Homestuck is a big deal. Written by Andrew Hussie on mspaintadventures.com between April 2009 and October 2016, it was basically the bible ...
On Homestuck: A Syllabus by DialMforMara
Thank you so much to everyone who has continued to follow the I Like Homestuck Project, and who has begun following since we stopped posting. There are over twelve hundred of you now. I can’t believe you guys are still reading our work, and I’m honored to have something I was part of creating read by so many people.
After I finished my master’s thesis, I started blogging again, and this year I’m pushing myself to do two essays and a crafting update every week. In today’s essay, I return to Homestuck to finally write down this thing that I’ve had on my mind on and off for literal years now: a syllabus for an undergraduate course on Homestuck and the cultural context in which it was written.
Feedback (appreciative and/or constructive) is welcome, especially if you can help me figure out how I might get to actually teach this class.
I am at a stressful moment in my life. As much as I love writing about what I like about Homestuck, right now it’s become one more responsibility that I don’t have the energy to fulfill consistently.
So I’m giving up on the every-Saturday schedule. I will post when I have a post to post, and @ohthewhomanity probably will as well. (And don’t worry, we haven’t run out of ideas.) We still welcome and encourage the submitting of guest posts.
A young woman has trouble communicating with her friends and feels increasingly alienated from them. She asks for advice from a mysterious and powerful person from another universe, who offers her a magical solution. She takes it, almost by accident, and it changes the color of her skin and how she talks and makes her feel like she can do anything she wants, with disastrous results.
Am I describing Rose Lalonde or Jane Crocker? Yes. Both of them, in fact. Rose’s grimdarkness and Jane’s Trickster Mode transformation have a lot in common, and the parallels between them emphasize the connections between the Alpha and Beta sessions and the emphasis the Game places on communication and teamwork. What I find most interesting, though, are the differences between them.
Rose’s descent into grimdarkness is caused by the Horrorterrors, but that it happens at all is a result of Doc Scratch’s deliberately cryptic advice. He doesn’t care about her feelings; her pursuit of revenge for her mother’s death, and her own death at Jack Noir’s hands, put her exactly where she needs to be to facilitate the Scratch and allow Lord English to enter Alternia’s universe. And everything he says about the Horrorterrors and Rose’s magic cue ball is carefully phrased so that he can both urge her to learn too much about the Horrorterrors and claim later that he had tried to prevent her from doing so.
Trickster Mode, on the other hand, is enabled by outside influences that mean well. Caliborn and Calliope send the codes for their Trickster jujus to Jake and Jane respectively, because they think that Trickster majyyks will make their pen pals stronger and better able to overcome the barriers to communication between them. But, as Hussie explains to Caliborn after the fact, it doesn’t work that way on humans. Instead, when Jane activated the combined Trickster juju, it caused her to believe that all her problems were solved and nothing she could do would fail, leading her to do dumb things like turn half her planet to zillium and ask Jake to marry her.
Grimdarkness is isolating. Rose’s pursuit of eldritch knowledge has distanced her from her friends, and her transformation literally causes her to speak another language, thwarting even open-minded John’s best attempts to figure out what has happened to her. It’s turned “no one understands me” from an angsty metaphor into something very real and dangerous: even if Rose suddenly wanted to ask for help, she no longer can.
Trickster Mode spreads itself and brings people together. Jane has trouble communicating with her friends. Becoming a Trickster makes that communication suddenly seem easy, so the first thing she does is go talk to Jake. And when he doesn’t get it, she makes him a Trickster too. And so on. Eventually all the Alpha Kids end up speaking the same language. And for a little while, it’s fun and everything works.
Grimdarkness has no benefit for the person it happens to. Rose literally dies on a pointless quest for revenge, and she learns nothing from the experience. After being revived, she is equally aloof, equally dedicated to plumbing the mysteries of the void, though now she does so by getting drunk, and equally resistant to engaging with her teammates. It takes Vriska’s lack of inhibition with regard to snapping her out of it for Rose to finally get her act together and become a useful member of her team with useful knowledge about herself.
Trickster Mode, meanwhile, has a lesson to impart, and it makes sure its students learn it. It leaves the Alpha Kids hung over and wondering what happened, and the only way for them to answer that question is to actually talk to each other. So they do. And they learn things about themselves and each other that allow them to grow.
It’s funny, really. We tend to think of the Alpha Earth session as being the less successful one, being as it is an infertile session whose players come from a world where the Condesce and Lord English have already won. But in this case the Alpha Kids have a leg up on the Beta Kids: they learn more about themselves, and become better at communicating with each other, because when the magical solutions were handed out, they got one that actually solved something.
Lord English is fascinating. He’s Caliborn all grown up, and he’s achieved his God Tier potential as the Lord of Time. He’s killed his denizen, a testament to his strength and tenacity, and gotten access to some very powerful juju. He’s Hulked up, been stuffed inside a doll, Hulked up again, and rampaged across the Furthest Ring, apparently determined to destroy everything around him.
That’s all well and good. Or, you know, not good, because he’s the Big Bad of Homestuck. But I’m not here to talk about Yaldabaoth, or the house juju, or the wanton destruction of dreambubbles and mass double-killing of time ghosts. I’m here to dive deep into what really makes Lord English the villain of Homestuck: the fact that he is the Lord of Time.
Lord English has power over Homestuck’s canon. By commanding Time, he controls causality and can decide what “really happened”--which timeline is the alpha, and which ones are doomed. This makes him, as far as I know, unique among fictional villains: even those who do change history, like Nero in the Star Trek reboot, only have power over one timeline. Lord English raises the stakes: he commands every timeline, and he is in all of them from the beginning to the end. It's awesome, both in the “really cool” sense (who among us hasn't at least wondered what it would be like to have that much power?) and in the old sense of awe-inspiring. And don’t forget terrifying.
The doomed timelines we’ve seen details of show evidence of Lord English’s control and already-hereness, starting well before we know Lord English exists. In the very first doomed timeline we see, Dave prototypes Lil Cal in his kernelsprite. At this point, Lord English’s soul is inside Lil Cal, so he won’t be able to escape from the sprite and go on that rampage across the universe. An Aradiabot’s memories provide more evidence: this particular bot comes from a doomed timeline where Gamzee sobered up early and went on his murderous rampage before the other trolls could use Lil Cal to create Doc Scratch (who, don’t forget, is Lord English’s host plush).
Even more compellingly, Hussie himself does not know of a timeline, not even a doomed one, in which Gamzee dies. Why is the only Gamzee we ever see, including during Ministrife, which features hundreds of doomed troll ghosts, the one from the alpha timeline? Because Gamzee is the one who makes sure Caliborn and Calliope survive their lonely infancy, who gives them a home and Internet access and all the lore from the troll and human sessions of the Game. Any timeline without Gamzee is a timeline without Lord English, so no timeline without Gamzee can exist. Lord English won’t let it.
It begins to look like the timelines that don’t get to play out are the ones in which Lord English cannot come to be. From there it’s no leap of logic to suggest that Lord English, with his power over the timelines, has made this so. I am the most important person, he says to the timeline, because I command you. And so the only timeline that matters is the one where I’m the most awesome.
But everything else we learn about the nature of canon and the Alpha Timeline in Homestuck contradicts Lord English’s beliefs. Every timeline matters. The Dave from the first doomed timeline we saw goes back in time, becomes Davesprite, and continues to affect the course of events. The Aradiabot from the early-rampage timeline brings Gamzee’s book of genetic code into the alpha timeline and allows the creation of Doc Scratch. New Alpha Vriska doesn’t have to search for a weapon to fight Lord English with, because Old Alpha Vriska found it already. Even timelines we never see affect the one we do, as Davepetasprite^2 points out:
[http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=009906]
The world as Lord English wants it is not the world as it was meant to be. And every bit of the world fights back. Skaia, the source of creative potential, stands firm as the moral center and ultimate goal of the Game. The Denizens instruct their players on how to work around Lord English’s commands: Echidna instructs Jade to bring the Battlefield and all her session’s planets through the Scratch, while Typheus teaches John to use his retcon powers to rewrite some of Lord English’s reality. The Horrorterrors, normally the players’ enemies, create dreambubbles when Feferi asks for them, allowing doomed timelines to continue.
Even Hussie fights back against the villain he himself has written into existence, because that villain has realized that Hussie’s authorial powers over the story of Homestuck rival his own. Lord English kills Hussie so that no one can prevent his victory--but as much as Lord English has been manipulating events since the beginning, Hussie, as the author, still got there first. Hussie had allowed the creation of an infinite afterlife in which all fan creations are not only possible but have actually happened. And, like we talked about last week, he’s shown us that every player within Homestuck is affected by the actions of even their doomed selves. Lord English may be Already Here, but Hussie, with the help of his fans, has Already Won.
Homestuck is a world with multiple creators, an amazing world of infinite possibility which accepts fan contributions on a practically equal footing to the main story. This world could not have a more appropriate villain than Lord English, who insists on a single correct canon and has the power to enforce it. But now Homestuck has ended, so there’s no more canon for Lord English to enforce. Just an infinity of fanmade possibilities.
hi! I have questions about who arted particular scenes in Collide, and Rah said you might be able to help. Specifically looking for who drew 1. Dave shortly before cutting off the Jacks' heads, 2. Jade jumping in between the Becs, 3. the last shot of John, Rose, and Kanaya looking relieved.
ok, here we go
1 Pencils by Viivus, cleanup lines by Tauhid, color and touch ups by Phil Gibson and Honesk1, respectively
2 Pencils by Viivus, cleanup lines by Tauhid, color and touch ups by Shelby, Jos Venti
I know where I came from; but what about all you zombies?
--Robert Heinlein
Dad Egbert and his post-scratch counterpart Dad Crocker are a fascinating enigma. For one thing, he’s the only human in all of Homestuck, with the exception of historical and cultural figures, who was actually born, and who looks and acts the same way in both Alpha and Beta timelines. How did that happen? Where did Dad come from, and who is he?
Here is what we know about Dad Egbert/Crocker: Before the Scratch, he’s Jane’s son, John’s guardian, and a lover of practical jokes; after the Scratch, he’s John’s son, Jane’s guardian, and in the Betty Crocker line of succession. In both timelines, he’s a serious businessman with a fondness for fedoras and fedora-fond friends; he keeps a car and a literal ton of shaving cream in his sylladex; and he’s a loving parent, as far as we can tell from his interactions with both John and Jane. Beyond that we know nothing about him: he is drawn faceless except for his nose, and communicates through notes scattered around the house and the occasional Stern Fatherly Emotion. He doesn’t even get a first name.
He’s the most enigmatic of Homestuck’s main characters. All eight of the other humans are point-of-view characters--even the other Beta guardians get their own stories told as the Alpha kids--but since we never see Dad as a child or a teenager, we only see him through the eyes of his children, John before the Scratch and Jane after.
The really fascinating thing about all of this is not that we have so little knowledge of what Dad is like. What I love about Dad is that John and Jane know just as little about him as we do. Because we never see him through his own eyes, Dad Egbert/Crocker becomes an effective--and quite clever--parody of how children see and imagine their parents. For all his loving nature, he is weirdly aloof, giving his children space to imagine him as things he isn’t, and in one case, deliberately allowing John to believe that he is a comical street performer (though this may be John’s imagination running away with him, more than any encouragement on Dad’s part). This aloofness, combined with the faceless depiction and the notes, exaggerates the emotional distance between parent and child into awesome and ridiculous pastry-based Strife.
But it gets better. After the Scratch, Dad becomes a parody of himself.
The narration claims Jane has a closer relationship with Dad than John did; she rebelled as John has, but that was years ago and she got over it. But because Dad is such a cipher, the signs we see of his presence are exactly the same as before the Scratch, except weirder. He still keeps his deceased parent in the living room...but as taxidermy instead of the more socially appropriate cremation urn. He still tries to keep his child indoors for their own safety...but this time he does it by moving the refrigerator in front of the door. And when Jane persuades Lil’ Sebastian to move the fridge for her, the note she finds underneath is the same note that John found inside the safe...but again, like so many things in the Alpha timeline, slightly more ridiculous, slightly more funny, and slightly more enigmatic. John didn’t understand his dad, and Jane doesn’t understand him even more. And it’s funny, because we don’t either.
Today we continue the intermittent series of Characters I’d Like to Hug with the character I most often imagine myself hugging: Karkat Vantas, Alternian mutant misfit, onetime leader of SGRUB Red Team, and constant arguer with himself. This essay is about some of the reasons I think he deserves those hugs.
First, I identify with his anxiety. Karkat is constantly worried that people will discover that he’s not as good or capable as they think he is. Or, relatedly, that they will discover his blood color, though he’s much more afraid of being seen as a failure than he is of being culled. Karkat deals with his anxiety in two ways, neither particularly healthy from a human perspective. First, he makes himself big and angry and shouty so that he can compete with highbloods for authority, and so that once he has some authority, no one will ever question it.
The emotional walls he builds around himself through constant anger interfere with his second strategy, which is to constantly seek external validation. Romantically, platonically, and as the leader of his team, he’s desperate for someone to tell him he’s worth it; and when someone does--and quite a few people do--he disbelieves it, because they have to be lying to make him feel better.
Karkat’s anxiety gets in the way of everything he tries to do. Even though all the evidence we have suggests that he was a good leader, he gives the role up immediately after the Scratch because he can’t believe he’s worthy. He also sabotages himself romantically--even though he spent so much of his childhood learning how to pursue and manage relationships, he won’t let the people he cares most about get close enough to him to test his theoretical knowledge lest he crash and burn. He won’t talk about his feelings for Terezi with Terezi--instead, he sends her mixed signals, then retreats, letting her start a matespritship with Dave, and then decides to fix everything by going over her head. And then he retreats again, leaving her to fall apart and fall under Gamzee’s influence. His fear of failure causes him to fail.
It’s really a shame that Karkat hates himself so much, because nobody else hates him. The worst anyone feels about him is simply not caring about him. Sure, plenty of other characters hate his prickly facade, but those who get to know him, even judgmental Meenah Peixes, usually end up liking him.
Karkat’s despair and anxiety and anger at himself all miss the point in ways I find painfully familiar. I felt the same desire to be approved of and suspicion that any approval I did get was false, almost constantly throughout high school and college, and even now, as a graduate student with real friends and a significant other who has decided it’s his job to constantly remind me how awesome I am, I sometimes wonder. In wanting to comfort Karkat, I comfort my past self, and to some degree my present self.
