Heir of Grief — John Egbert and the burden of being a Main Character
Here’s the thing: I am quite fond of John Egbert. I think he’s an extremely sweet, friendly boy who cares deeply about his loved ones and is endlessly charming, on top of being a fascinating character in his own right. He’s not as flashy as some of the other folks we get to know during Homestuck’s run, but I believe there’s a lot to be examined and talked about if you know where to look. I mean, he is sort of our protagonist, isn’t he? John is the first kid we get to know — he’s there right out of the gate, and permeates the entire story from beginning to end. There’s gotta be something worth looking at here.
That is to say, I’ve got a head full of John Thoughts, a heart full of John Feelings, and a hand full of keyboard. Grab a chair and get cozy: let’s talk about blue boy.
John is not a character that we see display extreme bouts of quote-unquote “serious” feelings very often. Sure, he gets angry and sad and what have you — but it’s not really common for him to express or acknowledge grief and other extreme, negative emotions in a more than passing way throughout the story. Unless they’re directed at something almost entirely inconsequential and mundane, that is. Like, say, a certain brand of food products, the inside of a father’s room, or an old childhood movie. We’ll get back to that last one later.
So, part of this comes from his natural disposition. John is a genuinely carefree guy! He’s a fun, goofy kid with a sense of humor and a pep in his step. However, it also ties into what I previously mentioned in my John Thread: he tends to swallow down his aforementioned negative emotions, and tries to pretend that everything’s fine and that those feelings don’t exist. And in key instances, those feelings end up resurfacing at inopportune moments and being redirected as anger toward a specific target — justifiably so or not.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at the first time we ever see something genuinely traumatic happen to John in the story: when Jade’s dreamself dies in order to save him. John sheds a tear as he reads her letter — and at that point he has no idea that this is a “backup” version of her, that the “real” Jade is perfectly fine back on Earth. We also get a neat little lampshade on John’s driving emotional conflict throughout the story, summed up in four panels and a single sentence:
After all, duty calls. The narrative demands action, a certain homicidal tyrant demands attention, and soon enough our very own Action Movie Hero Boy has other things to worry about: a clear goal and a mission to carry out, glimpses of the future he sees in the clouds and directions from outside sources and — oh, Jade’s fine actually! No need to worry about that anymore.
This becomes a pattern with John: every time something traumatic happens to him, he deals with it (wittingly or not) by allowing the story to dictate where he needs to go next and throwing himself into whatever it is that he’s supposed to be doing. Going even further as the comic unfolds, we could say that he tries to hold on to the fact that Sburb is just a game as a coping mechanism, clinging to that abstraction in order to distance himself from certain events that take place during its course.
When him and Rose find their respective parents right before the showdown with Bec Noir, he doesn’t have any time to process it. He finds his father, dead, but there’s a big boss fight ahead of him! And then he dies, and then he’s resurrected, and then he needs to revive Rose and initiate the scratch with Echidna’s Needles — he has many things to do, he has plot to carry out. At that point, we start skipping ahead through the Doc Scratch portion of the narrative up until Cascade, and I think it’s pretty safe to say that John doesn’t have much time for introspection in between those events.
We do see him address his father’s death in two instances, though. During his conversation with Karkat in the moments leading up to Cascade, he briefly mentions feeling upset at his death, but is immediately shut down by Karkat, because John needs to focus on the game and they can’t have him “getting all morose” (ouch, jesus dude!). He then promptly sucks it up and the last he has to say on the matter is that he hopes he can find an alternate version of Dad in their new, scratched session.
The second time the subject comes up, it’s during a scene I think we’re all pretty familiar with: during his trip through the yellow yard with Jade, at the very end of Year 2, John has a bit of Moment while watching Con Air on his 15th birthday. Long story short, he blows up, seemingly out of nowhere, about how stupid and lame his favorite movie actually is, acts extremely dismissive and rude towards Jade, freaks out at her breakup with Davesprite, and then promptly turns this aggression toward the orange bird himself when he finds the (extremely uncalled for and insensitive) note that was left inside his hoodie.
So, what is the takeaway here?
It seems pretty clear to me that John is someone who never learned how to properly unpack and process his feelings, and ends up developing a modus operandi that consists of letting them stew inside him until they are brought to the surface by an external source, spilling all over the place and making a huge mess in the process.
I don’t think it’d be a stretch to say that Karkat’s reaction somewhat confirmed this bias that John has — that he needs to be moving the plot along and doing things at all times, with no space for any feelings (unless the feelings in question are not his own), otherwise he’s not being an useful, proper Friendleader. He doesn’t have time to be sad or to think about his trauma because introspection means inaction, and a protagonist is meant to Act. Also, feelings are messy and complicated — they’re difficult to think about sometimes, and John definitely doesn’t want any of that when he could be focusing on other, simpler things.
This is arguably the moment where we see John at his lowest. He’s cranky, he’s mean-spirited, he’s snappy and aggressive — all qualities that are highly uncharacteristic of the boy we’ve come to know. The scene tells us that there’s a lot of frustration bubbling under the surface during the entirety of the ship voyage, at least from John’s end, and I think that comes down to two main reasons:
1) He’s been pretty much abandoned by the “plot” for the time being, relegated to the static role of waiting in a limbo, as the camera pans to focus on the Alpha Session and various other characters. Of note here is that his mood seems to pick up considerably once interesting things start happening in the dream bubbles, and this funk is effectively gone by the time he rejoins the “Main Plot” in earnest. Also, beating the ever-living shit out of Caliborn probably helped reduce his stress.
2) John adamantly refuses to engage with his grief in any constructive capacity, which causes it to resurface as anger and be redirected outwards during certain stressful moments. In this instance, the idea of meeting a brand new iteration of his father in the Alpha session does not negate the trauma of witnessing the death of a parent, and holding on to the game mechanics-based possibility only serves to distance him from that trauma and let him pretend that it didn’t happen.
There is, however, one other reaction that we see from John when he’s confronted with tragedy at a later point in the story: detachment.
Let’s talk about [S] Game Over.
More precisely, let’s talk about its aftermath. After exploring the desolate wasteland that’s become of the Alpha session, aimlessly floating through planetary debris and watching front-seat as someone disintegrates into nothing, John eventually happens upon Roxy and Rose on LOPAN. And, needless to say, the disparity between John and Roxy’s reaction at Rose’s death is… extremely jarring.
He seems to be completely detached from the experience on an emotional, visceral level. Mildly apathetic as this girl openly weeps over the body of one of his closest friends, a few steps removed from the whole scene — almost as if he’s become a little too Breath-involved. He even addresses it himself, a few pages later:
So, even if he’s not exactly feeling much of anything at the moment, he still is very invested in being an active participant in trying to find a solution for their session’s issues. Again, this need to do instead of think or feel rears its head, as John is absolutely ready to be pointed at a problem and told how to solve it — only this time, there isn’t anyone around to do that. His only company is Roxy, and she’s pretty adamant about her stance on their current situation.
This seems to actually get to John. If anything, he seems more upset after the exchange with Roxy than he was right as he saw Rose die in front of him. One might assume that the catastrophic weight of their situation has finally started to really sink in, with nothing left to occupy his thoughts and divert his attention.
Thank goodness for Terezi, then! She swoops in out of nowhere, crash-lands right in front of this small-scale pity party, and provides John with exactly what (he thinks) he needs: a solution, and a direction to move in. Additionally, her timely arrival seems to echo what some key plot points thrown at John have done in the past — interrupted his pain and kept him from entertaining the negative emotions he’s felt in a serious capacity. It’s almost as if the game itself is actively nudging him toward serving the plot above anything else, and John doesn’t seem very opposed to leaning on that. In fact, he’s quite eager to do so whenever the opportunity presents itself.
That is not a good course of action in Homestuck.
I don’t want to get too tangential here, so I’ll just drop a relevant quote from the wonderful essay ACT 6 HOMESTUCK AS NARRATIVE REBELLION, OR: ARCS ARE DEAD, LONG LIVE ARCS, which you should absolutely check out if you haven’t already. Here’s the quote in question:
“In Homestuck, Hussie contrasts his protagonists’ organic, individual growth with the harmful power of the narrative structures that try to control them. This is another manifestation of the recurring theme of Homestuck: human lives are spontaneous and personal, and don’t always fit into the structures that try to shape them. True maturity is being able to grow beyond these structures.”
I previously mentioned on my twitter thread that John is someone who’s very closely associated with childhood and innocence. Those aren’t bad things per se, but in the context of a story that is concerned with the effective, real maturation of its characters on an emotional level (among other things), holding on too tightly to these notions does not lead down a very happy road. Relying on Sburb’s artificial narratives and systems as opposed to organic, natural growth is shown to be harmful and stunting, with the biggest example of this being Caliborn — Homestuck’s very own main-villain-to-be.
During the post-Act 5 Intermissions, we are privy to rapid-fire snapshots of what is essentially a bunch of teenagers growing up. We see them grapple with their identities, reckon with past trauma and develop new relationships — for better or for worse. It’s clear that Sburb’s carefully engineered narrative and symbolic, ultimate act of self-realization, God Tiering, do pitifully little to actually help its players where their growth as people is concerned. As Dave helpfully summarizes in this conversation with Karkat:
“Levelling up” does not make your problems disappear, and in order to move past them effectively, you need to be willing to put in the work yourself, to look for answers beyond what the game provides. Essentially, these characters need to focus on their arcs rather than their Arcs. As betweenrealities puts it in the essay I previously linked:
“Good narrative structures (what I referred to as arcs) depict character growth in a way that feels organic, spontaneous, and real. Cliché narrative structures (what we’re calling Arcs) overpower organic character growth and force it to fit a preexisting, forced model based on a set of expectations.”
We’re all very familiar with John Egbert’s Arc. He’s the Hero, the Main Character, the Protagonist, the Leader. But… what about John’s arc? What about his development outside of what Sburb deems his role in the overarching narrative? What about the 16 year old boy behind the title of Heir of Breath?
Put into contrast with characters like Rose, Dave, Karkat and Terezi, among many others, there’s a sense that John remains relatively static throughout the story. He has no defining moment of internal realization, gains no new insights about himself, and seems pretty opposed to change in general. Even his reuniting with Dad Crocker, the arguable culmination of his personal journey through Homestuck, is more akin to putting a bandaid over a gaping wound than any sort of effective emotional catharsis. And sure enough, by the time the credits roll around, John is still very clearly missing his actual father:
John never quite manages to take full control of his own narrative — his sense of self is intimately tied to his role in the game. The extent to which he’s relied on Sburb’s mechanics, coupled with his tendency to simply take directions from others and his own lack of desire to face his negative emotions head-on means that, once these structures are absent from his life, we are left with someone who is lost, lacking a clear sense of identity and feeling disconnected from the people he cares about. Suddenly, John finds himself with none of his usual coping mechanisms to fall back on, and is left to pick up the pieces on his own.
Well, damn. That’s a pretty depressing conclusion to come to, huh? However! Do not despair yet, readers. What all that means is very simple: John’s arc is not complete yet!
We already see a laundry list of issues John needs to contend with in order for his emotional arc to catch up with his capital a narrative Arc. They all seem to stem from the same place: his refusal to do any self-reflection and his unwillingness to take the initiative on solving his problems. Really, he has his work cut out for him! And I believe that he will be given the opportunity to properly address these pitfalls in the upcoming epilogue (whenever THAT one happens), because Homestuck, at its core, is not a punishing narrative that relishes in pushing its characters into a pit of despair without giving them the tools to pull themselves back out of it. It’s a story about growth, about empathy, about knowing yourself and striving to be a better person.
And I don’t think this story will be complete without having given its Protagonist the opportunity to do exactly that.
