That Homestuck is “a Gnostic” story seems to be widespread knowledge, but I think there’s limited understanding as to what that actually entails. often you’ll hear that Roxy and Jade “have Gnostic themes” about them thanks to their chumhandles, but little elaboration on the matter.
The central cosmic conflict in Gnosticism is between two aspects of God, each with their own worlds; the feminine aspect, called ‘wisdom’ or Sophia, represents the world of the spiritual, while the ignorant masculine Yaldabaoth rules over the physical, the world of the flesh. This is also Homestuck’s central cosmic conflict (Yaldabaoth’s in-person appearance being but a small clue), and most readers will be able to identify the basic shapes these two forces take in the comic; the motherly female Muse oversees Space, and is locked in eternal combat with her brother the patriarchal Lord of Time.
It’s common to hear of Space and Time represented as the aspects of creation and destruction respectively, and this holds true to a point. But something that is crucial to understand is that while the Muse of Space is ostensibly our heroine, and the Lord of Time is our primary villain, creation and destruction are, in and of themselves, morally neutral acts. Indeed, the Muse’s ultimate spell is not to truly create anything, or even to put an end to the Lord’s destruction, but to condemn him to the same destruction for all eternity.
This is because, while creation versus destruction is the battlefield on which much of Homestuck takes place, Homestuck is only superficially “about” creation and destruction. The creation myth serves as a backdrop to the personal arcs of the characters, but also as a veil hanging over deeper themes.
A notable example of a force that obfuscates the morality of creation and destruction - and a force literally hidden behind a Veil of secrecy at that - is the Noble Circle of Horrorterrors. Described as “Evil Gods Who Oppose Skaia” and its ultimate goal of creation, in truth it is impossible to know for sure whether these gods are “evil” or not. That way lies madness, in much the same way trying to decode Homestuck as a morality story of creation versus destruction can never bear true fruit. If the 48 signs of the Alternian sky are to be believed, the Horrorterrors were themselves once creators; seemingly they only oppose creation now in order to prevent the rise of the Lord of Time, whose destructive tendencies they, too, fall victim to.
The Gnostic Lord of Time, Yaldabaoth, is not a destroyer. On the contrary, he’s a demiurge; a craftsman. Not a creator, per se, but one who takes materials and turns them into something else. As the axiom goes, there is essentially nothing new in paradox space. “[I]n this particular fictional realm, and especially where alchemy is concerned, the fundamental ideas the objects represent are more important than the objects themselves” (Homestuck: Book 3: Act 4,p. 335): something cannot be created from nothing, only transmuted from an existing list of ideas hard coded into reality.
This is what makes Yaldabaoth truly evil; not for destroying the spiritual world, but for transmuting it down from its pure essence into a corrupted form where sin and suffering are allowed to exist. And so too is this the sin of Yaldabaoth’s favourite protege Lord English. Homestuck’s worst kept secret is that Lord English’s tendency to destroy, and sometimes kill characters we by all rights shouldn’t care about, is not the thing that must be stopped. What must be rectified is what he has already done to reality. Beforus was once a peaceful, spiritual world, where the physically strong acted as protectors over the spiritually enlightened; but when English “rewrote everything” it became a planet where the dominantly male cool blooded castes subjugate the warmer castes, suppressing spirituality. And each subsequent world spawned from this corrupted universe would too be corrupted; merely killing Lord English would not be enough. A new, uncorrupted spiritual world - a foretold paradise planet - needs to be created.
As Homestuck exists in a fictional realm, the act of crafting a world out of ideas also becomes the act of crafting a story. This is why Scratch is called a “nefarious alt-author” (Homestuck: Book 4: Act 5 Act 1, p. 184), English “arguably is me [Andrew Hussie], but detached from the literal AH persona by several layers of symbolism” (Homestuck: Book 6: Act 5 Act 2 Part 2, p. 71), and their retelling of the ancestor story is “troll fanfiction”: Caliborn, as taught to him by Yaldabaoth, is telling a story where he is God, and everyone else is merely trapped playing the roles he assigns them. The purity of the blank page behind Homestuck, that “well of potential from which every conceivable possibility arises” accessible only to John after interacting with Caliborn’s ultimate weapon, is corrupted by the placement of words upon it.
Thus is the Homestuck cast’s preoccupation with “ascension”. To reach the god tiers is to become one with one’s dream body, something which “kind of operate[s] outside the normal time continuum” and can share information across all versions of a person; which is why the moon insignia of the dreamer appears on the chests of the sprites squared. This is the basis of the Ultimate Self, one’s pure essence as it exists in Plato’s world of ideas; the untarnished version of someone that exists outside of any fictionalised account of them, malevolent and otherwise.
Not to lose sight of the gendered conflict at the center of all of this; to say that the feminine aligns with the “good” spirit and the masculine with the “evil” flesh is not to say that the genders of our heroes places them on either side of some cosmic chess board. Vriska speculates that the game of Sburb seeks players “right around the cusp of sexual maturity”, going on to make the assumption that this is because Skaia has a breeding program in mind for its children from the beginning. But knowing that Sburb being about breeding is entirely a smoke screen, we can see that its fixation on pubescence isn’t about reproduction, or even about sex at all; what Skaia wants is heroes who haven’t yet fully formed a sexual identity. Ascending to godhood is intrinsically linked to the act of growing up, because at the cusp of adulthood heroes are at the perfect stage to shed off the evil flesh. This doesn’t necessarily mean shedding off maleness entirely, only the oppressive trappings of maleness established by Lord English as the patriarch of Alternia (and by his servants and disciples like Dave’s bro, who instill in children a toxic version of what masculinity should be); but it naturally makes perfect sense for our protagonist to be troubled by the overwhelming expectations of masculinity and tend toward femaleness instead.
As a final aside, viewing the primary threat in Homestuck as a masculine corrupting force, we can extrapolate parallels with various other forms of corruption and oppression . In as much as Jake serves as a proto-Lord English - Caliborn ’jacks Jake’s swagger’ just as much as he follows in the footsteps of Yaldabaoth - his habits of settling uninhabited islands and filling his grandiose homes with cultural artifacts looted from eastern tombs paints him as something of a coloniser; suggesting that Lord English’s corruption is in essence colonialism, a force that corrupts foreign cultures, forcing them to adhere to the coloniser’s own narrative, transmuting existing societies into strata of race, or blood colour, or binary genders. The Alternians could be said to have not only been corrupted but “colonised”.
An alternative, perhaps more modern, reinterpretation of the Gnostic masculine-versus-feminine conflict might even reinterpret Sophia as precolonial androgyny, and Yaldabaoth as a gendering force; a narrative not incompatible with that presented in Plato’s Symposium, where primordial androgynes are torn into gendered halves by the worship-hungry Zeus, just as English takes the very ideas of our heroes and splits them into multiple fictions, across scratches, across timelines, through his dominion over Time. In either case, it is the Lord of Time’s enforcement of his gender narrative upon reality that forms the central conflict of the comic; to the point where escaping gender, escaping the confines of the comic, and becoming the true version of oneself all become synonymous goals; the goal of knowing the truth behind the lie, attaining the Gnostic gnosis.
