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clonerightsagenda · 7 years

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I quit writing Homestuck meta a long time ago, but I guess the pre-4/13 fervor is infectious, because this popped into my head and wouldn’t go away. So here’s some musings on Homestuck, the ending, and its portrayal (or rather, erasure) of character identity and agency.

Let’s rewind back several years and a few subsubacts, to the meteor and battleship crews’ not so triumphant arrival in the combined session. Two of the kids’ number have been mind-controlled and forced to work for the Empress. Two have been thrown in prison. One has been banished to the outer reaches of space. The rest have been divvied up and placed on various Lands, given different tasks to be completed for the Empress. Even in beating SBURB and winning the game they have no escape, because she intends to rule the new universe they create… until it spawns Lord English and is destroyed.

Things look bleak. And things look even bleaker when Game Over rolls around, and most of the cast gets exterminated. But wait! John Egbert, Heir of Breath and leader of the Beta session, has gotten his hands on a miraculous artifact supposedly useful as a weapon against Lord English. He now has the ability to travel throughout time and space and to change things that usually cannot be changed. While his friends get wiped out, he fights the “tyrannous author” figure who has been telling their story wrong and wins. Surely with his newfound abilities, he will set things right and lead them to freedom.

Except. Not really.

Oh sure, John “saves the day”. He uses his retcon abilities to create a new timeline where everyone lives and wins the game. But is it a victory? And did everyone really live?

I’m going to argue that the ending of Homestuck is a tragedy where characters’ identities are frequently ignored or overwritten in order to serve the utilitarian aims of the narrative (and Skaia). I do not make this argument believing Hussie intended it. I think the dip in quality and coherency at the end of Homestuck was the product of an author who was tired of his project, had lost track of a bunch of plot points and characters, and just wanted to be finished. But I do think its treatment of identity is drastically different from the rest of the work and sends some disturbing messages about how “happy” that ending really is.

Alternate Selves

Dave and Davesprite. Vriska and (Vriska). Pre- and post-scratch. Bro, Dirk, Hal. Throughout the comic, we’re shown that alternate selves are different people. They may begin as the same when they split apart, but in not too long, their personalities diverge as part of lived experience. Bro is not Dirk is not Hal. They have certain base characteristics and sometimes experiences in common, but they are different people. Most members of the fandom would agree that it’s silly to suggest that they aren’t.

And yet the ending of Homestuck asks us to accept something very similar. The Game Over iterations of characters are wiped out, and a new set takes their place. While earlier parts of the comic train readers to view the loss of any one iteration as significant and the introduction of a new iteration as something different (Rose’s grief over losing her mother cannot be completely abated by the introduction of Roxy; Rose’s mother is still dead. And I suspect the fandom would not have been pleased if Dave had died forever and Davesprite had been anointed sole Dave survivor.) this asks them to do the opposite. Oh, sure, the characters you’ve been following for years are dead and never coming back. But here’s a new set!

Even more eerily, the characters themselves go along with it. Rose, who saw a version of Roxy die in front of her, is perfectly content to greet a new version. GO!Roxy’s arrival absolves Jane of the guilt of killing her best friend, and apparently the other Alphas aren’t at all perturbed that the Roxy joining them has a different set of memories. (I’m not sure anyone even tells Dirk, who was out in space for all of this.) John, who has a history of looking down on alternate selves (his entire fraught relationship with Davesprite versus the “real” Dave, his proclamation of friendship with “past Terezi”) apparently has no problem meeting up with a version of his sister who has no memories of the three years he spent with another version of her, and neither does she. The GO! survivors slot right into the retcon kids’ lives to fill some available gaps, even though earlier they would have been considered separate people by the story, not replacements.

Characterization

I’m not going to get into how nearly everyone’s character arc and development got dropped (or expound on why ‘real people don’t have arcs’ is nonsense) beyond that the majority of characters get sidelined, used as means to an end, and/or objectified, which also impedes their agency and identity. That’s another post. But what I will focus on is how one character who gets brought to the front of the stage exemplifies the destruction of identity for the sake of utility that this ending seems to prioritize. That character is Vriska Serket.

Now, Vriska is a lightning rod of fandom de88. But identity and the negotiation, suppression, or recreation of it has always been a big thing for her. Vriska emulates Mindfang and adopts many of her nastier behaviors on Alternia in order to survive their violent culture and her dangerous lusus. This is the explanation for a lot of her actions, but it doesn’t excuse them. Throughout the story, she frequently teeters on the edge of realizing and accepting that her behavior is wrong (GO!Vriska gets closest, although she never quite makes it). Retcon!Vriska, though, has had that spark of self-awareness snuffed. Puffed up with self-importance over having reality literally rewritten to save her life, she’s cruel for the sake of cruelty and forces everyone else to go along with her power gamer strategy regardless of whether it’s a good choice. When she encounters GO!Vriska, who we can presume is closer to what Vriska might have been without all these toxic influences, she lashes out at her and seems disgusted by who she has become (her more authentic self?). GO!Vriska then wanders off, encounters Terezi, and vanishes from the story entirely. Retcon!Vriska is the one who “defeats” (?) Lord English before vanishing as well. She is sold as the missing ingredient that leads to a victorious timeline – the version of Vriska who has rejected and lost her true identity under a warped façade, turning into the monster she always fronted as. Inspiring.

The Dreaming Dead

(EDIT) Since we just talked about Vriska, let’s talk about her pawns. The dreaming dead get jerked around a lot throughout the story, but the first time Vriska and Aranea steal their minds, it’s supposed to be messed up. The image of Scorpio signs hovering over their blank expressions is eerie, and John (the hero) points out it’s ethically dubious. Later, Sollux bails because the whole thing makes him “feel dirty”. The first time dreamers die at English’s hand, it’s portrayed as horrific both through the presentation in Caliborn: Enter itself and Dave talking later about how after witnessing “the screaming and the killing” he’s had a hard time sleeping. We even recognize some of the dreamers - the version of John killed hails from Davesprite’s timeline, and we even followed his time with Vriska briefly. These ghosts have identities. We know them.

In Collide, though, dreamers are dispatched in droves without fanfare. They’re simply a distraction Vriska uses until she can get English with the weapon (although why she needed a diversion I’m not sure, since she doesn’t exactly try to sneak up on him). They change hands between ‘leaders’ without ever having voices of their own, and their deaths have no impact. It’s just visual noise. The dead only matter to the extent that they can serve main characters’ aims and the narrative.

Ultimate Selves

In the last handful of pages of the comic, Hussie introduces the concept of “ultimate selves” through Davepeta. Apparently combo sprites can remember all iterations of themselves (although they don’t particularly act like it, but whatever). From this perspective, they find differences of selves meaningless, and inform Jade that every self is important because they help create your ‘ultimate self’, which is a compilation of all selves into a sort of Platonic ideal. This means, they tell poor Jade, that she didn’t really miss out on three years with her friends! Her ultimate self had a great time. Why this is supposed to be a consolation to this Jade, who had a shitty time, I am not sure.

Again, this flies against the established differences between selves that earlier Homestuck prizes. Alt selves have different identities. They’re different people. Claiming the boundaries between them are meaningless erases that. The concept of an ultimate self makes sense from a reader’s perspective. We get to see all the different paths the characters go down. We get to look at different selves and use that information to inform our reading of the character or our grasp of some of their inherent qualities. But that doesn’t apply to the characters themselves. It’s cold comfort telling this Jade that another version of her didn’t suffer alone for three years. She did. If this were leading up to some massive memory merge between timelines then I might acknowledge it held water, but as it is… it reads like the attempts of an author to justify a bad decision.

We have whatever Terezi did in Remem8er (a beautiful flash, but no one can quite determine what it meant) but we don’t know whether she actually accomplished retrieving any memories because she never gets to talk about it. (The flash also implies that every death spawns a ghost, which is directly contrary to previously established game mechanics so I won’t really get into it, but that does further complicate the whole identity thing we have going on here.) And I’m not sure I buy Davepeta’s pep talk at face value, as I’ll expand on in the next section.

Sprites Squared

Oh boy. If you’ve followed me much you know I hold a grudge against these entities for a whoooole bunch of reasons. But among other things, they’re an excellent example of lategame Homestuck’s identity destruction at work.

The combosprites take characters in pretty bad shape – struggling with depression and alcoholism (and Nepeta, but she seems mostly along for the ride. I mean, she doesn’t even get a Heart symbol as part of Dp’s outfit) – and perk them right up. Setting aside the fact that this is weirdly like the whole ‘smile away your problems’ shtick in Trickster mode, something even more sinister seems to be going on. Neither of them act all that much how you’d expect them to. Davepeta doesn’t talk much at all like either of their components besides surface level quirks and cat puns, imo. Jasprose, after Rose died lamenting that she didn’t tell Kanaya she loved her, rebounds at lightning speed. But let’s move right on over to the smoking gun, where Davepeta suggests dating Jasprose shouldn’t be off the table, even if some of their components are related. “The Dave part of me is saying no no no,” they say, “but that brain tantrum just cracks me up”.

This seems to imply that the components of the combosprites are in fact 1) separate 2) sentient and 3) not pleased. And were sprites ever true unions of personalities? We don’t see much of Erisol or Fefeta, but as soon as he’s distressed, ARquius’s two components start speaking separately, and based on Tavros’s comment that being Tavris wasn’t that bad versus Tavris screaming that they’re an abomination, that sounds like it was mostly Vriska talking.

So if Davepeta doesn’t sound much like either of their components, and at least one of those personalities is still independently yelling somewhere in their subconscious, who ARE they? I’m not sure, but I’d sure take their cheerful promotion of “ultimate selves” with a heaping pound or two of salt. (EDIT) Especially as I’ve argued elsewhere that it’s in Skaia’s best interests to have a bunch of game victors complacent about the sacrifice of hordes of people for the Big Picture, and sprites are a mouthpiece for Skaia and the game. And even more so since the message of the combosprites’ “fixing” of their components’ emotional distress seems to be that the way to achieve happiness is to stop being you, much as the Game Over kids were only able to stop suffering by ceasing to exist at all.

Retconbound

Finally, let’s look at John’s finest moment, altering the timeline so that everyone lives. He’s Breath – communication, freedom, travel – given ultimate agency by the juju powers. But… he doesn’t get much agency. He’s following Terezi’s orders, written in blood (Blood, an aspect of bonds and binding). And he seems rather unconscious or uncaring of the effect he’s having. After picking up the ring, he drops by a set of meteor kids recently transported onto LOMAX and enjoys a touching reunion, saying hi and hugging them… and then teleports off to make that never happen. What was the point of that display of friendship? What even happened to that group of kids, in a timeline with no ring of life? We don’t know, and the narrative suggests we shouldn’t care, any more than John does as he blithely flies away. We’re racking up a bunch of characters and timelines who are merely there to serve the narrative’s latest whim or need, not because they’re important in themselves.

And here’s the kicker. That juju, that magic device that saves the day? It’s powered by four Beta kids’ souls trapped inside it for eternity. We don’t know what timeline they come from, or whether they ever escape. They are faceless, voiceless, identityless plot devices that give John the ability to do what he does. They’re the culmination of how this narrative treats its characters in the endgame – as tools to get to the last page. Skaia doesn’t care who walks through the door, as long as it has warm bodies to hatch the frog and keep its cycle going. Homestuck, it seems, doesn’t care which set of characters prevails as long as it can close the damn curtains at last.

And the thing is, you could have gone somewhere with this. After all, how many troll ghosts are in the bubbles? Thousands. We don’t follow their story and then watch them die, but a bunch of versions of those characters we know and care about died and festered in the furthest ring. There could have been a point made about how Skaia is happy to consign groups of children to the scrap bin if they don’t fulfill its aims, how horrifying the whole system is and how little regard it has for life. Current set of tools broken? Fixing them would take too long and they’re not useful now, so bin ‘em and start fresh. Someone has to win. Doesn’t matter who. A quote by Hussie occasionally makes the rounds talking about how many Marios die before the end of a game, but we only care about the one who wins. Maybe that’s what he was going for, but I think he missed the mark tonally. (EDIT) Not to mention that the story’s biggest villain is a Lord of Time who, besides losing most of his own identity beyond a love of destruction long ago, is all about forcing people onto the paths that serve him despite what might be better for them and who has a whole subplot where he actually attempts to rewrite their story with crappy, subpar imitations of every character. You could easily have made a connection there, but that would suggest the villain triumphed in the end. Elements of the final flash almost seem to point in that direction, but the story still tries to play things off as a victory.

Because in the end, I think the Homestuck ending sucked. Some people say it’s a psycheout and the Epilogue will have more, or reveal that it was written by Caliborn, or whatever. Guess we won’t know until it arrives. But as it all stands now, I think it sucked a lot. And I could write about the dropped character arcs or messed up plot points, but I honestly try not to talk too much about post retcon HS because it depresses me that something I was so fond of ended so terribly. I wouldn’t have been happy if it had ended as a blatant tragedy, but I could have at least respected it a little more. But this? It’s not just that many characters sidelined and ignored, that plenty of important plot points are ignored or forgotten, that some of the writing and pacing is just poorly done. After an entire comic’s worth of emphasizing the differences between iterations of individuals and the importance and value of those independent lives, characters are treated as interchangeable and expendable as long as they get the job done. Utilitarianism rules the day. That’s how to win the game, to get this hulking behemoth of a tale to limp to its final rest. And the story tries to play this as a happy ending, and that’s the worst bit of all.

#homestuck//#bluh bluh huge bitching alert #meta

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