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.

further attempts at simple visualisation, this time of that last post

followed up my rewatch of Alien and Prometheus with Aliens on Thursday and Alien: Covenant on Saturday. given how closely Prometheus commits to being a straight-reinterpretation of the story of Alien, I felt primed for Covenant to be in some way a deconstruction of the sequel, and the film's opening act gave me ample reason to hold onto these expectations: where Aliens is an unashamed glorification of American heroes slaughtering communist guerilla monsters against all odds in Vietnam, Covenant is much more understated about its band of colonists landing on an unfamiliar world with slightly more assault weaponry than you think seems necessary for the job. but perhaps my hypothesis was coloured by the still-great theory that Avatar was James Cameron's apology for the crass implicit racism of Aliens, because Covenant quickly abandons any ideological qualms about colonising a planet which has already been agriculturally developed (don't worry, someone already killed off the entire indigenous population and the remaining wildlife is hostile enough to justify slaughter on sight - it's terra nullius!) - and maybe it would have been rude for Ridley Scott to have a go at someone else's movie like that, anyway.

i do think Covenant has some interesting developments to make on Prometheus' core theme of creator-versus-creation, though they're clumsily executed and go hand-in-hand with the franchise's struggle to come up with a horror prop that comes anywhere near to the effectiveness of the original facehugger. the whole film hinges on the line about humanity finding emotional androids unsettling and creating a more perfect soldier to replace it, and it's a great exchange, but as a whole the story fails to live up to the premise

@sicklyseraphnsuch said (in response to Jake's apotheosis-as-objectification):

well pointed-out! don't worry, I think you got my point; the confusion is an ambiguity of wording on my part, but it's an ambiguity that serves well to illustrate the gendered colours of the point I'm making, so I'll go into it a bit.

Manhattan's apotheosis and woman's objectification absolutely are both forms of "detachment from humanity": the purpose of my distinguishing the two is that Manhattan's detachment is self-imposed. He deliberately removes himself from personhood by strict adherence to what might be best described in this context as rigidly masculine values: a suppression of emotional responses and total dedication to logic above all else - put another way, rigid adherence to 'objectivity'. The objectification-as-woman is in contrast pressed upon Jake by outside forces: though we observe that Jake is a highly emotionally-driven being, his feelings are necessarily stifled by external actors who seek to project their own desires unto him.

I should also point out that in generalising apotheosis-as-objectification I have engaged in a degree of willful conflation, between objectification-by-author or by-audience (external to the story) and objectification-by-characters (within the story). Rei is such a strong example of the all-powerful woman cliche in part because she is equally subject to both; her transformation into the Giant Naked Rei is essentially the successful completion of a lifetime of grooming into sexual and maternal object by Evangelion's various conspirators. But for Rose Tyler and Jean Grey, their objectification is only implicit; the minimisation of their human agency is not the agenda of a shadowy cabal but rather the simple result of living as human women in a patriarchal society. In this sense their apotheoses are almost in spite of objectification, rather than a logical extension of it (think again of Jake's powers flaring up the most dramatically when his emotional agency is stripped from him) - as I say, at least within Doctor Who's established paradigm of power, Tyler becoming the Bad Wolf is an act above her station. The Bad Wolf and the Phoenix's objectification is exterior to the text; a re-claiming of the powerful woman as sex object for male consumption, just as the mundanely powerful woman like Lara Croft is empowered within-text but objectified from without. To the point: I believe that Beyond Canon's reflective nature (and Homestuck's generally) puts it in the perfect position to tackle the history and tropes associated with objectification-by-audience using a character like Jake who has a history of being objectified by his fellow characters.

Naked White Jake is the fulfilment of something of an unspoken prophecy in Homestuck regarding a mustachio'd radioactive mutant. Like Manhattan, over the course of his life Jake's trousers have been shortening inevitably towards this point. But for Jake in particular, this development represents not Manhattan's increasing detachment from humanity, but rather an escalation of his ongoing objectification-as-woman. Specifically, I think the next chapter in Jake's story is to be an exploration of 'apotheosis' as a form of female objectification in fiction.

Beyond the superficially Manhattan, the most obvious cultural point of comparison for Jake's new form would seem to be the End of Evangelion's Rei Ayanami - colloquially dubbed the "Giant Naked Rei" by Evangelion commentators. The similarities are in more than just their pallid, luminescent, larger-than-life (be that figuratively or literally) and naked forms; pictured above, Rei caresses in her hands a meteorite which was at one time the birthplace of the human race and now acts as the womb toward which all human souls are drawn in order to be born again. The parallels to Jake's protection of the meteor in 8r8k - a meteorite from which the population of Earth C was born and toward which they seem to find themselves once more inescapably drawn - are obvious.

But it's not the literal events of the battle for the meteor that are necessarily most significant here; more relevant is what Rei represents as a cultural symbol. Rei's designated role throughout Evangelion is primarily as object, sexualised and maternalised both - sometimes simultaneously - and it is in her apotheosis as the Giant Naked Rei that this objectification reaches its logical extreme. Like Naked Jake - and in some ways like Doctor Manhattan, too - Naked Rei's transformation into Lilith places her at the furthest possible point from her own humanity, as a sheer force of nature. Within Evangelion's mythology, Lilith is essentially an artifact; she is called by female pronouns, but only on the technicality that she exists to facilitate this process of birthing and re-birthing. Within folklore, Lilith's role is hardly any more illustrious, an existence solely to submit to husband Adam's will and to mother his hundreds of children - but it's this lot in life that speaks particularly to Jake's own history of objectification.

(taking all that into account, the nurturing nature of Naked Jake's actions does strike me as worthy of comment. while all of Earth C appears subconsciously intent on claiming the meteor-egg at the center of the universe, Jake's actions are protective, even generative; I've commented already on how unintuitive it seems that his hope field causes angels to radiate outwards from the meteor when everything else is trying to impregnate it. he almost appears to go through the motions of performing acts which had previously belonged to the women on the battlefield: it's hard not to draw the link between his hope bubble and Jade's force field {which itself seems to call back to the "containment" dead Calliope set up for Earth C itself}, and the part he plays in Jade's revival had up until that point been solely the domain of Life-givers Jane and Meenah {who have their own long and complex relationships with motherhood}. Naked Jake's hope field is destructive, but only ever passively; his primary contribution to the battle's events is that of midwife.)

A further point of comparison, which is less immediately apparent and has been far less widely discussed despite its broad cultural reach but I feel has equally significant potential ramifications, is to Doctor Who's Bad Wolf.

The gendered power dynamic between Doctor and companion is key to Doctor Who as a piece of art. By the very nature of the programme's structure she is disposable, interchangeable; and by the nature of the culture from which the story originates, the purpose of her existence teeters on the same precipice between emotional support and sex appeal that is usually occupied in our minds by the magician's assistant or the airline hostess. In reviving a 20th century concept for the 21st century it fell upon writers of modern sensibility to somehow make the programme's female deuteragonists just as 'special' as its male idol, and through the nadir of Doctor Who's relationship to gender politics (under self-proclaimed fetishist of "powerful, sexy women" Steven Moffat) this process came to be emblemised by the transformation of women with names into girls with titles. Following the example set by the prototypic "Girl in the Fireplace", "The Girl Who Waited" and "Impossible Girl" are stripped of human identity in order to sell their human identity: ascension to mythic status as the ultimate logical endpoint of the 'strong female character'.

Without delving too deep into all the nuances of Rose Tyler herself - who is just as worthy of being distinguished from the above examples as she is of being included among them, but this isn't quite the place for that essay - the Bad Wolf is easily identifiable as the genesis of Doctor Who's obsession with the (all-)powerful woman. Like Manhattan, Tyler is an ordinary human made unexpectedly omnipotent by exposure to exotic energy; but also like Manhattan, at least early in his life - and perhaps unlike the Giant Naked Rei - Tyler's actions as the Bad Wolf are still motivated by a recognisably human emotive impetus. Such it is that, even as-god, Tyler continues to be weighed down by the fetter of Doctor Who's intrinsically patriarchal dynamic: for a human (woman) to act above her station in such a way, by taking up the authority to control life and death which belongs traditionally to the Time Lords (gendered deliberately), could be not just her own undoing but the undoing of the whole (social) fabric of reality. The 'Bad Wolf' is referred to as if she/it is a separate entity from 'Rose Tyler' almost by necessity; a woman is 'allowed' to be a person or to be powerful, but never both simultaneously, because, crucially, a woman who is allowed to be a person makes mistakes.

Jake's powers are - so like a woman, one might cynically add - intimately tied up in his emotions. A comparison perhaps more familiar to Homestuck's established repertoire of cultural touchstones would be the Jean Grey-Phoenix (two names which, very much like Rose Tyler and the Bad Wolf, have come over time to be used to refer to two distinct entities, out of fear for what it might mean for one human woman to wield such omnipotent power) of Christopher Claremont's Uncanny X-Men, whose transformation into cosmic force of nature goes hand-in-hand with her self-discovery as an independent, sexual woman. Significantly, Jake retreats into his own force-of-nature state seemingly in direct response to objectifying treatment. The hope field isn't just something he struggles to control; it manifests itself directly out of feelings of loss of control.

Though the explosion of energy that lays waste to Derse is the most dramatic manifestation of this retreat into hopelessness, Beyond Canon throws us hints at how these attacks can arise in less drastic, day-to-day scenarios: specifically, how Jake's "just wishing that [Tavros' nut allergy] would nix" causes it to disappear, completely by accident. Like Rose Tyler, Jake English is a character that the story has decided is simply too tiny-minded to comprehend the massive power he wields, and as a result he reacts to situations of misunderstanding and distress by simply warping the world into one that he does understand.

For the Bad Wolf, this shows itself in the resurrection of Jack Harkness. Gunned down only moments before, Tyler decides in her childish ignorance that he should be alive again, and the result is that Jack Harkness being alive becomes a fact of reality: just as Tavros will never experience another allergic reaction again, Jack is abandoned by the Doctor - who in all his patriarchal authority on the matters of life and death has decided his existence is a mistake - to live an eternity without ever knowing death.

Naturally we must then question the significance of Jake intervening in the same way in Jade's death. None of the same ambiguity surrounds Jade that has previously surrounded other victims of resurrection interference; having done little in the way of villainy, and being struck unceremoniously from afar by an unnamed gunman, there is little reason to believe Jade's death could have possibly been narratively significant enough to stick. So if the lack of clarity is not on our part, we have to assume it is on Jake's: what, then, are the possible repercussions of Jake bringing back from the brink of death someone whose circumstances he does not fully understand? If Rose's assessment is correct - that whether a god is deemed heroic or villainous depends on the internal judgement of their own complex and nuanced "moral grey matter" - what then are the potential ramifications of Jake praying that this moral grey matter be cured of what ills it?

What are the consequences of the apotheosis of the sex object?

in Problem Sleuth, the rule is that for a demon to escape a black hole, an angel has to fall back in - or vice versa. I made this allusion back when Vriska was still stuck in the Plot Point, but I recognised then that this seemed like an unlikely direction for Beyond Canon to go in, and the events of 8r8k largely reinforce this feeling; the animation is about convergence, rather than divergence. (perhaps Vriska's angel- and devil-selves have merged into a demigoddess, instead?) but there are still a few crumbs I feel are worth taking note of. firstly, that 8r8k seems to be at least playing with the iconography of angels radiating from a black hole:

secondly; I now think the Plot Point storyline actually sets (Vriska) up as a symbolic angel? the segment opens with this kind of offbeat callback to Jaspers' tomb...

...which employs a trifecta of symbols that malo already figured out years ago - cats are angels are babies. but page 666 plays in this space in its own unique ways, too, frequently reiterating that the sprites and other hell-ghosts are eternal children. within the example set by Davepetasprite, the sense is that Vriska's eternal child-self must also be her angel-self.

(I also can't shake the feeling that the allusion to Jaspers' tomb - especially keeping in mind that it's Roxy herself who engineered one-half of the Plot Point* - is supposed to put us in the frame of mind of burying a child: that (Vriska) has to be buried for Vriska to ascend, in the same way I previously suggested an eight ball would have to be "sunk" to end the session? but it could be that I have things the complete wrong way around, and that the point is to exhume the child, as Rose does - if what follows is the "8r8k", then an eight ball is being set free rather than sunk? after all, Vriska's transformation also comes with being liberated from parenthesis!)

far more than vague symbols, though, there's one thing that page 666 directly calls attention to but which doesn't yet seem to have been paid off: the two-Nepeta problem.

right before Vriska comes face to face with herself, she calls attention to the fact that there are two Nepetas, and as a result one of them is whooshed away back to irrelevance. so what was that all about? if this hanging thread suggests the hatching of the meteor isn't necessarily the end of the Plot Point story thread, does it suggest, as I speculated previously, that the ascension of one Vriska means the descent of another? and so long as I am speculating: how sure can we be that a Twin Peaks scenario hasn't happened, and that the Vriska who 'ascended' is the one we think it was? Hell Tier Vriska's costume prominently evokes (Vriska)'s red belt and tall boots; is that because Vriska has come to accept (Vriska)'s existence, or because the new Vriska is Vriska? or maybe the distinction just isn't important anymore, like the 8r8k seems to be trying to tell us.

*if we can still think of Meenah as Roxy's doppelganger, it's hard for all of this not to be coloured by the fact that (Vriska) is Meenah's own 'little girl', too, even if it is in a slightly different way to the way that Jaspers is Roxy's 'little girl'... (though malo once argued that these things are more connected than they are distinct.) considering the consistent emphasis on (Vriska)'s youth and the vivid canny with which page 666 addressed Vriska's relationship to Doc Scratch, it would be an odd choice at this point to not ever address the situation with Meenah, especially now that the latter has risen to such a prominent role in the cast. the way Vriska subtly slips into the role of her own abuser over the last four years in the Plot Point only places emphasis on the lingering unease behind the whole thing. setting (Vriska) free for a bit could be one way to do that, though a merged Vriska could just as easily have the same confrontation.

Alien is such a fantastic film... I was entranced by the way the sets on board the Nostromo are just as unfamiliar to the viewer as the sets aboard the alien ship, allowing the xenomorph to blend in among human technology just as easily as it blends in with the Gigeresque machinery it was born from - backgrounding the mirroring of the android and the xenomorph (the way Ash literally tries to kill Ripley by forcing something down her throat!) - until it seems to literally become part of the ship in the climax!

watching Prometheus back-to-back with its predecessor (and in the wake of Ripley's totally bankrupt rehash of Gladiator, which to disclaim I have yet to see [though I have rewatched the original recently enough to reaffirm its quality]) only highlights how much of a poor man's version of this that the sequel is. beyond the beat-for-beat reruns of Alien's iconic plot elements, the heavyhanded themes of creator-meeting-creation seem to serve only to make the original film's subtext into text - yes, the xenomorph is just like one of man's own creations.

Meenah's use of Roxy as a coercive surrogate is a reenactment of her mentor Scratch performing the same trick on Rose with the Tumor. understanding that the Matriorb and the Tumor aren't just thematic and visual mirrors of each other but in fact serve the very same function in Rose and Roxy's mirrored arcs, though, we can identify another way in which Meenah becomes a symbolic player in the Lalonde family trauma; Meenah's also perpetuating a trick that Scratch once pulled on her!

Meenah having rejected motherhood early on in her Beforan life, when Scratch made sure her session was unwinnable and thus forced a reset, he was essentially setting up an elaborate scam ensuring that her quest leads up to this moment where she's forced to hatch a big troll egg. but where Rose hatching the Tumor was a "suicide mission" intended primarily to ensure her own destruction (with twin Dave coming along as collateral), Meenah sets the bomb off with the aim of ensuring her whole team's rebirth - setting up her new life post-scratch, she's forced to symbolically take on the role of mother to all trollkind (a burden which will only be lifted from her millennia later, with her death and the passing of the Tumor-in-Matriorb-form over to Kanaya).

while we can ascribe Meenah's late arrival to the dream bubbles to the temporal whims of the Furthest Ring, or even to the obscure motivations of the Horrorterrors responsible for them, having made the connection between Tumor and Matriorb it also brings to mind the immense spans of time it can take for troll genes to make their way through the incestuous slurry and finally be born, millennia after their ancestors have died. in fact the chronology of Dave and Rose's ascension even seems to hint at this same concept in action; while the pair presumably ascend instantaneously on their slabs the moment the bomb goes off, Aradia waits for some time at the pre-existing Sun for them to actually emerge from its surface, still engulfed in the flames that destroyed them. the Green Sun/incestuous slurry is like the Furthest Ring itself - they are mediums without a conventional flow of time, entry into which is not necessarily a reliable indicator of when you'll get out.