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munculus fanpage
this page has massive spoilers for hom, so please read through it at least once before you look at this page. homunculus is a comic where you can probably read it all in half an hour (what's been made so far), and you'll get the basic plot with a lot of unknowns, but you'll keep getting more and more out of it with rereading and paying close attention.
i am a massive homo (homunculus fan). hom has some of the best storytelling (to me) of any piece of media i've seen. i really like this comic; i read it for comfort sometimes. this page has interesting things i want to point out about it, as well as whatever silly fanstuff i make.
hom ring
i've made a webring for people who are fans of hom. most of its members will be my online friends to begin with, but anyone who likes homunculus is free to contact me and ask to join it.
no other members yet...
fanstuff
i made this animated button to put on your site if you like homunculus.
and some stamps.
some fanart doodles i've made. maya is so silly, i love her.
pls read my friend tabitha's nelly/vivi fanfic, it's so adorable.
unimportant interesting stuff
in chapter 1 page 35, on the first panel, "LIAR! LIAR!!" is faintly written over hadyn. if you inspect element, you can see a html comment that says "Liar." too.
in chapter 2 page 32, there's some ionian text that says "i really like trees".
random things to think about
who is harriet?
at chapter 1 page 44, sylvia says the luthir valves sound "almost like breathing". does this mean anything?
can vivian use her wings? it would be strange if they'll never have any use in the comic. they seem like a chekhov's gun to me
in chapter 2 page 32, there is some ionian text that says "you who came from the dark, i offer you a seat at my hearth, that you m[ay t]aste the sweet rot o[f] li[f]e." this might not mean anything on its own, since a lot of ionian text is filler, and the author never intended for people to read it. even this text has a mistake at the end that made me think it just said "dildo" backwards (lol). what makes this text important is that in chapter 3 page 24, there's some small, hard to read english text, that says "welcome to the hearth". so what is the hearth, and who is talking about it in chapter two? the luthir?
on that same page with sequoia seeing her memories of nelly, we see a distorted image of nelly with a halo, the same as hadyn does. the author has said that halos represent someone having a powerful "aura" and being an "esper". maybe this is linked to how nelly "sees things that aren't there", which is something i'll talk about further down. nelly has two horn shaped bits of hair that stick up from her head, which obviously look like devil horns, but you could also compare them to how hadyn's hair is drawn upwards by his halo. this could mean she already has a strong aura, just not enough to have a visible halo yet.
why are all the homs girls? do they have to be girls or was it hadyn's choice?
why can the twins sense things that are going to happen?
there seems to be a connection between nelly and fire. her hair's red (yes i know the comic's black and white, but look at klaufir's other art of her), and its style reminds me of the shape of fire. the twins painted nelly surrounded by fire. she even ate a burning cigarette.
what was the apocalypse that affected the world? where does all the hostile luthir come from and what are the wraithes?
pay close attention and you will see things that are there in one page have disappeared a little bit later. some of them are probably mistakes, but i think some might have meaning.
on chapter 2 page 21, on the first panel, hadyn looks a lot younger for a second, but another interesting thing that happens is his glasses' reflections show the dream version of sequoia.
"sequoia realises she's gay" theory
it's plainly obvious that sequoia's gay, so i'm not theorising about whether she is or not. i think that her false projected body in the physical black and white (straight) world being destroyed, all of her memories of nelly in particular saying things like "i'll always protect you" and "you're so pretty and tall" flashing before her eyes, and her awakening in the colourful (gay) world represents how she realises she's gay and can't keep pretending she isn't. it could represent other kinds of queerness too, really.
magic circles
magic circles seem to be used both to initiate a spell, and to keep a magic "enchantment" going. here i've made a list of all the magic circles i could find in the comic.
| image | context |
|---|---|
 |
1:14, hung up under a painting of someone with horns in the foyer, perhaps linked to the marsens. this circle's in a lot of older hom art on klaufir's tumblr, so it could just be an older design for the main one the homs have. |
 |
1:16, in vivian's eye when she looks at sylvia. |
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1:31, on the back of a book maya's reading called "pyromancy: advanced theory". |
 |
1:49, right at the end of chapter 1. it's the same as the one on maya's book. the text around it seems to be talking about hadyn, so i assume this circle has some connection to him. it has a halo, like hadyn does, too. |
 |
2:10, in nelly's eye when hadyn checks her seal. its distortedness seems to represent her seal being weak. the circle might be the seal itself. |
 |
2:22 and 23, we see hadyn making this practice drawing of the circle for the tempering. |
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2:28, hadyn draws the actual circle to be used. there are some interesting details about it that i'll talk about later. |
 |
2:29, a drawing of a circle, probably the one for the ceremony, on the utility room door. it isn't there in chapter 1. |
the meaning of the circles in the homs' eyes and similar ones
something ive noticed is that this wind chime in the attic has the same elements as those magic circles: a big circle, a small circle or dot, and five lines (or six , depending on whether you count the one with the small circle on it).
the triangle likely represents an anima. the five lines that stick out from the circle (counting the one that sticks out at both sides as a single line) might represent how many of them there are. you could alternatively see them as dividing between the 5 homunculus animas and the soul of hadyn.
tempering circle
in chapter 2 page 34, each mark on the circle has one person at it, except for nelly and polly, and erica and samantha, who share a mark between two. if you look closely at the homs, they have triangles on their heads to represent their animas. hadyn seems to have two dots on him. the twins share one tringle since they have one anima between them (we see that they share thoughts and finish each others' sentences, especially earlier on). polly doesn't have a triangle at all, i didn't realise why until recently. the twins have one candle, and the streams of smoke coming from their eyes merges into one above them.
the crazy thing i only noticed recently is that nelly and polly are depicted identically to the twins here; one candle, one merged stream of smoke, one triangle, one spot on the circle. the reason polly doesn't have her own triangle is that she shares an anima with nelly, or at least has one connected with hers. they don't seem to share thoughts like the twins do, though.
the way the homs are arranged on the spots around the circle is the same order as they're in on the characters page. this might be the order they were created in.
"things that aren't there"
(massive spoilers for potential future stuff in the comic)
in chapter 3, maya says that nelly "sees things that aren't there", but we never actually see any examples of this, right? :)
pay close attention the dining scenes and see if you notice any strange things about polly. in the first dining scene, she's shown once, and then never appears or interacts with anyone for the rest of the scene. she isn't even in panels where she should be visible.
two
pages
later
in the dining scene in chapter 2, polly doesn't have a chair at the table to begin with at all. when she climbs onto the counter, nobody notices her, not even the twins when she's directly in front of them. when she knocks the pan off and nelly starts shouting at her, sequoia says it's her own fault the pan fell off, even though it was clearly polly who knocked it off. at first i thought the twins calling her "polly poltergeist" was just them saying she's like a ghost in how stealthy she is, but now it seems like they actually can't see her.
there isn't any point in the comic where anyone interacts with polly, except for nelly. the only time anyone else mentions polly, except for the twins like i just mentioned, is in chapter 3 page 17 where hadyn asks nelly how polly is, and he shows more interest in how she is than he ever does with another homunculus. i think that there's definitely something special about polly. she looks like how sequoia's anima looks in the dream world, except with fully white eyes, so maybe she's more in the collective unconscious and less in the physical world than the other homs, and nelly is how she connect to the real world, i'm not sure.
if what maya means by "things that aren't there" is polly, then i think it's weird that she says it as if polly doesn't exist at all. wouldn't hadyn have explained to them that polly is actually real?
