Hiveswap/Hauntswitch Theories Thread - NO SPOILER TAGS

I keep thinking that the new mystery monsters in the Hiveswap trailers have a color scheme much like the Act 7 green-black hole scene.





It has me wondering if being swallowed by one of these hungry uglies leads to digestion, or just transportation.

So, possibly...

Green Sun: First Guardians ::  Green Hole : whateverthesedamnthingsare?

With Hiveswap's launch just around the corner, here's some last few crack theories for the road:

1) Some of the conspiracy theories Jude believes in will be things related to Homestuck the webcomic. Maybe he believes the world will end because of meteors, or that the constellations signify something, or that the universe is a frog.

It would be pretty funny to have some sneaky references to Homestuck through his conspiracy theories, which will seem ridiculous to people who didn't read the webcomic.

2) Jude will have a conspiracy theory about basically everything... except for Betty Crocker. For some reason he'll think it's a perfectly fine company that doesn't have anything to hide and that it's silly that some people believe there's something dark and mysterious about it. That would be amazing to see him not believe in that. xD

Alright, so the end of Act 1 is called Kansas City Shuffle, which is a kind of con where you make someone think they know what the con is and how to outsmart it, but really they're playing right into your hands. Since Doc Scratch's brand of convoluted, misdirectional planning is involved, my brain switched back into crazy Homestuck theory mode to try and figure out what that might be. I've gotten burned on overly complex Homestuck theories before, but here's what I think might happen:

I'm....not sure whether I should spoiler tag that but I'll do it anyway just to be safe.

PA BEING LE is... pretty out there. I think it slightly spoils the drama it causes for Joey if his reason for being such a lousy parent is something as extravagant as that. Maybe you could say he's influenced by LE or all the cherub-influenced tech, but I don't really like leaning on that either. The game has some lines in it already that hint at Jake having problems being close to his loved ones and having bad avoidance issues, those answer that mystery well enough in my view.

As for PA being on Alternia, I don't know. On the one hand, his behavior apparently hasn't been unusual, and the very last visit he still dropped off his normal assortment of artifacts like mummies and things. Additionally, the portal seems to be pretty dramatically one-use, starting a countdown and putting up a forcedown. I doubt Jake found a way to bypass this. There's also a line in the game suggesting he was looking for the key, which would suggest he never got it to run. ON THE OTHER HAND, He DOES have multiple globes evidently of Alternia's landscape sitting around, one of them possibly with Alternian writing on it. It could be he has visited there once before and made it back. And Jude very clearly knows it's a portal and says he lost someone else in it too, after feigning ignorance with it. So that one's kind of a tossup for me until we see more.

I'm pretty sure Homestuck says there's generally only two fuschiabloods at any one time; Her Imperious Condescension and the Heiress. Presumably they are so rare one is born only every ~7 sweeps, if even that. Though perhaps Scratch intends to sabotage things and assassinate the next grub to be born naturally so that Feferi's meteor can land and take her place. IF, that is, this takes place immediately before Feferi's reign as Heiress. Which it might not be?

I think subtext pretty heavily suggests A. Claire was shot to death, and that's why Joey doesn't like guns. It was probably an accident, and it might have been Jake's fault, which is why he can't bear to show his face to the kids anymore. Either way, I very very very much doubt she's any kind of alive. There is a worrying possibility her stuffed corpse is sitting around the house somewhere, though.

I have this feeling the key wasn't exactly "hers". I sort of get this feeling she stole it from Jake while he was working on assembling the portal, and then Joey took it from her possessions after she died as an heirloom. Jake never knew and never found it.

While Kansas City Shuffle refers to a con, I also feel it maybe suggests Hauntswitch is a city in Kansas? Maybe? That's kind of what I'm thinking until evidence sways me otherwise.

Oh, I fully realize that the theory's pretty out there... but this IS also the world where the big bad ended up being Caliborn + Gamzee + Equius + AR, so out there theories aren't exactly off the table But you do have good points as far as it spoiling the more human side of the drama. At the very least, the amount of cherub (and often Lord English-specific) references in their house seem like they're probably more than just nods to the audience, especially since the LE references in Hiveswap so far are most heavily in Half-Harley Manor and NOT on Alternia. I'm interested to see how it plays out.


Ooooooh, that's a really good catch! Bumping up the brightness on that image (since the wires are probably supposed to be in shadow) makes it clear that they're both pretty close to the candy red and lime green we associate with cherubs, and the background is a darker green like one would associate with their skin color, so I think that's definitely supposed to be an intentional reference. The idea that sendification is cherub-related technology is very interesting, especially considering there is ALREADY a lot of Cherub imagery in Sburb (such as being depicted on god tier clocks, Yaldabaoth's chamber, and the Hope symbol being similar to their wings). Even though I know Hiveswap isn't supposed to be about Sburb, I wonder if it might end up giving some insight into why those connections are so prominent, or at least why all of this cherub technology is showing up all over the place.

I hadn't even noticed that rectangle of dark green in the background of it but it's clear if I zoom in.  I agree that makes the odds of it being a deliberate design a lot higher than just the red & green wires alone do.  There are signs of the cherubs' pointy hands behind quite a few things.

Do you think there's a reason we haven't gotten Dammek's full name yet? I mean we've gotten full names for most of the other characters even prior to the game and we even have Trizza's full name, so why do we only have one part of Dammek's? I feel like his last name is going to have some importance. The two things that it could be are he's either related to someone from the comic, or for some contrived reason, his last name is Tethis and he is related to Trizza somehow... Maybe Dammek is faking his blood color or something, but that doesn't make any sense either since only two fuchsia bloods can exist at one time IIRC, and trolls don't have anything equivalent to siblings on Alternia since they're not even supposed to know anyone they're related to. So maybe he isn't even related to Trizza but rather he is higher up on the hemospectrum then he claims. Maybe his last name is royalty or something and that's why we don't know it?

Am I looking too deep into this?

Aside from the thought that she hid the key from Jake for some reason, how is it suspicious that she possesses a mystical artifact? That's a quality possessed by like, any given character in Homestuck. And the whole theme of this Act so far has been bigger character(s) manipulating events to produce a desired result.

I don't know about this green sun painting business either. For one thing, she painted a shape the Green Sun has NEVER been depicted in, much more like a star than a sun. For another, everyone knows the Green Sun is VERY VERY green, on the lime side. The same color as like half the things on the house thanks to cherub symbology. Yet she went for more of a mint/jade green shade. (For that matter, there's already another sun in the mural, so that would just be redundant.)

I mean... There's nothing she's misinterpreting or misunderstanding about him abandoning them and never being around. Even if he has the best reason in the world, he apparently doesn't even keep the house stocked with food. He has a babysitter to take care of them, and even she's not doing a stellar job.

It's certainly possible there's something mysterious about miss A. Claire, and we may not know the full truth about her. But if Joey discovered such a thing, and even if Jake jumped right out of nowhere to save her in some tight spot on Alternia or something, I'm pretty sure the only thing she'd get out of it is that neither of her parents were any good.

It's certainly strange we haven't learned his name like virtually every other character so far. It may mean something significant, but we'll probably learn it before the end of Hiveswap, and probably as soon as Hauntswitch starts too. For that matter, it'd be pretty crazy if a deposed Heir to the Empire went into hiding in a lowblood neighborhood, an area rife with psychics, where he would then make a band about abolishing the establishment and giving power to the lowbloods.

Actually, holy shit, I thought this was CRAZY but I'm kind of starting to see it. He flees certain murder at the throne, maybe because he's an anomaly for being born at the same time as another heiress, or maybe just for being born a male and the ruling powers want to ensure the highest caste is always female. There is the fact his horns don't really look like what we've seen royalty horns look like, but he easily could have made up or stolen a fake sign and be careful not to let any of his own blood spill. There's plenty all around the hive, but it may all belong to his lusus, a genuine bronzeblood lusus who lost their original charge and bonded to Dammek, a troll with strong leadership qualities, obviously.

It may explain why, even though Dammek appears to have genuine ambitions for his revolutionary ideals, he treats Xefros like such an inferior. I mean, I kind of liked the idea that the system of slavery and control could be such that even Bronzebloods and Burgundy weren't equal, and abuse could be passed down even between the two lowest tiers, and the theory takes a little something away from that. But it WOULD help to explain why an anarchist who wants to dispose of that system can't seem to help be so condescending, maybe without even realizing it.

There's also evidence that he wishes he were in Trizza's place, what with that depiction where he's drawn himself over her. And the song Frondly Warning's lyrics always struck me as... oddly personal? May count as another piece of evidence if Dammek wrote the lyrics for Xefros to sing, which is more than possible.

Wow, I, uhh. Am interested in seeing where this goes. It's kind of a long shot, but... wow.

EDIT: As it was embarrassingly pointed out to me, Dammek does not have fins. So, that'd take some doing. And while he still could be a highblood, a lot of what makes this theory works for me is that he has a relationship with Trizza in particular. So... idk.

Yes but 'any given character in Homestuck' so far has either been a player, a future player, a former player, some kind of game construct creature (the Carapacians, the Felt, the First Guardians and the Denizens) and...Dad, maybe? Miss A. Claire is, as far as we know, none of those things. And it would make far more sense for Jake to have found the key somewhere, given a lot of stuff that can be found around the house points to him actively looking for Cherub related shit. So why does the game make it so the key belonged to Joey's mom when it belonging to Jake would fit so much better?


Joey says, when her brother points out that the stars are wrong, that it's because they're not from the perspective of Earth. Given her mom has a key that can unlock a portal to Aternia and the fact that her father has found or will find a way to travel to the Medium, (and just the charmingly unsubtle way foreshadowing sometimes works in Homestuck) it's quite possible Joey is right, and the Green Sun can be seen as a Green Star from the vantage depicted.

Plus it's more ambiguous than the heretofore Green Sun Symbol would be to anyone who's read Homestuck.


Joey thinks her Pa is adventuring and leaving his kids in the hands of a babysitter just because that's what he wants to do. We know better. We know from Homestuck that at least three of the four Guardians knew the meteors were coming by the time S***b comes out. So here's the million dollar question: did they know the meteors and the destruction of Earth couldn't be stopped, and if so, did they know that at the time of Hiveswap? Because if Jake and Roxy were convinced that the world being destroyed by meteors was something they could stop at this point, that lends a whole new perspective to what they're doing. Because if you need to neglect your children to save their lives and their world, you do it. Or, alternatively, if you don't think you can save the Earth but you can cobble together a portal or a way off the planet for your kids to take advantage of before it ends, you spend all your time on that. After all they may, by this time, have found out about Jade, John, Rose, and Dave and know they will at least have the game to escape into, but Joey and Jude would have no such place to flee. 

Like I said, it'd be sort of like Rose and her Mom. Mom was still an imperfect parent due to being drunk all the time, but Rose was granted a new perspective on her mother when she realized both that Mom was never mocking her interests and that what she knew about the world's impending doom made her drinking, while not excusable, certainly a hell of a lot more understandable.

On a completely different note, have the forums been kind of....crash-happy for anyone else lately, or is that just me?

Heh, actually doesn't that kind of fit with what I'm saying? Like, if the star WAS the Green Sun making it a star threw you off the scent, at least. ;)

Most of the other references don't mean much to the plot. What Joey's mom (an unknown variable) did or didn't know could wind up being important because we don't know how she would know it or even if....well, even if she's a good person who didn't or isn't going to do bad things with that knowledge. We know Jake and Roxy are weird and should know things that we know that no one else on Earth would or could know, and that whatever their faults they are trying to deal with everything they know about as best they can. Joey's mom is different.


A) It's more than possible that before Jake had kids, he didn't know about the Earth's impending doom. Plus, there's nothing that guarantees yet that Jude and Joey were....let's say, more normally or purposefully conceived than Jade and John were. B) As for Roxy, I already said her drinking wasn't excusable, but drunk or not if she knows about shit like S***b, the meteors, monsters, maybe First Guardians or what have you, then Jake might've thought it'd be better if she watched over the kids because a babysitter who's not in the loop would not be able to deal with dangers like that, should said dangers find the kids. And....honestly I'd agree.