beta kids spaceship au: john is the captain who hardly ever tells anyone what to do and spends most of his time fucking around making star trek references and hanging out on the hull. rose is the first mate and navigator who actually runs the spaceship, but she has a weekly existential crisis and jade has to take over for her. dave is the communications officer who dicks around at the comms station playing mid-2000s hip hop on the frequency that’s supposed to be reserved for first contact. jade is the medical officer who keeps the whole place together by sheer willpower and fixes everything when it all goes to shit.
alpha kids spaceship au: they all die in the first week because an emergency happens and none of them talk to each other about it
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?
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