I kinda doubt we’ll be exposed to Sburb much directly unless the ending really does go the “escape into Sburb” route, which i find relatively unlikely. so i do think itll probably stay in the lore for the most part.
That said i think we’ll be learning a lot about aspects and probably classes too, since I don’t think those are exclusive to Sburb. As i’ll be making clear in…oh, about an hour.
Sollux thought that the game would kill him and his friends to save trollkind, which is why he didn’t distribute it. He was lied to, and once he found out the truth he tried to stop his friends from playing the game at all.
There’s also this, yeah. Even if he’d wanted to though, he definitely couldn’t have distributed the game on the scale Grandpa did.
I dunno that Sollux messed up, he just didn’t have a massive globe-spanning corporation to transmit the game to the planet/empire through like Grandpa did with Skaianet.
As for my trollsona, he’s in one of the Aspect videos! Here he is again:
There are plenty of other sessions. That is canon.
This is incorrect, dude. Feel free to pull up the “canon” you’re referring to, because nobody else on Alternia plays Sburb before the planet’s life ends.
There are other sessions out there in Paradox Space, but not every planet spawns the same amount of sessions. Earth had a ton of them because Grandpa distributed Sburb as a worldwide game event.
That is not the case on Alternia. It’s not that Sollux is the only genius on the planet, but that he’s the only one with access to the game code. Aradia finds the game code in her Frog Temple, and spends almost all her time at said frog temple before the game begins.
The only other temple is Kanaya’s, who similarly lives right with hers, and neither perspectives show us wily other trolls sneaking into frog temples to design a video game.
The difference between Sollux and Grandpa is literally pointed out in the story. Barring new information surfacing in Hiveswap, we have no reason to think anyone else on the planet plays Sburb at all.
And even if they did, that wouldn’t change the fact that the Alpha Trolls’ scratch was meant to create a world (Alternia) that would make the next crop of players strong enough to win (the beta trolls.) So it kind of changes nothing about what their place in the planet’s historical context is.
Not to mention it literally says on the extended zodiac test that if you have a “true zodiac sign”, your affiliation with the respective blood caste is “even stronger than you thought.”
Does this not imply that the trolls who possess these signs are, y’know, special? Does this not imply that the trolls who possess these signs embody the traits of their blood caste?
This says to me that, for example, those of the rust blooded caste have more ties with Derse and Time than any of the other aspects or Prospit. Because, according to this description, if you are a Rust blood, a Time player, and a Derse dreamer, your affiliation with the Rust-blooded class is “even stronger than you thought.” Right?
oh SHIT. I had no idea that line was a thing!
I’m gonna have to run this by my more skeptical friends but yeah that definitely sounds like a confirmation that the True Signs and the Sign Classes are linked to me. it doesnt stop from keep happening. Thanks!!
Okay, here’s a major problem I see with all this. Just with the top part, the idea that there are multiple HUMAN sessions.
Because there aren’t any. We have only the alpha/beta timeline kids, who I have to constantly point out ONLY EXIST BECAUSE OF THE GAME.
‘Oh but Roxy the game was being released world-wide!’ You can say that, IN THEORY, that the game was talked up and there was hype about it…
But the GAME was only released on FOUR DISKS. In a closed BETA.
As far as EVERYTHING IN THE CANON SHOWS, only the four kids from SBURB actually started, launched and linked their games. It’s more than likely that the entire ad campaign and the information about SBURB, including the things given to game magazines, were a cover done by the Harley/Lalondes to propagate the game so that the selected kids did not know that they were specifically chosen by fate to play it.
And also note, the post-Scratch kids were not playing a game distributed globally, but got their copies from Roxy hacking the Batterwitch’s computers and downloading it off of that network.
Just to clear things up: You’re right about the Alpha session, there were no other players there either. I just answered an ask talking about how world where only one group plays are more than likely an inherent property of the Scratch–only the players who spawn the Scratch get the deal to win their game next time, after all.
We don’t really know how many people played Sburb on B1, or how many of them managed to win their games. They’re not relevant to LE’s time loop, so theres not much reason to think doomed timeline rules apply to them.
We don’t have hard canon word on how the mechanic plays out exactly, but I pretty much agree, yeah. It makes logical sense, since the Scratch is only meant to benefit that group of players who play.
So the first thing to note is that any gender can be any class. Hussie confirmed that girls can be Princes on twitter at some point, I don’t really have a link or anythin but I thought I’d point that out.
And in my view the gender restrictions were always canonically shaky in the first place. They were delivered by Calliope early in Act 6, and Calliope understands a lot about the game (I think she’s right about her descriptions of Active/Passive classes and I use her definitions as my own), but I don’t think Calliope understands very much about gender or identity by that point.
I mean, that’s a plot point! Calliope thinks she’s incapable of feeling red romance because of her species…even as she expresses profound fascination and interest in it. Calliope, like all the characters, is influenced by a status quo of heteronormativity and gender essentialism. What she says about how often any class is any gender reflects 2 things:
1) Her own views on gender and identity, which at this point are still limiting and self-restrictive in a way she explicitly grows out of just like every other character in the comic, given that she starts dating Roxy.
2) The patterns of the four sessions she has access to and draws sources from. Calliope doesn’t analyze all of Sburb–she analyzes Sburb in the context of Homestuck, just like we the audience do, and where the conclusion she draws is incorrect, it’s informed by a bias towards preestablished gender norms.
As for the specifics, there’s tons of ways trans/nonbinary people could interact with Sburb. Dream Selves are idealized selves so I guess trans people who find that powerful and gratifying there could be an element of transition to the transformation. God tier powers are reality warping enough to enable that kind of thing in dozens of ways, too.
Not that that’s necessary, obviously. Lots of trans people don’t want to transition and I suspect some people would consider it being presented that way kind of cheap. There’s also tons of ways to enable more honest gender expression through the Alchemy system. For instance, I read Jake as non-binary or genderfluid and I think he expresses that potential fairly well. So there’s that. There’s also people who read, say, Roxy and Dirk as trans–and since Calliope is at the mercy of her sources which are historical documents that track the mythologies of the players as they present them, there’s not really any way she’d know better.
I think Sburb is always best interpreted as expansively as possible while still holding to the existential philosophy that informs its game design. So the answer is anyone can be anything they feel called to, wherever they fall on the spectrum. Sburb is interested in having its players self-actualize, and that can happen in as many different ways as there are stories to tell–whether we’re talking about rises to heroism narratives, or coming of age and coming out narratives. (Coming out narratives are intrinsically heroic narratives anyway, in my view.)
Hey guys! Here’s the next episode of Homestuck Explained.
In this episode, we take a look at the Server Player.
We’ll talk about the way players typically enter Sburb, what Server players do mechanically, and what Sburb’s mechanical setup says about both Sburb’s priorities as a game and Homestuck’s underlying philosophy.
Homestuck gains complexity through iterations, in plot, setting, and character. As the tutorial character, John’s actions are straightforward and relatively easy to follow, which sets the stage for grander installments. John’s plain house and Dad are followed by the increasingly complex circumstances of his friends. John’s ability to combine items across captchalogue cards (1917) is a primer for combining items via alchemy. If a rule is introduced through John, subsequent iterations of the rule will be more grandiose.
So, an observation: John is afraid of heights. When John slips on a staircase, he flips out (2460). When he nearly launches himself into the abyss with the Pogo Hammer, he has to take a nap before he has calmed down enough to continue (2537). Immediately following both moments of vertigo, massive ogres begin to climb toward John’s house (2461, 2542). The eventual fight with the ogres begins after John looks over the roof of his house, into the abyss (2562-3).
All of this suggests that Sburb is reacting to John’s emotional state (fear) to produce in-game content. This is further suggested by a peek we get at some of Sburb’s internal processes (3419):
Here, we have reference to terminology associated with Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud. The terms suggest that Sburb interacts with the ideas in the kids’ subconscious minds (archetypes) and brings symbolic representations of these ideas into conscious reality (manifests the ideas). Like, pipes are Johns’s dad symbol (1974), so LOWAS is covered in pipes as a subconscious reminder of his dad. Or, Dave is surrounded by dangerous sharp objects in his apartment, so LOHAC is full of grinding metal gears to subtly (?) remind him of his awful, awful home.
Even before we reach the kids’ planets though, John’s encounter with the ogres asserts Sburb’s dream-like nature. The “hyper flexible mythology” of Sburb is essentially the same as Freudian dream logic – Sburb caused John’s latent fear of heights to manifest as real, punchable monsters.
But if you look through Homestuck for things that materialize due to emotional events, it doesn’t stop with imps and monsters. It also includes the trolls.
This is some next level stuff. This is exactly the kind of content I’m hoping to see more of now that Homestuck is either slowly ending or revving up for a whole new phase. Glad I read this.
Hey everyone! Here’s the next episode of Homestuck, Explained.
In this episode, we track the broad strokes of the game that sits at the center of Homestuck’s narrative–Sburb–and explore the two main concepts it uses to be both compelling and versatile.
In the next few episodes, we’ll cover the three core game mechanics introduced in Sburb’s tutorial: The Server Player, the Kernelsprites, and the Sylladex/Alchemy system.
This also means we will soon be starting the first round of Patron voting! So if you’re interested in getting these subjects in any particular order, now’s a great time to hop on board.
Flying through Storytelling 