by marathemara



When I started reading Homestuck, I was struggling through a terrible Java programming class. I was in over my head, the teacher didn’t understand how to help me, I hated every minute of it. Imagine my surprise when this silly webcomic my sister recommended to me began with a boy who liked programming, but sucked at it, like I thought I did. Homestuck taught me more about data structures than any programming class I took in college, just by giving John (and then Rose and Dave) some space to futz around with fetch modi (moduses?). And then the programming stuff mostly disappeared as the kids entered the game and the plot really took off.



And then I met Karkat. Karkat also likes to program and isn’t very good at it. But the language he’s learning is the craziest and most fascinating part of all the computer-related stuff in Homestuck. It’s called ~ATH, and it shows how Homestuck blurs the line between science fiction and fantasy.

A lot of fantasy stories revolve around the trope of the dying curse: some character uses his or her last words to curse another character, or a group (think Mercutio’s “a plague on both your houses!”). ~ATH, appropriately pronounced “tildeath”, formalizes the dying curse and operationalizes it. All programs in ~ATH are tied to some real-world being, typically the programmer themselves. When that being dies, the code is executed.

The funny thing is, we never actually see ~ATH used as a dying curse. Karkat tries unsuccessfully to write one, but the only effective ~ATH scripts we see are tied to the lives of universes. The first one is written by Sollux, who, in contrast to John and Karkat, is an excellent programmer. He has tied his code to two universes, represented as red and blue, and then somehow nested their loops inside each other, which doesn’t work in any real programming language I know of.

Karkat, in a moment of frustration, runs this script, which blows up his computer and proceeds to visit misfortune on him and everyone around him. Maybe. It’s more likely, as Kanaya points out, that the meteor showers and the deaths of all of Karkat’s friends’ lusii are simply a consequence of playing SGRUB. Either way, the program is a nice piece of foreshadowing, as two universes (a red one and a blue one) are gonna die before the game is done.



But the foreshadowing gets even better. Sollux has found an ~ATH script he can’t hack. When the universe dies, it executes…pool balls?

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll associate pool balls with the Felt from the Midnight Crew intermission. And you’ll know from the narration on the next page that the code will summon an indestructible demon. This code is the first in a trail of clues (some of them fake) that culminates in the Scratch, the death of a red universe and a blue universe, and the summoning into the Alternian universe of Lord English.



~ATH is a ridiculous programming language, a wonderful foreshadowing tool, and an interesting way to add the concept of a dying curse into a science fiction story. I wish there were a few more examples of the latter. Roxy uses ~ATH too–did any of her code execute itself when she died in the New Alpha timeline? Sadly, I have a feeling we’re not gonna find out.