Void is linked to invention and engineering, so of some kinds of things, maybe. Equius and Horruss were both engineers who made plenty of robotics and robotic equipment, and Roxy was able to reverse engineer literally anything out of nothingness with enough practice.
Tag: Equius Zahhak
Anon with the book on gnosticism here, figured I should come off anon! After watching the latest Gamzee video, I thought it might be interesting (if not terribly relevant) to share a bit on Dyonisian cults/religion, more specifically their somewhat opposite cult/religion, Orphism. Orpheus is, in Grecian myth, the son of either a human man or Apollo, and Calliope (a name we all recognize), muse of heroic poetry. Orpheus was torn apart at the end of his life by the Maenads of Dyonisian fame.
Oh yes, I’m glad you brought this up. Me and the pals in the patreon discord talked about Orpheus a bit after this Dionysus stuff came out, and I think there are two solid ideas to consider.
The first is we should probably keep an eye out for an Orpheus themed troll in Hiveswap, since the story you mentioned is one of the more notable stories Maenads are involved in, so uh…we might be able to expect such a character might have trouble with Chahut. RIP @ that hypothetical guy, probably.
But it’s also possible Orpheus’ analogue is Already Here, in this guy:
We won’t get to this in video for a while, so lets just get into it here.
To start us off, yes–Orpheus’ dies at the hands of the Maenads, specifically for denying his former Patron God, Dionysus–who in Homestuck we can loosely understand as Gamzee in the flesh, and the Grand Highbloods and their ideology symbolically.
Gamzee kills Equius right when Equius turns his back on the Highblood’s ideology, and tries to stop Gamzee from murdering the lowbloods. So there are some legit parallels. An obvious issue here is that Orpheus is killed by the Maenads on Dionysus’ behalf, but there’s a couple things to consider.
If we’re reading Rage as the aspect of Theatre, then suddenly the masks and identifiers Gamzee wears become much more important. By identifying himself with Nepeta’s cat hat, Gamzee evokes the Maenads’ practice of dressing with panther skins, as Dionysus greatly valued the animal.
Note that Gamzee’s polka-dotted clown pants now suggest the spots on a cat, like the Panthers’.
Gamzee also enters the scene of Equius’ murder wearing Terezi’s shades.
Dionysian imagery plays into Gamzee’s treatment of Terezi already–Satyrs were known for “breaking down traditional values”, a good example of which is…Law.
So uh. That puts a new spin on all of Gamzee’s mockery of courts of law whilst pitting Terezi against Vriska. And his literal breaking down of Terezi–emotionally across the meteor, and physically before Game Over.
+ given how Gamzee basically dragged Terezi into his juggalo cult, I think we can–to an extent–read her as an unwilling Maenad, and so Gamzee identifying himself with her symbol here seems relevant.
Back to Orpheus, though. You’re right to point out the similarities between Orphic and Dionysian traditions–both were apparently mystery cults, fitting both the secretive nature of the Mirthful Messiahs and the unknowable nature of Void.
Orpheus in general comes off pretty Voidy–his mythology seems to feature a lot of water imagery, fitting Equius’ sweat motif, for example. But apparently, some held that Orpheus was a mortal version of Dionysus himself:
“Here his death is analogous with that of Pentheus,
who was also torn to pieces by Maenads; and it has been speculated that
the Orphic mystery cult regarded Orpheus as a parallel figure to or
even an incarnation of Dionysus.”
Which is certainly interesting because part of Dionysus’ myth is being ingrained in Zeus’ thigh until he grows to reach maturity. This “becoming part of the Patriarch God” narrative evokes, to me, Gamzee and Equius both becoming one with AR/Caliborn, who are both stand ins for Yaldabaoth, the sun-branded Demiurge described in Gnostic mythology.
One of the figures the term ‘Demiurge’ was born to describe was Zeus, and indeed, Caliborn’s arc in particular echoes Zeus at times–Caliborn banishing the beta kids into the house echoes Zeus’ banishing Typheus under Mt. Etna, which was also said to house Hephaestus’ forges.
And then there’s the most famous myth Orpheus is involved in–his quest to seek his dead wife in the Afterlife.
When Eurydice dies, Orpheus travels to Hades and charms the gods into letting her travel back to the world of the living with him…
Void is the counterpart to Light, the aspect of the imaginary, the Humanities–the realms of thought. So ‘Thoughtless’ feels particularly Voidy here, especially since it causes a return to depths. Memory and Forgetting pretty clearly tie into Light/Void respectively, too.
I might be reading too much into the wording here, but the basic parallel stands–Equius doesn’t die to find Aradia, but his stint in the underworld coincides with dating a bunch of Aradiabots, and when he returns to the world of the living it’s without her, as…
A version of Yaldabaoth/Zeus, with a side of Orpheus/Dionysus attached. I’m not totally sure I buy this reading–if we were talking about any Aspect besides Void, which is literally linked to vague and unknowableness, I’d want to feel a lot more certain. Its possible there are other deities that might reflect the Zahhaks better.
But this seems pretty fitting to me, so I thought I’d raise the curiosity.
What do you all think?
” 2) Inherently irrelevant and unimportant to anything about any of the characters except how it makes society treat them.3) Explicitly a lie. ” But that’s wrong you fuckin dumb.
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.
I just wanted to drop by and say that first of all, I love your theories and analyses. They’re so good and I cry daily about them. Secondly I wanted to express my… I guess dissatisfaction with the lack of fan analyses about John and Dave’s friendship, in particular from John’s POV. They are basically the only proclaimed pair of best friends whose relationship didn’t waver during the course of the whole comic, and I just wish people talked more about their influence on each other!
Ok so first of all I have to say that the idea that Dirk and Jake’s relationship seriously wavered on any level but the superficial “are we officially dating” one is, imo, inaccurate. The boys are in love, they love each other and are best friends and this is true across the board for the Alphas.
Thanks a lot for your message though, and I’ve been meaning to say something about John and Dave’s relationship for a while now so sure, I’ve got a bit to say for you.
predictably as hell this got really long, so meet me under the cut.
But to talk about them, I’m going to have to talk about a different pair of friends who grow up together, first. One underexplored element of Homestuck that I’ve always found interesting is how Classpect seems to reflect, to a degree, how characters take influence from their societies.
I’ve written plenty about Jake and Jane in this regard, but I think John is maybe my favorite example for how nuanced it is.
A great example of what I’m talking about is Equius and Vriska’s contrasting relationships with the Hemospectrum. Namely, Equius, the Void player, values it greatly, while Vriska, a Light player, regards it as a bunch of bullshit.
What Vriska DOES put value in is how it affects circumstance–how it makes people see Tavros, how it makes people see her, the very real burdens of responsibility and societal expectation it puts on everyone. THAT’S real.
THAT matters to her.
But the ideology itself is a bunch of baloney, and Vriska picks up on that almost instinctually. Now let’s take stock of what the Hemospectrum is in the story.
It is, simultaneously:
1) A source of STRENGTH, at least for Equius.
2) Inherently irrelevant and unimportant to anything about any of the characters except how it makes society treat them.
3) Explicitly a lie.
4) Most importantly for our purposes: Entirely physical.
True to Homestucks’ Gnostic roots, unlike true ideas that the characters reason out over the course of the story, information that is unimportant, irrelevant, and built upon markers of physical identity is inherently coded with Void, as the aspect of all things false, unfortunate, unimportant and untrue. The world of the physical Yaldabaoth creates in Gnosticism is coded not just as the world of lies and physicality, but also as the world of Darkness. Hence the link.
For Homestuck, this means that that sort of information has a source. It can be traced on a timeline, just like any other objects in the story, because information like the Hemospectrum amounts to what is essentially a bad meme.
For the Hemospectrum, that source is Equius, who first inherits that incredibly unimportant information from his society and then becomes nothing when he succumbs to its influence, allowing Gamzee to kill him.
Now here’s the kicker: Eventually, Equius (along with Gamzee) becomes the source of the Hemospectrum himself, becoming part of Lord English and so explaining how LE got the idea to impose such a complicated system in the first place.
In essence, once he becomes part of LE, the hemospectrum itself is Equius’ most lasting legacy on the plot, a time loop to rival Gamzee’s RIDICULOUS proliferation of clown-themed horror across the cosmos. Equius has truly become Void in this regard, a potent undercurrent for Heirs.
Now let’s talk about Dave finally.
So like while it’s true that John and Dave’s friendship is mostly wholesome as fuck and really sturdy, I’m going to complicate that narrative a bit on both extremes.
One of the things I’ve always found appealing about Dave is how intensely devoted he is to his friends growing up–which makes sense when you consider how unhappy he says he was in his home life.
If Dave has a penchant for rapping ad nauseum and talking to his friends even after they leave to humorous extremes early on, well–that has at least something to do with the fact that he’s using them as an escape from his nightmarish childhood.
This devotion is more than just him being very giving and caring–he’s invested in all of the other betas emotionally, and it matters to them how they feel about him. Maybe none moreso than John, even years and lots of chilling out later.
And it plays into Davesprite’s lost sense of self in a big way. When John rejects him in favor of “Real Dave”, Davesprite is genuinely hurt and angry, and John continues to aggravate those feelings of displacement during the 3 year journey on the ship. John’s perception of him MATTERS to Dave.
And a lot of what made Dave’s childhood awful was his internalization of heroism as linked to not just Bro’s weird hypermasculine bullshit, but also explicitly to heterosexuality.
Dave compares himself unfavorably to John as a hero, and knowing what we know about him now, it’s pretty reasonable to put Dave’s struggles with his attractions to men at the root of it.
And given how similar Jade and John are and his obvious romantic interest in Jade, I’ve always read him as being just as interested in John–just closeted and repressed about it.
Which means that all of those gay jokes he and John partook in had an effect on Dave far beyond what they had on John, which I think is really interesting.
Also interesting, though, is how John reveals he parsed all of those things growing up:
As jokes. See, John also inherits a lot of his culture’s toxic ideology, like Equius does. But unlike Equius, John doesn’t inherit it as information to value and define himself by.
Breath is the aspect of detachment and levity, and fittingly, John inherits these toxic masculinity-enforcing cultural memes as a series of jokes! Stuff he says, but doesn’t think about. Stuff not particularly worth “taking seriously”.
So his relationship to masculinity is a lot less fraught and intense–partly because he fits the mold more neatly than Dave, but also partly because he simply didn’t actually believe the stuff he was saying.
Here, John is a depiction of the straight dude who makes shitty jokes and claims to be “just kidding”, except that John actually IS just kidding, and so he doesn’t really force the issue or focus on it.
That doesn’t mean that toxic masculinity hasn’t had an effect on him–he still struggles with cultural shifts to a degree. But I like that Homestuck allows for different levels of impact of these cultural memes across individuals. This stuff doesn’t affect everyone equally, and it doesn’t affect everyone quite the same way.
On top of that, it’s a good example of the fact that even a genuinely good person who doesn’t believe this stuff can have a negative effect on people they care about by transmitting these cultural cues. Because it’s the memes themselves that are toxic.
Flying through Storytelling 