Where do we go when we die? Humans have been asking this question for thousands of years, and most if not all human religions attempt to answer it. Some assign posthumous reward or punishment based on a person’s morality; some assign afterlives based on social status; still others declare that you will be reborn repeatedly until you meet the criteria for the afterlife.

Homestuck also answers this question, and it does so in a simple and compelling way: if you die and can’t be brought back to life by one of the several methods allowed by the Game, you go to a dreambubble, an enclosed region of space in the Furthest Ring put there by a quick-thinking Witch of Life who realized the people around her were going to do a lot of dying. These dreambubbles are amazing places, not only in their similarities to and differences from the afterlives of existing religions, but also in the interactions they allow with Homestuck’s canon and fandom. Let’s dive in.



In Homestuck, a newly dead person finds themselves reliving their own memories until they become aware that they are dead. After that, they can move between dreambubbles and interact with other dead people and their memories. There is no morality-based assignment of dreambubbles: a person whose death was Heroic can wake up next to someone whose death was Just.



The dead in Homestuck can affect the living. Living people can visit dreambubbles, either awake or asleep, and interact with the people in them. Anyone who died after mastering their God Tier powers can use those powers on the living, and can have all kinds of effects on the alpha timeline as a result.



A doomed Feferi brings the Mayor, who everybody loves and who doesn’t get extra lives on his own, back to life.

A doomed Aradia brings Doc Scratch’s genetic code, which had been destroyed in the alpha timeline, back into the alpha timeline to ensure that Doc Scratch, and therefore Alternia as we know it, is created.

Rose keeps her doomed dreamself’s memories, and they add to her knowledge of the future and influence her interactions with Doc Scratch–not to mention that the Dave from this same doomed timeline is the one who became Davesprite.



But the greatest thing about dreambubbles is that there seem to be infinitely many of them, each holding the ghosts from a particular event or doomed timeline. Think about it: everything that could possibly have ever happened in the human, troll, and cherub sessions of Homestuck is represented in a dreambubble. There is a bubble where your favorite character went God Tier. There is a bubble where your OTP is canon. That fanfic you just wrote? Its characters, who have had exactly the experiences you wrote for them, are out there in a dreambubble. Everything that could have happened has happened.

[edit: found better picture of God Tier KatNep in [S] Roxy: Sleepwalk]

Homestuck’s concept of death makes it the perfect environment for creator-fan interaction. By making Homestuck’s afterlife infinite, and not limiting it to characters from the alpha timeline, he validates fan creations in a way the vast majority of authors don’t, and in doing so he’s created an amazing environment for new writers and cartoonists and animators to start creating in. In the Homestuck fandom, you don’t have to worry about whether your work is any less “real” than the “canon”, because everything that could possibly have happened is in some way “real.”



Now, what does Hussie’s approach to canon have to do with Homestuck’s in-story morality system? Tune in next week to find out, in Why I Like Lord English!