True Light, False Light:
Yaldabaoth, Racial Identity, and Gnostic Horror
Disclaimer and Prologue
I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while, but Sam’s post about creators has kicked up a light dusting of Hussie criticism, much of which centers around the Trickster arc and how Hussie “made fun” of progressive fans with the Caucasian joke.
So I thought I’d take it as an opportunity to point out that, well basically, I think everyone assuming Hussie’s intent was to mock progressives or flirt with being an edgelord is completely wrong? Oh and also to say the Trickster arc was well-written and built naturally off Homestuck’s Gnostic themes while I’m at it. You know just, the usual. No way this can go wrong. Yup.
Full disclosure: I used to be pissed off about this stuff, too! I’m dark-skinned and latino. I’m nonbinary and gay. I was pretty swept up in the Homestuck criticisms of late 2013–14 on a variety of fronts, some of which I think there’s validity to. Some of which. Mostly I think fandom built up a lot of preconceived notions and pissed itself off over nothing.
This isn’t an out and out defense of Hussie’s writing re: The Race Stuff. Yeah, there were ways his background as a white writer obviously influenced him. Yes, this sort of made the “Aracial characters” thing seem like a cop-out. In some ways, a cop-out is exactly what it is!
But despite it’s flaws, Homestuck is a pinnacle of diverse representation for LGBT experiences and experiences of neurodivergence and trauma, and it’s only improved in that regard over time. I believe it deserves to be recognized as such.
And I think there’s room to talk about the Racial stuff in a nuanced way, too. Because here’s the kicker:
Hussie’s approach to race seems perfectly genuine to me. I don’t think it was borne out of laziness or a desire to steer clear of race altogether. In fact, Homestuck’s approach to race is sourced in the same philosophical core that motivates everything else about the story.
And understanding that philosophy gives far more weight to one of the most contentious parts of the story, one which many progressives at the time regarded as Hussie enacting a joke directly at them — when in fact, the story was suggesting directly the opposite.
So let’s talk about the roots of Trickster mode.
Once again, we return to my old favorite: The Gnostic Shit.
Abstraction vs. Physicality: The twin Suns of Homestuck.
For those of you who aren’t up to date, I’m far from the first to argue for a Gnostic reading of Homestuck. Sam herself was describing it as an inherently Gnostic story as early as 2012 (and predicting the “Characters escaped from the narrative” angle to Act 7 that early, too). BetweenGenesisFrogs has been doing great writing from this angle, and yeah, so have I.
The gist is that Gnosticism posits two distinct worlds that exist in parallel:
The world of darkness, the low world ruled by the false God, Yaldabaoth:
The physical world of material reality, that we interact with on a physical basis. This world is described as false, limiting, and the source of suffering.
Then there’s the world of Light, the spiritual worlds of Ideas and true information. The way the creation myth works is that there is a True God who goes by many names, the most modern of which is Abraxas. This God contains all opposites and emanates a series of Aeons — Deities/Ideas that come in pairs, and who are meant to “create reality together”.
If these Aeons sound familiar, well, they should. Besides the various parallels smattered throughout the story with specific pairs of characters, Homestuck has a literal set of pairs of Ideas that together make up all of reality:
The Aspects.
So what we end up with is a work greatly informed by Gnosticism.
And one of the core principles of Gnosticism, the one we’re going to discuss here, is that distinction between the invisible but “Good” World of Ideas and the tangible but “Flawed” World of Matter.
The capacity to perceive ideas is an intrinsic Good in Homestuck’s universe. Hence why the artistic instinct is so championed: Anyone who adds ideas to reality through art is bettering that reality for themselves and all others, according to this philosophy.
This is why Caliborn is marked as a villain by his incredible inability to engage meaningfully with any art, or any Ideas other than the ones he has espoused for himself. What Caliborn creates, he creates poorly — and a lot of his “creation” is tantamount to stealing.
Understanding this gives new meaning to what have, up until now, seemed like somewhat arbitrary symbols:
The two different styles of Sun depicted in Homestuck.
This comic by my pal SamusRidley illustrates the point quite nicely.
On the one hand you have the blank white, Schematic Homestuck sun, which characters can look at with no issue. This sun is a representation of the idea of a sun. It is a depiction of the idea of Light, on a conceptual level, much like the Light aspect itself.
On the other, you have the photorealistic sun. This sun is realistic and presented as physical, literal.
This sun is still a symbol, but the physical sun denotes Material reality, and looks more photographic and well-executed to reflect this. The schematic sun, by contrast, is a representation of a concept — a cartoon, a blank suggestion of Ideas.
Sam herself put it best:
“ Both the schematic, abstract sun and the photorealistic, seemingly “real” sun are symbolic. They both carry meaning within the narrative. But the fact that one is schematic and the other is photorealistic is significant (it signifies).
Because in our culture we have a whole sort of mythology about photographs — that they’re more real, that they’re trustworthy, that they are in essence the simple truth. Whereas a cartoon is “just” a fabricated image.But Homestuck flips that mythology on its head, turning the schematic, more abstract and notional image, the image closer to language, the image that needs to be read, into the true world of ideas that underlies reality.”
As such, what few symbols the photorealistic Sun DOES contain stress it’s objective reality and raw physicality. In place of Blank #ffffff White, the physical sun looks bright and angry— and it is given a particular photo-realistic pallete, at least by comparison to the rest of the comic.
This sun is not a symbol for the concept of Light. It’s a symbol for little else than all of the literal, physical realities that the Sun represents. The sun conveys heat and intense, unceasing, dangerous light. It is overbearing and browbeating when it appears. And the events it appears during define absolutely everything about the characters it appears TO.
Dave’s strife battle with Bro is the epitome and conclusion of years of abuse for Dave, and the dominating tension of the sun conveys all of Dave’s pent up stress and desperation, mirroring the pressure he puts himself under.
This relationship defines all of Dave’s feelings about himself and interactions with others throughout the story, and the overbearing sense of weight he gives his abuser’s implications for his identity are unquestionably True to him.
The same can be said of Alternia, where the sun is DESCRIBED as overbearing and dementedly forceful. The sun that blinds Terezi is also this colored-in, physical sun. Her viewing of it is also the result of an act of troll violence, an act that carries along the history of karmic acts that reverberates across her people throughout centuries and lifetimes.
Just like all of the feelings of inferiority to heteromasculinity Dave carries with him feel intrinsically True to him, troll ideals of cultural violence and suppression of emotion feels Real to Terezi. But neither thing is truly real. They are both just excellently formed, incredibly bright Lies.
But Terezi also sees her first glimpse of True light through Vriska’s actions, and she grows to cherish the moment for this fact. Awakening on Prospit also guides Terezi further from Troll society’s crude, imposed reality of violence and enslavement and towards Skaia/Sburb’s ideology of self-fulfillment.
Do you see what’s happening? Vriska’s blinding sets Terezi on the path to lift herself out from the confines of Alternia’s crude, material reality and up towards freedom and self-actualization in the Pleroma — the World of Light, the World of Ideas. It’s the Gnostic path to Enlightenment, built into a character arc.
In contrast we have Kanaya, a troll who’s values are pretty much completely untouched by the rest of Troll society and who’s forms of self-identification and expression are informed entirely by Sburb. She’s also the only Troll noted not to be affected by Alternia’s overbearingly powerful Sun — Just as she is unaffected by it’s brutalizing ideology.
Much as material reality is a lie in Gnostic faith, in Homestuck, the physicality of the sun is used to mark the extremely well-consructed ideological Traps that both Humans and Trolls are trapped in by their respective physical realities.
This is much as we in the modern day are encouraged to think in mutually exploitative and dehumanizing patterns by the physical worlds in our lives.You know exactly what I’m talking about, right? I don’t seriously have to give a whole explainer on that, right. Ok let’s move on.
This reaches comically explicit heights with Calliope. Like, how on the nose can it get? Calliope’s entire existence has so little freedom it consists of a single room. Of a silent cage that plays host to an exhausting familial chess game, a death match of mutual disapproval and loathing.
Her only escape from Caliborn’s spiteful, self-aggrandizing moralizing is escaping into fiction and friendships carried out online, and Calliope literally blurs the line between these two so much they don’t exist. Her best friends ARE her favorite characters, and all she wants in life is the opportunity to escape the physical walls around her and be able to Be With Them.
She’s LITERALLY TIED TO THE ROOM WITH A BIG CHAIN, she’s as Homestuck as it gets — Calliope is CHAINED to her material reality,
both literally AND ideologically, as she believes all sorts of things are true about her own nature that hold her back and make her hate herself.
If any of that sounds familiar, well — it should, because in a lot of ways it was literally my childhood. I think in a way it was a LOT of people’s childhoods. Calliope is the millennial nerd fandom experience for those of us growing up in conservative environments or with conservative family with control over our lives, distilled into a metaphysical microcosm.
Like me — like us — Calliope hates herself. Calliope hates her life and the arbitrary, meaningless rules keeping her and her brother connected, and keeping her from living out the life she dreams of — with friends and love and possibility and creative potential.
But she can do nothing to escape her confines except go online and engage with reality on a conceptual level — in the realm of Ideas. You know, just like we do in fandom? This is what Gnosticism is getting at — that the world of Ideas is intrinsically Good, for humanity and for ourselves.
The base, physical reality we live in is a burden, a falsehood, and we are diminished whenever we are bound to it. That’s what Homestuck is getting at.
That’s the lived experience Calliope represents. This dynamic is mirrored and recolored for every single character in the comic, pre-Sburb entry.
If you STILL don’t quite buy that this is intentional, consider that the Gnostic depiction of Yaldabaoth depicts a red, colored sun:
And the Yaldabaoth that Caliborn kills actually represents the Schematic Sun that Skaia presents to the viewer through the Light aspect. The one that gives off true Light — true information, wisdom, and good fortune all in one. Enlightenment.
In it’s place, a new Sun symbol retroactively emerges: The realistic sun that acts as a mark for Lord English’s domains of influence. Yaldabaoth creates the physical world we inhabit, after all, and so too is Lord English responsible for the creation of both Trolls and Humans.
A symbol of extremely Important feeling information…that is ultimately purely physical, and thus, inherently untrue. That is Caliborn’s impact — the nature of the Suns he forces into being is to serve as mirrors for the imperfect, cruel worlds he creates.
This reaches a new extreme with the Green Sun, which literally embodies the death of both the character’s universes but also acts as a mark of Lord English’s domain.
In fact, the Green Sun is one of the Alpha Timeline’s primary enforcers simply through the sheer inertia it exerts on the story. Through the sequence of events required to secure both it’s creation and destruction, the Green Sun marks it’s surroundings as dominated by Lord English’s Alpha Timeline.
Where before the characters were trapped in the material reality of their home worlds, now they are trapped in the material reality of Sburb’s hyper-specific, brutally demanding Alpha Timeline. The rest of the story is them striving and suffering through it while climbing ever upwards to more understanding about the nature of their realities and how to be happy as they explore the realm of Ideas.
And in this context, Black Holes and pockets of Void generally serve as assets for the Heroes. In them, they are kept hidden from the Green Sun’s Light — and also from Lord English and Doc Scratch’s awareness of them. And it is in those black spaces — outside of the view of the story — that the characters are most often happy and most able to grow as people.
It is in the World of Ideas — outside of their literal depiction, lit by physical Suns — that the characters are free. And what is the act that heralds the near-complete end of the Alpha Timeline, and freedom on Earth C for the main characters?
Right. The death of Lord English’s final realistic Sun.
Definition as Horror — Trickster Mode: Engage
Now, let’s carry this over to Tricksters I guess finally. I thought I would make this post small, can you believe that? Someday I’ll learn to fucking redact stuff to a reasonable length.
It’s important to note that Tricksters aren’t ever, at any point, depicted as a Good thing. If the joke were simply, “Ha Ha the kids were White all along and you guys are fools for caring about alternate depictions!”, then you’d expect the kids becoming “Caucasian” to be a positive or even neutral thing that doesn’t Matter. Because who Cares about race, right?
But that isn’t what happens! On the contrary, the characters react to the Tricksters in a way that implies they are visually unnerving and repulsive.
One friend of mine described it perfectly: Tricksterstuck is Murderstuck.
Or specifically, an inverse of it. It’s Comedy-as-Horror, a buildup of unbearable tension scenarios distinguished by the payoff:
In Murderstuck the punch line is a club to the head.
In Tricksterstuck, it’s a pie in the face.
And one results in Death: the shutting down of the physical body, a denial of any further ability for the person to influence or make themselves felt in reality.
The other results in Life: The ascension of the physical body and ONLY the physical body, an empowerment of one’s impact on reality that is so intense the characters are unable to perceive any ideas any more complex than getting Exactly What They Want, Whenever They Want It, However They Want It.
The Trickster Kids have ridiculous, impossible, game-breaking Power. They can affect reality in ways that are totally unreasonable to expect of any human power but somehow they do it anyway because they’re Just That Good.
They Get Shit Done. They’re the ultimate fulfillment of all of Society’s most brutal and demanding expectations for young people.
Fuck, they even seek Procreation above all else — the single biggest reason most of society cites for abusing and disempowering LGBT folks! And once they match the single Perfect Idea our human culture decided was good, they are simultaneously empowered to do Literally Anything.
Then they demonstrate this desire by exploiting or overruling the feelings of other people, even (especially!) people they love, because making the physical reality of what they desire (each other, in various capacities) is more important than dealing with all the messy but valid concepts, ideas and feelings standing between them and those they care about.
Dirk’s connection to his Heart — his True Self — obviously denies him the urge to participate in this simplification of reality, because Dirk’s inherent connection to queerness means he knows he doesn’t truly fit into this procreative, hyper-efficient mold.
Dirk innately understands he doesn’t have it in him to want to Procreate in this literal, material way. So even if parts of him want the Trickster package,
it simply isn’t for him.
And Caliborn explicitly LOVES this shit! He’s actively angry at the characters when they stop playing out this impossibly “effective” role, despite the fact that doing so is poison to them, and demands that they immediately pick the torch back up and continue. He is demanding they assume the single specific Role he is satisfied by by emulating ceaseless action on the material world.
In a way, one can view Tricksterism as a direct inversion of Grimdark — and in fact the same language is used to describe both. The Squiddles are an idealization created by the Horrorterrors to influence reality, but peering at the their Material forms also exposes Rose to becoming a vector for their true ideology — an undistilled Thanatos instinct that demands action at all costs.
Tricksterism, in contrast, is a materialization of all of Cherub ideology. After all, everything about a normal Cherub’s existence revolves around exerting personal power and getting shit done in the material plane of reality. It makes sense that, when viewing humanity, they would prize all the traits that most effectively denote having the Power with which to do so.
Where Grimdark materializes a destructive ideology, Tricksterism idealizes the material. And herein lies the horror in both. So the Tricksters being White doesn’t mean that their literal, material reality is to be Racially White. Rather, Whiteness as a racial category is used to denote the acquisition of absurd levels of power.
As such, the way the characters are presented as unsettling puts their racial identity front and center. The Tricksters look horrifying BECAUSE they are caucasian, or at least, because they’re definitively A Particular Race.
Just like the white Schematic Sun is replaced by a colored-in, photorealistic Physical Sun, the kids’ white, Schematic Templates are filled in with definite, defined skin tone Palletes.
But they aren’t quite given Literally White Palletes. Instead, they’re given largely Caucasian skin tones mixed with what can only be described as Anime-colored hair, eyes, and cute cheek swirls. They’re rendered cartoonishly colorful in the way cartoons or Anime main characters are, and cartoon Anime Main Characters can pretty much do anything.
Which is the point, because Trickster Mode represents unmitigated physical Power. But it comes at the cost of the constriction of the character’s identities to a single iteration with a definite physical form and a greatly diminished capacity for emotional relatability and complexity.
And that’s the source of the horror — the denial of the possibility to be anything else. Notice that even the new joke stresses the fact that Jane embodies exclusively a single option among a myriad of possibilities, and thus an implicit refusal OF those possibilities in interpreting the character.
Just as Humanity’s material reality makes it feel impossible to Dave to embrace ideas like bisexuality and alternatives to heteromasculinity, or for Terezi and Vriska to embrace forms of interaction outside of hyperviolent Troll competition.
So the new joke keeps the philosophical context even while distancing itself from the overtly political one. But that very political context was on the side of diversity, of variety, of championing the infinite ideas of the many over the raw, physical power of The Presumed Default.
The Whiteness in and of itself is the brutal, exhausting punchline. It is a burden the kids have to throw off and find actively unpleasant to wear.
It is a limiter and a poison.
This is re-contextualized somewhat by [S] Credits, where Trickster Mode is cast in somewhat less disparaging tones, of course. But even as it’s used more playfully, Trickster Mode here is still presented as a definitively temporary little drug-coded power trip.
Comfortable reality for the characters is still being blank and undefined.
On top of that, the engagement of Trickster mode is presented as a mischievous ploy by Calliope, who is influenced by the same Cherub ideology as Caliborn.
And there’s a soft tone of horror under the humor, as we still get Jake’s “Noooooo” over the experience: implying the characters will regret this in the morning, much as you regret any ill-advised binge at a party.
The point remains the same. Trickster mode is rendered as a drug trip of inverted reality — the complex, multifaceted, hyperinterpretable realities of each character are paved over with a hypercompetent, hyperspecific Cultural Ideal.
But true peace and good existence comes in the empty spaces, in the blank skin, in the periods of life we can fill in with Ideas. This is the mentality that suffuses the entirety of Homestuck. One can definitely argue about it’s merits, I think that’s a debate worth having.
But I think it’s worth acknowledging the intent is THERE, and that it’s more than a smarmy take-that at Concerned Liberals. It is, in fact, an affirmation of the undiluted Rightness of their creative potential, as expressed through the context of Homestuck itself.
Homestuck literally says Canonically White Kids = Bad And Scary, and
Schematic Template Kids Who Can Be Anything = Cool And Good.
So like. Maybe it’s still a cop out in some ways. But it’s a pretty well-built up one, that plays into all of Homestuck’s themes as a story.
And I mean, if nothing else, we actually get a depiction of what characters in Homestuck look like if they’re drawn as Literally White in the comic. Which means that whenever the characters are drawn in blank, they look distinctly and uniquely…Not Like That?
So if anything Homestuck itself establishes a context where there’s a stronger argument for the kids being ANY RACE OR SKIN TONE AT ALL…besides White. Because we saw what White looks like in the comic, in sprite and hero-mode form. It looks like none of the kids we’re meant to love.
So yeah. Hussie didn’t set out to write White Kids, even if he messed up and White identifiers slipped into his comic as a byproduct of his whiteness. Hussie quite deliberately set out writing kids who could be any kind of kids, and who in fact are all kinds of kids, because the point of their designs is to encourage interpretation. And those philosophical roots go deep.
So yeah Homestuck is good and everyone’s been oversimplifying it for years, I’m right about everything, etc etc the end you’re welcome.
But for real I’m perfectly willing to have a conversation about this. I don’t think Hussie executed Race stuff perfectly regardless of this, I just think presuming he was being mean-spirited and mocking the SJWs with this is pretty misguided and not at all the obvious conclusion to reach given the context Homestuck puts enormous effort into setting up.
Thanks to SamusRidley for making me think seriously about those damn Suns for the first time and for supplying the imageset linked. And thanks to Sam Keeper for making the post that wound up inspiring this one in the first place, and both of them for generally being the best?
That’s all for right now, then.
Keep Rising,
