by marathemara

Note: Since most of the information in this post comes from Openbound 2 and Openbound 3, I have linked instead to mirrored walkthroughs on Youtube so that I could get timestamps for specific references.



I need to retract a statement I made in my first-ever post on this blog. In that post, written during the Gigapause, I claimed that Caliborn was perfectly evil and entirely unsympathetic.This is not the case. Caliborn is cruel, vicious, and vindictive, but throughout Act 6 Act 6 we readers see life from his perspective and begin to understand how he perceives himself. He becomes, not really someone with whom we sympathize, but someone with whom, against our better judgment, we start to empathize. We see him as yet another child caught up in the destiny trap of SBURB, and we almost believe him when he says “I just wanted to play a game.” And of course he has the Freudian excuse that he was literally born to be evil.

Cronus Ampora has no such excuse. He is a douchebag because he has chosen to be a douchebag, and his repeated and continuous choosing to be a douchebag is what makes him, in Hussie’s own words, the worst character in Homestuck. But I like him, because he makes me think. He’s a puzzle: how did he get to be so mean? What led him to make that choice, and to keep making that choice? And what does that say about the nature of evil and of free will in Homestuck?

Here’s my answer: Cronus probably chose to be an asshole early on in his life. As a healthy, un-mutated member of the Beforan aristocracy, he most likely grew up alone with his lusus, looking in at the cosy lives of adopted children like Kankri. He would have envied the attention these children got, and started coming up with ways to make himself special to get that attention.

All speculation aside, Cronus himself admits that his weird personas–the mythical wizard of before and during the game, and the “humankin” persona after his death–are an act to get attention. All children come up with these characters for themselves to some extent, but Cronus has done two things with his that make him abnormally selfish. First, he forces his personas on his peers, and puts in a lot of work to convince them that he actually believes he’s a wizard, and later, a human. Second, he continues to force it well past the age when such a thing is either cute or appropriate. It’s even implied that his peers would like him better if he dropped the act.

But even without considering the selfishness of forcing his personas on the people around him, Cronus is still a selfish asshole by choice. He is physically and emotionally abusive to Mituna, because it makes him feel like he has power over somebody. He sleazily hits on everyone around him–even his own dancestor, and it says something that even desperate Eridan considers Cronus only worth dating to shut him up. He blames everyone else for the results of his choices. And he keeps on choosing to be an asshole: when Meenah calls Cronus out on his bullshit, and gives him a chance to start being a nice person for a change, Cronus takes Kankri’s interruption of the conversation as an excuse not to.

There’s something compelling about Cronus Ampora in the same way there’s something compelling about a car accident. Actually, no. That metaphor implies that Cronus’ behavior is an accident. He has the freedom to be whatever he wants to be, and he chooses to be mean and petty and sleazy. And the fact that he makes this choice repeatedly is fascinating because it highlights the fact that, at least in Homestuck’s universe, evil is a choice, and the players have the power and the freedom to choose one way or another. Caliborn chose to stop being cruel and destructive for the sake of being cruel and destructive, deciding instead to be cruel and destructive to avenge himself on the SBURB players for ruining what he sees as a great art career. That gives us as readers a tiny window through which we can empathize with him. Cronus is just amazingly nasty, and he’s nasty because he wants to be nasty. We want nothing to do with him, and it’s all his fault.

