by @marathemara

I know where I came from; but what about all you zombies?

–Robert Heinlein

Dad Egbert and his post-scratch counterpart Dad Crocker are a fascinating enigma. For one thing, he’s the only human in all of Homestuck, with the exception of historical and cultural figures, who was actually born, and who looks and acts the same way in both Alpha and Beta timelines. How did that happen? Where did Dad come from, and who is he?

Here is what we know about Dad Egbert/Crocker: Before the Scratch, he’s Jane’s son, John’s guardian, and a lover of practical jokes; after the Scratch, he’s John’s son, Jane’s guardian, and in the Betty Crocker line of succession. In both timelines, he’s a serious businessman with a fondness for fedoras and fedora-fond friends; he keeps a car and a literal ton of shaving cream in his sylladex; and he’s a loving parent, as far as we can tell from his interactions with both John and Jane. Beyond that we know nothing about him: he is drawn faceless except for his nose, and communicates through notes scattered around the house and the occasional Stern Fatherly Emotion. He doesn’t even get a first name.

He’s the most enigmatic of Homestuck’s main characters. All eight of the other humans are point-of-view characters–even the other Beta guardians get their own stories told as the Alpha kids–but since we never see Dad as a child or a teenager, we only see him through the eyes of his children, John before the Scratch and Jane after.



The really fascinating thing about all of this is not that we have so little knowledge of what Dad is like. What I love about Dad is that John and Jane know just as little about him as we do. Because we never see him through his own eyes, Dad Egbert/Crocker becomes an effective–and quite clever–parody of how children see and imagine their parents. For all his loving nature, he is weirdly aloof, giving his children space to imagine him as things he isn’t, and in one case, deliberately allowing John to believe that he is a comical street performer (though this may be John’s imagination running away with him, more than any encouragement on Dad’s part). This aloofness, combined with the faceless depiction and the notes, exaggerates the emotional distance between parent and child into awesome and ridiculous pastry-based Strife.

But it gets better. After the Scratch, Dad becomes a parody of himself.



The narration claims Jane has a closer relationship with Dad than John did; she rebelled as John has, but that was years ago and she got over it. But because Dad is such a cipher, the signs we see of his presence are exactly the same as before the Scratch, except weirder. He still keeps his deceased parent in the living room…but as taxidermy instead of the more socially appropriate cremation urn. He still tries to keep his child indoors for their own safety…but this time he does it by moving the refrigerator in front of the door. And when Jane persuades Lil’ Sebastian to move the fridge for her, the note she finds underneath is the same note that John found inside the safe…but again, like so many things in the Alpha timeline, slightly more ridiculous, slightly more funny, and slightly more enigmatic. John didn’t understand his dad, and Jane doesn’t understand him even more. And it’s funny, because we don’t either.