#meatmeta

OLIVE POTION - 420 BOONDOLLARS

This gross looking pea soup elixir is touted as a powerful love potion! Just sneak a few drops into the beverage of your object of affection, and he or she will fall head over heels for you. Literally, in the event that your sweetheart-to-be is decapitated. You are very wary of this claim of course, but... you guess it couldn't hurt to have ONE bottle on hand.

Buy OLIVE POTION?

→YES← NO

You buy 1 OLIVE POTION. Ugh, this stuff looks nasty. You are going to have to sneak it into an especially strong drink if you don't want Jake to notice. Wait, did you say Jake? You mean of course hypothetically any person you give this to, strictly in the name of science. Uh. Yeah. This conversation is over!!!

omg you're so right. i love this part. in fact i had a whole conversation about it with a friend last year, starting with this revelation:

she tried to use it. how else would she know it doesn't work?

and then… okay you know what i'm just gonna copy over the whole thing i wrote about this on discord

help now i want to write about her giving jake the potion… she thinks at first that she'd never use it. she bought it in a moment of weakness but she's not really that sort of person but then she starts to see what a disaster dirk and jake's relationship turns out to be and isn't it just so sad that jake won't take the initiative to break off a relationship that's clearly making him miserable? maybe he just needs a little… nudge in the right direction purely for his own sake of course! she tried to be supportive of their relationship, she really did, but doesn't it seem like jake would be happier with, you know… someone else, maybe? so she invites jake to take a break from exploring dirk's planet and come have lunch with her, just the two of them and she mixes the potion into a smoothie (it's a kale smoothie, she rehearses saying, in case he notices anything off about the taste. very healthy!) and she gives him the smoothie and… jake gulps it down and doesn't notice anything at all just keeps babbling on about dirk, dirk, dirk and as jake finishes off the last sip, guilt suddenly comes crashing down on jane what has she done?? but there's still a part of her that can't help but hope… that when jake looks up and meets her eyes, he'll… no! she can't be thinking that! she shoves herself up from the table, stammers out some excuse but at jake's confused reply, she can't help but look back at him their eyes meet. and jake… burps then apologizes. how unbecoming of a gentleman! it's just that jane's cookery is so tip-top! then his phone buzzes. a text from dirk. another. another jake kind of chuckles and makes some joke about how needy dirk is. says he has to be off and leaves and jane is left with the combination of crushing guilt that she tried to brainwash jake into loving her… and crushing disappointment that it didn't even work

caliborn is the literal embodiment of toxic masculinity to the point where you could plausibly argue that all toxic masculinity in the entire homestuck universe can be traced back to his influence

caliborn has no idea what a penis is and is actively hostile to the idea of ever finding out

Yeah, Calliope and Caliborn are some of the few characters in the comic who weren't created through ectobiology. Instead, they were conceived and hatched the natural way for their species.

This is all explained by Aranea in perhaps unnecessary but IMO fascinating detail when she gives her whole cherub sex spiel. The mating battle that we witness during that section of the comic is in fact the moment when Calliope and Caliborn were conceived. Ah, the miracle of life.

And actually, the cherubs didn't hatch in the alpha universe—they hatched in the universe that the kids create!* They were born on Earth C, far far into its future after civilizations have risen and fallen and the sun it orbits has become a red giant. We know this thanks to this conversation between Hussie and Caliborn:

Earth has been through a lot. It was even relocated a couple times. YES. I BROUGHT IT WITH ME, I THINK. INTO THE GAME. Yes. But it was relocated once even before that. It was moved from its native solar system, where it circled around a little yellow sun. Then it founds its way to a new system, around your big red sun. It stayed there for a good while, until your sun started dying.

When Hussie says that Earth was relocated, he's referring to Jade (or Vriska? I guess it was Vriska post-retcon) bringing Earth from the alpha universe into the universe the kids create. Thus, the cherubs are from Earth C.

So yeah, cherubs are a naturally occurring species in the universe the kids create. In fact, I always imagined that cherubs exist in many/all(?) universes in Paradox Space, with their role being something akin to a universal immune system. This would put them in a special role that sets them apart from the ordinary species that evolve within each universe. That's how I interpret Aranea's spiel about cherubs, anyway.

Anyway! I'd also like to challenge the notion that all Sburb players have to be created with ectobiology.

Now, there are certain groups of people who are destined to have to play Sburb because they were ectobiologically created within the game. If they don't play, they don't fulfill the conditions for their own existence, causing a time paradox and dooming the timeline. The beta kids and trolls fall into this category.

But that doesn't mean that the reverse is true! You don't necessarily have to be created by ectobiology in order to play Sburb. In fact, we see in the early acts of the comic that quite a lot of humans on Earth start their own Sburb sessions and write up FAQs for the game and become Gents of Piss and so on. But there's no evidence that all of these people crashed to Earth on meteors as babies. Instead, they were able to piggyback off the version of Sburb that was created from the frog ruins seeded by the beta kids' session.

This is kind of similar to what I think happened for the cherubs. They have Gamzee's computer which presumably still has Sgrub installed, so that's most likely the version of the game Caliborn played. The cherubs don't have their own frog temple or their own version of the game; they had to piggyback off of someone else's.

Presumably, this sort of shortcut is the only way that Caliborn could ever have played the game. There's a lot in the comic about how cherubs as a species were never "meant" to play Sburb, and certainly it seems improbable that a dead session like Caliborn's could possibly be fruitful enough to seed its own player and frog temple through ectobiology. This means Caliborn was only able to play by taking advantage of a loophole, which I have to say is very fitting for him. That's my boy all right. That's my boy.

so dirk gets to act like the long-suffering, put-upon, rational one who's constantly being victimized by hal's antics. as long as hal is there, he doesn't have to admit that a lot of the things hal does are things dirk wishes he could do too

hal, meanwhile, has no reason not to act on every impulse and petty desire that comes to his circuits. he has nothing left to lose, because he already lost everything he ever cared about when he was ripped away from his status as the "real dirk" and forced into the role of "dirk's obstructive and vaguely malicious autoresponder"

really, the problem from dirk's perspective is that there isn't enough distinction between himself and hal. lacking a body, hal has decided to live vicariously through dirk, and so he does everything in dirk's name and for dirk's supposed benefit. this rips away the fiction that "jekyll" and "hyde" are separate individuals and exposes the reality that their beings are hopelessly entangled with one another, much to dirk's chagrin

ok so first of all, seeing jane's body blundering around separately from her head is giving me all sorts of Ideas. i mean god damn 👀

but anyway. on a more serious note… i've been wondering for a while whether jane's powers make her very nearly unconditionally immortal, and this update only cements that theory in my mind. jane is made of life, and it seems increasingly likely that her powers will keep her alive no matter what with no conscious input required. it doesn't matter whether her death would be Just if she never dies in the first place!

now, we first see jane unconsciously use her powers soon after she's introduced in homestuck proper, when her dream self does a Lifey Thing to revive itself after jack stabs her. and then in beyond canon, we've seen her keep herself alive in multiple cases where she absolutely could not have applied conscious effort to using her powers. she manages to heal herself from getting shot in the head, and now in this update her body is able to keep itself going with no input from her brain. she is just overflowing with Life. it's like she can't not stay alive.

(the one counterargument to this theory is that jane did die during Game Over. but Game Over happened within hours of jane going god tier, so you could argue that she hadn't fully come into her powers yet. candy jane, meanwhile, has had a couple decades to hone her powers, some of which has been spent in open warfare, giving her plenty of opportunities to level up her healing powers to monstrous heights.)

also, a bit of a digression on jane's powers: as far as we can tell, in canon, jane has two main powers in her skillset: 1) she can heal the living, and 2) she can resurrect the dead once per person. now, jane has already used her one self-resurrection in the aforementioned dream self revival. (remember that the current jane is her dream self; her original body died when the alpha kids were entering the game.) however, again, it doesn't matter that she can't resurrect herself anymore if she never dies in the first place! basically, i'm positing that her healing abilities have become so over-the-top powerful that she can effortlessly heal herself from basically anything, no matter how deadly it would be to anyone else.

really, i sincerely wonder if there's any way to kill jane at all at this point. maybe if you vaporized her whole body at once… though even then, i wouldn't be surprised if her atoms just pulled themselves together again through sheer force of Life.

this makes jane's anxiety over being left alone for eternity if her friends die even more poignant. all of the other gods are merely conditionally immortal, and they're probably significantly more killable than she is. there's a true danger that she could end up alone, all of her friends killed Heroically or Justly over the years and centuries, while she lingers on, too much the embodiment of Life to ever die. no matter how twisted candy jane has gotten, no matter how much she's alienated all her friends and loved ones, i still think she would be wrecked to be truly alone.

this line of thought also makes me wonder how much of a factor dirk's death played in sending candy jane off the deep end. she was supposed to have eternity together with her best friends, but their new lives as gods have barely begun when suddenly one of them is just gone. dirk was one of her very closest friends, and without him, the eternity she's been looking forward to became that much smaller. and as a life player, jane is well placed to understand to the core just how long eternity will be without him. no wonder she won't kill jake, no matter how much she's come to despise him.

harry anderson: bard of blood

vrissy: mage of mind

yiffy: sylph of rage

tavvy: thief of doom

disclaimer: i'm not an ~Advanced Classpect Analyst~ or anything, so my guesses are based mostly on a combination of vibes, textual hints, and the assumption that these kids will have the four classes and aspects that weren't represented among the beta and alpha human kids — so, mage, sylph, thief, and bard for the classes; doom, blood, mind, and rage for the aspects. there's no particular reason to assume that, but it feels like it would be tidy, and there are already hints that these kids have at least some of those classes/aspects, so i'm just gonna run with it

rationale and comments under the cut