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Credits to optimisticDuelist’s Rose Garden Discord guild for commentary and criticism.
Special thanks to Wakraya, DM Sylph, localbeefcake, Rap Kenobi, and optimisticDuelist.
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What is Time?
The problem is that when the subject of temporal mechanics is broached our sparing human intellects instantly assume the most ingratiating posture of surrender imaginable. But we will do our best to understand regardless. Time is one of Homestuck’s twelve Aspects, one of the two considered essential to a Sburb session. In Homestuck, it is the Aspect of four characters: Dave Strider, the Knight of Time, Aradia Megido, the Maid of Time, Damara Megido, the Witch of Time, and Caliborn, the Lord of Time.
My perspective on how these particular Classes function and interact with the Aspect of Time is informed by optimisticDuelist’s Force and Flow essay series as well as my own Class and Patriarchy essay. I think they’re really good but they should not be necessary for this one.
I will also be making occasional reference to my Aspect Zodiac essay series, which defines the Aspects in terms of closeness to four conceptual poles or principles. Time in particular is one of the Cardinal Aspects, a pure embodiment of one of these, specifically the Active principle (also known as the Hot principle) which governs that which is intense, personal, and subjective.
Willpower
Aka Impatience
The first theme of Time, then, is that very intensity. That subjectivity. The Timebound are cursed with fierce and fiery wills, blessed with an incapacity for patience. As the Extended Zodiac puts it, they are fighters, full stop, incapable of accepting the status quo as it is presented to them, relentless, actionable. Reckless fools and courageous heroes. Doers.
It is in the pursuit of these wills that the Timebound are granted their most iconic ability, the power to travel through time, to overlap their lifelines within a single temporal frame and multiply their abilities, accomplishing in hours what takes others weeks. When even that is not enough, when the timeline itself takes a wrong turn, they pit their wills against the shape of the world itself and rewrite the past through sheer determination, dooming themselves in the process.
Dave embodies this theme well, always tense and ready from a childhood spent being stalked by his fearsome Bro, shaped into a taut spring that reacts quickly and violently to surprises and represses the grief such actions lead to. Against more cautious advice, he will chase his destiny to the most dangerous of places, and even override his friend’s autonomy rather than wait. Yet, though his impetuousness brings both him and others grief and worse, it is also his greatest strength; bringing him the drive necessary to execute circuitous time-based stock manipulations and the heroism to chase after his ecto-sister to save her from the Draconian Dignitary, fully aware of the doom that this will bring him at the Tumor’s blast.
But what of Aradia, then? How can Time be Impatience and Willpower when its Maid is a depressed ghost? It’s simple, really. Aradia is a depressed ghost when we first see her, yes, but she wasn’t always. Once she was as alive as you or anyone else, and when she was, she was fearsome. Focused and goal-driven, with victory on her mind and a strong personal sense of justice, angry when her friends were hurt, and willing to act on that anger even knowing such action was unwise.
As laid out in Class and Patriarchy, this is the arc and challenge of the Maid. With her willful spirit, Aradia presents a threat to the forces that maintain the status quo, and so those forces conspire to lay her low, to force her into a role of subservience to that which should be her domain. Even so, her anger at Equius attempting to control her with his heart chip, her violent revenge at Vriska, her aggressive ranting at Rose’s similarly impatient actions, in these and other ways, Aradia makes her feelings known even when barred from fully experiencing them.
But when she does experience them, she is transformed utterly. As a fully realized Fairy, Aradia’s will transcends the story almost entirely, and she promptly leaves the audience’s spotlight, returning only to deliver exposition or briefly help the heroes out here and there. One might think this helpfulness would conflict with Time’s wilful nature, but the important thing is that Aradia does these things not because they are needed, not because others ask for them, but because she wants to do them.
Not much is known of Damara, her role in the story is brief and tragic. A failed hero, her will is corrupted by Lord English’s machinations. Like her dancestor, she is capable of great acts of anger, crippling Rufioh and killing Meenah as revenge for the former’s cheating and the latter’s goading, and spending most of the Beforan session sabotaging her former friends at every turn. As the Handmaid, she is stubborn and rebellious, attacking her guardian, threatening suicide in protest of Scratch’s ungentlemanly asphyxiation, reactivating the Fifth Wall in direct contradiction with his express request, and running away at the first opportunity.
Caliborn is, of course, the very embodiment of all these things. From the very beginning he has decided exactly what he wants and he is willing to break any rule and endure any hardship to achieve these goals. When someone annoys him, he shoots them. When the story doesn’t go the way he wants, he hits it with a crowbar. When his spirit fuses with three others, two of whom have very real reasons to dislike him and work against him, the resultant conglomerate, Lord English, is really just a bigger Caliborn, his overwhelming will having all but completely subsumed the others.
Death
Aka Endings
But why are all these characters so wilful, so impatient? Why do they put so much energy into everything they do, every moment of their existence? Why do they write like they’re running out of time? Plainly, it is because they are. Take a moment, dear reader, to go back to the previous section, and check how many times the subject of Death has already come up in the discussion of the Timebound. I’ll wait.
And it doesn’t stop there. Dave keeps preserved remains of the dead in his room, he’s unwittingly made an accessory to his Bro’s puppet snuff film, he dreams of death, even his longstanding association with crows hints at his close connection to Death, crows being carrion-eaters with a longstanding mythological association with the dying and dead.
Aradia is, of course, dead when we first meet her, but even before dying she was a determined archeologist, digging up the remains of the old and the dead in her yard and even unearthing one of the ancient frog temples containing the code of Sburb. Her psychic powers allow her to hear the voices of the dead, a sense which sharpens following her own death, and she follows the instructions of her mysterious ancestors until their guidance apparently stops somewhere around the time she enters Sgrub. She also easily holds the record for most on-screen deaths following the mass-obliteration of Aradiabots in the fights against both Bec Noir and Lord English.
Even once she ascends, Aradia’s fascination with the dead does not end, she immediately heads for the dreambubbles, Homestuck’s afterlife, and takes up a hobby as the resident psychopomp, guiding souls into the world of the dead or even just hanging out with them. She ceases to even see death as much of a bad thing, having reached complete harmony with her Aspect.
Damara’s section is, again, short, but it bears repeating that as Meenah’s killer, she is one of only two dancestors known to have taken a life, and unlike Meenah, she likely didn’t have her victim’s best interests at heart. As the Handmaid, she is an agent of death and destruction, responsible for much of Alternia’s misery, enslaved with a curse of conditional mortality, wishing for nothing more than to die and escape her servitude.
Caliborn takes oneness with Death in a different, more disturbing direction. He delights in seeing people die, he kills without hesitation, and his face is a terrible skull. As Lord English, he has become known as a physical embodiment of death on Alternia, his primary means of transportation is the Cairo Overcoat, a flying, time-traveling sarcophagus, and his terrifying ability to kill even ghosts with his laser breath leads Kurloz to refer to him as the Angel of double death.
Time
And Timekeeping
There is, of course, a more literal dimension to the name. The Time icon is a stylized gear, and both time itself and methods of timekeeping are significant parts of the Aspect’s symbology. Beyond utilizing time travel and being closely connected to the Scratch constructs, –that grand reset button around which so much of the story swivels– the Timebound are also known for urgent action and Dave, Aradia, and Caliborn are all at some point faced with a test of waiting (something none of them do well at, tying back to their Impatience).
Their Lands are also closely tied to timekeeping devices, with Dave’s Land of Heat and Clockwork being littered with spinning gears and Aradia’s Land of Quartz and Melody evoking piezoelectric quartz crystals, a material used in modern clocks among many other technologies.
optimisticDuelist lays out some of the ways Dave serves his friends time here, like by rambling for long periods of time, giving them time-altering weapons, and providing for basic game necessities like grist, boondollars, and general know-how, freeing up their time to focus on their own goals and objectives (again, the intersection between time and will).
Where Dave’s use of time is precise and skillful, as befits a Knight, Aradia’s approach is one of overwhelming power. Over the course of the troll session she creates hundreds if not thousands of doomed duplicates of herself in the process of correcting for the timeline errors made by her teammates and uses them all to aid in the fight against first the Black King and later Bec Noir, buying her team and her alpha self time to escape the latter by teleporting to the meteor. Once ascended to the godtiers, Aradia’s ability undergoes further evolution; she gains the ability to stop Bec Noir in his tracks by freezing him in place, buying her time to escape him once again and reach the green sun and the dream bubbles, in which she proceeds to make time for herself instead of letting the alpha timeline and her ancestors decide everything for her.
Recorded Music
Music is one of Homestuck’s most universal languages, and its presence suffuses the story on every level. Many of its pages feature sound, and each of the beta kids are associated with a particular instrument. Those instruments are implied to play an important role in their personal quests, since John’s quest culminates in him playing a magical song in the core of the Land of Wind and Shade. Fraymotifs are unique special moves performed in combat, by all appearances the most powerful attacks available to the protagonists, and not only is the name itself musical, the word fray referring to combat and a motif being a recurring musical piece (in combat terms, a signature technique), each named fraymotif itself has a musical name, from Breathless Progression to Adagio Redshift.
Time, however, has a particular relationship to musical recordings. Dave’s signature instrument is the turntables, which do not create original sound but are rather used to remix existing pieces into new forms. Indeed, Dave wears a vinyl record on his shirt, further linking him to this instrument. Dave also sends Jade musical remixes of his own composition.
Dave’s turntables are connected more directly to the Time Aspect when he (or rather his alternate future self Davesprite) uses them as the base for the Timetables, his personal time machine. Aradia, too, uses time machines based on devices for playing recorded music, in her case a music box, an old-timey device which has previously shown up in Problem Sleuth. Larger versions of these devices also make up the Scratch constructs on Dave and Damara’s Lands.
The Homestuck music albums also connect Time to the practice of remixing, from Felt album songs like Omelette Sandwich that repeats itself over and over adding instrumentation each time or English which has a semi-palindromic structure that encourages the listener to themselves alter it by playing it backwards, to the Dr Who quotes in Aradia’s theme song Arisen Anew.
Uniqueness
Aka Weirdness aka Shitty Art
As a side effect of their Impatience and strong personal drives, the Timebound tend to end up incredibly idiosyncratic people. They’re simply not interested in conforming to what’s popular or a traditional sense of aesthetics, and as a result their personal preferences and aesthetics tend to be unsettling to those that haven’t gotten to know them yet.
Dave writes SBaHJ, a webcomic known for its deliberately low image quality, absurd sense of humor, and absolute lack of coherent plot. He also owns a mummified hand and what looks like a chemically preserved infant. Once he gets around to alchemizing, the objects he creates leave the underlings around him squinting in fear and discomfort.
While dead, Aradia mostly unsettles people with her lack of reactions, but once she reaches the godtiers her endless cheer and absolute lack of a filter regarding her excitement over things like funerals and the destruction of reality makes more than a few people take a couple steps back from her enormous grin.
Caliborn is obsessive about his interests to a degree that his sister claims transcends human understanding, delighting in death and action and meat/candy. He fetishizes tenderness and soft affection, considering it scandalous and depraved. His aesthetic is garish and his artstyle is almost incomprehensible at first before he puts in the herculean efforts required to become merely bad in a somewhat ordinary sense of the word.
Narrative
Aka Pacing aka The Script
So where do we find ourselves, at the intersection of these things? Time is Willpower, the power to Act. It is Death, hanging always over our heads, inspiring us to fight, the final moment of drama. It is the flow of time itself, equated with the progression of events by Red Calliope. It is that which is recorded, and played back. It is Uniqueness, Strangeness, that spark which sets one character apart from another. In summary, as suggested by TexTalks, it is Narrative.
And who writes the Narrative? Well, Andrew Hussie does, obviously. But, ignoring him, within the confines of Homestuck’s own story, who decides what happens? To paraphrase optimisticDuelist parahphrasing Bladekindeyewear: Everyone does. Every wish, every desire, will be realized somehow, eventually. Time, the progress of events, is wrought into shape by acts of Will.
Of course, that’s not the whole story. Tamping down on everyone’s ability to realize their desires is the outsized influence of Lord English, whose dominating Will and complex temporal manipulations forces everyone else to dance, puppet-like, in accordance with his Script, his Alpha Timeline. Those who will not submit to the Lord’s will are marked for death and removed from his story.
In this light, Dave and Aradia’s conscripted service maintaining the Alpha takes on a more sinister tone, one of keeping at least some version of their friends alive long enough to complete their purpose, and in Dave’s case of keeping the dead Dave pile from growing too tall. Dave helps facilitate the story in other ways too, his boondollar donation to Terezi forming the initial link between the troll and human sessions, the first link in a circular chain. From a meta perspective, then, Aradia’s decision to leave the story of Homestuck behind shows profound wisdom and an understanding of the Alpha Timeline’s cruelty.
Sidenote: Aradia’s Pesterquest chapter touches in interesting ways on Time as narrative and in particular on her helping Reader to Make Time in the sense of creating a narrative, but I’ll leave the details of that vague for spoiler reasons.
For those still trapped within its jaws, the Alpha breeds resignation and resentment. Dave is gradually foreshadowed to be the one to defeat Lord English, a fact he picks up on and grows to resent. Aradia, perhaps more trapped than any, takes to ranting at any who will listen about the inevitability of pointless aggression, always being told what to do, and wanton, reckless destruction. The Handmaid is, as previously mentioned, miserable in a manner similar to Aradia, but with a clearer understanding of who put her in that situation and what she must do to escape it.
For Caliborn himself, it’s different. Inevitability delights him, for he knows that it serves him, that causality is on his side, that the story of Homestuck is the story of his domination, his control. Even his defeats are part of his journey, and he pays special attention to those who will accomplish them, chatting with Jake and giving him advice while keeping an eye on Dave through Lil Cal’s eyes and raising him as an adversary with Bro’s help. He even draws comics about him, calling him his Alpha Male and God’s Gift to the Yaois.
But no tyrant rules forever. Homestuck is the story of Lord English’s domination, the cruelty it imposes through the choices it deems worthy of the Alpha Timeline, and the further cruelty it inflicts on those that Alpha casts aside. It takes ages, eons, but eventually those cast aside people gather, rise up, and fight back against him, and through their collective efforts (and Vriska), he is overthrown, and Homestuck ends.
