#i don't think we can even deign to define 'consciousness' so straightforwardly in the first place

[dingodad]

What is the deal with the beta and alpha kids ghosts in Terezi remem8er? When their main bodies die, their souls just go into their dream body/god tier body, so their dead bodies shouldn’t have specific ghosts. I get how dreamselves have ghosts since when the main consciousness takes over the dream body, the original soul dies, but there should be no soul left inside of the main body of the kids if they ascended. As far as I know, this flash is the only one that shows ghosts of the dead bodies of characters? Every time a character dies, is there just a ghost made of them no matter what? Do souls just not work that way in homestuck?

Remem8er is a moment in the comic i prefer not to think about most of the time because of these exact insane implications but I think the best way to frame those implications in a way that expands our understanding of the rest of Homestuck rather than coming across as a crazy last-minute twist is to think of the ghosts in the dream bubbles not as "souls" as we might traditionally understand them, but as "memories".

like, obviously the point of the entire flash is "Remem8er"ing, so any understanding of the events in the animation should stem from that. but we ourselves also have to remember that these structures we think of as an 'afterlife' are first and foremost "dream" bubbles. and while we tend to think of ghosts and memory projections as two distinctly different things in the dream bubbles, they're not without their overlap; remember that psychics like Aradia and Sollux interacted with and even summoned the shades of the dead all the time before they ever visited the dream bubbles, and there are subtle implications that interacting with a memory of an event can have some real impact on how that event plays out.

the "soul" as it is exists in Homestuck is something that can be "splintered" by a mere thought - the Brain Ghost Dirk has its own ghostly existence, but it's really just Jake's 'interpretation' of Dirk, and Hal and Dave's bro are all just different kinds of interpretation of the same character. and this is basically how the things we see in Remem8er are framed; the animation ends with everything flashing by in a neuron, because it was all a visualisation of Terezi's Mind powers, and Mind is an aspect that deals not with facts of physics (like 'you only get one soul') but with the way our own interpretation of events dictates reality - as quoted in the link above, reality isn't something that happens to you but "SOM3TH1NG [you] 4R3 M4K1NG 3V3RY MOM3NT W1TH 3V3RY THOUGHT".

as I've said before, as Homestuck approaches its conclusion and the shape of the Ultimate Self begins to emerge from the fog, the comic starts to introduce more and more of these different kinds of 'interpretation' - first doomed timeline versions, then post-scratch versions, then post-retcon versions - not because it wants you to keep track of them all as if they were different characters, but because it wants you to get the picture that no matter what permutations you make they are all ultimately the SAME character. I once talked to someone who suggested Remem8er was SUPPOSED to be some kind of shocking twist that forced us to deal with the gravity of death in Homestuck in a way we had previously been ignorant to, but I don't think this could be further from the truth: Remem8er puts importance on these deaths precisely because they are NOT moments of grave severity, but stepping stones in the journey the characters took to become who they are now. after all, "Remem8ering" is not mourning something you lost, but accepting that something has always been part of you, even when you weren't aware of it.

so to actually answer your question: yes... as hard as that might be to accept initially, i guess it does make a ghost every time you die even if you get reborn afterward? but like Terezi points out, we make new memories and therefore new ghosts any time we make any decision that affects the world around us. don't think of the soul or pieces of the soul as something you lose to the void every time a new ghost of you is born into the void, but rather as one huge picture that gets sharper as each new ghost takes the place of a new pixel in the image!