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?