Archive of Our Own ^beta

It’s official - Homestuck is one week old today! And while a week is not a long run for a comic, it’s already got more pages than the author’s earlier work Bard Quest, so maybe it’s something worth recognizing. So I wanted to mark a week of Homestuck by doing a deep dive on what we’ve learned about our protagonist John Egbert so far. It’s some fact collection, some wild speculation, and some ongoing questions.

We’re introduced to John on page 4, where we’re given five key interests of his: bad movies, programming computers, paranormal lore, amateur magic, and gaming. I’ll take these one by one and use them as a framework for John’s character so far.

 

1. “Y ou have a passion for REALLY TERRIBLE MOVIES.”

John has eleven (11) movie posters on his walls. Of these, three star Matthew McConaughey and two star Nicolas Cage. More notably, six have a Rotten Tomatoes rating below 50%, and two of these are below 10%. I haven’t seen any of these movies, but as far as I can tell, here are the one sentence summaries [broad spoilers for all these movies].

• Little Monsters: A boy befriends a monster and visits the monster world, where they try to convert him into a monster too.
• Con Air: A paroled man disrupts a gang of prisoner’s escape from a prison transport plane.
• Deep Impact: Earth tries to prepare for extinction after a comet is found on a collision course with Earth.
• Ghostbusters II: After going out of business, the Ghostbusters reunite to combat a negative energy slime monster.
• Mac and Me: A boy befriends a young alien who gets separated from his family and lost on Earth.
• Contact: An Earth scientist successfully discovers alien life and travels to an alien world.
• A Time to Kill: A father is acquitted in court for killing the perpetrators of racial hate crimes against his daughter.
• Failure to Launch: A 35 year old man’s parents hire a woman to persuade him to finally move out of their home.
• Face/Off: A terrorist and a FBI agent go through facial transplant surgery and temporarily swap identities.
• Armageddon: A group of space workmen go on a mission to stop an asteroid from destroying Earth. 
• Ghost Dad: A man temporarily dies but is able to interact with his children in ghost form.

From this we can see that John really likes science fiction movies related to aliens, ghosts and monsters, as well as action comedy. We also know from page 21: ‘Films about impending apocalypse fascinate you’. A Time to Kill and Failure to Launch are the only ones that don’t fit his taste. The implication here is that John really loved Matthew McConaughey in Contact and so watched his other movies even though they were things he wouldn’t usually watch.

I’m curious if these movies are intended as clues to John’s character, the future of the comic, or both. In terms of his character, they make me see him as someone who’s imaginative and goofy, young and carefree, not concerned with other people’s opinions, more interested in watching movies for their surface meanings and exciting stories, maybe wants to escape to a different world, might be a little bit gay. 

In terms of the future of the comic, it could be that we’re going to see literal aliens or monsters - they could even be already here, keeping John ‘homestuck’. Slime monsters are particularly highlighted, with Slimer from Ghostbusters appearing on John’s shirt and computer background, and his chumhandle, ectoBiologist, relating to slime. Slime invasion honestly feels too obvious, and anyway, several of John’s movies are about befriending a more benign supernatural force - could John’s Pesterchum friends be something other than human? Or maybe it’s a more metaphorical meaning, referring to John having a very different life to his friends? 

Two of these movies feature Earth extinctions by giant space rocks, but there’s absolutely no indication of this being a real world threat John is dealing with. Again, it could refer more generally to a sudden, life changing event that’s about to happen to disrupt John’s current state, something that would fit thematically with this being John’s 13th birthday, a milestone age.

There’s also a theme of crime and the legal system in several movies, including Con Air, the one that’s been most highlighted. The most obvious interpretation of John’s dad right now is that he’s a clown or performer, but there’s an outside chance he could be in law enforcement, or a criminal. It’s even possible that he’s currently in hiding or some kind of safe house. This would explain John being ‘homestuck’ and sick of spending time with his dad.

Speaking of John’s dad, I’m concerned for him based on the Ghost Dad summary - the comic keeps teasing his presence, but we haven’t actually seen him yet. Could he be a ghost? Or become one at some point? Alternatively, we know John has an already dead relative - could his nanna be a ghost? Did John dropping her ashes release her ghost? Family is a really common theme in movies, so I don’t know if a large number of these movies being about family (especially fathers) is relevant, but I’m noting it all the same.

 

2. “You like to program computers but you are NOT VERY GOOD AT IT.”

John claims he ‘likes to program’, but it actually seems to make him angry. We first learn ‘[y]ou were never all that great with data structures and you find the concept [of the stack modus] puzzling and mildly irritating.’ We then see three files on John’s desktop, two in ^CAKE - ‘pff.^CAKE’ and ‘FUCK FUCK FUCK.^CAKE’ and one in ~ATH - ‘AAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGH.~ATH’. These tell a clear narrative of John trying to work on his programming and getting increasingly more frustrated with his attempts, until inevitably giving up. Both of the programming languages are puns, too. ^ is often called a carat (carrot cake) while ~ is a tilde (til death). 

I know this is wild speculation, but… John started off coding in a harmless programming language, was already struggling, then for some reason switched over to the most ominous possible sounding language, screwed it up even worse, and now… he’s constantly haunted by the ghost of failed programming attempts in the form of his sylladex, which he appears to be new to using (he had no prior understanding of it on page 7 - although this could be handwaved due to video game tutorial logic), and which operates similarly to a computer program and seems to cause John endless frustration. He’ll have to figure out how to exploit the inventory system in ways that help him, which involves actually figuring out some stuff about coding, in order to partake in some real life ghostbusting, or monster hunting, or dealing with whatever threat he’ll have to deal with by using inventory hacks.

 

3. “You have a fondness for PARANORMAL LORE,” (…)

By far the interest of John’s that we’ve seen the least of so far, John’s love of the paranormal is mostly inferred through his movie preferences, and we don’t see any direct evidence of an interest in lore. However, I can’t stop fixating on John’s chumhandle: ectoBiologist. The comic’s first act was to draw attention to giving John a name, and for many 2009 kids, the names they go by online are more meaningful and representative of them than their real world names. 

‘ecto-’ means ‘outer, outside, external’ according to dictionary.com, and it’s actually a common prefix in a variety of fields of biology, but there’s no such thing as ‘ectobiology’ as a field, or an ‘ectobiologist’ - neither term has any search results prior to Homestuck. I think it’s way more likely that this refers to ectoplasm, a term from both cell biology and spiritualism that was popularized by Ghostbusters to mean any substance secreted by a ghost, in practice often manifesting as green slime. Slimer, who we can guess is John’s favorite, is a benign ghost made of pure ectoplasm. I love the idea that John loves this dumb ghost so much that he’s memorized all the lore about them in their appearances throughout the franchise, and devised this username based on being an expert on these ghosts right down to their biology (or at least thinking he is). 

The only catch is, ‘fondness for paranormal lore’ is very passive and doesn’t even imply much knowledge, much less action, while ‘biologist’ implies that John has been doing actual experiments. The idea of John trying to create a real life Slimer the same way other kids make slime in their kitchens is really entertaining, if an off the wall theory. Does ‘homestuck’ just mean John is grounded for an unethical science project? 

 

4. (…) “and are an aspiring AMATEUR MAGICIAN.”

The magic chest is one of the biggest, most eye catching and most colorful objects in John’s room. We see its contents on page 8, which lean more into joke store items than things a magician might use, except for the trick handcuffs and perhaps the collapsible sword. The narration on this page states that John is neither a skilled magician nor a cunning prankster. I’m nitpicking definitions here, but everything John has done so far has been way more about pranks than about magic. 

John’s uses of the magic chest to date are…

• various putting things into his inventory and removing them (funny, but unintentionally)
• combining fake arms with cake (p.36) out of necessity, which ‘makes the cake at least 300% more hilarious’
• merging hat with beagle puss to create a clever disguise (p.45) and wearing it for 25+ pages, which he acknowledges is a ‘shitty disguise’
• attaching fake arms to harlequin doll (p.65), which makes it ‘AT LEAST a million percent funnier’

All of which are definitely not magic tricks, and honestly not even pranks. Arguably John’s best and most successful prank so far has been when he pretended not to have arms for the first six pages, before revealing his arms after the interface had gone to the trouble of moving the cake off his magic chest to get him some arms.

John keeps thinking about reading Colonel Sassacre’s Guide to Magical Frivolity and Practical Japery, but always finding some excuse not to. He can’t read it until he captchalogues it, but once he does that, it gets buried in his inventory. He assumes that the book can tell him the exact percentage increase of hilarity a prank leads to, but it’s too big for him to actually look anything up. 

An outside theory for this that I don’t think is likely simply because it’s so much darker than the comic has been so far, is that John loves this book, but since the incident where his nanna was killed by a copy (perhaps even this copy?) he hasn’t been able to bring himself to read it. A far more likely theory is that while John is an aspiring amateur magician, it’s more of a big idea, and he hasn’t actually done any magic yet. This also tracks with his weaksauce pranks above. And if that’s true, then it says a lot about John that he defines himself by a hobby he aspires to but doesn’t actually practice - he’s someone with big dreams and less motivation, just like his big dream of going to collect the mail from his father despite the lack of motivation that’s kept him messing around for 70 pages. 

 

5. “You also like to play GAMES sometimes.”

Potentially most important of all is Gamer John. We get a list of games John likes to play from inspecting his CD tower the same way we get a list of movies from looking at his posters. 

• Bard Quest
• The Caper Havers
• Problem Sleuth
• And It Don’t Stop
• What Pumpkin?
• Ghostbusters II MMORPG
• Little Monsters (for Nintendo)
• Harry Anderson: Call My Bluff!

The first five games all reference previous work by the author of Homestuck, and as such probably don’t need in depth analysis. However, the fact that within the world of Homestuck, these are all games (instead of comics) is one of several suggestions that we should think of Homestuck as a game, something that needs further analysis. 

The next two games are video game adaptations of movies we know John likes, and the last is a branded video game from Harry Anderson, whose book we’ve already seen in John’s magic chest. Notably, none of these are real video games in our world either. It says a lot that John plays game versions of things he already likes (he’s put ‘countless manhours’ into this assortment of quality titles). 

However, it’s undeniable that the most important game in John’s life right now is Sburb. The poster is behind his head in the first panel, placed centrally with one of the only two splashes of color in the panel. The beta release is the only thing marked on his calendar for April besides his birthday, and the Sburb logo is even the picture printed on the calendar - perhaps it’s a calendar themed around new game releases? There’s clear delight on John’s face when he thinks about getting the beta, and his quest to fetch it from the recently delivered mail is the closest thing to a story this comic has so far.

Unfortunately, we know almost nothing about Sburb, so we don’t know what it says about John that he wants to play it. It’s publicized as the Game of the Year, and according to GameBro, the game may be about houses and the player may not get to thrash anything, although these details are provided by someone who hasn’t played the game so I’m not taking them as expert opinion. It might be multiplayer - TT has been pestering TG all day about playing it with her. Maybe John just wants to share a game with his friends.

Speaking of GameBro, John can’t stand the magazine, although he for some reason has a copy on his desk. He describes the publication as ‘a joke’ to TG, and he makes the effort to take it downstairs to the fire and burn it, presumably releasing asbestos fibers into the house and causing serious lung damage to himself and his father. Does he read this because it’s the only games magazine that exists? Or did he like it just fine until now, when it trashed the game he’s excited about, and now he’s furious with it? Either way, it tracks with John’s overall fondness for critically panned media that he would be angry about contrarian critics. 

–

All of this has left me with a few questions about John as our main character. These are the things that I’m keeping an eye on and trying to answer as the story continues.

What is John good at?

We hear so much about what John is bad at. He’s explicitly stated to be bad at programming, pranks, and magic. He’s bad at using his sylladex. He’s clumsy and knocked over his nanna’s ashes. He’s got bad taste in media. He’s funny but only when he doesn’t try to be, and even then he’s sometimes the butt of the joke, where the joke is how not funny John’s joke is. He was tempted to squawk like an imbecile and shit on his desk. He has like six different prankster props and he doesn’t even use all of them. I’m saying all this with love and kindness because he also just seems like such a sweet kid, but so far he doesn’t have any defined strengths or skills. 

Is he going to turn out to be really good at gaming and kick ass at Sburb? Are we going to get a curveball where it turns out John is an amazing baker, and he hates the cakes in his room and the smell of Betty Crocker because he can do so much better than that packet mix? Or is he starting off from this low point so he can develop skills as time goes on?

 

What is John’s relationship with his dad really like?

John doesn’t want his dad to monopolize his time and feels trapped in his room, despite his dad baking cakes and leaving notes on gifts telling John he’s proud of him. John’s dad gets his son one great present that John’s really appreciative of, and one terrible present that John immediately hates. All of this feels very reasonable and normal for a teen feeling misunderstood by a parent who’s trying their best. 

And then there’s the clowns.

John can excuse magical frivolity and practical japery, but he draws the line at harlequins. He’s an aspiring magician, but his dad’s figurines are ‘fucking garbage’ and his dad ‘sure can be a real cornball’. John seems like somebody who gets angry at ultimately unimportant things, like bad reviews of games, too many cakes, and harlequin figurines, but because of the subject matter it reads like an intense rivalry between two highly specific subcultures that outsiders would group together. John is really making a huge deal of needing to disguise himself and mentally prepare himself to go down and face his dad, and I want to know if there’s any genuine reason behind John’s fear, or if it’s solely the overdramatics I’m starting to think are typical of him.

 

Is John ‘Homestuck’?

‘Sometimes you feel like you are trapped in this room. Stuck, if you will, in a sense which possibly borders on the titular.’ (p.30)

John clearly feels like he’s stuck at home, but is this the extent of the title’s meaning? His dad has recently returned from getting groceries, so leaving the house is in theory possible. Reasons why John might be homestuck include: he’s not allowed to leave the house (for example, he’s grounded, or his dad is very controlling), he can leave the house but there’s nowhere to go (he lives near major roads, bodies of water, farms, or other obstacles, and there’s no public transport to get anywhere), or he can leave the house but it’s not safe to do so (there’s some sort of external threat, either supernatural like a monster or alien invasion, or mundane like a criminal or bomb threat). Seeing out of John’s window and into his front yard does not provide any clues; it looks like an extremely average front yard with a tree, swing and mailbox, and we know the mail was recently delivered, so there can’t be anything too world-ending happening in the neighborhood. Right now John’s goal (the Sburb Beta disc) is inside the house, so this might not get answered right away - in fact, my running theory is that the game itself might hold the answers, as its logo is a house.

 

What’s the differentiation between John and the narrator?

My biggest question of all, and one that probably deserves its own essay. I’m fascinated by the lines ‘In a kid’s yard, a tree without a tire swing is like a proper gentleman without a monocle.’ (p.27) and ‘In a home, a FIREPLACE needs a fire, because that’s what FIREPLACE is for.’ (p.50). These lines carry so much opinion, but because the narrator is constantly addressing John with the second person ‘you’, I don’t think these are John’s opinions. The narrator does have a window into John’s thoughts, so the line between them can be blurred, but there’s clearly a distinction somewhere, because there have been pushbacks and disagreements between the two of them. 

One theory is that John’s dad is the narrator - John’s at home a lot for whatever reason, and so the constant and overbearing presence of his dad means that he can’t get him out of his head even when he’s alone, the commands at the top of each page reflecting John’s dad’s level of control over his son’s life. But I think this question is open ended enough that I’m not willing to commit to one theory yet. After all, we ‘examine 3rd and 4th walls of [John’s] room’ which is a directly meta allusion to the comic’s audience that only really makes sense if the narrator isn’t a character in the comic itself. 

–

I think John Egbert has been really well characterized so far. He feels like a real kid, one who keeps getting off track and forgetting what he should be doing, but one who it’s enough fun to get to know that I don’t really notice. While the main character in media often doesn’t end up being the most interesting character, I do want to keep an eye on John because I think he has a lot going on to analyze. Above the style and the world and the mechanics, John as a character is the aspect of the comic I’m most interested in right now.