by marathemara

NOTE: This post was written during the Gigapause, before what we might call Caliborn’s artistic awakening. Corrections can be found in Why I Like Cronus Ampora.

The mission of this blog is to celebrate every aspect of Homestuck, including those not generally considered worthy of celebration. With that in mind, I would like to congratulate Andrew Hussie on making Caliborn completely and perfectly evil.

How do I know he’s accomplished this? For one thing, Caliborn is completely unredeemable. A lot of popular villains have sweet sides: Loki, the Joker, the Master, and even Lord Voldemort all have some quality attributed to them, either by their creators or by their fans, that makes them capable of becoming better people. Caliborn doesn’t. I have not yet met a single person who believes that Caliborn or Lord English can be saved, because as a cherub, evil is built into his DNA. The nature vs. nurture debate comes down hard on the side of nature for cherubs: Calliope was born good, and Caliborn was born evil.

Speaking of which, one thing I like about Caliborn is that we get to see almost his whole life story, from before he hatched to the day he reached God Tier. And as the evil half of a cherub, he’s despicable the whole way. He bites his caretaker. He cheats at chess. He coerces Dirk into drawing real-person fanart. It occurred to me the other day that as cherubs go, Caliborn is also a pervert. His species considers violent kismesissitude the only valid romantic relationship. Meanwhile, Caliborn is obsessed with chaste, consensual matespritship. But at the same time, and more in line with his species’ norms, he’s a horrible misogynist.

But wait, there’s more. Caliborn bribes his session’s Jack Noir to kill his sister, then chews off his own leg to escape from her restraints and enter the game. And once he’s in the game, he starts trying to kill Gamzee again. He’s as evil as it is possible to get.



But he’s also clever and hardworking. He doesn’t have a lot of common sense: HIS TYPING QuIRK INVOLVES HOLDING DOWN THE SHIFT KEY AND LETTING GO FOR THE LETTER u. But he’s good at crafting plans and sticking with them till they work. They can be simple and brutal: beat Hussie’s command terminal with a juju breaker until Hussie agrees to explain the game to him. They can be complex and subtle: beat his sister in chess by disguising his king and queen as each other until she thinks she’s checkmated him. They can span universes: beat the Game itself by completing the impossible task it sets him and use the rewards he reaps to rampage through the Furthest Ring.

And he does it all, if we believe him, in spite of a learning disability. Everything Caliborn has ever done may be an attempt to work around this disability and get people to take him seriously. Or perhaps to lower people’s expectations of him and then humiliate them for assuming his disability limits him. But by the time he reaches God Tier, he seems to have overcome his own personal difficulties to a degree which makes him able to steal control of the narrative from Hussie and use that control to construct an elaborate parody of the story he’s in.

Caliborn has achieved what only one other character in Homestuck has so far: he has completed his personal quest and matured into an almost fully-functional adult member of his species. Unfortunately for the rest of paradox space, he’s the evil half of a cherub.