Episode 35: Egberticles

Lily discusses Homestuck’s relationship to classical literature with Kate. Topics include vore, ergonomics, Virgil as Andrew Hussie’s dancestor, the Condesce as Juno, fate in Homestuck, unreliable narrators, Tiresias, the epilogues and binary choice, Pickle Inspector, and MSPA Reader.
Listen to this episode at https://perfectlygenericpodcast.com/updates/episodes/35
== Transcript ==
Kate: The Perfectly Generic Podcast contains spoilers, occasional adult language, Vriska, and (Vriska). You've been warned. This show is listener supported. I'd like to thank our Crockertier patrons: [names], for their incredibly generous support per episode.
[intro]
Lily: Achilles accuses Agamemnon of being into vore.
Kate: Uh-huh. Welcome to Episode 35 [struggling not to laugh] of the Perfectly Generic Podcast [laughs] 
Lily: [laughs] 
Kate: We're talking — 
Lily: I haven't found the line reference. This is a really intellectual conversation we're having.
Kate: Yeah. So you're joining us mid-conversation about vore. It's — y'know, it's — 
Lily: You know, comparisons between the muse Calliope voring her own brother at the end of the Epilogues and great Greek heroes.
Kate: Yeah.
Lily: I mean quite a few Greek heroes eat people.
Kate: [laughs] 
Lily: Sometimes by accident. One of my favorite texts is just a Roman tragedy about cannibalism. That's not relevant [laughs] 
Kate: I mean it *is* relevant, because now — because vore has officially appeared in Homestuck.
Lily: It's in the tags, it's a theme.
Kate: Yeah. [laughs] 
Lily: Yeah.
Kate: [quoting] Davepeta: "Wrow you almost got vored to death!"
Lily: [laughs] How does Davepeta know what vore is?! Like — 
Kate: I mean, to be — 
Lily: Was vore a thing on the internet when Dave was on the internet back in 2013?
Kate: Yes, but also Davepeta has awareness of all of Dave and Nepeta's alternate selves, which includes the ones that are in vore fanfiction.
Lily: [distressed noises] Ohhhhh.
Kate: But also Terezi and Nepeta's like, role play chat log is very vore-adjacent.
Lily: I don't remember that and I'm quite glad I don't remember that.
Kate: [laughs] [quoting] "GC's alarming and splendiferous girth settles over the succulent cholerbear steak. When she finishes the savory red meat, she lifts her proud, wise head and opens her great big mouth and speaks the ancient tongue of a thousand wisdoms."
Lily: [disapprovingly] Terezi!!
Kate: [giggles]
Lily: Terezi. 
Kate: [laughs] 
Lily: I mean I think of all characters — I mean Terezi's just relatable because she said her like, horrible things like that half joking to make everybody else really uncomfortable.
Kate: Yeah. She's so powerful.
Lily: Which is what I do in pretty much every conversat— yeah exactly!
Kate: You do it in pretty much every conversation but you can't do it here, this podcast is too powerful. So Lily — 
Lily: I mean — you tricked me into doing it!
Kate: [laughs] So Lily, why don't you introduce yourself?
Lily: I'm Lily, @homerstuck on Twitter, and homerstuck is pretty much my brand at this point because I'm a Classics student which means I spend all of term time hyper-fixating on my degree, and all of the holiday time hyper-fixating on Homestuck. And the combination of those two is mind-blowing. 
Kate: Mhmm. It's so — it's an extremely potent combination. So when someone joins us on the — 
Lily: Yeah it's just a lot.
Kate: [laughs] So when someone joins us on the show for the first time I ask the question: what's your Homestuck story? Like how did this start for you? When was your first exposure to this work and how did you become — how did you get to this place where your life is now ruined by Homestuck?
Lily: Two words: Zich Sburbd.
Kate: [laughs] Our dearly departed — 
Lily: Our dear Zich. Sometimes I can still hear his voice.
Kate: Yeah. It's great 'cause the nicest thing about making fun of Zich on the Perfectly Generic Podcast is he'll never hear it.
Lily: [laughs] [mutters 'fuck' under breath] Yeah, maybe. Yeah. So in — the literal day that Homestuck finished Zich was going off pretty much everywhere about how much he loved it and how good it was, and seeing as he definitely used the two words "postmodern" and "gay", I took a look at these posts and I was like, well, that's clearly something I have to get my teeth into as soon as possible! And so I suggested to him that I read Homestuck without knowing anything about it and it kind of spiralled downwards from there. I read it in 2 weeks and the scrolling gave me a repetitive strain injury.
Kate: Oh my god!
Lily: So Andrew Hussie is personally responsible for physical injury. Yeah.
Kate: [laughs] 
Lily: It was — I think it was just before my exams.
Kate: I think — I mean, look, I gotta say, what's your scrolling technique like?! Like y'know, I work with pro gamers, like it seems like you might have some ergonomic issues to work out with how you scroll. Like what's goin' on?
Lily: I mean — I don't have a mouse. It's — I don't know if it's the track-pad movement that wasn't helping it — it's probably just because I draw and I do a lot of writing and I do a lot of typing, so my right hand is sort of constantly under stress and I hadn't learnt to do hand exercises at that point.
Kate: Yeah, right, so obviously stretches work really well — so let's just — 
Lily: Yeah — 
Kate: Abandon Homestuck completely and make this an ergonomics podcast. When you're scrolling, like on your track-pad, is your — 
Lily: Yeah?
Kate: Is your wrist at an angle? Like are you like, twisting your wrist at a sort of unnatural angle?
Lily: Yeah. Yeah I think so.
Kate: Yeah you've gotta flatten it out, y'know, you gotta keep it level and relaxed. That's gonna help avoid RSIs [Repetitive Strain Injuries] in the future. [laughs] 
Lily: Okay, so putting your hand at like a completely forward angle, rather than twisting your elbow off to the side.
Kate: Yeah exactly — 
Lily: Yeah okay.
Kate: Like the closer you can get to like, laying — like y'know if you laid your hands flat on the desk in front of you — like the closest you can get to that when you're moving around, the better. And like the more that you can do the movements with your whole arm, and not your wrists, that's also better for you.
Lily: Oh okay! 
Kate: Yeah.
Lily: Yeah. So now that I've got like, half of Lattimore's Iliad supporting half of my palm on the track-pad, that's probably better for my hand.
Kate: Yeah absolutely. It's — 
Lily: Yeah [laughs]
Kate: Any — that's one of the better uses for the Iliad.
Lily: Especially Lattimore's.
Kate: [laughs] 
Lily: Which a lot of people don't like! [laughs] And I now don't like because I can't find the vore line. And if he's cut the vore line he's dead to me (he's dead already). I'm just waiting for Emily Wilson to finish translating the Iliad. She was like, the first woman to translate the Odyssey and I think that's very cool and I once @'d her on Twitter to tell her that the Aeneid was the same as Homestuck and she never replied.
Kate: Okay, tell me about this take. I need to — so first off, tell me what the Aeneid is.
Lily: Okay, so the Aeneid is written by a man called Virgil in — at the beginning of the Roman Em— of Rome as an imperial state rather than a republic. So Augustus has just come into power, and he's sort of writing under the patronage of the Empire. Now Augustus thinks that he is descended — by adoption, might I add — from a guy called Aeneas, who is — who was a hero in the Trojan War, who was the son of Venus. And according to — I don't really know where these legends came from before Virgil, I think they're probably Roman — Aeneas left — was like — left Troy with his companions because he was told that it was his fate to found a new Troy, said Troy being Rome. So the Aeneid is the story of Aeneas sailing to Italy to found Rome and sort of various adventures that happen to him on the way. Now it's a foundation epic, and actually I'm going to bring in one of the user questions — 
Kate: Okay.
Lily: Because spacearbys on Twitter asked: "what are the funniest parallels?" and the funniest parallel between Homestuck and classical literature is that the Aeneid begins with the line: "Arma virumque cano," which means "I sing of arms" — as in weapons — "and a man."
Kate: [laughs] 
Lily: Yeah! Yeah! I — Aeneas: retrieve arms from the chest!
Kate: [laughs] 
Lily: So Aeneas flees from burning Troy with his father and some of his friends and sets out to sea, and literally everywhere they go there is some prophecy about what they have to do and what is going to happen to them. He goes down to the Underworld; in the Underworld he meets his descendants.
Kate: Oh my god.
Lily: I know. When they — I have a long Tumblr post about this. When they get to Italy they have a huge war to fight before they can found the city, and said war is orchestrated by the sort of main female ant— like, god— by Juno, who is really a lot like the Condesce in that she's sort of — has a personal grudge against the hero but is also, like, she feels threatened by the sort of — by the fact that [thinks for a moment] she's actually powerless to stop them because it's his fate to found Rome in the first place. Not to accuse Zeus of being Lord English, but sort of everything I think about leads 'round to that — 
Kate: Zeus *is* kind of Lord English though, isn't he.
Lily: It's just that he's not seen as malevolent in ancient lit because he is their god.
Kate: We have argued on this show before that like, Lord English is more of a force of nature than like an actual antagonist. Like — 
Lily: Yeah. Yeah.
Kate: Like once — like Caliborn is an antagonist. Once you get to the point where Lord English is created, like that's just a sort of self-fulfilling — like it is a na— Lord English is like a natural disaster!
Lily: [snorts] Which is — yeah so I feel like Lord English is more akin in ancient literature to the idea of fate.
Kate: Mhmm, right!
Lily: And I mean, so I think — I was having a conversation with a friend on Twitter about fate in the Aeneid and they said something that made me think that it actually works in a similar way to in Homestuck. Because the fact that Rome will be founded by Aeneas — that's a true fact, because Virgil is writing in Rome, and that's already happened, just like when the kids see things that happen in the future they know that that's an immutable fact.
Kate: Well you also have to note that the author avatar is revealed to be on the ruins of Earth C, the planet that the players create in the game.
Lily: Oh shit! Oh shit, yeah.
Kate: Andrew — like the author avatar of Andrew Hussie is actually in a very similar situation to Virgil.
Lily: I hadn't — yeah, yeah, so it's actually more similar than I thought.
Kate: Leave it to me to always be thinking about the little author guy.That's — that guy is my favorite line of analysis for the entire work.
Lily: I mean you got drunk with him!
Kate: [laughs] Yeah I did! [laughs] Well no I didn't — let me be clear, I did not get drunk with the author insert character in Homestuck. That guy's a different guy! The actual — 
Lily: That's not — no — 
Kate: The actual guy would not propose marriage to a like, teenage girl.
Lily: Vriska!
Kate: Yeah, let's be like, absolutely fucking clear about that.
Lily: I trust him that far. Yeah.
Kate: [breaking down with laughter] It's just a metaphor.
Lily: So — 
Kate: Well there was that theory that DJ put forward which is that like, at that point you're actually seeing — 'cause the character is dead at that point and joins the like, other like — 
Lily: Oh yeah.
Kate: Caricatural "shades" of the dancestors that you see. Like, you're seeing Andrew Hussie's shade — 
Lily: Oh! Yeah.
Kate: Who like carries on the obsessions and worst qualities of his actual — of his, y'know, like living self.
Lily: That's a good point actually. Yeah, yeah. [laughs] Andrew Hussie's dancestor.
Kate: [laughs] 
Lily: So back to the Aeneid.
Kate: *Virgil* is Andrew Hussie's dancestor.
Lily: Vir— yeah. Oh fuck!! No! [various thinking noises] Is Virgil or Ovid Andrew Hussie's dancestor...? But you see Virgil — The Aeneid is not cursed. There's another Roman epic poet who writes the most cursed shit imaginable.
Kate: Alright, can you tell me a little bit about this please?
Lily: Yeah, he's called Ovid, and he wrote — his sort of — every time he writes something he seems to like, be setting out to deliberately destroy said genre he's writing in. He did it once and it got him exiled for being horny.
Kate: [laughs] 
Lily: I mean it may be something else as well, but we don't know, we only know that he thinks a horny poem got him exiled. So he writes — he wrote this epic called "The Metamorphoses", which is — the sort of point of which is kind of to subvert everything which an epic should be, in that epics are sort of inherently — they're there to explain and to — well not explain but sort of to give an account of the way things are in the world and reinforce sort of social structures and stuff. Which they do and don't, and they sort of discuss them in a way that's more nuanced than that, but the Metamorphoses was all about people transforming into things and things being in a complete state of flux all the time — it changes narrator, it has like, narrators within narrators, there is no one protagonist, it sort of skips from story to story so the only sort of theme throughout it is change, which is very meta. Which I like — it's not — it's just sort of — reading it is a bit like reading Homestuck in that you don't know where you're going at any given point, and that things are all over the place. And it's a bit non-linear and stuff. But sort of what reminds me most of Homestuck is that it's just completely irreverent to the stories it's telling. Like it'll tell a very serious, sad tale, but in a way that is different from how it's ever been told before, and that way is like in reference to a — like, a less serious genre or something. And it just sort of textually fucks with you like that. So sort of Ovid's — 
Kate: Would you say it's a shitpost epic?
Lily: Oh yeah! I mean Ovid — everything Ovid wrote was a shitpost. Some of it is literally dreadful, but that's — [laughs] he got every— like, when I think about Ovid and all the dreadful things he wrote — I think that he at least got exiled for writing them and was miserable for the rest of his life — but — 
Kate: It seems that some people want to do the same thing to the authors of the Homestuck Epilogues.
Lily: [noise of discomfort] Yeah they haven't — nothing they've done is quite as on the same level as Ovid's "Ars Amatoria", so until you get there you can't go exiling people to the like, coast of the Black Sea and — yeah.
Kate: So you recently — so y'know, Homestuck as a self-contained work is very postmodern, and it has this open ending.
Lily: Yeah.
Kate: Like, is there a precedent for the kind of work that the Epilogues are?
Lily: I think there's something very interesting in thinking about Homestuck in relation to the way epic — especially Homeric epics — end. I mean the Homeric epics are sort of part of a larger cycle, the rest of which we've lost, but they were sort of considered in antiquity to stand on their own anyway — because sort of — they deal with the idea of like, how can you — there is an end point, so in the Iliad the sort of end point to which everything goes is the fall of Troy, and in the Odyssey it's Odysseus' homecoming. But neither of those points are ever reached. In the Iliad doesn't even — the Iliad just ends with — it ends long before Troy falls. And in the Odyssey Odysseus comes home, and then you know that he has to leave again very soon. So it's sort of about the transience of finding that satisfying ending, and the fact that these sort of big fated points which people's lives are supposed to lead up to — they just — they don't get there in the way you think they are, or at the time you think they're going to. And that sort of reminds me a lot of the way that people talk about the epic — not the epic — the *Epilogues* being sort of, lacking closure. And — 
Kate: They're a subversion of the very idea of what an epilogue is supposed to be, they're basically — 
Lily: Oh completely! Yeah.
Kate: Or at least this modern conception of an epilogue. But — I mean you see — I guess — I mean — is it that they're like, called epilogues but it's really more of a sequel, in the like — 
Lily: I — hm.
Kate: Sorry, go on?
Lily: I'd say it's — actually what they feel like more is prologues to another work.
Kate: Yeah they do, it's true!
Lily: Yeah, or like an intermission, even!
Kate: Yeah, right? Exactly, right, and which — words don't mean anything in Homestuck, like most of Homestuck was intermissions by the end of it.
Lily: But like, they're called an epilogue because we were all expecting an epilogue. But that's actually, if we were given those works without that title, is that really what we'd call them?
Kate: Yeah.
Lily: Yeah.
Kate: It's — it is like a — it is a transitional work, and you mentioned like, classical theater being these big cycles; were there individual works in classical theater that were just like transition points? And was there like, disappointment in those, contemporaneously? Like, about like — oh it's not satisfying to just have to sit through the middle part of something?
Lily: I don't know, I mean I always think of — so we have a lost epic that follows the Odyssey, and when the Epilogues came out I thought of this 'cause what happens in it is just as absurd and unsatisfying, in that Odysseus is killed by his son and then his son by another woman marries his wife, and his other son marries that woman, so it's like what the fuck?! Which just kind of reminds me of the Candy route.
Kate: Yeah.
Lily: And like, so these other poems in the sort of cycle surrounding Troy were probably composed — possibly after or sort of in reaction to the Iliad and the Odyssey, and they are considered to be not as good. We have — we don't have them, sadly — and possibly slightly too long. I mean, I sort of — comparing Homestuck and like the Homeric oral tradition is a very interesting topic, because the Iliad and the Odyssey, we actually — Homer doesn't exist — didn't exist as a person. My linguistics lecturer once said that Homer is a meme — 
Kate: Yeah, the classical definition of a meme.
Lily: Like an algorithm which produces formulaic epic poetry. Because what they are — what they were originally was orally composed out of formulae which are words which are put together to make up a line in a certain meter. And so what you are, if you're a bard, is you've just learnt all these formulae and you can use them to tell the story in the meter, and if you told a bard to tell you the same story twice they would tell it in a different way. And Homestuck is kind of formulaic — 
Kate: It is!
Lily: In that there's a lot of things that repeat, and that repetition is sort of signalling, like, the integrity of the work to us, on a level that's different from what it means in the text. It's like, Ah, that's a Homestuck phrase being repeated in Homestuck. And even if like, the situations the phrase is repeated in don't necessarily relate to each other in any meaningful way — or they might do, but I don't think they do entirely — but there's also the fact that Homestuck is a visual work, which I think is really interesting, and that it's made up of sprites. And sprites are literally formulae but visual.
Kate: Yeah!
Lily: Because they're a medium that you can use to convey a story, but they're like a set medium and you have these set of expressions or these poses, or this or that, so in a sense Homestuck is being composed more like an oral ancient epic than probably anything else that's been written for centuries. And I think that's really interesting. I don't — I feel like, sort of visual analysis of Homestuck, we don't get enough of that.
Kate: It's true, I've long thought about like, we need to talk more about like, Homestuck panels from like a film perspective.
Lily: Yeah! Yeah, and like, sort of art theory — like using art as a medium of communication, which is something I — yeah — 
Kate: Yeah. But it's also interesting to see that visual element be completely discarded by the Epilogues.
Lily: Mmm! They're fanfiction!
Kate: [laughs] 
Lily: You're removed — you're literally removed from canon. You literally have to make up what you think the characters look like. It's really interesting.
Kate: Yeah.
Lily: And — but like — and that — ah, the removal of the visual element is literally what allows the narrators to have that much influence over the story, kind of. 'Cause there — I mean there was always a narrative voice in Homestuck, but y'know, you could judge both from what you were being told and what you were being shown, and those two might've contradicted each other sometimes and you build like, the point of what you're looking at from both of them. Not the point, but I mean, the sort of — the truth of what is going on, through both of them.
Kate: And like I think a lotta people need to — like, especially as it's directly mentioned in text — like, every narrator that has narrated at you in the history of Homestuck is unreliable. But not just that: every narrator that's narrated at you in the history of media is unreliable and has a perspective. Like — 
Lily: Yeah.
Kate: Some works pretend to have objective narration, but like no matter what, there's always a lens that you're viewing every story through. Like — 
Lily: And visual narration is also just as biased.
Kate: Yeah exactly.
Lily: Y'know when characters spoke through like that narration monitor thing in Homestuck it was sort of — the characters could hear them, but it wasn't like they could control them, they would just suggest things to them.
Kate: Yeah.
Lily: Kind of. Like the outcasts — the exiles? Exiles.
Kate: Yes.
Lily: Yeah. But it feels like the narrators in the Epilogue have a much stronger — well, they do have a stronger hold over what people do, don't they.
Kate: It seems to be. It's extremely unclear, because I mean, y'know, Dirk sort of egotistically talks up his own abilities but there's very clearly limitations to them. It is extremely unclear like, to what degree is Dirk fully a puppet master, or is he creating these — or is he just suggesting things that characters would do and are capable of anyway.
Lily: Yeah. Yeah. I mean there's — there's like when he deliberately slows down Kanaya before kidnapping Rose, or when Alt!Calliope tries to slow him walking up the stairs. Those moments interested me because it felt like they did actually have a say over — well not what the characters th— well actually it was over what the characters thought, but it wasn't something that they were totally susceptible to.
Kate: Is — lemme ask a question. To what degree is this similar to the influence that the gods had in classical fiction?
Lily: Free will does exist in the sort of — in classical lit. The gods are not controlling everything a person does by any means. They're not narrators. They're mostly just fucking around. Sort of the structure, I think, of fate in ancient literature is that there is an end point. There is something that is going to happen and there is nothing you can do to stop it, but how you get there is kind of up to you, and even more than that how you cope with that, with getting there, and how you cope with that fate, is up to you. And I think that's something that Homestuck deals with as well, in that there's — throughout lots of the comic, y'know, Dave especially knows things that are going to happen — or knows that he sort of, more than anybody, has to follow a particular path to get there. But lots of the characters are aware of specific outcomes, but they aren't sure how to deal — how to process those outcomes or how to get to them.
Kate: It's like the way Aranea talks about choice.
Lily: Ah, yeah. I'd forgotten her.
Kate: And choice — like, just because certain things are bound to happen does not mean you are actually without choice. Like — 
Lily: Yeah, exactly.
Kate: Paradox space creates these moments where your choices — like, they don't determine the outcome, but they do determine you.
Lily: Yeah.
Kate: They determi— like, in paradox space, you are a series of choices more than anything else, like the most commonly asked — 
Lily: Oh yeah.
Kate: The question asked when every character is introduced is: "What will you do?"
Lily: "What will you do?" yeah, yeah. And it's sort of — it's — I'm gonna talk about Vriska now.
Kate: Alright yes, excellent. [laughs] 
Lily: It's what can you do — what choices can you make that will make you into a certain person before you get to that inevitable outcome? is very much at — so Vriska reminds me an awful lot of Achilles in the Iliad because I think the way that Homestuck deals with heroism is very interesting in relation to classical heroism, which is very much not the hero as somebody who comes in and saves everybody. My lecturer once said "heroes aren't like patron saints. Oedipus is a hero. There are no patron saints of mother-fucking."
Kate: [laughs] 
Lily: Which I noted down in my lecture notes word-for-word. So heroes tend to be assholes, and they're assholes because they have a total commitment to their heroic identity and to themself, which reminds me a bit of Dirk.
Kate: Yeah. And Caliborn in the original work.
Lily: Oh my god yeah. And sort of — to be heroic is to transgress things. To transgress the rules of what is right or what is a good thing to do, and by transgressing transcend: to become somebody who has to be honored and has to be revered, almost because they're too dangerous for you not to. And so Achilles is a very very powerful — he is just fucking good at fighting. He's a hero who knows that he is going to die in the Trojan war — well actually that was a choice he made, he knew that he would either die — he could either stay at home and live a long life, and nobody would ever — he would never be famous and nobody would ever know who he was; or he could go to war and he could be very — he could be sung of for millennia. Which has happened! He literally — when he gets insulted by Agamemnon and insults Agamemnon back by calling him an eater of men, he tells his mother, who's a goddess, to tell Zeus to make the war go shit for the Greeks on whose side he is on, and so that loads of them will die, but they'll want him to come back and start fighting for them again. And so it's that sort of commitment to glory at the expense of everybody else — and that reminds me of Vriska, like creating Bec Noir in order to take him down, y'know at the expense of great destruction, but so that she could be the most important person in the narrative. And she has this sort of similar commitment to a narrative role, which y'know she doesn't know it, but is more similar to a Homeric hero than to a modern one. But she, y'know, being in a modern work, is aware of the fact that a hero should be somebody who helps other people. And so she was — 
Kate: And that's sort of the biggest struggle for her — 
Lily: Yeah.
Kate: Is her attempts to directly intervene and help other people one-on-one in like the modern hero sense are pretty dramatic failures. Whereas her transgression of expectations, and like breaking the rules of the game, does have a positive effect.
Lily: And that's what makes her relevant. Achilles just wants to be relevant, which I think sort of — Homestuck doesn't have the idea of — the idea of fame isn't really important, it's the idea of fulfilling a role for yourself and having — being able to — and for your friends to see you as a certain person, rather than like, immortal glory, which is what the Iliad goes on about.
Kate: Yeah, well right, and it's about that perception for Vriska — 
Lily: Oh!
Kate: I mean Vriska has a very — like has a discussion with another version of herself — again! — in the Epilogues, and says that — 
Lily: Oh!
Kate: What's the point of becoming your best self if the people most important to you aren't around to witness it?
Lily: Yeah! Yeah. No, exactly. I mean it's not — she doesn't want — yeah that's what I meant, it's that it's wanting all of your friends to see you as particular sort of person — 
Kate: Yeah.
Lily: That is the equivalent to "kleos" — glory — in Homestuck.
Kate: Although Vriska wants one person specifically to think of her as a hero.
Lily: [inscrutable shipping noise]
Kate: [laughs] 
Lily: [more of same] Yeah. Vriska/Terezi Achilles/Patroclus — I don't think that holds up but it's a horrible thing to think about!
Kate: Tell me more about this. I don't understand this.
Lily: Oh, Achilles' boyfriend gets killed and that's the point that he realizes that in fact his bonds with other people are something he cares about as much as his own commitment to glory, and it's when he goes into a wild, vengeful rage that he actually gets shit done and kills an awful lot of people. And then goes and cries over Patroclus' corpse an awful lot. It's not entirely Vrisrezi — 
Kate: It's a little Vrisrezi.
Lily: It's a little Vrisrezi! [laughs] 
Kate: [laughs] 
Lily: Terezi is way smarter than Patroclus!
Kate: [laughs] Well Terezi's smarter than everyone.
Lily: Correct! Correct.
Kate: So let's talk about — so Terezi is a very, like — y'know, Terezi's literally a blind prophet. Like Terezi's a very classical character.
Lily: She's — 
Kate: Can you talk about Terezi's inspirations in the classics?
Lily: So Terezi's name comes from Tiresias, who was a really cool figure, who — he's a seer who's mostly connected with the city of Thebes, where literally everything bad that could possibly happen happens, including the mother-fucking incident in which he is sort of involved. And I think seers in classics — in classical lit — actually have quite a similar role to seers in Homestuck. Especially since the seers we've seen — y'know, Terezi — Mind is sort of about choices and different directions that things could go, and Light is about the most fortunate outcome. So when seers are called in to solve a problem in ancient lit, it's usually not what is — it's never — well, sometimes — it's usually not 'what is going to happen', it's how — something bad is happening, can you tell us why, which god have we offended, and what do we need to do to stop it? So they're in there — they tell you what is the right choice to make in order to lead to your desired outcome, which is literally what sort of the role of the Seer appears to be in Homestuck I guess, unless you're like a Seer of Time, in which case you can probably just see the future. But they are — I mean Tiresias especially, every time something bad happens in Thebes he gets called in, and then gets ignored, and every time he gets ignored something really bad happens to the person who ignored him.
Kate: [laughs] 
Lily: Like — well, I mean — 
Kate: Like Vriska getting stabbed in the back.
Lily: Exactly! Ignoring what the seer is saying usually means that you're going to continue doing the thing which is transgressing divine law, and which is going to fuck everything up. And which, again, makes me think of like, doomed timelines — and actually the point I was, I think, almost got to make a long while ago about the Aeneid, is that any time something — somebody does something in the Aeneid to stop — to get in the way of the destined outcome of the story, something really bad happens to everybody and there's just suffering all 'round. It's not like everybody dying in an offshoot timeline, but it's the closest you can get in a world that doesn't actually have time travel.
Kate: 'Cause in Homestuck you see the result — you see — almost always when there's a binary choice you see the right option, and you see the good option and the bad option both play out.
Lily: Yes. Yeah you do. Hmm.
Kate: And of course — like the — y'know, you very frequently see heads or tails, right, but now in this case you've got meat or candy, you got this very binary choice, and neither option is the right one.
Lily: No! I mean, it's — yeah. It's a hundred percent the fact that sort of Homestuck is built on being a mixture of a lot of things and that by separating out these things it's not going — it's never going to be the same story. Y'know, if you wanted — if you want Homestuck to be entirely plot-driven you're not getting Homestuck, and if you want it to be entirely character-driven you're not getting Homestuck. But those aren't really the binaries on which the actual routes seem to operate. 'Cause candy also — it's not just character development, it's like extreme absurdity, thanks to Gamzee let's be honest.
Kate: "Whichever way our fate unravels" — this is Rose — "Whichever way our fate unravels there's too much of something. Too much blood, too much sugar. I almost can't see through it. It's as though our extra-canon reality, our surroundings, our actions and our consequences — they've all lost the ability to blend the ingredients responsibly. As if the moment we entered the victory state, everything began to slowly congeal, and when John made his decision it accelerated the process. The congealing intensified, causing a sort of grotesque conceptual clumping, concentrating the constituent properties of consumption into unbearable doses. Like when you get to the bottom of a sweet drink and all that's left is syrup."
Lily: [I think it's] 'cause it's fanfiction!
Kate: Yeah!
Lily: And 'cause fanfiction writers write what they want out of a tale, which is likely to be either meat or candy. Although that sort of — that's a sort of fairly meta point because I'm not sure how much Homestuck — like, how directly is Homestuck actually acknowledging the fact that it has an external readership and a fandom?
Kate: I mean, Rose's whole conception of what canon is relies on the perception of their — of like — on a collective remembrance. She doesn't directly identify it as a reader, although Dirk does later, but she does identify that like, when the story is no longer relevant, true and essential, something somewhere begins this process of forgetting that causes them to dissipate. 
Lily: Yeah, yeah. I think what I find interesting about the way Homestuck engages with a reader is that the reader is made quite singular. I mean, MSPA Reader is like, the example — 
Kate: Yeah, right, the reader was always a singular character, and that singular character just got explored a lot more.
Lily: [emotionally ]My child. 
Kate: And I think it's fair to suggest that — especially since — I mean this epilogue has been in the works for three years — it's fair to say that Friendsim and the character of MSPA Reader was structured with the foreknowledge of this, and as a setup for the Epilogue, and that Dirk is directly speaking to that character.
Lily: MSPA Reader has definitely got to the Epilogues by now.
Kate: Yeah.
Lily: Yeah. But what — it doesn't seem — it sort of does and it doesn't. It doesn't acknowledge the readership as a fandom, which has — it acknowledges fandom internally but it doesn't acknowledge the fact that its readers all have vastly differing opinions and really will not stop arguing about what is going on within the story. I don't know if that's a valid point.
Kate: I mean you do see, like — you see — 
Lily: Characters argue about it.
Kate: [laughs] Yeah!
Lily: Like Caliborn and Calliope and Dirk and — yeah.
Kate: And like John becomes convinced at the end of the candy timeline that everyone is acting wrong, right? 
Lily: Oh yeah!
Kate: That everyone is acting "not real" — 
Lily: Yeah.
Kate: Which Roxy has some major issues with.
Lily: Yeah. Jerk-off emoji.
Kate: Yeah.
Lily: Yeah [laughs] I love Roxy! 
Kate: I love Roxy so fucking much. Roxy is like the moral center of the Homestuck epilogues.
Lily: Well, Roxy is the only important character in the Homestuck Epilogues.
Kate: The — I do have — y'know what, this is — 
Lily: That's not entirely true, Vriska Maryam Lalonde matters.
Kate: Yes. No, but I do have one fucking problem with candy Roxy, which is: she doesn't have a fucking job! Like what does she do? Like she's not mentioned — like, why doesn't she get to be a cool scientist or something, like why are all the women nerf—
Lily: Yeah!
Kate: Like I understand the point, but I'm still like — I've got it stuck in my fucking craw. Like, how come everyone — like, you can tell this story about like, the narrative being potentially hijacked by John's unconscious biases, without making it so fucking misogynist, because John Egbert's not actually a misogynist. 
Lily: No!
Kate: Not to an extraordinary degree, not to the degree that's shown during candy.
Lily: Yeah, yeah. Like John got off Earth aged 13.
Kate: Yeah.
Lily: Like that was how long he had to be conditioned to be a misogynist.
Kate: And was surrounded by brilliant women the entire time.
Lily: Yeah! Yeah. Who he at least sort of spends his every conversation trying to respect.
Kate: Yeah!
Lily: Yeah, like what was Rose doing?
Kate: Well she was being — 
Lily: 'Cause she isn't mentioned as having — 
Kate: I mean she's a resistance leader.
Lily: Yeah, yeah, by then she is, yeah.
Kate: Yeah.
Lily: Yeah, no I guess — yeah. 
Kate: But that's still romantically motivated for Rose.
Lily: Yeah. I mean I just feel like we didn't really — that Rose didn't get as much depth — 
Kate: Yeah, we've hotly — 
Lily: To her as a lot of the other characters did. Or a lot of the other men did!
Kate: Yes, right, we've hotly debated on the last episode, like, how much agency Rose actually had in this plot decision — 
Lily: Oh, yeah.
Kate: And I think that it's more than she's letting on. I think it's a repeat of when she was — like, I don't think she's getting played by Doc Scratch again, right? 
Lily: No.
Kate: Like I don't think that's the mistake that she's gonna make twice.
Lily: No.
Kate: Although with all the themes of relapsing into the same problems that you had previously it's possible that it is?
Lily: Yeah, and that feels like quite a Rose theme, trying to like, get out of —
Kate: Yeah. But like, I think that Rose Lalonde has a play, because it would be really boring if she didn't.
Lily: It would be really boring if she didn't, yeah. Yeah.
Kate: And Homestuck's a lot of things but it's not boring.
Lily: No! Yeah, that's a — well that's sort of the issue at stake, isn't it. The sort of, candy is trying to — well Dirk is out there trying to get you — trying to make things interesting on his own terms, and candy is trying to make things interesting on its own terms. But neither of these terms are entirely satisfactory to the reader because the story has been subsumed by one person. Well at least very much in the meat — in meat's case, by one person's idea of what the plot should be. Which is a thing that I think makes Dirk interestingly comparable to an ancient hero as well. In that this sort of commitment to self often leads to an attempt to control the narrative — to control what is happening to him as much as possible, and to control his reputation and the sort of — basically in ancient literature, any time one person's sense of — one figure consumes an entire narrative, it tends to lead to tragedy, which I think is interesting. And this — it's not necessarily gendered. I think women — that happens with women in tragedy quite a lot, especially Medea, whom I just really love. Because like, when you have — that — such a commitment to self and heroic identity and to being known as a hero, inevitably leads to transgression, which inevitably leads to tragedy, which is — y'know, and Dirk knows this. He literally — he says "somebody needs to come and stop me".
Kate: Yeah.
Lily: And that somebody will come and stop him. So sort of going that far is making a commitment to dying young as a hero, kind of.
Kate: And I mean paradox space — like this system of being a god in paradox space is structured around, like, this conception that like, to be relevant you have to put yourself at risk of dying heroically or dying justly.
Lily: Yeah. I was thinking a lot about god tier deaths recently because there's that, but there's also the fact that — so if you like — people — y'know humans naturally think of their lives as a narrative because we do know that our lives are going to inevitably end. And when you become — if you become immortal that end is taken away from you, and that sort of — so that seeing your life as a structured narrative is also to some degree taken away from you. And I think this is — the Epilogues feel like that a bit. Like in candy especially it feels like Oh we've got so long to get through all this, and they don't really know what to do with all time that they've got. And so in order to have your life — your human life return to its sort of — to be allowed to die to be — for your life to have a satisfying — an end, you have to become — you have to take on a role as a character again. You have to take on the role of either a hero or the villain, sort of in order for you as a human to have that kind of structure to the way you think of yourself as a human. The game forces you to play its game as a hero. There was another point that I noted down about god tier deaths somewhere. Oh yeah, the gods in ancient lit don't care about glory or reputation because they're immortal. Immortality renders glory useless, and therefore if you're — y'know if you're immortal there's — there becomes less point in becoming this sort of idealized version of yourself. I'm not sure if I'm making much sense.
Kate: No, it makes sense.
Lily: Yeah. Yeah, so it's interesting when Dirk talks about John's death in meat, isn't it, that he's sort of — what's it he says, he talks about him like — there's definitely — he definitely says something along the lines of, this is the most satisfying way in which he could have ended his story — his arc or something, isn't it. And that's what the sort of construct of god tier appears to be pushing you into.
Kate: I mean you're sacrificing not even, like, for your fellow man, you're sacrificing for the narrative, for an amorphous concept.
Lily: Literally! Literally. 
Kate: John Egbert died on the cross for Homestuck to continue, not for any particular person's sins, but just for Homestuck.
Lily: Amen. [laughs] Yeah. John's kind of interesting because he doesn't have — 'cause Dave sort of has this idea that he's fated to kill Lord English, doesn't he, but John never has a very concrete destiny handed over to him. And like the power he gets is the absolute opposite to that. He actually gets the ability to change what happens in the story.
Kate: Yeah.
Lily: He sort of — he becomes — comes outside the concept of narrative fate as well as outside the concept of canon.
Kate: At a certain point, like, Homestuck and John Egbert are — like John Egbert falls into Homestuck and the work is like, comprised of him. Which is sort of analogous to what happens with — I can't believe I'm about to say this, but what happens with Pickle Inspector in Problem Sleuth.
Lily: I haven't read [struggles with the name]. I haven't read Problem Sleuth. Yeah.
Kate: So in Problem Sleuth, Pickle Inspector creates a like, paradoxical situation where he splits himself infinitely, like into past and future selves, that disperse across the entire timeline, and it eventually becomes that, like — it eventually turns out that all matter in the universe of Problem Sleuth is comprised of elemental "part-pickles".
Lily: [laughs] Shit.
Kate: Like, Pickle Inspector is the very fabric of the story, and I think of John in a very similar way to Pickle Inspector [laughs] 
Lily: That's interesting because Lord English, Caliborn, wants to make — is the fabric of the narrative progression as well. Like, his life and coming into being is what the alpha timeline is. And John falling into Homestuck and becoming Homestuck is ousting him from that.
Kate: Yeah.
Lily: It's — that's how you defeat Lord English. Everything — you make everything made up of Egberticles.
Kate: [laughs] I'm — 
Lily: That was awful [laughs] 
Kate: That's the title of this episode.
Lily: Oh shi— [laughs] 
Kate: Because not only — 'cause if you're just reading it on the website it looks like you might be saying Egberticles [pronounced Egbert-i-cleez].
Lily: [laughs] Oh shit, of course!
Kate: [laughs] 
Lily: [In a very Greek accent] John Egberticles.
Kate: Alright, let's see. We got a couple questions that I wanted to get to. "Thoughts on the d—" Anat asked on Discord: "Thoughts on the denizens and their roles in Homestuck compared to monsters and gods in Greek myth?" You had an opinion on one of these.
Lily: I had an opinion on one of these. I don't think the denizens and their mythological shit is — well I mean it's like, it's introducing themes which you can then look at this theme and think it corresponds to — it may be somehow relevant in the rest of Homestuck, but I think Echidna is quite interesting. Can I just get up a Wikipedia page?
Kate: Yeah, sure. Just Dirk it up.
Lily: [snorts loudly] I can't stop thinking about that bit! [laughs] Like, is — on Earth C is there some kind of — because they've lost — haven't they lost most literature from the original human — from original human society? Are there like, academic institutions devoted to reconstructing, like, lost literary works from what Dirk can remember about them from their Wikipedia pages?
Kate: I hate this [laughs] 
Lily: Or do they have like, old Earth internet? If they have old Earth internet, are they trying to reconstruct things from like, Tumblr shitposts? I mean most things are uploaded somewhere. Are they like trying to get around old — like, viruses on a download pdf free website in order to access like, forbidden texts that they kind find anywhere else?
Kate: The primary job of scholars on Earth C is trying to figure out like, journal logins that work.
Lily: [sound of distress] Yeah! Yeah.
Kate: [laughs] 
Lily: Mine too!
Kate: [laughs] Okay so there's this connection between Space and motherhood, and Echidna is the mother of all monsters, right? And all of the Space players — 
Lily: And there's a connection — yeah — 
Kate: And all of the Space players have Echidna as their denizen.
Lily: And there seems to be a connection between Space and monstrousness, and having some sort of power which is beyond what your species should have — which I guess goes for Alt!Calliope more than it does for normal Calliope, because they're literally a black hole!
Kate: Yeah, I mean normal Calliope never meets Echidna because normal Echidna never plays the game.
Lily: Oh, yeah yeah yeah. Yeah. But I think that sort of — that idea of monsters which are, in greek thought, often chthonic — meaning that they sort of come from the earth, they're underground — the Space aspect and space as generative but also going beyond the limits of the limits of the body slightly — I just think that's interesting. I think that's all there is to say on the matter.
Kate: Well, okay, so what's the si— so Kanaya kills Echidna in her session.
Lily: Oh shit! Yeah.
Kate: Which I guess is — I mean that session was, like — the mothering process of Space went wrong in that session.
Lily: Yeah. Yeah.
Kate: And — but Calliope — Alternate Calliope is voluntarily killed by Echidna, giving up her life to become — y'know, to become this muse with impact on multiple universes.
Lily: Yeah. That's interesting, because that means that Echidna literally births Alt!Calliope as something beyond — as a monster, in terms of her own species.
Kate: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, as a ghost, just like — y'know just like Jade as the dog beast and Kanaya as the vampire.
Lily: Yeah, yeah. Sort of unlocking Space to its fullest potential means becoming something other than what is — yeah, becoming something slightly monstrous. And I don't know — I wonder if — I wonder where that will lead, because — I mean Lord English isn't — he is unlocking Time to his fullest — to its fullest potential, but he's made up of like, how many people? which have a lot of different aspects, so it's — he doesn't feel quite so genuine an expression of his aspect as like, Alt!Calliope does. Although he does have control over the entire narrative timeline. Somebody whose name — it's on Discord, and I can't pronounce the handle — well, I don't trust myself to pronounce the handle, it has an Old English letter in it, probably a Norse letter — 
Kate: Oh, Járnviðr! Járnviðr asks — I have that character in my DnD character's name so I'm a fucking expert. [laughs] 
Lily: Yeah I mean I have a friend who's fluent in Old Norse so I should know.
Kate: "Plato's Republic as a point of reference with regards to Homestuck's attitude towards monarchy, suddenly having a planet with a species to save, creating new universes, and antagonistic alien forces which determine the fate of a society." That's not really a question, I guess it's more of a topic?
Lily: I wasn't entirely sure what this question was getting at but it did make me think something — 
Kate: Okay, what did it make you think?
Lily: About Dirk and the ultimate self. 'Cause we know Dirk has read Plato, and I think Dirk probably conceives of the ultimate self as akin to Plato's idea of understanding the Form of the Good — like the highest form of knowledge possible. Of course, Dirk being Dirk, he thinks that the highest form of knowledge possible is to know himself. And kind of everybody else, but like it's a self-contained — it can be something self-contained from his Heart player point of view. And that — so in Plato's Republic, people who have gone through a laborious education and have seen the Form of the Good can become philosopher kings over the city they live in; and that because they've — because they have this knowledge, they have the authority to rule the city and to guide the people in it. And I think that this is the role that Dirk envisages himself as having, as narrator. As in, because he has ascended to his ultimate self, that he has more authority and knowledge, that he can manipulate everybody else for what he thinks — or he tells them — is beneficial for them. I'm not sure if that really says much more about Dirk than what we already knew, but like, it's highly like— I dunno, I just think it seems likely that that's a frame of reference that he's using.
Kate: Voidfish asked — nice username, by the way, stan the Voidfish — "What classical author would've most likely written Homestuck?" 
Lily: Okay the answer to this is Lucian of Samosata, who is a late — he's writing in about, like the second century CE. He's under the Roman empire — emperor — but in Greek, and he wrote was is considered to be the first work of science fiction. It's called "A True Story". In the first, like, line it says that "whatever I'm writing here isn't true." It's about a man who goes — like, goes I think on a ship to the moon and the moon is populated by gay people exclusively — 
Kate: [laughs] 
Lily: Who are having o— who are like, at war with the gay people of the sun. And like, at some point — it's really Homestuck adjacent!
Kate: [laughs] 
Lily: Like, and everything he writes is pretty bizarre, and at some point during that story the protagonist goes down into the underworld and like, argues with Homer. And like, I think Ovid wrote Homestuck but I think Lucian probably also wrote Homestuck. It's just like — and the gay moon-people have one foo— have like, one leg and one toe, and there's a like — there's definitely, there's a genuinely scholarly debate about like, bottoming in the gay moon-people society — 
Kate: [laughs] 
Lily: I haven't found this debate yet but I've been told that it exists.
Kate: So — 
Lily: It's just like the trolls!
Kate: Yeah, right!
Lily: He refuses to explain how they reproduce and so the fandom just goes wild!
Kate: [laughs] 
Lily: The gay moon-people bottoming debate is akin to the troll dick debate.
Kate: And that's our show! [laughs]
Lily: [laughs] 
Kate: You can find the Perfectly Generic Podcast at perfectlygenericpodcast.com — fancy that — on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, Overcast; wherever you get your podcasts. Give us a review or a recommendation on those services, it helps us reach more people. You can support the Perfectly Generic Podcast on Patreon and get access to our exclusive side-show [I]ntermission — if you're interested in what [I]ntermission's like, the most recent episode with Aysha, one of the contributors to the Homestuck Epilogues, is available for free to all listeners. It's basically a bonus episode of Pgenpod every week. I'd like to thank our 413s — Skylark Tier patrons: [names]. Thank you so much for your support, it wouldn't be possible without you. You can support the show at patreon.com/pgenpod. You can find me on Twitter at twitter.com/gamblignant8, and you can find my new game Snowbound Blood, which just released its third volume, at vasterror.itch.io. Where can folks find you, Lily?
Lily: My Homestuck Twitter is @homerstuck, and my main Twitter is @palatinamedea, which is also my Tumblr. And my — I have an art blog too, which I usually can't pronounce the username of it, so like, link in bio. Yeah.
Kate: Next week, Cee L. Kyle, author of many Friendsim routes, returns for Epilogues talk with a focus on the mental health themes in the Epilogues. Tomorrow on [I]ntermission, Nell — nellcromancer — returns to talk about gender and trans themes in Homestuck.
Lily: Hell yeah!
Kate: Yeah, and so I'm really excited for that episode. [laughs] The music for this episode was done by Goomy, the President for Life of the Perfectly Generic Podcast — did the intro, and I did the outro music. Let's see, I think that's it, see ya next week everybody, thanks for coming on Lily.
[outro]
Category:Episodes