HOMOSUCK

We are at an irresistable cliffhanger. In the long-awaited moment of Jade’s arrival and Jane’s ascension, the Baroness corrupted them both and made them her servants. Jake and Roxy are in Derse jail. Dirk and the three Jacks are converging on the session from its outer edge. John has gained a canon-jumping power that he cannot control. And the meteor crew, all the friends John has not heard from in three years, have been dumped at his feet. How does their reunion go, and what happens next in the Alpha session?

Back when Disc 2 was damaged, Doc Scratch took charge while repairing it. He knew its contents and told some of the story himself. Now Disc 2 is over, and here we are again at the mercy of another narrator.

We saw before that Caliborn’s land had a radio tower with an interface for the narrative prompt. The Author still controlled most of this interface, but Caliborn could unlock it if he found the right keys in his land.

After rising up as the god-tier Lord of Time, Caliborn can now unlock anything. Thus he takes over as narrator and entertains us for a spell. His narration showcases his artistry, which has improved since we last saw his nasty scribbles. He seems to have decided not to go fight the denizen Yaldabaoth until he has mastered the cartoon arts.

Where Scratch’s aim was to continue the story in progress, Caliborn’s aim is to jeer at it. He voices his contempt for Hussie in a new comic called “Homosuck”, a satire of Homestuck’s adventure game conceit and lazy sprite art.

Just when it seems as if we will be reading Homosuck forever, Caliborn opens a cabinet in the exile command station where he has been working. The items that spill from this cabinet appear to have been put there by Hussie. They include art tutorials, horse figurines, and a piece of physical media labelled the Act 6 Act 6 Supercartridge Expansion Pack.

The Supercartridge promises to rescue us from this endless mockery. The Act Act Acts chronicling Caliborn’s growth as an artist will be punctuated by Act Act Intermissions returning us to Homestuck proper.

When Caliborn realizes he is holding the rest of canon, he sabotages it by gumming up the cartridge with “Special Stardust” glitter and candy corn.

Several events must happen in the Alpha kids’ session whose results we have already seen on Earth, such as the First Guardian GCat and the frog temple. A frog meteor must deliver its seed to the paleozoic Earth, but not before weapons are put into its lotus time capsule for Terry Kiser. This is how we know the lotus does not come from the scratched session. And because Earth with its shitty Liberties is the planet on which Gamzee raises the cherubim, we know that Gamzee and the lab must reach Earth too.

Act 6 Act 6 Intermission 1 begins with a cinematic that is poised to close some of these loops while showcasing the Supercartridge’s exciting new gameplay features. Grimbark Jade places the four planets of her old session alongside the new ones in the Medium. She then pilots the troll meteor through a Skaian defense portal and lets it impact the flooded Earth amidst the Red Miles killing Universe B. But the rest of the action is obscured and glitched out by Caliborn’s stardust.

The stardust manifests itself not just between us and the content, but also between the players themselves. A colourful static interference gums up the Medium and makes it hard for the kids to understand each other.

Rose, Dave, Karkat, Kanaya, and Terezi lose their memory of what happened while the animation was jammed. They find themselves separated on different planets. Dave and the Vagabond are on Lohac, Karkat and Kanaya are on Lofaf, and Rose and Terezi are on Lolar. Presumably, Jade did this, but why?

In usurping the Black Queen and commanding the agents of Derse, the Batterwitch has, so far as we know, been carrying out the will of her loathsome Lrd. But her failure to turn Earth into a second Alternia, as recounted by Dirk in Act 6–3, hinted at an agenda of her own.

Now Jade and Jane are in on that agenda. They visit several of the scattered and jailed players, dictating the roles they are to play in the Waterbitch’s plan.

First, the Condesce is plotting against her master. She thinks that Dave and his sword will be instruments in Lrd English’s undoing, but it isn’t yet the right sword. The legendary piece of shit, Caledfwlch, needs to be unbroken.

Jade finds Rose’s magic cue ball, which Doc Scratch called one of his seeds, and brings it to Dave at his house. They use it as an ingredient in alchemizing Caledfwlch, supposedly Dave’s top-tier sword, but actually long surpassed by the Deringer which Hephaestus forged from the broken version. Condy told Jade that Caledfwlch is the only sword capable of injuring the constant conqueror.

Dave is uncoöperative and out of practice. Jade finds him as exasperating as Davesprite, whom she is still not over. She tries to make Dave spar with her, but he is on strike from his dumb quest. Even when Jade kicks the Vagabond off the roof toward the lava of Lohac’s surface to goad Dave to action, he swoops down and saves the Vagabond with a basic flying dive, not with the time travel turntech she hoped he would use.

As Dirk flies back to the Medium, Arquiusprite fills him in on Jane’s corruption and suggests he introduce himself to Dave. Dirk works up the nerve to contact the beta kid version of his idol Bro Strider, but the stardust noise between them makes conversation impossible.

Second, the Condesce wants the kids to perform the ultimate alchemy and create a new universe for her to rule over. After riding the meteor to Earth, Jade shrank Earth and returned with it to the session. This will be the starting point for Condy’s dominion in Universe C.

The hitch is that the tadpole that will become the Genesis Frog fell into the Forge during the Scratch. Lofaf’s denizen Echidna now holds the tadpole and won’t give it up to Jade. Echidna will only speak to the other Space player, Kanaya.

Jade and Jane visit Kanaya and Karkat and order them to get the tadpole. In a gratuitous act of intimidation, Jane impales Karkat on her culling fork and then resurrects him. She says she can bring everyone back from the dead exactly once except for the vampire, who would be harmed by healing magic. Kanaya thinks this is bunk and is not cowed.

When Jane switches to pusher mode, Kanaya acquiesces to her troll blood pitch at an outrageous markup. Kanaya finds herself ashamed of her weakness for the rainbow ichor of her dead friends when Rose messages her to apologize for her own drinking problem.

Third, the Condesce wants to breed a new race of trolls to populate her empire in Universe C. To do this, she needs a mother grub egg known as a Matriorb. On the theory that Roxy should be able to bring objects into existence with her voidy powers, Condy has been trying to get Roxy to conjure the horny orb since the last time Roxy was in jail.

Jade visits Roxy in her cell and explains what a Matriorb is. She prods Roxy to realize her powers and make one. Roxy thinks this is impossible and doesn’t want to help the Batterhag, but succeeds in conjuring a perfectly generic object. Satisfied that Roxy is making progress, Jade leaves her to it.

In another cell, Jane and GCat visit Jake. Jane now considers herself a supreme being of pure logic to whom Jake is good for nothing but his looks. He will be her obedient royal consort when she rules Earth as Her Imperious Condescension’s heiress. Jake implores his Dirk tulpa to get him out of this situation, but Brain Ghost Dirk cannot materialize at Jake’s current level of Hope power.

The rest of the players have no part in Condy’s new order. Jade isolates the hungover seers on Lolar and doesn’t talk to them. She only returns to Lolar while chasing John.

John has been on the run ever since his grimbark sister came back with micro-Earth and broke up the reunion at the Slab. Jade cannot confine John to a planet like the others. Every time she catches the Heir of Breath, he dissolves into wind or involuntarily jumps to another part of canon, throwing her off the trail. Wherever he blows, the stardust disperses and conversation becomes possible again.

In this fashion, John shows up briefly on Lofaf to see Jane cull Karkat and on Lohac and Lolar for conversations with Dave, Rose, and Terezi. Rose tells him to try to find the other players.

Gamzee is also somehow still around to do minor mischief. Terezi resolves to hunt him down. Gamzee’s continued presence after he is supposed to have gone to Earth seems explainable by his use of Aradia’s time machine. But, as we will see in later Acts, Gamzee’s personal timeline of events becomes incomprehensible unless we engage in speculation.

Until now, the “retjohns” were only cosmetic, with images overwritten so that John or his arm had always been there. It remained to be seen whether John could rewrite history with his canon jumps and create new branches of continuity the way Dave and Aradia did with their time travel. It turns out he can, though the consequences are subtly different from those of time travel.

John’s first two rewrites happen in quick succession and cancel each other out. First, he derails Jade and Dave’s sparring argument. Events diverge, and Jade no longer kicks the Vagabond off the roof. Dave has a strong feeling that John is not supposed to be here. But we don’t get to see where this leads, because John’s presence is further rewritten by a second John jumping to the same moment. Future John removes Present John before he is noticed, putting the scene back on its original track.

Unlike previous retjohns, this one does not overwrite the pages in which things went differently. The Homestuck canon includes both versions of the scene, even though the version on pages 6402–04 seems not to have happened from the perspective of anyone in the other version. Let us reflect on how puzzling this is.

With Dave and Aradia’s doomed offshoots, it was always the case that the doomed time players brought their knowledge of the offshoot with them to the alpha timeline. Rose even gained memories of a doomed self who did not make the trip. Similarly, the Signless Sufferer gained memories from his otherwise scratched Beforan self, Kankri. The offshoots and annihilated realities we know of are those which send information about themselves to the alpha reality.

For this to also be true of the retjohns, we would expect Future John to be from the averted future, but we discover later that he is from the reinforced future. No one came from the averted path, and no one but the reader is aware of it. What’s more, despite Dave’s unease, it isn’t obvious whether he is in a doomed timeline or a viable one in which Sburb might still be completed.

Are we to read this non-scene as nothing more than a demonstration of John’s new power, or does it have some hidden connection to events on the main path? It wouldn’t be proper for me to speculate here, but we could always consult an oracle.

John finally finds Roxy in her cell on Derse. Roxy has stolen the non-existence from more cubes and made a pyramid of them, but she has had no luck with the Matriorb. She and John get to know each other. They figure that maybe Roxy will do better once she is free to manifest the orb for herself and not the evil witch.

Roxy tells John about the cherub Calliope whose ghost is hiding from her brother’s rampage through the Furthest Ring. Of all Roxy’s friends, Callie is the one she worries about most.

John offers to give Calliope his ring, which Aranea said could bring a ghost back to life. But when John returns to the Prospitian battleship to collect the ring, it’s gone.