#beta human session

Okay so to start with, Timelines in Homestuck work under the assumption that Parallel Timelines exist- Timelines where you took a different route, you chose something differently, and produced a deviation. However, Homestuck also says there exists an Alpha Timeline, a Timeline that’s considered as the True Path, what should be happening in the end, and considers any deviation from this path to be Doomed. A Doomed Timeline is, thus, a series of events deviating from the Alpha Timeline that Paradox Space considers redundant. No matter how far that Timeline goes, since it’s deviated from the Alpha, it will never be relevant, and as such, it needs to cease existing at some point. We see this actually happen with Davesprite’s Timeline. Rose falls asleep, the last Player Character left in the Timeline gives up, and everything around her just... Disappears, before erasing her very existence. It’s as if that Rose had never existed in the first place. (Except of course, Alpha Rose manages to assimilate this Rose’s memories, likely either a Seer or a Light or a Seer of Light thing)

So this is straightforward enough. But this is only the first layer. The next layer are Time Loops. And this is the thing Dave, and every other Time Player needs to deal with. Whenever they use Time Powers to travel back in time, they’re travelling back into the Alpha Timeline. But now imagine that the ‘you’ from the past sees the ‘you’ from the Future, and decides that they don’t want to go back in time. Given that the Alpha you never went back in time, the one ‘you’ that did travel in time became Doomed, they are redundant, and are fated to die. So if you don’t want your Session to fill with Dead Copies of yourself, you need to travel back in Time. As such, you may see your future Self warping back in time, and then you know if you don’t want that ‘you’ to die, you need to travel back at some point just like that, closing this ‘loop’ and avoiding the creation of a Paradox.

Still with me? Okay! Because that’s only Timelines within a Session. Now is when we get to the spicy part of Cross-Dimensional Timelines. Already within the same Universe, there’s several elements that interact from different points across the Timeline. Let’s take the moment the Player Enters SBURB and consider it the Present. Before the Present, the only thing that exists within SBURB is Prospit, Derse, the Veil and Skaia. The Battlefield is unprototyped and locked in an eternal Stalemate, and even then the existence of all of this is only confirmed by the Players’ Dreamselves being able to Wake Up prior to the Entry of the Lands, implying that at LEAST the Moons and Skaia do exist. When we reach the Present, a Land is created. This Land has history, inhabitants, that act as though they had always been there, however as we see from the Entries of the Kids, this is false. The Lands come into being the second the Players enter, in the Present, but they are pre-programmed with a history.

Now within the SBURB Session in the Present, there’s the Veil. The Veil is the Asteroid Ring surrounding the Session, and it contains Ectobiology Laboratories, as well as the Frog Temple (Only one per Planet, so arguably only the Kids’ Session would have this, but for argument’s sake, let’s say every Fan Session is a ‘Main Session’ and has the Frog Temple in it). When the Reckoning begins, the Veil’s Meteors are sent towards the Battlefield, and in an attempt to protect it, Skaia opens defense portals that send these Meteors to various points in the history of the Planet. Now, inside of the Frog Temple, there’s a Time Capsule. A Stasis Device that allows anything to remain inert for Millions of years. So when something is put in the Capsule, it travels with the Frog Temple to the FAR past of the planet, and spends Millions of years isolated inside of it until it blossoms and allows it out. This connects the ‘Present’ of the Session with any point in the past of the Planet, allowing for items, people, weapons, anything to be put in there in any point in the future that will be retrieved at any desired point within the Planet’s lifespan.

Conversely, the Meteors that Land in the Present causing the End of the World, eventually become Exile Stations. At some point within the Session, one, or both Kingdoms are going to end up ruined, and Carapaces are going to lose their homes, their way of living, and their lives. The survivors will abandon the Kingdoms and fly through the Meteor Portals to create a new civilization on the Planet. And when these Stations appear, they allow the contact of the surviving Carapaces with the Present of the Session. With Sendificators and Appearifiers that allow them to take and give items at will, Command Devices to communicate directly with the Players, and even more complicated Devices I’ll get to in a little bit.

This way, the Future is linked with the Present through the Exile Stations, and the Past is linked with the Present through the Time Capsule, allowing for all sorts of Cross-Timeline Shenanigans. Got that? Good. Because now we’re talking about the Scratch. In the SBURB Session, in the Land of the Time Player of the Session, there’s a Device. The Scratch Construct. They tend to be shaped as methods of storing music- At least the two we’ve seen were, a Music Box and a Record- And contain vast amounts of Time and Space Energy. Raw power. And if this Device is Scratched in such a way that it releases the vast amounts of energy carried within, Skaia will take this event as a Signal, and begin a Soft Reboot of the Universe. Skaia will take the Energy from the Scratch Construct, and retroactively alter the Time the Meteors were sent through the Portals. Given the Meteors carried the ectobiologically created Players of the Session, changing the Time at which they arrived effectively Alters the Timeline.

But the Scratch is no mere Time Loop or Alternate Timeline bullshit. No, the Scratch is more than that. It’s a reset button. The vast Spacetime Energy of the Scratch Construct isn’t used to switch the Portals. It’s used to delete the Timeline. It doesn’t create a new Timeline, it overwrites the one that was there already, and as such, everything within the Session simply ceases to exist when the Scratch happens. However, as I said, the Scratch is overwriting the Universe. Paradoxically, what happened before the Scratch STILL Happened, and by being outside of the Session, outside of the Universe, when the Scratch happens, people who once inhabited the Universe can survive and live on beyond this reboot.

And this new Reality that is created, this new Timeline with the destination of the Meteors changed, exists as if it had always been there, and in fact, it always has, because even though the new Planet will have a New Frog Temple, they still occupied the same Universe, and the Frog Temple has a sendificator that connects Pre and Post Scratch versions of the Universe, which as we see in Canon with Jade and Jake, has kept the two in contact from the very beginning! In addition to this, it would seem as though Pre and Post Scratch versions of the same Universe’s Sessions are connected through the Fourth Walls present in the Archagents’ office, connecting with an extra-dimensional Space where the author of the Webcomic himself inhabits, buuuut let’s not talk about this too much okay? So. We have the way a single Timeline works, we have the connection between the Session and the Planet, and we have the connection between Pre-Scratch and Post-Scratch Realities. 

Now let’s talk about other Universes. The purpose of SBURB is to create a New Universe, this is the Genesis Frog, and the result of breeding the Genesis Tadpole, winning against the Black King to stop the Reckoning from Destroying the Battlefield, perforating the planet, feeding it the Grist Hoard to make it fertile, and casting the Tadpole from the Forge by burning the Queen’s Magic Ring in it in a process very reminiscent of a sperm cell getting to an egg. Once you create this Universe, a Gate is created that connects your Session with the new Universe, and allows you to travel to it and claim your place as the God of the new Reality. And as we see in the post-Credits Snapchats, the Door that connects the Session and the Universe is Permanent if not destroyed. Jack Noir and the Felt travel through it 5000 years after the Kids won the game from the perspective of the new Universe, or maybe not 5000 years but they use Felt Time Juju Shenanigans to get there exactly 5000 years afterwards? Hard to tell. The thing is, however, that Terezi comes back to the Session, and to the Crumbling Paradox Space a year afterwards, implying that yes, wherever the Door actually leads, there’s a permanent portal connecting the Session that made the Universe and the Universe itself. And in the same way, the Exile Stations that will appear in the Planet of said Universe have devices that can send things and people to the Session that created it, seen specifically sending a Prototyped Jack Noir to the exact instant the Trolls were about to claim their reward for winning the game.

Adding upon the devices SBURB itself uses to connect points in the Timeline, we also have Trollian. Trollian is a Highly Advanced Chat Service used by the Trolls that can connect you, not just to anyone from another Chat Service as long as you have their address, but it does this across any point of the Alpha Timeline, and across multiple Universes. With this, the Trolls can connect and speak with the Beta Kids of the Universe they created, through their entire lives up until the point of the Scratch, and it allows Calliope, who lives millions of years in the future of the Universe the Alpha Human Session creates, to chat and interact with both the Strilondes that live 413 Years in the Future of Post Scratch Earth, and with Jake and Jane who live in the Present of the same Planet. It seems that Trollian loses contact with any Timeline that is Doomed, as seen when they stop talking to the Kids after John dies in the Davesprite Timeline, but as we see in some of the Trolls’ Screens, it does allow to talk to multiple versions of the same person within the same Timeline, such as the various Daves doing time loops through the Session.

SO we have the Timeline within a Universe, the connection with it and SBURB, the connection between the two Pre and Post Scratch Realities, AND also the connection between different Universes! That’s it right!? There’s NO way it can’t get more complicated than this!

And that, my friends, is where the Furthest Ring comes in.

The Furthest Ring is the Space Between Universes in Homestuck. It’s the great Beyond, it’s where the Eldritch Lurk. The Confines of Space-Time. It’s Homestuck’s Version of that unknowable extra-dimensional Space where the Eldritch Inhabit that has been described before in all sorts of media. This is a realm inhabited by the Horrorterrors, Immortal, Eternal, Chaotic Beings opposed to the forces of Creation, presumably because each time a new Universe is made a Bubble pops in their turf and they don’t want neighbours. They’re actually pretty chill all things considered. The important thing about the Furthest Ring, however, is that there’s no Time or Space in the Furthest Ring.

It’s a Space outside of common dimensions, and its fabric is permeated with the 12 Aspects of the Homestuck Universe. Sometimes walking a distance will send you back in time, or staying still make you change locations, there’s few ways to map or predict a journey through this Space, both Where and When you will end up. Only through Frames of Reference created by the Cracks Lord English creates with his mouth lasers, destroying reality itself, through Foresight, such as Rose’s Seer of Light abilities telling her where to go, or through Willpower alone, with the Furthest Ring guiding you to where you need to be the most, can you actually navigate it. And so, once you leave the Universes or the Sessions and find yourself in this weird plane of existence, all Timelines converge because, no matter where you come from, everything is fair game out there.

Not only that, but after Feferi requests the Gods to blow Bubbles for her and their friends to Dream and remain as Souls, effectively becoming the Homestuck Analogue of the Afterlife, the Bubbles become a cauldron of Information from every single Timeline, Doomed or otherwise, and all three Universes the story spans. The Alpha Trolls, the Beta Trolls, the Beta and Alpha Humans, Lord English, Calliope, Alt Calliope, Bec Noir, PM, the Felt, everyone ends up in the Furthest Ring at some point, Dreaming or Dying or passing through Physically, and as such, all events in Homestuck mix together outside of their respective Timelines.

And yet there’s STILL one more thing. Beyond the In-Universe Mechanisms and the Extra-Universal Bullshit, past Alpha and Beta and back to Alpha, A, B or C, there’s still one thing that makes Time even more of a Mess in the realm of Homestuck. The Retcon.

It’s hard to say exactly what John’s powers are- If just an amplification of his own powers as the Heir of Breath, or a new Power Caliborn’s Juju grants him. Whichever the case, one thing is certain, John becomes effectively unstuck from the events that transpire Homestuck. The Alpha Timeline becomes meaningless to John, distance and time become irrelevant- Or it would if he could actually control his God Damn powers properly. But of course this isn’t the case.

See, John’s powers are very special in the sense that they grant him control over the more Meta aspects of the comic. Narrative coherency goes out the Window, because John has, effectively, left the Story. So when he goes Back in time, he’s not creating a new Timeline. He’s editing the Story. He’s inserting himself into another point of the Narrative Timeline. This makes him not actually need to follow any Loops, and not create Doomed Timelines. He’s Changing the plot. Most of these uses are gags, with him being unable to control When or Where he goes, he just appears at random during events that happen in the story, and leaves marks such as his arm poking out, the glow of his body, or a stain of ink. But there’s one thing he does manage to fully Retcon, and that is the Game Over Timeline. Following Terezi’s instructions, he alters the plot to bring Vriska back. He brings Roxy and his Land with him to the new Session he created by bringing Vriska back, and carries the Ring from another Timeline for Roxy to revive Calliope.

However even this Canon-Breaking power is something defined within the Narrative of Homestuck. It changes the plot, but given Homestuck knows and plays with the fact it’s a story, it also plays with the fact that this power has its limitations, and its consequences. For one, the Retcon Powers are necessary in the first place for Lord English to be born, which, as stupid as it sounds, makes the power to change the plot actually necessary to complete the plot. Second, even though John can change virtually anything in the story, every change comes with a price.

This is seen in the Timeline he creates by reviving Vriska. Since he’s carrying himself, Roxy, and a couple of Sprites to the new Timeline, the John, Roxy and Davesprite of that Timeline are Doomed to Die to make room for them. Curiously, this doesn’t seem to apply to everyone- In the End, there’s two Nannasprites going around, implying that either Sprites are seen as ‘irrelevant’ enough by the Timeline to allow duplicates, or that by the End of Homestuck we’re not even following the true Alpha Timeline, and instead just the ‘Changed’, idealized version John has created to escape the Alpha Timeline.

In this way, the Retcon Powers work similarly to the Scratch, where things technically are Changed, Reset, but there’s still ways to escape its influence. John stops Terezi from killing Vriska, but the Dead Vriska from the original Timeline still exists, because she’s in the Furthest Ring. And as there’s no proper Space or Time flow in the Furthest Ring, she exists outside of the normal parameters of the story.

And THAT is how Timelines work in Homestuck. Again, by itself, each part isn’t that complex, but given the story of Homestuck happens across 3 different Universes, several pocket Dimensions, the Furthest Ring, and has things such as the Scratch and the Retcon, it gets incredibly convoluted the further you get into it.