In topic: "characters hussie hated, and characters hussie loved"

Saturday, August 9th, 2025, 4:36 PM29 days ago

there's this thing homestuck fans do where they don't really recognize that "death" is a more complicated thing in homestuck than in most stories. a lot of people treat deaths in homestuck like they do with say, tv shows. on tv, characters die for a lot of reasons. in fact, characters dying as a part of an intentional narrative arc is really more the exception than the rule. characters die on tv shows because the actor wanted to do a different job, because of contract negotiations, because of the difficulties in scheduling actors to appear on set, because the showrunner had run out of things to do with the character.


that's not really how death in homestuck works - death in homestuck, once the dreambubbles are established, acts as freedom. this goes back to a lot of the gnostic influence on the comic, see: yaldabaoth and abraxas being invoked by name, the idea of the flawed author who constructs a flawed world that must be escaped from, it's literally in jade's name. the approach gnosticism takes towards resolving the inherent contradiction between an all-powerful, world-creating god and the struggle of existence is that the demiurge, the creator-god, creates flawed worlds in their flawed image. the afterlife, then, is an escape from this flawed world, and homestuck is really no different from standard gnosticism in this way.


but it's layered in another way atop that - dying in homestuck is freedom from social pressures, and it acts almost like handing over characters to the fandom. the characters that live on in the dreambubbles get fandom wishes granted. one of the first dreambubble pairings we see is karkat and nepeta together, something that would have never happened while they were alive. things like the crowd of cosplaying trolls in ministrife evoke cosplayers who would do absurd things like "sailor moon!damara" and "maid!equius". the ghost army, rising upon the corrupt author figure evokes the crowds of cosplayers at conventions.


this whole thing creates a meaning where the best way to do homestuck is to get in, get shit done in the story, and die, where you can try to be at peace. it's why terezi: remem8er starts out the dreambubble world tour on eridan, of all people. eridan was one of the worst kinds of bastard the story had to offer, and even he gets to have his moment.


it's not necessarily "hussie hated these characters" with that in mind, it really feels more like "hussie did all they wanted to with these characters, and put them in a toybox for fandom to play with like the end of toy story 3"

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