Homestuck's Gnosticism: The World / The Wheel

Everyone knows Homestuck is "a Gnostic story".

Wait, why does it feel like we've had this exact conversation before...?

If you followed along with the first post in this series, you'll be familiar already with the Gnostic nature of Homestuck's central conflict between the spirit world and the flesh. And even if I say so myself, I think that post is pretty definitive; if you're ever unsure what a particular character's motivations or end goal are, the Conflict will tell you. But what's conspicuously absent from the post is any explanation of what actually happens in Homestuck. We've covered the why, but very little of the how.

I left us off on the "synonymous goals" that spring naturally from this conflict between flesh and spirit; attaining ultimate knowledge, and escaping the confines of Homestuck itself. Eagle-eyed readers probably spotted what was lying between the lines, there: the comic is called Homestuck because it's about being stuck in a house, so the ending is about escaping the house. But what does that really look like? And how did they get in that house in the first place?

Let's return very briefly to a quote I used in the previous post. "[Y]our ultimate self [...] unlike god tiers or bubble ghosts or whatever, it really IS immortal". Two assumptions naturally grow out of this fact. First, and probably most obvious: when John dies, he's not really gone. The idea of him still exists out there, somewhere, and in our minds, so he still exists. Second, though: if the idea of him is eternal, John obviously didn't start existing when he was born. So again we ask, where did he come from?

How did John get here? Where does he go? The answers to these questions are like the four sides of one hypercoin, in that Homestuck is a time loop... of a sort.

ive been doing this for going on 7 years now i dont expect to stop anytime soon :) thanks for the support!

can't help but wonder recently if Vriska's "[e]ach class has a huge alpha8et of signs, so when someone shares yours, you know you have a lot in common" line is implicitly about aspect symbols? like in the same way a troll's sign doesn't actually determine who they are but can be used to draw two trolls into a shared destiny, she's saying an aspect has no intrinsic meaning of its own but serves to draw lines between heroes who share that aspect. Aranea seems to imply something similar when she talks about Cronus' destiny, which could be "passed on to his descendant, or if his descendant proved to be as much of a failure as he did, then perhaps on some other Hero of Hope."

it feels particularly indicative that Vriska uses the word "class" as a synonym for caste here: each "class" has a "huge alpha8et of signs" in the same way each class has twelve aspect variations within it. this confusion of RPG class with social class is echoed later on in Caliborn's literalism (LOWLY PAGE versus A LORD'S WORTHINESS [and] NOBILITY) - which seemingly went on to influence Alternian society (THEY'RE ALL MEN. BECAUSE I SAY THEY ARE.) - and was realised in an even more literal sense in the extended zodiac, which divides trolls into "sign classes" with "aspect sways".

re: tags on last post, if Calliope and the mother grub are both mirror images of Skaia, and are also both "skull mothers" of a sort, does it stand to reason that Skaia should also be a "skull mother" of some kind...? thinking of its odd structure as a ball of sky surrounding the Battlefield, which could almost be Skaia's "skull" or skeleton

wondering if maybe Vriska's caste as a "vestigial class" is maybe reflective of women in general being a vestigial concept on Alternia

Vriska and Equius live in a symbiosis as man/wife and lowblood/highblood. Hussie's commentary on Equius' introduction says the following:

in this way Vriska's blue caste is almost vestigial, without any purpose in the Alternian hierarchy distinct from that of indigo nobility - which is why her "class" is that of an outlaw, the Thief. Vriska's ancestors were once proud gamblignants, who offered the Zahhaks sanctuary in their territory; but now the gamblignants are dead, and Vriska hides within Zahhak's pocket of void while offering very little in exchange. as you say, this is reflected in their lusii: Vriska's lusus demands servitude, yes, but it is also a parasite which basically gives its troll nothing in return for a constant supply of food. other blue blooded lusii, like Ardata's tick, further emphasise this parasitic nature.

even moreso than flesh being suppressed by machines, Alternia's lowbloods ARE the machines. as part of its veil of superficial matriarchy, Alternia has no true computers or robotics, and instead uses living organisms for those roles. drones and battleships are ultimately the same in this respect, which is why they're both depicted in the same colour schemes in act 6 (with dronegorg as a crossover between the two) and why Trizza's battleship in Hiveswap is depicted as a giant crustacean; it is itself an immense drone.

Lord English's symbol being a black hole, or singularity, is a double entendre - because a "singularity" is also the hypothesised end result of machine supremacy, the point at which technological advancement outstrips human advancement and spirals out of control. AR alludes to this theory when he brags of "the jaw-dropping speed of [his] post-singularity cognition."

the machine uprising, à la the Terminator, is the inevitable outcome of technological expansion in just the same way Lord English himself is the embodiment of inevitability itself!

old ask because i was thinking on it for a little bit so i apologise, but i guess i don't think there is necessarily this contrast between a positive experience on Kanaya's part and a negative experience on Vriska's part. if Kanaya does have a neutral or even positive memory of Scratch's influence on her early life, that's at least partially down to Kanaya's more passive demeanor and in least one big part down to the fact that she probably just does not remember what it was that he did.

both girls were groomed, certainly, but Scratch is telling a characteristic truth when he insists upon his own asexuality, because he does not groom for pleasure but of course for a purpose, and Kanaya and Vriska were simply made for different purposes. which, of course, in turn reflects on their differing demeanors - after all a storyteller has no ability to alter the truth about someone's personality, only to twist how that personality is portrayed. from Hussie's commentary: "[Scratch is] always there at the right moment to nudge people in the direction of doing the nasty thing that, deep down, they already know they want to do."

i guess i might argue that it's unlikely any feelings Vriska and Kanaya might or might not have toward their old mentor are really about Scratch as "a person" or what he specifically did at all, for two related reasons. firstly that I don't think anyone really "remembers" what it is Scratch "did" to them because he's, really, almost beyond "doing" things to people; he acts in the nudging and rearranging of ideas, which live solely in the subconscious and in the genes (as kind of discussed or vaguely mused about here) and not in living memory.

in this sense, in this specific context, i'm often reluctant to even refer to Scratch with titles like "character" because he essentially asserts himself as an inevitable narrative force whose motives can no more be analysed than the motives of the sun or the night sky. the effects of Scratch's manipulations are ultimately not so much things he has "done" as they are the things he has caused others to do; which is really the crux of my second reason, that to have feelings about "what Scratch did" is really just to have feelings about where your life has taken you - railing against the narrator is just railing at God, and railing at God is for all intents and purposes railing at your own life. for Vriska, the path God sent her down led to destruction in her own life and in the lives of everybody around her, while in Kanaya's case the manipulations were so subtle that it is still not entirely clear to us what they involved; she was awoken to Skaia's light and seemingly grew to be a vampire as a result. if there weren't so much suspicious mystery surrounding what Scratch would have even done to cause this awakening in the first place, one might even be tempted to think of these manipulations as "benign", in comparison to Vriska's, if it weren't that there simply can be no benign act of God in Homestuck.

but ultimately Scratch as a storyteller understands that his story needs good girls and bad girls, passive and active players, and while we're all intimately aware of the heavy load of baggage Homestuck's chosen heroes are saddled with - a part in which Kanaya's burden of motherhood no doubt plays - the fact that Vriska spent so much of her life convinced that she had been given the good girl hat probably contributed no small amount to the psychological knock-on effects of being groomed into the bad girl.

The Matrix is often criticised for its weak central premise - humans do not make any better a source of fuel than, for instance, plants. but what I think is implicit in The Matrix is what is explicit in the movie it is widely recognised as being heavily inspired by, Dark City, in which the malevolent aliens controlling the city need to study humans specifically because the humans have something the aliens don't have but need. I think it's clear by English's employment of computer beds and (spy-)drones that the situation on Alternia is the same. English needs the trolls to make a new universe for him the exact same way drones need a population of living trolls to make more drones - at least until the Condesce has the technology to do all that with machines.

maybe the drones lacking genetic material is an analogy for something else - or maybe it's exactly that literal. maybe the reason Lord English needs a race like the trolls to reproduce for him is exactly because by disposing of his female half he made himself totally incapable of sexually reproducing himself!

(how's that for an obvious thing I missed: by throwing off his "creative" female side, Caliborn condemns himself to be literally unable to "create" in any capacity)

I've noted before of course that the preoccupation with reproduction and breeding control on Alternia seems to echo the broader concerns re: these same issues on a cosmic level - trolls reproduce on a mass, quantity-over-quality scale so that those masses can be cut down into a small set of perfect soldiers, the same way Sburb seems to proliferate on a mass scale while only a few sessions succeed - so it makes sense that English and the imperial drone would seem to occupy similar "bogeyman" positions on these microcosmic and macrocosmic scales. and this idea that a living system requires a living manifestation of destruction to counterbalance itself is not without precedent in Homestuck itself; it could be said that malevolent cherubs serve this same bogeyman role on an intrauniversal level.

in which case I wonder if the echoes of Kanaya in Calliope go a little deeper than their shared green blood and godhood over space; do the (virginal) jade bloods counterbalance the (asexual) drones in the same way green cherubs balance out the red?

I think the drones are such a great piece of economical storytelling because we as the reader understand two key things about the trolls - that they are social insects and that they live under a militaristic regime (both of which are also such stock staples of the sci fi fantasy genre that they take very little effort on the part of the reader to comprehend) - and just by giving these things the name "drone" we are immediately able to draw the connection to what a "drone" is both in insect social structures and in a military technology context. and from these inferences we can very easily and correctly assume basically everything there is to know about these very much minor but essential worldbuilding characters that don't even make an in-person appearance in the story until well over 2000 pages after their introduction