Hello everyone! Welcome to a (new) installment of Beyond Canon theories with me, StellarAmphibian, as your OP! This thread will mostly theorize about the game of SHURB in Homestuck: Beyond Canon, but this theorizing will also extend to Homestuck as a whole.
I've had this theory on my mind for a while now, and I've written this out before but the documents got lost in the void, so I decided to open a thread on this forums after writing about another amazing theory you should totally check out.
Soo, what made me start this theory? Well, as far as we know now (and the 10/08 update hasn't dropped yet), the SHURB session we are seeing in Beyond Canon will have 4 prototype towers, and 10 players. This goes against almost everything we have known about Homestuck so far!
Up until this point, we have only seen the following configurations of sessions:
- 2 players, no prototypes
- 4 players, all prototypes
- 12 players, all prototypes (with one double pre-session prototype, which doesn't seem to count towards the initial prototyping)
- 4 players, no prototypes.
Because Caliborn and Calliope's session was special in the way SBURB was played (it was basically an one player session) and the fact the sprite turned into a black hole, we will exclude this session from this whole theory. So to summarize: so far we have only seen sessions where either everyone prototypes or everyone doesn't.
Or do we? Because the way that the kid's session played out, it was technically an 8 player session from the start. As indicated by the Skaianet terminal that Rose encounters in the lab, the incipisphere is displayed as having 8 players/planets.
I will loop back for a moment, because I hear you ask "But Rose said that everyone has to prototype, and Vriska said the same". In this context, Rose was mainly talking about a session with no prototypes at all, foreshadowing the Alpha Kids session. She also states: "But it doesn't really matter. As I said, the session was designed this way before they began playing. Any efforts to prototype may have been in vain regardless. Possibly subject to sabotage." This is true, the amount of prototypes is determined from the start. If you deviate from this you end up with doomed timelines, as seen with the Dave & Rose timeline before Dave prototyped himself.
Vriska I believe in this context is talking about the server -> session chain, stating "you need to complete your prototyping chain!", which basically requires every player to at least enter the medium.
On both of these pages, Rose and Vriska make an interesting statement.
ROSE: Without successive prototypings, the battlefield will never reach its final form, which must be fertilized to grow a new universe.
AG: Only when all players have entered with a prototyped kernel does the 8attlefield assume its final form.
AG: That form prepares Skaia to grow the new universe you will cre8te.
We can assess that both these players are talking from previous experiences with their own and others sessions. But we know now, with the 8 player 4 prototype session that birthed Universe C, this doesn't HAVE to be true.
So 4 prototypes seems to be a minimum then for SBURB, but how did I get to 3 prototypes? Well, we haven't seen any 3 player sessions to make a conclusion, but we can at least theorise! For this we have to look at the evolution of the battlefield.
The battlefield prior to prototyping, is a very simple instance of the chess game. We see this prototyping in the Alpha Kids session, where it gets blown up almost immediately because of the lack of prototyping that is happening.
The first prototyping adds a more complex version of the battlefield.
The second prototyping turns the battlefield in a cube, adding more complexity and dimensions.
The third prototyping turns Skaia into an orb. (heh)
The fourth prototyping adds a Möbius net. Now this is the most advanced prototyping we have seen so far, except for maybe some snippets from the Troll session. This structure is only really seen in this panel, the other panels show it as some kind of tentacles in the sky, and seems to be some kind of extra defense for the reckoning, but as seen in Cascade still lets meteors through.
