#beforans

1.

So. I’m very much in agreement with DJay’s big thesis that the shallow, annoying personas the Dancestors hide in are a ruse - a distaction, if you will. The dancestors present themselves as annoying, one-note characters, but they actually have a lot of history and pretty complex psychology if you look a little further - it’s just that at *this* point, after a billion years of living out their memories they’ve retreated into simplistic roles that they can safely play without engaging any more deeply with their past. Terezi and Karkat even acknowledge this, calling them caricatures. I love DJay’s term - “shades.”

I think where this really clicked for me was in in-story Hussie’s comment on Latula. He claims there’s nothing more to her other than being a cool rad gamegrl radgirl coolgirl.

This is obvious bullshit. Talking to her as Porrim reveals that Latula puts on the gamegirl persona as a way of dealing with other people, and she’s actually kind of relieved to be able to drop the act and acknowledge her problems. Relatedly, talking to Kankri as her reveals that she’s dealing with the problem of him awkardly hitting on her, which is one reason she retreats into a Gamegrl persona around him.

This is true for basically all of the characters introduced in Openbound. In-story, Kurloz is dismissed as a ridiculous mime when he’s helping Gamzee orchestrate LE’s rise and suppressing the agency of his friends (oh hey, Gamzee does this too, putting on the persona of “lolrandom incomprehensible prankster”); Cronus is indeed terrible, but terrible in a “what could have been kind of way” where he once had the chance to be a Harry Potter-esque hero; Mituna babbles and insults but only because he burnt his brain out making a great heroic sacrifice, Damara distracts the pretty significant statements she’s making about LE with vulgarity, Rufioh is pretty insecure beneath being Rufioh ...the list goes on.

So Hussie, in his in-story persona, is a god damn liar, and this is key to everything to that comes next.

The funny thing is, you don’t get the real stories from Hussie. You get it from talking to Aranea, which is framed as an act of “indulging” her, and by extension the author...but it’s only this “background” information which gives these characters complex lives and motivations beyond their personas. The effect it has is not of indulgence - the effect is to frame the whole dancestor ballet as a non-indulgence, revealing them as deeper than they seem.

(At this point, though, many readers will already be sick of them, and miss what’s really going on.)

Porrim would seem to be the one exception. In her case, though, I think it’s not so much that the reader doesn’t recognize her complexity as a person, but that her friends don’t. They stereotype her as being all about sex and relationship when her sex positivity is actually part of a larger goal of honestly examining her society. She’s the only one who can see the personas for what they are, since she recognizes it as something put on her from the outside.

2.

The theme of a voyage to the underworld (katabasis) can be analyzed a number of different ways, and all of them fit Homestuck. As an epic, Homestuck of course has an obligation to go to the land of the dead halfway through its story, so that the protagonist can learn something they need to know.

If there’s anything we’re learning these days, though, the protagonist of the epic Homestuck isn’t a character,  it’s the MSPA reader. It’s us who make the journey to Homestuck’s underworld. Meenah plays the role of hero there, with Aranea her guide, but we know that we move through which characters we control, each of them being temporary analogues for our will. We are the ones who descend into its hell.

(And now I think we’re finally figuring out what we’re supposed to learn there.)

Just as DJay says, the fact that these characters are reduced to stereotyped shades is all Lord English’s fault. Literally, they’ve been hollowed-out by millions of years of being trapped in their memories, thanks to his machinations ruining their lives, and now face his threat again in the afterlife. Metafictionally, we’ve been asked *not* to care about them by the narrative, in the same way Caliborn demands that we don’t give a shit about Homestuck. That’s LE’s great power over the narrative: the threat of apathy.

3.

I tend to think of Life, in Homestuck’s platonic-narrative symbolic system, as representing positive character growth, and by extension things that readers experience as positive development. It’s interesting, then, that the one who brings these dead souls back to life is Meenah, a Life player. It’s even more interesting in that it’s Meenah who deprived them of their lives in the first place. Thinking to escape a dead session for the afterlife, the Thief of Life robbed them of their literal lives, but she also robbed them of their chance to grow as a people. They are thus echoes and victims of LE’s nature as a being that cannot grow or change, and is doomed because of it. But also, it’s kind of Meenah’s fault. Her frustration with them echoes her own choices.

(Worth noting, though, that Tavros is able to persuade them to take part in the final fight against him! It’s subtle, but a little burst of Life at the last moment.)

4.

Openbound is full of good parallels to katabasis mythology. The dream-bubble afterlife echoes both Greek Hades and Christian hell. Homestuck’s dancestors are a lot like the shades Odysseus and Aeneas encounter: they’re faded ghosts, “shades,” who can’t speak until the hero gives them blood to restore their intelligence for a brief time. In Homestuck, what we - and Meenah - give them is a brief window of attention. But it won’t last, and it won’t restore them to life. But it’s also Dante’s Hell. Dante sees souls undergoing ironic punishments, trapped by their own greed, avarice, and lust. The limitation of their will is what keeps them in hell.

There’s one more descent story which I think is very instructive here, though.

And that would be the City of the Old Emperors from Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story, a tale which has quite a bit of relevance for Homestuck.

5.

The first half of The Neverending Story featured the protagonist Bastian being called into the pages of the book and the world of Fantastica, explicitly stated to be a realm made of humanity’s ideas, to recreate this world anew. In the second half of the book, he does so. Unfortunately, as he becomes more sure of his world-creating power, Bastian loses the memory of his own humanity, and begins to forget that Fantastica is not merely his plaything. Declaring himself Emperor, he tries to pretend he created it all, when really he was only acting through the power of another, The Childlike Empress. Bastian soon undergoes a spectacular fall at the hands of his previous allies and friends.Only then can he wake from his reverie and find the last wish he needs to achieve redemption.

But for that redemption to happen, he needs to go into a kind of underworld himself, to learn what mistake it was that he was making.

After being defeated by his friends, Bastian stumbles into a strange city. His horse disappears under him, and he falls - down, down into a crater, where there is a city of strange buildings, full of people in strange clothes doing bizarre things. Before long, he finds a monkey-like guide named Argax, who calls the place the City of the Old Emperors. These strange figures, Argax informs him, were all people from the human world who declared themselves Emperors as Bastian did, and this is the sad result.

“How did they get here? What are they doing here?”

“Oh, there have always been humans who couldn’t find their way back to their world,” Argax explained. “First they didn’t want to, and now, in a manner of speaking, they can’t.[...]”

“Why can’t they?” he asked.

“They’d have to wish it. And they’ve stopped wishing. They used up their last wish for something else.”

“Their last wish?” said Bastian, going deathly pale. “Can’t a person go on wishing as long as he pleases?”

“[...]No! No!” he chattered. “You can only wish as long as you remember your world. These people here used up all their memories. Without a past you can’t have a future. That’s why they don’t get older. Just look at them. Would you believe that some of them have been here a thousand years and more? But they stay just as they are. Nothing can change for them, because they themselves can’t change anymore.”

- The Neverending Story, Chapter 23, pg 378-379

Bastian learns that all these people used up their wishes, leaving them unable to understand or interact with the world. Imagination eludes them - they can only tell stories by randomly forming words from jumbles of letters. Because they didn’t understand where their wishes were coming from, they were left without the capacity for wishes altogether

Another way of saying this is that they were left without will. They have no will to impact the world, because they turned away from the world altogether, retreating into a false idea of themselves. A persona, and not a person who could grow.

This is exactly the position we find the dancestors in in Homestuck. In both Homestuck and the Neverending Story, the limitations of one’s own will are the limitations of one’s agency to influence reality, and the Beforans have given up their will. Theirs is the same mistake as Bastian’s, as Caliborns, and it leaves them hollowed-out, unpleasant, shallow people.

It is their ideas about their will that failed them.

From his encounter with the Old Emperors, Bastian learns the truth about his wishes, enabling him to make his last few wishes count, and bringing him to where he needs to be to find the Waters of Life and make his final wish a wish for his own capacity to love.

So what do we need to learn from the Beforans?

Like us, Bastian is at once both a reader and the protagonist of the story. Michael Ende uses Bastian’s experience to argue that readers have a responsibility to the stories they read and tell. We must give them dignity by breathing life into them, rather than read them in self-indulgent, shallow ways, and we must be willing to grow as we read them.

Homestuck suggests much the same thing. Just as Bastian needed to descend to the hell of the Old Emperors to understand his mistake, we need to descend to the hell of the Dancestors to understand the final confrontation with Caliborn. Like them, we are offered a choice. We are shown his limited view of the world - a view that reduces Homestuck to shallow jokes. We must decide whether we will become him - or set ourselves free.

And to set them free, from the hell they’ve made for themselves, we must also, difficult as it is, believe that the Dancestors can change, more than they can believe it themselves.

In presenting us with their ballet, Hussie challenges us with his favorite question: are we going to accept the surface level,  that Homestuck is just a bad joke full of meaningless flat characters?

Or are we going to take up his challenge to look a little deeper, to breathe life into them and believe there’s more going on beneath the surface - even, no, especially when it’s hardest to do so?

The dark hell of Openbound is the other side of the triumph of Calliope’s Rapture. Homestuck’s fractal structure reflects itself many times over, again and again asking us what we make of it, because we can make of it what we will.

But what will we make of it?