transhumanisticpanspermia:

another thing about death in the update:

death is reparative. some force repairs the dead’s bodies, removes wounds, reassembles them, etc… so that they can enter the afterlife.

that means the process of death is not something passive which “just happens.” it is active. and active things can be denied.

we have an explanation for gamzee’s plot armor. it is in the interests of the force which controls death for gamzee to never die, and so his death is never performed by that force. this force elects not to perform the process of death upon gamzee’s body, so he cannot die.

the question is who or what controls the force of death, and why gamzee’s invincibility is in their best interests.

there are a few possibilities:

  1. lord english. he is literally the “lord of time,” time being the aspect of destruction, and the “angel of double death.” gamzee is necessary to his creation, because gamzee is a component of his self and part of his upbringing. however, this does not explain his invincibility in all timelines, alpha and doomed. english only requires a single gamzee to live, the alpha gamzee. there’s no reason for him to spare the doomed ones, which is what’s happening - there are zero gamzee ghosts. also, it’s unlikely that english is in control of the force of initial death, because it’s not in tune with his desire to destroy anything within reach. initial death creates a ghost, and LE destroys ghosts.

  2. the horrorterrors. we know little about their motivations, other than they are actively frightened by LE and they are passively opposed to the creation of new universes. the possible explanation here is that any gamzee ghosts in existence would give LE some sort of critical advantage - additional power, or perhaps the ability to find alt!calliope through the gamzees’ searches. for this reason, the horrorterrors would withhold death from gamzee. it also makes intuitive sense that they would control the mechanism of death, since they control the dream bubbles. this would also provide some explanation for why grimdarkness is the one affliction not shown being repaired by death in the flash.

  3. alt!calliope. this one is a bit more out there, but hear me out. she would be opposed to the creation of gamzee ghosts for roughly the same reasons the horrorterrors would. but she also has a vested interest in the process of ghost creation itself - the ghosts are a cloak for her, keeping LE busy, and of course she herself is a ghost. given that there’s some implication that the dreambubbles are abnormal (feferi said she had to convince the horrorterrors to glub them), that LE could very well wipe out all the ghosts in existence, and that a non-human, non-troll ghost has never been encountered, one possible explanation for the existence of ghosts is that ghosts are a complete abnormality created and sustained by Muse of Space powers. other than the four sessions implicated in the creation of both LE and alt!calliope, no other sessions of the game produce ghosts for their players, who instead go to the normal offscreen afterlife (the unexplained one from which, for example, aradia hears the voices of non-player troll dead.)
    this would mean that the muse of space would have the option to restrict these powers from a certain individual who would sabotage the very cover the ghosts provide, gamzee.
    this would also give a Mind player insight into the process of death, as we see in the flash, beacuse the current iteration of death is constructed by a conscious and perceptible individual (as opposed to an unknowable horrorterror.)