by marathemara, who guest-posted a version of this on her boyfriend’s blog as part of the RPG Blog Carnival’s Weapons of Legend event

Since Homestuck is based on the tropes of fantasy roleplaying and adventure games, it’s got some legendary weapons lying around. This post could be about any of those weapons. I could sing of the cherub majyyks and skillful manipulation of time that brought the Warhammer of Zillyhoo to John; I could ruminate on the nature of the jujus used by the Felt or the duality of Kanaya’s lipstick chainsaw; I could rant about how Dave’s breaking of the great sword Caledfwlch fits into the arc of his rejection of the heroic role the universe of the Game has laid out for him, or how Vriska’s use of the Fluorite Octet helps to build up her own dramatic fantasies.

I will write about all these things in due time. The legendary weapon I present to you now is the laser rifle Ahab’s Crosshairs, forged in the distant past of the planet Alternia and wielded by the notorious pirate Orphaner Dualscar, lost in the sinking of the Orphaner’s fleet and found again after centuries had passed by his less-than-legendary descendant Eridan Ampora.

The thing that sets Ahab’s Crosshairs apart from all the other legendary weapons in Homestuck is that different characters perceive its power differently. For Eridan, it’s a massively destructive object of power, which he uses before the Game to kill the guardians of unsuspecting trolls, and during the Game to massacre NPCs who were probably trying to help him at the time. And anyone who’d seen Eridan wield the Crosshairs agrees with him.

Characters who have seen the gun when it was not wielded by Eridan disagree: Jade (who, by the way, has Riflekind as her strife specibus) dismisses Eridan’s declarations about its power as untrue, calling the gun a “legendary piece of shit”, and Meenah is able to snap it over her knee like a twig. Most legendary weapons, both in and outside Homestuck, are respected by everybody. What gives?

There are two possible answers. The prosaic one is that Ahab’s Crosshairs really is a powerful weapon, and that Jade and Meenah went through the following thought process: “This gun belonged to Eridan Ampora. Amporas are whiny and useless. Therefore, this gun must not be all he says he is.” And then Meenah’s ability to break the gun comes from her being a fuschiablood and thus incredibly strong.



The second possibility is more interesting: maybe Ahab’s Crosshairs really is a legendary piece of shit. Eridan’s role within the Game is Prince of Hope, meaning that he is destined to use belief to destroy. Maybe Ahab’s Crosshairs works in his hands, and only in his hands, because he believes it does, and because his powers amplify that belief.

That’s what I really love about Ahab’s Crosshairs: the idea that its power comes from its wielder, that whether you see it as trash or treasure depends on who you are. It’s not a static object with known powers, like the Warhammer of Zillyhoo or the Fluorite Octet; it’s a part of Eridan’s character, and how you see it parallels how you see Eridan: as powerful or pathetic, as bloodthirsty aristocrat or unstable facade. And just like Eridan, Ahab’s Crosshairs gets to be both.

