remember hope sperm meta? this is me trying to do that for dream moons
The symbolic meaning of Derse and Prospit is not something I see discussed a lot beyond lunar sway. I can’t remember who said it, but a couple of days ago someone told me they had a theory that prospit dreamers want to proceed with the narrative and derse dreamers don’t. I think that this is incorrect, but the fact that I felt there was a wrong answer made me think about the concept of a right answer, so I’m grateful to them for that. Getting to the point. I’m fudging with fandom terms here, but bear with me: what does it mean that Prospit dreamers dream of Prospit and Derse dreamers dream of Derse?
Looking at the facts of Sburb, Prospit and Derse each want to defeat the other on the Battlefield, but this isn’t the conflict between them that tends to matter. Ideologically, the difference between the two is that Prospit wants to destroy Skaia through the hatching of the Genesis Frog, while Derse wants to destroy Skaia by aborting it with meteors. So if you’ll continue to bear with me, dreaming of Prospit involves dreaming of a world where the Genesis Frog is hatched in a fertile Skaia, and dreaming of Derse involves dreaming of a world where that will never happen. This dichotomy carries a lot of interesting symbolism when we look at what these events mean to the players: hatching Bilious Slick from Skaia means winning the game, but launching meteors at Skaia in the reckoning is what allows any of the players to be “born” in the first place. In the story, Prospitians like WQ, PM, and WK do much of what is required to make sure the players’ quests run smoothly, while Dersites such as the archagents cheat and murder through the game. In broader strokes, Prospit is connected to the more player-forward quest-type processes of Sburb, the “correct way” of interacting with the game, while Derse is connected to the more unfriendly and mechanical aspects, and frequently to breaking the game’s rules.
If Prospit dreamers symbolically dream of winning the game the right way, what is it exactly that they are dreaming of? I’ll stop beating around the bush: Sburb is a game about expanding your suburban home into a terra nullus-ass planet and fighting off the evil imps that live there, where you physically progress through gates symbolic of spiritual enlightenment towards the goal of confronting your Denizen, which is defined entirely by being a big bad guy who lives in the place you want to live. What does it mean for this game about colonialism to present one side as ethical and one side as unethical? We can see the answer by seeing how our dreamers interact with the worlds Sburb places them into.
When John reenacts movies with his planet’s population and captchalogues one of them because he finds them cute, he is doing some wholesome colonialism, the kind that Prospit endorses and Sburb encourages. When Rose gleefully destroys her planet, terrifies her consorts, and disembowels her imps in particularly sadistic ways, she is doing unwholesome colonialism typical of Dersites. When Gamzee sits down and eats pie with his imps, he’s being a wholesome Prospit child dictator, and when Eridan just tries to kill all of his planet’s wildlife he’s not just symbolically masturbating, he’s being a mean and evil Derse child dictator. Caliborn barely has any consorts, but the only one we see gets shot for no reason.
For some reason or another, it seems like this game for teenagers has its own coherent moral symbolism around colonial power, and it seems to even have opinions about it. On one level, the fact that Derse is always destined to win could be commentary on how ridiculous it is to believe in “wholesome colonialism”, but I’m not quite ready to reach outside the fourth wall yet. Sure, half of the players might dream of Derse, of a world where they can wreak havoc and destroy everything that was already there in order to build something new, but to win they have to go against Derse’s antinatalist principles and let the frog hatch. What’s up with that? I think the answer lies in what happens after the game. Sburb is grooming its players for something else.
Sburb is a machine that boots up every time with a Skaia, two planets of chess people, and one win condition. (unless you’re caliborn). Half of your players will be Prospit dreamers, symbolically aligned with “ethically” colonizing Sburb’s worlds for the purposes of creating a new universe and winning the game, and half of them will be Derse dreamers, symbolically aligned with the opposite of that. Derse dreamers who don’t care too much about respecting native wildlife or ”peaceful” diplomacy. Derse dreamers who just want to burn everyone else down and build something new that belongs to them. Derse dreamers who do “bad” colonialism.
Derse dreamers don’t seem to have any symbolic function when it comes to winning the game and hatching the frog. But after the frog is hatched, what function do Prospit dreamers have?
Just like the Dersite side is destined to win the eternal stalemate between Prospit and Derse, the Dersite side is destined to win the relevancy battle after the game is won. In terms of what Sburb wants out of its players and its universes, leaving Prospit dreamers in charge doesn’t seem to lead to any useful sessions. Jane’s Earth C has entire consort kingdoms. For Sburb, that’s completely useless. Where the Candy timeline is defined by fighting between the Prospitians Jane and Karkat over how to be good god-kings, the Meat timeline is giving Sburb actual sessions through two Derse dreamers, Dirk and Rose, who got to work wiping out the Deltritan ecosystem and started ENGINEERING life to replace it that was more like them.
I hope that this view of Prospit and Derse can spark some ideas about the symbolic meanings of things like Deltritan Australia, the candy kids coming to meat, and whatever’s going on with the Nymphs and their dreamselves. Thank you for reading!
