wait this is driving me a lil bit crazy… we know Rose’s MEOW code was written in a journal, presumably after the interview with Jaspers in which he told her his secret. so, presumably, Rose was under the delusion that when she was filling a journal with the word ‘MEOW’ she was actually transcribing some incredible secret Jaspers had revealed to her.
but Tavros, Aradia, Terezi and Vriska wrote their codes in Flarp books. which means that when they wrote them they were probably under the delusion they were filling in Flarp books. right. so were they filling in character sheets? like Vriska thinks her Flarp character is called Mindfang but when you look in her book does it actually just say the word 8R8K over and over again. was the entire Flarp campaign between these four trolls literally just a shared delusion
given the subtext of the Flarp game being that the kids are reenacting the lives of their ancestors, it’s also interesting that the “t1ck” quirk Tavros uses while under his trance retroactively became the quirk associated with his ancestor… like it’s being suggested that the ancestor myth, that trolls have the destinies of their forebears literally genetically coded into them, is actually true? and that the act of “role play” - or perhaps more specifically role play that leads to the reenacting of the traumas that encoded these genes in the genes in the first place - is the trance that allows these recessive ideas to bubble up into consciousness…
(to say nothing of the real missed fact here, which is that Doc Scratch so typically arranged for his own genetic code to be written in the traumas of children)
footnote: the idea that trauma can cause epigenetic changes which alter gene expression is a more recent theory than Homestuck can account for, but… being the man with a nuclear bomb for a head certainly makes Doc Scratch a pretty viable candidate for someone who causes traumas that alter your genes
