was thinking today about how for as much as i love her calliope is just… a huge mary sue, right. a female character with no apparent flaws (other than, like, she is Too Sensitive or Too Selfless or she Loves Too Much - flaws that arent flaws) with some unique and fascinating attribute (initially its her lime blood, later its her role as the secret super-ultimate-maximum-most-powerful class the Muse), who injects herself into an extant narrative (although the alpha kids were introduced approximately alongside callie, their beta counterparts were more or less established before act 6) and is immediately beloved by all who interact with her - save, of course, for her abuser (caliborn), which gives her a very sad and tragic backstory that everyone else wants to save her from. its textbook. she ticks every box on those “is your oc a mary sue” quizzes that used to circulate in the early 2000s.
and then i realized thats, like, the point. this is deliberate. homestuck experiments and dabbles in meta and self-satire for acts 1-5, particularly in the scratch intermission, but in 6 it takes a hard turn into fully self-aware metafiction. supposedly the macguffin everyones after is the rings, but theyre not, not really, because who among us was really invested in the ringquest aspect of the plot. the macguffin of homestuck is homestuck, the narrative itself, thats whats being fought over, and its at the center of a relentless tug of war between the author and the audience. the characters are, to an extent, aware of the conflict, but theyre trapped inside of it and unable to do anything until john learns how to retcon. (homestuck doesnt really delve too much into the characters vs author portion of the conflict but its fine because thats what theatre of coolty is for.) the author (who is hussie-the-character, sort of, but also hussie-the-person, because hussie-the-character gets killed off but nobodys ever forgotten whos really writing the damn thing - lord english/caliborn assume his place because the authorial figure needs to be more loathsome and less sympathetic than hussie-the-character was for the conflict to work) is a ruthless dictator, pioneering and perpetuating the death and suffering of children for entertainment, and the audience are the ones sympathizing with the characters and rooting for their happy ending.
so callie is a reader injecting herself into the narrative in exactly the way readers tend to do. shes a sweetheart and a darling and she hooks up with her crush at the end as a love letter to homestucks readers (and specifically gay girl readers), sure, but also because thats what fucking happens in self-insert fanfiction. callie is a homestuck fan and she solves the narrative exactly the way a homestuck fan would. the canon is a dictatorship, and the author is its king; the fandom is a democracy. and homestuck has never been ambiguous about which of the two it prefers
I’m torn on this, because I love homestuck meta-story explanations, but I also think Callie is canonically and explicitly not *nearly* as nice as fanon tends to portray her.
Some of it is culture clash–she is fascinated by relationships but struggles to understand them, and some of her advice and solutions lean strongly towards the harmful. (I made you a magic lollipop that would make you stop caring about things b/c I thought that would work out well!) ((oh hey, tho, def an interpretation to be had of her as a fan-author there)).
But some of it is–well, like she said, cherubs don’t do redrom. And we saw alt-universe Calliope and she was scary as heck. Idk, I just have this impression that Callie is someone who niceness does NOT come naturally to, but who still kind of would like to be nice.
She is a cosplayer, she is a fancreator, she is a storyteller, she recreates herself an imaginary identity where her limeblood is super-special and not just normal cherub stuff. She is someone who is finding her identity by exploring and acting out others. And, yeah, she is the flipside of Caliborn as a representation of fans and fandom and how storytelling and media contributes to the coming of age experience.
I really liked her ending too, where it’s like “you don’t have to have some grand narrative purpose, you don’t have to be explicitly *part* of the story, you don’t have to have a *resolution*, you can just be you and that’s more than enough.”
…I don’t think any of this actually invalidates your own analysis, you just got me thinking about Calliope. :)
(via anonymousalchemist)
