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betweengenesisfrogs · 7 years

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OFF THE CUFF HOMESTUCK THOUGHTS #3: THE SELF PILE DOESN’T STOP FROM GETTING TALLER OR: THE PROBLEM OF DEAD MARIOS

DISCLAIMER

IMPORTANT THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

[CHECK THE TAG FOR MORE THOUGHTS]

So, a long-ass time ago, Rose and Dave had a conversation like this:

TT: After you go, what do you think will happen to me? TT: Will I just cease to exist? TG: i dont know TG: i mean your whole timeline will TG: maybe TT: Maybe? TT: Is there a chance it'll continue to exist, and I'll just be here alone forever? TT: I'm not sure which outcome is more unsettling. TG: the thing with time travel is TG: you cant overthink it TG: just roll with it and see what happens TG: and above all try not to do anything retarded TT: What do you think I should do? TG: try going to sleep TG: our dream selves kind of operate outside the normal time continuum i think TG: so if part of you from this timelines going to persist thats probably the way to make it happen TT: Ok. TG: and hey you might even be able to help your past dream self wake up sooner without all that fuss you went through TT: I think the true purpose of this game is to see how many qualifiers we can get to precede the word "self" and still understand what we're talking about.

This is the most important sentence in Homestuck.

I am dead serious.

Well, OK, I mean, it’s pretty important for understanding some major Homestuck themes and shit or something like that.

Also, I totally should have said: Pre-Retcon Doomed Timeline Non-Dreamself Rose but ultimately about to become Dreamself Rose who semi-merged with Pre-Retcon Alpha Timeline Rose and Doomed Timeline Dave aka Davesprite AKA future Davepetasprite^2 or as we all call them around the office, Davepeta, had that conversation.

Maybe you begin to see what I’m going to talk about here.

One of the major frustrations a lot of people had with the retcon was that the characters we ended up with at the end weren’t the ones we’d come to love and know throughout the story. Was it even worth it, to lose the characters we loved to the tyranny of Game Over? The victorious kids, with the exception of John and Roxy, were other people, with other histories, other goals, and other choices.

Allow me to submit that that may be the whole point.

SBURB is cruel. We’ve known that for a long time. It’s cruel not as Caliborn is cruel, but as the cosmos is cruel, as a supernova is cruel. It wants what it wants, and doesn’t care about how that intersects with the needs of humanity. It wants to make universes through a complex game-playing method, and drags hapless, vulnerable adolescents along for the ride. And most of the time it doesn’t even succeed, leaving its champions to rot in a doomed timeline or similar! Skaia’s victory is an amoral creation myth where individual human beings are just the carved pieces on the chessboard. (I mean, the other ones. Not the carapacians.)

Again, let’s consider the theme of VIDEO GAMES vs. REAL LIFE.

Homestuck, let’s be real, is basically some postmodern horror timey-wimey Jumanji. For a generation way more familiar with pixels than cute little tokens It’s easy for teenagers and in fact, basically everyone, to fantasize about escaping their life and slipping into some game world forever, where they get to do awesome things and be a heroic person.

Homestuck makes that literal. Congratulations, everything you ever knew is dead. You will never see it again, except your internet friends, who turn out also to be your family and other important people. I mean, from a distance, SBURB sounds like an awesome game, right? You figure out who you are and get to wear a cool costume displaying that identity. You get to make anything you want and enjoy this hyperflexible mythology tailored to YOUR CHOICES. HS fans talk all the time about how cool it would be to play a real version of SBURB. That’s a big part of the appeal of SBURB fan adventures. They put you and your friends in the story. Or your favorite characters! It sounds like a fantasy come true.

The thing is, as fantastical as it is, it’s also really fucked up, and ultimately you and your friends are being used. By a giant frog to let it have its babies. By the universe. By a smug blue cloud thing that doesn’t care about you at all.

SBURB does not care about you at all.

The funny thing, SBURB features a mythology with so many layers and nuances and seemingly human motifs about growth and self that you might search for some grand ultimate meaning behind it, but it’s not even human enough to have a personality, to be something you can argue with or fight. It just is. It’s all the cruelty and power of a god without any of the dazzling personality. It’s empty. It just wants to make universes all day long, or fail trying. It is a great, weird tadpole-making machine that eats children.

One of the big ways it doesn’t care about you is its attitude toward the self. Humans and trolls and whatnot prefer not to be relentlessly duplicated. SBURB says, oh yeah, let’s make tons of copies of the player characters and use them for a lot of different purposes.

There’s the dreamself, an essential bifurcation of identity (you are now and were always the dream moon princex) that sometimes gets merged into god tier but sometimes doesn’t. There’s doomed timeline selves, who exist ultimately to augment an Alpha timeline whose Alphaness is decided very arbitrarily and frequently by Lord English. There’s the you who exists before a scratched session and the you who exists afterward, who are two different people but started as one baby in an act of ectobaby meteor duplication, your player self and your guardian self. Dead timeline yous fill up the dreambubbles made by the horrorterrors and get endlessly confused with each other. Any one of these could be the you experience being at any given moment, and which one it is entirely arbitrary. Don’t like being Dead Nepeta #47? Tough hoofbeast leavings, kiddo.

To top it all off, in Terezi: Remember, we learn that every single time we thought someone changed from one self to another, was resurrected or something like that, it was another act of duplication. For every time someone’s died, there’s another version of them waiting in the Dream Bubbles, surprised that they’re not the main character anymore. And we have no way of knowing which is which. Even John, good old everyman John, may or may not be the person who died three or four times. It’s really impossible to say whether we’ve been following the same person throughout our story, or just the illusion of the same person, like a horrifying cosmic flipbook.

The retcon is a return to this same theme. Ultimately, there’s very little new in the changes John makes to reality except that they drive the point home.

John’s friends all died. John and his friends won the game. These things are both true at the same time, except those things may not have happened to the same people. There was a happy ending. Hooray! For, um, some folks who may or may not be the ones we care about. In fact, it’s very confusing, because from Rose’s perspective, Roxy is dead but came back to life, and from Roxy’s perspective Rose is dead but came back to life, except also she came back to life as a weird tentacle catgirl of pure id and self –indulgence. So there’s that. Um. Which Rose are we rooting for again?

Or wait: is it none of them, because the first Rose died in a doomed timeline, hundreds of panels and a number of years ago?

There’s a tension here which one experiences between saying it’s okay because it’s still the same people, and saying it’s not okay, because it’s not the same people at all. This tension is exactly what we’re meant to wrestle with. To put it another way, Homestuck asks if identity can work in aggregate. Are all Johns John, all Roses Rose, and do they all share in what they accomplish? Or are the final victors only accidents created by the whims and needs of the frog baby machine?

What I’m saying, basically, is that the retcon, in the sense that it pointed out our confused relationship with these characters, was already here.

In interviews and questions put to him over the years, Hussie constantly compares HS and SBURB to other video games, particularly Mario, which he frequently returns to as a baseline of comparison that most of his readers will know. One answer, from a recent Hiveswap interview, is particularly revelatory. To the question of “Why do you kill off all your characters?” Hussie replies:

[…]HS is supposedly a story that is also a game. In games, the characters die all the time. How many times did you let Mario fall in the pit before he saved the princess? Who weeps for these Marios. In games your characters die, but you keep trying and trying and rebooting and resetting until finally they make it. When you play a game this process is all very impersonal. Once you finally win, when all is said and done those deaths didn’t “count”, only the linear path of the final victorious version of the character is considered “real”. Mario never actually died, did he? Except the omniscient player knows better. HS seems to combine all the meaningless deaths of a trial-and-error game journey with the way death is treated dramatically in other media, where unlike our oblivious Mario, the characters are aware and afraid of the many deaths they must experience before finally winning the game.

The big man hass the answer.

Homestuck is the story of those dead Marios.

Other works, like Undertale, have engaged with this topic as well. But one of the major differences between Undertale and Homestuck is that in Undertale, between “lives,” one’s consciousness is preserved. In Homestuck, it’s discontinuous, and the value of the overall trial-error process is called into question by the fact that you, the player, may not even get to experience the victory. What meaning does victory hold if that is the case?

So, to put it in a nice thesis format:

One of the central themes of Homestuck is the challenge of reconciling an arbitrary and destructive pattern of growth and victory with the death and suffering you experienced along the way. Homestuck asks: is victory worthwhile if you’re not you anymore? And would you be able to know?

What even is the self? Is there such a thing?

If you were left feeling somewhat disconcerted by our heroes’ tidy victory and departure to their cosmic prize, or by how which Rose gets the spotlight is so deeply, deeply arbitrary, there’s a good reason for that. You’re supposed to be.

The philosophical problem of Wacky Cat Rose is insignificant next to the bullshit of SBURB.

And don’t forget—John and Roxy’s denizens helped them achieve the retcon. Ultimately, the victory they achieved was mediated by the same amoral system of SBURB, and was a victory over an enemy, Caliborn, whose power was created, perpetuated, and ended by that same system.

Okay, so here’s where it gets contentious. There’s an argument to be made, which I’m not sure how I feel about, that some of the character development that could have been in post-retcon Act 6 was left out precisely to push this feeling and play up this tension. Note that this is not the same thing as saying that they were deliberately badly written, but that they’re deliberately written to make us uneasy.That Hussie deliberately played with the balance between making these retconned characters feel familiar and making them feel eerily different to leave us feeling uneasy with the result.

I’m not sure I like that idea. It smacks a little too much of that “everything is perfect” thinking that comes sometimes from the far Metastuck camp. Some of the differences may also be the result of flawed writing. (See: Jane and Jake’s character arcs, which I might talk about later.) And I want to be able to critique those flaws. Ultimately, I think we still needed more time and development to figure out who these new people were—even if our goal was ultimately to compare them to their earlier selves. And again, more conscious acknowledgement of the problem from our heroes—especially John, the linchpin in this last and biggest act of duplication—might have helped drive this theme home.

Still, I think the Problem of Dead Marios is one of the most fundamental questions of Homestuck, maybe THE biggest question. It’s essential to understand it to understand what Hussie’s doing—or attempting to do— in the retcon and the ending.

I don’t know that Homestuck offers us a clear answer to that question. There are some confusions around the issue, too. Where do merged selves fit in, exactly? Clearly they’re a big part of the discussion, because Hussie spends some time in Act 6, especially near the end bringing the identity-merging powers of the Sprites to the forefront. (See also: the identity-merged nightmare that is Lord English.) Can we even come up with a clear answer to what it means when a dead Mario returns to life grotesquely fused with Toad? How does he beat the game? Does he tell himself that the princess is in another castle? Or what if he merges with Peach? Are they their own princess? How do they know if they’re in the right castle?

Um. Anyway—

Interestingly, it’s not all grotesque—spritesplosions suggest that personalities that are too different don’t stay together long, so a fusion might rely on some inherent compatibility between the two players. Erisol’s self-loathing, sure, but also Fefeta’s cheerfulness. Davepeta seems to be a way of bringing out the best in their players, a way of getting Davesprite past his angst and Nepeta past her fear. Honestly, I know a lot of people don’t like Davepeta as the ending of these two characters’ arcs, but I can’t help but love it. They’re the ultimate coolkid. Cool enough to know they don’t have to be cool. Regular Dave got there, too, of course. But was his retcon assist from John ultimately any different?

Then, of course, we come to Davepeta’s speech to Jade in one of the last few updates before Collide. Davepeta suggests that there is such a thing as an ultimate self beyond the many different selves one piles up throughout the cosmos. A set of principles that describes who you are that’s larger than any individual instance of you. Your inherent Mariohood. (Maybe this is comparable to your Classpect identity, which attempts to describe who you are?) Davepeta even tells Jade, strikingly, that one might learn to see beyond the barriers between selves. Be the ur-self, in practice, rather than theory. This would be incredible news for Jade, who wrestles with the issue of different selves perhaps more than any other character. (There’s a lot to say about Jade.)

Honestly, I wish this ur-self idea had been developed more, and I honestly expected it to be. It doesn’t fully come to fruition, I feel. (Same goes for Davepeta’s character. Ohhhh, ZING!) I’m not sure it entirely makes philosophical sense, especially with fusion—I mean, doesn’t Davepeta themself disprove it? Or at least complicate it? Like, are they part of the ur-Dave or the ur-Nepeta? They seem to imply they’re BOTH? Does that even work? Does that mean that Marieach is all the Peaches and Marios at once?

(In fact, Bowser/Peach/Mario are but the three manifestations of one eternal principle. Also, Bowser/Peach are the true power couple. Read my fanfiction plz.)

And what, say, of Dirk, who ultimately ends up rejecting aspects of his other selves? It feels like there’s a lot more you could say here, and I wonder if Hussie would have said more, if he’d had time. What’s weird is, none of our victorious kids never reach an ur-self (though to their descendants, they become archetypal to some degree), which one might have expected. They’re just individual selves who happened to get lucky. Does that make them representative of the whole? It feels like something’s missing here, or like something got dropped at the last minute.

Same goes for the idea of the Ultimate Riddle. You’d be forgiven for missing it, but there’s been this riddle in the background lore of SBURB that seems to have something to do with personal agency in this overwhelming, overarching system. Karkat called it predestination, saying something like “ANY HOPE YOU HAD OF DOING THINGS OTHERWISE WAS JUST A RUSE.” But others have interpreted it more positively. My favorite interpretation, from bladekindeyewear: the answer to the Riddle is that YOU shape the timeline through your existence, personality, and choices, even when it looks like it’s all predestination. Ultimately it’s your predestination, your set of events, based deeply on your nature, that you are creating. Someone like Caliborn can use his innate personality to achieve power; someone like John might be able to use it to achieve freedom.

I definitely expected something like that to be expressed more explicitly. Like, a big ah-ha moment that helps John or Jade or whoever understand how to escape Caliborn’s system. Something like that would have been very helpful for a lot of our heroes, actually, who’ve been pushed around by Skaia and SBURB together, in finding a cathartic ending. Once again, I wonder if something was dropped or rushed because there wasn’t time to put it all in. There’s places where you can see hints of that Answer being implied, maybe? But it’s kind of ambiguous.

You can see how the Answer to the Ultimate Riddle ties into some of Davepeta’s ideas. If your personality, the rules of your behavior are a fundamental archetype that goes beyond each individual self, then the answer to whether it matters if one self of yours makes it through to victory is an emphatic YES. You are all of those people, and by winning one round with Skaia, you’ve won the whole game, despite all the arbitrary challenges and deaths it heaps upon you along the way.

This may strike some as too positive for Skaia’s brutality, or again, some way of excusing flaws in many characters’ arcs, or unfair things that happen to them. To be fair, I don’t know that Davepeta’s necessarily meant to be taken as authoritative or the voice of Hussie. They may simply be offering a purrspective.

Hussie not choosing to come right out and engage with the Ultimate Riddle leaves the question of Dead Marios and what they mean for the victorious versions of our cast very open. I like that in some ways—let the reader decide—but I can’t help but wish we had more to work with in making that decision. Plus, it might have brought the thematic messages of Homestuck all the way home to tie them more closely to our characters and their experiences—character development being one of the things most people found most lacking in the ending.

NEXT TIME: All that wacky gnostic stuff probably

#homestuck #off the cuff homestuck thoughts extravaganza 2017 #homestuck meta #homestuck theory #homestuck analysis #The Ultimate Riddle #dead marios #ugh why is tumblr basically unusable #pictures and text can go together TUMBLR #GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER IT'S 2017 WE HAVE HYPERCOMICS #HOMESTUCK COULD TEACH YOU A THING OR TWO ABOUT COMBINING MEDIA

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dramallamadingdang · 7 years

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And finally...replies. :)

Sorry if this gets incoherent. :) We went on a hiking day-trip with a group of friends today, and I’m pretty wiped out. Just wanted to get Tumblr communication done before I totally crash because otherwise, I get way behind and never get out of the hole. :)

First of all, I’m very happy that people liked the skies I shared! I did work hard on some of them, and I’m so happy to see them in people’s games. Thank you all for all the “thank yous.” ;) And I look forward to making more, too. I think the rotating ones are going to come out well. :)

And now for more specific replies for @nerianasims, @quill-of-thoth, @kyosmash, @strangetomato, @elfpuddle, @eulaliasims, @lilsisterg, @holleyberry, @littleblondesim, and @penig...

nerianasims replied to your post “kyosmash replied to your post : You can always use the fitness4all mod...”

I 100% get what you're saying, but I feel like the game itself is largely at fault in this one case. It's a mess when it comes to weight. To deal, I look at the "lazy/active" node as "slow/fast metabolism." Unfortunately, the way the game is programmed, the only way to have chubby Sims organically is to have them eat "too much" (which ugh, I gain fat when I don't eat enough.) So I have noeatcrap for that. And because seeing Sims eat spoiled food makes me feel sick.

Yes, it’s true that game mechanics are partly to blame. And really, the “eat too much, get fat” thing IS a reflection of real life. That is actually how it is. Generally, if you eat too many calories for your metabolic and activity level -- barring various medical issues, etc. -- you’ll gain weight. Thing is, that’s true for everyone. Not just for lazy people. True, less active people require fewer calories so if they aren’t careful they are more likely to gain weight than more active people, but if a lazy person is careful and doesn’t eat too much for their lower activity level, they are no more likely to get fat than a marathon runner. (Barring, as I said, various medical conditions like thyroid issues and whatnot.)

The issue, in my mind, with the mod is that it “targets” only one group of Sims for fatness, to the exclusion of everyone else. And it happens to be a group that, in real life, is stereotypically fat. The vanilla game does not do that. Like I said, I’m probably over-sensitive on the issue because of my own struggles (even though my own struggle is to put and keep weight on, not to lose it), but many people are overly sensitive about something in the game. It’s probably inevitable, since it’s meant to reflect real life. True, it’s “supposed” to be a cartoonish kind of life, but a lot of people don’t play it that way, so...Yeah, people will get bugs up their butts about different things. This is my very own pet butt-bug. ;)

quill-of-thoth replied to your post “kyosmash replied to your post : You can always use the fitness4all mod...”

What I always wish with the pescado mods is that he ever took the time to LIST all of the things that he did in them in his initial release, because we need that info to prevent conflicts... even with other MATY mods. I also wish I could mess with BHAVS, I've been meaning to find something to vastly reduce rolling wants to be cured of supernaturalism / unlink it from aspiration forever...

Yes, I have the same wish. :\ But as I said elsewhere, not documenting is part of his shtick. So, that leaves it up to users who care about what they put in their game to do the documenting. That’s wrong, IMO, but what can you do? *shrug*

Anyway, I could very well be wrong but as I understand it, rolled wants aren’t related to BHAVs and are just governed by “want trees” that link certain wants to certain aspirations and things like that. There are mods out there that alter those trees, but they are sort of like default replacements in that you can only have one replacement file at a time. Perhaps it would be instructive to look at one of those? It usually isn’t for me because I often have not a clue as to what I’m looking at, but maybe you’ll have a better understanding than I would. :) Me, I’d just like to nuke curing wants altogether. In my game, the various “supernaturals” are just genetic conditions and can’t be cured except by aliens, who have superior knowledge of genetic engineering. So, those wants are completely worthless to me and are never fulfilled unless the aliens happen to cure someone when they or a relative has a cure want for them.

kyosmash replied to your post “kyosmash replied to your post : You can always use the fitness4all mod...”

Thank you for the info! I've actually been getting into BHAVs myself so if I get a chance I might be able to take a look, maybe there's just one or two things to get pulled out of there. I wasn't aware of this because I've had it in my game for so long I didn't think about it. Have to agree that Pes' descriptions are a little lackluster sometimes.

Hey, if you come up with anything, I’ll be happy to have it! :) And you’re welcome for the info. IMO, when it comes to Pescado’s mods, the more info that’s shared about what they do and don’t do, the better. :)

strangetomato replied to your post “kyosmash replied to your post : You can always use the fitness4all mod...”

Yeah, I understand they were his personal mods, @lilsisterg. I'm just saying that for my game, those features make the mod unusable. And the more disparate features included in a single mod increases the sense of "his way or the highway". And I will gladly take the highway if some of those features put me off.

That stuff I bolded and italicized up there? That. Totally that. With Pes’s mods, I stay very close to the on-ramp to the highway until I’ve thoroughly tested. :)

And on a totally unrelated note: I am so happy to see JRO on my dash lately! I’m not gonna be able to catch up and comment tonight before I crash, but I just wanted to say that I’ve been thrilled to see you posting. :)

elfpuddle replied to your post “You can always use the fitness4all mod from MATY so your already...”

What food mods do you use instead (if any)?

Very few. Off the top of my head, I think the only food-related thing I have is Mog’s “Simply Leftovers,” so that leftovers can be stored as individual plates rather than as group meals that have to be re-served. Oh wait! I also have one that makes the meals have 8 servings rather than 6. I think that’s all I have that’s food-related...

eulaliasims replied to your post “The bad thing about @nyshabrokeit‘s new townie body diversity mod? Is...”

I kind of want to, too, and I *make* all my townies. Such a cool mod!

I will never, ever, have the patience or desire to make all my own townies because Sim-making is definitely not something I enjoy doing. Plus, I kinda like seeing (and sometimes pointing and laughing at) what the game comes up with. It’s why I townify everything. So, the mod is just what I wanted. :)

lilsisterg replied to your post “You can always use the fitness4all mod from MATY so your already...”

I make all of my townies and I have this mod installed ... Some of the townies are fit and some have gotten fat over time. I believe it works according to their lazy/active personalities. I'm not really sure, but I also have a mod that prevents Sims with high active points from over eating which helps keep them fit. This adds balance because I suspect without it all of my townies would be fat by now.

This one, I’m going to try out, see what happens. I suspect that I will end up with too many fat townies because I enjoy sending Sims out to eat and I currently have a couple player-owned restaurants that get run five days a week when I’m playing the owning household. Non-playable Sims at restaurants get a push to eat whether or not they are hungry and regardless of their personality, and that will contribute to them getting fat with such a mod in place. Whereas I believe (although I could be wrong) that at a community-lot gym, the visiting Sims are still governed by the lazy/active aspect of their personalities as to whether or not they’ll work out.

In any case, I appreciate that Nysha’s new body diversity mod creates “extreme” townies, in that those who are generated as fit or fat are at the extreme point values for those states, so they will not be too easily altered by what they do (or are forced to do) on community lots.

holleyberry replied to your post “The bad thing about @nyshabrokeit‘s new townie body diversity mod? Is...”

I was thinking the same thing. I have a "Just for Fun" hood I'm thinking of starting over now too.

I actually AM going to restart my religious isolationist ‘hood, now that I’ve ironed the bugs out of its ruleset, and I got kind of excited about being able to use the mod in a non-testing environment...and then I remembered that that neighborhood will have no townies at all. FOILED! :)

littleblondesim replied to your photo “Since Sharon and Nathen want a large family (She wants four kids, he...”

Is their ideal family sized based on that one algorithm you shared that one time? Vague question is vague. :P

Yeah, it is. Basically, I arbitrarily assigned a range of values for each aspiration that I think made a sort of sense. For instance, the max number of kids for Romance is 2, while the minimum number for a Family Sim is 4. When I need to assign an ideal family size -- which is most often when a born-in-game turns teen, but also for married-ins and for CAS Sims -- I do two random number generations, one for each of their aspirations, and then take the average of the two results as their ideal family size. This way, a Family Sim with a Romance secondary (or vice versa) would have the possible extreme results for each of their aspirations mitigated a bit.

Nathen is actually Knowledge/Pleasure, but he managed to roll the high extreme (which is 8) for both of his aspirations and so ended up with an IFS of 8, which is usually more like a number a Family Sim would have. :) So, that was interesting. :)

penig replied to your post “After all that hard work at Uni and graduating magna cum laude in a...”

It beats Test Subject, and she'll rise like a rocket.

True. But it’s just disappointing that there is very little career reward for all her hard work. :) The limiting factor was one of the necessary skills for the career; the biology major just didn’t require her to get that many points in that category. (I don’t remember which skill it was off the top of my head. Maybe Logic.)

#nerianasims #quill-of-thoth #kyosmash #strangetomato #elfpuddle #eulaliasims #lilsisterg #holleyberry #littleblondesim #penig #replies

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