#first guardians

[popomerrygamz]

First Guardians: ???

Feel free to name her in the tags!

[notwhatyoucameherefor]

Fuck it. What Homestuck species would you be but this time the poll lasts a week.

Human

Troll

Lusus

Carapacian

Leprechaun

Consort

Cherub

Denizen

First Guardian

Horrorterror

Sprite (specify what of)

Other (Again, specify)

Voting ended onApr 7, 2024

Rb for higher sample size because I still have like 2 active followers

[starcrossed-trolls]

THE FOUR GUARDIANS

[sumbier0]

First guardians 2 flavors: big beast and bastard

[homestuckexamination]

as far as we know any world's race is normally caused by the actions of a first guardian, directly or otherwise, and it almost always involves a really big meteor

example of a direct involvement: Becquerel's Vast Howl razing Earth dry of life for 413 years just to keep Jade from dying

example of indirect involvement: Doc Scratch bringing Gl'bgolyb to Alternia where it would eventually be crushed by a meteor, bringing about a galaxial Vast Glub in it's dying throes, ensuring there be no chance for the troll race to come back through anything other than the sacred game even after 612 sweeps

The problem with this train of thought is that, these aren't Two Examples of their involvement. They are the only examples of their involvement, because we Never Really See Anything Else. The Alpha Session being Void, we don't even really get Meteors to go with it- And then Humanity dies off just in general eventually because Condy forces a dystopian regime upon them.

While you CAN draw patterns from this stuff, and like- First Guardians ARE super-powerful beings associated with planets, and SBURB is a global calamity meant to wipe the civilization out, SO USUALLY it makes sense for them to be involved in some way, but also it's kiiiinda hard to draw full patterns of how SBURB fates whole worlds to die like that from that small pool.

[house-bound]

Okay so since PQ ended with the reader becoming that timeline’s first guardian, which is something that can happen apparently, can we start making First-Guardiansonas that keep versions of timelines that we personally want? 

Because I’m gonna do that, create a timeline that appeals to me personally and make a First-Guardiansona to lock it away. Because I can I guess.

[wak-after-dark]

do first guardians fuck? can first guardians fuck? obv bec was able to but like,,, did he? doc scratch never seemed like the type to fuck. could bec have had puppies? would they have inherited his powers?

Doc Scratch didn’t, and couldn’t, because he was made entirely of non-living elements and didn’t have the necessary equipment, nor did he show the drive. Jade, on the other hand, was confirmed to have inherited... Bec’s junk in the Epilogues, so the assumption is that Bec did, in fact, also have it, and honestly, 413 Million Years sounds like a long time to NOT bone when you’re a dog with largely animal instincts. Given the lack of any other First Guardian though, I’d assume the genetic mix-up renders them either sterile, or unable to pass their powers down onto anything, otherwise the entire world would be flooded with First Guardian Bec Pups.

[ardenttheories]

How do First Guardians even have their powers in the first place. It honestly feels like the term nigh-omnipotent is tossed around a lot in Homestuck, the First Guardians, Lord English, John after he gets his retconning abilities. Like how strong are they exactly?

First Guardians are a bit complex, because the two most prominent First Guardians - Doc Scratch and Bec - show different instances of First Guardian creation, action, and reasoning for action. 

A sequence of codes is required for something to become a First Guardian; for Doc Scratch, this is 8r8k H34DS (courtesy of Team Scourge), t1ck t0ck (courtesy of Team Charge), and honk HONK (courtesy of Gamzee), all from a doomed timeline wherein Gamzee went Sober prior to them actually completing the game/reaching the meteor. For Bec, this is the MEOW/GCAT code (courtesy of Rose)

This code then has to be combined with something else. The most obvious example of this is Bec; Diamonds Droog, as the Draconian Dignitary, attempts to appearify Halley prior to his death, creates a paradox, and instead paradoxifies him. He types in the MEOW/GCAT code, stolen from Rose’s journals, which then merges with the paradox slime, and creates an imperfect clone of Halley imbued with the energy contained within the MEOW/GCAT code; this is how Bec is created. 

The same thing happens with Doc Scratch, to a lesser extent. The Black Queen attempts to appearify an all-knowing cue ball and Lil Cal, creates a paradox, and paradoxifies them instead. She then merges the paradox slime with the code she found from the ~Ath book, Team Charge’s journals, and Team Scourge’s journals - the 8r8k H34DS t1ck t0ck honk HONK code - and from this combination comes Doc Scratch. 

Doc Scratch’s code is significantly more complex, requiring six distinct components to complete it, whereas Bec’s is a much more simple GCAT code (although it does contain all variants of GCAT with the letters in different orders). Bec is also created from the ghost slime imprint of a dog, whereas Doc Scratch is made specifically from an all-knowing cue ball and Lil Cal, both things which are completely inanimate. 

I’ve seen someone suggest that First Guardians must be made from things which are living, and that Doc Scratch works simply because the Lil Cal he’s made from contains the souls of Hal, Equius, half of Gamzee, and Caliborn, and that the reason he’s so much more prominent as a First Guardian is because he had humanoid souls to have as a basis of his foundation. 

This would imply that First Guardians who are made from the species of a planet which are capable of higher thinking are more powerful than those who are made from less intelligent beings. So a First Guardian based on a Human would be a more powerful guardian compared to one based on a squirrel - although, if we take GCAT as an example, the truth is more likely that First Guardians based on animals retain their animalistic traits and simply work their actual powers around them, whereas more humanoid Guardians act in a way we would see as more “active” and “efficient”. 

This, for instance, is the difference between Doc Scratch manipulating Vriska and Aradia through text to reach his end goal, and Bec sort of wandering off with Jade on his back when he knows a present from John will appear. They are still doing the same job, but I think the animal Guardians are a bit more to the point with it. 

When it comes to actual powers, it’s… complicated. 

To some degree, First Guardians will always know what is going to happen in relation to the game and what route needs to be taken in order for things to happen. Bec innately knowing that John’s present will appear on Jade’s birthday years in the past, thus being the reason why they are even friends in the first place, is an example of this; Jade and John need to be friends for the game to make sense, and so Bec creates an instance wherein Jade finds out about John’s existence through a stable time loop (John sends a present to Jade containing his chumhandle, ghostytrickster, some pumpkin seeds to help with her garden, and a shirt in her favourite colour, which is sent back in time; Bec takes a young Jade to find it, who then gains a passion for gardening and for the colour blue, things which she did not have prior to that present arriving; she then seeks out the chumhandle on the letter the presents came from, and meets John). 

That is really the main point of a First Guardian; ensuring the game is created, that the main players always exist, that they are created in the first place (something we see in more detail with Doc Scratch), and completing stable time loops to ensure that all of these things happen. 

For instance, yes, Bec prototyping himself was an incredibly bad idea, because that then created Bec Noir. However, this then meant that when Jade died, Bec Noir had confusing feelings over her death and immediately took her to her Quest Bed, thereby ensuring she reached godtier - something that may not have happened had Jack Noir not been prototyped with Bec. And as we know, Jade godtiering is vital to her and John being able to make it to the alpha session with Skaia and their planets, which ends up being their only way to actually beat the game. It was also the only way to ensure that Jack Noir had a way to cause enough damage to the beta session to require a Scratch, which then flung him into the trolls’ session, which then required the two sessions to work together to turn their doomed sessions into one viable session. 

One tiny action by Bec essentially completed every timeloop within Homestuck. That’s the power of a First Guardian. 

In a more literal sense, they also have the same sort of abilities a Space player has, though the most prominent seems to be the ability to teleport themselves and other things around them. However, Bec specifically seems to have a very powerful bark attack, maybe indicating that there is a more offensive way for First Guardians to attack. I’d say that’s not really their purpose, though; they’re orchestrators, not warriors.  

In the wider scheme of things, no other being is as powerful as a First Guardian, so long as the Green Sun exists. They are incredibly hard to kill due to their teleporting abilities - after all, you can’t kill what you can’t hit - as well as their importance to the timeline, and the sheer, raw power a First Guardian contains… well, you can see that in Bec Noir. He destroys an entire universe, and every instance of existence within that universe. That’s Lord English levels of destructive - which, ironically, Lord English likely derives some of his powers from Doc Scratch, whom he uses as a host for his birth. 

Their drawback on power, I think, is their inherent lack of initiative. They’re not made to go destroying everything, so they don’t. They just do what they’re meant to, ensuring everything within their instance of the universe runs smoothly. Once they reach a point of importance, that’s them done - for instance, Bec being prototyped was his instance of importance, because after that he is no longer Bec, and the creation of the Green Sun/his own death is the importance of Doc Scratch, because after that he births Lord English. They have no ambitions or ideals beyond what they are meant to do. 

So, logically, Lord English is significantly more powerful than Doc Scratch, but Lord English wouldn’t exist without Doc Scratch. Doc Scratch, should he have wanted to, could have completely set up a series of events in which Lord English was born with severe handicaps that would have made defeating him so incredibly easy it was laughable. He could have set up a timeline in which Lord English simply never existed to begin with - but this would have gone against the concept of Lord English having “always been here”, and thus wouldn’t have created a stable timeloop, so this possibility is simply nonexistent. 

I suppose for no bigger example of how powerful a First Guardian can be as they actually are, think of godtier Jade’s abilities (many of them enhanced by Bec’s own powers), or how Doc Scratch managed to systematically change an entire race’s culture and history to impose a strict governmental ideology on class divisions and militia brutality in order to change the trolls from being like the Beforans into the Alternians. 

A First Guardian will never be as powerful as Lord English in a physical sense, but they are powerful in the sense that Lord English isn’t able to create the timeloops in order to bring himself into creation; he needs Doc Scratch to do that for him. 

I hope that makes sense? It’s hard to really put into words the power of something that isn’t physically powerful, but instead powerful in the strings it pulls and the knowledge it has to pull those strings.