precisionfstrike:

Let me warn you guys in advance: This, and most of my character analyses, are going to be all sorts of crazy long. Total stats for this character analysis are eight pages, single-spaced, and 4,279 words. I’m not sorry. This is fun. As you might imagine, a monster of this size is going to be hidden behind a cut. So without any further preamble, away we go: 

JOHN EGBERT: THE NAME BREAKDOWN.

John. What a name for a main character. John has always been an incredibly popular name for guys; from 1880 until 1924 it was the most popular name for boys (prior to that, it and William regularly exchanged places dating all the way back to 1550), and even after it lost the #1 rank it still took until 1973 for it to fall out of the top five. It’s a Biblical name, usually referring to either John the Baptist, who baptized Christ in the Jordan River, or the apostle John, who wrote the five books of the New Testament. It’s a name with a lot of history, and a lot of character behind it. You’ve got kings and emperors and conquerors and popes, saints and villains and of course your normal everyman too. It’s a name that sees a lot of use in media because of how traditional a name it is. 

Which makes it a fitting name for our main character. Much like his name has quite a history behind it, John’s got a hell of a past as well, from his origin until his deaths. The history of rulers bearing the name also means that it’s pretty fitting for someone who grows into the Heir, wouldn’t you say? He’s got a lot to live up to, and he has a name that carries those same expectations.

Egbert is an Anglo-Saxon name meaning “Bright Edge.” For the most part it doesn’t have so much in the way of significance, especially given that these first few names were fan-generated. However, there’s one pretty remarkable story that relates to John Egbert’s name, and that is the tale of James Dallas Egbert III, which I expect most people already know about. Egbert was a student at Michigan State University who, years ago, was said to have disappeared into the steam tunnels underrunning the campus for “reasons related to the role-playing game” D&D. This was later proven to be false, but it certainly makes for a great story. Perhaps the namesake isn’t entirely fitting (John certainly seems to have a much sunnier outlook on life than Egbert did), but the connection between a D&D player and the character of John Egbert seems to be a pretty neat parallel.

ghostyTrickster & ectoBiologist 

All of the pesterchum handles are evocative of the character they represent. John’s are pretty easy to decipher: his initial name, ghostyTrickster, combines two of his interests: Ghostbusters and the study of practical jokes. His second handle, ectoBiologist, is directly lifted from his conversation with Terezi, wherein she tells him he’s a disgrace to the field of ectobiology. This second handle obviously foreshadows his role as the ectobiologist in the kids’ session, even if when he made the name he didn’t know the significance of it. 

Interestingly enough, we might also note that John’s initial handle, ghostyTrickster, may have foreshadowed his grandmother’s role as his spiritual guide in Sburb—she is certainly a ghost, given her resurrection via the kernelsprite, and is shown several times to enjoy the prankster’s gambit the same way John does (hoo hoo hoo!).

FIRST IMPRESSIONS.

My first impressions of John as a character were… not stellar. I didn’t outright dislikehim, as he’s far too much of an ingénue character to keep from endearing himself to me in some way, but he was just. Eh. Part of this was because of the silliness of his introduction—retrieve arms, place arms on cake, eject the cake from your sylladex into the toilet… that’s not really my type of humor, and unfortunately that reflected on John as a character, particularly upon statements such as “This definitely makes the CAKE at least 300% more hilarious.” He was there, he was the character that didn’t understand what was going on, he was the one who sat and nodded and went “okay!” while the rest of his friends made all of the decisions and played an active role in their own worlds.

As we progressed through the plot, this was a pretty common theme: while Dave exploited time loops and Rose learned everything she could about the game in order to later break it to hell and back, John was just kind of bumbling around, accidentallying the correct moves. Karkat mentions at one point that John doesn’t even understand how the game works, even after he’s reached god tier. John keeps getting rewarded and progressing further, without the same challenges that a lot of the other characters are being faced with. I definitely didn’t dislike him, but he wasn’t my favorite either, considering how things just kind of fell into his lap.

That changed.

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Everyone needs to read this because PFS knows how to analyze characters like nobody’s business