Alice Over Zero

when we read any story or engage with any narrative, what comes out of that is a mixture of what the story affords and what we bring to it. this is one implication of Foucault's "author-function" we discuss early on--when approaching a text, we assume some agent or collection of agents put things together in a certain order to produce a certain meaning, even when the meaning produced is not the meaning the material, historical agent(s) who composed the text intended. because at the end of the day, those interpretations are still real! like, real people actually have them, and they have them for reasons! the issue is simply getting a handle on where different parts of your interpretation are anchored and how, with knowledge of the assumptions that underpin your reading experience.

if i had one big goal with HMTW, it was drawing attention to these facts, because i think despite living in a culture where engaging with and talking to each other about stories is extremely common and important, we are often not taught to be meta-reflective about the moves we make to get to our interpretations. we are generally not encouraged to make distinctions and judgments about what a text affords us versus what we actively bring to it, but rather to conflate those things in the search of singular "correct" interpretations. when you layer this attitude over something like Homestuck, which is actively playing with the modes of reading people were bringing to it, things get wild pretty quick, as history shows. but the fact remains: every interpretation you ever make, of Homestuck or anything, is going to be at least partly You, rather than something contained wholly by the author or the text itself.

so if you look at John's aspect as a sort of metacommentary on oral storytelling, that's not a problem, it's the thing working like it was built to, combining elements of the text with larger reserves of individual and communal knowledge. i think it ultimately does not matter what Hussie thought or thinks on this point, as long as you can do something useful or interesting with your approach. and i think your point is certainly interesting enough for further thought!

but let's break it down, and do some meta-reflection on the moves that can get us there:

textually, the comic clearly aligns Breath with life, resurrection, and so on--that's pretty cut and dry, and we can reasonably say it's an intended reading. John is also an heir, which on the one hand is just some role the game assigned him but textually speaks to his position as Basically the Main Guy with the Responsibilities and the Questions Surrounding Them. at a structural level, this all makes loads of sense for the protagonist of a riproaring fantasy epic aimed at young people, almost to the extent that's it's barely worth remarking upon. if you abstract everything i just said a little i am also describing Luke Skywalker and his relationship to the Force and the Jedi, right? anyway, if we couched our understanding of these textual features as coming straight from Hussie with intent, i don't think we'd catch a lot of resistance.

but your question follows through on another Homestuckian habit, which is using concrete narrative elements to thematize the nature of the story itself. and this is where things can get fuzzy, but also a lot of fun. we just have to be thoughtful! the next question to ask is: where does oral storytelling show up in Homestuck? textually, in its most elevated sense as a longstanding facet of human culture, the thing that has given us some of the most lasting creative works available, maybe not a lot?? Hussie also doesn't have any formspring responses or tumblr posts going on at length about oral storytelling or anything like that to provide a grip.¹ so we might say at this point we are actively Making a Move: we are taking an idea we know from outside the text (oral storytelling, as a particular sociohistorical term for describe human action and culture) and putting it into dialogue with the text as part of our reading practice to see what comes out.²

what we might notice now is that there are several places where telling a story out loud is clearly meaningful in Homestuck, even if these scenes don't always seem terribly significant or serious (like John summarizing the whole plot for Roxy in Act 6). this also is a comic with characters whose entire deal is exposition dumps, and that's the joke. it does draw our attention to how much the comic is about people talking to one another (or, at critical moments, not doing so). with that in our pocket we can look at Homestuck the object and note that, as the product of a rowdy and communicative fan culture, with fan discourses being openly incorporated into the thing itself, that there is in fact good reason to think about an older form of lively social and collaborative storytelling as useful context when looking at Homestuck.

there is now a rallying cry as the text charges back in to help us out: oral storytelling aside, it is pretty inarguable that Homestuck is a story about stories in a lot of ways. and if we want to make a connection between oral storytelling and breath in practical terms, we can then look to the comic's idea of Breath and note that all the clearly textual stuff i mentioned (life, resurrection) is enriched by thinking about how this speaks to the dynamics of storytelling that produce Homestuck in much the way your question framed it.

did Hussie intend all that from the start? maybe not! but that doesn't mean the connection wasn't eventually made--sometimes when you're writing live, weird echoes and synergies show up and you're like "oh hell yeah, that's useful." so it could have been one of those situations! and even if it never rose to the level of conscious thought for Hussie, it clearly has for you and others, and that matters, too. hell, if you listen closely to the induction at the very beginning of Episode 13, you may notice that some similar thoughts appear to have crossed my mind.

1. i'm speaking rhetorically here; there may in fact be a a formspring or tumblr post where Hussie does get into this as it relates to Homestuck or the Breath aspect, in which case we can bring it into the conversation and see what it adds

2. it must be said: sometimes you Make a Move in interpreting a story, and you realize it doesn't go anywhere; there's not as much evidence as you hoped, it doesn't fit that well, etc. i point this out, again, only because our discourse around interpretation is so focused on producing things that are "right" or at least "work on the first try" that we understate the occurrence and even the value of throwing your spaghetti at the wall and watching it all tumble to the floor. but that's not failure! at least you cooked some spaghetti! maybe you can throw it at a different wall later