Analyzing Space and Time as personal philosophies turned up common threads of meaning in the jumbles of seemingly random symbolism, and in general made things damn interesting. Doing the same with other pairs of aspects is both more and less difficult – less because many of them are better documented by other theorists, and more because identifying real philosophers for some of them is a giant pain in the ass.

Light and Void stand out as the best starting point. We know from Calliope that they’re related somehow, we have a more in-depth canon description of Void than of any other aspect, and we’ve seen examples of Light powers from three very different classes. The variety of meanings confuses the hell out of people but that’s no big deal for us because we’re attacking the root of the problem, the fundamental difference in perspective that makes Light and Void especially alien to one another.

So let’s dive right in and shed some Light on the subject.

Write down what you were thinking when you clicked this link. Make a note of the time to the exact second; the first object you see when you turn to your right; the thing you’re touching with your left hand; the total number of shoes with laces in the same room as you; and the predominant ingredient in what you ate for breakfast (such as bread).

I picked these things at random, but they’re important anyway because they happened in the first place. They have meaning and significance. In a different reality you would have done things differently, or you might not exist at all. Somewhere, somehow, there is a reason it happened this way.

Light players are up to their eyeballs in reasons. Their world is a drama and they’re searching for their role. Knowledge is power – knowledge of any kind, about anything. Even lies are important, because the reasoning behind the lie can say as much as the truth ever did. Every action taken by another person, every random accident, is a hint at the profound secret of the universe.

Rose is frustrated by her mom because she overanalyzes her actions, unable to accept that they might be random nonsense. Her attempts to explain everything ever are a mixed blessing to her friends. Of course, we already knew this about Rose because Doc Scratch explained it in detail:

Ordinarily, Light players have no oracle but reality itself to which they can pose “the right questions.” They can only wonder, wait for a sign, and hope they’re bright enough to understand it once it appears. In their eyes, whether they get it or not hinges on whether they are important enough to deserve it.

Luck is how they rationalize and quantify this feature of reality. A Seer of Light with “all the luck” would serendipitously know whatever she needs to answer any question posed to her, and a Prince of Light would find events conspiring to help him destroy. A sociopathic Thief of Light desires attention almost to the exclusion of other concerns, so powers like Vriska’s guarantee her objective importance while causing otherwise unpredictable events.

Each aspect has a different relationship with luck, in keeping with its view of the world. For example, Breath players might say that luck is always good, and Blood players that it’s always bad. Mind players like Terezi recognize that corrupt people can be important, and evil deeds can steer history. Luck “doesn’t matter” because being important has nothing to do with being right.

Void players take it a step further. To them, luck doesn’t even exist.

Turn the concept of meaning on its head. Look under a microscope: All atoms of hydrogen are exactly the same, made of interchangeable parts. The whole world is made of these objects with no individual distinctions, bouncing off each other, none of them having goals or decisions to make.

Realities themselves are likewise interchangeable. Our universe could be replaced with a different one and we’d be none the wiser. Take another look at the notes you made. Instead of English words and Roman letters, imagine some other script, for a language you learned in an alternate reality. That would be as readable there as this text is here. The message is immaterial to the form.

Sartre’s existentialist writings model consciousness as the process of imagining importance. Because meaning exists inside our heads and not as a physical object, the absence of matter has the same power as its presence. Darkness does not exist in the same way as light, nor caves and silence in the same way as rock and sound. Such distinctions are human inventions, meaning that we created from nothingness.

Heroes of Void dwell on the concept of absence because they feel it eroded within them. They see their own existences not just as weak, but undefined. Invisible, ineffectual, they could drop dead and the world would continue uninterrupted. If you asked them who they “really” are, they could not begin to answer the question.

For a spy or a thief – or a Knight striking from the shadows – this inner anonymity is an awesome power. For others, it is terrifying. They cling to outside meaning indiscriminately, appealing to religion or society to fill up the void and grant them a purpose. They dwell in absurdities, their lives consumed by nonsense. They uphold even the faultiest of moral codes to keep from looking inward and seeing what isn’t there.

To master Void is to rebuild yourself from the inside out, accepting that you are nothing and then becoming the darkness that others run from. The unknown frightens us because literally any threat could be lurking within it. A Void player can be none of those threats, or all of them. He can even make the unknown unknown, becoming the invisibe man he imagined, moving amongst others as if he truly did not exist.

Rose came into Sburb with no concept of a lack of meaning. She thought of the darkness as concealing deeper secrets, alien to other mortals simply because they were too dumb to unravel the greater mystery. She had the ambition to seek that power, and the intelligence to understand its arcane teachings. Finding the outer gods within her grasp in a realm of miracles and monsters, she quietly labeled herself the chosen one. She was going to do things nobody else ever could.

John’s death changed that. Trapped in a doomed timeline, mourning the friends she never met, she faced pure futility for the first time in her life. The seeds of doubt followed her dreamself back to the alpha timeline and sprouted with the revelation that the whole session was doomed. Within minutes she was clawing to win back her place in the cosmic spotlight. She met the call of the horrorterrors with enthusiasm. If she and her friends could no longer win, she’d bring the world down around them. If the devil himself dared obstruct her, she’d kick his teeth out. Better to die screaming and become a legend than escape into obscurity with her meaningless life.

So thinking, she talked to Scratch.

We’ll never know exactly what damage she sustained from their earlier conversations, but her final moments of clarity amount to a crash course in existentialism. Doc Scratch spends the entire pesterlog breaking down her Light player mindset, assaulting inconsistencies in her valuation of intrinsic meaning. She learns bit by bit to see the world from a Void-like perspective, with disastrous consequences.

Let’s take it from the top:

Literally the first thing he does is remind us he’s a world-class douchebag. Rose has been going mad with anticipation, wondering what it could possibly mean that he’s forcing her to wait, and he straight up tells her it meant nothing. This would be one thing coming from a mortal, but when an omniscient truth-teller says something was meaningless, it has to be objectively meaningless. Rose can’t waste any time interpreting this as a sign from the horrorterrors. He’d have told her if it was any such thing.

Rose might overanalyze but she’s not superstitious. She knows that if the world is full of signs and meanings, they have to come from somewhere. Logically, that source ought to be intelligent, and it has to be capable of dictating its meaning to paradox space. This is Rose’s understanding of a god, and now that the horrorterrors are disqualified she thinks maybe she’s been talking to the wrong gods the entire time.

She keeps her mouth shut about this for a few minutes because she doesn’t think blurting things out is dignified, but soon finds an elegant way to bring it up:

If Scratch is not a god, he’s just some guy. If “some guy” is way stronger and smarter than the gods, what the hell is the point of having them?

Her battleship isn’t sunk just yet. She’s been toying with another idea since she made those wands in act 4. It’s hard for her to believe because she thinks it’s really stupid, but she wonders about it regardless and even brings it up in conversation with humans and trolls alike. We could picture it as a forcefield permeating the multiverse, pure meaning as a power in its own right, omnipotent but lacking in conscious will.

Rose calls this power magic.

We call it “plot.”

There’s a very good reason for “objective” importance in the context of a work of fiction. A Prince of Light doesn’t simply destroy what he wants; he destroys what the plot needs destroyed. A Sylph heals plot holes and gaps in exposition. A Seer glimpses plot points and navigates by them. Vriska steals the spotlight by upstaging other characters, and the plot is forced to revolve around her. Serving the Light aspect means making the story more interesting, so that the eyeballs of the audience itself remain fixed to the screen.

The Void aspect is thus the admission that we could stop reading Homestuck and our lives would go on without it. Somewhere there is a Void player who can take advantage of this. She could get up and walk out of the comic, taking her friends with her. Other characters would be oblivious to their absence. The villains could go on doing battle with transparent cutouts in the shape of the people they think they’re fighting. Our heroes would be out of Lord English’s reach not because they’ve defeated him, but because they’ve escaped to a totally different website.

That sounds far-fetched though. Let’s get back to Rose.

Scratch can’t come right out and say “magic isn’t real,” but that’s not his game anyway. What he wants is for Rose to treat ideas coming from within her as unilaterally more meaningful than the ones that come from reality. To this end, he starts asking questions. He signals to her that his objective knowledge is less valuable than the perspective of an individual; that nobody can tell her what something means, not even a god or someone smarter than a god. Which, by the way, she could become if she so chose.

This stuff is poison for Rose. She’s about to crack. The rest of her life could go great and she’d still be tormented by doubt, because she no longer sees any particular reason to be Rose Lalonde.

With the news of her mother’s death, she shatters. Everything she has ever done in her life was a waste of time. She already has nothing left to contribute to her friends’ survival, and even if they escape she feels they can go on without her. Her will to live is finished. A sneeze could bowl her over. What she gets is a hurricane.

Let’s say you were asked to estimate the amount of evil in the furthest ring. If you responded with nonsense like “probably not,” a Void player would laugh it off, but a Light player would slap you in the face. You’d have to remind them that not only does “evil” need a more precise definition, but concepts like “now” and “everything” are useless out there, and their implicit inclusion makes the question unanswerable. You were asked a bullshit question and you could only give a bullshit answer. The symbols had lost their meaning.

Void players work well with computers because they can think like computers. A word processor won’t see the difference in meaning between “God is dead” and “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.” A paint program can’t tell you what colors look like. Machines just manipulate these interchangeable symbols according to rules with no inherent meaning. It’s our job as human beings to look at the monitor, put the colored dots back together, and invent the picture of a cat inside our minds.

Rose’s head didn’t work that way, not on LOHAC and not once she’d ascended to god tier. She can see symbols in terms of other symbols so long as the meaning makes sense, but if they’re broken down into something “irreducible” like the taste of apples, she’s lost. Her powers work the same way. If you define what it means to succeed, she can tell you how to pursue that success.

The magic cue ball doesn’t appear to share her limitations. It tells the truth objectively and without hesitation. It cannot ask you to clarify a question to which the only answer is nonsense. An inability to handle the whole truth is a human failing for which it lacks compassion, so the onus is on the asker to engage it only with a meaningful question.

A part of Rose must have realized this was a bad idea, but the rest of her didn’t think it mattered. Asking such a question could make her head explode for all she cared.

To her credit, this isn’t quite what happened. She looked into an infinite well of utter nonsense, and her mind found a way to handle it. She’d been trained for it unwittingly by Scratch. The training worked.

The horrorterrors had no hand in what she became. She did it to herself.