Jade tells us that the trolls stopped talking to her, mirroring what happens when characters go from Alpha to Doomed Timeline (because the trolls only have access to the Alpha one). Maybe that's what happened there ? The Retcon MSPA Reader made created a "second" Alpha Timeline, one that the trolls can't reach. But since he didn't replace the original Alpha Timeline (as he just created a new one). Maybe that's also what happened with John's Retcon, creating a "second" Alpha Timeline.
(Sorry for second ask, I had this thought when writing the first one) The Retcon creating a new Alpha Timeline could also explain the Ring of Life. He took the Ring of Life from the original Alpha, and then, after making sure Vriska stayed alive (and thus, Hussie kept the Ring) he was doing this on the second Alpha Timeline. (It’s also possible the Retconned Timeline with Vriska alive is the third, and the second is created when John took the Ring)
And then, from anonymous:
jades route foreshadows that more is going on! bec noir destroys prospit so they have to enter at some point. i have absolutely no idea how this is going to play out but they seem to have a plan
Oh. So the trolls are definitely in the Medium, then? It can be safely assumed, I suppose, that the trolls do play their game, and perhaps the MSPA reader will appear on the Meteor to get in contact with them rather than interacting with them pre-game.
So we definitely know that we’re in a sort of Doomed timeline, if nothing else.
Except clearly the kids… don’t play the game. When John, Rose, Dave, and Jade wake up on the 13th of April, 2009, the game is already in motion. In the canonical realm of Homestuck, everything happens because they specifically do play the game.
E.g. Skaia only exists because they play it, but because they were always going to play it, it’s been in existance long before they actually START the game. This means that the Reckoning isn’t actually brought on by anything they do, in technicality; they were always going to play the game, so the Reckoning was always going to happen.
But that doesn’t happen in this new timeline. There is no Reckoning on the 13th of April, 2009. John’s home isn’t destroyed, Rose’s mansion doesn’t face a secondary meteor after narrowly avoiding the one aimed at the lab, Dave’s apartment isn’t only just saved by Bro slicing a meteor in half, and there is no colossal meteor for Bec to divert away from Earth using his newly gained Sprite powers. In fact, there’s. No signs of the meteors at all.
This is very telling of a session that hasn’t evolved enough to even allow the Reckoning to begin. This is very telling of a session that doesn’t even exist.
I have no idea why that didn’t occur to me before, but there’s literally a thousand things pointing out that this session was never played. Like, this isn’t even the MSPA Reader just saving them from the horrors of the game itself; this is them ensuring that the game never even started to begin with.
Which means the thing with Jack Noir is really weird? Unless, like the anon said, all the MSPA Reader’s really done is create a new timeline where the session starts a little later than usual.
Although to me, that would seem weird. The countdown on the Cruxtruder just warns you when the meteor is about to strike. I don’t think it actually calls that player’s specific meteor to go for them?
Because there are a thousand meteors that hit Earth at once. That’s a thousand different sessions.
Unless we’re assuming that for each game, there’s literally only one session that’s even viable to get into the Medium and have a fertile Skaia for the Reckoning to begin, and it’s only their meteors that hit Earth?
But that goes actively against the walkthrough Rose reads at the beginning - we see someone enter the Medium there. They even get their Entry item. Unless we assume that their failure to update their walkthrough means they’ve died rather than that they’ve gotten too busy playing the game.
Because we also know that John’s neighbour enterd the Medium, too. So some of those sessions have to be viable.
So, what do we assume is truth? That only John’s session actually caused the Reckoning, so every meteor that we see hit Earth in Homestuck is a direct consequence of the Beta kids playing the game (meaning that no other child on Earth had a game that could actually go anywhere), or that the Reckoning in every session was scheduled to happen across the span of a specific time period on Earth, and literally no child played SBURB?
Because, like I said, we know that someone else must have played SBURB. There are a few different walkthroughs that Rose reads before they even play the game, and they’re updated all the way to Entry. If we assume that John’s session was the only viable session, and that every other session on Earth was always going to be cut short because of the meteors created by their game, then… surely the other sessions on Earth must have had some success, paradoxically, because the meteors from John’s session never hit?
On the other hand, if we assume that some sessions still played out on the 13th of April, 2009, and that those walkthroughs were still written and those people actually managed to enter the game, then surely the Reckoning would have still happened? Someone must have been able to get Skaia up to its third form. The only way to fuck that up is to not prototype the sprite prior to Entry, and from Rose’s prototyping of the Harlequinsprite, we know that someone must have done that successfully because she knows how the prototyping works.
In fact, on page 184, Rose knows enough to say that the Kernelsprite needs to be prototyped twice. Specifically from a “horrendously written” walkthrough.
Having read a bit more, I’ve found something even more confusing, which has sparked another thought:
Rose says on page 256 that, over the past few days, much smaller meteors have been hitting people’s homes around the world - it’s just that John’s was the biggest at the time. If I recall correctly, too, John’s game actually arrives late - SBURB was released on the 10th of April, 2009, not the 13th.
So that’s three days unaccounted for. Three days’ worth of sessions with meteors aimed specifically at homes. When we consider that Rose finds the terminal on page 874 showing that each session has a meteor, but not all meteors have sessions, we have to assume, to some degree, that these sessions have meteors specifically related to their Reckoning.
Rose’s mom has been analysing this for a while before Rose even finds the terminal. So this can’t have just been brought on specifically by their session. Although the Skaia portals send things through time and space, it would be a little odd for John’s session’s meteors to SPECIFICALLY be targeted for other sessions.
Additionally, my initial thought was that, if the Beta session were the only viable session, then Jade’s meteor must be the one that destroys the Earth - it is, after all, the biggest by far. But Rose actively says on page 876 that it’s “lucky for the Earth” that the meteor is all the way out in the Pacific Ocean, implying it isn’t big enough to cause world-ending destruction. She also doesn’t say that it’s the final - just the biggest.
So I think I can say, with some certainty, that Hussie’s lore is fucking weird and this is a much bigger headache than I thought it would be.
Going back on point, the lack of meteors destroying Earth in Pesterquest is weird unless we suppose that everything above is fucking coincidental. It doesn’t make sense unless we assume that only the Beta kids’ session would have ever caused a Reckoning, and that their not playing it means Skaia never grew enough to allow a Reckoning to begin.
It then also means that we have to assume, for the Jack Noir scene to make sense, that they then play the game late and, by some wild coincidence, just so happen to do everything exactly the same.
But I don’t think this is the case, either - because Jade’s lilipad, the one containing Dave’s copy of the game for her to access, is broken. It’s eternally stuck on 4:13.
This implies, to me, that their session’s paradoxes were never fully met, and therefore their session can never truly be completed. Unless the MSPA Reader helps them get everything back on track - including Retconning everything that didn’t happen because they fucked it all up - then the Beta session just won’t happen.
This makes me wonder, then, how the hell the MSPA Reader and Jade end up on Prospit when Prospit can’t be the way it is without all those Paradoxical circumstances. This Jack Noir isn’t said to have canid features. He’s not the Jack Noir that can leap from universe to universe - not yet, anyway.
So how on Earth did they transportalise to a Prospit that has Jack Noir with leathery wings and a crimson force crackling around him? Transportalisers don’t take you through time, they just take you through space - meaning the Prospit they transportalise to must be the Prospit that exists in that very second.
Which means it’s a Prospit that has no prototypings. It’s a Prospit surrounding a Skaia that isn’t developed.
Which means Jack Noir quite literally cannot have any of those features because they haven’t been prototyped for him to gain them.
We literally see Jack Noir develop as prototypings happen in Homestuck. He doesn’t gain his Goddog powers until Jade prototypes Bec, so we have to assume that there is some liminality between when events happen in the real world to when they happen in the game. It’s not too long after Bro’s death that Jade enters the medium; therefore, it’s not too long before Bro’s death that Jade prototypes Bec.
So the Jack Noir we see on Prospit is… a complete outlier.
It doesn’t even quite work in the sense of it being an offshoot Alpha Timeline when you take all of these factors into consideration, because everything that signifies it to even be an offshoot Alpha doesn’t exist.
Whenever a timeline ends in failure, it becomes Doomed. These are the offshoots, essentially. There is the main Alpha Timeline (the one that’s going to succeed), and then if a timeline doesn’t fit with that, no matter how closely it followed the Alpha timeline, it will offshoot.
The Game Over timeline, though it was initial the Alpha Timeline, still ended in failure. When John went back to retcon everything, he created an entirely new timeline - essentially shifting the original Alpha Timeline down to an offshoot Doomed one. That’s why he has the Choice to go back or not, and why that universe’s John has to die for it.
In essence, for all his retconning, John wasn’t going to reap the benefits of what he’d sown. An entirely different John was.
But that’s not what we’re seeing here. MSPA Reader isn’t leaping back and forth in time with purpose, they’re just… stalling a key even before it can even begin by interrupting the timeline.
So they’ve created a Doomed offshoot. One that’s entirely non-canonical, and doesn’t follow the Alpha Timeline at all.
I can think of two things this means:
1) MSPA Reader has fucked up the timeline completely, is making a new Alpha Timeline where the game doesn’t exist, or doesn’t exist the way it’s meant to, and the actual timeline of Homestuck will be punted down to an offshoot Doomed timeline
2) MSPA Reader has created an offshoot Doomed timeline that runs parallel to the Homestuck timeline, a bit like the very first Doomed timeline we ever saw did (Davesprite’s)
The only thing that confuses me, then, is that odd commentary from who we assume is Dirk hidden in the files - that someone is “messing with the narrative”, from what I recall. If this was an offshoot, Dirk wouldn’t have to worry.
Which means whatever the MSPA Reader is doing will have rippling effects down to the Epilogue Timeline. Or maybe it means that Dirk is just hyperaware of all timelines, and furious that someone is fucking it up from the start so casually.
This is, after all, the first time anyone’s tried to retcon things from the very beginning. That’s bound to have very weird, complex effects on the rest of the game.
Okay. This is a very long, very confusing post, and my main takeaway is this:
Hussie’s messing with the lore once again. So far, he’s messing with it in a way that actively goes against what he’s shown us previously, and I can’t really tell what’s meant to logically be going on. There are a few different theories, for sure - several of which I’ve gone through above, and Florian’s theory is probably about the only one that makes sense overall so far - but there’s nothing wholly concrete.
So, while I can make guesses - that this is a Doomed timeline, a new Alpha Timeline with long-reaching effects, that the game isn’t going to happen at all, that it’ll happen late, that some things just don’t make sense at all when we take pre-existing lore into consideration - I can’t predict that’s going to happen with any sort of confidence, nor can I really explain how it works when everything seems to contradict itself.
