Fridge / Homestuck B 1 Universe

• Dave's symbol is a broken record.
  • Double pun as when he goes into a rant and overly-long metaphors he seems to be unable to stop talking.
• Jade being a Distaff Counterpart to John may not mean much, except when you realize that John (at least in the beginning) is a naive loser. Suddenly, their differing genders accentuate their distinctiveness from one another.
  • There's also the fact that John starts out knowing the least about how to play, and ends up being ridiculously powerful by the endgame, while Jade starts out knowing things way beyond everyone else, then gets Brought Down to Normal and misses out on much of the story developments while she was asleep.
  • Similarly, Dave and Rose have a tendency to not say what they mean. They both use sarcasm and sardonicism, but for different reasons. Rose is somewhat pretentious, and Dave just thinks irony is cool.
  • And there is of course also the fact that Jade and John are siblings, as are Rose and Dave.
• When Jade asks her magic 8-ball if it's John's birthday, she takes its answer of "not exactly" as a reminder of what a cheap piece of garbage it is. Looking back at this page after learning about ectobiology, we realize its prediction was as wrong as it could be; it is EXACTLY John's birthday (as opposed to the mere anniversary of his birthday).
  • You can't forget that it's also a tongue-in-cheek joke about the date in the story compared to the date the update happens on. For the majority of the story, it has always been April 13, 2009. So, it's his birthday, but also, kind of not.
  • There's also the fact that the Incipishpere is described as a place untouched by the flow of time in the kids' universe and as a Timeless Expanse. It's because of this that Grandpa Harley's exploits in the Medium are possible.
• What was keeping John's jetpack on the ground? A cinderblock, a violin, and a pot. All seen or referenced in Dave's, Rose's, and Jade's room respectively.
• John figures out the alchemizing system much faster than anyone else. Consider his earlier struggles with both programming and using his sylladex.
• Dave doesn't just wear those shades to be cool - his eyes are red, which receive an abnormally high amount of light compared to other eye colors. Wearing sunglasses keeps him from frying his eyes. (Also related are that his and Rose's eyes - Purple and Red - are the most common pigments of someone with Albinism, although Word of God is that Rose at least isn't an albino.)
• In Act 1, John alchemizes Some Hellacious Blue Phlegm Aneurysm Gushers (with ghostly healing properties!) from a box of gushers and the blue slimy stuff Nanna leaves behind on John's bedroom wall. What's Jane's mythological title in the B2 session?
• I thought it was funny that John was the only one of the kids who didn't have a Strife Specibus that could be readily construed as phallic. Then I remembered that Dave's Swordkind is a broken half-sword. Then I lol'd.
  • Hammers, not readily construed as phallic? Are you kidding? Hammers have been a phallic symbol since viking days!
  • The hammerkind is his penis.
  • Also, it's ironic that for a guy whose characterization revolves around irony and hipsterness, Dave's weapons of choice are swords. The most cliched heroic weapon.
    • Exactly. Dave's just that good.
• John's come into his hereditary Super-Strength in less than a day, and on his 13th birthday, no less. Early on, he couldn't even lift a sledgehammer. By the start of Act 4, he's Dual Wielding Pogohammer and Wrinklefucker with relative ease. So it's no wonder John's dad expected him to be able to lift the safe!
• Jade's fetch modi [1] seem to be relevant to the story. We've already seen a Battleship and the Crocker Monopoly, and doesn't the jenga tower look a lot like [2]? Connect 4: 4 kids and 4 trolls are being united. We've had characters talk with the dead (Ouija), and the 12 silhouettes on the Guess Who modus are reminiscent of our introduction to the trolls.
  • Yahtzee could refer to Vriska's dice, Cluedo to the Midnight Crew intermission, Operation to removing the Tumor...
• EB: i am the wind waker. it's me.
• It is said that players have to die to reach the God Tiers because they must be able to face their own death. It seems like John involuntarily cheated because he was unconscious at the time, so he never proved himself as intended. However, when we learn about his doomed timeline counterpart's Heroic Sacrifice, we see that, when it comes right down to it, John could face his own death.
• The reason why John, born on April 13, which is under the time of Aries, has the Scorpio Vriska as his patron troll is explained here.
  • Also, there's the fact that the apostle John in The Bible is represented by Scorpio in the Western Zodiac.
• Recent updates are a call back to Jade's fantasy of being a wolf, only now told from WV's perspective, and in the form of Serenity's flash speak. Remembering the final line makes me worry for Serenity.
  • Or Vriska, which is more likely since she actually is described specifically as a weird bug. Scratch did say she wouldn't live to see the silver lining.
  • And its in morse code.
• this shows that there have been 42 Daves. this shows the current living Dave count at 12. Do the math.
  • That doesn't mean those are all dead Daves - through Trollian, Terezi is recording every single passage through time that Dave does, while Jade could only see the Daves that were currently running around. He had done plenty of time-hopping before she could see him, and will go on to do plenty more time-hopping as he says.
  • 42 Daves, 12 living. What's 4+2?
• The hood of Dave's God Tier outfit looks a bit odd...until you realize that he's wearing a chain mail coif. He is the Knight of Time.
  • Additionally God Tier Jade really does look like a witch. Also, she looks a bit like Kanaya, who shares the element of Space, and Jade at the moment can sorta be considered undead. And "dog" is "god" spelled backward, so Jade has also reached the "Dog" Tier.
    • Also, the shrunken down planets circle behind Jade, the five planets forming the corner points of a pentagram, which is quite fitting for a witch.
    • Not to mention her shoes, which truly do make her seem like a witch.
• John has wind powers. John lives near the Tacoma Narrows.
• By putting his hand into the Juju, John was removed from existence, yet he somehow still remains. He's a ghost now.
• When Dave alchemizes the Royal Deringer with the magic cueball to create a weapon that can stand against Lord English, he ends up getting the Caledfwlch, this time repaired. Keep in mind that Dave's Character Arc revolves around Dave acknowledging that he himself is an own awesome hero even if others such as Dave and his Bro seem to be better heroes than him. Suddenly his quest doesn't seem so stupid.
• The running gag about carrying no less than five computers with you at all times is all the funnier when you go back and realize that John has thus far lost six^note His SERIOUS BUSINESS goggles are still on his corpse..
• When I first read the poem They Wait in [S] Seer: Descend, I recognized the quotes for the kids had all made earlier appearances but had not researched the quotes before. Well I finally did, and mind is blown.
  • Rose's quote comes from The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot, a poem that The Other Wiki describes as having "shifts between satire and prophecy, abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its elegiac but intimidating summoning up of a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literatures." Which fits pretty well with Homestuck overall.
  • The person behind John's quote, François de La Rochefoucauld, is a good World to contrast John's Fool. Where John is at the start of his journey and knowing very little, Rochefoucauld is a mature man well versed in the world around him. Add that while his writing can be summed up that everything boils down to self-interest, he makes this claim as a non-spiteful humanist. A compassionate cynic to John's compassionate optimist.
• That gust of wind that extinguished the salamander's burning village was a bit of a Contrived Coincidence. But look, the salamanders are happy, John's happy, and the plot can progress...oh wait, John can do "the windy thing".
• Jade becomes the Witch of Space in the October 25 update - less than a week before Halloween.
  • She places the planets and Skaia in orbit around her in the shape of a pentagram. The Kid's four planets with their associated elements and Skaia taking the point for light.
• The Homestuck Anthem features John, Rose and Jade's instruments, in that order. So where's Dave? Playing the rest of the song from the start. He is a time traveling DJ, after all.
• Jade is rosy, Rose is jaded
• Dave, the coolkid, ends up in a land of heat, and Jade, the hothead, ends up in a land of frost.
  • This also applies to John and Rose. John, the goofy, happy kid, ends up in a land of shade, while the snarky, cynical Rose ends up in a land of light.
• Although it is Dirk's theme, Unite Synchronization can be seen as a theme that unites the instruments that the Beta Kids are associated with. There is some notable piano (John) and violin (Rose) parts, as well as bass (Jade), guitars (Dave), and synths (again, Dave).
• Rose animal motif is that of a cat. When she goes grimdark her skin gets darker essentially making her a black cat, a black cat whose title as a hero of light means that she is mainly manipulating luck.
• The Heir of Breath went to the Land of Wind and Shade. The Seer of Light went to the Land of Light and Rain. The Knight of Time went to the Land of Heat and Clockwork. The Witch of Space went ot the Land of... Frost and Frogs? What do either of those have to do with space? Frogs does. Remember that the player has to breed a frog that will become the new universe!
  • Don't forget that it's also very cold in outer space.
    • No it's not.
• Terezi specifically states that it is the job of the Exiles to repopulate the player's planets after the Reckoning. This appears to have happened successfully on Alternia, with Spades Slick and the Midnight Crew having "made this town what it is" despite it being "nothin' but a bunch of dust and rocks" beforehand. On Earth, however, three of its five Exiles have been brutally murdered and the survivors are off-planet seeking revenge (or building more towns out of tinned food products). This means that, failing a biologically viable group of sentient beings landing on Earth, either through accident or design, our home planet will never be repopulated. Goddamnit, Hussie.
  • Not only will Earth not be repopulated, but the universe has come to an end!
    • Our universe had cancer anyway. It was screwed out of the Forge.
  • When the WQ had her landing on earth revealed it showed that she had brought several of her people with her so they may have lived through the entire ordeal, after all the WQ, WV, PM, and AR all survived without much in however long they had been on Earth.
• Aradia mentions here that "a future self returning t0 the past fr0m a d00med timeline will always be slated f0r imminent destructi0n herself". Unfortunately, this may apply to at least two members of the main foursome...
  • Given that she exploded it may apply to her as well.
  • Davesprite is probably exempt due to prototyping. Kernels have a preference for doomed (and dead) entities so it wouldn't make much sense for them to be doomed after the prototyping.
    • Oh, You Just Had to Say It. Turns out he wasn't exempt at all.
    • Turns out, YES HE WAS.
  • Rose may be doomed but that isn't clear because it may not apply to mental time travel.
    • Given that Dream Selves are essentially 1-ups Rose is probably safe.
    • I do recall Rose saying her Dream Self was going to die in a Green Sun destroying suicide, doesn't that count as a doomed destruction? May also count as Fridge Brilliance.
    • ...Except she and Dave have now ascended to God Tier, and they unwittingly CREATED the Green Sun in the process.
• The Homestuck Anthem features John, Rose and Jade's instruments, in that order. So where's Dave? Playing the rest of the song from the start. He is a time traveling DJ, after all.
• At the beginning of Act 1, John lacks a pair of arms, and you, the player, command him to retrieve arms from his chest. Out of sympathy for his lack of arms, you move the cake off his magic chest using your mouse, signified with the hand icon moving the cake. However, retrieving his arms reveal John holding his FAKE arms with his REAL arms. Now, say as a player, you never played this game called HomeStuck, and never issued commands to retrieve his arms. Would he be forever armless without your command? No, he always possessed arms; it's the character design that makes John look armless. The Fridge Brilliance arrives though when you realize the hand icon that represents the mouse could also represent his pair of hands moving the cake onto the bed. Compare that to the Fridge Horror of being John and witnessing a cake fly off your chest after hearing voices recently command you to retrieve your arms...shudder.
  • There's also a bit of Fridge Logic in place, as you later find the Exiles can only type—there's no mouse on WV's terminal.
    • Mouse Keys.
  • Also, you could say his arms were on the chest. They were attached to his chest all along, even if they weren't visible.
• When Jade prototypes Dream Jade with her sprite, she plans to get Jadesprite to fight Bec Noir, although Jadesprite boohoos and flies off. But Jade's dreamself is alive again, so she can reach Godtier now. If she does, she will be part sprite, part godtier, part witch of space and part First Guardian.
• At one point, Jade states how wonderful it would be to combine traits of both animals and humans.
• It's understandable why Jade is in to furry fandom when you consider that her guardian is a dog.
• Draconian Dignitary got the jump on Dave on twice. In Act 5, Dave finally returns the favor.
• A "gavelkind" is a system of land inheritance. The character who has "hammerkind" (a gavel being a small hammer) as his strife modus is the Heir of Breath.
• John is wearing a spade shirt when Karkat discovers him. Dave is wearing a heart shirt/bib when Terezi discovers him.
• The only character so far who's gone grimdark is in a relationship with one of only who characters who can literally light up. Dark and Light as one.
• There's a line in "How Do I Live" that's emphasised more in the cover than the original: Without you, there'd be no sun in my sky. Recall that Rose wants to sacrifice her dream self to destroy the Green Sun.
  • Related, but much worse: How do I breathe without you?
• At one point, Dave finds a disturbing comic on his Bro's computer, where Rolf somehow kills Animal. What makes it especially disturbing is that they're Muppet Babies. So, why use their Muppet baby selves and not their regular Muppet selves? Well, anyone who watched that cartoon growing up might remember the theme song, specifically these lines:
  When the world looks kind of weird and you wish that you weren't there,
  Just close your eyes and make believe, and you can be anywhere!
  • What happens with the SBURB/SGRUB players? Their homes are transported to weird worlds, and when they fall asleep, they wind up somewhere else.
  • I dunno if this is appropriate, but: WAY NSFW (just delete this addition if it doesn't belong, but it is the source of that comic Dave found)
• John and Jade were the only ones to prototype their guardian, John and Rose prototyped a doll, John and Dave had at least one prototyping done by someone else, Rose and Dave each prototyped a normal animal, Rose and Jade prototyped a pet, and Dave and Jade combined an animal with an alternate self.