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OFF-THE-CUFF HOMESTUCK THOUGHTS #5: ACT 6 HOMESTUCK AS NARRATIVE REBELLION, OR: ARCS ARE DEAD, LONG LIVE ARCS

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[Note: This one’s a doozy! Still kind of off-the-cuff, in that I tried not to stress out about getting everything perfect, but I did do some revision to make my ideas more clear. That’ll probably be the norm from here on out. Hope you’re in the mood for a long read and a wild ride!

…Seriously, this shit is like twenty pages in Word.]

In my previous posts, I’ve discussed a number of ideas present in Act 6 and Act 7 Homestuck that I think contribute powerfully to the ending of Homestuck, especially on a thematic level.

I’ve discussed Homestuck as a meditation on the nature of a self divided across the many timelines of a dispassionate cosmos, and argued that the Retcon, far from a drastic change in storytelling, is a continuation of that long-running theme. Is victory meaningless if one’s original self isn’t around to claim it, or can a coherent, archetypal identity can be understood as existing beyond all of one’s disparate selves? In the system of Skaia, Homestuck asks, how do we live?

I’ve also discussed Homestuck, especially Act 6 Homestuck, as a Gnostic work, the story of an escape from a cosmic tyrant, a Demiurge whose ultimate weakness is that he cannot see the limitations of the domain he’s been given. In the same post, I discussed how this realm of the Demiurge, Lord English’s domain, is constantly paralleled with the space embodied by Homestuck itself, and how the kid’s departure from the story evokes their escape from this tyrant’s space-time domain as it reaches the end set for it by Paradox Space. From the system of Lord English, Homestuck asks, how do we escape? And at the same time, in the system of narrative called Homestuck, how do we find meaning within its limitations, and how do we escape them?

These themes work together. As we’ve seen, they echo and reinforce each other, provide parallels and points of contrast. In fact, I’d argue that each of these different themes are diverse manifestations of one larger theme, in the same way that individual selves in Homestuck can be thought of as manifestations of one larger Self. This overarching theme is present throughout Homestuck, but it reaches its culmination in Act 6 and 7, in a finale that drives it home in a different ways. To understand Homestuck is to understand this theme.

If someone were to ask me, “What is Homestuck about?” this would be my answer:

Homestuck is an exploration of the tension between abstract, impersonal systems and individual, personal experiences of those systems.

Abstract, impersonal systems are everywhere in Homestuck, systems that don’t always align with the desires, emotions, and goals of the main characters. The central question of Homestuck is how these characters will choose to understand the systems that govern their lives, and how they will carve out meaningful lives in relation to those systems. Gnosticism, metafiction, divided identities, and Sburb itself all play into this theme. As Homestuck’s characters decide how to live their lives within these many interconnected systems, they suggest possibilities for our own lives, for we readers also live in a world that also contains many systems and forces outside of our control. In their choices, we find opportunities and implications for how we should live.

You’ll notice I said there’s a tension, rather than an opposition, between individual experience and abstract systems. I think that gets closer to the truth of what Homestuck is trying to say. Characters in Homestuck sometimes reject its systems altogether, but just as often they exploit them or find identities for themselves within the constraints/opportunities of those systems. While Caliborn’s Gnostic-style domain of control is presented in a negative light, as something worth opposing and escaping, other systems, like Sburb itself, are presented in a much more ambiguous light, challenging us to decide how we feel about those systems and the possibilities they present within their rules.

I’ve talked about several of these systems in my previous posts, but today I want to talk about one I haven’t yet dug into in detail. Narrative itself.

Narrative in Homestuck, the power a story holds over its characters, is another system which the characters of Homestuck are constantly fighting, exploiting, and embracing.

Because another word for those abstract systems in Homestuck is…

Arcs.

Some Dave-Related Groundwork

[Note: If you’ve read previous posts of mine, I’m going to repeat myself a bit here, but I’m going to revisit the subject here because I want to make sure it’s understood.]

When we talk about Narrative as a system in Homestuck, we have to be really, really careful what we’re talking about.

Perhaps no sentence in Homestuck has been more unfortunately misunderstood as Dave’s statement to Rose near the end of Act 6:

DAVE: rose we dont have fuckin "arcs" we are just human beings

This has been interpreted in some quarters as Andrew Hussie throwing up his hands and saying, “I don’t care about character development or giving my characters meaningful growth, because arcs, like magic, are fake anyway, so it really doesn’t matter what I do.”

This would be incredibly annoying and misguided if it were actually what he was saying, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Andrew Hussie is deeply invested in character development, and it shows.

As I’ve said before, if Hussie rejected the idea of character development altogether, if he didn’t believe stories that contained character growth were important, he wouldn’t have given Dave himself one of the most cathartic character arcs in Homestuck! Even among those disappointed with other aspects of the ending, it’s pretty widely agreed that Dave’s growth out of his internalized homophobia, his connection with Dirk, and the chance this affords him to process his feelings about his abusive brother make a story that’s pretty damn powerful and triumphant.

The simple truth is that Hussie handled some character arcs well and not others, like many an author with a large, diverse cast to juggle. While he arguably dropped some balls and made some mistakes while attempting to take on his enormous humdinger of an ending, these failures did not come from any lack of passion or commitment to his characters, but from an inability to handle everything at once.

Dave’s statement, and the discussion that follows it, should not be read as a writer dodging responsibility for completing his work. Dave is talking about something very different, a subject he has a lot of experience with, and which his own development as a character has a hell of a lot to do with.

Dave is talking about the tension between his friends’ individual lives and the narrative frameworks, the overpowering Archetypes, that they, and Sburb, and Lord English, try to construct their lives around.

Dave’s arc, in fact, is about learning to question Arcs.

Arcs are Dead, Long Live Arcs, or Critiquing Clichés With Characterization

Let me explain this statement in a little more detail. By Dave’s arc (lowercase) I mean the series of events and choices that led to his growth as a person. By his Arc (UPPERCASE), I mean a story structure that tries to enforce a narrative on Dave from the outside, rather than exploring who he is as as a person and what path makes sense for him to take.

Think of an Arc with a capital A as something like a cliché. A cliché is a predetermined story structure that is tedious because we’ve seen it a million times before. The hero hooks up with the only girl with a speaking part over the course of his journey for no reason other than that’s what we expect from a movie. That’s tedious, and we all know it’s (heteronormative) bullshit. It isn’t true to life. It likely doesn’t represent what’s natural or personally fulfilling for the characters. It’s something imposed by the writer, the studio, and/or the need to please a certain audience. It’s a narrative structure, overwriting and suppressing a more organic process of growth.

A narrative structure is a set of changes from point A to point B: the hero starts humble, gets more badass, meets girl, achieves badass goals, wins girl. Or something like that. The structure is the shape of a certain kind of story. Meaning, encoded in a certain, archetypal trajectory.

Ideally, we would like to tell and read stories that say something true about our lives, rather than just regurgitate narrative structures that have little to do with our own life experiences. What makes this tricky is that stories rely on structures. Stories are not real life; they’re only representations of life. (Once again we’re getting into the tension between the Map and the Territory that Homestuck showcases so well.) We need structures of some kind to have stories. To tell any story at all is to fix it in a specific, limited set of representations, narrative structures, arcs that create meaning.

Hence the paradox, the ambiguity inherent in the word “arc:” conveying a person’s growth over time requires that you fix it in an arc, even when you’re drawing from how that person would naturally evolve and change. At the same time, though, certain narrative structures are overused; they overdetermine the story you’re trying to tell. They become a certain set of expectations, rather than tools for conveying a character’s development as a person. They become Arcs instead of arcs.

Do you see the difference? Good narrative structures (what I referred to as arcs) depict character growth in a way that feels organic, spontaneous, and real. Cliché narrative structures (what we’re calling Arcs) overpower organic character growth and force it to fit a preexisting, forced model based on a set of expectations.

Dave’s arc is his growth from repressed coolkid with internalized homophobia to a gentle, mature adult whose relationship with Karkat is one of the most positive forces in his life. He’s rightly proud of that growth.

Dave’s Arc was the set of expectations that were placed on him by his society, by the narratives inherent in Sburb, by Lord English, and ultimately by many readers and certain narrative structures within Homestuck itself. Expectations that he might be a powerful, unflappable warrior hero figure destined to slay villains like Lord English. Dave rightly rejects these expectations placed upon him, which had little to do with who he was as a person or what he needed. His arc revolves around him rejecting the Arcs that were harming him.

In Homestuck, Hussie contrasts his protagonists’ organic, individual growth with the harmful power of the narrative structures that try to control them. This is another manifestation of the recurring theme of Homestuck: human lives are spontaneous and personal, and don’t always fit into the structures that try to shape them. True maturity is being able to grow beyond these structures.

Read Dave’s statement this way:

“Rose, our lives aren’t stories. They’re just lives. We decide what they mean. Outgrowing the need for my life to fit those structures has been freeing for me, and I think it’ll be freeing for you, too.”

Now, what Dave’s saying here works on two levels. From an in-world perspective, he’s exactly right. In reality, human beings don’t have inherent structure to their lives. And that’s exactly the tension that exists between the protagonists of Homestuck and forces like Sburb, Homestuck, and Lord English.

But, at the same time, we can also recognize that Dave’s a fictional character and Hussie is, in fact, crafting a narrative arc with Dave’s statement. Dave’s growth as a person (his arc) is about learning to free himself from the overpowering, harmful narratives (Arcs) that surround him.

Hussie is using arcs to defeat Arcs.

Arcs as Archetypes

With me so far? Okay. So, I’ve been distinguishing between arcs and Arcs because I think we want to be clear about the point Hussie’s trying to make, especially in this conversation. Now that we understand that, though, let’s acknowledge again that we’re talking about two different versions of the same thing.

Art is a way of representing life. It can represent life well and with an understanding of the nuances and ambiguities of real human beings. Or it can represent life poorly, forcing characters to conform to predetermined expectations, and robbing us of our chance to learn from other people’s experiences. But it’s a sliding scale. No representation will ever be perfect, and no representation is completely without some grain of realism. Every story structure falls somewhere along the line between the most human arc and the most aggressive Arc.

But one of the greatest things about stories is the way they critique each other. So an author like Hussie can use his own, more naturalistic story structures to critique the harmful, false story structures of others. That’s exactly what Homestuck is doing, and the escape the characters experience is every bit as much an escape from harmful clichés as it is from a cosmic tyrant named Lord English.

A given narrative structure is not necessarily positive or negative. Nor are all the narratives in Homestuck seen negatively. (Again, it’s tension, not opposition.) Before, we talked about the danger of clichés. But now we’re saying they’re not always harmful. What’s a better word, one that takes in both the positive and the negative?

I really like TVTropes’ word trope, which they use, I think, to address this very problem. Trope is like the value-neutral version of a cliché. While clichés have been repeated so often that they become harmful and restraining, tropes are simply things that exist in narratives, structures that authors use to achieve various goals. It’s up to us to decide if they’ve been used poorly or well. Homestuck is built on tropes, and uses some of them to challenge others.

A trope can be a certain kind of story. The hero went and slew a monster. The gods created the world. A young man overcame his psychological demons. These are narrative tropes we know well. We might also call them myths, or stories.

Another word we might use? Archetype. Literally a “leading type,” an archetype is similar to what we’ve talked about as the Ur-Self, or the Forms that come up in discussions of Platonism. It’s the original thing which can be seen behind various manifestations.

Ultimately, what we’re talking about here is an idea. And one of the fascinating things about Homestuck is that ideas are the basic building blocks of reality. In Homestuck, the power an idea can wield is immense.

Idea, archetype, trope, arc—they’re all words for what Homestuck is built on. The stories we bring to it, and the stories it presents to us. Above all, acts of resisting and embracing stories are at the heart of Homestuck and what it’s about.

What I want to delve into in this essay is: what are the narratives that Homestuck contains, and what are the narratives it critiques? What are the new narratives it suggests as more organic, more naturalistic alternatives? What does Homestuck suggest is the way to live?

Let’s find out.

Sburb vs Homestuck

On a narrative level, there’s a tension between Sburb and Homestuck. Sburb is a game and a system heavily constructed around certain narratives, archetypes, and ideas. Homestuck is a fictional work that is heavily constructed around many of the same ideas, but also calls some of these structures into question. This is deliberate as all hell.

Meanwhile, superimposed over the narratives of Sburb, another set of narratives lurks: the rules of reality set by the cosmic tyrant Lord English, who enforces certain narratives, rewarding some and punishing others, and literally rewriting the story in the most juvenile fashion. Homestuck takes on his narratives, too. And, at the same time, it takes on many narratives that we know from our lives, and calls them into question even when they’re built into the structure of the universe.

Let’s take a look at how all this works.

The Narratives of Sburb

Start with Sburb. It’s not surprising that Sburb takes the form of a game. Games are, in a sense, nothing but structure. They’re made of mechanics, and mechanics frequently have narratives encoded into them. The possibilities of a given game system, the choices one is able to make within it, produce narratives and produce meanings. Sburb resembles many different games, including chess, fantasy RPGs, and billiards (to say nothing of the playing card motifs elsewhere in Homestuck). This is because it has many different goals and thus creates many different narratives around those goals. In many ways Sburb can be read as critique and examination of all of these types of games (especially fantasy RPGs). But certain narratives encoded into Sburb seem to be extremely important, and over and over we see them come to the forefront.

Let’s call them Creation Myth, Coming of Age, and Heroic Epic.

The Creation Myth

Hussie has been very up front about Homestuck being a kind of creation myth. In a 2011 Formspring Q&A, Hussie wrote:

Question: So now you've revealed that the trolls' Sburb session CREATED OUR GODDAMN UNIVERSE. How long have you been waiting to spring that on us?

Hussie: Since before Homestuck started.

HS was always going to be a story about an extremely elaborate creation myth. As elaborate as I could conceive…This was always what Homestuck was about. This revelation was carefully guarded, although there are plenty of clues. It has taken 4.5 acts to understand the "what" (as well as some of the "how" along the way.) The rest of the story will be about exploring the rest of the "how", as well as determining whether the players succeed.

A Creation Myth tells the story of how the world was made. It usually tells the story of powerful gods, who represent certain aspects of the universe, causing different aspects of it come into being, often through fighting, procreating with each other, carving up the bodies of other, older beings, and all sorts of other memorable ways. By the end of it, the most dangerous gods have been defeated or made peaceful, and the world is paved for the arrival of human beings. The message is clear: these beings help us understand the world, and should be respected, as they still have power over it today.

This is Sburb’s central narrative. Only for Sburb, the gods are the players of a video game, and power over creation—described in terms of a new universe that is also the body of a giant frog—is offered as a reward for successfully completing the game. So, too, is their godhood (and god hood) a reward. It is not intrinsic to them, as with traditional creation myths, but must be earned over the course of the game.

But they earn it. Not only do they take on more elemental personas with magical power, and even become immortal within a strict set of rules, they also become mythologically important in the newly created universe. For the trolls, this takes the form of them becoming the twelve zodiac signs and constellations of Earth’s mythology. Later on, for the kids and trolls, this takes the form of them becoming venerated hero-ancestors who create the new civilization and guide it into a prosperous future. (Who knows, maybe they have constellations as well? Please, somebody put this in a fanfic.) To say nothing of the way Calliope venerates their journey as holy, almost mythological writ.

Hussie also wrote:

The goal is to create a universe all at once after overcoming an extensive series of challenges, and as is implied, the universe fleshes itself out with galaxies and systems and planets and lifeforms, ready and waiting for entry by the victorious players. The ultimate reward is for the players to enter the universe they created and do as they see fit. They are essentially the gods of that universe, and that is what the trolls are to our universe.

This ties in nicely with Sburb’s other strong narratives.

The Coming of Age and the Apotheosis

Sburb fuses the Creation Myth with the Coming of Age Story, or Bildungsroman (fancy German word for Coming of Age Story.) Sburb is designed to be played by adolescents, children on the cusp of adulthood, and it draws parallels between their journey into adulthood and their journey into the game. Indeed, Sburb seems to view maturity as what qualifies one for inheriting the mantle of a god. You can’t be a god without growing up, it suggests.

And isn’t it interesting that the goal of Sburb is to help a universe reproduce? A biological, evolutionary narrative, the non-narrative of the species blindly shaped by its attempts to reproduce, is introduced to the players right at the point in their lives when they’re also navigating their growing sexual and romantic maturity. The mysteries of adulthood are sublimated into the mysteries of giant cosmic space frogs. (See my Gnostic post for more about Sburb as biology.)

This process can often be cruel, as noted in how Sburb frequently kills off the guardians of its players, and usually their entire homeworld as well. It represents adulthood as a process of loss and grief and needing to move on. Not entirely untrue, but painful, too. It’s a brutal approach to maturity, one that echoes its inhuman, survival-of-the-fittest origins. The last generation must pass away for the next generation to take its place.

One of the most fascinating things about Sburb’s approach to maturity is the way that it tailors it to each individual player. Sburb tells them how they will mature, and who they will mature into. This is done through the system of classes and aspects (classpects) which are assigned, RPG-like, to each player. On the one hand, these are clearly elemental powers, like breath, light, space, and time. On the other hand, these are also descriptors of psychological realities for each player. Space connects with solitude and patience, breath connects with freedom, light with knowledge and agency. And the class side of the equation, the heroic titles of heir, seer, witch, and so on, are even more personal, describing a relationship to those elements and those powers. These are both the god-like roles the heroes will take on and the person they will be. (Or, in prophetic ways, they describe their failure to grow into maturity—see Eridan for an example.)

Thing is, though, they don’t start as these people. Because in Sburb it takes time to grow into being a god, right? As Kanaya says, Sburb frequently gives its players roles to challenge them. So what a Sburb title is…is a narrative. Player A started off as young and brash…but grew into maturity as the wise, reflective Seer of Time. She grew as a person because of her journey in Sburb, and became someone who could be a Seer and a God.

But it goes even further. As Tex Talks discusses in his excellent analysis video here, the elements are literally elemental; that is, the aspects make up the deepest-level structure of the universe. As Calliope tells us, reality is built out of the same aspects that describe the players. So when the players are maturing, part of what they’re maturing into is people who are closely tied to the structure of the universe. They’re becoming gods.

The combined narrative of Creation Gods + Coming of Age we might call Apotheosis. A fancy word for the story of becoming a god.

And as Tex reminds us, drawing heavily on Rose in her apples speech, for Sburb, the basic building blocks of the universe are ideas. Ideas in the Platonic sense; free-floating ideas that manifest in diverse forms but contain a central underlying truth. Tex argues, convincingly, I think, that these are also narrative ideas within the context of Homestuck. Light represents knowledge for both the reader and the player, and it represents importance on a metafictional level. Time and Space are constructs built into any narrative, Breath and Blood have ties to pacing, and Rage represents utter contrivance and bullshit.

It’s narratives all the way down.

So the story of each player’s growth into maturity, and the story of the group of players’ growth into the kind of people who can be gods of a new universe, is rich with narrative meaning on many levels. Each class, aspect, and pairing is a story, and given that Sburb can perceive all space and time, that means the story these descriptors tell is guaranteed to be tailored perfectly to each person’s process of growth or failure to grow.

Whew. Let’s see how Apotheosis, this fusion of the narrative of maturity and the narrative of creation, connects to the third major narrative of Sburb: the Heroic Epic.

The Heroic Epic

The Heroic Epic is a kind of story we’re all familiar with, I think. A Heroic Epic generally pits one or more figures of great might, skill, or intelligence against overwhelming enemy forces. Despite the odds, the hero or heroes are able to triumph, a testament to their inherent excellence as people. This is a story framework as old as mythology itself. A given hero often has one or more traits that a society considered desirable or noble--military skill, tactical cleverness, and so on—and to the degree a hero fails, it is because they fall short of these goals. Often a hero is a special, other kind of person, chosen from birth for greatness or descended from the gods.

An epic frequently takes the form of a long and complex poem or narrative, interweaving many different heroic figures and their struggles against opposing forces. Examples include the Trojan War, the Mahabharata, and the Journey to the West. Victory and defeat, usually in war, are among an epic’s major themes, and despite the complexity of its many interwoven figures, despite death and failure along the way, we generally expect some of the figures the story depicts as noble will succeed in their aims, even if they have to pay a heavy cost.

Sburb structures itself as an epic, and so does Homestuck.

What’s interesting about Sburb’s approach to the Heroic Epic is that it could have come straight out of many fantasy video games. Sburb structures itself as a military conflict between forces who share the players’ goals and forces who oppose them. It depicts the players as the noble figures who have the power to win victory for the forces of good. It even calls them, explicitly, its Heroes. As in Skyrim or a fantasy RPG, without the intervention of the player character, good cannot prevail and the world is doomed. It’s a fantasy that exalts the one who participates in it: you’re the one who carries value; you’re the one who everyone is counting on. You are the hero. It’s you.

This joins nicely with the theme of Apotheosis. The player character in Sburb is able to achieve victory, grow into maturity, and become an immortal god capable of bringing a new world into being. These are all echoes of the same theme: achieving value. Value in Sburb’s terms, according to its structures.

Like many video games, Sburb places value on achievement, strength and victory. While personal growth will be different for every player, the Heroic Epic carries the same theme for everyone: greatness is achieved through victory. By helping the forces of light achieve their goal and defeat the forces of darkness, you become a Hero. By leveling up and growing stronger, you become more worthy.

Beat the enemies, beat the game, by being the best. It’s a theme familiar to us from many a video game. And it’s a theme the video game Sburb places at the heart of its heroic narrative.

These are the narratives, the Arcs, Sburb is built around. They’re not necessarily good or bad, but they have their limitations. They’re tropes, archetypes, that can only say so much. Homestuck is a depiction of these narratives, but also a critique of them.

The central science-fictional/fantastical concept of Homestuck is Sburb. To that extent, Homestuck and Sburb share the same narratives. Homestuck, as Hussie discusses above, is an attempt to tell a very strange creation myth. Homestuck is also a story about kids growing up, and how they deal with the problems in their lives. And Homestuck is very deliberate and self-conscious about its status as a large, complex work where many heroic figures war against opposing forces, not just the forces of Derse, but also Lord English and his many agents. An epic. Homestuck is all of the same things Sburb is.

But it also critiques these things. Homestuck isn’t just Sburb, but a story about Sburb. Like any science fiction work about a particular concept, it has the chance to show both the exciting things and the limitations of a world where that concept is true. Homestuck offers a sharp critique of the narratives of Sburb by showing its limitations and showing how its players struggle against those limitations.

If you’re inclined to anthropomorphize Sburb, you might say Homestuck calls Sburb’s major narratives out as being cruel and callous. But, given that Sburb is fairly abstract, a structure more than it is an entity, perhaps it’s better to say that Homestuck tries to show how a system like Sburb imposes limits on its participants, and what the results of those limits are. We’ve seen this before with Sburb’s approach to the self. Now we can examine how Sburb also places limits through its narratives.

Interwoven with this critique of Sburb’s narratives is a critique of two closely related elements of Homestuck: what we might call the world of Inherited Narratives, and the narrative of Lord English.

Inherited Narratives, or: Everything is Caliborn’s Fault Forever

What do I mean by Inherited Narratives? Remember how I talked about Arcs (in the negative sense) as being like clichés? When we read a story, we don’t read it alone. We bring an entire world to it, the world of all the other stories we’ve ever read. We compare any story’s narratives to the narratives we’ve encountered before. This shapes our expectations, what we want to happen, and this shapes how a story is told. This is where clichés come from: they’re echoes of stories we’ve seen before, from the mind of the writer and the reader. But if a cliché narrative is just passed on without close examination, it creates an unsatisfying experience for the reader, one that doesn’t really say anything meaningful about its characters.

We exist in a world of cliché narratives in everyday life, too. We pick up a myriad of messages about what it means to be a good person, what it means to grow up, what a hero looks like, what gender norms look like. If you’ve been on tumblr for any length of time, you’re probably familiar with how these narratives are embedded in our society and our ways of thinking, picked up from the media we consume but also from everything and everyone around us.

Homestuck’s characters inherit these narratives, too, from their dying word. Much of the psychological growth they go through is found in challenging these expectations, these clichés pressed upon them by society, that no longer make sense for them to inhabit.

These Inherited Narratives even shape our expectations of what a creation myth, growing up, or heroic victory look like, and you’d better believe that when Homestuck’s critiquing Sburb, it’s critiquing them, too.

In our lives, we can blame history, culture, and society for the narratives we inherit.

But in Homestuck, we can also blame Sburb, and we can also blame Lord English.

Let’s get Gnostic again for a second. In case you thought I’d run out of things to say about Gnosticism, nope! There’s more here, courtesy of some great discussion from the legendary revolutionaryduelist and their commenters.

As revolutionaryduelist discusses here, in Gnosticism, the realm we inherit from the Demiurge, the Material World, is viewed in opposition to the World of Ideas. The false god gives us the world of flesh and death and suffering. But we can escape it by connecting through our own wisdom to the world of Truth and Goodness and Ideas. We escape to the world of the Platonic Forms, become more than our limited selves, become something more archetypal, more meaningful, more absolute.

The thing Homestuck does, and does so well, is that it parallels the Material World, the realm the kids inherit, with Inherited Narrative. As the Gnostics believed we inherit the limitations of the material, and can escape into a higher realm that is unlimited and good, Homestuck posits that we inherit the limitations of restrictive Narrative, too, and can escape into narratives that are more meaningful, nuanced, and free. Material Arcs. Transcendent arcs.

Lord English’s Demiurgic tyranny thus works on two levels. He creates Homestuck’s material reality, that is, its stuff, its substance, by devising time loops that perpetuate his own self-indulgent existence. Objects like Cal and the harlequin dolls dance to his whims.

But at the same time, he also creates Paradox Space’s narrative reality, its inherited ideas. The scratched trolls are born into an Alternia rewritten by LE’S agents into a world of bloodshed, competition, and cruelty, where Doc Scratch guides evolution and the Handmaid slaughters the unwanted, perpetuating fear. Earth, meanwhile, inherits LE’s toxic ideas about masculinity and power (ideas we’re all familiar with from our own Inherited Narratives), and a dystopic future. In a bizarre twist, arguably these narratives form another enormous self-perpetuating loop, with Caliborn being influenced by the most toxic elements of Earth and Alternian culture, and then as LE orchestrating scenarios that bring Earth and Alternia into being. That’s the second level on which LE the Demiurge creates a harmful, limited reality.

But remember what Tex taught us? In Homestuck, reality is made of ideas. Paradox Space is literally composed of Platonic forms, narrative and conceptual elements. So these two levels of LE’s influence are really one and the same. He has created our players’ limited world, and their quest is to escape it for a better one.

So, Inherited Narrative, the Material Realm, and Cliché are all the same concept in Homestuck. It’s easy to see how this is a critique of Caliborn and all he represents.

But I think it’s also, implicitly, a critique of Sburb, or at least an examination of some of its limitations.

Because many of Caliborn’s harmful narratives echo structures from Sburb.

Caliborn: Sburb’s Demon

What does Caliborn value? He values his toxic notion of masculinity, but more specifically he values strength, self-glorification, and being the best. Especially when it comes to games.

Caliborn’s ideal narrative, and the one Sburb lets him achieve, is the story of someone who was inherently the best achieving victory over his enemies, overcoming absurdly difficult trials, and becoming recognized for his superiority by becoming a god, a god powerful enough to shape world after world in his own image.

As we’ve seen, this is illusory. What LE is able to influence is actually, like the Demiurge, quite limited. But from Caliborn’s perspective, this is his story.

In it we can recognize many aspects of Sburb’s narratives. Deification comes from the creation myth and from Sburb’s notions of growing stronger and better. Most of all, though, Caliborn draws on the Heroic Epic. He sees himself as being at the center of a great story, in which he proved his inherent worthiness via his victory over the great forces set in his way. Constant conquest is his way of approaching the world. He is a warrior hero, slaying the weak and worthless left and right; he is an artist, triumphing over the haters. He is as arrogant and militaristic as a warrior-king like Agamemnon, but without any of his redeeming qualities. Caliborn takes narratives encoded in Sburb and exaggerates them to a profoundly unhealthy level. He is an echo of what’s harmful about them. He is Sburb’s shadow, its demon, summoned up by what its Yaldabaoth principle encourages, as limited as the Heroic Epic itself can be.

But there is a theme from Sburb that Caliborn’s missing, and that’s the narrative of Growth in its notion of the Coming of Age.

Caliborn rejects his coming of age, or to put it another way, sees it simply as an act of self-glorification. He places deification over inner conflict, victory over meaning. He’s encouraged, in part, by the narrative structure of Sburb’s Heroic Epic, but he also pushes it to new levels, creating his own kind of game. He rejects the normal maturation process for his species, and because of this, as Hussie says, will remain an enormous stunted tool forever, lacking his maturity and his wings.

Caliborn adores one of the most limited parts of Sburb: the aspect of it that’s a Game. He wants to keep playing the game forever, to keep achieving victory at the expense of all meaning. He is the ultimate powergamer, and the game enables him to live out a false maturity, a false coming of age where he never has to be challenged, never has to grow. This is the horror of Caliborn’s love of games: that games are meaningless without our own growth within them. Caliborn misses life for the game, maturity for mere strength, and meaning for cliché. Personal arcs for Arcs. Thus does he perpetuate a horrible Paradox Space and a horrible, cliché set of ideologies, and pass it onto others.

Echoes of his mistake are everywhere in Homestuck, harming and shaping its characters. We could talk about them for pages and pages, but let’s look at just a few examples.

Dave Strider vs the World

Again, let’s talk about Dave. Dave inherited a very toxic narrative, the narrative of the Hero. I use this word to describe the Heroic Epic in part because it carries such emotional weight for Dave within Homestuck. A Hero, in Dave’s mind, is someone masculine, unflappable, perfect, and cool. A warrior whose life is all about fighting and victory. He gets this idea straight from his Bro, who personified ideas of masculine perfection, irony, and constant conquest. Bro is a warrior-hero, untroubled by complexity, and his attempts to force Dave to live up to this warrior-hero ideal through terrifying ironic mind games and daily fighting are explicitly called out as abuse.

As Dave says:

DAVE: it was "training" you know DAVE: but you know what it really was it was some vicious shit that was bad and sucked and i hated it DAVE: it didnt make me stronger DAVE: it did the opposite DAVE: it made me never want to fight DAVE: it made me never want to see blood or be near danger or hear metal sounds DAVE: it made me hate the idea of being a hero cause he was a hero and he ruined the idea of heroism

The narrative of the Hero, like the idea of being cool, was harmful for Dave, and to grow as a person he needed to escape from that narrative and find who he was beyond that story. When he said “I’m not a hero,” what he needed was not to learn to see himself as one, but to recognize that not being a hero was a good thing if that was the definition of heroism. In the end, he’s able to make that escape, and that’s a profound triumph over a harmful narrative.

Bro’s horrible influence was his own, but it was also Lord English’s. The two figures are linked: LE influences Bro through his soul embedded in Cal, but a splinter of Bro (AR/Hal, one of the more negatively-depicted versions of Dirk) is also in that soul, shaping Lord English.

And, at the same time, there’s a distant echo of Sburb here. A video game all about fighting enemies and becoming a victorious warrior figure perpetuates the ideas of value-through-victory that were so harmful to Dave. Bro’s actions within the Game were often to push victory forward on Sburb’s terms. He saw his abusive “training” as a way to help Dave win the Game. So, too, did Doc Scratch see his alteration of Alternian society into something competitive and violent as a way to help the trolls win Sgrub. It doesn’t make either of them less horrible and evil, nor their actions less abusive.

This isn’t to say that Sburb is inherently evil, but that it prioritizes certain things, including the militaristic, fighting-based heroism of a Heroic Epic, and the players of the Game suffer for it. In a way, it’s a critique of games in general: what does it mean for victory to be found in slaying enemies and gaining strength? (It’s probably not a coincidence that we find this theme in Undertale as well.) In a world where those game narratives shapes people’s lives and worlds, there are some deeply troubling consequences, especially after LE gets involved.

Accordingly, Dave struggles more than any other character with what he even wants to do within the confines of Sburb, what he should strive for. In the end, he ends up rejecting Sburb’s idea of heroism in a big way. He chooses to fight for the people he cares about, not for glory, self-exaltation, or conquest. At the same time, he rejects a world of harmful clichés that he inherited from the same sources. Dave chooses to define himself by his own goals, not by his failure to live up to the inherited narratives of heterosexuality, irony, and unshakable coolness. He learns to celebrate his bisexuality, sincerity, and vulnerability instead.

In the end, Dave’s able to leave Bro, Caliborn, and Sburb’s ideas behind him and make his own choices about what his life means. It’s not surprising, then, that he understands the harmful power of overbearing Arcs better than anyone, and what it means to escape them.

Rose Lalonde, Disgruntled Narratophile

Rose’s reluctance to leave Arcs behind makes an interesting counterpoint to Dave, because it comes from an entirely different place. Rose doesn’t define herself by Caliborn’s narrative, but she does define herself very strongly by narratives she’s picked up elsewhere. Initially we see her as a psychoanalyst, trying to make sense of her friends’ minds by fitting them into Freudian and other models of repression. Yet at the same time, we also see her missing the reality of her own repressions because of the narrative she tries to fit them into. Rose misses the reality of her mother’s alcoholism because she turns it into a tale of irony and mutual antagonism between mother and daughter. She writes a story around it and makes herself believe it. Is this in part because the truth is too painful to admit? Almost certainly. It makes sense to us that Rose is introduced to us as a writer, because her way of dealing with the world is to reach out to narrative tropes and make sense of it that way.

Later on, we see her in the context of Sburb, and there she begins to think of her experience with the game as a kind of epic. Her GameFAQ is laced with grandiose purple prose and self-aggrandizing attempts at pathos, even as she mocks herself for it in an ironic-but-not-really-ironic way. She uses it as a chance to depict herself as a protagonist, a hero about to conquer a mysterious world.

Later, of course, as she becomes more disenchanted with Sburb, she turns the narrative around: she becomes an antihero opposing a corrupt world, ready to break the Game for its injustices. But it’s still an act of roleplaying, one that she eventually becomes disenchanted with. And as Dave later observes, it’s probably a narrative Sburb itself wanted her to fall into for its own reasons, giving her a reason to advance the time loops the destruction of Lord English required. After she breaks free of grimdarkness, though, she focuses on a narrative of self-sacrifice, wanting to find fulfilment in martyrdom that lets her companions escape their dire circumstances. Dave’s insistence on coming along with her complicates that narrative, as does her survival and transformation into the God Tier Seer of Light in the fires of the Green Sun.

After Cascade, Rose wrestles with the broken pieces of narrative all around her, not knowing how to put them into a framework. We’ll talk about that more in a bit, but perhaps we can see now why Rose has such a hard time believing Dave’s experience with Arcs—she writes everything that happens to her into her own personal story.

Though Doc Scratch is being his usual asshole self when he tells Rose this:

The plans you were making were based on assumptions and fabrications of your imagination. You were writing more stories, much like those about your false magical men.

…I think he’s actually got some pretty good insight into Rose here. He knows that she constructs stories around her life in the same way that she constructs stories about Zazzerpan and the Learned. In Rose we see someone who’s constantly casting about for narratives that describe her circumstances. The narratives she finds aren’t so much Caliborn’s but Sburb’s—the story of a protagonist of an epic, destined for heroism and achievement.

But once again Hussie is stressing the difference between narrative Arcs, especially Sburb’s, and the random chaos of human experiences. Rose wants everything that happens to make sense narratively, for every event to be Chekov’s Gun, but sometimes shit just happens. Jasprose’s existence in the narrative, I think, is primarily to highlight this tension. Sometimes your dumb cat brings back your alt-universe dead self and fuses with her for no particular reason and it doesn’t really mean anything. That’s life, you know? It be like that sometimes.

It’s not surprising to me that one of the other narrative things Rose is uneasy about in the end of Homestuck is Calliope’s return from the dead. Rose wants to see her as a messiah figure, central to the culmination of an epic (her word) but the fact is, as I said in my Gnostic post, Calliope exists on her own terms, not as part of any narrative structure. This is hard for Rose to wrestle with, but it’s the entire point. Calliope, and by extension all the characters in Homestuck, don’t need to be narratively significant to be worth protecting. They need only to live.

(Okay, I can’t resist making another point, silly as it is: Even Rose’s tongue-in-cheek suggestion that Jade will debunk the concept of endgame ships has some truth in it. Homestuck approaches endgame ships somewhat differently from other narratives, showing a lot of different possibilities for each character’s relationships over the course of the story and leaving it somewhat ambiguous and open to reader interpretation where they finally ended up. This is especially true of Jade, whose close bond with Dave and Karkat is left to be interpreted by the reader. Homestuck acknowledges that relationships don’t always fit into simplistic narratives, and that how a relationship turns out has a lot to do with a person’s maturity, needs, and growth. Rose and Kanaya, interestingly, are among the exceptions, being very clearly defined, but even still, Rose is surprised, I think, at the ways in which her problems endanger the relationship and the fact that it needs communication and upkeep beyond the usual romance trope of “they got together and all problems were solved forever.” So as much as Rose was joking, she’s also 100% right. Okay, I’m done. )

So that’s Rose: someone who attaches very strongly to Sburb’s narratives about importance, heroism, and growth, missing some of the ways in which her own life doesn’t fit those models. In the end, though, I think she ends up in a good place. She begins taking Dave’s remark to heart, as evidenced by how she begins approaching reality’s departures from her narratives with humor and levity rather than angst. And her connection with Roxy, which allows her to see past the story she constructed around her mother and perceive the real facts about their relationship, brings her out of her illusions and into a more mature perspective on her life. I think, by the end of Homestuck, she’s headed in the right direction, and she has a strong, mature bond with her kickass alien wife to help get her there.

Cascade vs Character, or God Tiers Don’t Cure Your Blues

With Rose we touched on how Sburb’s narratives aren’t always what the characters really need. This is something that also comes out in Sburb’s approach to maturity: the god tier. The god tier mechanic suggests that maturity comes from developing into a very specific kind of person. A Seer of Light, a Knight of Time, and so on. Most importantly, it shows this as happening in one cathartic moment, usually involving self-sacrifice, in which the Hero dramatically transforms into their mythological role. Bam—maturity unlocked. It’s growth-as-cutscene, identity as leveling up.

In Cascade, we see God Tiering happen in parallel with moments of catharsis for the characters. Dave and Rose find themselves alive on the other side of self-sacrifice, and Rose is empowered by her aspect to see things clearly, rather than be caught up in her illusions. Meanwhile Jadesprite, caught up in Jade’s self-loathing, is instead transformed into Jade’s greatest strength and glorious furry self-affirmation when Jade goes god tier. These moments are immensely satisfying, and one well might think that they represented the end of each characters’ story.

But Homestuck deliberately calls this catharsis into question. After Cascade, we’re shown that these flashy moments of ascension didn’t solve the characters’ problems. Becoming god tier didn’t keep Rose from having an ambiguous, painful relationship with her mother’s legacy. The strong narrative it suggested for her didn’t keep her from losing direction and becoming unsure of what was important. Similarly, Dave’s ascension to being a Knight of Time didn’t help him reckon with his brother’s abuse; if anything it heightened it because of his ambiguous relationship with heroism and battle. In the Game Over timeline, we see him having a nervous breakdown because of all the ways in which he hasn’t dealt with this! Only a real connection with Dirk, the right person to help him work through the problem, could set him free. And Jade’s reabsorption of Jadesprite didn’t fully allow her to integrate the sadness she represented into her psyche; it remained repressed, as comes out later when she’s under the GrimBark influence of the Condesce.

What stands out to me about the god tiers is that they represent powerful narratives within the context of Sburb—all three received powerful abilities that would help them win the Game of Sburb. But taken out of that context, on the three-year meteor and battleship journeys, the God Tier roles didn’t help them in the least. They needed actual growth, not the narrative structures that Sburb provided for them. This, I think, is the whole reason for the three-year gap: to show how Sburb gave our protagonists Narrative growth without giving them actual, individual growth that they could rely on.

And John? Well, John’s god tiering is taken to represent maturity, and as Homestuck’s everyman, his death and resurrection is a cathartic moment for everyone in their deepening relationship with the Game. But when he finally leaves the context of Sburb for good, we see him lost and aimless, holding onto the past, unable to follow his friends into a more meaningful maturity. He helps achieve a happy ending for everyone else, but he doesn’t know what to do without living in that story. (One hopes that in the Epilogue, he’ll find a way.)

I’m Feeling Just Peachy About Hegemonic Narratives

While we’re making contentious points about Homestuck’s relationship with narratives, let’s talk Tricksters. Yes, we’re doing this man. We’re making this happen. While some confusing signposting and the deliberately off-putting nature of the Trickster arc led to it not being well-received at the time, looking back I think it reads much better (and is much less tedious) archivally, and actually continues the theme of individuals versus narrative tropes rather well. I’m drawing on the aforementioned essay by revolutionaryduelist, which is frankly the definitive work on the topic of Tricksters, so go read their work, not mine, for a real examination of the subject. Cannot recommend it highly enough!

But to summarize how Tricksters fit into what I’ve been discussing here: with the Trickster arc and the candy juju, we return to Inherited Narratives and the toxic narratives perpetuated by Caliborn. The Trickster Arc is a depiction of whiteness, heteronormativity, and hegemonic power as horror, because all these things clash with who the characters are as people. And once again it represents big, seemingly cathartic moments as emotionally bankrupt because they lack the substance of actual growth. The Trickster sequence is off-putting not by accident but by design; it’s extremely uncomfortable to sit through because it is extremely uncomfortable for the characters and not what they really need.

The Juju is explicitly compared to the star in Mario; it’s a game mechanic that allows you to skip difficulty and blaze ahead to the end of the level. Of course, since this is Sburb, it’s paralleled with skipping ahead in one’s maturity as a person. The God Tiers offer catharsis irrespective of real growth; for Tricksters this is turned up to one zillion. It’s not surprising that this “gift” comes from Caliborn, who dearly loves achievement and leveling at the expense of growth, and from Calliope, who’s been led to dismiss the importance of her individual existence and whose hero-worship of the protagonists can sometimes be alien and othering.

Needless to say, the use of a power-up to achieve maturity goes horrifyingly wrong.

Caliborn’s link to Inherited Narratives of aggressive, overpowering masculinity is also here connected to other hegemonic narratives of heterosexuality and whiteness as power. While I wouldn’t call Homestuck’s approach to race perfect, ultimately I think the Trickster arc is written around showing Homestuck’s more usual goal of racial ambiguity for the kids as the ideal, while the departure from that ideal, ie; Trickster versions of the kids being represented as white people, is depicted as negative and horrifying.

This is demonstrated in Jake’s horrified reaction to Trickster Jane. While sober, he doesn’t see her peachiness as a good thing. He reacts with the same terror, and in fact the same panels, with which Nepeta reacted to the nightmare of Sober Gamzeee. Whiteness is being played here as horror, especially in that it’s supposed to be a way to achieve power and advancement. That whiteness would be seen as a tool for success and catharsis represents Inherited Narratives from our world to the highest degree, and we are indeed supposed to be horrified by it, as we are by all things Caliborn. While there was a lot of confusion around this at the time, and in ways it was written confusingly, looking closely, I think ultimately invoking the terror of hegemonic whiteness what Hussie was going for here. Again, see revolutionaryduelist, who puts it better than I could.

Tricksters also evoke inherited narratives of Heteronormativity. Marriage and reproduction are their obsession, and they’re particularly concerned with fixing Jane and Jake’s problems through having a zillion babies. Trickster Roxy, meanwhile, ignores Dirk’s sexuality out of a misguided belief that she is entitled to a romantic relationship with him. Tricksters ignore the difficulty of working out one’s relationship problems by believing makeouts and absurd marriages will solve everything. The Tricksters also decide to head straight to self-sacrificing themselves into being god tiers. And why wouldn’t they? They’re high on the very notion of progress, and that kind of flashy, cathartic progress is exactly what they crave.

Ultimately, we can read the Trickster arc as a much more direct representation of what figures like Caliborn have been doing all along: enforcing seemingly cathartic narratives that are harmful to the protagonists in lieu of actual growth.

The good news for the Alpha kids is that when they wake up hung over from this narrative-induced bender, they’re forced to confront how abysmally it failed. They realize that this wasn’t the growth they needed, and they begin the painful work of actually communicating with one another and working through the problems which the Juju couldn’t solve. It’s a rejection of Caliborn and his ideals, and it’s a sign that they’re headed in the right direction.

This brings us, at last, to the finale, the ultimate repudiation of Caliborn and what he stands for.

Two Endings: Glory vs. Escape

One of the things that most caught people off guard, including me, about the ending of Homestuck was that the main kids, our central protagonists, never directly confronted Lord English.

I remember thinking, as I’m sure a lot of people did at the time, that there would be one more plot twist, that the seeming fight with the Condesce and three Jacks who were connected to Lord English’s power would give way to a fight with English himself, that somehow the kids—especially Dave— would have to confront him and take him down.

That didn’t happen. Instead, Homestuck played things much more straightforwardly. Those who’d said they were going to confront English—Vriska especially— held a showdown with English in the Furthest Ring, while the vast majority of our protagonists, the kids we cared especially about, simply confronted the lingering problems in their session, the echoes of his influence over Paradox Space, and achieved victory not over English, but their Game.

I was certainly surprised by this. Do I think it was a bad choice?

Hell no.

I think it’s an incredible fucking choice, and it’s a big reason I love the ending.

Look. The central narrative of the Heroic Epic, the idea of becoming important through victory over powerful foes, is called into question throughout Homestuck. It’s often a necessity to engage with because the Game asks those kinds of victories of its players, but Homestuck shows that it isn’t the same thing as real growth. Caliborn is the ultimate manifestation of the problems with this idea, someone who’s latched onto the achievement games offer, the sense of power and importance, while rejecting the opportunities to mature Sburb also presents. Caliborn wanted a multiverse in which everything revolved around him, and for a time, he got it.

But for the kids we care about, life doesn’t revolve around Caliborn. It revolves around their own goals, their own lives, their own reasons for being. They have Caliborn and Sburb’s systems to wrestle with, but they can choose how they want to engage with those systems. They can, if they wish, depart from the values of these narratives and be set free.

For John and his friends, the experience of Homestuck isn’t about having the biggest showdown with the biggest bad guy. It’s makings sure your friends are safe and getting to the end of the Game so that you can be free. It’s about finding a way, in a multiverse made out of these narratives and these systems, to live. Their story is not truly a Heroic Epic, that is, an Epic of Battle, of Victory, but an Epic of Escape.

But that isn’t true for everyone. While John and friends are bringing the story of an Escape to a culmination, a completely different story is going on at the same time over in the Furthest Ring. It’s a much more traditional story. The story of a great Warrior, confronting a great Enemy. It’s a traditional Heroic Epic, a Sburban Epic. And who is its protagonist? The one person who most wanted to be. Vriska.

There’s so, so much more one could say about Vriska, and I hope to say it all at a l8r d8. Suffice it to say for now that Vriska—especially this version of Vriska—is caught up in the very same narrative Caliborn is. The narrative of Becoming Important through Achieving Victory. Vriska rejects the growth the people around her have achieved, and berates her ghost self for growing away from this framework that’s so important to her. Like Caliborn, she can’t let herself grow, because to grow would be to lose her central role in the Narrative of Heroism.

It’s a narrative she inherited from her culture, from Sburb, and from Caliborn himself. Because technically, she’s right that what she’s doing is necessary. Lord English called someone like her into existence. It was always necessary that someone confront him, someone with the same devotion to Game Skill and Conquest that Caliborn has. Another powergamer, ready to (Heroically) take the bad guy down. Indeed, as a product of the aggressive, game-winning troll culture Doc Scratch brought into being, she is a reflection of English, his Girl Gamer double, his light mirror. She wins, in a way. She trounces Hussie. She gets exactly what she wanted. She gets to be the most important person to the cosmos. She gets to end his reign of terror, just as he got to have one in the first place.

But just like Caliborn, she’s caught in that story like a trap, and she can’t see it. She throws herself into the same black hole that devours Caliborn’s domain. Indeed, she chooses to sacrifice her relationship with Terezi, and the chance at a happy life it provides, for going out in a blaze of glory. She loses so much by this narrative, and yet she chooses it. This is in sharp contrast with her ghost self who instead chooses—of all the absurd things—happiness. And like Alt-Calliope, by committing to her narrative, she ensures (ironically) a loss of her own agency, ensures that she will be a tool used by Skaia and Paradox Space to end the story of Caliborn, to close a loop that was always meant to end. Just as Calliope and Alt-Calliope stand on two sides of that thematic divide, Vriska and (Vriska) also represent the choice between identity within an overpowering narrative and the more terrifying, but more meaningful possibility of personal growth.

(And isn’t it interesting that while Vriska thinks she’s the most important person to this story, she couldn’t have done it without Meenah, and Tavros, and Davepeta, and Aradia and an army of ghosts, all of whom work together to achieve that moment of victory? Her individualistic idea of her story is shown to be false by the very mechanism of her satisfaction.)

Simultaneously in Paradox Space these two stories take place. In the Furthest Ring, the story of Glory. In the final Sburb session, the story of Escape.

In contrast to Vriska’s story, the final chapter for our thirteen protagonists is about living despite the narrative structures around them, not throwing themselves into a predetermined role. We already talked about this with Calliope, but I think it’s the nature of the victory for all of them.

In ending their Game, John and friends are working within the confines of one system while rejecting another entirely—and yet they find a way of escaping both. They do not choose to live by Caliborn’s values. They don’t go to the Furthest Ring seeking glory but merely seek an ending, seek peace. The peace that Vriska and Caliborn rejected.

Sburb itself offers them that peace, and mediates their victory. Its narratives are a structure that they must turn to their advantage, rather than reject entirely. Because Sburb—or, to put it another way, the rules of the Game, the rules of Paradox Space—has been running the show this whole time. The retcon Juju was Skaia’s creation, and the kids’ use of it to retcon a better ending for themselves was part of its plan to close the loop of Lord English and bring him to an end. This is clear from the way the Denizens approve and sign off on their victory, as they approve of all victories in their Game. The kids’ happiness is incidental, a footnote in the grand essay that is Paradox Space, and not necessary to this larger narrative.

But it matters because it matters to John, and Rose, and Dave, and Jade, to Calliope and everyone in that final victorious group. Their freedom comes not from a grand narrative but from themselves, from the ways in which they’ve grown and the things they want to achieve. They fight the final enemies LE throws at them—a Queen, a King, some Carapacians locked in stalemate—just as they’d fight the final bosses of Sburb, not because they’re seeking glory, but because they want their Game of Sburb to come to an end.

John talks about the importance of his friends in his final conversation, and how glad he was to be able to save them. Roxy talks about everything that was taken from them by the Condesce and LE’s agents—the promise of a better life, a future for humanity and trolls—and how by defeating them, she hopes to take back those possibilities.

But in the end, not much needs to be said, because implied beneath all the humor, beneath the painful memory of Game Over and John’s retcon journey, is that what everyone’s fighting for fighting to be free.

And in the end, Sburb sets them free. For its own reasons, yes. But because they seek this freedom, also for theirs. They’re given a world to define and create for themselves. A world where they no longer play the Game. A place where the narratives they inherited, from LE, from Sburb, from the world, no longer matter. Where they can tell their own stories, the stories that come from their own growth and their own lives, rather than anyone else’s.

The End of All Storytelling

At the end of Homestuck, the camera begins to pull away. In their final moments in the story, we see the kids from a distance, wordless, opening the door to their freed but no longer clearly in the spotlight that once shone on them. We see them gathering together with loved ones, embracing those they thought they’d lost, reconciling after their past arguments. It’s not the end of a story, exactly. It’s an arrow, pointing in the direction of one. The signs that happiness is possible in that world of freedom. Even the depiction of the world they will build together is a suggestion, a projection forward through the door they will walk through. We can’t look on it directly, because it’s out of our scope. And in the Credits sequence we get glimpses into that world, but nothing direct. A series of suggestions, literal snapshots with us left to fill the space between.

The map begins to show only glimpses of the territory. Homestuck begins to pull away from Homestuck. We come to understand the kids are heading into a world in which all narratives cease.

Don’t misunderstand—this isn’t a rejection of the story of Homestuck. It’s an acknowledgement of its limitations. Homestuck sought to present a story of several kids who found themselves in a world of overbearing narratives, and how they responded and reacted to that—some by embracing those narratives, some by creating their own. They inherited narratives, but they made new ones that were more true to spontaneous experience, to their own lives. But Homestuck acknowledges that even the new narratives it creates can only say so much. No representation will ever perfectly be able to capture the spontaneous meaning of real lives. No map can ever perfectly show us the territory. So Homestuck chooses to point at the territory instead. To give us a sense of a future, of the lives that the kids, now freed, will be able to lead, without nailing down the details. In that wide-open space, we can imagine infinite possibility, and infinite freedom. Freedom for the characters, but also for the readers who love them.

In the end, it’s the same question all endings confront: how do you bring things to a close while acknowledging that life goes on, that nothing ever really ends? For Homestuck, the answer is to paint with broad strokes, to suggest that there will be a future, that each person we care about will shape it in their own way while leaving a wide space to explore what that means. For Homestuck, that means lifting away the restrictive structures of story for the wide-open possibilities of living.

Homestuck

So. Let me tell you about Homestuck. What does that word, that title, really mean?

If a home is the context we come from, the world we inherit, the realm we live in, then Homestuck describes our relationship with that origin. There are many origins in Homestuck, and thus there are many levels to that relationship. To be Homestuck is to be stuck in one’s context, to be stuck in one’s universe, one’s home planet. But also to be stuck in one’s narratives, in all the narratives one inherits from one’s guardians and from the world. To be stuck in a game, a set of rules. To be stuck in the corrupt realm of a Demiurge. To be stuck in the story one tells to oneself, to be stuck in a domain that promises glory but also prevents any other story from taking place.

The end of Homestuck is about escaping all of these things. How one achieves that escape, or fails to achieve it.

In the end, some do. Leaving Homestuck, they leave the context they inherited—through the door of a white house that represents their Game, the realm of their Demiurge, and their Story. Leaving it, they become unstuck from the Home they once knew.

They’re free.

Homestuck offers us the possibility of taking that journey with them, and finding our own understanding of that Escape. And it suggests to us the possibility of our own escape in a world that has its own structures, its own limitations, its own narratives, a world that, in its challenges, is really not too different from the world of the comic. It suggests that by questioning our inherited narratives, by writing our own stories, by living our own lives for our own reasons…

We, too, can be free.

That’s the meaning of Homestuck.

[Next time: confronting Homestuck’s reception, the limitations of my model, and the relationship between the fandom and Andrew Hussie. Coming…..at some vague point in the future.That sounds like a good release date. Yes, that’s right! Same day as Hiveswap. *rimshot*]

#gnostic influences

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#gnostic influences