on alternate selves and the “ultimate self”

I’ve got Stuff to Say about the latest Homestuck update, some analysis to make on the whole idea of an “ultimate self”. I started thinking this when I saw one of my mutuals post about the concept, but I wasn’t sure if they’d be okay with me hijacking their post and potentially turning it into a Popular Post so I’m making my own post instead. to paraphrase, they said “the ultimate self thing weirds me out. who you are as a person is dependant on the choices you made. an alternative version of me is not THIS me, and I had no control over THEIR choices, so I shouldn’t be held accountable for that and it’s wrong to say this other me contributes to the idea of an ultimate me”. except, y'know, in more detail and with better writing. but you get the idea. anyway, this sparked some thoughts in my brain and I wrote them all down and here we go:

so to start let’s take Dirk and Bro, for instance. it would be unreasonable to hold Dirk accountable for Bro’s actions, and I don’t think anyone really does. Dave talks about it in his discussion with Dirk, saying that Dirk and Bro are two separate people who had different lives full of different choices. Bro does, however, represent someone Dirk could have become, and I think there’s an important distinction there. now this is a particularly extreme example since Dirk and Bro lived two very different lives straight from birth, but I think it illustrates that Homestuck isn’t trying to say you are directly responsible for the actions of alternate selves

rather, those alternate selves provide a deeper understanding of who you are by testing who you could become under different circumstances. it reminds me of a thing one of my professors (business ethics, lol) said about the idea of virtues. if you say someone has the virtue of courage, you’re not saying they are always visibly courageous, but rather that they will show courage when the situation calls for it. I’ll probably never encounter a house fire in my life, but if I do, will I risk my life to evacuate others or will I be too scared to try? that is something I can’t know, but if I could see into an alternate universe where I did end up near a house fire, then I could find out. that, I think, is the idea Homestuck is getting at. if you look at all of a person’s alternate lives, you can get an idea of how they’d react to all sorts of different circumstances that they never get exposed to in the alpha timeline, and understand them better as a result

going way, way back, that’s why Jade was so upset by Jadesprite. it wasn’t just that Jadesprite was scared and whiny, but that Jade had never realized she could come to act that way. that’s a very understandable source of discomfort, of course. similarly, that’s why Vriska was so incensed about (Vriska), because Vriska didn’t want to accept that she could ever come to act like that. but I think there’s a potential for growth in seeing these alternate selves, and that’s what Homestuck is getting at

because none of these alternate selves are so far removed from the “original” that they’re unrecognizable, y'know? we’re dealing mostly with small divergences, not… idk, AU fanfics where Jade is someone’s murderous stalker. Dirk looks at Bro and sees what he could become if his flaws were exacerbated instead of fixed. Vriska looks at (Vriska) and sees all the personality traits she tries to suppress with her ego. Jade looks at Jadesprite and sees flaws she didn’t know existed because her circumstances never brought them to light. in all these cases, seeing these alternate selves enhances our, the readers, understanding of the character. and in-universe, it gives the characters an opportunity to confront - and ideally, fix - flaws that they might otherwise have left unchecked

and a person’s ultimate self, then, is what you get when you look at all of their different selves and see what that says about them. how likely are they to behave in this way or that? what personality traits manifest most often? how do they tend to behave in different situations? which of their virtues seem to always be present, and which of their flaws? the answers to these questions are never a reflection on any given instance of that person, but that person as a general concept. maybe there’s a universe where you committed murder, and one where you didn’t, but that doesn’t mean the ultimate you is a murderer. what if you only committed murder in one universe of 100, and it was under very specific circumstances? what if you were a murderer in 99 of 100 universes? those paint two very different pictures of who you generally are

it’s very introspective and frankly, yes it can be deeply uncomfortable to think about, but I think it’s a really interesting concept to explore and I don’t think it’s quite as restrictive as it seems. at the end of the day, you as a single person are still totally responsible for yourself and totally unaffected by any alternate versions of yourself. but it’s a neat thought exercise - or, in the comic itself, the character’s actual situation - to consider what your alternate selves would be like and what you could learn by looking at all the different versions of you as a collective