#'Caliborn is not meant to be a role model'

[homestuckconfession]

i think it’s okay that most of the characters say the r slur because 90% percent of them are super autistic, especially karkat

nobody is as autistic about troll romance as karkat and i appreciate that deeply

.

[betweengenesisfrogs]

OFF-THE-CUFF HOMESTUCK THOUGHTS #4: ALL THAT WACKY GNOSTIC STUFF AND THE ENDING OF HOMESTUCK, OR: THE YOLOBRO PRINCIPLE

DISCLAIMER       FRAMEWORK

[CHECK THE TAG FOR MORE THOUGHTS]

All right! I’ve finally had a night free, I’m hyped up on friends and good feelings, and I’m ready to continue. Let’s make shit transpire. B)

So, one thing a lot of folks were talking about near the end of Homestuck’s run was Gnosticism. Gnostic themes and references (referances) were everywhere in Act 6 Homestuck. A lot of folks were predicting these themes would be heavily involved in the ending. Then, when Act 7 came out, I saw a lot of disappointment and confusion. The major Gnostic revelations they’d predicted hadn’t taken place! Had Hussie dropped Gnostic themes like they were hot and the pimp was in the crib?

I don’t think so. I think, far from being dropped, the Gnostic themes and ideas are KEY to Homestuck’s ending. They’re vital to understanding massive parts of it, and, for me, at least, one of the things that make it so enjoyable for me. The trick, though, is to understand what kind of Gnostic story we’re looking at. So let’s see if we can crack this cueball open.

This is going under a cut, because it’s going to be an essay in itself.

GNOSTICISM, OR: SOPHIA, YALDABAOTH, AND YOU

Okay, first off: what even is Gnosticism and what themes are we even talking about? Many of you may be familiar with this stuff already from the aforementioned posts, but I’m sure there’s plenty of you out there who aren’t, so let’s do a quick recap.

Gnosticism was an early breakaway movement in Christianity back when the new religion was first finding its feet, and in fact it still has some adherents today. This is pre-Bible, pre-general acceptance of Christianity stuff. Think 100s and 200s CE. It was generally a lot more focused on individual experience of the divine than the hierarchy of the developing Church—which, sadly, was probably the main reason it was outcompeted by the hierarchy. It just didn’t have as much unified social or political power. So we’re mostly forced to reconstruct it (like so many alt Christianities) from the texts of the people who were arguing against it.

But, as far as we can tell, its beliefs were and are pretty interesting compared to the Christianity most of us are more familiar with. Basically, the God of the Old Testament, the God of Judaism, was not the God to worship according to Gnostic Christianity. He’s actually the villain. (Which was a pretty huge divergence from Christianity’s Jewish roots, so you can see how that might not have sat too well with some folks.)

Among many different texts, there’s a common mythic story that goes something like this. We live in a realm which is fallen and contains evil, but the true reality is different. The true reality is a perfect realm of perfect goodness, created by the true (very abstract) Creator. This state is called the pleroma, Greek for “fullness.” The pleroma emanates forth perfect worlds with the help of beings called aeons, angel-like beings who exist in male-female pairs, each of which is called a syzygy.

The fall occurred when the pairs became unbalanced. One of these aeons, Sophia (“wisdom” in Greek), broke away from her partner, and went off to explore the void. While she remained perfect, she accidentally emanated a being that was not paired with anyone: a masculine, flawed being known as Yaldabaoth or the Demiurge. Some folks will tell you this means “half-creator,” but that’s a mistranslation. Demiurge in Greek really means, literally, “worker from/of the people,” but less literally it means something like “artist” or “craftsman.” Usually it’s a guy who makes pretty stuff like jewelry or decoration or something like that. (Can you tell I took Greek?)   This being created our world, our whole flawed material plane, believing himself to be the creator, and became the God of the Old Testament. The task of the Gnostic is to transcend Yaldabaoth through self-knowledge, or gnosis. By understanding oneself, one realizes one’s unity with Sophia, the true source of our divinity, and ultimately, with the pleroma and the true Creator.  

All in all, it’s a pretty cool concept, whether you believe in it or not. And already, if you weren’t familiar with Gnosticsm before, I imagine you’re spotting things from Homestuck.  Names like Yaldabaoth and Abraxas (a name used sometimes for the true Creator.) The aeons, who resemble Homestuck’s cherubs in their perfect pairing.  It’s pretty clear that Hussie was familiar with this story, at least enough to draw on it for some references and motifs. So why might he have wanted to bring Gnostic stuff into his story? What might he have wanted to convey?

Let’s find out.

CHERUBS CHERUBS CHERUBS

It all begins, of course, with the aeons. I mean cherubs. OK, so I make no secret of the fact that I love cherubs. God I love cherubs. I’m a sucker for the whole cherub loredump Aranea provides, even if it had to be lampshaded to hell and back as a loredump. I think the thing that makes cherubs so interesting to me is the place that they occupy in Homestuck’s enormous, builds-on-itself-Powers-of-Ten-style cosmos. They’re not just another alien race. They don’t operate on the ordinary scale we’re used to, like trolls and humans do (the microcosm of ordinary life), but they don’t operate on the gigantic universe-spawning scale, either (the macrocosm.) They’re in between, in the “mezzocosm,” to steal a phrase from Joseph Campbell.

Cherubs act on the scale of say, galaxies. They operate within universes, many cherubs existing within each individual Billious Slick. Destructive cherubs cause huge waves of death, wiping out solar system after solar system and species after species of poor innocent aliens and fantrolls along the way. But good cherubs are protectors, defending said species from their cousins’ rampages. While cherubs resemble individual aliens traveling through the void, they also operate like much larger beings, claiming huge swaths of territory as their own, either to defend or to destroy. When they mate, their large-scale nature becomes much more evident, as they transform into AU-long serpents that wrestle for dominance in perfect pairs.

Cherubs fit the idea of the aeons really nicely. Dualities up the wazoo, obviously. (I haven’t even mentioned their inherent bodysharing stuff, where they already have to wrestle for dominance within themselves.) And a cherub, after all, in Abrahamic myth, is another kind of angel. And by being part of the natural processes of universes, they echo the aeons in being a natural aspect of reality that—as we’ll see—gets subverted with disastrous results.

They also fit really well into Homestuck’s running theme of cosmology as biology. Universes are literally frogs, whose DNA has to be combined to create the next generation, and they reproduce with massive amounts of redundancy and failure, like real spawning animals who produce hundreds of eggs.  Doomed timelines are compared to capillaries, which all feed back into the central artery of the Alpha timeline (and maybe they’re literal capillaries within the universe-frog?) I gave your universe cancer, etc., etc. Cherubs, meanwhile, are compared to bacteria and cells: the destructive cherubs to viruses or germs, and the protective cherubs to white blood cells, defending the universe from disease.

Cherubs also make a really nice parallel with the events of the Game. (I’m pretty sure this insight came out of conversations between agenderarcee and zenosanalytic and other such awesome folks, so credit where credit is due.) In the Game, one party supports creation: Prospit, backed by Skaia, while the other doesn’t so much support destruction so much as oppose creation: the armies of Derse, backed possibly by the Horrorterrors. Creation vs Nullification. It’s hard to get a universe going; there’s too much inertia in the way. Meanwhile, Cherubs are an inversion—the wicked ones support Destruction, the good ones oppose it. Creation vs Nullification. Destruction vs Protection. It’s pretty cool, and maybe suggests that Skaia doesn’t just contain cherubs, but relies on them, too, working them into its system as aeons are part of the system of Gnosticism. I’m super stoked that cherubs seem to play a role in Hiveswap somehow, and curious what more we might learn about them when it finally comes out. They’re super cool.

All of which is to say: yeah, cherubs are definitely aeons, and they’re a pretty rad take on them, too.

So…what would happen if your cherubs got fucked up?

But you knew that would happen. The upfuckery was already here.

Enter *our* cherubs, Calliope and Caliborn.

THE MANCHILD DEMIURGE

Caliborn and Calliope are born into a weird code of life (set up ultimately by Caliborn, interestingly) that privileges their more down to earth side, rather than their cosmic side. Ordinary cherubs aren’t supposed to live in rooms and type on computers, but here they do. This is a problem, as I’ll explain later, but the obvious problems are that A) Caliborn and Calliope decide to play a game meant for other, less cosmic species B) Caliborn uses the game to kill his sister through artificial means rather than grappling for dominance the ordinary way and thus dooms himself to being a stunted immature tool forever C) As a solo player, he plays a very different game, with enormous and disastrous cosmic results. Namely, he becomes Lord English, an unstoppable being with incredible power over the timeline and the opportunity to devour world after world at a whim. Note that inflicting destruction is exactly what he would have done as an ordinary cherub…but here he’s able to do it on a much larger scale.

Caliborn/Lord English is pretty clearly modeled on the Gnostic Demiurge. Not only does he control a reality that our heroes are ultimately meant to escape, he also has some other familiar traits. He’s a self-described artist, obsessed with his creation, a terrible and insipid imitation of the story we know as Homestuck. A craft’s man, as he says. The irony being, of course, that the events of Homestuck are also his creation, but indirectly, as the much more powerful and manipulative English.

It’s easy to see LE’s entrance into a universe at the end of its life as an event. But in some ways it’s better to think of it as a kind of territory, marked for his possession. After all, from an outside perspective or from Skaia’s perspective, all universes are already here. Think of how the trolls are able to communicate with the universe they created at any point in its history. Think of how the Furthest Ring—the weird space-time outside of universes and sessions—is inconsistent and an event necessary to LE’s powers, the creation of the Green Sun, can take place within one of the universes marked by his predation. It’s Mobius Double Reacharounds all the way down, is what I’m saying. So really, from a perspective outside of time it’s less a chronological set of events and more a place, a set of universes that LE is able to inhabit.

Actually, I made a couple maps in past posts of what such a territory might look like. Tumblr frequently won’t let me fit images into a long post like this, but here’s two  links instead.

So, just like the Demiurge, LE has a whole realm to his own. A false realm, carved out within the reality of SBURB. LE is Homestuck’s Demiurge.

Wait a minute. Wasn’t the Demiurge’s name Yaldabaoth? Isn’t that the name of a Denizen? More specifically, Caliborn’s denizen? Huh?

Let’s back up a bit. LE’s progression through the universes isn’t a surprise to Skaia. We knew early on, actually, that his actions were “sanctioned by Paradox Space.” And really, how could it be otherwise? If all universes coexist simultaneously, even during the process of their creation, the forces that create reality would be well aware of divergences from their normal pattern.  The Game itself offers him his power!

Now, it’s hard to say how much of what goes on in Paradox Space is Skaia’s will. Skaia itself seems to want to make universes, but most of these efforts fail, and will definitely fail without player intervention. And it’s implied that there are forces acting against Creation. Maybe just inertia. Or maybe these are the Horrorterrors, who seem to advance their own agenda through Derse Dreamers. Maybe they’re just creatures that naturally inhabit the weird tangled space-time of the Furthest Ring. If so, it’s not surprising that they would be opposed to the creation of new universes in their midst. So whatever LE is, like everything else within Paradox Space, he’s hashed out between Creation and Nullification.

Denizens are weird and interesting in this regard. They’re the closest thing the Game has to intelligent cosmic entities that you could actually talk to. They’re like the public face of Skaia. They seem to communicate information to themselves through different realities, and they manipulate events to ensure certain results in the timeline. Their goals, though, are as inscrutable as Skaia’s and the Horrorterrors’ always are. They’re associated with the Game and therefore with Skaia. But they seem to me to be part of the ever-ongoing process of negotiation between Creation and Nullification.

So, when Caliborn finds himself in a dead session where his Denizen simultaneously promises to punish him for his hubris with a grueling challenge AND offers him incredible, godlike power if he succeeds, it probably indicates that these perspectives are once again at play. Skaia likes to figure out who will win its ongoing argument with the void through a Game. Why not offer a different Game as a way of resolving a different question?

I’m not sure if I borrowed this theory from someone, but one idea that I remember thinking about earlier in Homestuck’s run was that LE’s existence was the result of a failed coup by the Horrorterrors that totally backfired. If they really did represent the forces of Nullification, suppose they got tired (non-temporally speaking) of losing matches and seeing new frogs pop up in their precious space-time over and over again. Say they decided to switch from Nullification to outright Destruction, to make a weapon that destroys universes. But their weapon blew up in their face once it started attacking them right back.

Or, maybe let’s turn it around: say Skaia thought, hey, let’s get a leg up on these void-loving bastards for once, and make a weapon that, yeah, sure, fucks up a bunch of universes and some of our player’s lives (not that we really care), but also lets us really stick it to those tentacley motherfuckers for a change.

Both possibilities seem worth considering, depending on how much you think Skaia is willing to sacrifice.

So when Yaldabaoth offers LE the Choice and the chance to play the ultimate game of table stickball, he’s really doing a whole lot more: he’s offering the major parties involved in anything going on in Paradox Space the chance to score points in their own Game.

Denizens sometimes seem to me to represent different aspects of Skaia, or different aspects of this negotiation process. It’s even possible that they could be in competition. So what could a Denizen named Yaldabaoth represent?

The power to make and break certain players. The power to make a Demiurge.

Yaldabaoth is associated with power, and, interestingly, with the Light aspect through his shape. He can’t be easily classified as belonging to a particular aspect like some Denizens can, though, because he manifests to both Dirk and Caliborn. What do they have in common? An interest in power and a considerable amount of it, yes. But also toxic masculinity, arrogance, and an obsession with being the best.

If Skaia loves games, how does it feel about winners? Maybe Yaldabaoth represents the principle of the conqueror. The one who defies even the onslaught and punishment of the dead session. The one who’s good enough at games to become part of the game itself. Maybe Yaldabaoth is the part of Skaia that finds someone like Caliborn deserving of a certain honor. Or at least allows its opponents to make use of such a person. The part of Skaia that says, power comes to the one who overcomes it all, through sheer brutal obsession. To the bro who is the most hardcore of all the bros. Who by throwing himself into his game more than any reasonable person would…somehow succeeds.

You might call it the Yaldabaoth Principle, or maybe…

The Yolobro Principle.

So that’s how you make a demiurge. How do you break one?

With a syzygy.

THE ARTIST, THE MUSE

Ah, dear, sweet, sweet, precious Calliope, I’m sorry to have held off talking about you for so long. Your brother ruins everything. But we all know you’re leagues, no, AUs better than that guy.

There isn’t anyone named Sophia in Homestuck, but Calliope is a pretty close analogue. She’s the other half of Caliborn’s cherub pair or syzygy, and it’s her separation from him that’s the catalyst for LE’s. Much of the personality Caliborn crafts for himself is in opposition to her: she’s a passionate and skilled artist, so he becomes an artist too in order to mock her work. Even his cartoonish misogyny seems to arise mostly out of his hatred for her and everything she enjoys. Even after he becomes LE, he’s still obsessing over her, just as cherubs generally obsess over their defeated halves and seek out mates similar to them in adulthood—creating crafting a parody of her in Doc Scratch, killing limeblood trolls because she’s fond of them, and so on. Honestly, Calliope is a great and wonderful character whom a lot of the fandom can empathize with (indeed, she’s crafted as a celebration of Homestuck fandom), and so it’s a shame that we’re going to spend most of this post talking about her stupid brother. Let’s just acknowledge that she deserves better, but her dumb bro has to go make it all about himself, as usual.

But let’s talk about Calliope as the Gnostic Sophia. Like Sophia, she can kind of be described as an inherently good being who made a mistake. In her case, that was believing that she could play a cosmic game with her brother and reconcile with him, rather than defeating him in cherub puberty as cherubs usually do. This ultimately led to her death, Caliborn’s dead session challenge round, and his Yaldabothification into LE.

It wouldn’t really be fair to be mad at her, though! It was an innocent mistake born out of good intentions, and it cost her her life. Also, the warring forces of the Game totally set that situation up, as did LE himself. The cherubs’ unusual living situation encouraged them to think of themselves as the type of species that would play the Game, and thus LE was born.

But there are two Calliopes: the one who was killed by her brother, yes, but also another from an alternate timeline, who defeated her brother in the normal cherub way. Part of the difference in her timeline was that she never learned to think of herself the way humans do, never followed their adventures as a fan, and thus never believed that they could reconcile in their game. Alt-Calliope is much closer to Paradox Space’s idea of a traditional cherub. She’s much more cosmic, much more like an aeon. But also much less human. She’s a force for good, but, like Skaia, she can only see individual beings as abstractions. From a certain perspective, she’s much more empowered and much more important

And yet the game is rigged against her. The challenges of her dead session are designed for her Lord of Time brother, and it seems to be implied that hers is a doomed timeline. When she consults with her Denizen—interestingly, not Yaldabaoth, but Echidna—she is given the Choice to wait out an eternity to become someone who could bring an end to a Yaldabaoth-like tyrant. And she accepts that destiny, committing herself fully to a cosmic purpose. Like LE, the ascended Muse of Space is happy to be part of Skaia’s machinations—if for a very different reasons.

If the Denizens represent different aspects of Skaia or the Game, then maybe there’s a countervailing force to Yalda that we could describe as the Echidna Principle. A dedication to protecting and preserving life within Skaia’s system. Or at least, an acknowledgement that the reign of any false god needs to come to an end.  The Echidna principle employs Alt-Calliope as a counterpart to Caliborn, bringing the two cherubs back into symmetry.

This symmetry is INTEGRAL to Homestuck’s ending. We’ll see how, once we establish some ending-related Homestuck Facts.

In the meantime don’t forget regular Calliope, either—she’s going to be important to the meaning of all this, too. We’ll catch up with her by the curtain call.

THE MAP HOMESTUCK AND THE TERRITORY ENGLISH

Okay! Homestuck Facts!

As I’ve discussed before, there’s a thing that keeps happening in Homestuck which we might call Map-Territory Confusion. This is a concept from literary studies and stuff. Basically, what we mean by Map and Territory is that representations of things are not the same as the things themselves. Like, a map of, say, Houston, is not the same thing as the actual city of Houston, right? One’s made of paper and the other’s made of, like, buildings and shit.

Except in Homestuck, the Map and the Territory blur together all the dang time. The labels for Prospit and Derse float in front of their respective planetoids. Jack knows how to flip his sprite. Terezi’s scratching the game disc glitches Homestuck the webcomic. Caliborn’s sabatoge of the expansion pack causes significant glitches in the Game Over session. Sooo many examples going on here that it would take forever to list them all. Even the way that the omniscient narration (which is sometimes the same as the character of Andrew Hussie and sometimes argues with him) blurs together with the subjective experiences of individual characters contributes to the confusion. Even though, on some level, we tend to believe that Homestuck is a representation of a set of events going on in a number of universes that all exist out in some conceptual space, we’re forced to question constantly whether what we’re witnessing is part of those events, or part of the frame we witness them through, or whether that question even makes sense.

By the time we reach Act 6, and even possibly earlier, I’d argue this confusion is being used very deliberately.

Remember how we talked about LE’s territory earlier?

In Homestuck, Map-Territory Confusion is used to draw an explicit link between the Map that is Homestuck the webcomic and the Territory that is the set of universes and sessions over which LE is able to hold sway.

This is a big part of the reason for Hussie and Caliborn’s conversation. Caliborn is arguing with the theoretical author of the map Homestuck, screeching at how his choices have affected him, and trying to put forward his own version of the narrative.  Meanwhile the author is literally dead, killed by LE. And after this conversation, Caliborn takes over the narrative prompt by entering his text into the same space where he had conversations with Hussie. He tries to rewrite Homestuck in his own bad-fandom image, while simultaneously A) his sabotage of the the Homestuck narrative cause glitches, confusion, and GAME OVER for the kids and B) his future-self LE’s power over the timeline becomes even more of a concern for both the living and the dead. This, mind you, is all on the heels of us finding out through the last few acts how LE and his agent Doc Scratch have been manipulating every disaster, and indeed, everything that has happened within the narrative Homestuck from the very beginning.

An large set of universes and sessions are LE’s playground.

Homestuck itself is LE’s playground.

The two are one and the same.

The other piece of the LE’s Domain = Homestuck puzzle is of course the house-shaped Juju, and the weird powers John gets from touching it. Now, the weird timeline retcon stuff that the Juju allows John to enact is its own weird, often frustrating subject that probably deserves its own post, and if we were to discuss it here, we’d get more derailed than we already are. What’s important for our purposes is that the Juju is even more associated with the narrative than LE is. When we first see it, it looks grey but is actually transparent, by which I mean it bleeds into the grey background of the base website. This grey background is also the place John ends up when he’s testing his powers and dragging LOWAS between realities. We know that LE used it in the very beginning of his reign to trap his opponents, and we know that afterward it passed out of his control, and became something that could only be used against him. It’s shaped like the logo for the Game, in the kids’ version, which is the closest thing we have to a symbol of Homestuck.

We don’t know much about what Jujus actually are, but one thing that’s frequently true about them is that they have strong effects on time. Well, what has a greater affect on time than a story that shapes all the different universes and timelines into a coherent progression?

I’m pretty sure that what Yaldabaoth gives Caliborn and what Caliborn traps our heroes inside to ensure his ascension is Homestuck itself.

So, when I say that the ending of Homestuck is about escaping Homestuck, please believe that it’s not just some weird meta bs that dismisses the story and says it doesn’t mean anything. It’s an actual plot point. Once we learn to see the link between Homestuck the narrative and Homestuck the events, we can see that to escape Homestuck the webcomic has a deeply metaphorical meaning. To escape Homestuck is to escape the hidden conductor behind all events and enter into a domain he cannot control.

With all that in mind, we’re now ready to interpret Act 7.

ACT 7: COSMIC SYMMETRY

We see two main things happen in Act 7. Alt-Calliope makes her move, and Vriska (oh Vriska, you’re your own post and a half) activates the house Juju against Lord English, which is to say, she weaponizes Homestuck against him. The result is a black hole where the Green Sun used to be. Which of the two are responsible? Wrong question, I think. Alt-Calliope, our Sophia, is serving as the conductor of the orchestra and by implication, the guiding hand of the narrative, while Vriska is bringing the narrative to bear against him. The Juju undeniably has power, but so, too, does a Muse of Space showing that this has been her domain all along. The physical destruction they cause is inextricably linked.

Thought the timeline stuff is knotty and confusing as hell, the actual mechanics of LE’s destruction are secretly fairly simple. As others have noted, the defeat of this pool-themed villain evokes the rules of table stickball. We see the Juju/weapon/narrative briefly resemble a ball of light, like a cue ball. We see LE’s eyes become eight balls. And we see the light from the juju charging toward him, like something about to knock him into a dark hole.

Click.

The symbolic meaning of the eight ball is important to keep in mind, and in fact was evoked earlier in Homestuck. In many games of billiards, you can’t pocket the eight ball until the last shot. With Snowman, that meant that you couldn’t kill her without destroying the universe. But in fact, Snowman did get taken out—when Scratch wanted someone to destroy the universe and bring in LE. The meaning of the eight ball, then, is: the time has finally come. The rules permit victory. The right timeline has been found. Everything necessary to make the final move has already taken place.

That’s exactly what Alt-Calliope represents in the eyes of Skaia or the Game. From the beginning of LE’s power trip, the Game knew that his power trip wouldn’t last forever. It would have limits both in time and in space. For Skaia, Alt-Calliope is those limitations being enacted. She is LE’s end.

Think back to the tangled spacetime of the Furthest Ring. Scratch enlisted Dave and Rose to create the Green sun long before the chronology of their session. Thus he achieved, in one sense, LE’s beginning. The destruction of the Green Sun (which unites all of LE’s universes as an ordinary star unites its planets) achieves LE’s end. It doesn’t matter that this end has to come, chronologically, after his long reign of terror. It still ends it.

It’s an end spatially as well as temporally. LE’s rampage through the furthest ring led him opponents around in a great circle of ravaged space-time. (Like a sucker.) Which by the time of the final confrontation makes a complete loop. Imagine what effect a star collapsing into a black hole might have on that ruined space. Imagine how a fully-realized Muse of Space might be able to manipulate the fabric of the Furthest Ring to achieve exactly that effect. Now recall that the universes and sessions LE’s able to influence are part of the Green Sun’s orbit. Yeah, they’re not going to make it out of that collapse intact. Nor are the army of ghost selves that echo the twisting progression of all the universes and alternate timelines we’ve seen going to escape. They’re going to be caught up in the extinction of the domain, swept up in its wake.

That’s the physical side of things. Looking at the Juju itself lets us talk about the narrative side of things. When Vriska activates the Juju, it takes shape as the familiar house symbol of Homestuck. But that same symbol has another meaning—it’s the shape of the Exit Gate for the Game. At the exact same moment (remember, things that are juxtaposed in Homestuck are circumstantially simultaneous, meaning that they’re somehow associated or related to each other) the Juju becomes the Exit Gate, we also see the kids’ (previously red and doorless) Exit gate flip turnways, turn white, and feature a door. The two look so similar that for a moment I thought the kids were going to walk through and end up in the Furthest Ring. But no—the two aren’t two sides of the same door. They’re the same side of the same door.

Down in front of LE crashes a white door. The same white door appears to the kids at the same moment. The difference is, the kids will walk through, and LE will not. He won’t escape the end of his own ambitions. Where does the door lead from? From LE’s domain, also known as Homestuck. Where does it lead to? A new universe outside of LE’s domain, and outside the canon of Homestuck. So outside the canon that it’s only glimpsed as a flash-forward to the future, unable to be directly shown onscreen before the End of Act 7.

And—whatever interpretation we want to assign to the bizarre timeline questions that surround the retcon, Caliborn’s vision of trapping the kids, and the Juju—one thing stands out clearly. This is the right timeline. This is no longer the timeline trapped under LE’s sway. As the eight ball tells us, everything has finally lined up the way it should. Time to take that shot.

One more thing worth noting—in Homestuck, specific colors have long stood for specific timelines and universes. The curtains of the Beta kids’ acts are red, and the Alphas’ green, and their game logos invert this. Meanwhile the trolls’ curtains are blue. As was foreshadowed in Rose’s walkaround, the three colors of curtains eventually fuse to make, in Act 7, white. The color of everything coming together. The color of the Juju in its final form.

What better way to represent everything from the whole history of LE’s domain coming together? What better way to represent everything from the whole history of Homestuck combining into one victory?

In the ending of Homestuck, weird time shit, cosmic destruction, and the culminating power of the narrative all fuse together into one white-hot path toward victory. And even as all this happens, we see Caliborn smashing his clock, see LE gaining his terrifying time powers in the first place. The end is the beginning, and the beginning is also the end.

For a Demiurge and for Skaia, that’s the same thing. The Game has granted Caliborn unfathomable power. But it’s also trapped him in a false, limited world of his own devising. Forever. His obsession means power, but his obsession is also his greatest weakness. He will never know freedom from the loop he set himself in, has become the loop itself. He will never know the freedom the kids know. His ignorance of anything but himself makes him, in a way, a deeply tragic figure. Tragic because Skaia knows how limited he really is, and he never will.

Skaia, or whatever power is at work in the symmetrical ballad of the twin cherubs, is satisfied. Alt-Calliope has fulfilled her cosmic purpose. The circle is complete. The cosmos is satisfied. And our heroes have left the old world behind forever

…But what does that mean? What does it mean to escape?

A GIRL WHO LIVED

What surprised a lot of people who’d been following the Gnostic themes of Homestuck was that the kids didn’t ultimately escape the game. A lot of folks, I remember, felt sure that the kids were going to leave the Game behind forever by escaping into a limitless realm, the pleroma of Gnostic myth.

Here’s the thing. They did.

What I’ve been trying to show here is that the Demiurge to escape, as figured in Homestuck, isn’t Skaia, but Lord English. And the pleroma, the realm of freedom we’re trying to get to? That’s not some place outside Skaia and its cycle of universe after universe being born.

The pleroma is Skaia itself.

This is deeply weird and it’s easy to see why it would catch a lot of people off guard. After all, the pleroma in Gnostic myth is a deeply positive thing, a realm of perfection and joy. It’s the home of the perfectly good God, as Christians tend to view him. Skaia, however, is depicted as amoral, uncaring, even cruel.

But I think this ties into Homestuck’s major themes. The amoral, almost animal-minded cosmos Homestuck depicts is fascinating precisely because it offers no caring God. Cherubs are part of the ordinary progression of things, just as aeons are, but reconnecting with that progression simply means the continued perpetuation of reality through an infinite frog machine. The deep meaningfulness of mythology clashes, quite deliberately with the deep meaninglessness of perpetual motion.  God is a video game that doesn’t care about you as a person, but as a tool it can use to keep the whole show running. And yet, like a video game, it offers grand, mythic narratives and archetypes you can invest yourself in, to the point where you can lose sight of the fact that they don’t necessarily mean anything for your life. Skaia will always exist, even after the story is done, as the Spirograph at the end of Act 7 suggests. It’s up to us human beings to make sense of that.

I’ve talked before about the difference between huge, archetypal narratives and actual personal experiences. Within the context of Sburb, that usually means the difference between the game and your experience of it. But it can also be the difference between Dave and the toxic masculine narratives he inherited. The difference between your archetype and yourself. Or the difference between Calliope and her doppleganger.

To Skaia, Alt-Calliope is the important one, because she enacts its mythic narrative and brings the ballad of Lord English to an end. To Skaia, the Calliope we know is a footnote, an accident, an irrelevant detail. It doesn’t care whether she lives or dies.

But we do. Because we know her. We’ve seen her suffer and struggle, just as we’ve seen all the heroes suffer and struggle. We’ve seen her yearn to be part of something important, celebrated fandom with her, and wanted to defend her against her horrible brother. We’ve seen her dream of something better than a limited life locked to a monster with a chain. We’ve been rooting for her to achieve it.

There’s no reason, from Skaia’s perspective, that Calliope needed to be brought back to life with the ring of life. The ring allowed Aranea to cause Game Over, which was important to the retcon and thus to its grand plan. Calliope is irrelevant.

But she gets brought back to life anyway. Why? Because her friends care about her. Because we do.

Because our Calliope isn’t part of the construction of a grand cosmic architecture. She’s a person.

She has the right to exist. Not because she fulfils some time loop or causes some outcome. But because she’s a person. She doesn’t exist for the cosmos. She exists for herself.

In our Calliope, what was formerly godlike, angel-like, beyond mortal comprehension, gets a chance to be something more human. Calliope expects her doppelganger to be superior to her. She fears her friendships, her peacefulness, her history make her weak. But it’s just the opposite. She’s strong in a way that has nothing to do with what Skaia values, but everything to do with what we value as readers. She matters in dreaming and striving. In herself.

As Alt-Calliope says, recognizing this truth about her counterpart, even as she lives out an entirely different story:

CALLIOPE: you don't need to do anything.

CALLIOPE: be who you've become, and who i didn't.

CALLIOPE: consume the fruits of an existence i could never understand.  

CALLIOPE: live.

The kids escape Lord English, but at the expense of all their past and possible selves, and are left to wrestle with the meaning of their victory: is it divinely ordained, or just an accident, just Skaia’s whim? Is it truly victory when they’re not sure if they’re the same selves, or have they lost something along the way? Caliborn and Calliope embody a similar dichotomy. Caliborn will forever be archetypal, larger than life. But he’s doomed to live out a foolish, self-indulgent story in a bubble of space-time he will never escape. Calliope will never have the glorious, cosmic importance Skaia granted to her brother and to the ghost of her it conjured up to defeat him. But she has a freedom that neither of them will never be able to possess. Freedom to live.

Ultimately, Homestuck uses Gnosticism, a mythic framework all about the relationship between human and the divine, to show the difference between the two. It suggests that the divine, the archetypal, the stuff of grand heroic stories is ultimately limited. In the end, Homestuck argues, there’s great strength and freedom in being mortal. Being human.

I think that’s a pretty cool story to tell.

Next time: other ways of thinking about the ending.

(PS: This essay turned out to be 11 pages in Word. The first mention of Vriska is on page 8. Of fucking course.)

[EDIT 5/21: A previous version of this post claimed that Abraxas was the name of Sophia’s syzygy counterpart, but looking around, that appears to be unsubstantiated. Instead, Abraxas appears to be used as the name of the Ur-God who created the Pleroma or of another Aeon within the Gnostic system. This is pretty cool, as it ties the Denizen Abraxas and the Hope aspect even more fully into the normal functioning of the Sburban cosmos/pleroma. Pretty cool stuff! Thanks to @revolutionaryduelist for pointing it out!]