the void aspect Pisses me off. like. void is about nothingness, yeah? meaninglessness. irrelevance. etc.
but void is also about symbols. that's undeniable. roxy, our rogue of void player, steals symbols. that's what she does. she describes making things as stealing their nonexistence, but not only is that...not what we see happening when she's literally performing classpect feats (if she's stealing the nonexistence, where does the nonexistence go? if she's stealing the nonexistence, why does she have to envision the object she's making first and not the nothingness she's stealing?), we also see her steal a symbol at the end of act 6. like, a pretty fucking important one. that being bro's sword.
it was a symbol of the sort of hypermasculine self-sacrificing heroism that bro championed and that dave rejected, but after roxy took it...she states later that it reminded her of everyone she'd lost, and although she didn't know what it meant to whoever first had it, she knew what it meant to her, and she stole it. (https://homestuck.com/009879). she outright calls it a symbol.
and...that makes a sort of sense. symbols aren't real, they're void, they don't exist. they're just representatives of things we find meaningful.
but. BUT. that should be setting off alarm bells. "things we find meaningful"??? isn't that the purview of Light???? if void is partially about symbols, it follows that light is partially about whatever the opposite of a symbol is. and the only thing i can think of is...something that doesn't have meaning. but that should be the purview of void, right?? something's not adding up here.
i don't know. the only other meaningful conversation regarding "symbols" in homestuck i can recall is rose's drunk alchemy rant. she mentions conjuring symbols from the void, she says that the "atomic idea" that hit newton jarred from the void a more profound understanding of nothingness, she says that people think up symbols from the "abyss" of consciousness without understanding what they mean, but they would cross through a ray of light regardless, because of the symbols...because the "symbols hol dall the power".
so, like, what the fuck, right? is symbology light-bound or void-bound? the only conclusion i can draw is that symbols are concepts of void (nothingness, ignorance) that nonetheless allow people to reach light (knowledge, thing-ness).
actually that makes a sort of sense post cancelled
