All Hail Shadow / Good Riddance
Part of the Aspect Cycle
Thanks to ReversalSun, optimisticDuelist, and localbeefcake
Least explored of all the Aspects is Doom, an obscure, pitiable thing, filled with naught but miserable truths, burning brightly for one singular moment, then falling silent evermore. Belonging to the category of Mutable Aspects, Doom deals with unchangeable material conditions and the suffering they bring, but with a broad perspective that looks beyond present problems and sees the disasters of tomorrow. Thus, it is strongly Material, dominated by the Cardinal Blood, and weakly Cold, influenced by the Cardinal Space. Its heroes are Sollux Captor, who fights against his species’ fate and achieves glory, however brief, and Mituna Captor, who is consumed by his destiny and achieves peace, however fragile.
Disaster
To be a Captor is to know your doom well in advance. The powerful prophetic abilities which Sollux and Mituna share deliver messages of agonizing clarity: their worlds will die, their futures are grim, and there is nothing anyone can do to change this. For nearly as long as they live, this fact forms the core of their motivations. The future fills their visions, and it is all they can do to try and fight it with everything they are. Endlessly, they warn those around them of what is to come, and like Cassandra of myth, their prophecies go tragically ignored. Still, they fight. When Kanaya finds a temple of the Speaker, Sollux is the one who takes on the effort of deciphering the glyphs within, guiding Aradia to seek out the temple’s twin and complete Sgrub’s code. Seeking to optimize the chance of success, he organizes twin sessions and selects for each team the most rational leader he can find among his group.
It does not work. Both of his elected leaders are soon ousted, his twin entry chains forcibly merged by circumstance and fate, and the game he had hoped would avert the apocalypse was always its harbinger. Still, he fights, trying first to call things off, and when that fails to enter and try to mitigate the damage best he can. It does not work. Aradia psychically knocks him out and when he wakes up, things are just about as bad as they can be. The game is well underway, meteorites fall like rain, and the Vast Glub, the swan song of all trollkind, is already keening.
And then, somehow, Sollux Captor completes the entry chain, getting himself and Feferi into the game even as his psyche is presently torn apart by a psychic storm the size of a galaxy. And all it costs him is his life.
Homestuck’s Doombound are beings shaped by foreknowledge of doom, of disaster. They are ever preparing for the worst, ever aware that their greatest efforts may not be enough. And when the worst does happen, when the need is greatest, they break beyond their limitations and burn, burn bright like stars, until the problem is solved and they can fade to ash. Homestuck’s characters carry with them echoes of great archetypes, and as the comic’s premier Doombound Sollux bears the mantle of the mythological System Administrator, ever stressed, ever ornery, doing everything he can to delay system collapse for just another day.
Bladekindeyewear associates the Doom Aspect with binary-colored bombs, red fire, and skulls, a disastrous blast of heat and pressure and the smoldering wreckage left behind. Greatest of these bombs is the Tumor, whose shadow hangs ever over the binary universes of Earth and Alternia. The Tumor, an echo of which Sollux captured in the enigmatic Möbius Double Reacharound Virus.
Intermission: The Möbius Double Reacharound Virus
Let’s take a moment to explore that last statement, actually. Homestuck is a story filled with foreshadowing both overt and oblique, and Sollux’s virus certainly falls in the latter category. Computer programming has a reputation as an impenetrable discipline, and many a reader’s eyes will immediately glaze over when presented with even more straightforward pieces of code, never mind the Möbius virus, which when examined more closely defies causality itself in its construction. But I will do my best to explain regardless.
The Möbius virus is composed of two interleaving loops, one red, one blue.
- First, the red loop initiates, waiting for the death of the red universe.
- A while later, the blue loop initiates inside of the red loop, waiting for the death of the blue universe.
- When the red universe dies, the red code checks for the completion of the blue code, including the blue loop, then terminates.
- After this is done, the blue code follows suit, waiting for the death of the blue universe before checking if the red code is complete.
- Finally, both the red and blue codes are destroyed.
Following linear causality, it should be clear that this code will never finish. The red code cannot complete before the blue code does, and vice versa. Nevertheless, the image presented by this structure, of two interleaving universes each waiting for the destruction of the other before itself terminating, bears a strong resemblance to the structure of the first half of Homestuck, the half in which the Möbius virus is introduced (introduced, in fact, about halfway through).
First a red universe, that of Earth, is imported. A while later, its blue counterpart, that of Alternia, follows suit. The two interleave, connected together by channels of communication and shared destiny. Finally, the two are destroyed together in the Tumor, resulting in a detonation so vast it echoes across all of Homestuck, and in the heart of that calamity is born the originator of misfortune, Lord English.
Sollux has even managed to capture a quite subtle detail about these universes: he refers to the blue universe not as U2, the universe he originally imported, but as !U2, the added exclamation point (“bang” in programmer lingo) representing the mathematical concept of negation, truth turned falsehood and falsehood turned truth, as Alternia itself resides within a scratched universe, the negative image of Beforus. For those keeping score at home, the Möbius virus is first introduced some 2000 pages before the notion of Alternia being a post-scratch world is properly introduced.
To bring us back to our original point, then, the power of the Tumor is what Sollux’s virus taps into, a lesser echo of the apocalyptic design which has wormed its way into the very structure of causality itself. Running it creates an immediate explosion, followed by a lasting curse that spreads to all unfortunate enough to meet its victim. It kills Karkat’s lusus instantly, and the remaining guardians are soon to follow. Of course, perhaps that was always destined to happen regardless. Certainly, things do not turn out better in the timeline where the Möbius virus remains untouched. Then again, perhaps not. The causality is ambiguous at best, as it often is in Homestuck.
It is in the hinterlands of explosive force and terrible sacrifice, then, that we can understand the psionic powers of the yellowbloods. Explosive, overwhelming power which can be overclocked to truly staggering levels but will tear a troll’s life apart unless managed. Bees, whose honey the Egyptians used in their funerary rites. Ominous visions of impending death. And the haunting shadow of Helmsman recruitment.
Rules
Loss is key to the story of the Captors, and both Sollux and Mituna eventually lose their psychic abilities, among them the prophetic powers that so dominated their lives up to that point. And when they do, a miraculous transformation takes place. Freed from the curse of knowledge, they achieve a kind of peace, taking a more optimistic view of things. In particular Mituna, who has lost much of his mobility and ability to communicate with others, displays an overall cheerfulness that stands in stark contrast to the dour prophet of doom Aranea describes.
This forms a particularly clear instance of a broader pattern in Homestuck, acknowledged by Hussie themself (video link), that losing something that seemed essential to who you are can be an empowering, liberating experience. To diminish and remain Galadriel allows one to view the Self from a different angle and so gain a greater understanding of its mysteries. It is to approach, however incrementally, that superceding bodyless and timeless persona that embodies all possible and impossible angles.
Every part of Homestuck contains some trace of its overall structure, and in Doom that structure is at its most blatant. The theme of duality stands out most here; Homestuck is riddled with binaries, and the Doombound bear the mark of the First Prime in everything they are, from typing quirks to color schemes to dream selves to bees. And just as Homestuck’s binaries are frequently collapsed or discarded, so too do the Doombound eventually lose this theming, Sollux’s frantic lisping twos fading to peaceful zeroes while Mituna adopts a chaotic rainbow of numbers to suit his colorful language (though in fairness his original quirk is lost to the mists of time).
As the patterns of Homestuck stand out more clearly around the Doombound, so too are they more clear-sighted themselves. Sollux’s ability to encode cosmic truth into his computer programs is legendary, from Sgrub to the Möbius virus, and as explained by TexTalks, computers and programs are themselves central to the way Homestuck functions. His intuitive grasp of this cosmic machinery in turn leaves him unflappable even in the face of the strangest plot twists, from his own half-death to the narrative left hook that is the retcon. Even Mituna is said to have had powerful second sight in spite of being an Heir, a class Homestuck does not otherwise associate with prognostication.
Tragedy
Narratively, Homestuck associates Doom with the concept of Tragedy, an ancient form of storytelling heavily preoccupied with oracles and auguries. More broadly, Doom is a story’s focus on suffering and downturns, inevitable disasters and the pain they bring. It is an Aspect of enduring that which you are forced to endure, and to make the most of what few chances you have to change what you can change, even if it costs you. As described by the Extended Zodiac, it is an Aspect of wisdom, born from pain, as Tiresias, the original blind seer, learned from the curse that transformed him into a woman for seven years.
TexTalks describes Doom as an Aspect of emotional low points, and places a particular emphasis on Doomed Timelines, those pathways of alternative causality which by their nature contain naught but death and misery, but which nevertheless invariably contribute to the health of the alpha and the perpetuation of the Paradox. Insurance for all that lives and furtherance of the plans of Lord English. A sacrifice offered up before a skull-faced God.
The only wise choice, then, is to leave that ever-churning gyre behind before it swallows you whole.
