♃

I'll be vague because I don't know how much lore I want to publicly share yet, but Gloom was created from the suicide of another character. He's a personification of their ''negative'' half; he's all of the traits the deceased desperately wished they could remove from themself, and they only succeeded by dying.

Gloom has past life amnesia/repressed memories, and he wants to know who he is. Because he's the ''negative'' half of someone, the scenarios and encounters that unlock his memory and carry him on his quest relate to his previous self's fear, disgust, anger, regret, shame, etc. He quickly figures out that he's missing half of the story, and that there's a pattern of having to confront things that trigger, upset, and repel him because he doesn't have access to any of his past self's positive associations for guidance.

For example, when he was first ''born'' (as an adult, who didn't know a damn thing) he worked in the lighthouse on the shore he washed up on. He didn't know who he was, but he knew that the ocean and isolated imposing tower made him feel something, eventhough it was dread, so he clung to it.

He was in the trenches in WWI, he's been an underground pit fighter, gangster, smuggler, sailor, and thief, and he travels the world in search of discomfort, evil, and violence in hopes that he'll find some answers.

He also hates the moon, because what he describes as ''a crescent moon, on it's side like a boat, behind a huge, dark tower'' is constantly in his nightmares, and he feels like it's watching him. He spends a large chunk of theoretical runtime unravelling the mystery of why the moon makes his skin crawl.

34. When thinking about themselves, are they a soul, a consciousness, or a body? Do they think as I, we, or you?

If he starts thinking about shit like this too hard, he goes and gets super drunk, starts a bar fight and/or wakes up in a gutter over it.

Which is to say it's something he's thinking about constantly due to his story's themes, and the answers to those questions are changing constantly. THM deals so much with concepts of consciousness and identity, ego death, plurality, reincarnation, and ''persona alchemy'' as Andrew Hussie once called it when they were talking about the amount of times homestuck characters get fused and ripped apart and cloned and time travel nonsense'd.

What he's going through has similarities to Steven Universe's arc, though. They're both reincarnations who learn about their progenitors over the courses of their arcs. They deal with the pressure of being associated with their previous selves by people who were around to know them, and having to forge their own identities.

I do think that further into the story, when Gloom has a better grasp on his situation, including the knowledge that he was cast out from a larger whole because he was an unwanted bundle of negative traits, it instills a lot of shame and self doubt in him. He'll start imagining himself talking to either his past self or his theoretical ''better'' half when he's alone, and doing a lot of ''we''ing and ''you''ing, asking ''what would you do?'' etc.