i'd love to read about gnosticism sometime since it seems incredibly interesting and i always feel like a poser whenever the topic comes up wrt homestuck... @chthonikix if you have any book recommendations or anything please send them my way lol! but from my basic knowledge it seems pretty intensely tied into homestuck's core themes way beyond surface level allusions right? imo the absolute central thematic and ideological pillar of homestuck, tying every layer of it together, is the search for truth and meaning in artificial systems and escape from those systems. the coming-of-age stuff, metanarrative authorial stuff, the formats of sburb and paradox space, even things like the world seeming to work on strict computer logic, all tie into this. the gnostic aspects add another clear layer to this, a spiritual/mythological one, which helps sketch out homestuck's place as a 'modern creation myth' as hussie's put it before. homestuck is the story of a bunch of teens growing into adulthood, oppressed subjects escaping power structures, and humanity (and trollity and cherubity) achieving enlightenment, creating a 'true' world at the end and escaping the false world of homestuck (until the epilogues and hsbc which add a ton of complications lmao)