That’s a very good point. While Caliborn is associated with a spiral, Lord English is strongly linked to the Perfect Circle, itself pretty much the symbol of the Paradox–”A SHAPE WITHOUT ANGLES. WHAT.”
Circles might be another thing we want to look out for with Marvus, Whodis, and whatever other characters show up that give us Lordly vibes.
also totally forgot, wanted to make a note on something Vriska says about Echidna
VRISKA: Really, who knows what her real purposes are? They’re pro8a8ly totally unfathoma8le. VRISKA: Echidna is kind of a 8ig Deal Denizen. One of the real heavy hitters, like that other guy… the really strong one with the ridiculous name. VRISKA: She might even 8e the 8iggest deal. She’s the mother of all denizens. I mean, not in a literal sense. Like, I really dou8t she physically spawned them all.
in greek myth Echidna is literally the mother of all monsters, but that bolded line there is referencing Yaldbaoth, a gnostic concept, not a greek myth
and i think this is interesting that this is the way that Hussie is deciding to mix Gnostic and Greek myths, he’s making Echidna the literal mother in both myths
he’s basically equating her with Sophia the aeon of wisdom from gnosticism that spawned Yaldabaoth and was responsible for his creation by emanating without her partner aeon (reproducing on her own without her spouse essentially) which is where we get our word Philosopher, meaning Lover of Wisdom, Philos Love and Sophia Wisdom
and thats really cool! i just wanted to say that lol that Homestuck’s Echidna can be thought of as more of a mix between the Greek Echidna and the Gnostic Sophia! adds a new angle onto how to view her 😀 and makes sense as she has always been a denizen in Homestuck that has all this wisdom to give and greater knowledge of all the sessions beyond and likely to be the essential key denizen when stuff goes down
Makes me start to question my thought that Calliope would get Abraxas as the other more truly powerful gnostic concept, if Hussie is adding a gnostic connection to Echidna, who is already the space player denizen then it’s a high candidate for a version of Calliope to have her as a denizen as well!
Caliborn as one half that was stunted in growth has Yaldabaoth the stunted god thrown out of heaven Lucifer analogue
The cherub that is the true merger of Calliope and Caliborn has the Abraxas, as the ultimate god merger of everything
and a Calliope would have Echidna, as the super strong mother space denizen with connections to Yaldabaoth directly made with the connection to Sophia as his mother
and I keep saying a Calliope because what I think is most likely is that Alt!Calliope is most connected to Homestuck Echidna which is better understood as Echidna/Sophia, powerful all knowing warrior mother goddess most in opposition to Yaldabaoth with the Sophia connections, while our Callie gets Abraxas, the true real one, what is meant to happen and the actual gnostic denizen who transcends both Echidna/Sophia and Yaldabaoth!
I love pretty much all of this-the link between Echidna and Sophia has never felt more explicit, especially with Alt-Calliope as a manifestation of the “Holy Ghost”.
though I disagree with our Calliope having Abraxas as opposed to Echidna. Part of this is that I think Jake and Karkat fill the role of Abraxas partly through their relationships to both cherubs.
But to me, Alpha Calliope seems like the truest version of Sophia we get in the story, and that makes all the difference. She’s the Sophia who tries to “know the unknowable” (Cherubs playing Sburb is an explicit taboo) and creates the Yaldabaoth of Homestuck: Lord English.
You’re not wrong, but I think part of what Homestuck’s arguing is that what we think of as “true evil” IS just lack of maturity, and Bro’s stoic machismo is simply one of the different explorations of this stunted lack of emotional growth and self-awareness.
Caliborn isn’t just arbitrarily an infinite evil asshole–he’s literally biologically incapable of growth. AR is the same way–frozen in time developmentally by his nature as AI. Both reflect an absolute domination that echoes Yaldabaoth, and both turn out to be mayor components of LE.
The difference between them is that AR becomes LE through heroic sacrifice, having transcended his innate limitations through connections to others by becoming one with Equius and wanting to serve his friends.
Caliborn stunts himself willingly, by making the selfish and childish choice to murder his sister and force his predomination early. This is what allows him to play Sburb alone.
But it also secures his downfall, because by killing Calliope rather than devouring her soul through predomination, he puts Calliope’s soul out in the furthest ring, thus ensuring he’d be out looking for her as LE and causing the events that end his rule in Homestuck.
(This is why there’s no Caliborn ghost corresponding to Alt!Calliope’s timeline–she predominated naturally, and devoured Caliborn’s soul/consumed his strength. This is also why we don’t just see AR/Equius/Gamzee’s souls out in the void after they become part of LE–Caliborn didn’t just kill them to take over, he predominated and made their souls part of him.)
Both are tragic heroes, in the true Greek tragedy sense. AR’s story is one of heroic but flawed transcendence out of inherently unjust circumstances that made him innately imperfect–a result of Dirk’s own childhood hubris and demiurgic act of creation. Caliborn’s hubris is his own, and it’s what allows him to both create and destroy himself and the entire reality of Homestuck.
i kinda think the fact that dirk deliberately steered himself away from the legacy of Bro/Caliborn/LE is exactly why he never got to face Yaldabaoth in the first place. the more of a Denizen’s Choice a player embraces, the more they seem to fulfill said Denizen’s mythological arc.
The legacy of Yaldabaoth is quite literally the legacy of Lord English–the former is a symbol of the latter. But Alpha Dirk proper is charting his own destiny, apart from that doomed recursive loop. Yaldabaoth no longer has sway over his story.
Not really. Personally, I find the very idea that he did tiresome, because people only ever seem to use it to downplay the canon dirkjake built into it.
As things stand, there’s just no real reason to think so from a writing perspective. Like yeah, ok, unreliable narrators are a thing in Homestuck. But that logic doesn’t really work to just discredit whatever point a character makes that happens to be contentious.
There has to be an in-character or in-universe reason for a character’s perspective to be discredited, or it’s just bad writing. And I don’t really agree Homestuck is written badly! You might know this about me by now.
So focusing in on Caliborn.
Caliborn is quite aware of the Alpha Timeline, and the role he plays in it. He’s also pretty much the only character who actually likes the Alpha Timeline, and revels in his coming existence as Lord English.
He’s explicitly okay with and willing to endure whatever negative consequences are necessary to get him to that point, and he thinks he and his actions across his timeline make him the hottest shit ever to grace paradox space.
There’s no real reason to think he’d knowingly lie about events in the Alpha Timeline–especially the events that result in the creation of Lord English–because Caliborn is on record as thinking all of that is RAD AS FUCK! Including Jake beating him up, since its what leads to Lord English having his very name.
This comes through in the Masterpiece. Caliborn is noticeably excited to share these events with the audience, and ultimately pleased with the result of the event–he’s using it as a form of self-aggrandizement.
So if someone tells me they think Caliborn is lying about the Masterpiece, my immediate question is how–and why? And most importantly, what is there in the story to contradict or replace the Masterpiece, if we can’t accept it as part of the story?
As of right now, there isn’t anything. I wouldn’t be surprised, for example, if the Epilogue happens to cover the Masterpiece or part of the Masterpiece, and follows the Beta kid’s release from the Juju and/or the Alpha kids being picked up by John after the end.
We were viewing the Masterpiece from Caliborn’s perspective, so there could definitely be more to see after his particular role in the story is finished. I just don’t think that means Caliborn was lying, per se.
This is kinda unrelated but I’ve been thinking about it so here we go. This is basically the same as people dismissing Calliope’s exposition on the Classes–in that a critical source of exposition on a certain area of the comic, with no equivalent anywhere else in the text, goes disregarded because of some hazy claim of “unreliability.”
Remember how I said there has to be a textual reason for such a source to be disregarded on a particular point? Homestuck actually does do this with gendered classes, so it’s a good example of what I’m talking about.
Yeah, Calliope says classes are gendered–but Calliope is explicitly as susceptible to biological essentialism as anyone else in the cast, believing she’s incapable of red romance just as John believed he was incapable of black.
Think what you will of the message, but by the endgame Homestuck is loudly stating that both views are inaccurate. Calliope’s ignorance is contextualized in the text.
That she’d make certain assumptions about gender makes sense–especially if she’s working her understanding of the classes off the sample sizes in Homestuck itself–which she explicitly is, and which explicitly do have gender biases.
But that doesn’t inherently discredit every other statement she makes, especially since without the exposition she provides it becomes ridiculously harder to prove anything about Classes as a system. Almost as if the author included that text as a source of important exposition or something.
Higher castes live longer and tend to be more vicious. While lower castes have shorter lifespans (even without the drones hunting them) and are naturally attuend to become psychics.
Just because you want to force political correctness unto a race of violent space dominators and establish that racism is bad in our world doesn’t mean it’s a lie among the trolls.
1) Charming. Do you get invited to parties often when you open rebuttals to people’s points with “you fuckin dumb”?
2) All this, and yet, Beforus managed to handle the exact same physical differences with a system that didn’t necessitate genocide and slavery! Hm, how about that! It’s almost like the eerie bargain the Alpha trolls made that allowed Scratch onto Alternia had some sort of impact on their society. Interesting. Almost like…the racism and exploitation was a bad thing? Huh.
3) Before you even go there, no, Beforus is not as bad as Alternia in “a different way”. Alternia is explicitly presented as a fall from grace for Trollkind, and it’s brutal, and it’s awful, and it’s Lord English’s fault. Don’t make me dig up the screencaps just please go actually read Homestuck. Systems of exploitation are bad and unnecessary across the board–no physical differences justify exploitation and brutality. Period.
And another thing about the source of STRENGTH thing. I don’t think that’s right either. Equius is plenty strong in his own. The reason why him and every other Zahhak followed it (in relation to how the hemocaste was in each alternate universe) was because they are incredibly dependent on SYSTEMS. Everything has to be in their right place, everyone doing what they’re meant to do. If someone doesn’t fit in the system it confuses and flusters them.
Equius is physically strong because that’s a mutation endemic to his blood color, of which he seems to be a particularly exceptional example. He values the blood that marks him as someone physically strong quite similarly to how Caliborn values physical strength itself.
And he values the system that takes that physical trait of his and tells him he’s special for it, tells him he’s Above Others due to something he was born with, which is objectively. Not. True. There is nothing about Equius that makes him intrinsically better than anyone else–he just treats others that way because the system he so values conditions him into believing there is. Yes, of course he’s reliant on the system on which he predicates his entire self-worth.
“Confuses and flusters” him? Sure. And on Alternia, he would’ve acted on that confusion and fluster by exploiting, hurting, or reporting others to the authorities. He’s a Good Troll by alternian standards. This is how systems of oppression work. None of this does much to counteract my point, or…make Equius’ ideology more palatable? Is that what you’re trying to do here? It sounds unbelievable, but I’m not sure what else you could be going for.
It took him being killed, get his moirail killed, be revived as a sprite, getting combined with a horse AI, and finally reuniting with his moirail but he did change at the very, very end when it would even matter. Either way, the changed Equius is what was finally put into LE.
Yes, at which point the “changed Equius” was promptly devoured by Caliborn’s soul and integrated into LE like so many spare puppet parts. Caliborn predominated–that’s what he does. The other souls incorporated into LE are little more than amalgamations of interests and puppets for him. Equius has no blame or agency in this–it’s simply a way he fulfills his Class role by “becoming” Void. Not reallyyy sure what this is supposed to tell me.
John getting the retcon powers and making [S] Game Over “Unhappen” certainly qualifies as an improbable glitch in causality. It’s essentially the same as a controllable Scratch, it’s just that John is doing it himself.
More to the point, no other source is given for Alt!Calliope’s existence in the comic. So occam’s razor suggests this is the understanding the comic wants us to have.
there is someone like that, in my opinion. it’s caliborn.
I was going to get mad but then I remembered that no – there was an alt-Caliborn. We never met him, but he was dominated and defeated by alt-Calliope.
The end result, though, is that unlike anyone else in all of reality, there’s only ever really One Caliborn. Caliborn doesn’t exist conceptually, in many different iterations, like the rest of the characters do. He exists only and exclusively in the single physical form that goes on the single physical journey he ever chooses to take.
The Alt-Caliborn only existed through forced John scratch, and his only fate was to be consumed and become part of Calliope. He doesn’t truly exist except as part of her. So Caliborn remains a true individual–an oddity in Homestuck’s cast. Everyone else is multiple people.
Flying through Storytelling 