doc scratch is different from every other villain in homestuck. i read the condesce’s dialogue and, yes, she’s a villain! no doubt. but she’s fun to read, she cracks jokes, she’s entertaining as a concept, and she’s intimidating without being personally frightening. she’s a threat to the characters, not to you. lord english is just fucking funny as a concept even if he is powerful, and he’s not even there for most of the comic, so you’re not afraid of him as a character so much as you’re afraid of the concept of him. the narrative treats him like a force of nature. but doc scratch is deeply, chillingly scary not because he poses a physical threat to the characters, or their journey, not because he’s dangerous in a tangible way to them, but because he’s meant to trigger the audience’s danger sense. odds are, you’ve had a conversation with someone like doc scratch before. you might not have realized it at the time, and you still might not realize it, but for those who do, the way he (an adult) speaks to rose, vriska, and terezi (children, and in particular teenage girls) sets off alarm bells fucking immediately. it’s scary because it’s familiar, and because it’s real. he doesn’t deal in fantastical life-or-death fate-of-the-universe stakes. child predators exist. they’re real. and that’s why doc scratch is so scary.
How come Eridan doesn’t also come off as threatening even though neonazis are also real?
a) eridan is distinct from doc scratch in that reading him as a 1-to-1 allegory for a neonazi is more interpretive than reading doc scratch as a predator. eridan’s ideology is based around fictional bigotry. that makes him less threatening per se because the threat he poses is limited by the fiction of his universe; if eridan were a person, he’d probably be a racist/neonazi/what have you, but he’s not. he’s an alien. so we don’t necessarily think about his bigotry as something pertaining to us. doc scratch, on the other hand, is a child predator. that is a literal description for what he does. he preys on children.
b) eridan is a child. that doesn’t make what he does okay, or make his beliefs any less fucked up, or make the reading of him as a neonazi any less accurate. but it does change the power dynamic between him and the people around him. he has neither the agency nor authority that an adult does, and he spends most of the plot being outnumbered by more competent, more powerful, and less bigoted people. overall, he’s just not presented as a threat to the people around him, until, that is, the very end – by which point it doesn’t matter, since he’s killed immediately afterward.
If you go back and read Andrew Hussie’s early work – back when he ran a website called Team Special Olympics, and thought that was a hilarious thing to do – certain patterns emerge. What were his go-to themes, his muses?
-Clowns (Whistles, Riddler’s Gammon)
-Rapping (And It Don’t Stop)
-Big muscular livestock (Humanimals, Zoosmell)
-Bodily mutilation and transformation (Humanimals, Whistles)
We already knew that Doc Scratch was the Hobbes to Hussie’s Calvin. Now that we’ve discovered the precise nightmare cocktail of soul juice that makes up Lil Cal, it’s even harder to escape the conclusion that LE is, on some level, AH. English is an agglomeration of the most distinctively Hussian characters in the comic – they represent in turn grotesque exaggerations of his manner (the AR), his interests (Equius, Gamzee) and his endless desire to fuck with people (Caliborn.)
I read late-period Homestuck as an allegory, a story of Hussie’s struggle and ultimate inability to finish his own comic. Hussie gets so angry at Scratch during the first Ancestor arc because the good doctor is doing everything he can to prolong the narrative – dumping exposition, introducing a whole slate of new characters, scattering Hussie’s carefully ordered panels into an endless series of formless digressions. Scratch is replaced by Lord English, who is defined first and foremost by his endlessness – everything about him, from his immortality to his rise to power down to his name, is ensured by stable time loops. It’s hard to see how a story with LE in it can come to anything resembling a satisfying conclusion. In light of all this, it makes perfect sense that the monster who must be overcome to end the story is an awful caricature of the author himelf. As an artist, he is his own worst enemy, and we all get to live in that struggle.
Hussie’s in-comic avatar, with his recapping and fussy attention to detail, represents the author’s better nature, his desire to make things orderly and sensible.
All of Hussie-the-character’s actions are attempts to mend places where the story has gone off the rails. Past the Doc Scratch arc, all of these gambits to “fix” the comic backfire (the three-year journey across the yellow yard being the most egregious example) – every new attempt just leads to more sprawl, more characters, more exposition.
When he is finally gunned down by LE, it’s because he is unable to believe in the story anymore. Accepting the fakeness of his creative magic, he is swallowed by his own shadow, overcome by his own worst instincts. Wandering his own comic as a ghost, he tries to bring Vriska back to life, aware that she was his most successful character but unable to understand that her death – her end – was an inextricable element of that success.
So – here, in the 11th hour, we are assured that the end is once again just around the corner. Hussie’s final gambit – bringing Vriska back from the dead and thus invisibly rewriting thousands of pages – has been set in motion, but up to this point it has succeeded only in bringing the plot back from the edge of formlessness. Lord English remains, and in case there is any doubt as to what is at stake here, our main characters have been trapped inside a symbolic rendering of the comic itself (subtle, no? No.) Those of us who are still here watch and wait. We have been promised a mere 400 pages more – the empty promise of an addict reaching for one last cigarette. We watch as a floppy orange man wrestles himself. We wait for him to win.
You know, beta!Roxy’s parenting style suddenly makes a lot more sense in the context of her having seen the specific ways that Jake Harley was a shitty parent and deciding to avoid all of his mistakes as hard as possible.
That’s the point, really. You can’t really build a functional relationship with another person, let alone a person who is dependent on you, by focusing on not doing things. Even if the things you’re not doing are objective negatives. Not being a specific flavor of shitty parent doesn’t automatically shake out to being a good parent.
I’d definitely agree that Rose was neglected, but she was neglected in an entirely different way than Joey and Jude were neglected. Rose self-isolated because she was showered with so much generically positive attention that she stopped trusting it, and Roxy either didn’t understand why Rose was withdrawing, or didn’t know how to fix it, so she just doubled down. Roxy hid a lot of aspects of her life from Rose and presented an empty caricature of domestic motherhood as hard as she could to try to compensate, and all it taught Rose was that she ought to hide anything she cared about at any depth, too. Roxy kept the house so spotless that any area that isn’t Rose’s private space seems almost sterile, and the constant senseless housekeeping made Rose uncomfortable moving around her own home. None of these mark a healthy relationship! But they do all read as reactionary overcompensations for Jake Harley’s behavior toward his kids – the frequent extended absences, the passive exposure to his “trophies” which Joey, at least, seemed deeply upset by, the complete emotional distance with which he treats them, the lack of concern for their living conditions.
(And sidebar, but with how Joey doesn’t know anything about her long-term babysitter’s family and doesn’t feel comfortable asking but suspects that it’s not a happy situation? Yeah, I agree with Joey’s suspicions; Roxy probably didn’t have a lot of good parenting role models at home, either, whoever was raising her.)
The point isn’t “not being Jake justifies Roxy’s parenting,” it’s "a lot of healthy interpersonal dynamics are learned skills and the new canon contextualizes why Roxy doesn’t seem to have learned them despite appearing to have good intentions.”
homestuck uses seemingly random things/concepts – the zodiac, a deck of cards, billiards, the magic 8 ball – as thematic elements so fucking cleverly it’s almost infuriating
the game over timeline failed because vriska was killed – much like in billiards, you lose the game if you pocket the 8 ball too soon
not to infodump or nothing but imho its even deeper than that, in that by act 7 the entire web of symbolism has been flipped
this is foreshadowed kind of obliquely by one, having chess and pool be exactly the same game in-universe, with sburb taking the form of a collosally complicated game of chess in multiplayer sessions, but taking the form of pool in a single player session, and two, having caliborn switch his king and queen’s appearance, but having them move as if they were the piece they appear to be
vriska appears to be the 8 ball and killing her appears to end their game prematurely, but shes actually the cue ball, and killing her causes a scratch in which she can be placed wherever is most advantageous for the opponent, and english is the 8 ball, and shoving him into the metaphorical pocket that is the black hole from the collapse of the green sun ends the game
what im getting at here is that i fucking h8 homestuck
holy shit
There’s also all the parallels drawn between Snowman(The Black Queen) and Vriska. And of course, while Snowman APPEARS to be an 8-ball, what is killing her circumstantially simultaneous with? A SCRATCH. From the perspective of Caliborn and his Session, it appears to be a victory, but it actually allows his opponents to reposition themselves to best win The Game(like vriscourse says).
It goes significantly deeper than this, since the cueball is also likened to an Egg visually and explicitly. Scratch’s cueball head is the egg from which LE is born, and Dave literally calls Grimbark Jade’s cueball an egg:
Which links the cueball to Homestuck’s pervasive traditions of Gnostic/Christian, Grecoroman, and Egyptian myth. In all of these stories (but in Gnosticism in particular as far as I can tell), there’s a consistent focus on Eggs as a symbol of both destruction and birth, best summed up by a quote from Herman Hesse’s Damien:
The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. That God’s name is Abraxas.
(if that sounds familiar, it’s because it also shows up in Revolutionary Girl Utena, another story steeped in Gnostic symbols.)
And let’s not forget that the cueball/egg is also tied to another symbol: That of Homestuck itself.
So symbolically, The Ultimate Juju/Story of Homestuck is at once three things:
1) It is the world that Lord English has created, that the bird (our kids!) must destroy to be born.
2) It is the cueball. Specifically, it is the IDEA of the cueball. Lord English successfully suppreses all cueballs that can hurt him in physical reality, but is ultimately beaten because he cannot stop the power of the IDEA of the cueball, manifested symbolically.
3) It is also, simultaneously, an egg–a symbol of inevitable change. Change, whether it be for himself or the world he created, is, of course, the only thing that Lord English cannot tolerate, so it makes sense to present eggs as a weakness for him.
I’ve written about most of this in my essay on Gnostic myths and how they influence Homestuck, which you can find here.
But one last note: Just as important as how it affects LE is what this means for the characters. Homestuck is arguing that none of its characters have been “born”, constrained as they’ve been within the “shell” of LE’s alpha timeline.
In Act 7, that egg seems to hatch, the shell of the world that constrains it cracking and splintering under the force of the bird’s will.
So what comes next for Homestuck’s characters, if this is meant to be the moment of their birth?
I love how in the homestuck fandom, “stuck” has become a synonymous suffix for ‘AU’. Want an au that takes place in college? collegestuck. Want an au that’s sad and angsty? sadstuck. Want an AU that takes place in the harry potter universe? potterstuck. Just add ’-stuck’ at the end and you got yourself an AU™
honestly it’s the hardest thing not to drag the terminology into other fandoms, because —stuck is much more efficient a labeling convention.
‘au’ just indicates something about the fanfic is different from canon, and it could be anything from a minor plot deviation to a genderswap to a wild west retelling to a crossover. so you have to actually use a couple words or even a whole phrase. ‘everyone’s at hogwarts AU’, ‘biker gang AU’, ‘abducted by aliens AU’, ‘AU from this canon event where that character made another decision’. it’s clumsy.
conversely, the ‘stuck suffix indicates that something major about the setting or characters has been changed, with the prefix indicating what, such as collegestuck, humanstuck, demonstuck, knightstuck, treckstuck. the exceptions that sort of prove the rule are ‘stucks that indicate a genre shift such as sadstuck and horrorstuck. you get a short, snappy compound term that conveys the basic premise of your story and off you go.
it really is awfully useful, as are the troll romance quadrants. if i say “i ship pidge and hunk pale” you know i don’t just mean they’re friends, i mean they’re in a platonic but extremely close relationship involving lots of supportiveness and squishy bro feels. it’s hard to write a story about ‘these two are friends’ because like… so what? everyone’s got a dozen friends. but it’s easy to write a story about a pale ship, because that is fraught with motherfuckin feels.
People can say what they like about the Homestuck fandom (and they will probably be right lbr) but it has yielded a number of really CHOICE concepts for transformative works that I have never seen the like of in any other fandom.
i find the decapitation meme really interesting, cus it feels like it was gonna happen for sure based on the fandoms sense of humour, but the way it works is based on how it happened in-comic
like a similar joke was gonna happen either way because even tho its a long comic where a lot of characters die repeatedly, dirk managed to get decapitated TWICE, but i feel the joke wouldve gone differently depending on whether both incidents were on purpose, both accidents, or one was on purpose and the other an accident
since both incidents were dirks idea, it became the joke that dirk comes up with being decapitated whenever hes faced with a problem (which is hyperbolic to comic effect, considering in the canon both occasions were life or death situations, but i love the hs fandoms hyperbole)
but i think that if both had been accidents, the fandom wouldve still come up with a similar meme, namely that this is just something that can randomly happen to dirk whenever. similarly hyperbolic comics would emerge of, like, him an dave playing frisbee and the frisbee accidentally decapitating him; him and the others are sitting around eating breakfast and his head falls off in his cereal. that kinda stuff
and if the first instance was on purpose but the other one turns out to be daves idea i imagine it wouldve been at least one comic of dirk complaining “wow you cut your head off ONE TIME and suddenly its A THING”; or if the first was an accident and the second was on purpose there would be at least one comic along the lines of dirk musing mid-battle “yknow actually, that decapitation worked out pretty well, maybe it will this time” (tho tbh i dont think these ones wouldve caught on as much because of the lack of room for hyperbole and possible applications for the joke)
but yh, this is just something i was musing about in the shower yesterday. i just think that this meme kinda perfectly captures a large part of the fandoms sense of humour in a few ways
i just think its amazing that we’re now imagining MEME AUS
next time youre about to make an “actually dirk is a sympathetic softboy and vriska is an irredeemable sociopath” post i want you to really close-read homestuck and look deep in your heart of hearts and try to convince yourself that if their places were swapped dirk would not be feeding people to a giant spider
It’s flippant to say that the main bone people have to pick with Vriska is her abuse by Spidermom, though.You could put many people in Vriska’s shoes and they would do the same things as her for their own survival while not being like her. It’s not like Feferi is a controversial character, for instance.
I don’t think Dirk (while not a “sympathetic softboy”) would treat Tavros, among others, in the same way Vriska does. Nor would he engineer Bec Noir’s creation, or meddle with Jade in the same way.
i mean of course nobody has a bone to pick with vriska BECAUSE she was abused, and i don’t think that was the implication of the original post. in fact, people tend to just generally disregard that vriska was very blatantly abused altogether when they criticize her character – which is ridiculous, because characters like eridan and equius are given the benefit of the doubt when they’re infinitely less deserving.
the obvious reason people dislike vriska is because she was abusive and a bully. the bec noir and jade thing i care less about because they’re forgivable, but people genuinely hate her because she hurt tavros. and that’s fair!
but like, every other murder she committed was done because she had no other choice. she was very obviously terrified of her (massive, dangerous) lusus and just as terrified of living life without her lusus. doc scratch even engineered her murder of aradia and manipulated her into acting on his suggestions that she hurt her friends. vriska was a very easy target for a pedophile/child abuser like doc scratch who needed someone with poor social skills, poor impulse control, and pent up anger because of her already abusive situation. abused kids are extremely easy targets for being further abused by adults looking to exploit them.
bringing up feferi in this instance is pointless, because feferi’s situation was nothing like vriska’s. that was the whole point of this post. the only character whose childhood had as much suffering as vriska’s – and in a tangible way that caused them suffering readers can easily understand as being caused by an abusive parent – is dave’s. sure on a surface level feferi’s lusus is a demanding guardian with specific and dangerous needs (much less horrifying than spidermom’s, though) – but this never fell on feferi. eridan helped her. feferi was likable and upbeat and seemed generally well-adjusted compared to the other trolls, far from the neurotic mess vriska was dealing directly with the needs of her guardian alone (and the only person who ever “helped” her (terezi) hated her for good reason, unlike eridan who was thrilled to help feferi). vriska bears the characteristic hallmarks of a child from a broken home and an abusive parent. this is very much intentional and while a lot of people (for whatever reason) never picked up on it, it’s incredibly apparent in the narrative. the comic “vrisky business” was written by hussie himself and actually shows first hand how bad things are for vriska with her lusus and the emotional damage it causes her on a fairly regular basis. not to mention her interactions with (vriska), which show the reader directly that vriska hates herself and – in her own words – has never been happy in her entire life.
there’s no other character you can really compare to vriska beyond dave, who grew up in a society very different than vriska’s. it’s not to say this excuses vriska’s treatment of tavros and her other “friends”, or that people aren’t completely valid for disliking her, it’s that when attempting to compare her to other characters or put other characters in her shoes they fail to understand the scope of her situation or the severity of her abuse, nor do they understand that these were things the reader is SUPPOSED to understand about vriska.
As it happens, Gamzee has a line I never gave much weight to before noticing Bro’s SAW interest that I’m more inclined to take seriously now, that suggests Gamzee and Bro’s relationship to Cal WAS intrinsically different:
But even if Bro is kind of a noble captor figure holding Cal back, I still wouldn’t think it excuses any of what he put Dave through. He’s still an awful dude.
As for Gamzee, here’s the main problem with reading him as “just” brainwashed.
Gamzee doesn’t require Lil Cal’s presence to go evil. In fact, Gamzee doesn’t seem to require ANYTHING to turn evil. But even if like, Doc Scratch ALWAYS teleports Lil Cal into Gamzee’s presence to trigger his personality shift, I don’t think it would matter. The weight of the sheer SCALE of Gamzee’s devotion cements his place as an ultimately willing accomplice/acolyte to Caliborn’s Dark Carnival.
And it kind of makes Gamzee fucking terrifying and a fantastic villain.
I’ll explain my reasoning here.
We know for a fact that Gamzee snaps and kills all his friends in at least one Doomed timeline. This is the source for half the code used in the creation of Doc Scratch. There’s no implication that Lil Cal is involved here at all.
But again, let’s assume Lil Cal was here again. It doesn’t matter.
Because there is canonically, explicitly, no timeline in the history of Gamzee where Gamzee ever, ever, EVER chooses to rebel. Gamzee Makara simply does not ever choose his friends over Lord English. In any timeline. Ever. How do I know?
Lets talk about Ghosts for a minute. The fandom has historically kind of taken these guys for granted, and loose fandom consensus is that they aren’t coherent/who has what ghosts is arbitrary. This is incorrect!
Pretty much everybody in the Bubbles that should have alt!ghosts does, including Meenah and Aranea, the two characters who’s alt!ghosts are typically presumed “Missing”.
This is important. The Ghosts kind of give us very low-key character development, and contextualize the characters for us. For example, Eridan is an absolute irredeemable bastard in the Alpha timeline. But in a God Tier iteration of themselves, Eridan and Feferi seemingly come to friendlier terms. In another, there’s suggestions Eridan makes up with Feferi and Sollux. In yet another, he seems to be Trans or exploring femininity at least.
The point is, there’s a certain fluidity to Eridan’s potential. Still terrible in the comic, but it’s important to remember that Eridan didn’t CHOOSE to be trapped in the meteor with Jack, or to be born to Alternia’s power system, or to be trapped in the Alpha Timeline.
It’s important to remember these things because in Homestuck, someone with power–Lord English–deliberately and willfully chose those things FOR him. Eridan’s lives are lived in response to that imposed power structure. These factors don’t redeem him completely necessarily
But anyway, the fact that the rest of the cast have coherent quantum expressions means there are only three real exceptions–three characters who either don’t have any ghosts at all, or should have more ghosts than they do.
The first is Caliborn, who’s timeline has exactly one deviation from the Alpha–apparently caused by John’s retcon. This riddle’s solved easily enough: Predomination doesn’t leave a ghost to appear in the bubbles at all. When Calliope says she ate his soul, she means that literally. Caliborn’s cheating in the Alpha Timeline is indeed the only reason Calliope exists in the bubbles at all.
(This, by the way, explains a lot about the relationship between Caliborn’s soul and Gamzee/Arquis’ in the Lord English. He predominated over them, too.)
The second is Vriska, who only has a single ghost in (Vriska). This is really weird, because we literally know for a fact she dies in more than one doomed timeline! As with the two Calliopes, I think this is down to John’s retcon doing some weird entanglement nonsense to Vriska’s quantum existence. The point is: Where others have a palette of possibility, Vriska has two extremely polarized halves. Schrodinger’s Vriska.
Important to mention that just like Eridan, the structure of the Alpha Timeline that limits potential Vriskas is IMPOSED ONTO HER. Vriska didn’t want anything about the way she was raised or where she was born. She didn’t ask John and Terezi to retcon her into this bizarre state. Both Vriskas, like the rest of the cast, are rolling with the punches LE has seen fit to give.
Except for Gamzee.
Hussie literally tells us Gamzee never dies. His single non-Alpha Timeline death in [S] Game Over is retconned by John, and Hussie suggests it straight up doesn’t count. But that presents a problem.
There are thousands upon thousands of Doomed troll timelines. How is it that Gamzee specifically never ever EVER dies? Well, there’s only one real way that a Non-Time player can survive a Doomed timeline, that we know of:
Dream self merger. By going to sleep as the last player present in Sburb, the Doomed Rose from Davesprite’s timeline triggers a game mechanic that ends her timeline completely and merges her consciousness with that of Alpha Rose through their dreamselves.
If Gamzee survives his doomed timelines, this is the only possible way how. And collapsing all of his potential instances into a single Alpha identity certainly sounds like the reduction of possibility commonly attributed to the Rage aspect. But what that means is that to move on to the Alpha, every Doomed Gamzee must inevitably either snap and kill all the other trolls, or somehow outlast them.
And it means that if any Gamzee had EVER, in the entire spectrum of plausibility the Alpha timeline affords, EVER been inclined to rebel against LE–then we would know. Because somewhere out there, that at least Hussie could see, there would be a Ghost to show for it.
But there isn’t. Similar in this respect only to Caliborn, Gamzee simply has no alternate deviations because he doesn’t want them. He chooses the path that leads to Lord English freely and willingly, over and over and over again.
And like Caliborn…
Gamzee does this because he wants to.
Gamzee doesn’t BELIEVE he’s going to become his own God–he knows it for a fact. He sees it in Lil Cal’s mangled soul. And he embraces that truth wholeheartedly, throwing himself into the acolyte role from then onwards and presumably following instructions Doc Scratch gives him throughout Act 6.
Which we can talk about some other time. The point is: Gamzee chooses all this. Whether or not Lil Cal causes him to is beside the point, because there is not and never will be any timeline where Gamzee chooses to resist.
Gamzee is the ultimate in shitty cosmic nazi religious zealots, and devoted to the very power structure that causes every other character to suffer so. There are no mitigating factors for him as there are for everyone else but Caliborn. At the end of the day, he’s evil. Bad clown. Worst enemy.
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