)
Scratch’s deception regarding the Green Sun then takes on a characteristically insidious subtext: he’s tricking Rose into giving birth. and not just to the Green Sun, or to Lord English, but - in the characteristically incestuous, cyclical nature of things in Homestuck - to her own ascended self! and as such, in the inverse: when Rose flies out to the Furthest Ring believing that she’s about to defy the role Sburb has laid out for her by aborting the Tumor, she’s also unknowingly setting out to abort herself - a “suicide mission” in more ways than just one.
the whole gravity thing has kind of been staring me in the face from my very earliest post on the subject - where I fail to even comment on the fact that Dave conflates Dragon Ball Z’s “Gravity Machine” and “Hyperbolic Time Chamber” by referring to a “hyper gravity chamber”. (of course, the real-life relationship between gravity and time as a plot device is seeded all the way back in Problem Sleuth, which I’m also yet to mention - though possibly because PS infamously gets the relationship backwards.)
but I honestly think the centrality of gravity as a concept might be even more deep-rooted in Homestuck than that: understanding that at the very fundamental level the name Homestuck is supposed to evoke the name Earthbound, doesn’t it make complete sense that the force keeping the characters ‘earth bound’ would be the very same one keeping them 'home stuck’?
