Why I Like Homestuck

It's a silly vaudeville song, not meant to be taken seriously, and it appears in Homestuck at moments intended as breathers. It shows up in its original recording, made in 1909 by vaudeville performer Eddie Morton, among the records in a hidden library on the trolls’ meteor, during a brief break from Terezi’s hunt for Vriska.

An a capella version plays over a montage in Act 6 Act [?] that catches the reader up on recent events. While parts of the montage, including Hussie’s murder at the hands of Lord English, are serious and emotional, others, like Vriska’s rejection of Hussie’s marriage proposal and the images from the Warhammer of Zillyhoo sequence, match the music in tone. The overall effect is to mute the emotions of the emotional part, and to take the steam out of the Draconian Dignitary dramatically putting on the Queen’s Ring.

The connection between the Midnight Crew song and the Queen’s Ring is an important one. Parts of it play both when DD ascends, and when Jack Noir does in the Beta Kids’ session, and the way the song is played highlights the differences between them. DD is calm and cool and he gets things done, and he could have become the leader of a new Midnight Crew if this session were at all functional. He gets the luxury of playing the whole song. 

Jack Noir, on the other hand, is rash and angry and actively destroying any chance for the other potential Midnight Crew members in his session to keep up with him (including killing his session’s Courtyard Droll). His ascension gets fragments of the song, sung clearly at the beginning, then more chaotic and broken as he nears and finally reaches the breaking point. The breakdown of the song follows Jack’s breakdown, and with it the breakdown of the session. Once Jack puts on that ring and becomes the Sovereign Slayer, playtime is over and Jack’s (and Gamzee’s, by the law of circumstantial simultaneity) murderous rampage begins. This session isn’t going to have a Midnight Crew, or a nice peaceful postapocalypse to continue fighting in.

But the real payoff of the Midnight Crew song doesn’t come from either Alpha DD or Beta Jack. It’s Spades Slick, who we first meet as the leader of his own Midnight Crew, who brings everything together in the end.

Bring your wife and trouble, it will never trouble you, Make her a member of the Midnight Crew!

Slick’s flushed relationship with Ms. Paint, and her joining the Felt under Slick’s leadership, are what bring it home. The Midnight Crew may no longer exist, but Slick still found a “little wife” and made her a member. And that just makes it all really sweet and totally worth it.

Gamzee tries to live as his gods do, giving us some insight into what he believes about them. They answer prayers and perform miracles. They encourage the use of mind-altering drugs like sopor and Faygo. They permit the murder of blasphemers and paint walls with their blood. And when the world ends, the Mirthful Messiahs are supposed to reveal themselves to trollkind and lead the faithful to the Dark Carnival.

Like magic, religion in Homestuck is hella fake, and so nothing comes of Gamzee’s beliefs. The Mirthful Messiahs do not appear when the world ends, and since Gamzee can't bear being wrong about the nature of the universe, he decides that he, as the last believer, embodies his gods himself and tries to carry out their promises.

But there may be some truth behind Gamzee’s disproven beliefs. There are two senses in which the Mirthful Messiahs can be said to exist. The first is that they may be a representation of Doc Scratch and Lord English’s manipulation of Alternian history. It is, after all, their voice, speaking through Lil Cal, which suggests to Gamzee that he take on the Messiahs’ role and slaughter his nonbelieving teammates.

In the second sense, the Mirthful Messiahs do manifest, looking approximately as Gamzee expects them to, and signal the end of a world with their presence. But that world is not Alternia.

The appearance of the Mirthful Messiahs is based on (and within Homestuck, inspires) that of Insane Clown Posse, two hardcore hip-hop artists who paint their faces to look like creepy clowns and sing about the Dark Carnival. In our world, Gamzee’s cult, and the terrifying “subjugglators” who keep Alternia’s land-dwelling population in line, are based on their fan base, who are known as juggalos. Within the world of Homestuck, the Empress of Alternia chooses ICP to rule Alpha Earth as human subjugglators.

Now, this all happened in Homestuck. In a timeline we don’t live in. We’re safe from evil clowns taking over the world, right?

Let’s get serious for a moment. Last week Violent J, a member of ICP, got an editorial published in Time magazine. Its purpose is mostly to protest the US government’s labeling of juggalos as a dangerous gang, but it hits home in other ways.

I’m going to add one more type of clown to Violent J’s list: the racist, sexist reality-TV clowns who have turned the American political process into their own personal circus.

Most of what we know about cherubs comes from Aranea’s research: the morality, the solitariness, the multiple personalities, the turning into giant snakes to have sex. But her dry textbook facts make cherubs seem like soulless monoliths with very simple motivations. We can give them more personality just by looking around at what Caliborn and Calliope keep in their rooms. To some extent, this just represents what Gamzee, or whoever controls Gamzee, decided was important for Caliborn and Calliope to have, but some of it is treated as being representative of things all cherubs want or do.

Here’s the part where I start asking questions without answering them. Hussie has left the rules for how cherubs work as a species up to us, but we can start our worldbuilding by considering the details that seem to be representative of all cherubs. Out in the infinitude of Paradox Space, any logically consistent answer you or I can think of to the following questions, and any other questions you can think of, is correct somewhere.

We know that cherubs eat meat, and they seem to be happy eating it raw. But they can also draw energy from stars, and they enjoy a powdery snack called “special stardust” which no other species can eat. Cherubs grow up on their own, left to fend for themselves on barren rocks. How do they know they can eat meat, if they can't fly and thus visit other planets until they're adults? And speaking of growing up on barren rocks, what's it like for a young cherub to change personalities without a sarswapagus to sleep in? How much sleep does each personality need, let alone the body that houses them?

We know that cherubs have some culture and mythology. They know how to use jujus, and they have myths about powerful majyyks, legendary weapons, and the powerful Tricksters who wielded them. How do they know these things, if no cherub ever meets another except for brief encounters with kismeses? Is it instinct? Racial memory? Something Gamzee made sure they learned? Or is the idea of Tricksters embedded in the cherub universe the way the Western zodiac is embedded in ours, because the session of the Game that created cherubs had Tricksters in it?

The little bit we know about cherubs represents a huge possibility space that Hussie has basically left wide open. The cherubs’ home universe is the one created in the Earth sessions of the Game, so a lot of its history (specifically, the part where our heroes live in it) is outside the scope of the comic. So I guess it’s up to us to fill in the gaps.

Rose’s mother has a lot of secrets, so it makes sense that she has a public cat and a secret cat. The public cat is Jaspers, whom she treats as befits her eccentric persona, dressing him in a suit and giving him to Rose as an attempt to connect with her by being cutesy. Rose, of course, resents this, and instead turns Jaspers into her own “public cat”, practicing her psychoanalysis skills on him to build up her facade of pseudointellectual detachment from her mother’s world, and openly mocking her mother's display of grief at Jaspers’ death.

But both Rose and her mother secretly value the companionship of a cat for reasons other than keeping up appearances. We learn this as Rose explores her mother's lab and discovers her secret bedroom and her secret cat, a likely product of ectobiological experiments which Rose names Vodka Mutini.

Vodka Mutini (Mutie for short) is a symbol of the environment Rose finds her in: an adorable, friendly kitten, hiding in a teapot in a sugar-pink room that her mother has hidden from her for years. Mom Lalonde’s attempts to be cutesy at Rose were not as shallow as Rose took them to be. They came from the heart: she loved pink, she loved wizards, and she loved cats. Rose takes Mutie with her into the Game, which seems to be a sign that she's accepted that her mother is not who she thought.

Everything I’ve said about Mom Lalonde and cats also applies to Roxy in the alpha timeline. Roxy appearifies Jaspers into her house, renames him Frigglish after a character in her mother’s books, and keeps him (still wearing his suit) until his untimely death as the cat she kind of feels comfortable telling her friends about. But she’s also bred a whole colony of ecto-mutant cats in secret. The world has ended, so there’s really no one left to keep secrets from, and yet she’s just as concerned about what her friends will think of her, and as selective in what she shows other people, as Rose’s mother was. Some things never change.

Back to Rose. She’s accepted that her mother genuinely cares about her, and is genuinely and unironically interested in cutesy things like ponies and tea parties. But Rose is too invested in presenting herself as aloof and uninterested to figure out whether she actually likes these things as well. So when her planet in the Game turns out to be full of pastel colors and cute critters, and Jaspers urges her to find self-actualization by completing her planet’s quest, she rejects the whole thing out of hand as silly and unbefitting her persona. Her search for answers that fit who she wants to be, instead of who her mother, her cat, and the Game want her to be, ends with her feeling alienated and frustrated and turning to Doc Scratch for help.

And that, as we know, never ends well. Following Doc Scratch’s oblique instructions makes Rose grimdark. Then it makes her dead, brings her back to life, destroys the universe, and makes her God Tier. She’s no longer in control of her life after that, and she feels helpless. In the Old Alpha, she fights this feeling mostly alone, and mostly with alcohol, while in the New Alpha, Vriska forces her to stay sober and actually interact with people until she feels like she’s gotten some control back.

Both Roses, but especially the Rose who became an alcoholic and experienced Game Over, are in desperate need of some cat therapy. So it’s fitting that Jaspers is the one who brings Old Alpha Rose back into the New Alpha timeline as a sprite.

Rosesprite has seen the terrible consequences of keeping up her emotional walls for too long, and is ready to try something new. But she's not really sure what that is, or what it means to no longer be Alpha Rose, until Jaspers’ enthusiasm gets the better of him, and causes Rose to fully embrace the feline enthusiasm and lack of inhibition that she'd kept carefully locked away up till this point.

Becoming Jasprosesprite^2 seems to do a world of good for this Rose: while New Alpha Rose is mortified by Jasprose’s existence and decides to strengthen her facade in response, Jasprose becomes much less self-conscious than Old Alpha Rose was and stops worrying about what people think of her, and in the process she becomes better at getting things done and much more open to Davepeta’s advice about what it all means and how to live. Interacting with cats can be soothing and relaxing in real life, too. Just don’t get quite as close as Jaspers and Rose ended up. We here at the I Like Homestuck Project do not condone physically merging with your cat.

Rose’s descent into grimdarkness is caused by the Horrorterrors, but that it happens at all is a result of Doc Scratch’s deliberately cryptic advice. He doesn’t care about her feelings; her pursuit of revenge for her mother’s death, and her own death at Jack Noir’s hands, put her exactly where she needs to be to facilitate the Scratch and allow Lord English to enter Alternia’s universe. And everything he says about the Horrorterrors and Rose’s magic cue ball is carefully phrased so that he can both urge her to learn too much about the Horrorterrors and claim later that he had tried to prevent her from doing so.

Trickster Mode, on the other hand, is enabled by outside influences that mean well. Caliborn and Calliope send the codes for their Trickster jujus to Jake and Jane respectively, because they think that Trickster majyyks will make their pen pals stronger and better able to overcome the barriers to communication between them. But, as Hussie explains to Caliborn after the fact, it doesn’t work that way on humans. Instead, when Jane activated the combined Trickster juju, it caused her to believe that all her problems were solved and nothing she could do would fail, leading her to do dumb things like turn half her planet to zillium and ask Jake to marry her.

Grimdarkness is isolating. Rose’s pursuit of eldritch knowledge has distanced her from her friends, and her transformation literally causes her to speak another language, thwarting even open-minded John’s best attempts to figure out what has happened to her. It’s turned “no one understands me” from an angsty metaphor into something very real and dangerous: even if Rose suddenly wanted to ask for help, she no longer can.

Trickster Mode spreads itself and brings people together. Jane has trouble communicating with her friends. Becoming a Trickster makes that communication suddenly seem easy, so the first thing she does is go talk to Jake. And when he doesn’t get it, she makes him a Trickster too. And so on. Eventually all the Alpha Kids end up speaking the same language. And for a little while, it’s fun and everything works.

Grimdarkness has no benefit for the person it happens to. Rose literally dies on a pointless quest for revenge, and she learns nothing from the experience. After being revived, she is equally aloof, equally dedicated to plumbing the mysteries of the void, though now she does so by getting drunk, and equally resistant to engaging with her teammates. It takes Vriska’s lack of inhibition with regard to snapping her out of it for Rose to finally get her act together and become a useful member of her team with useful knowledge about herself.

Trickster Mode, meanwhile, has a lesson to impart, and it makes sure its students learn it. It leaves the Alpha Kids hung over and wondering what happened, and the only way for them to answer that question is to actually talk to each other. So they do. And they learn things about themselves and each other that allow them to grow.