Reach Heaven Through Violence (Kill Six Billion Demons)

Spoiler

Red Eyed Heir

 

Now let's see how Jaggy feels about getting punched a thousand times simultaneously without a time-stop.

 

Oh, worm?

 

these last few updates..... i am so, SO nervous. i believe wholly in abbadon but my GOD

Spoiler: spoilers for latest update

me reading these updates like

 

gotta love how the hover text for the recent update is the same word repeated 42 times
"the answer to life, the universe, and everything" indeed.

*edit*
at least according to jadis

 

Breaker of Infinities 139-140 (The Tower) is pretty cool. Also great out of context.

 

I continue to love the rp of the comments section as well

 

i love how its clearly Baby's First Webcomic Fourth-Wall Breaking Moment for some of them. i've been homestuck for so long with so many other homestucks that i've forgotten the moment of awe and wonder it is the first time someone does that with their story. so its been nice to see here too.

also nice to have the 'mind: blown' moment for the fandom at the same time allison is exposed to the literal mind-breaking viewing machine. some good damn timing. also hilarious how close this is to the webb telescope images coming in.

*edit* thought of more stuff!

there is a thin white line running counter to the rest of what's going on right now. like perpendicular. which is VEEEEEERY interesting. because they pointed out the other colors are the ones associated with the demiurge's keys. so the white one would be allison's/the master key? which implies the master key gives you a different perspective than any of the demiurge keys.

also between the name of her most recent fusion and the name of this page, we're starting to get tarot references thrown in. the fool and the tower. the person who's journey is described, and the moment everything falls apart so something new can take its place. which uh...could go a NUMBER of ways rn.

if allison's perspective of the universe changes to show the 'wheel' head on that would be yet another card. but its very interesting that that WASN'T what she's seeing with the god-telescope thinggy. because its what jadis THOUGHT was being shown but clearly isn't quite the same thing in this case.

 

A card is also a flat plane, not unlike a blade, when turned appropriately

 

goddamnit. i hadn't thought of that. and jadis was the bearer of the word MIND and mentioned like chakra points or something earlier so its entirely possible her range of abilities includes some kind of ur-tarot that the earthly version is a pale reflection of. but also:

combining that with this bit i noticed before led me to more thinky thoughts.

what if each of the demiurge keys only give you part of the whole picture? the way jadis perceives the world is similar but distinctly different to ...uh, fuck whatshisname, the big red guy. she sees it as frozen amber, he sees it as an endlessly repeating cycle leading to a culmination of a Big Fight with him before it all resets and goes again. she sees the iterations simultaneously but cannot act upon them, he acts (and changes based on what he remembers) but cannot see as clearly as her. so what if each key is only part of the whole, literally. not just part of the whole king's key but also part of the vision it grants. colored lenses to limit it to only certain wavelengths.

the white perpendicular line being part of/tied to the king's key would make sense. it cuts through the other colors and the "tower" itself. in a way it is itself a tower, running counter to the disk-edge of throne. and in certain types of color theory, white is the combination of all other colors. the unfractured whole.

honestly its reminding me about string theory. where the universe is a single string closer to everything than your clothing to your skin. except when they worked out the math there were like 5 possible solutions. AND a competing theory that there were actually like 10 dimensions instead that explained everything but couldn't quite explain as much as string theory. so someone got the bright idea to combine them, to run string theory through a model with 10 dimensions and realized it was like it needed one more dimension to work. so bumped it to 11 and suddenly the 5 strings collapsed back into one that wove around itself into a membrane. so the current "best theory" is that each universe is one of these membranes and there are LOTS of them.

and this is reminding me of that. 7 keys for 7 incomplete but plausible views of the world, but combine them into one and you see more than the sum of their parts. hell from that perspective both the 'wheel' and 'tower' might collapse into an even stranger truth. maybe we'll hear from zoss again. he IS still hanging around in her mind isn't he?

also: goddamnit, a papercut, because cards

also also: fuck, the perspective from each key is true but not truth. like that goddamn 3d infographic of it. one is a square, one a circle, one a triangle, but the shape that cast all of those is a combination of the three, as viewed from different perspectives. each individual shape is technically true, but the whole truth is a mix of them all.

 

hmmm i wonder if the sun frozen in place over throne has anything to do with the "frozen in amber" aspect of all this shit. like its a timekeeping device so if the 'clock' is 'frozen' wouldn't that also freeze any change?

something something space and time are linked something something

is allison gonna get pissed and yeet the sun thereby accidentally unfreezing the entirety of creation? cause like...we know of at least one other demiurge who moved a sun. that is a thing that can happen.

which makes me wonder who froze the sun in the first place. was it zoss? metatron? someone else? cause i remember something about how it used to orbit but then something happened and now its stuck. but i don't recall if we were ever told what happened to 'stick' it

 

Ah, the narrative convention of "existence is predestined, decisions are meaningless, actions are merely motions in part of the inevitable flow, yadda yadda," says an antagonist, as though trying to undermine the willpower of the protagonist into following their plan, because whoopsie it's [not predestined at all] / [only predestined if no one breaks the machinery] / [the protagonist has the narrative warping power to break the predestination anyway if they Believe in themselves]

 

oh shit

... that second bit especially sounds like what we just saw. allison saw "nothing" when shown the entirety of creation all at once. and the first bit sounds like what jadis just tried and probably expected to happen, that allison would be burned by it like she was when she saw it all. not sure about the last bit though

oh and this was brought to my attention by the wiki

 

...oh
the wheel-breaking king
...and the symbol is a circle broken by a singular cut
its not just a computer power symbol, its....literally the goal of the whole story
...................................the level of fridge brilliance, goddamn

 

shit was trying not to triple post but no one else has commented

Spoiler: longish theory 1

ANYWAY guess who just realized our protagonist has a title for each of the demiurges. aka 7 titles

1. kill six billion demons
2. the heir
3. wielder of names
4. seeker of thrones
5. king of swords
6. breaker of infinities
7. wheel smashing lord

none of these are her given name and 4 5 are the names of story arcs/books so we could possibly even match them up to individual demiurges based on who she met/interacted with in the most important way during that arc. hell by that metric 'kill six billion demons' would be associated with jadis twice over in a way EERILY reminiscent of how her echoing precognition works like we were shown. she says it long before anyone else does and its in the arc with the most interaction with her, specifically, that we get the title drop/allison accepts the role

so if i had to take a guess the order/associations would be something like:

1. kill six billion demons - jadis (her 'prophecy' is how they know the name in the first place)
2. the heir - ???
3. wielder of names - nadia om/mottom
4. seeker of thrones - mammon?
5. king of swords - solomon david
6. breaker of infinities - ??? not sure since its not complete
7. wheel smashing lord - ???

not sure about jagganoth, gog agog, or incubus. all three have significance/importance in the breaker of infinities arc: jagganoth for starting a war, gog agog for fucking it up for everyone by abandoning them, incubus for breaking what was left of allison so badly it took her ~4 years of recovery with jadis to get back her resolve

and since the current arc isn't done yet we don't know what the next one will be called but the most likely candidates are 'the heir' and 'wheel smashing lord' since all the other titles have already been used for arcs/books

also interesting to note the ties between the arc name/allison's title and the events. like yeah 'wielder of names' does suit mottom since she uses magic words (red and i thing white 'art') to fuck with people including turning one poor fucker into a tree by changing how she refers to him. like she sure is shit is wielding both her name and the terms for other things rn. and 'seeker of thrones'? they were looking for how to access mammon's inner sactum, his throne if you will. 'king of swords' was all about a fighting tournament and who's the baddest bitch around...which jagganoth crashed to start a war so its swords all around. not entirely sure about 'breaker of infinities' but the ~eternal~ stalemate between demiurges was broken, gog agog summoned infinite selves then 'broke' trust with the other demiurges and took off, and jadis has been going on about unbreakable eternal fates which is a related concept to infinities so..yeah. 'kill six billion demons' was the start of the story about the titular character and the first few pages are about allison getting slapped in the face with a whole new cosmos of otherworldly 'demonic' looking beings.

Spoiler: theory 2

also i just noticed ANOTHER thing when i was going back trying to find the demiurges goddamn names that ties back into the bit i noticed a few posts up about points of view and the light spectrum and the color coding of the keys and their wielders

the master key is white as a combination of all possible light colors, but allison's peak power (until now) has been rainbow.
the Fool: Aspected Chaos giant woman form had a rainbow aura and power. so just having all the wavelengths isn't enough, you have to mix them properly to get the correct form. and the moment her 'vision' was better she busts out the white light aura and is properly named The Heir by the narrative. like did she need to sync up the points of view or what? what the hell happened???

what this MEAN'S yet i don't know but its absolutely important

*edit* fixed a lore error (it was minor tho)

 

One of Jagganoth's titles is [WHEEL-TURNING KING] so [WHEEL SMASHING LORD] probably contrasts that!

 

Yeah, Jagganoth is definitely the wheel, given his relation to the cycle of destruction. Incubus is the one who has more "heir" connections out of the remaining two, given that he isn't the original holder of his key and he was Meti's pupil. The "infinities" could refer to the multiplicity of Gog-Agog.

 

so refined list (based on your suggestions/good points) is something like:

Spoiler: naughty spoiler jail

1. kill six billion demons - jadis
2. the heir - incubus
3. wielder of names - nadia om/mottom
4. seeker of thrones - mammon
5. king of swords - solomon david
6. breaker of infinities - gog agog
7. wheel smashing lord - jagganoth

but the order seems to be going jadis,mottom,mammon,solomon,gog agog, incubus, jagganoth

which would be: blue, orange, yellow, purple, green, pink/magenta, red if we're going on colors. which is...interesting. its almost opposite color pairs.

but that depends on if the next section is incubus or jagganoth. i could honestly see it going either way

 

On the other hand, have we actually seen Solomon David ever wielding a sword? He's all about hand-to-hand. If one of the demiurges is about Swords, it's Incubus.

 

yeah but then we also got a character who is a master swordswoman with a broken blade (like cuts with bits that aren't even there anymore kind of broken) and solomon is kind of a living weapon himself and bears the word Diamond. that and i was going more off of the tournament (which solomon sponsors/runs whatever) where other people used swords. (add in somewhere the whole "royalty is a continuous cutting motion" quote that keeps getting brought up)

...so...its not exactly literal and not just the demiurge but what was going on as well

like by that logic 'kill six billion demons' has to be gog agog because only she might have six billion demonic selves to kill. and yet thats...not what seem to be going on and not what i'm going for here