Character death doesn't matter and that's okay

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How many times has your favourite character died? In any other media, the answer is probably "one" or "zero", and if it's "one", it's probably a bad thing. But in Homestuck, people die. And come back to life. Repeatedly.

I can think of one other example, actually. Re:Zero. It's an isekai anime about this guy named Subaru. Every time this guy dies, he rewinds to the start of his journey, and experiences the same thing all over again. He's also a massive moron who you want to punch in the face, until you realise that if you took his place, you'd probably be worse.

But Subaru's deaths are pretty integral to the point of Re:Zero. It's symbolised by the "Re:" in the goddamn title. This guy dies in the OP. In Homestuck's case, death is not really all that important. I mean, it's a thing that happens, but deaths are only impactful when the circumstances align.

Part of it would have to do with all the backups Sburb gives you. If you die, you've got your dreamself. If that also fails, you'll get bumped down a reality-level into the dream bubbles (provided they exist in your session), where you can just sort of wait to get revived, or double-die (i.e. real death). There are at least 10 distinct ways to bring someone back to life, and with enough brainpower, you can probably make up a million more.

That's to be expected in a god-game, really. Especially a god-game where losing the life of one important player could doom your whole session just because they happened to be the only one with the space aspect.

Though this tenet of god-game design does cause some problems too. What happens when someone becomes a huge asshole and tears the place up? How do you deal with them without dooming your entire session?

Well, this did happen. Lord English happened. This nasty motherfucker used every dirty trick in the book to get super overpowered and wreck a bunch of shit. Due to the extent of Caliborn's prior bullshitscapade, Lord English pretty much couldn't die (even once!), so he was locked into a timeloop instead. I say, that's a pretty hacky solution, but it works. Also, does getting timeloop'd count as a death? Not medically, of course, but philosophically. Ooh, much to think about.

Now that I think about it, Sburb is a social game. You've got a much better change of winning if all the players are on the same page. If you die, someone who cares about you is gonna want to bring you back. I think this is why the Beforus session faceplanted as hard as it did - from what we learn about them, there was some serious interpersonal beef going on, and they never really managed to resolve it.

Speaking of death, there's a lot of weird and heavy shit that goes on in Homestuck that doesn't really get elaborated on with the proper weight. I think at some point it got aware of that, and then it got so much better. Yeah, I should write about that next.

Pretend I wrote a really interesting conclusion here.