#ultimate self

[sacrosanctitty]

becoming your ultimate self only makes you an evil pos if youre already so sucks

[girlbowser]

going to go completely bugfuck insane for a little bit here. we need to talk about ultrose

Ultimate Rose, Pt. 1 (establishing facts)

so

ultrose is a fucking bundle of contradictions, huh?

i think its worth immediately establishing postcanon rose as a liar. specifically, there are a few crucial lies -- lies she tells herself as well -- that define the basis of ultrose. (im mostly going to be looking at candy timeline here, because meat ultrose is a whole other tin can of worms.)

the crucial scenes to compare are the last scene where she talks to john at the peak of the war, and the scene where she plays her hand in beyond canon.

i'm going to skip around this scene (candy 33), but stick with me.

this rose.

this rose right here. this rose who is happy. who loves her wife. who has *a* daughter.

this rose, as she herself describes.

is not "true."

rose firmly believes that knowledge means suffering. which, given the state of her body at the start of the prologue, probably feels deeply true! and her ailment disappearing coincides with her sight vanishing, and her knowledge of The Shape Of Postcanon slipping away. (candy 4)

"For some reason" "whatever it was she felt"

i think it's extremely important to establish here that rose wiped her own mind.

or maybe roxy wiped her mind. or the severing of meat/candy wiped her mind, but that last one feels very unlikely to me considering that this mind-wiped-state is at-will.

and we know that, because during the candy timeline, she is two things:

blind to the world

happy

and in beyond canon, this very same rose, days later, is:

too-aware, and in touch with her powers

deeply miserable

she stopped trying the moment the comic came back. she stopped trying because she never started. that was a whole ass different rose. one without the memories or powers.

if you'd allow me to be insane, i think i know which rose.

from ultdirk describing his experiences (with supplementary text from davepeta), we know what being ultimate is like. we understand that he has access to every splinter of himself, some more prominent than others.

so if rose is able to prioritize bringing one iteration of herself to the front of her mind... which rose would be the best?

which rose would be the happiest, the most pleased by living on earth c? the one blissed by love, the one who would be happy with a daughter and a wife.

it's not our main rose. she was not happy during her wedding. she didn't enjoy her life. she didn't think she'd ever be happy until after the meat/candy split happened.

you know who would have loved that?

what

what is this...... very very important thing doing here?

why is she "correcting" herself? why is she making this distinction? we haven't heard a word spoken about complacency of the learned, maybe at all, in the entire epilogues. and we know rose never really finished the story. it was just some amateur wizardfic.

but say there was another rose. a member of the gestalt, who actually DID finish writing complacency. who fought her whole life for the right to have a family, but ultimately failed.

say there was a rose who was an author.

yeah. i think the rose who gets to act out the bulk of the candy timeline (notably NOT yiffy. that was alllllllll ultrose) is alpha rose. roxy's mom. the one who fought the condesce and lost. and i think she's here simply because she's the best choice.

i mean, fuck, in hs2 rose straight up says it.

so . yeah. this is all establishing stuff for my Insane Theory. my real one about why shes doing all this. how shes doing all this. i have been sitting on this theory for months and if you thought "candy rose is alpha earth rose" is unhinged you aint seen nothing yet

gloves are canon

part 2 is here.

[drhomestuck]

another dirk question! do his splinters have a sort of reverse effect on him? for example with arquious and lord english, does having a spliter of himself merged with another being impact his real self?

as far as i can tell, we don't know for sure but i would bet money on that being the case. a lot of Dirk's monologues in The Epilogues and Beyond Canon feel disctinctly Caliborn, and the concept of the ultimate self being almost like a widening of one's self to incorporate other selves would definitely imply that imo!

[whatsmyisyours]

I am wondering a question fellow homestuckers.

So we usually assume that the classpect of a character is set in stone (ie. No matter the universe dirk would be a prince of heart) however classes and aspects seem to have a nurture vs nature thing happening where aspects are your nature and classes reflect your nurture (how you were raised). So if the actual question

Considering ultimate dirk, would an ultimate self include every class comb to whatever aspect the character is bound to (dirk also has access to versions of himself that are seers of heart) or would an ultimate self be stuck to the class (dirk can only access other dirks that are princes of heart)

[lime-bloods]

had a really interesting conversation with a friend this week about the Ultimate Self versus character growth, particularly in relation to Vriska and the hell tiers. in the past I've advocated pretty strongly for the Ultimate Self as core to Homestuck's themes, and as part of that I've been pretty defensive against its detractors because I think the idea is largely misunderstood and unappreciated. and while I still believe an appreciation for what the Ultimate Self represents is a really important tool for understanding Homestuck proper, now that we've moved out of Homestuck and into a new fictional framework I've come around on the importance of being able to critique the concept as well.

there's been a lot of talk lately about whether classes and aspects are really reflective of "reality"; whether Homestuck really says that someone might be defined by arbitrary labels applied to them by a video game - even if that video game literally is responsible for the propagation of reality - or if these are merely roles that we are expected to play but are free to break away from. I've always been in the latter camp; I've made quite a few posts now about how the class-based roles assigned to heroes of Sburb are reflective of the class-based roles assigned to trolls on Alternia, which are themselves biologically-essentialist assumptions that play a similar role to sex and gender among humans. and the Epilogues attest to the queer reinterpretation of such biologically-essentialist social structures; gender is an arbitrary label perpetrated only by cruel, self-serving cycles, and can be cast off if one's self-liberation calls for it. so the conclusion one might draw from this is that the Ultimate Self and the classpect are in a way opposed to each other; that the Ultimate Self is androgynous, without blood, and without class.

however.

it must be recognised that while Homestuck is one story, the Epilogues detail the exploits of characters who have stepped outside of that story and - depending on which Volume you're reading, and the outlook of each individual character - either into another story or outside of "narrative" altogether. and within a narrative, the roles assigned to each character do have special significance. just as one labelled "Thief" is expected to play the role of self-interested antagonist, and one labelled "jadeblood" is expected to live out her life looking after larvae underground, the "narrative" places certain expectations on characters designated as "boys" and "girls". as far as the narrative is concerned, characters are not "people", but rather ideas to be played with, and that's exactly what the Ultimate Self is - the "idea" at the core of a character's being. so it could equally be argued that a character's class, aspect, blood colour or gender are part and parcel with their Ultimate Self, and therefore that, stepping outside of the rules that govern Homestuck, shrugging off the Ultimate Self could be just as important as - or interconnected with - shrugging off gender.

crucially, Homestuck is a story about teenagers, and there is baggage that comes with this conceit. the coming-of-age story is one of self-discovery; the disrobing of the cocoon of childhood and the uncovering of the "true self" underneath is core to the genre. but importantly, at least in Homestuck's case, this never actually means becoming an "adult". coming-of-age stories are about teenagers because teenage makes for great stories, and as such it's only natural that a Lord of Time interested in creating a neverending story would try to engineer neverending teenagerdom. allusions to this abound, particularly surrounding Alternia, a planet populated entirely by teenagers who awaken from literal cocoons every evening only to return to their cocoons of a morning when it comes time to sleep. their quadrants seem hand-designed for the express purpose of making not "healthy" relationships but compelling ones, driven by the confusion of teenagers learning about themselves for the first time. by pretending to be a story "about" reproduction, Homestuck uses the fact that its heroes "enter right around the cusp of sexual maturity" as a smokescreen for the truth that Homestuck characters are expected to "come into" their genders in just the same way they "come into" their class and aspect roles.

in this sense, while the attainment of the Ultimate Self may superficially represent the dispersing of narrative contrivances like "timelines" and "alternate selves", it also follows Homestuck's "children coming into themselves" script to the letter. and to uphold our "full potential" as the Ultimate version of Self, as Hussie describes it, is to fetishise the prenatal kernel from which our entire life grows, untouched by any worldly corruption; to insinuate that we grow forward by stripping away our outer layers like insects, rather than by embracing each new layer as it comes, is a romanticism of childhood that borders on the reactionary. when viewed through this lens, what is "true" is also what is "innocent" - just as the world Before-Us, before Lord English's "corrupting influence", is innocent, Edenesque before the fall brought on by a serpent's bargain.

the Epilogues and more pertinently Beyond Canon, meanwhile, are very essentially not about teenagers at all! breaking free of the old cycle of storytelling also means breaking free of that expectation to stay a child forever, and in a world no longer inhabited primarily by children, how much need is there, really, for a "true self" that determines everything about your being? within the bounds of Homestuck, we can accept that characters like Meenah and Vriska must by their very natures be selfish because selfish teenage girls fill a vital narrative niche, and because when you grow up in a situation like Vriska's, being selfish isn't necessarily the same as being a villain. but becoming an adult means growing up, and among grown ups, on a planet where selfishness is no longer a survival mechanism, being selfish often does make you a villain, and there is an expectation that in order to continue being a hero one must learn and change. and in a world where a Thief no longer has to be selfish, how then can it still be said that every character has an immutable platonic Truth at the essence of their being?

the presence of the sprites in Vriska's purgatory illustrate this idea perfectly. because a sprite is an "idea", they represent a step toward the Ultimate Self, just as the sprite^2 is another step closer. but a sprite is also a ghost image; a photograph captured of a person in a particular moment in time, forever unchanging. this is why the sprites seem to simply disappear at the conclusion of a game of Sburb: while they are immensely powerful and vastly knowledgeable, their significance is tied to a specific purpose within a specific context. whether they simply cease to exist or commit deliberate suicide-by-meteor on the dying battlefield of skaia, they demonstrate an understanding that as great as it is to be an immortal and omniscient sprite, they lose their purpose for existing once the game of Sburb ends: just as the Ultimate Self loses all significance and purpose once the game called Homestuck ends. Davepeta demonstrates this exact superfluousness within the Plot Point; while they may have been a fountain of knowledge about all things arcane within Homestuck, when it comes to actually "growing up", there's not a single piece of advice they can give!

finally, and probably most crucially of all, Beyond Canon has not merely stepped outside the bounds of the rules of the original Homestuck, but outside of its authorial purview altogether. if escaping into Universe C means escape from Lord English's expectations for what it means to be a "man" or a "woman" or a "Page" or a "lowblood", then escaping into Beyond Canon also means leaving behind any of Andrew Hussie's expectations for what it means to "be your Ultimate Self". this is exactly why the story is CALLED Beyond Canon, and is central to exactly the kind of questions it is asking about canon; if Hussie is no longer in charge, why should "the Ultimate Self in Hussie's Own Words" (as linked above) remain the "canon" answer? and these characters' new home, in the custody of a diverse team of new creatives, is reflected by the multiple competing narrative forces within the story; it's probably significant that the character who shows the most reverence and concern for his Ultimate Self is Dirk, the very same character who wishes to bring Homestuck back to its heyday with throwbacks to nostalgic and outdated plot artifices like Sburb! no doubt the story's other key schemers, like its various Calliopes, have their own points of view on the meaning of the Ultimate Self and Homestuck's other mysteries, and the writers responsible for this story in our own world should be allowed to have their own views as well. in order to live up to its very premise, Beyond Canon can and must be allowed to offer up different opinions and interpretations to those of the original text.

ultimately this is key to understanding why Beyond Canon is not a traditional "sequel" and should not be thought of as such; why it was never Homestuck 2, only Homestuck^2, and then dropped the 2 altogether. in much the same way Homestuck was a story not "controlled" by its fans but rather written in continuous conversation with them, Beyond Canon, now finally under the control of fans, is a story in conversation with the text that came before it. in the end this is what any narrative-about-narrative boils down to; there can be no "reality" in fiction, only a version of reality as told by a given narrator. and while we are forced to take a narrator at their word when offered no other options, that doesn't mean every subsequent narrator is going to narrate the same story from the same point of view! it's important to have an understanding of the Ultimate Self as portrayed by Andrew Hussie because it deepens your appreciation of the original Homestuck, and a well-formed appreciation for Homestuck will in turn increase your understanding of Beyond Canon: not because HS and BC are the "same story" by any means, but because better knowing HS will make us better prepared to engage in the conversation being made when BC deconstructs, subverts, and even critiques the story we already know.

[derseprinceoftbd]

Okay so I'm revisiting my Homestuck rewrite thing and one idea I had for it was that the Ultimate Self should be, like, the highest expression of an Aspect, sort of like how Hope has the Hopesplosion, and according to some Void has Grimdarkness and Life has Trickster Mode. However, I'm wondering which of the two Aspects that seem obvious it should be.

Does the Ultimate Self work better as an ultimate expression of Heart/individuality/the soul/that which is inherent, or Mind/choice/the brain/how our decisions define us?

Heart

Mind

Voting ended onJun 11, 2025

[scalding-homestuck-confessions]

ult selves are so confusing and would be better in practice if they weren't just an excuse to make everything OP and/or evil

Also if they weren't created in postcanon because i think them being in the shitverse timelines makes them inherently shittier

Power creep like this would've been better used in Homestuck. Unfortunately, nobody who ever worked on Homestuck or prior adventures knew how to make power creep work as anything but pure satire, so Ultimate Self became an ultimate joke. I won't hold my breath for Hell Tier being any better.