Be Wherever You Are
A sequel to TIME.
Special thanks to optimisticDuelist and Wakraya for helping me figure out the ideas in this essay. Special thanks to localbeefcake, Psychic Sylph, espressodepresso, and optimisticDuelist for beta reading.
Environment. Harmony. Receptiveness. Becoming one with the world around you. Housekeeping. Motherhood. Monsterhood. Physical Space. The Setting of a Story.
The queen of the aspects is Space. Where Time wears blinders, narrowed in, fixated on moments, actions, passions, always seeking impatiently to add as many things it can into its script before it reaches finality, Space’s moments are few and far between, affording a wide latitude for harmony and simple existence in between. In this, Space is Cardinal Passive, the coldest, calmest Aspect, finding harmony where it rests in between the moments before it rises leisurely from its repose and brings about the end of the world.
The Spacebound are gentle, and they are wrathful. They are princesses, and they are monsters. They are silly, and they are calculating. They are patient beyond belief, until they suddenly act with calamitous force. They are tools that do whatever the world demands of them, and they are people with wills of their own. They are Jade Harley, Witch of Space, Dorothy and Wicked Witch. They are Kanaya Maryam, Sylph of Space, Hunter and Vampire. They are Porrim Maryam, Maid of Space, Promiscuous and Motherly. They are Calliope, Muse of Space, Monstrous and Adorable.
Eden
Eternal Stasis
Homestuck’s character arcs follow a pattern recognizable from stories both modern and ancient. Before ascent, descent; before descent, stasis. All stories initiate into a ground state from which the events of the story present a divergence. A land called Eden.
And does Jade not live in Eden? A great big greenery, forcefully isolated from its surroundings and guarded by divine fire. On this island rests the Temple of the Speaker, the source of Sburb’s code, and the Forge, which will one day become part of the Medium. A world with all she could possibly desire, save change and human contact.
I mention the symbolism of this land because Jade inhabits her home so much more completely than her friends. Where John, Rose, and Dave hide away in their rooms until the game pushes them to move, Jade runs free, exploring the living land, playing fetch, delivering mail, building machines, and maintaining her wondrous garden. And where Dave is resistant to the lure of the world of dreams and John and Rose yet unawakened at the story’s start, Jade has wandered the streets of Prospit for many years and found joy among its inhabitants and wonder in the visions of Skaia.
And in her oneness with this world, Jade becomes herself the image of her surroundings. She is silly, cheerful, and colorful as her home is silly, cheerful and colorful. She is mysterious because she has access to knowledge beyond the world of her fellows. She is calm and collected because on this island, under Bequerel’s watchful eye, there is nothing that can harm her. She is entranced by fauna because her good dog is her best friend. In her dreams she is scatterbrained and goofy, as one often is in dreams, and she is able to put Skaia’s chaotic visions to order only by use of her reminders, solidifying her dream-memories by grounding them in the physical world.
If Jade’s world is isolated, Kanaya’s is all but desolate, a tiny plot of green surrounded on all sides by endless, undead-infested desert. Unable to venture far from home, Kanaya indulges her creative instincts by decorating her oasis with sculpted trees and colorful fabric, sews clothing, or stays in and reads about the undead rather than face them in combat. And she dreams, of course. All Spacebound are tied to Prospit, but Kanaya extends her connection further, reshaping her topiary in the image of Skaia’s mysterious clouds and professing her faith in Skaia and her mistrust of that which exists beyond its light.
Billions of years in the future, in the long-corroded ruins of Homestuck itself, there lives Calliope. Alone save for a brother she can never meet, and bound by a chain to her room in the ancient meteor base the trolls once inhabited, she has nothing to explore and no animals to play with. As such, she spends all her time indoors, poring over her great tome of lore, imagining its twists and turns, its characters and their relationships. Homestuck is her Eden, and she inhabits it as fully as her predecessors, writing down her speculations and her headcanons in fics, drawing pictures of her favorite figures, and even cosplaying as a self-insert troll, a version of herself capable of existing among Homestuck’s characters. A version of herself worthy of those things her home will not give her.
Hades
The Descent
At the close of Act 4, Jade’s dreamself dies, and her robot explodes, taking her room with it. The effects are profound, when we next see her, her pissy attitude is a stark contrast to Feferi’s chipper words, the sharp jump from Prospit to dreambubble to glimpsing the ineffable giving her a migraine and a sudden temper. And the tragedies compound. Her greenhouse is first emptied by John, then shattered by her Bec piñata entry item, shortly before the real Bequerel destroys what remains of Earth’s population while protecting Jade. She emerges into the Medium confused and reliant on Dave to guide her as she gets her bearings. Only with time does she grow accustomed to the drama and chaos of Act 5, learning to make harsh sacrifices for dubious gains or yell to get her voice heard with the best of them. And then, without warning, she dies.
And it could be worse, oh it could be so much worse. Jadesprite, having only ever known the peace of Prospit and strange aeons in the dreambubbles, falls apart instantly upon being pulled back into the world and asked to fight Jack. Over the course of her few hours of existence she pulls herself together only slightly, managing to help her friends out in some small way before the close of her arc.
Kanaya’s descent is slower, more gradual. Hades walks alongside her, at a distance at first, but treading ever closer. Her composure is tested by the antics of her peers, shaken by their betrayals. By the time she is trapped in the meteor, it is all around her. Bit by bit, she is pulled from the comfort of Skaia’s plans into the seductive turmoil of dangerous girls and idiotic boys, embroiling herself against better judgment in their antics, telling herself perhaps that she can help, or at the very least that her actions are so ridiculous as to be incapable of harm. Until the trap snaps shut.
Calliope’s descent is the sharpest, she has only the warning of Skaia clouding over before her brother has her assassinated, and her soul departs from their shared body. Next we see her she is consumed by fear of him, hiding behind layer upon layer of obscurity and panicking at the slightest sign of danger. Her alternate, Red Calliope, was trapped by her own self-sacrifice within a near-eternity of darkness and loneliness, taking its cold, harsh necessity into herself.
Ascent
The Resurrection
And what awaits after this loss of innocence, this katabasis into infinite drama? Why, catharsis. Power, clarity, the granting of dearly held wishes. Having known joy and grief, peace and struggle, the Spacebound ascends, integrating her experiences and emerging in a newer, stronger form. With mastery of one duality achieved, all that remains is to depart for the next.
Jade Harley, the girl in the tower, who loved her dog dearly, and wished so strongly to share in the wondrous world of fauna, emerges from her session having become one with Bequerel, gaining his powerful snout and his majestic ears for herself through the manipulation of Sburb mechanics and the power of his love. So empowered, she swiftly collects the remnants of her damaged session and leaves for greener pastures.
Kanaya Maryam, dutiful girl raised in sunlight, last of the jadebloods, is granted one last gift through her blood when it turns out the power of the rainbow drinkers she read of as a child rested within her all her life, and she awakens as kin to the wild undead that surrounded her home. So empowered, she puts a decisive end to the vagaries of Horrorstuck and the troll drama that pursued her throughout her journey to that point.
Though we see little of her path to that point, Porrim, too, awakens to the power of rainbow drinkers under unknown circumstances, following the path of the Fairy classes to re-create themselves in the image of their Aspects.
Calliope, loneliest girl in Paradox Space, who hides her face beneath a fantasy out of fear and uncertainty, is granted no physical transformation but the gift of a life within the world of Homestuck, and proof that she truly is worthy of love.
Red Calliope, grim reaper, as one with the vast emptiness of Space, collapses herself into a black hole, and in so doing takes the Green Sun and the whole of Homestuck with her.
Further Vistas
Two themes emerge, then. First, that the Spacebound are receptive, with a keen sense of their environment and an ability to adapt to it, changing this way or that as circumstances demand. Second, that they have clear, legible character arcs with pronounced dips and rises, reflecting their organized natures.
Still, Homestuck does not end with the first dip and rise. There’s more to the story, still more places to go.
For both Jade and Kanaya, ascension is followed by a swift return to a long, difficult period of waiting. Accustomed to stasis, they take to it as best they can, enduring the years of isolation with the help of their friends, mastering new skills, and finding love, an easier proposition now that they are no longer alone in their isolation. And yet that love is fragile, cut through with pain and uncertainty. Davesprite’s insecurities drive him and Jade apart, while Rose’s descent into alcoholism is something she and Kanaya find difficult to broach, to properly confront, before it is too late. Perhaps this is Kanaya’s unfamiliarity with human alcoholism, perhaps she is preoccupied quietly dealing with her own addictions, perhaps she finds overwhelming the contrast between Rose’s air of competence, her undeniable intellect, and her self-destructive tendencies. Perhaps it is simply that she is young, and young love is all that lights the pallor of the meteor and the darkness that awaits after their journey.
It is as part of this journey that we, and she, encounter Openbound. I used the word katabasis earlier, the descent, literal or figurative, into the underworld, and Openbound is inarguably a katabasis. It is for Meenah, it is for the Reader, and it is for Kanaya. At the start of the game Kanaya is found working up the nerve to descend into Openbound and seek out Porrim, at the end she has found her and learned valuable lessons about vampirism and legacy. Porrim is able to act as a guide for Kanaya because she represents the lone eye of calm in the infinite echo chamber of teen drama that is the dancestors, her maturity contrasting their arrested development and her free love policy contrasting their obsessive approach to relationships. Porrim does not struggle against the currents of the afterlife, for she has found peace, absorbing the strengths of her environment while shedding as much of its weaknesses as she can.
Upon arrival into the alpha session, Jade is immediately controlled by the Condescension, her Aspect expressing itself darkly as she embodies the helplessness of a villain-controlled session. Her death in that timeline, along with Kanaya’s, signals the end of its potential and the necessity of the retcon.
Housekeeping
And Patience
Thus far we have spent considerable time discussing what the Spacebound can become, what different environments might shape them into being. But what are they in and of themselves? When we cancel out all these complex influences, what immutable essence is left behind?
Harmony. Patience. Duty. Creativity. Housekeeping. The Spacebound are organizers, doing their best whenever possible to make the world around them a little more sensible, a little more level-headed, a little more beautiful.
Jade maintains a large garden, a labor-intensive practice that requires a great deal of patience, especially in a world of disappearing pumpkins. She also executes circuitous plans of mail delivery through her visions in Skaia. She is resourceful in her isolation. She organizes her conversations with the trolls through her password system. She makes sure to alchemize as many spare computers as she can, just in case. She picks up the planets in Cascade. In Grimbark form she also acts as an enforcer of the Condesce’s plans, moving people into place with her powers.
Kanaya shapes the trees in her garden into cloud shapes with her chainsaw and drapes colorful cloth all over her home, creating her whole environment with her labors. She also makes clothing, for herself and, on request, for others. She protects Tavros from Vriska and cleans Vriska’s room unbidden. She tries (and often fails) to keep her friends from hurting themselves and each other (pale and ashen romance, by Alternian standards).
Porrim keeps an eye on Latula, tries to help her unwind and deal with her problems more constructively, creating harmony. When Kankri frustrates her with his ugly pants and performative suffering in the cold, she knits him a nice sweater.
Calliope guides her friends through gentle encouragement and cryptic hints, suggesting what she is not willing to say outright and speculating what she does not yet know, connecting them through transtemporal chat across their disparate timelines. She cleans up after her brother. She speculates on the nature of Homestuck, weaving together what information she has to try and make sense of the Active and Passive, the masculine and feminine.
Even Hussie himself fulfills this duty, cleaning up the mess Doc Scratch has made of the narrative as well as literally cleaning up Doc Scratch’s apartment while wearing a prominent Space hoodie.
Womanhood
Homestuck as a story has a great many things to say about gender, and on that particular topic the Spacebound are its favorite mouthpieces. Not only are they all girls, but all of them share classes that my essay Homestuck Classes and the Patriarchy identify as most strongly tied to womanhood. Indeed, these four classes, the Witch, the Sylph, the Maid, and the Muse, are the only four classes that essay identifies as exclusively tied to womanhood, suggesting a particularly strong connection between Space and the concept of femininity in Homestuck’s symbolic language.
And what kind of womanhood does Space present? What statements on femininity exist in its emphasis of Duty, of Sense, of Adapting to one’s environment to the point of becoming synonymous with it. Plainly, it is the ideal of the caretaker, the housekeeper, woman as Mother. From Jade’s fumbling “woman’s touch” to Kanaya’s need for someone in her life she can take care of and keep safe, motherhood suffuses the Aspect. We know next to nothing about the Dolorosa, but in what we do know, motherhood features prominently, to the point where her relationship with the Sufferer carries over in Porrim’s doting on Kankri.
Motherhood is kindness. Motherhood is safety. In myth and stories, the loving Mother is as close as one gets to an objective, uncomplicated force for good. Except, of course, when she’s not. Echidna, Mother of All Monsters, is closely associated with the Space Aspect as the confirmed Denizen of Jade, Kanaya and Red Calliope, and as optimisticDuelist has written, a character’s Denizen is a mirror of their arc, so the Spacebound are all Little Mothers of Monsters. Jade’s entry turns Jack Noir from a deadly threat to an apocalyptic one, Kanaya crafting the Empiricist’s Wand allows Eridan to carve a short but bloody swath into the meteor, and Calliope’s very existence is the motivating force behind much of Caliborn’s terrifying rampage through Paradox Space.
And as the mother of a monster is herself a monster, so too have we already seen the propensity of the Spacebound for transforming into the most dread creatures, from doggy girls to daywalkers. Here, too, the Dolorosa is instructive, as brief as her appearances are, the story still manages to emphasize that while she can be gentle, she can also be the very image of dread.
Is this all a little bit sexist? It’s a little bit sexist, isn’t it, all this talk of motherhood and duties and the implicit pigeonholing of a woman’s role? If Space is closely tied to mythic conceptions of womanhood and motherhood, then the actions of Homestuck’s Spacebound represent a conversation of sorts with those archetypes, from Jade’s buried grief and anger at being always isolated, locked away in the home for safekeeping, to Kanaya’s frustration with people taking her presence and aid for granted to Porrim’s feminist interrogation of gender roles.
And of course, the characters themselves are more complex than that, and do not fully fit into the motherly archetypes they’ve been assigned, from Jade’s fiery temper to Kanaya’s lesbianism (which makes it impossible for her to fulfill the mythic archetype of the mother even if she weren’t an alien).
Physical Space
The Spacebound are defined by the spaces they inhabit, and through their dutiful labor they organize, manipulate, recreate those same spaces. This also applies in a more literal sense.
Jade demonstrates a preternatural intuition for her surroundings, she is able to perform high-energy experimentation based on guesswork and know with seeming certainty where the cards are in her Memory Modus, her knowledge supplementing her ability to control her surroundings. Once in the medium, she further expands her ability to perceive the world around her by creating the Junior Compu-Sooth Spectagoggles, a considerable upgrade of Rose’s crystal ball.
Bequerel, Jade’s familiar, has a powerful control over physical space. In his very first scene, he is shown teleporting, resizing objects, and accelerating to supersonic speeds in order to outrun and catch a bullet mid-flight. Jadesprite, who is partly Bec, additionally demonstrates the power of telekinesis, and Jade inherits all of these once she godtiers.
Kanaya wields the power of Separation, of increasing the space between things whether metaphorically or literally, be that through moirallegiance, auspisticism or chainsaws (as optimisticDuelist notes, Kanaya’s weapon only severs in a story where stabs are far more common). As a Rainbow Drinker, she becomes attuned to space itself, gaining vampiric speed in a reference to Problem Sleuth.
Setting
All Creation
The metanarrative nature of Space is so self-evident it’s almost invisible. Environment. Physical Space. Setting. The House. And, in particular, those things without which the Setting cannot possibly function.
Let us finally address the elephant in the room. The creation of the Speaker of the Vast Croak is the central task of Sburb, the assigned “victory state” of the game, and the Spacebound are absolutely essential to this task. Not only do their homes contain equipment absolutely essential for the game, from the frog temple containing Sburb’s basic code to the Forge which injects the Speaker into Skaia’s waiting incubator, but their lands themselves teem with frogs to use as raw material.
As another facet of their importance, while the benefits of completing one’s personal quest and facing one’s Denizen are great, and some manner of deal will need to be reached with them to release their respective Grist Hoards and mature Skaia so that it can bear the Speaker, completing the Spacebound’s quest is necessary to stoke the Forge and make the frogs on their Land more accessible, enabling their recombination and preparing for the Forge’s ignition and the launching of the Speaker.
On a conceptual level, frogs form an essential part of Space’s symbology. As amphibians, creatures half of the land and half of the sea, they are closely associated with Abraxas, the Gnostic God that embodies all opposites in one being and so permeates the universe entire, both its conceptual and material halves. His influence is also felt in the Consorts populating the players’ Lands: Salamanders, Turtles, Crocodiles, and Iguanas are all beings with one metaphorical foot on land and one in the water.
The Green Sun, too, is heavily associated with Space. Formed from burning universes, its emerald eye forms the gravitational center of Homestuck’s story in itself, and its heat fuels the First Guardians, beings defined by their instinct for protection and guidance (though this instinct can be subverted, as in the case of Doc Scratch).
Jade spends much of her early arc dutifully helping introduce us to key concepts like Dreamselves, First Guardians, dream bubbles, and frog breeding. Later in her arc, as Grimdark Jade, she helps lay out the foundations of the Condesce’s plot and set up the various pieces for Collide. At the close of her story, after a long and complex struggle with the duties imposed on her, Jade’s triumph is being allowed to have fun and play with her dogs and in so doing create the circumstances that allow White to beat Black, altering the fundamental rules of Sburb’s chess game.
In addition to standing at the center of Sgrub, Kanaya stands at the center of Alternia. As the bearer of the Matriorb, she represents the last hope of trollkind perpetuating itself beyond its extinction in the Reckoning, the trust of her impossibly rare virgin mother grub lusus placing the duty of motherhood of an entire species on her shoulders.
This important duty of reproduction echoes in other jadebloods, including both Porrim and the Dolorosa, whose lives were destined for vital labor in the brooding caverns maintaining the health of the species, though as wilful Maids they both chose to renounce these duties for the thrills of Sgrub or the more personal duty of raising the Signless to maturity in spite of his lususless, off-color mutation.
In some ways, Calliope is the most important character in Homestuck. In others, the most trapped. Effectively exiled from the plot, Calliope’s influence on the story and setting is indirect, her presence in the void inspiring key actors like Caliborn, Aranea, and Roxy to chase after her, each for their own purposes. In this way, she acts as a McGuffin, a princess in a tower in the narrative sense where Jade and Kanaya were towered princesses in a more literal sense.
Finally, the most important Spacebound to be introduced is Red Calliope, whose consumptive assault on the Green Sun collapses the heart of Homestuck, sweeping up the storm of infinite calamities with which the story is synonymous into a tidy package and putting a neat, orderly end to Lord English’s reign.
In Summary
Space is the most zoomed out Aspect, heavily preoccupied with large scale systems like the reproductive functions of Sburb or the preservation of the Alternian species. This is in keeping with its position in the Aspect Zodiac as Cardinal Cold/Passive and its description in the Extended Zodiac as “concerned with the big picture”.
As a result of this outward-looking attitude, the Spacebound are highly receptive, prone to absorbing the overall emotional tenor of the world around them, learning from their environment and changing to match their surroundings.
The Spacebound tend to have clean, readable character arcs. They start at a relatively tranquil place before being exposed to progressively darker and more traumatic events, culminating in death. Then, they resurrect in a powerful new form that bears the marks of their experiences, both good and bad.
As befits those concerned with the bigger picture, the Spacebound tend to be calm, controlled individuals, with a penchant for organizing and prettifying their surroundings. They believe strongly in approaching situations sensibly and impartially, and try to impose this attitude on those around them. In this, they act out the archetype of the Mother, which weighs heavily on the Aspect as a whole.
On a meta level, Space as an Aspect deals with Homestuck’s Setting, and the Spacebound tend to be found near things that are essential to its functioning, such as the frog temples containing Sburb’s code, the matriorb, or the Green Sun itself.
