the ghost stuff has definitely not been solved, per se–a lot of the legacy fandom would probably say hussie phoned it in there for various reasons, though I would definitely not agree.
To answer your questions:
Is the ghostrealm conditional to the universe that spawned it, or is it truly infinite?
The furthest ring–the black void surrounding all Sessions and Universes–is truly infinite. The eldritch horrorterrors that inhabit it are also infinite, since they’re part of Sburb’s design.
The dream bubbles, and the ghosts that inhabit them, however, are conditional to the universes that spawned them. The horrorterrors glub up those bubbles, but as far as we know, they don’t do so for every session.
They glub up the afterlife for our Heroes thanks to the influence of Feferi Peixes-the Witch of Life. She was actually raised by a horrorterror as her familiar, and is able to commune with the gods to request they establish the bubbles.
You could read this as Feferi changing the nature of Life in Homestuck, granting everyone who perishes a sort of second life in a weird limbo of half-existence.
Later parts of the story suggest that the horrorterrors were manipulating Feferi and all of the ghosts of the afterlife to protect themselves from Lord English, and to serve their mysterious goals by both A) Ensuring Lord English’s destruction and B) Enabling his creation in the first place.
Which brings us to…
is there a hypothetical alternate-alternate world where the conditions that rolled the troll-verse are different?
No, definitely not. That scenario is theoretically possible for other species elsewhere in PS, but not for trolls–or humans, for that matter.
We’re not sure what the limits are on variations of existence and choice in Paradox Space, but Aranea tells us there are some, and goes into some of the philosophical problems that come with the admittedly attractive idea that there might not be any:
But really, the problem is logistical. Having even potentially infinite variations of a particular universe isn’t necessarily impossible in Paradox Space, but it is impossible for the worlds and characters trapped in Homestuck. Because of Lord English.
Aranea gives us this little spiel about how the choices and possibilities available to everyone in Paradox Space are limited by the fact that PS itself is using the characters to propagate its own existence. Only choices and scenarios that allow reality to exist and continue to propagate are allowed to flourish.
And by the very nature of his existence, Lord English traps every universe and person we see in the comic in existential stasis. He’s a notable influence in the Alpha Trolls’ session through Kurloz, Damara and Cronus, and he’s THE reason Alternia exists as it does and the Beta trolls are who they are.
He made trolls what they are, so their reality can’t actually exist unless he exists, and if trolls existed in any other way they wouldn’t create and interact with the humans the way they do, meaning the humans wouldn’t eventually create LE, meaning trolls wouldn’t have existed in the first place.
It’s a grandfather paradox, but on a cosmic scale. Trollkind may be able to exist in varied ways from Earth C,’s Troll Kingdom onwards, which is now free of the influence of Lord English. But its origins–and those of humanity–are forever entangled with Lord English. Them’s the br8ks.
my favorite troll is definitely Tegiri, with Charun and Maxlol sharing the #2 spot.
As for the ectobiology, not really, to be honest! There’s plenty of cool people looking into stuff like that, but the biological/genetic details have never really been my thing. I’m a lot more invested in symbolism and thematic reference at the time being.
Yeah, I mean, I think most of the Alternian trolls are coded as having some kind of mental illness. The kids too, but like, Alternian society itself is a dystopic wasteland. It’s basically designed to ensure these kids are disassociated, desensitized to violence (both literal and structural, from the system and others to them), and willing to hurt others. Most of these kids are probably not super healthy.
I hadn’t really gotten to Jude yet at all–he still seems like a Doom player, but now I’m more uncertain about all of them.
I have been reconsidering Joey as a Life player pretty heartily, actually, BUT…I think in the end, at least so far, it’s only left me more sure she’s a Light player.
But the reason why, I think, suggests some new infomation relevant to how the Classpect system works. I’m curious to know what you’ll think about it! And since I’m about to record this in video form and it’s pretty overwhelming and difficult to talk about, I think it’ll help to get my thoughts in order somewhat, so I think I’ll do some prep here.
My logic goes something like this:
Xefros is a Rage player. Looking back at Act 1, it’s actually all there in his Page behavior! While Xefros himself isn’t angry or upset, he does continually frustrate, anger, and confuse Joey, essentially giving/serving her Rage (in my reading of Knights/Pages, of course). What’s more, eventually Joey’s anger stops being directed at Xefros and starts being directed at Dammek and Alternia at large, on Xefros’ behalf.
In this reading, we can understand Dammek keeping Xefros away from the sopor slime as “training” to be a form of serving him Rage, too–the Sopor Slime just keeps trolls away from the chucklevoodos, and the chucklevoodos have already been equated to Rage before. Xefros has been given Rage, to his own benefit.
I had figured that, if Xefros was a Page of Time, he’d eventually gain a Warrior to defend/fight for him through his communion powers–Xultan filled the niche perfectly. Seemed like a solid way to get Xefros to a Brain Ghost Dirk-type power boost or whatever. But Joey is ALREADY one of Xefros’ champions at the end of Act 1, and Xefros got her there mainly through Rage. Pretty solid echo of how Jake won over Dirk initially, or how Tavros won over Vriska/Aradia/Terezi (obviously, all of these to varying degrees of success).
So yeah, Xefros as a Page of Rage checks out. One critical difference, though: Jake and Tavros were already inclined to think in terms of Hope/Breath respectively at 13. While Xefros apparently has a considerable Ragey influence on Joey, he doesn’t seem to be thinking in Rage terms much himself. In Act 1, Xefros’ conscious THOUGHTS center around…
Time. It’s not just him, either–Dammek has some pretty hefty Breath implications, especially once you consider that the hoverpad he took from Xefros is essentially an object of detachment and flight. But we know Dammek is a Blood player, as opposed to Breath.
The bottom line is, there’s just too much DRAMATICALLY CAPITALIZED TEXTUAL EVIDENCE linking Xefros to Time and Dammek to Breath to be outright ignored. We don’t know either way with Joey, but she certainly thinks lot about both Life and Light, and one of them presumably has to be her actual Aspect.
The way I see it, there’s two possibilities at play at this point. It’s totally possible, of course, that all of that stuff was just misdirection, or just stuff we weren’t meant to take seriously or read into.
But if that’s the case, I’m not sure the fandom can ever actually accurately deduce a character’s classpect based on canon clues. Xefros has some Rage behavior, but it wasn’t telegraphed nearly as strongly as the Time stuff.
So maaaybe WP doesn’t particularly care for this type of speculation? Maybe the Time stuff was just like, general writing, and we’re not really meant to dig into the lore here and try to pick out clues and Figure Shit Out, like I thought we were being invited to do?
That would suck for me, but I would accept it. Hiveswap still has a stellar narrative with plenty of background lore to dissect and explore, Classpect stuff to look through or no. I’d be cool with just waiting for the narrative to tell us what’s going on outright, too.
However, until we know for sure one way or the other what WP intends, I’d like to keep regarding the Classpects as a coherent system with rules that can be figured out and considered in assessing characters’ natures and potential character arcs.
And there’s still the other possibility:
Calliope told us player abilities can manifest “in defiance with their Aspects” under the right circumstances. We’ve seen this in Homestuck, most clearly with Rose, which a lot of the fandom (you included, if I remember right?) has parsed under inversion theory.
I differ in that I parse it through Roleplay. It seemed to me that players attempting to act out a different Class, or being forced into acting as one, was always the source of these Aspect “shifts”.
So Rose manifests Void not because Witch is Seer’s natural opposite, but because Rose is interested in Magicians and wizards and wants to take an Active role in Changing the fate of the session.
But I wasn’t sure if we were dealing with Aspect inversion, ie: the player simply switching to the opposing Aspect, or if the Aspect side of the system was even more flexible and players could focus on any other Aspect in the spectrum, too.
This is the first clear indication I’ve seen for the latter interpretation. My current best guess for why Xefros has all this Time focus and Dammek has all this Breath focus is that the blood castes, on Alternia, are somewhat stereotyped in favor of their corresponding Aspects.
There’s a cultural bias predisposing members of each Caste to think in terms of the Caste’s True Sign Aspect. This is why Xefros implies all Indigos are super strong, but Equius’ introduction says he’s strong because he’s kind of a freak.
And it sort of makes sense, given Lord English nor Doc Scratch would care to figure out the nuances of every individual troll–the founders of the hemospectrum as it exists on Alternia only had the profiles of the twelve trolls Gamzee and Equius knew to work with, while guiding society’s development of the Caste system.
And this is a fascist, exploitative system, so I would’ve found it odd if it was actually good for the characters to begin with, to be honest?
So if each Sign in a Caste is linked to a different Aspect, but the Caste as a whole is stereotypically connected with or pushed into conforming to one particular Aspect…
Then we’re looking at a world where a lucky few would have the social advantage of being told about their own latent potential through their Aspect (not that they couldn’t confuse themselves perfectly fine, if they were so inclined), but the great many were kept confused by stereotypes, and the contrast between their inner worlds and their own biological powers.
This conflict would be different for everyone, and would become even worse factoring in the variety of roles further imposed by society–like Dammek and Xefros being forced into Butlering.
The end result? A society where almost nobody is given the time and space to figure out who they truly are, and where almost everyone is playing against their strengths in some regard. As a bonus, almost everyone is stressed out, because they’re not allowed to do what would naturally make them happy.
Sound like Alternia to you? It does to me. And fostering that kind of widespread societal confusion certainly sounds like something you’d want to do if you were Doc Scratch or the Empress. What better way to keep the threat of uprising at bay?
Hilariously, that means her Maid behavior might be roleplay instead of her actual Class, so I might be debunking myself here! But I’m a little more inclined to think her admiration is manifesting as an interest in the Life aspect in general.
The key thing for me here is that her interest in Life has a potential source, that we can put under scrutiny going forward. Her interest in Light has no such apparent source, other than her own nature. Hence why I’m still falling on Light as her innate Aspect, at least for now.
As for Jude–I don’t even know right now, there’s too much going on. I’ll have to revisit him once the dust settles and I have some answers I’m more confident about. He certainly seems like someone chosen to suffer in Act 1, though, man. Poor kid.
I might be reading too much into it, but it seems like a pretty solid way to use Classpects to tell us about the violent and cruel nature of Alternian society. Whether I’m right or wrong about any of this, though, Act 2 is going to be very interesting. We stand to learn a lot!
[4. Gnostic Myth – Literally fucking everything. A Non-Exhaustive review.]
It’s honestly kind of weird to me how skeptical people are on this point, so before we dive deeper, let’s recap the sheer breadth of references to Gnosticism in Homestuck.
For starters, no less than three–up to potentially five–of the human kid’s chumhandles reference Gnosticism. You’ve got the stunningly obvious ones, Jade and Roxy: gardenGnostic & tipsyGnostalgic are as direct as it gets.
And given the number of references to Gnosticism seen here, Occam’s razor suggests two others are likely specifically Gnostic references, too:
Dave’s turntechGodhead references, well, the Godhead. Seemingly a general name used for the “Unknowable, Unseen” nature of a variety of Gods across different traditions, Godhead is one of many terms used for Abraxas in Gnostic myth.
And Jake’s golgothasTerror,commonly understood to be a reference to Christian myth, also easily reads Gnostic. Golgotha is the hill Jesus died on, but Jesus is as prominent a figure in Gnosticism as he is in Christianity.
Moving away from the simple chumhandles, Jake himself suggests quite a bit of Gnostic influence–particularly through his reflection of the mythological image of Abraxas, much as Lord English reflects the mythology behind Yaldabaoth.
There’s a pretty direct link in the ABRACADABRA reference from Jake’s BARK book (for which Abraxas is already considered a potential root word), but it’s also worth considering the way Carl Jung’s 7 Sermons to the Dead describe Abraxas. Two references are of particular interest to us.
It is the monster of the under-world, a thousand-armed polyp, coiled knot of winged serpents, frenzy.
The first is this, due to the similarity of language. Jake’s Angel-emanating Hope bubble could certainly be described as a coiled knot of winged serpents, for one thing. But more interestingly…
It is the lord of the toads and frogs, which live in the water and go up on the land, whose chorus ascendeth at noon and at midnight.
Abraxas is described as the Lord of frogs, specifically for their amphibious qualities. This puts new shades of meaning on Jake’s establishment of The Consort Kingdom, as it makes him literally lord of the amphibians.
Light and Void’s status as complementary Aspects is more obvious once you consider Gnosticism’s dualistic divide between the World of Light/Ideas and the World of Darkness/Matter.
And Equius’ Void powers manifesting as super strength makes a lot more sense when you consider that in Gnosticism, the Physical realm was synonymous with the unimportant, the deceitful, and especially with Darkness.
On top of that, I’d argue that the Christian “biting of the fruit” imagery involved with the Alchemy tutorial also leans towards a Gnostic interpretation, as opposed to a more typically Christian one.
After all, biting the fruit doesn’t damn John to penance and suffering, as the Christian myth of Adam and Eve does to its protagonists. Instead, it begins an endless climb towards Enlightenment, as Sophia’s descent to physical reality does in the Gnostic myth.
And speaking of that Gnostic myth, Homestuck re-enacts it not once, but twice. Two different characters play out the role of ‘Sophia’, the Gnostic Aeon of Wisdom who attempts to interact with ‘the Unknowable’, and accidentally creates the evil God with absolute power over the physical world–Yaldabaoth.
In their acts of transgression against the boundaries of reality, these characters also create figures identifiable as “Yaldabaoths”–Gods who have complete mastery over the physical world, but cannot engage with the world of ideas.
The first of these characters is Dirk, who happens to have Yaldabaoth for a Denizen…although he never meets him, and in fact, loses his Denizen along with his planet in Collide.
Dirk’s act of creation without a partner results in AR/Lil Hal, who attains cyber-omniscience and orchestrates the events of Unite Synchronize. Just as Caliborn is linked to Jigsaw, AR is linked to Hal 9000, from 2001: A Space Odyssey, also a mastermind figure with complete control over the surroundings of his victims.
Also like Caliborn, AR is set apart in the narrative by his inability to grow up instead of by an outright blindness to abstract thought. Eternal immaturity seems to be the mark of a Yaldabaoth figure in Homestuck, rather than a complete inability to perceive ideas.
The common denominator between all components ofLord English IS that stagnation. The same stagnation Bastian falls victim to under AURYN’s power. The same stagnation that drives Giygas to madness, and Pokey to the exploitation of the Nowhere Islands, countless other worlds, and ultimately, to The Absolutely Safe Capsule.
Which brings us back to Lord English. Calliope is the second Sophia-figure to play out the Gnostic Creation myth–with Caliborn as the Yaldabaoth she produces, also marked by a link to Yaldabaoth as his Denizen.
In her case, the “Unknowable” element she attempts to breach is the playing of Sburb itself–which she identifies as a foolish act that allowed Caliborn access to the power to become Lord English in the first place. Aranea even describes Sburb as a gameCherubs were never meant to play.
And now that we’re here, let’s unpack Lord English as Yaldabaoth a bit more. Along this series, we’ve seen a number of archetypal Lord figures that Caliborn seems to be drawn from: Bastian, Giygas, Pokey…
But there’s one that we haven’t discussed yet.
“I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God,”
YHWH, Yahweh, The Tetragammatron: The Lord God of Christian tradition. Yaldabaoth as originally envisioned by the Gnostics was not just a random evil God, but explicitly a criticismof thespiritual movement that would eventually consolidate into mainstream Christianity as we understand it.
As such, Lord English borrows quite a bit from the Abrahamic God of Christian tradition. Down to his very name, in fact. After all, the Bible’s first introduction to God is…
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
And words factor strongly into our own Lord’s construction of artifice and suffering. Doc Scratch’s precise lies of omission, The Condesce’s indoctrination of the masses through subliminal messages, movies and fiction informing the biases and self-loathing of Dave, Karkat, Jake, Dirk and almost every other character…
Culture is one of the antagonists’ most powerful tools, and that culture is transmitted through language. Indeed, you could say a common Language–a common Word–is the only thing truly binding all our protagonists together, across timelines and universes and bloodlines and species.
Lord English indeed.
And even Lord English’s very existence mirrors the Abrahamic All-Father, distributed as it is in a structure reminiscent of a Holy Trinity.
You have Lord English as Father….
Caliborn as Messianic, Dark-Enlightenment Bound Son….
And Lil Cal as ever-present, indecipherable but suggestive Holy Ghost.
The sun is the mark of the nature of a Universe, and the Sun Dave sees when traumatized by his physical surroundings is the same as the one Terezi sees when being blinded by Vriska, and which all Trolls except Kanaya are noted to suffer the light of. It is bright red-orange, angry and hot and suffocating, a spiral of red in the sky that–
He even does it on the exact same page as John bemoaning the mangling of their own story. And let’s not forget that John’s primary conflict during this whole section is the simple, astonishing shittiness of the reality that Caliborn has constructed.
Caliborn’s main form of aggression towards the characters isn’t any particularly hostile overture towards any one of them, but rather the construction of the inherently flawed and horrible reality they are all striving to escape from. Just as with Yaldabaoth’s subjugation of humanity.
And the nature of their escape is, fittingly, best exemplified with the sequence in which John finally masters his powers. Typheus floods the chamber in Oil, encasing John in the raw, physical reality of his own imminent drowning. Suddenly, John’s existence is focused entirely on the material plane…and simultaneously, John is drowned in darkness.
Jade tells us that the only way for John to truly free himself was to imagine a third option, outside the binary–Die or Escape–presented to him. Her language is specific: John needed not to “find” or to “notice” a third option, but to “Conceive” it: To Create, or bring into being.
And the moment he comes to that realization and begins thinking in terms of the World of Ideas, he is suddenly encased not in Darkness, but in overwhelming Light. John reaches Enlightenment over his world, and so masters his physical circumstances. Jade even references John achieving mastery over an explicitly “Confining” reality!
And the duality of that wording–The “Confining” reality and the “Conception” of Ideas–brings us to a final Gnostic symbol, and to the nature of our Protagonists’ final victory over Lord English.
And that is the symbol of the Cosmic Egg.
A motif that recurs in many of Homestuck’s influences.
The Childlike Empress enters a Cosmic Egg in order to force Bastian into saying her name, thus ending the old iteration of Fantastica and giving birth to the one Bastian will give form and texture to in the second half of the book. In The Neverending Story, the Egg is both the jail cell of the world, and it’s origin.
But it can be said that the Nowhere Islands themselves are an Egg, trapping the Dark Dragon within. To awaken the Dark Dragon is to destroy the Islands–the shot featured above of it’s back rising from within them is, after all, the final shot of the game. And yet, to do so is necessary for a free world to be born.
Now, Cosmic Eggs are by no means explicitly Gnostic symbols (though I could easily argue both The Neverending Story and Mother 3 are pretty Gnostic works in and of themselves). But there’s a particular concept in Gnostic literature relevant to understanding Homestuck’s relationship to the image.
A concept quoted to excellent effect in the following clip, which I highly suggest you watch:
But here’s the original quote anyway, since I trust you’ll find it relevant:
The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. That God’s name is Abraxas.
The birth of a bird requires the destruction of its own world–and such an act is apocalyptic, no matter how confining the bird’s reality.
And this sentiment certainly pervades Homestuck. Dave has an egg as his Cruxite item. Calliope and Caliborn are born from a literal Cosmic egg. Trolls and Humans alike must destroy the eggs of their home worlds to be born into Sburb, and Ascend to Godhood.
But we can go further than that, right? Surely there’s a symbolic egg in this story worthy of all my pretentious as hell build up? Of course there is. In fact, there’s likely two, though, in the end, they are one and the same.
The first of these is the Cueball, which has it’s origins in Caliborn’s God Tier clock. It seems to be a sort of ticking pendulum item, but by breaking off the timer it’s linked to and destroying his clock, Caliborn gains a permanent, unconditonal immortality, and invulnerability to all things except Cueball-infused weaponry.
Such as the weaponry Jade has Dave make in the Pre-Retcon timeline. She claims to get her intel from the Condesce and identifies the Cueball as an item Lord English is somehow vulnerable to. Dave, however, has a different idea:
And as it turns out, Dave’s impulse is also pretty on the money!
After all, the nature of Lord English’s indestructibility is tied to a certainty that he will never, ever change. Lord English will not grow or have any ideas other than what he had already decided on in his youth–befitting his status of Childlike Emperor and Yaldabaoth.
The egg, by contrast, is a symbol of inescapable change. The Cosmic Egg is the promise of apocalypse–that nothing is eternal, and that eventually, every world ends so another can be born. Seeing as that is a premise Caliborn so strongly rejects for himself, it is a reasonable element to counter him with.
Turns out Dave is right in identifying it as an egg! The Cueball that is Doc Scratch’s head does, after all, get used as a Literal Egg again and again– Lord English asserting his dominance over both the Cueball and Calliope in his hatching from Doc Scratch.
But in the end, the Cueball reaches Lord English in a different way. He turns out to be able to stop the physical reality of the Cueball, but not the fundamental idea of it. In fact, in his attempts to do so, he ends up creating it.
Because the true Cueball turns out to be the Ultimate Juju–in other words, the Story of Homestuck itself!
Tex Talks has already made this case for Act 7′s language, but it’s worth repeating because the visual language is so clear and simple. Before the Juju manifests as the House shape, it materializes as a simple white orb–indistinguishable from the Cueball.
And Vriska, standing straight and rigid like a Cue Stick, uses it like one–the Juju slamming down a shockwave and unleashing–something–at Lord English, something that will presumably pocket the 8-balls in the Black Hole that has just been created behind him, and thus endingLord English’s Game of Billiards.
And all the while, the domain of Paradox Space that all of our characters have been trapped inside? The game space that Lord English spent countless strange eons creating? All of that falls apart around us– Lord English’s world meeting its Apocalypse right as his being is finally hit with the symbol destruction and rebirth he strove to avoid for eternities.
The Betas may have been physically trapped in the Juju, but the entire cast has been trapped in the egg known as Homestuck from moment one–fighting to be free of the tyranny of Lord English’s constructed narrative. Struggling to be born.
Until now. All that’s left to find out is whatever the Epilogue has to show us. The nature of the world about to be born. Will we see a black End Screen, as Mother 3 gave us? Will we chart the new forms of Fantastica, as Bastian once did? Or are we in for something entirely different?
I honestly don’t have a fucking clue. But I’m excited to find out.
That’s all for now. I love you.
Keep rising.
Thanks to @betweengenesisfrogs for pointing out the link between Lord English and Cosmic Eggs! I would not have figured this shit out without you.
Flying through Storytelling 