For those of you who aren’t up to date, I’m far from the first to argue for a Gnostic reading of Homestuck. Sam herself was describing it as an inherently Gnostic story as early as 2012 (and predicting the “Characters escaped from the narrative” angle to Act 7 that early, too). BetweenGenesisFrogs has been doing great writing from this angle, and yeah, so have I.

The gist is that Gnosticism posits two distinct worlds that exist in parallel:

The world of darkness, the low world ruled by the false God, Yaldabaoth:

The physical world of material reality, that we interact with on a physical basis. This world is described as false, limiting, and the source of suffering.

Then there’s the world of Light, the spiritual worlds of Ideas and true information. The way the creation myth works is that there is a True God who goes by many names, the most modern of which is Abraxas. This God contains all opposites and emanates a series of Aeons — Deities/Ideas that come in pairs, and who are meant to “create reality together”.

If these Aeons sound familiar, well, they should. Besides the various parallels smattered throughout the story with specific pairs of characters, Homestuck has a literal set of pairs of Ideas that together make up all of reality:

The Aspects.

So what we end up with is a work greatly informed by Gnosticism.

And one of the core principles of Gnosticism, the one we’re going to discuss here, is that distinction between the invisible but “Good” World of Ideas and the tangible but “Flawed” World of Matter.

The capacity to perceive ideas is an intrinsic Good in Homestuck’s universe. Hence why the artistic instinct is so championed: Anyone who adds ideas to reality through art is bettering that reality for themselves and all others, according to this philosophy.

This is why Caliborn is marked as a villain by his incredible inability to engage meaningfully with any art, or any Ideas other than the ones he has espoused for himself. What Caliborn creates, he creates poorly — and a lot of his “creation” is tantamount to stealing.

Understanding this gives new meaning to what have, up until now, seemed like somewhat arbitrary symbols:

The two different styles of Sun depicted in Homestuck.

This comic by my pal SamusRidley illustrates the point quite nicely.

On the one hand you have the blank white, Schematic Homestuck sun, which characters can look at with no issue. This sun is a representation of the idea of a sun. It is a depiction of the idea of Light, on a conceptual level, much like the Light aspect itself.

On the other, you have the photorealistic sun. This sun is realistic and presented as physical, literal.

This sun is still a symbol, but the physical sun denotes Material reality, and looks more photographic and well-executed to reflect this. The schematic sun, by contrast, is a representation of a concept — a cartoon, a blank suggestion of Ideas.

Sam herself put it best:

“ Both the schematic, abstract sun and the photorealistic, seemingly “real” sun are symbolic. They both carry meaning within the narrative. But the fact that one is schematic and the other is photorealistic is significant (it signifies).

Because in our culture we have a whole sort of mythology about photographs — that they’re more real, that they’re trustworthy, that they are in essence the simple truth. Whereas a cartoon is “just” a fabricated image. But Homestuck flips that mythology on its head, turning the schematic, more abstract and notional image, the image closer to language, the image that needs to be read, into the true world of ideas that underlies reality.”

(Don’t worry, I’m not going to write paragraphs for ALL of these. I really need to cut down my word count. Which means I should probably shut up now, wait, shit —

As such, what few symbols the photorealistic Sun DOES contain stress it’s objective reality and raw physicality. In place of Blank #ffffff White, the physical sun looks bright and angry— and it is given a particular photo-realistic pallete, at least by comparison to the rest of the comic.

This sun is not a symbol for the concept of Light. It’s a symbol for little else than all of the literal, physical realities that the Sun represents. The sun conveys heat and intense, unceasing, dangerous light. It is overbearing and browbeating when it appears. And the events it appears during define absolutely everything about the characters it appears TO.

Dave’s strife battle with Bro is the epitome and conclusion of years of abuse for Dave, and the dominating tension of the sun conveys all of Dave’s pent up stress and desperation, mirroring the pressure he puts himself under.

This relationship defines all of Dave’s feelings about himself and interactions with others throughout the story, and the overbearing sense of weight he gives his abuser’s implications for his identity are unquestionably True to him.

The same can be said of Alternia, where the sun is DESCRIBED as overbearing and dementedly forceful. The sun that blinds Terezi is also this colored-in, physical sun. Her viewing of it is also the result of an act of troll violence, an act that carries along the history of karmic acts that reverberates across her people throughout centuries and lifetimes.

Just like all of the feelings of inferiority to heteromasculinity Dave carries with him feel intrinsically True to him, troll ideals of cultural violence and suppression of emotion feels Real to Terezi. But neither thing is truly real. They are both just excellently formed, incredibly bright Lies.

But Terezi also sees her first glimpse of True light through Vriska’s actions, and she grows to cherish the moment for this fact. Awakening on Prospit also guides Terezi further from Troll society’s crude, imposed reality of violence and enslavement and towards Skaia/Sburb’s ideology of self-fulfillment.

Do you see what’s happening? Vriska’s blinding sets Terezi on the path to lift herself out from the confines of Alternia’s crude, material reality and up towards freedom and self-actualization in the Pleroma — the World of Light, the World of Ideas. It’s the Gnostic path to Enlightenment, built into a character arc.

In contrast we have Kanaya, a troll who’s values are pretty much completely untouched by the rest of Troll society and who’s forms of self-identification and expression are informed entirely by Sburb. She’s also the only Troll noted not to be affected by Alternia’s overbearingly powerful Sun — Just as she is unaffected by it’s brutalizing ideology.

Much as material reality is a lie in Gnostic faith, in Homestuck, the physicality of the sun is used to mark the extremely well-consructed ideological Traps that both Humans and Trolls are trapped in by their respective physical realities.

This is much as we in the modern day are encouraged to think in mutually exploitative and dehumanizing patterns by the physical worlds in our lives.You know exactly what I’m talking about, right? I don’t seriously have to give a whole explainer on that, right. Ok let’s move on.

This reaches comically explicit heights with Calliope. Like, how on the nose can it get? Calliope’s entire existence has so little freedom it consists of a single room. Of a silent cage that plays host to an exhausting familial chess game, a death match of mutual disapproval and loathing.

Her only escape from Caliborn’s spiteful, self-aggrandizing moralizing is escaping into fiction and friendships carried out online, and Calliope literally blurs the line between these two so much they don’t exist. Her best friends ARE her favorite characters, and all she wants in life is the opportunity to escape the physical walls around her and be able to Be With Them.

She’s LITERALLY TIED TO THE ROOM WITH A BIG CHAIN, she’s as Homestuck as it gets — Calliope is CHAINED to her material reality,

both literally AND ideologically, as she believes all sorts of things are true about her own nature that hold her back and make her hate herself.

If any of that sounds familiar, well — it should, because in a lot of ways it was literally my childhood. I think in a way it was a LOT of people’s childhoods. Calliope is the millennial nerd fandom experience for those of us growing up in conservative environments or with conservative family with control over our lives, distilled into a metaphysical microcosm.

Like me — like us — Calliope hates herself. Calliope hates her life and the arbitrary, meaningless rules keeping her and her brother connected, and keeping her from living out the life she dreams of — with friends and love and possibility and creative potential.

But she can do nothing to escape her confines except go online and engage with reality on a conceptual level — in the realm of Ideas. You know, just like we do in fandom? This is what Gnosticism is getting at — that the world of Ideas is intrinsically Good, for humanity and for ourselves.

The base, physical reality we live in is a burden, a falsehood, and we are diminished whenever we are bound to it. That’s what Homestuck is getting at.

That’s the lived experience Calliope represents. This dynamic is mirrored and recolored for every single character in the comic, pre-Sburb entry.

If you STILL don’t quite buy that this is intentional, consider that the Gnostic depiction of Yaldabaoth depicts a red, colored sun: