so i think the setting of Earth C is MASSIVELY underrated, ok? like. jane and jake run corporations they presumably do genuine business through. i don’t think Earth C has a simply capitalist society. It’s more likely to have elements of capitalism but with universal basic income and a robust social safety net.
As such there’d be no need for work and all of Skaianet and Crockercorp’s staff would be volunteers, and why wouldn’t they volunteer? They’re companies run by the literal gods that created them and both of the heads have demonstrable market savvy in other lives or while being cyborgs.
Also they have literal magic superpowers they can use to create ideas out of nothing. It would be stupidly easy to make a killing by just selling stuff in that context. Both companies would probably have giveaways and all sorts of marketing campaigns.
Ultimately what I’m saying is, in Earth C, these companies would act something like Disney or Marvel in our U.S. society–as cultural powerhouses. They’d also be means to introduce any kind of product or memetic idea into the world’s culture a particular writer found valuable.
And the culture of Earth C’s world is somewhat malleable, as the Snapchats showed us. If bigotry still exists to some extent, then the kids potentially become sort of…Super-Liberals, with kindhearted values that will be listened to by all the adults around them.
That create art that will be paid mind through, and appreciated by the mainstream through like professional companies under their own name. And these are kids just starting to get a handle on superpowers with near limitless utility, meaning they’ll only get craftier and more capable over time.
It’s just such an irresistibly rich setting.
What I’m trying to get at, in the end, is that someday in just the couple-years gap between Act 7, Credits, and..whatever happens in the epilogue, it’s totally plausible that, like
Dirk like…accidentally distributed too good a memetic marketing scheme through the media arm of skaianet, and ended up creating a thriving smuppet porn industry that dominated the entertainment sector of…
the consorts.
You could even write compelling character drama around it.
Dave coming to grips with the stunning revelation that Dirk had delivered on the promise of raising a small flock of bots of hardcore soft plush aficionados, but his bots were…literally living and breathing and ADORABLE fucking amphibian idiots. All like, buying dicknose masks and smuppet ass strap-ons and shit.
And Dirk just now realizing this could be potentially uncomfortable for Dave and freaking out internally about it, already crafting plans to make Consorts think smuppets were gross as hell actually, already trying to figure out how to apologize–
Only for Dave to bust a gut laughing and think its the funniest thing ever. Because Dirk isn’t Bro, and this isn’t creepy or mean-spirited or malicious its just having fun with how objectively hilarious the premise is.
Oh also Jake gets them into wrestling. The consorts I mean. So the consorts are into wrestling with smuppet paraphernaliaon, specifically. In fact Jake used Skaianet to distribute Hope-produced magic sexy stamina-restoring jack off bro crystals to the consorts considerably surfer dudebro subdemographic. That’s a whole thing, too.
“You sold a magic crystal that restores amphibian sex vitality perpetually, with magic literally powered by two salamander bros engaged in the intense spiritual practice of gay smuppet wrestlewanking?” Karkat says, horrified at the sheer power Skaianet’s marketing arm wields. Jake is a powerful man.
Also shameless as hell. Dave has a freudian slip and suggests a human-troll version and everybody dies but Jake, who is grinning and being very loud about what a good idea that is in this diner.
I have completely given up on my tsundere endeavor to claim that i don’t like JakeDirk so here’s a scene from the second chapter of An Ocean Between, go read it
oh my god this is incredible thank you so so much for drawing my fic!!
me, with 100 unfinished works: hey I should draw Jake and Dirk “sleeping together because nightmares are easier to handle like this” stuff inspired by aesthetic stuff i found on tumblr
Songs for Rune, an album about me (Rune) from artists and musicians who brought you Homestuck…
Is name your price for 24 hours! All of Bandcamp’s proceeds today go towards The Transgender Law Center. They take some amount out of every purchase, and that amount today goes to a great cause. The rest of it goes to me!
But since I want everyone to hear it so much, you can pay $0, and I will be glad too! As long as someone who could use some cheering up today can get their ears on this album, everyone can pay nothing.
Spread the word!
This is today!
Guys this album is so good! Y’all should check it out 😀
Commissioned work for @oceanboydirk! Thank you so much for giving me this prompt. I deeply apologize for turning your simple and great request into whatever the actual good christ this convoluted thing is.
(It’s 12,000 words of post-canon dirkjake set early on in their re-established relationship while everyone is still settling in and figuring out the shape of their of their new forever. It’s awkward and full of pesterlogs and yes, nsfw as hell, enjoy.)
You probably weren’t expecting an essay length answer to this question. So like let there be no doubt at all from this point onwards this is exactly the kind of content you can legitimately expect from this blog. This is who I am. I’m sorry.
Also, you’re welcome.
Yes, Dirk is a furry. And his relationship to furries shows us a lot about his parallels and similarities to one Rose Lalonde. Who is also a furry.
Let’s get into this.
Dirk is interested in furries to some extent, and finds the aesthetic appealing on some level. I mean, look at this. I can’t even count how many pictures of muscley horse dudes there are here. The dude isn’t exactly subtle. To quote Jake…
He dodges, and badly at that. To Dirk, swole bunny men represent something to hide–an interest he has that he cannot honestly incorporate into his cool, stoic, Above It All Persona. Not even through the hyper-sincere irony he tells Jane about. It’s something to hide, which means that at his core it’s something that matters to him.
And hey, you know who else is very much not shy about plastering her interests where anyone can see for her own pleasure?
As plenty of people have noted recently, there’s no heterosexual explanation for this. I’d already categorize this as falling into the spectrum of anthropomorphization we talk about as Furry–if you disagree that’s fine, though I do know furries who like this kind of thing. The point is that like Dirk, Rose knows what she likes, and like Dirk, Rose likes some weird shit.
On this side of the argument, though–showing that the characters like this furry stuff through their own characterization–Dirk gets a lot more content than Rose does. But Rose’s relationship with furry is confirmed much more intensely than Dirk’s on the other side of this argument: through their relationships to their Splinters.
In both cases, they’re happy to pretend that furry stuff doesn’t interest them at all, and part of their approach to doing so is either joking about others being interested in it or actively playing up their resentment for it. Either way, the implication they send is that they themselves are Not Interested.
This is a lie, and is to be ruthlessly exploited for comedy, which Homestuck does magnificently well.
Both Dirk and Rose are very invested in seeming Above the kind of self-indulgent identity play that Furry tends to encompass. Intense sincerity of expression bothers to them even as it appeals, because the images they want to project to the people they care about is one of aloof, self-aware, competently critical collectedness. One could say it bothers BECAUSE it appeals.
Which is the exact reason Rose is so annoyed by Jasprose. Jasprose acts as Rose would without the self-awareness she uses to present only the carefully crafted persona she wants other people to see. Jasprose doesn’t think about what others think of her at all. Jasprose thinks in terms of self-indulgence.
A self-indulgence explicitly linked to their status as full-blown, unabashed Furries. Jasprose, by her very being, brings all of Rose’s hidden words and feelings to Light, not being shy at all about sharing them and indulging whatever desire is on her mind.
She mixes cat terminology with flirting, stressing her identity as someone who is a furry and loving every second of it. Davepeta even draws the distinction between her and Rose, noting that Jasprose owns who she is and acts more honestly about it.
But there are genuinely harmless ways that Arquis DOES reflect Dirk’s interest, and those are worth unpackaging. Specifically, there’s the way AR describes himself finally becoming happy.
And yeah someone could nibble with this wording and say well actually Equius likes horses so maybe its him and I actually couldn’t be less interested in trying to explain why Dirk’s character already incorporates an absolutely Furry level of enjoyment of horses so here’s his room again.
So basically Dirk and Rose are interested in furry stuff to some extent but won’t really admit it. They wouldn’t admit it to you if you asked them or anything.
I think this is really fascinating and that they share this particular nuance of characterization so completely is fantastic. Even Dirk’s double face palm and Rose’s pillow hiding feel really similar to me in the sentiment of mortified frustration it gets across.
And all this really stresses their similarities and makes Roxy’s line emphasizing how similar Rose and Dirk are hit home all the harder. I wanted to ramble about that for a while. God I love these kids what was I talking about again?
Oh yeah furries. So Rose and Dirk are both furries but neither of them would CALL themselves furries in public.
Yet. The thing is, this girl exists:
Give Jade like, one birthday party where she decides she wants everyone to have a furry party and draw up fursonas together, and we’re good to go. There’s pretty much no circumstances under which I doubt Jade’s power to get all her friends to stop hiding an interest they ALL KNOW DEEP DOWN they share with her but keep pushing away out of a dumb point of pride.
It’ll be great I promise someone write this fic ok thanks in advance. Anyway yeah give Jade like a year after they get to Earth C and she’ll get them all on the same page. By which I mean all, not just Dirk and Rose.
Jane’s actually the only main character who hasn’t expressed any interest in furries at any point in the story to my memory, and she’s already been willing to play around with trollsonas. Which means at some point in the context of eternity these kids are going to get the hell over themselves and draw some fursonas. And if they don’t, Jade will make sure they will.
So yeah. Every human kid in Homestuck is a furry. Also every living troll, and Callie. Probably all their subjects too frankly.
The two Yaldabaoths, Dramatic Tension & The Diegetic Reader (That’s You!)
[Spoilers for Earthbound:Beginnings, Earthbound, & Mother 3]
Most know by now that Earthbound is referenced every time we say the word “Homestuck”. It’s built into the name: To be Stuck at Home. To be Bound to Earth.
And fittingly for a reference which such pervasive impact on our understanding of the comic, Homestuck styles itself as a spiritual successor to Earthbound in a number of ways.
Both Earthbound and Homestuck begin with a set of four kids who go on an adventure together. Both feature kids with psychic powers, friendship, and the meaning of growing up.
But there are three particular similarities to Homestuck that I want to present you with here. In these three areas, Homestuck and Earthbound/Mother are notably alike:
The Characters:
1) Both feature a unique execution of dramatic tension and narrative stakes for the characters.
The Player:
2) Engage in heavily metatextual, diegetic relationships between the World/Story and The Player/Reader.
The Antagonists:
3) Are God-Like, Authoritarian powers that cannot engage with ideas. In other words, they operate as Yaldabaoths.
These antagonists are who I want to talk about first. We will proceed from number 3 up to number 1, talking about the context of the games and tying it into the comic further as we go.
I’ll ask you to be patient with me if you don’t see much about Homestuck at first–there’s a lot of setup work to do.
Without further ado, let’s begin.
3) The Antagonists.
Side A) Earthbound — The War on Giygas.
Earthbound is the story of a boy named Ness, and his neighbor, Pokey Minch. One day, a meteor lands in their town, a time-traveler called Buzz Buzz appears from within. Buzz Buzz tells Ness he has come from a bad future, where an alien overlord named Giygas has cast the world into eternal darkness. Only Ness and his prophecized friends can stop Giygas.
From then on Earthbound is mostly a fun, sweet adventure romp for our Protagonists. Pokey goes on an adventure of his own, acting like a cruel child whilst striking deals with agents of Giygas and steadily gaining more and more power, both in business and through the dark forces Giygas employs.
Then we skip ahead to the very end of Earthbound. Where we get one of the most horrific and memorable boss sequences in gaming.
Giygas is explicitly unfathomable, indescribable: Giygas is Eldritch in the true “Man was never meant to see this” sort of way. Giygas isn’t explicitly A God, but rather an alien. But he certainly acts like a God. His influence makes inanimate objects animate, makes animals aggressive, lures people into cults and evil deeds.
He’s tapped into the centers of power and wealth in society. Giygas is nowhere, and yet everywhere. He is, in short, the God of the material world Earthbound’s kids wander through. Their Yaldabaoth.
And interestingly, as with Yaldabaoth, Pokey describes Giygas as being “an all-mighty Idiot”–unaware of himself or what’s happening around him.
Giygas shares similarities with Bastian and Caliborn, too–in Earthbound: Beginnings, he’s driven insane by a song that reminds him of his mother. Like Bastian, Giygas has connotations of warped, eternal childhood.
But unlike Bastian, Giygas does not escape his damnation until he dies.
And there are fates even worse than death. Such as the fate reserved for Pokey Minch, who against all odds, is the more interesting of the two–and the more relevant for Homestuck.
Let’s talk about Mother 3.
Side B) Mother 3 — No crying until the end.
Mother 3 is not as happy a game as Earthbound. Where Earthbound concentrated it’s gloom and despair into intense climaxes while being generally upbeat, Mother 3 is bittersweet and tragic throughout–though still plenty beautiful and joyful when it wants to be.
Like Homestuck, it has an unusual structure of Acts–8 instead of 7, but also of variable lengths, including a chapter that takes up almost half the game. Playable characters vary with each section, but the bulk of the game features Lucas, his dog Boney, and their friends Duster and Kumatora. So again: Four protagonists.
Set in the post-apocalyptic Nowhere Islands, Mother 3 tells the story of the fascist, totalitarian Pig Mask Army’s encroachment onto the idyllic, peaceful lives of the Nowhere Island natives.
As it turns out, the Pig Mask Army is led by the megalomaniacal dictator Pokey (Japanese name “Porky”) Minch, who discovers the ability to travel spacetime and escapes the final battle against Giygas.
Since then, he’s traveled countless worlds and lived through millennia, conquering and exploiting all unfortunate enough to be caught in his way.
Now, one interesting parallel about Pokey is what he does to the world he rules over. Just Lord English does to the Troll’s universe–and more indirectly, to both Human universes–Pokey manipulates and exploits The Nowhere Islands through a number of tools.
I note these similarities mostly because through Pokey we get a direct linking between the idea of a God-Like Yaldabaoth figure and the idea of a tyrannical, authoritarian dictator.
This is an area of Lord English’s insidious evil mostly delivered to the audience through implication and background information, so I think it’s worth the time to draw it into focus.
And the similarities between their atrocities might give us some context between the similarities at the end of their stories. Because, again like Lord English…
Master Pokey can’t die.
But he is defeated, as his machine runs out of power. And so, lacking other options, Pokey plays his trump card.
One that proves to be the end of his influence in the story.
“Oh, my! As evil as old Porky here is, I feel bad for him now. It’s true that the “Absolutely Safe Capsule” that the Mr. Saturns and I developed together can protect one from every manner of danger. It IS an absolutely safe capsule, but once you enter it, you can never exit it… Even what’s outside of the Absolutely Safe Capsule is absolutely safe. I did tell Porky in a hushed voice that he shouldn’t use it yet… But all he can do now is live for eternity inside the capsule, in absolute safety. Who knows, in a way, he may’ve gotten exactly what he wanted.
What do you think? Is it wrong of me to think this way?” — Dr. Andonuts
Once Pokey seals his life into the capsule, there’s no longer an out for him. Not ever again. In a way, Pokey’s fate may indeed be one worse than death. And it’s one that seems to be echoed by Lord English, since after all…
Lord English cannot die, but he is defeated.
Specifically, Act 7′s visual language suggests he’s pocketed in the Black Hole that Alt!Calliope created. As a Black Hole is a gravitational singularity, once there, Lord English would be trapped–no amount of Time powers would let him come out, and First Guardian powers would no longer work either, since they rely on the Green Sun’s power.
An immortal, tyrannical kid–denied his playground for eternity. Pretty fitting, I think.
But Lord English is only one part of the story, and I think the relationship between the protagonists and the Player/Reader is the more interesting area of Earthbound to explore. Because…didn’t I mention?
In the Mother series, there is another God.
It’s you.
2) The Player
Both Earthbound and Mother 3 explicitly address your existence in the context of their worlds. Both games, in fact, pause entirely just to ask you your name. In Earthbound, this role is taken by Tony, Jeff’s canonically gay friend. He calls Jeff, and in the process brings up a prompt for the Player to input their name. This can seem like a bit of cheeky fourth-wall breaking, but consider:
You are the unseen hand behind the characters’ every action. You lead them through their world just as Giygas does for Pokey. You’re never viewed, but always present, witness and privy to all things.
And in the final boss battle (you did watch that, didn’t you?), when all else fails, Paula’s prayers reach the people of Earthbound who care about the four chosen children…including you. Your name is the final name given, praying for the protection of Ness and his friend. Your prayers are the power that end Giygas.
Mother 3 makes it even more explicit. In this game, you’re asked your name by an unseen voice, while Flint prays at an altar in the only Church in the game. Depicted on the front of it are the Light and Dark Dragons of Nowhere Island, the latter of which is the subject of an apocalyptic prophecy we’ll talk about soon.
A good question to ask at this point is: Why does this matter? And the answer is that because we’re given the God’s-eye view of these games, the context of our engagement with them is diegetic: explained by the narrative itself.
Like Bastian reading The Neverending Story, we’re not just observers consuming the content of these games. At least as far as the stories within are concerned, we are active participants. We are part of the story.
And this is true of Homestuck, too. Doc Scratch is a smarmy asshole, but he directly acknowledges the reader. He even credits us with more of an impact on the story than our protagonists. And on some level, this is true.
We HAVE had a direct impact on the story, through command prompts and fandom memes and all sorts of other engagements that ended up shaping the way Homestuck has been told. We’ve always been part of the narrative.
And this has important implications for how we, the readers, might best engage with Homestuck.
Because the fact that our window into its world is diegetic means that it is presented through us through an explicit frame, a frame that is narratively constructed.
And frames have limits.
1) The Characters
Whenever I hear people say Homestuck is a tragedy, or that it’s headed for a sadstuck ending with the Beta kids stuck in the Juju in the Masterpiece, I honestly can’t help but laugh. You don’t need alternate timelines and sacrificial lamb versions of our protagonists to secure a happy ending in Homestuck.
Homestuck itself is practically a loop of impossible-seemingly, absolute-dooming circumstances…
met by perseverance and good cheer.
And when all’s said and done, the story pretty much always breaks in favor of the latter. Remember that one of the fundamental rules of Homestuck’s universe is the “Do As You Will” principle–everyone always gets what they want.
Caliborn gets to be LE, as does Gamzee. Arquis gets to fulfill the out-of-nowhere heroic destiny he wanted, and finally proves himself to the Alphas in an act of atonement. Lord English gets his eternity of destruction, and Vriska gets to be the great Hero she always wanted to be.
But our protagonists? The Alphas and Betas? They just want to live in peace. Their desires are compatible with the wills of all the other characters.
Lord English’s will is not, and he’s trampled the agency of every other character a million times over to get where he is. That’s what makes him a tyrant, and that’s what dooms him to his Absolutely Safe Capsule. Karma is an established force in Homestuck, and LE will pay his due.
And in this extremely-dire-until-the-very-last-second approach, too, Homestuck seems to be standing on the shoulders of giants.
Because this big buildup to a Big Dramatic Tragedy of an ending is pretty much exactly Earthbound’s M.O.
Earthbound’s final boss isn’t just one of the most horrifically well-executed eldritch monsters in gaming history. It’s also set-up as what amounts to a suicide mission.
Even more interesting to me, however, are the parallels we find to Mother 3′s ending.
I’m going to take a time out from Homestuck for a second and talk about Mother 3 for a second, because this moment is too important to me to waste frivolously, or subject to my overwrought explanatory dialogue with without giving you the option to watch a scene that’s Undertale-level good.
Unless I’ve already succeeded in getting you to stop reading, drop everything, and go find a translated version of Mother 3 now (you can’t play it in english without emulating, since it was never released in the US), I would really appreciate it if you took the time and sucked up the spoilers and watched this ending cutscene.
It’s a work of art. A heartrending, heartfelt symphony to the pain of loss and the fear of something changing forever. Mother 3 is a game about the Apocalypse. A game about CAUSING the apocalypse, to be precise.
Your final moments with the game are spent watching Lucas pull the final needle that binds a dragon bigger than the world, and the only hope is that Lucas’ good heart will pass on to the Dragon and make a good new world to come. Nothing else is certain.
And the shots we see aren’t encouraging: Immediately after pulling the needle, the world begins to fall apart. Earthquakes rise and wreak havoc. Twisters of water dominate the sky and ocean. Meteors fall from the sky, and as if rising from an enormous egg, a vast, black back archs out from under the world we came to love.
And then we cut to black, and the End screen pops up. We never see these characters again. Only…
Only we do get to talk to them. Once this question mark pops up, you can move around in this black screen-with ‘You’ represented by the END? depicted- and occasionally, you’ll bump into…words. Words that say things like:
And
You get glimpses of things you can’t talk to, like…
And best of all, this is where the game brings out its ace.
Because this is where the name you gave in the church comes into play. At the end of it all, all of the characters in the cast not only tell you they’re ok, but recognize you. Thank you. Love you. Treat you like a friend, say goodbye, invite you back over, and wish you well in life.
In Mother 3, you play as the God of the old world, the world bound by the rules the cast had to play by. By playing through to the end, you set them free.
And by treating you as a real part of its world, Mother 3 invites you to consider its characters a real part of yours. Invites you to think of them not as characters, but as friends. As people. If that sounds familiar, it’s because Undertale built a whole damn game out of the concept.
But the same approach has always been in Homestuck’s DNA. These characters were always people first and characters second, and we were always privy to a limited frame.
That frame is Homestuck, which until The Masterpiece and Lord English’s defeat, has belonged to Caliborn. This has always been the story of his circle–the Alpha Timeline–and the context it crafts out is his childish empire.
Next time, we’ll talk more about Homestuck’s Gnostic themes, and just what it is *exactly* that our protagonists are escaping from.
For now, I’ll leave you with this song.
If this piece interested you in Mother 3, I suggest checking out Tom Ato’s legendary fan translation for the game. Mother 3 is a masterpiece, and I owe both it and Tom Ato my life in some ways. It’d make me really happy to know even one more person has been touched by their work because of me.
This section is pretty much setup for the next three essays. There’s a couple sections here that I have a fair bit to say about, but probably just as many where I’ll close out with some minor observations, or reference to someone else’s Good Post™.
What I think is important is noting the consistency and similarity with which Homestuck engages in meaningful reference. I just want you to have this list in mind as I flesh out the three truly impactful references I want to talk about in this series.
So here’s a short list of cases where Homestuck outright leans on other stories to structure itself, with accompanying references:
1) The Game Over Arc — Plot Structure & Dragon Ball Z
We’re starting with Dragon Ball Z because the reference sets up pretty clear structural parallels, rather than thematic ones. DBZ’s Over 9000 meme is referenced a couple times in Homestuck, but in this case the comic lends the joke a degree of focus and gravitas.
This is pretty much what we can expect from Homestuck’s methodology — the more important a meme is to understanding a given plot twist or character arc, usually the more weight with which the reference is delivered.
In case you don’t know, the “over 9000″ meme has its roots in this iconic, hilarious sequence from DBZ:
What’s notable is what follows. From the moment this joke happens, the very structure of Homestuck changes to following the loose structure of some of the most memorable DBZ arcs.
I’m no buff on the series, but the memories it calls up for me most strongly resemble the Namek/Freeza or Buu arcs, and expert DBZ consultant @alotofmomos (who hates me for writing this) confirms these are the arcs that most perform the particular structure Homestuck will now be mimicking.
And what does that structure consist of? A particular mix of “pacing” choices, cinematography, and sheer scale of spectacle that I find hard to source to anything but DBZ. I can’t even think of other Shonen series that mix all these elements in quite the same way, though again, I’m no expert.
Some of these elements are:
A) Drawn out, massive power-up sequences:
B) Conflicts that carry out on planetary scales, and indeed often destroy the planets hosting them.
This pretty much speaks for itself, doesn’t it? Do I really have to say some stuff to make it look like I’m doing anything other than pointing out some obvious goddamn parallels that blew my mind because they took me years to notice?
Alright, fine. I’ll say this much: I think it’s quite fitting that Homestuck would borrow from the DBZ playbook for the section of the story that illustrates the sheer mind-boggling scale of power our protagonists have reached.
There’s very few stories out there that demonstrate this sense of mortals achieving such bonkers dominion over reality through sheer force of will, and the homage certainly hammers home the idea that these kids are Gods with levels of power we’ve barely scratched the surface of.
But I don’t think there’s a big Narrative Payoff to this particular reference. Instead, I think what Homestuck takes from this is functional in terms of narrative. Because the most interesting things this narrative model adopts are structural.
C) Convenient plot-structure.
Namely, what we end up with is a bunch of characters grouped into disparate conflicts across the same larger “playing field”, separated by considerable amounts of distance–and thus, isolating them into distinct narratives.
As a natural consequence of this, the pacing slows down to an excruciatingly slowness, as we cut from conflict to conflict, each one progressing in small snippets of minutes or even seconds at a time. All of this is par for the course for Dragon Ball Z, particularly in the Namek saga.
So what this provides us with isn’t a profound, revelatory moment of thematic meaning–but instead, an effective backdrop on which to flesh out that meaning elsewhere. In fact, this very arc does that like twice with two other stories!
So let’s move on from this and take a look at a couple of character arcs whose resolutions are telegraphed by way of reference.
The bottom line is: Terezi janks Jade’s shoes, and adopts the role of Dorothy in Homestuck’s symbol logic. This leads her home–to Vriska and their memories of growing up together, and ultimately to embracing her red feelings for her.
Terezi’s resolution is one of two relationships resolved in the wake of [S] Game Over. Let’s take a look at the other.
3) Jake as Buttercup
Don’t have much to say about this one either, cause I already wrote most of it. I will say I don’t think it’s an accident that the arcs to coincide here are Dirkjake’s and Vrisrezi’s, since the two relationships are in many ways direct parallels. But that’s another essay for another time.
I have received some rightful criticism on my writing on Jake in particular, and this is a good place to clarify my position, however. I do not think it’s particularly “Good” or “Healthy” for Jake to indulge his own desires at the expense of Dirk’s (or Jane’s) feelings.
My point has never been that Jake’s selfish behavior is inherently good–merely that Jake’s reasons for being in love with Dirk are his own, and not imposed to him from Dirk himself, or anyone around him.
As with all things in Homestuck, the key is for Jake to grapple with the negatives in himself and come to balance with the tension between his own wants and his relationships with others. This is true of literally everyone in Homestuck.
And there’s an easier way of saying what I am getting at. Because Homestuck literally gives us a guidebook to understanding Jake and Dirk’s relationships to each other, as parsed in Jake’s head–a guidebook that provides context to their entire relationship.
Just as you can read Terezi as Dorothy, so too can you read Jake as Buttercup. This is the crucial distinction I seek to make. In common readings of Dirk and Jake’s relationship, Jake acquiesces to Dirk’s pushy forcing of the relationship despite Dirk’s control issues.
In this one, Dirk is a flawed but committed provider and protector, and Jake picks up on and begins internalize a belief that Dirk will always be there for him, prompting him to fall for him. This reflects the fundamental core of their attraction to each other. It does not present a solution to their communication issues. They both have to work through that and be more aware of each other’s needs.
Now, The Princess Bride is a comedy action-adventure movie, but it’s also a philosophical fairy tale. Buttercup and Westley aren’t just in love, they’re in True Love, and the driving force of the movie is how Westley’s love empowers him to do anything it takes for his beloved.
A big part of her journey is learning to truly commit to not just Westley’s love for her, but her belief in that love as something both true and powerful. Something that can transcend all odds and obstacles.
Which is. You know. Exactly what Jake does when he’s fully immersed in the power of his own faith.
Now let’s move on, and note two more movie references that the comic makes outside of the context of this DBZ-mini arc.
4) Tavros as Peter Pan
There’s not a terrible amount of depth to be drawn here, either. I think most people accept that Tavros is deliberately invoking Peter Pan in his narrative victory here, with the ghosts as his Lost Boys. I will add, however, that if Peter Pan is the role Tavros is emulating in reaching his full potential, well…
Peter Pan isn’t exactly known for being Selfless, is he? He’s a hero, for sure, but self-centeredness is pretty much his calling card as a hero. To the point that Wikipedia claims that
“In the play and book, Peter symbolizes the selfishness of childhood, and is portrayed as being forgetful and self-centered.”
Understanding Caliborn as a Yaldabaoth is one way to contextualize his power over the reality all the characters preside over, and we’ll definitely touch on that further in the next three sections I’ll be covering.
But one easy way to contextualize Lord English’s power is as…well…Jigsaw.
Like Jigsaw, Lord English builds a massive, highly controlled gauntlet that he exploits and terrorizes his victims through. The only difference is that Lord English’s dungeon is bigger than some creepy gray cellar.
It is in fact, Literally Everything that occurs within the context of the Alpha Timeline. Every homeworld that every character originates from–except for, arguably, Beforus, which is still under his sway enough to be doomed, but also presented as borderline Eden-like by comparison to Alternia.
While Yaldabaoth’s control seems very distant and abstract, Jigsaw’s is crystal clear and vicious. Everything the characters of SAW suffer is, ultimately, in the hands of the orchestrator of their misery. Their puppetmaster, so to speak.
In the same sense, pretty much every single way the characters in Homestuck suffer has Lord English at the root of it–even the thing they do to themselves and each other as a result of cultural memes.
Troll Violence, heteronormativity, quadrant normativity, and hypermasculinity–all are memetic structures that exist because Lord English himself disseminated them, in the context of Homestuck. They’re thought-traps rather than literal physical torture devices, but they’re torture tools all the same.
And you can even see Jigsaw as a symbol for Lord English’s influence, since it is, after all, one of the primary differences setting apart Bro and Dirk. Dirk has no interest in the SAW franchise at all, whereas Bro makes a point of mocking Dave with it. (thanks to @jadedresearcher for pointing this out, by the way!)
So yeah. Not only does SAW tell us a lot about the nature of Caliborn’s effect on our characters through the Alpha Timeline, it also acts as a mark for his influence. That’s…pretty much all there is to say on the matter.
For now.
That wraps up this little introductory round-up. Now I can get to talking about three of the biggest influences on Homestuck as a story: The Neverending Story (the book), Earthbound & Mother 3, and Gnostic Myth.
Hope you’ll follow along with us over the next couple of weeks to find out more.
I’m not the first to note Homestuck’s references to AURYN, the magical amulet from The Neverending Story. The symbol of the intertwined black and white snakes is directly referenced only twice in Homestuck’s story, and both times it tells us a mind-boggling amount about the nature and function of Homestuck’s universe.
And even that only scratches the surface. So instead of starting off with Homestuck, let me tell you a little bit about The Neverending Story.
The Neverending Story is a book split in two. In the most commonly printed version, it comes in Red and Green text halves. The real world, the realm of humans where you and I live–those sections are printed in Red. Fantastica, the world of fiction and stories and all things imaginary, is printed in green.
And as with two sections, The Neverending Story is split into two central figures:
The Childlike Empress, and Bastian Balthazar Bux.
Muse & Lord
In the green-lettered plains of Fantastica, The Childlike Empress rules over all. Although her authority is accepted by even the most evil and mostrous in Fantastica, she never gives orders. Even so, she is both eternal and eternally childlike. Good and evil are equal in her eyes. She sometimes called the Golden-Eyed Commander of Wishes, though she gives no orders.
She is the embodiment of Fantasy itself, inspiring others to act out her will. She is a question, a mystery, a wonder. She is, in short…A Muse.
And she has a direct parallel in Calliope, who similarly draws no distinction between good and evil (people forget that she read what was likely the worst of Vriska without being exposed to her growth, and seemingly wanted to be friends with her anyway)…
Everyone is entangled in and created by Lord English’s Alpha Timeline, but that web is Calliope’s as well, and she’s causally entangled in the creation of all four of the universes we follow.
And again like the Childlike Empress, Calliope bestows her Symbol on others, granting AURYN to humans–an emblem which endows in the wearer the ability to make any wish come true.
Hell, Calliope even seems not to grow up normally in Act 7 and [S] Credits. A Childlike Empress indeed. And as for her counterpart? Bastian may not be as much of a jerk as Caliborn, but the parallels between them are even more explicit:
Where The Childlike Empress is a Muse only by implication, Bastian is textually and demonstrably a Lord.
But let’s back up a bit.
Bastian Balthazar Bux is a little boy who steals a book named “The Neverending Story” from a bookshop and hides in his school to read it in one sitting. His sections, those taking place in the Human world, typically feature text colored Red.
However, around the halfway point of The Neverending Story, he realizes that the story is not only aware of him, but calling out to him. And he eventually finds himself pulled into the realm of Fantastica.
Bastian is a human, you see, and only humans can create stories–the inhabitants of Fantastica themselves cannot. And once the Childlike Empress is reborn with a new name, Fantastica must be reborn as well. So The Childlike Empress meets Bastian in the void between the two realms of Fantastica, and gives him the amulet AURYN, the symbol of her power.
And so, she entrusts him with a quest: To fulfill his wishes in Fantastica, and re-create the realm of Fantasy as he goes.
Incidentally, receiving AURYN also changes Bastian’s race. Bastian is explicitly white, but upon arriving in Fantastica transforms into “a young prince from the Orient”. I’m not sure why that even happens, to be honest? Let’s note that this book is from, like, 1979 and definitely not perfect.
To be honest, I should’ve noted that was explicit earlier, since Homestuck all but explicitly states that Tricksterfied Cherubs would look like Lil Cal, which definitely entails a primary skin color swap. And there, as with Humans, the transformation always renders the subject Caucasian-looking.
Now, where were we?
Ah, right. So, the first thing you might notice is that Bastian’s ascent to Lordship also coincides with him leaving the World of Men and entering the World of Fantasy/Ideas.
Which strikes his first echo with Caliborn. Both characters’ entries into power are marked by changing their text color to Green–the color of their respective Muse figures. And like Calliope dies for Caliborn to Enter, The Childlike Empress disappears from Fantastica as soon as Bastian becomes it’s Lord.
Bastian spends most of his adventure in the realm seeking to meet her once more, on some level–just as Lord English spends an eternity in the Void, trying to find and destroy the Calliopes.
And during his search, Bastian also accrues subjects and followers who carry out his will. Bastian is adored for his ability to create stories–which instantly become Real– across Fantastica. With The Childlike Empress’ AURYN around his neck, nothing can resist his will. Bastian becomes, for all intents and purposes, a God.
Although he loses his humanity little by little with every wish he makes. The memory of being weak, the memory of being ugly, the memory of being scared– as Bastian travels, he grows more self-satisfied and arrogant, desiring the adoration of others without true regard for their feelings and hearts.
Until in the end, he’s exploiting those he calls friends through sheer force of will.At this point, Bastian seeks to replace The Childlike Empress entirely, attempting to become the Childlike Emperor–just as Lord English seeks to emulate Calliope through a multitude of stylistic choices in his personal aesthetic.
“Doc Scratch was born to serve as Lord English’s other half, replacing the role Calliope served when the two shared one body. From Caliborn’s warped perspective, the two share many similarities. They’re both wordy, intelligent, and (as Caliborn saw her) quite smug. He scrapbooks with a ~ATH book like she did, and carries her weapon.
In addition to being a pastiche of his sister, Scratch is also a symbol of his other weakness, the cue ball. Both are heralded to be the key to his defeat, after all. He does double duty then by killing Scratch, hatching out of his body and growing more powerful (by assimilating Scratch’s first guardian powers), “predominating” over him and asserting his dominance over both his vulnerabilities once again.”
And Bastian, well…
Sound familiar at all?
By the end, Bastian is at risk of becoming what is essentially a Yaldabaoth–an arrogant God with full dominion over his material reality, but blind to the world of ideas outside of him.
Luckily, Bastian escapes this fate, and goes on to live a happy life, becoming a world-renowed storyteller. His path is not the path of the Lord forever. But that is another story, and shall be told another time.
There’s one last thing to note about AURYN, because it appears in two places in Homestuck. There’s the Lollipop, yes–and by linking AURYN to the Cherubs, we learn a great deal about both Muse and Lord, Calliope and Caliborn.
But AURYN’s impact is a bit more far-reaching than just them.
The emblem is also depicted during the mating ritual of Cherubs, remember? And it’s important to view this image in context, because as Aranea tells us…
Mating Cherubs tap into the forces of power presiding over all that is eternal. Cherubs are linked to the primordial forces of reality by their nature. The source of Cherub’s powers is their intrinsic connection to the flow and nature of reality.
Which suggests that the principle that AURYN is inscribed with, the principle that guides the power of its magic, is also the fundamental principle of Homestuck’s universe. Cherubs are simply beings with a unique ability to tap directly into it. And that principle is…
“Do As You Will.”
Nothing in Homestuck’s reality happens except by the Will of someone living inside it. Individual will is the backbone of all events and objects, all circumstances and beings, all people and universes in Homestuck. In Homestuck, everybody always gets what they want–one way or another.
That is what AURYN– placed here, at the center of the forces of creation and destruction– suggests. A good example of this is Lord English’s creation, where Caliborn and Gamzee’s wills to become Lord English meet Arquis’ desire to have a heroic moment of unfathomable impact onto reality:
Thus resulting in a scenario that fulfills all of their desires, and results in the creation of Lord English and Doc Scratch:
I’m not going to list a bunch of other examples because this kind of stuff is literally always what happens in Homestuck. The only thing that trumps a person’s desires in Homestuck is the desires of another willing to undermine or exploit the former.
And that kind of authoritarian behavior is the closest thing to “Sin” Homestuck’s setting has. It always comes with consequences. This is also why Karma exists in Homestuck’s causality, as noted by Latula. This is what the cycle of revenge was about.
Not even killing someone can truly erase the impact of their will on reality in Homestuck’s universe, and usurping or denying others their wills always comes with a whiplash effect back on yourself. So what does that mean for Lord English, who has so thoroughly usurped and denied the wills of every other member of the cast?
Well that… is another story, and shall be told another time.
Next time, we’ll talk about the Mother franchise’s two later installments: Mother 3, and Earthbound. There’s much to discuss. Perhaps we’ll even find an echo of Lord English’s karmic punishment there?
Flying through Storytelling 