#happy homestuck day to those who celebrate as well+

[pixelpeebs]

Oh Neil!! The tunes!! They are bangin!!

#peebsart #neil banging out the tunes #neil bangin out the tunes #april 13th #happy homestuck day to those who celebrate as well+ #procreate #art #tumblr

[madohomo]

u know what day it is!!

happy homestuck to all who still celebrate as well as all those who refuse to forgive and forget

#txt

[noveratus]

Happy homestuck day!

To celebrate, I decided to write my own idea of what I wish the epilogues/sequel would have been like. I tried to stick to only "canon" characters, but I did alter their personalities and backstories past the canon events. I hope you enjoy!

"A young man stands in his room. It so happens that today, the 7th of July 2007 is this young man's birthday. Though it was 13 years ago that he was given life, it is only today that he is given a name!

What will the name of this young man be?"

Tavros Crocker grew up hearing about the story of gods and heroes who, over a thousand years prior, created the entire universe and defeated an Undefeatable Demon known as Lord English. Most of the gods have disappeared, but the legends say that they are still alive somewhere in the universe, with the only known remaining hero being Jane Crocker, his mother and owner of the most influential company in the world. In his 15th birthday, he receives a mysterious message from a Troll claiming to be Vriska Serket. She tells him to get the "others" who he assumes to be the Legendary Heroes because Lord English is coming. 

Tavros proceeds to try to tell his mother, who immediately dismisses him, telling him it was likely someone lying and that she has no time for these child stories since she has an empire to run. Frustrated, he vents to his online friend, Harry Anderson, who shares an admiration for the heroes, except for Tavros' mother, who he believes to be evil. He immediately believes his friend's words and says they should run away from home to save the world together, also giving them a chance to meet in person for the first time. Tavros is reluctant at first, but upon being convinced by Harry that the fate of the universe is in their hands, he runs away from home much for his mother's horror. 

Harry Anderson lives on the other side of Earth C with his mothers, Roxy Anderson and Callie Anderson. Roxy helped Jane with her campaign, leading her to later regret her actions after seeing how far the woman would go, so with her wife's help, she became a thief who would steal from Crocker's business to give it to those who needed it the most. While Harry admires his mothers, he also somewhat resents them for not giving him the attention he wishes they did, even if they are ultimately supportive. 

He sees Tavros' message as an opportunity to perhaps get their attention while also saving the world, so he gathers his best friends from drama class, Avril Thorpe, Silas P Beauregard III and Imode Kurita, and leaves to rescue Tavros from his mother, stealing a spaceship in the process. They also end up being followed by Jane's 'personal hound,' tasked with bringing Tavros back home, Yiffany Longstocking. She acts as an antagonist to the group until being eventually convinced to help them save the world.

Eventually, they are also joined by Vriska "Vrissy" Maryam-Lalonde, the daughter of Kanaya and Rose. Vrissy wishes to see Earth instead of being with her mothers, and the group are the perfect excuse to escape. She also becomes their self proclaimed captain and has a romantic relationship with Harry.

In the 2000 years that passed, Roxy and Callie decided to continue on living hidden amongst humans and trolls. Jade and Dave have left the planet to find a way to extend Karkat's life span. Meanwhile, Rose and Kanaya spend their time exploring the universe, looking for another habitable planet along their daughter, Vrissy. Dirk and Jake have been training in a far off planet now populated by robots, awaiting English's arrival. Jane took control over Earth through her baking empire, controlling the geopolitical scenario with her son, Tavros, as well as Yiffany, a human-dog hybrid created to be as strong as Bec Noir using his dna as well. Terezi's fate is still unknown and Gamzee has somehow survived all this time and works under Jane. John is still on Earth, living all alone in a replica of his original home. 

John is the first adult the group finds and the only one who agrees to help, however, he decides to go find Terezi, imagining that the group can bring his friends around on their own.

 Dirk seems to believe the group at first until realizing who Tavros and Yiffany are. He believes that they were sent there by Jane to get Jake to return to Earth, banishing them from his planet before they can even talk to Jake. 

Jade and Dave have used their powers to create a bubble in which Karkat can exist despite how long it has been. The two of them refuse to help out of fear of what might happen to Karkat if they ever stopped concentrating. Dave does give Harry his sword, but says that is all he can do. 

Much like Dirk, Kanaya and Rose think that the children are being sent there by Jane, who was the reason they had to leave in the first place due to how she acted towards trolls, wanting to limit their reproduction. When they attempted to reach their friends, they all turned their backs on them for their own selfish reasons (except for Jade and Dave who had already left Earth with Karkat.) So now they travelled the cosmos looking for a place that trolls could live without prejudice. They refuse to help. 

Jane believes that Harry and the others have kidnapped her son, who she refuses to listen to, so they continue to try to escape her. 

Finally, Harry learns that his mother, Roxy, is in fact one of the gods of legend, however, he refuses to go to her for help since it would go against one of the very reasons why he went on this mission. He has an argument with Tavros, and the group splits up, with Harry and Vrissy going to a planet where life appears to have just started. As he walks through the primitive life forms, he tells his girlfriend that even if they did manage to convince his mother, there was no way she would be enough to defeat him, even with John. He doesn't want to lose him mom more than he already has. As they walk through the planet, they come across a frog temple with some mysterious writing that appears to be code. Harry recognizes this as what might be the code for SBURB, and he comes up with a new plan. He gets Tavros and the others to come to the planet, thinking he would apologize, but instead, he reveals his new plan: For them to become the gods. If they play the game and become gods and heroes, they can defeat English themselves. At first, there is reluctance, but Harry manages to convince Tavros who agrees and convinces the others. Tavros then makes the game using his programming skills, and they get ready to play it in the ship, not realizing what would happen to the planet if they did. 

Meanwhile, John finally returns with both Terezi and Vriska with him. He expects the group to have gathered their friends so they can all battle together, but is surprised to see no one there. He comes to Roxy to try and understand why, but she reveals surprise at this and that it is new information. It is too late, however, for all across the universe. Lord English's arrival is felt, and all the gods realize they made a huge mistake. At the same time that English arrives, the children start their game, starting a new session and destroying the world they find themselves in before it even has a chance to fully develop.

Like that, the past players are pulled back into the game, with seven new ones and a boss that is impossible to defeat. 

#homestuck #alternate universe #au #fanfic #writing

[skaiatemple]

February 20th is the Festival of Life!

If you follow as a practitioner of Pop Culture Paganism, a user of Homestuck inspired Chaos Magic, or just want to use your favorite series to inspire you throughout the year, Skaia Temple is your resource center!

Whether you want to just celebrate it on the day, use it as a date for empowered energy, integrate it into your more mundane celebrations, or just appreciate your favorite characters and concepts this month, we have suggestions for whatever path you want to take with us!

Read below the cut for a condensed idea & resource list for this month of Life!

Aspect Centered Celebrate the Aspect in all its glory if you’re all about on celebrating the Festivals for exactly what they represent: The Aspect and all the traits associated with it.

“If you’re poisoned, chances are the Life-bound have something for what ails ya. This applies to both physical and mental suffering, though it might not be a cure you’ll like.”

Life is about care and improvement. But never at the cost of your real needs- if you spend all your time giving love and attention to the lives of other people, you’ll eventually become bitter with the lack of attention to your own. However you decide to nurture your environment, make sure you’re taking care of yourself as well.

Take some of the things you planned in the season of Hope and make sure they include some pressing self care matters as well. If you’re all good, be a support for your friends and those important to you. Take all the care you can manage to nurture yourself and make you healthy and happy to go after the Life you want to lead.

This month is for living it.

Magical Inspiration If you want to use Homestuck concepts more abstractly and need some ideas for what brands of magic would work best for the season, if you have an Aspect or character-themed spell, feel free to send it in so it can be added to this section!

Life is different for all of us. We all have different paths, blockages, and goals. Homestuck meanwhile is a story about many very different children growing up in a world that is challenging them. Use their endurance, beliefs, and mistakes to help get your through your own journey.

Divination can be a good thing for this time, use it to check out what options you have or avenues your best be focusing on that will lead to your best benefit. Sympathy spells as well to help out those around you if that’s what you’re ready to focus on. What ever you do, make sure you have cleansed, purified and grounded yourself to be in the best condition you can be right now.

Check out what the Zodiac signs the moon is in this month to help yourself plan!

Here is a Feferi-inspired healing ritual. And here is a cute infograph on the effects of the Life aspect

Integration Route For people in the broom closet who are too timid or anxious to celebrate the Festivals openly- you can always integrate the Aspects traits to fit in with the more common trends and holidays of the month. Not even Hussie is is Homestuck God, no one will mind!

March is Womens History month, along with March 8th as International Women's day, a good time for any female-aligned practitioners to flaunt your pride! Support each other and all you’re capable of accomplishing.

Fandom Driven For if you’re not all about spirituality or routine and just want to enjoy going all-out with a beloved story & characters, you can honor the ones of this month by driving full-throttle on the fandom bandwagon.

Life is the Aspect for the Peixes. Strong, beautiful girls with big personalities and bigger dreams. They let nothing stand in their way, and cut loose of anything that tries to hold them down! Their Life is theirs to do with what they see fit. Use this positively and do something that helps -------EV-ERYBODY!!!! 38D

Its also the Aspect for lovely lovely Jane Crocker. A varied example of the Life Aspect. In one timeline she gave up all the opportunities in front of her for a shot at peace and justice for the world she loved most, and even as she settled into a quiet, non threatening Life with a family of their own, she embodied a strength of a seasoned old Nanna we all wish we had. In another timeline then, where she’s allowed to go after what she wants full force, her issues lie in trying to remain passive and without arguments. Then there's that timeline where she becomes a ruthless dictator. And another where she goes through Lesbian boot-camp? And ANOTHER where she overthrows a ruthless dictator???? Jane is a Character and that should be Appreciated.

Draw art, write fic, and post analysis’ for these strong, inspirational, and deliciously savage women! But please be considerate and don’t like, destroy the entire human race to do it though.

We hope you got some ideas for activities you can do with your friends or otherwise use to inspire and better yourself this month. Everyone plays the game of life differently, and everyone's beliefs are their own. Celebrate yourself as you see fit, and Thanks for Playing with Us.

~Mod Bee

#festivals #life guide #life aspect

[shakks]

Thoughts

Happy New Years, I suppose. I’ve got a lot on my mind that I need to say, but I’ve been reluctant to do so. I’ll ramble off-the-cuff for a little bit (a LOT) down below if anyone can be bothered to listen. Just some random unedited and unformatted thoughts about what I’m doing with myself and trying to figure out how life works.

...Seriously, it’s a massive post. Don’t strain yourself if you’d rather not.

I don’t like to speak often, or give excuses. I prefer to let my work do the talking. Actions speak louder than words, right?

It’s funny, I did a search through my blog and found a post where I had celebrated hitting 200 followers two years ago. Curious, I checked my follower count now... And it’s at 206. I think it’s more than safe to say that I’m beyond stagnation. Still, I’m here to see this adventure through to the end, one way or another, regardless of how long it takes.

Actions speak louder than words... I’m sure my inaction is speaking volumes. I’ve always made it a point not to apologize when an update is missed or when I make a mistake. I have a bad habit of holding myself to unrealistic standards, and not only would I be apologizing with every update I make, I would draw attention to issues that few people would have noticed in the first place (such as me forgetting to draw Phobia’s hair in one of the panels from earlier this month). The LuFa from ten years ago would have dropped everything to fix it, and then would have combed through every other panel, worrying about every other possible thing that could have gone wrong. At this point the LuFa from today is just glad that there’s an update to post.

When I made the post last week about not being able to update, it was because just as my Christmas holidays were starting, I hurt my back. I’m not sure how (I’m guessing in my sleep or something), but I’m not able to sit at my computer for more than an hour without taking many breaks. I had intended to continue updating all the way through the holidays, but I ended up spending more time than usual resting in bed and attempting to stretch, walk, exercise, or try anything to lessen the pain. This has killed any creative drive that I had, and rather than power through it, I thought it would be better to stop trying to grind myself against it and take it easy so that I can hit the ground running. I’m starting to feel better now and hope I will be able to get back to the updates as early as next week.

This raises the question of my update schedule. Why the long pauses, and why the sudden rush of updates in December? The pauses are simple, I keep trying to outdo myself with each update. Even though I’m trying to step away from full Flash animations, I still catch myself leaning towards them. It’s not the animations themselves - I’ve caught myself designing overelaborate gifs when just a couple static images would do fine. I let myself get stuck in this spiral where I would constantly build myself up and then tear myself back down. I would get caught up in it and let entire years pass me in the blink of an eye...

I’m not old, but I feel old. I still have most of my life ahead of me, but it frankly isn’t much longer until I hit middle-age and that is no longer the case. As a child, my parents pushed me to try as hard as I can. They’re the type who want their kid to go to university, become a doctor, and make a boatload of money. I gave them a hard no on the doctor path, so they sent me to university to become an engineer instead. I went through it and got the sheet of paper, but never really figured out what to do with it. I ended up moving across the country and settling for a job that by all metrics I should be overqualified for, but I’m not too sure that I really care. I’m making enough money to live quite comfortably, but I’m still living alone, and don’t really have anything else to my name. It was always hammered into me to be successful, but I never really understood what being successful meant. Looking at other people from the outside, I can make a few guesses that success generally means owning your own place, having a family, and lots of money to make sure you’re still able to support it all. I don’t really know about all of that. I just wanted to be left alone. Mission accomplished, but I still have to figure out what I’m supposed to do with myself...

I used to run forum adventures even before I was aware of MSPA or Problem Sleuth. I remember how happy I made my peers, and how much joy they got from engaging. I started Waterworks in my second year of university, when I had moved into student housing and finally had that loneliness that I had been craving for most of my life. It was strange, but that first year of Waterworks... I don’t think I had ever felt more fulfilled. The act of telling a story to anyone who was willing to listen; it truly felt like this could be something that I could see myself doing for the rest of my life. Not as a career, but purely because of its ability to engage people and make them feel things out of the ordinary. I truly want to keep doing this, even after Waterworks is finished. I can never give a straight answer when people ask me if I’m happy, but to be frank, I don’t think I’ve ever been happier after posting an update, engaging with readers, and furthering the story. It’s a little unorthodox for a life path, but the more time I spend on this planet leaves me even more uncertain of everything. I’m going to stick to what I know.

So, aside from getting stuck in a self-esteem spiral, what prompted the surge of updates this month? Well, I had a little bit of a reality check. The company that I work for was acquired by another company. Normally I wouldn’t have cared, but this has happened several times now. In my short tenure at this company, I’ve seen it grow from a small local operation to become part of a massive conglomerate, and this latest acquisition really had me questioning what I was doing with my life and what I should truly value. My job technically requires me to help people, so I go about my day believing that I’m doing just that - It’s not about the money, or the benefits... I work because it helps others. Meanwhile, board members and investors who I’ve never met - people who control the entire direction of the company and its employee’s livelihoods - are passing it and other companies amongst themselves as if they were trading cards. This forced me to stop and take a look at what I was really doing. I thought I was helping people, but really I’m just making numbers go up and down for the people upstairs. My coworkers are only doing it to take the paycheck and feed their families. I’ve been placing a disproportionate amount of value into my day job, a place where people who I’ve never met could cut me loose in the blink of an eye just because I didn’t make the right numbers go high enough.

I’m not quitting or anything, it’s a great place to work, but it got me thinking about what it means for someone to value something. Bizarrely, my thoughts turned back to MSPA, and what happened to Homestuck. I’m not clear who owns which rights to the adventure, and I’m not saying that you shouldn’t profit off your own creation... but I DO remember when the MSPA forums were taken down, seemingly without reason, and we were all cut loose by someone upstairs, be it knowingly or not. The forums were down for many months, and now a bare bones version of the site that it used to be is up, managed by a publishing company. Thinking about all those posts that were lost still hurts a little bit.

The company I work for being acquired had some eerie parallels to not just Homestuck’s forum situation, but a couple of other projects and franchises that have grown too big and have had their creators cast their fans to the wayside... If I ever manage to rebuild my reputation, I don’t ever want to let anything like that ever happen to anything I make. If Waterworks truly matters to me, then I need to act like it.

#real life #waterworks mspa

[stevenuniversallyreviews]

Episode 139: Lars of the Stars

“Bingo Bongo.”

On Saturday, January 22, 2011, a character from the webcomic Homestuck was suddenly killed. On Sunday, the scene continued, and in a string of wordless panels, another beloved character prepared to take revenge for this murder. On Monday, this character was also killed, and the murderer escaped. (I didn’t remember those dates on the top of my head, Homestuck has a very well-maintained archive, but I do at least remember that it was my first weekend back at William and Mary after my junior year’s winter break.)

To this day, that one-two punch remains my go-to example of a nameless phenomenon in serialized storytelling that fascinates me to no end: when reading Homestuck in real time, these deaths are two discrete events that happened days apart, but when reading it literally any time the after full string of updates concluded, both deaths are one big event. The gap between published segments of a serial have a tremendous effect on how the audience takes in a story, but once the story is complete, that effect can’t be felt again by new audiences.

Lars of the Stars aired just over seven months after Lars’s Head, and as someone who watched Steven Universe live since the pilot first dropped, it felt like the momentous return of the Off Colors. An ultra-early preview of the episode piled on the hype for the fanbase (I personally avoided discussion of it, not wanting to spoil myself), and the Breakup Arc made the divide seem even greater. But if you’re watching all the episodes in a row, the gap between Lars’s last appearance and this one is just 66 minutes; for context, that’s shorter than the time between Spinel landing on Earth and leaving it with the Diamonds.

I see Lars of the Stars as a very different episode today than I did when it debuted, and that’s fully because of the release schedule. Because while it remains a fresh, fun new direction after dwelling on the Breakup Arc for a few months and waiting on Lars to come back for even longer, watching it without the hiatus makes it clear that this isn’t just the start of a new chapter. It’s also an epilogue.

The fourteen episodes between Doug Out and Kevin Party pile on so much tension that we need a follow-up that feels like a break, which Lars of the Stars is happy to provide. But that doesn’t mean we can’t celebrate how far our characters have come during that chunk of episodes, and that’s exactly what happens here. Part 1 of the big stretch ends with Steven leaving everyone behind as he goes to space, and now we get an episode about him returning to space but including Connie in the way he should have from the start. Part 2 of the big stretch ends with the Off Colors trapped on Homeworld with little hope in sight, and now we get an episode about their freewheeling lives among the stars. And Part 3 of the big stretch ends with Steven and Connie establishing a new understanding of their relationship, and now we get an episode where they share what they’ve learned with the class.

In our last episode, Connie showed an ability to socialize without Steven. While this makes him worry that she might only be at Kevin’s titular party to have a good time rather than reconnect, the furthest he goes in terms of dark thoughts is that she doesn’t wanna hang out with him anymore. Meanwhile, Lars takes Sadie’s similar ability so socialize without him as a personal insult: his instinct is to assume she’s hanging out with the Cool Kids as an act of revenge, because it turns out people don’t just flip personalities after major life events, and despite some tremendous changes Lars still has work to do. (This is something that happens more and more as the show goes on, it’s almost as if the perpetual need to work on yourself is a major theme of the latter-day series or something.)

Stevonnie’s ability to help Lars out works in any episode, because Stevonnie embodies close relationships and Lars could use some tips on that front. But the fact that their defense of Sadie in this situation is what causes Steven and Connie to fuse in the first place gains new power when this it comes right after watching Kevin Party, because feeling uncertain about a friend/love interest’s new friends is something they just experienced both sides of. And as one last reflection of the kids as individuals, Steven reacts to Lars’s concerns with a thoughtful monologue about his feelings, but only after Connie chews him out for being such a dingus.

It’s lousy to be possessive and self-absorbed, but for all my criticism of Lars in the past, it’s not as if he’s the only teenager to be possessive or self-absorbed in the world (or space). That doesn’t make the behavior great, but it’s more a sign of adolescent insecurity than any deeper failing at this stage of his life; if he doesn’t grow out of it then that’s a whole other story, but his negative impulses are outweighed by his ability to take criticism of those impulses and reexamine his outlook. And as part of a show that teaches big lessons to kids, I love that his poor reaction to Sadie’s happiness is presented not as some angsty relationship hurdle, but as comically pathetic. Matthew Moy has a blast playing a version of the character who’s finally confident, but he hasn’t forgotten how to tap into Lars’s whiny grouch.

Thankfully that confidence defines the rest of the episode (which itself lends power to the stark return to his old personality). I don’t just say “thankfully” because I’m glad he’s got some self-esteem, but because like I just said, Matthew Moy has a blast. This is the goofiest episode we’ve had since The New Crystal Gems, and while I’m sure it’s even better for anime fans out there (Space Pirate Captain Harlock being the clearest influence) it still works for scrubs like me without that reference pool. Which is critical, as I doubt many members of the youth audience are all caught up on their late seventies anime.

Excellent pacing helps the fun hit for maximum impact, pivoting us from Kevin Party to space with a brisk opening scene and reintroducing characters not through exposition (which takes time) but on-screen text (which is faster and also magnificently cheesy; Lamar Abrams practiced this in Restaurant Wars). We use space jargon and references to old adventures to throw us in the middle of Lars’s journey in a quick and believable way, all the while building up the camaraderie between the Off Colors. His miniature breakdown would normally be a third act affair, allowing for its resolution to conclude the story, but instead it’s smack in the middle of the episode and we get a bunch more fun after it: it’s an important part of the story that informs Lars’s final gambit, but it’s not the main set piece.

(And, of course, the music remains as on point as ever: Aivi and Surasshu give the Sun Incinerator a punchy theme that complements those introductions perfectly, and revisit the motif heard in the Love Like You reprise, Holly Blue Agate’s scenes, and the drone attacks from Off Colors during this new foray into space. I don’t think it’s even possible for these two to disappoint.)

Confident Lars is marvel to behold, because it’s the real deal. His insecurities are still there, but rather than patching them up with a superiority complex (which so often is the case when insecure folks go too hard in building themselves up) he doesn’t feel the need to put on a front anymore. He’s cocky, but he loves his crew for who they are and is never as mean to them as he was to Steven, even as a joke. His exaggerated anime poses aren’t just dopey and delightful for the sake of being dopey and delightful, but show a newfound ability to have fun without being crippled by self-consciousness. And his zany schemes, shouted about by Emerald at first but then seen in action, actually work! He comes into his own as a space pirate, and as neat as it is to see him become a baker when he returns to Earth, Lars of the Stars makes a strong case for a life in space.

Speaking of Emerald, while I’m sure a lot of folks who hyped themselves up on Lars of the Stars were disappointed that this is all we see of her (especially because emeralds are big-name gemstones in the real world), I think her single appearance makes the episode even more of a hoot. This is not Steven’s story, so we get very little frame of reference for what the Off Colors have been up to: it feels like a crossover episode with a nonexistent spinoff. Having a small glimpse into the greater journey was a great call, because this is just one of many tales from the Sun Incinerator’s sterling crew, and it keeps up the thread of Steven being out of the loop on Lars and Sadie’s lives.

It also lets Jinkx Monsoon ham it up even harder than Moy without getting bogged down by character complexity. This is a ridiculous space adventure, and that tone is heightened by a baddie who doesn’t chew so much as gorge herself on the scenery. I mean, this is still Steven Universe, so even someone as over the top as Emerald gets a tiny arc: Lars seems to be the instigator of their rivalry, and while we side with the Off Colors because they’re the underdogs escaping persecution, Emerald has legitimate reasons to see herself as the wronged party. And Lars’s realization that she would never fire on her own ship doesn’t just work as a conclusion to his story, showing that he learned a lesson from his bitterness towards Sadie, but for Emerald’s, showing that while she wants her revenge she more just wants her stuff back. But this is still an opponent who we only see screaming from a screen, and that’s exactly what this episode needs.

The Off Color Gems stick to the characterization that defined them in their debut, but they’ve all let their guard down in a way that suggests both familiarity with Lars and relief from the unending pressure of a lifetime of hiding on Homeworld. We get a few good jokes from their roles on the ship, but their competence is never undermined. It’s funny that Padparadscha is a technical advisor, considering she only offers insight on events that already happened, but she ends up being able to foresee Emerald’s intent as well, which certainly has its uses. It’s funny that Fluorite is the chief engineer, considering her meandering nature doesn’t mesh with the tight time windows of keeping a speedy starship afloat, but despite her slowness she manages to keep pace. It’s funny that Rhodonite is head of strategic operations, considering her usual strategy is to panic at the most minor setback, but her constant worry about what could go wrong helps balance out Lars’s recklessness. While while the Rutile Twins’ natures aren’t at odds with their role as pilot, they’ve grown out of their quirk more than anyone else on the team: the sisters have branched out from their repetitive dialogue, with each head now expressing separate thoughts on a regular basis. They don’t just summarize each other anymore. They aren’t redundant anymore either.

Steven and Connie are largely around to observe and comment, even after fusing into Stevonnie, until they take over for the final action sequence. And that’s just fine, because it turns out AJ Michalka nails supporting role as well as nails lead: Stevonnie’s blithe “Whuzzat” is the perfect punchline to the Off Colors’ fear of the melodramatic "that,” but nothing tops the sincere adulation of “Wow Lars I missed you.” And because they don’t steal Lars’s spotlight in his big moment, it’s that much more exciting when they take the Star Skipper out for a drive, ending the episode with a brilliant action scene and a cliffhanger that promises further adventure, like any good space serial should. Steven Universe has the occasional incomplete first half of a two-parter, one that works fine in context but not as well on its own. Lars of the Stars does not have this problem, working so well as a genre piece that the lack of a conclusion is the only viable conclusion.

Finally, Lars of the Stars doesn’t just celebrate the end of Act III’s fourteen-episode sweep: this is the last episode from Jesse Zuke, who came out swinging with Chille Tid and maintained an unbelievable batting average over the course of their twenty episodes. There’s only one episode Zuke had a hand in that I’m not huge on, Know Your Fusion, and even that is funny as hell if you’re into that style of meta humor. Alongside Hilary Florido, Zuke gave us two of the show’s greatest instances of characters just hanging out in Beta and Last Stop Out of Beach CIty, and the pair laid and reinforced the foundation for Peridot’s post-villain characterization in Catch and Release, Too Far, Log Date 7 15 2, Barn Mates, Too Short to Ride,  the aforementioned Beta, Gem Harvest, and Room for Ruby. But on top of being a master of comedy, Zuke could also do horror (Chille Tid and Are You My Dad) and drama (Beach City Drift, Steven vs. Amethyst, Gemcation), and had a good enough understanding of Steven and Lars to earn solo boarding credit on Stuck Together. I would’ve loved to see what else Zuke might’ve brought to Steven Universe, but that makes their unbelievable consistency that much more of a gift while it lasted. Bingo Bongo, Jesse.

Future Vision!

This is the first time we hear Sadie Killer and the Suspects by name, and it thankfully won’t be the last.

We’re the one, we’re the ONE! TWO! THREE! FOUR!

It speaks to the range of Steven Universe that teen drama Kevin Party can stand alongside Lars of the Stars in my list of favorites. Granted, my top five also speaks to this range, but it’s nuts that the last two episodes are back-to-back and it not only works but benefits from this viewing order despite their wildly different tones.

Top Twenty-Five

Steven and the Stevens

Hit the Diamond

Mirror Gem

Lion 3: Straight to Video

Alone Together

Last One Out of Beach City

The Return

Jailbreak

The Answer

Mindful Education

Sworn to the Sword

Rose’s Scabbard

Earthlings

Mr. Greg

Coach Steven

Lars of the Stars

Giant Woman

Beach City Drift

Winter Forecast

Bismuth

Back to the Kindergarten

Steven’s Dream

Kevin Party

When It Rains

The Good Lars

Love ‘em

Laser Light Cannon

Bubble Buddies

Tiger Millionaire

Lion 2: The Movie

Rose’s Room

An Indirect Kiss

Ocean Gem

Space Race

Garnet’s Universe

Warp Tour

The Test

Future Vision

On the Run

Maximum Capacity

Marble Madness

Political Power

Full Disclosure

Joy Ride

Keeping It Together

We Need to Talk

Chille Tid

Cry for Help

Keystone Motel

Catch and Release

Back to the Barn

Steven’s Birthday

It Could’ve Been Great

Message Received

Log Date 7 15 2

Same Old World

The New Lars

Monster Reunion

Alone at Sea

Crack the Whip

Beta

Back to the Moon

Kindergarten Kid

Buddy’s Book

Gem Harvest

Three Gems and a Baby

That Will Be All

The New Crystal Gems

Storm in the Room

Room for Ruby

Lion 4: Alternate Ending

Doug Out

Are You My Dad?

I Am My Mom

Stuck Together

The Trial

Off Colors

Lars’s Head

Gemcation

Raising the Barn

Sadie Killer

Like ‘em

Gem Glow

Frybo

Arcade Mania

So Many Birthdays

Lars and the Cool Kids

Onion Trade

Steven the Sword Fighter

Beach Party

Monster Buddies

Keep Beach City Weird

Watermelon Steven

The Message

Open Book

Story for Steven

Shirt Club

Love Letters

Reformed

Rising Tides, Crashing Tides

Onion Friend

Historical Friction

Friend Ship

Nightmare Hospital

Too Far

Barn Mates

Steven Floats

Drop Beat Dad

Too Short to Ride

Restaurant Wars

Kiki’s Pizza Delivery Service

Greg the Babysitter

Gem Hunt

Steven vs. Amethyst

Bubbled

Adventures in Light Distortion

Gem Heist

The Zoo

Rocknaldo

Dewey Wins

Enh

Cheeseburger Backpack

Together Breakfast

Cat Fingers

Serious Steven

Steven’s Lion

Joking Victim

Secret Team

Say Uncle

Super Watermelon Island

Gem Drill

Know Your Fusion

Future Boy Zoltron

Tiger Philanthropist

No Thanks!

     6. Horror Club      5. Fusion Cuisine      4. House Guest      3. Onion Gang      2. Sadie’s Song      1. Island Adventure

#lars of the stars #steven universe #su #steven universally #review

[dukeofriven]

Good In The World

I meant what I said with that extended LOTR quote being what the Epilogues are about - about there being good in the world, and it being worth fighting for. Given that I’ve been up to my neck reading Hussie commentary lately I feel like I’ve gotten a pretty strong grasp on what makes him tick - and who boy does this guy love stories about friendship, teamwork, and love, loves them so much he sometimes sounds like Téa Gardner about to lay down a friendship speech on Yu-Gi-Oh. So - while noting that the extent to which the epilogues are and are not Hussie’s work are even more muddled that usual in regards Homestuck - the take-away is this: everything went wrong, in both Meat and Candy, because everyone forgot that - that friendship, teamwork, and love is the only reason any of them survived. The Sburb survivors came to Earth-C as literal gods, beings of inordinate celebrity and power, and then didn’t work as hard as they should have to still be friends and family. We point to John as some kind of recluse but it quickly becomes clear that everyone stopped working at staying together. Karkat and Dave are as much shut-ins as John, stewing together in their own incapacity. Katkat’s self-loathing, so often a hilarious joke in Homestuck is - free of the immediate pressures of Sburb - shown to be intensely debilitating. It undermines him repeatedly in Meat, and requires incipit genocide in Candy to be set aside, costing him everything that mattered on a personal level. Dave made the mistake of many in his position before him, leaning too much on the first epiphany about trauma and not taking the care to continue down the path to further healing and reconciliation with the past. It leaves him desperately reaching for intimacies he too scared of to actually experience. Coupled with an abused kid’s terror of perpetuating harm he lies to Karkat and Jade both time and time again to try and save their feelings. Jade, so utterly fucked up by years of isolation and loneliness, and so endearingly, crushingly full of love makes all the wrong decisions in trying to build a triad (that is - the triad could have worked, but she went about it all wrong) and makes two separate instantiations of Dave and Karkat miserable. Rose and Kanaya have no malice in their actions, but they do what married people always do: pull away from everyone else, and focus on themselves and their new lives. Harmless, normally - or, at least, not seriously harmful - but those lives took them underground and away from everyone else, The two most insightful and level-headed members of the party simply weren’t around when everyone needed them most. Unaware how bad things were getting they missed so many of the warning sides that would have clued them in earlier that everyone was going off the rails - and being as isolated as she was in Meat this left Rose vulnerable to the manipulation most likely to succeed: just like with Doc Scratch she was preyed upon by someone who could flatter her sense of grievance, knowledge, and uniqueness. Terezi wouldn’t have stood by and let things go to shit - but she was doomed the moment she tied her heart to ego personified, and so was absent too.  As for the Alphas, well - their problems were never resolved in the first place, their 'conflict arcs’ interrupted by the arrival of the betas. Only Roxy, element of void, utterly self-contained, a refugee from a dead reality, walked onto Earth-C able to withstand the horror that awaited them: celebrity. Skaia is benevolent, but it is not wise: Sburb seems to have a cherub’s worldview, full of bright colours and heightened stories, but not much maturity. When the victors of Sburb escaped to Earth-C the last thing they needed was celebrity, praise, and positions of note. The issues are all laid out in the prologue: John retired before he ever started working, every one of them richer than any mortal could conceive of. These kids didn’t need parades, they needed to go school. Jane didn’t need honorary degrees from every business school on the planet, Jake didn’t need a TV show centred entirely around his ass: what everyone needed was to be aggressively ordinary. Mundane and unregarded. They needed to put everyone in a group home with four on-staff counselors and take a chunk of years doing nothing but heal. Because everyone was damaged. Other than Calliope - a special case - everybody walked out of Sburb having witnessed at least one apocalypse. Put aside any of the individual traumas and deaths and abuses and sins and just focus on that alone: the death of entire worlds and the burden of saving seven sentient species. Rather than the ultimate Reward being a sit-down with kindly professionals who could help a bunch of kids cope with that, these literal children entered a new world and built new lives on a foundation of dust. The beta kids never finished seventh grade. Jane Crocker never finished high school. Jade Harley, Jake English, Roxy Lalonde, and Dirk Strider never went to school at all. Not one of those four had ever been around more than four humans in their lives until the day they won the game. They couldn’t have. Jade and Jake grew up alone on islands. Roxy and Dirk grew up in the apocalypse. Dirk grew up in a literal box. As Cascade hit Dave and John were the only living humans Jade had ever met who wasn’t her grandpa: and she spent three years alone on a ship with only the Nannasprites and consorts for company. (And Jaspers to chase.) For those four especially, think about they went through within 24-hours: BAM here’s a group of people including your alt-relatives and literal aliens BAM here’s a crazy fucking battle against technicolour chess people, killer dogs, and fish queens BAM here’s a pristine new-ish world better BAM produce thousands of species to populate a new world /TABLE SCRATCH/ Welcome to Earth-C in the year 5000 Celebrity Gods. Here’s your debit cards full of riches. Seriously - this all happens in about a day. And yet people are shocked that things didn’t work out? They were sixteen years old. Four of them had no formal education of any kind, nor had ever been around enough to people to form a softball team. And that’s not even starting on the trolls, who had multiple culture-shocks and traumas of their own the sort through. And yet people are shocked that things didn’t work out? There is, absolutely, a way all of this could have been addressed and become a happy ending. If you don’t like the Epilogues because you’re just sick and fucking tired of tragedy stories - boy do I feel you. Man, don’t get me started on shit like Westword we will be here all week. If you just wanted there to be a fucking happy ending because god-damnit people deserve to be happy - I feel that too. Had that been what we got I can’t say that I’d have been displeased. But if you’re angry because what happened in the Epilogues seems “unreasonable”  all I can do is wave my arms at all the shit everybody went through and ask you why going from that to retired celebrity godhood was good for anyone. What happened on Earth-C was nobody’s fault - not even Dirk’s. Of course he lost it. Of course he took his godhood to its logical conclusions - what possible grounding in real human beings had he ever seriously had, and what in his life was there to make him see people as people? Dude grew up alone in a box with SBAHJ and rapping robots for company - the only voice in his head his own, magnified in the echo chamber of ego and his own blindness to his inadequacies.  Why wouldn’t Jane cling to status quo of her dead world? Really, what did Sburb ever bring her but heartbreak, an excessively baroque Bad Relationship Simulator that took away her home and her position as a corporate heiress for a six month romp through a bunch of dead planets and inter-friend squabbling (We don’t talk about how fucking boring the alpha session was: nothing but undead and emptiness.) She reaches a new world, gets told how smart she is, gets a bunch of degrees - but as Dave himself notes, when you’re rich as can be and have everyone on the planet lining up to do business with you, it’s pretty easy to think you’re actually skilled at running things, especially if YOU STOPPED YOUR EDUCATION AT SIXTEEN AND GOT TOLD THAT YOUR SIXTEEN YEAR OLD SELF WAS THE APEX OF YOUR BEING. Take a moment to remember yourself at sixteen. Try to put sixteen year old you in charge of something meaningfully important - like, mmh, let’s say a regional bank. Uh - oh. Oh dear. Oh it’s on fire, is it? And the fire is spreading? Yeah, that’ll happen. [One glaring issue I’ll note in these epilogues is that nobody knows what the fuck to do about Dad Crocker, so they do... nothing, until Candy reminds you he exists in order to kill him to motivate Jane to do something she probably could have been easily prompted to do anyways by another means. I guess Dad Crocker just... happily let Jane not finish school or exert any kind of parental control at all after that point? On her or anybody else? You want to talk about OOC: what the fuck happened with Dad Crocker, of whom I expected better? And where did Tavrosprite and the Nannasprites go?] My point in all this is that Homestuck is a story about how important love, teamwork, and friendship is, and after the Earth-C victory everybody got lost. Everybody reacted to being Celebrity Gods in their own way, and it created little cracks that widened over time, and when everyone should have been coming closer together - group therapy sessions, even - they got further and farther apart. These emotionally-stunted mentally-teenaged kids with buckets of trauma, the power of gods, and the celebrity to match broke. One by one. All in their own unique ways. The Epilogues are in some sense a musing on the absurdity of adulthood - how its mantel is placed upon you regardless of whether you are ready or not, for reasons as arbitrary as ‘turning a certain age’ or ‘winning a video game.’ In some cases it takes our heroes DECADES of life before adulthood - before real maturity - begins to make something of an appearance, and even then it’s a crapshoot. Love, friendship, and teamwork are what matter in Homestuck: in the epilogues it takes years of monumentally boneheaded decisions for our heroes to remember this, and some of them never do.

Is there still a happy ending at the end of Homestuck? One that lies ahead? I think so. Hussies loves his characters dearly - and yes, he does. Of course he does. He didn’t spend ten years of his life telling the story of one dimensional Brechtian Archetypes to make some otiose point about the nature of narrative: if he had none of you would be feeling as you are now.  The difference between you and Andrew Hussie is that you see his characters like family: you leap to their defence whenever they are hurt, and when they are cut you bleed: “How?” you ask, “Could anyone be so cruel to do this thing?” But Hussie sees his characters as characters, in a story of which he is author, and in which pain and hurt and tragedy can be the vehicles through which good stories can be told: that the light is made all the brighter because of the quantity and quality of darkness that was banished. Candy and Meat are the story of a boy who can only destroy love because he thinks he understands it, and lashes-out when things don’t go as planned. Dirk is just as much the villain in Candy as in Meat, as Calliope makes very clear: the Candyverse is in some sense defined, or at least made more distinct, by his absence. He is a tragic figure on the macro scale - if only he and all the walking wounded of Sburb had been given help when they needed it - but his death in Candy is not a tragedy of ‘what ifs,’ it’s an act of petulance and cruelty by a kid who’ll take his ball and go home if he’s not allowed to play the winning game. His death destabilizes the Candyverse far more than John’s choice to stay, its just that its corrosive effects take longer to be obvious - and the gears he’d already set in motion didn’t cease to turn, though they may have slowed. Dirk destroys love, his effect on both timelines is to push people apart because division suits him, and to push his own view of what ‘love’ is on people who experience it far more expansively than he could ever imagine. He’s a sad little boy who grew up in alone in a box and entered a world that told him he was a literal god with the powers to match - by the end of Meat it’s clear that love, friendship, and teamwork mean nothing to him, only the perfect order of his own fevered imagination. What will bring him down in the end is the reclamation of that feeling at the end of Act 7 - the joy of victory, of having worked together, of the love of family both found and familial, and of the realization that they were none of them better apart. And then some therapists. Some actual therapists. For a good long time. (Also I hope that they find Doc Scratch and beat his sorry ass from here to eternity because that smug fuck has his puppety fingertips all over this thing, and if Dirk really is merging with his ultimate self that includes (as @geekycalligrapher noted) aspects that wound up in Lord English, including a not insignificant portion of one Doctor Vanilla Milkshake, Esq.) (Edit: I did, in fact, do a few edits when I noticed the opening sentences were missing things like ‘the subject.’)

#homestuck #The Homestuck Epilogues #beta kids #alpha kids #doc scratch #dirk strider #andrew hussie #homestuck analysis

[theorynexus]

Chapter 10 in the Ongoing Live Reaction Blog

Well, now. Good for her.   This feels like something that could be used to establish a proper timeline, if I could just remember what happened in those bloody... Instagram (?) pictures... .  Also:  Jake continues to embrace hope, distracting everyone with his manliness, as is the natural order of things.   I do not know how to feel about either of the relationships showcased here.  Specifically, it feels like both of them might be unhealthy, but there’s not enough displayed to judge for sure.   At least Jake isn’t the one being pressured into things, right now.

Of course she is. She’s the heiress to the Batterwitch. Obviously. 

Yeah, I’ve noticed humans are often Xenophobes too. It’s a very strange phenomenon.  But this is why it struck me as odd when John was thinking of them as celebrities, earlier. It is also why gods living among mortals in general is a dangerous proposition. It could potentially stifle greatness emerging from within the population, despite all the potential good that could be acquired via the intervention/aid/ingenuity of incredibly long-lived beings with super powers. That problem becomes worse when the gods in question are barely adults. Great Power coming with Great Responsibility has a correlate suggesting Great Irresponsibility among the Greatly Powerful results in Massive Tragedy and Horror. We’ll see how that will play out for Homestuck, I guess. Let’s hope for the best!

On the other hand:  HECK YEAH, KARKAT!!!   (I just really want him to have an important and leading role again. I loved what he was able to do during the trolls’ session with Aradia’s help, and I missed him being important. [No, it didn’t feel like his role in the fights against Lord English, or against Clover were enough to really earn that feeling of role fulfillment~] I’ve always been a sucker for his personality.)

I am just... extremely happy that this is the case. It almost brings tears to my eyes.  (Not only that Karkat is loved, but also that Dave recognizes all the great leadership potential within him, even despite all the garbage programming he’s shoved down his own throat following the end of the Trolls’ session.)

Ouch. Low blow on two notes:  Not only the puppet mastery comment, bringing back all the cringe memories of his ninja brother madness, but also calling him a coward after all the struggling Dave has had related to that conception of himself. “ or talking about the top six hundred stupid things Karkat saw earlier that day because he made his intrepid annual decision to go outside. “ How can something be so cute and horrible at the same time?   I mean this specifically regarding the possibly hyperbolic annual trip, not the semi-cuddling, by the way.

This. It is also sad and beautiful. *shakes my head and quietly laughs, because I knew that Dave would bring up Obama, here*      Just so fricking ridiculous and sortof beautiful, after he tries to pretend that he was purely thinking about their current Earth.  I love how neurotic and silly he can be, at times.

It’s funny because it doesn’t even matter what side of the aisle you’re on. There is a horribly great sum of ironic humor to be derived from this. It’s almost painful!

Yes. As long as you are friends with a god and are one of the ancestral heroes of your no-longer-dead race, YOU TOO can become President!    (Which is a horrible joke, considering I secretly aspire to high office, myself.) ... Did we really just have a massive time skip, demonstrating Karkat/limebloods are extremely long-lived, or was that “thousands of years” referring to things before these creatures were transplanted to the new Earth? HOW THE HECK DID THE MAYOR DIE?!?!?! ***rewatches the Credits***    Oh, well that time travel explains some things. I am going to continue, then~ Wow, that Dirk Pinata was quite beautifully cut down in the prime of its youth. I approve. OH!  Thaaat’s where John went Trickster Mode.  That makes much more sense than the Easter Egg being canonized. ...  I just realized that John’s reaction to his black hole dreams is sortof weird, given his conversation with Terezi, who’s going out and investigating things around it at the time. I do appreciate the consistency of Karkat’s frustration with Jake’s butt. Thus John’s malaise starts at 18.  I suppose this makes sense, in a coming of age story.  He had no endgame plans, so it’s a bit harder for him, maybe.   At least he doesn’t have to abandon some massive project he had in the works, or anything like that. (Kanaya and Rose look very cute in front of that mother grub together~   As is the picture of all the chess people coming together to celebrate John’s birthday.) ***wonders if indeed the ten people other than Caliborn are John’s 10 closest friends***   If so, has Terezi indeed returned, then? Or perhaps Calliope has replaced her on that list, for some reason?  It is indeed a difficult mystery to untangle, to be sure. I love Caliborn’s “COME TO MY DARK CARNIVAL” picture. He just looks so excitable and strangely almost cute.   Also: Hooray for knowing where that was in the timeline, now!

OH NOOOOOO!!!~            (It’s a good thing I chose to confront him.  ;3)

#Homestuck Analysis #Homestuck Liveblog #Backlogging #Homestuck Spoilers #Homestuck Epilogue

[wakraya]

Hiveswap Act 2 & Friendsim

So! It’s that time of the year! And I think it’s time to talk about some things regarding the state of Hiveswap right now, since I occasionally see people asking for what happened to it and such, and I imagine the complaints may ramp up soon given we just reached the 1-year Anniversary of Hiveswap! First let me add, however,

Happy Hiveswap Day!

With that out of the way, for those less informed about what’s going on, or those who need a recap, I’ll be talking about a brief explanation of Hiveswap’s development, speculation, and predictions.

The Kickstarter, Hiveswap 3D, The Odd Gentlemen

For those who don’t know or don’t remember, Hiveswap was the Crowdfunded Homestuck game, if I recall, it was 5, now 6 years ago that the Kickstarter was funded several times over with a budget of over 2 million dollars. We got Concept Art and some promising screenshots and the idea of an adventure game set on Earth and Alternia before the events of Homestuck, it was going to be cool! But then there was silence for a while, and a leak of some sort suggested that the company Hiveswap had been given to, had been redirecting funds from the Kickstarter to make another game.

This has never been proven, but given the legal nuance behind this, it seems very likely there was some issue of this kind that set Hiveswap back. Further into development when Hiveswap was being made by WhatPumpkin, we got more images of the Beta concept of the Half-Harley Manor, the Monsters and the Cherub Portal, but ultimately this was dropped as it didn’t have the feel the Team wanted for the game. The staff doing 3D assets was laid off, and development began on Hiveswap 2D.

And so, after 5 years, Hiveswap launched with a charming, fun... But rather easy and short First Act.

People liked it, but they, obviously, wanted more. Bugs were fixed, support for other OS was added afterwards, it wasn’t perfect but it was nice and it promised that there was going to be more of it soon!

Spring 2018, VIZ Media, Friendsim

Not long after the game’s release, we got news that Act 2 would be coming on Spring! This set the Volumes to be a bi-anual release or something around that range, and building up hype towards the launch, there was the Troll Call, showcasing some of the most important Trolls for Act 2! However... Soon enough, this was set to become a missed deadline, with development on Act 2 halted for reasons unknown.

Many were quick to point their finger at VIZ Media’s ‘restructuring’ of the company, however there’s actually no proof of this being a thing. It simply came at a time where VIZ Media was showing itself more prevalently around Homestuck stuff- With the creation of the books and the redesign of the Website, many entered in Panic Mode. I have my gripes with the new Website, however it’s a necessary change and it’s still in development, so I’m giving them time.

Regardless, the most likely reason for Hiveswap’s Stopped Development is... Money. With stolen money, a re-start of the project half-way, and not too impressive sales, it’s very likely the team simply didn’t have the resources to continue production on Act 2. This doesn’t mean the project is dead though- Because that’s where Friendsim comes in. A good way to get to know these main Trolls on Act 2, a way for WP to get some funds, and just generally more fun content for the Fandom to sink their teeth into! I’m loving every and each of the Friendsims so far, and it shows that the Team is still there developing these characters and making content for us. However, Friendsims have come and gone, and while we’re a bit over half-way through the Friendsims, today is Hiveswap’s Anniversary...

Celebration, Future, Predictions

As I write this, the WhatPumpkin Website has not made a formal post celebrating the anniversary or updating the state of the game or saying anything, so this could all become obsolete in a few hours/days.

However, let’s talk about a few things regarding the state of Hiveswap- The Friendsims have definitely softened the blow. A year ago I told myself and everyone they weren’t going to spend half as much time developing Act 2 as they did Act 1- But then the issues happened. And that’s the thing- These issues, likely monetary, have stopped the development for the time being. Hiveswap is not being actively worked on, but when it is, again, it will likely come to us in a few months. I am really frustrated because I see there’s some issues going on, the game’s not taking long, it’s just not being worked on because of these issues, and we have things to fill the gap in the meantime, so in a way we’ve been constantly getting Hiveswap stuff! I still want to go back to Joey but... I can wait and keep supporting the Devs if it means we’ll eventually get a quality product.

This being said, I am hopeful Hiveswap will come back soon. Why? Well a few things! First of all, it seems that the Friendsims have been getting more and more quality as time goes on. This is to be expected I guess, but at the same time just. The art style sort of getting more consistent, the larger amount of backgrounds and more intricate story bits, the more detailed Lusii as time goes on, it’s been great building a world around the MSPA Reader in Alternia, but it’s also been telling me that they’ve been putting more care and attention in them- They’re enjoying making them, yes, but they’re also likely starting to recover at least a little bit from them.

On top of that, the latest post in the WhatPumpkin Tumblr said that “So yeah. Nothing new. Except, well … the volume itself.“ Hussie and WhatPumpkin are kind of notorious for long periods of silence- But they’re not for no reason. They don’t report on things when there’s... Nothing to report on. It may be a bit anxiety-inducing, but it’s how they’ve been doing things. Their statement either tells me that they still have nothing, but are aware of this and are working towards actually getting us some news- Or they’re teasing us and about to drop an update. My expectations are tempered, and I won’t be disappointed if there’s just a little Anniversary post, but still we’ll see.

That being said? The mysterious second DLC in the store, and JamesRoach’s last video make me think there may be some sort of update soon. For those of you who don’t know, our boy James uploaded a video on the dynamic music of Act 2, and it confirmed a bunch of stuff! That there’s a lot more Trolls we haven’t seen that are only sort of background characters, he’s teased some important Trolls we may not have seen yet, but namely, dropping this kind of stuff for the anniversary of Act 2... It tells me there may be news incoming quite soon.

Either way, whether I am right or wrong, the constant flow of these Friendsims has really been reminding me of the Upd8 culture surrounding Homestuck. Maybe at a smaller, tamer level, but that is completely fine. The memes, the surprise and excitement, the little misshaps and paranoia. It may not be always perfect, we may still be waiting, but hey.

I am glad to be here and part of the Fandom, and I am happy to see what may or may not be updated by @whatpumpkin soon!

Again, as I said before, Happy Anniversary, Hiveswap, and hope everyone has been enjoying this weird, wild ride too! <3

#Homestuck #Hiveswap #Friendsim #WhatPumpkin #Upd8 #Long Post #Longpost

[kittywolves]

1-200 if you want lmao If not then just your favourites

200: My crush’s name is: don’t have one tbh, not romantically anyway

199: I was born in: west virginia, 2000

198: I am really: dumb

197: My cellphone company is: idk man

196: My eye color is: blue w/yellow bursts but they just appear green if you’re not super close

195: My shoe size is: 7+1/2-8

194: My ring size is: 7+1/2-8

193: My height is: 5′5″

192: I am allergic to: sesame :T

191: My 1st car was: N/A

190: My 1st job was: N/A

189: Last book you read: uh, Percy Jackson? i think

188: My bed is: warm, cozy, full of plushies & cat fur

187: My pet: CALCIFER!!! 

186: My best friend: uh,, i don’t have one?

185: My favorite shampoo is: idk fruity scents that aren’t watermelon

184: Xbox or ps3: PS3

183: Piggy banks are: cute or terrifying, no in-between

182: In my pockets: my phone

181: On my calendar: birthdays

180: Marriage is: cute 

179: Spongebob can: CAN SPONGEBOB FINALLY END PLEASE

178: My mom: can go die 

177: The last three songs I bought were? uhh, i haven’t bought any songs,,

176: Last YouTube video watched: DrawingWiffWaffles newest video

175: How many cousins do you have? 1

174: Do you have any siblings? yes, 2 alive 1 dead

173: Are your parents divorced? no,,

172: Are you taller than your mom? around the same height

171: Do you play an instrument? no, but i wish i could play the harp tbh

170: What did you do yesterday? uh, i went shopping with my mother and then watched Futurama 

[ I Believe In ]169: Love at first sight: ? i dunno anymore

168: Luck: i guess so, yea

167: Fate: yea

166: Yourself: no

165: Aliens: YES

164: Heaven: yea

163: Hell: yea

162: God: ? yea?

161: Horoscopes: not really

160: Soul mates: YESSSSS

159: Ghosts: yep!!

158: Gay Marriage: %100

157: War: no >:(

156: Orbs: what

155: Magic: yep!!

[ This or That ]154: Hugs or Kisses: hugs pls

153: Drunk or High: never been either, both sound fun

152: Phone or Online: usually use my phone tbh

151: Red heads or Black haired: all are adorable!!

150: Blondes or Brunettes:  a d o r a b l e ! !

149: Hot or cold: uhm, comfortable warm,,

148: Summer or winter: SUMMER

147: Autumn or Spring: HALLOWEEN !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

146: Chocolate or vanilla: CHOCOLATE 

145: Night or Day: NIGHTTIME

144: Oranges or Apples: apples 

143: Curly or Straight hair: both are great!! i have slightly wavy hair uwu

142: McDonalds or Burger King: neither >:(

141: White Chocolate or Milk Chocolate: MILK PLS

140: Mac or PC: um, idc

139: Flip flops or high heels:  F L I P F L O P S

138: Ugly and rich OR sweet and poor: SWEET AND POOR PLS GIVE ME A KIND BAB TO LOVE @ UNIVERSE

137: Coke or Pepsi: coke !!

136: Hillary or Obama: obama!!

135: Buried or cremated: cremated so i can’t come back :’)

134: Singing or Dancing: i can’t do either :(

133: Coach or Chanel: ugh, coach ig

132: Kat McPhee or Taylor Hicks: who or who

131: Small town or Big city: i live in a city, but a town sounds nice tbh

130: Wal-Mart or Target: TARGET

129: Ben Stiller or Adam Sandler: what

128: Manicure or Pedicure: PEDICURE PEDICURE PEDICURE

127: East Coast or West Coast: i live on the west, so west

126: Your Birthday or Christmas: MY BIRTHDAY BC I GET TO PICK THE THEME !!!

125: Chocolate or Flowers: flowers die and give off the aesthetic but chocolates are delicious so both

124: Disney or Six Flags: i love disneyland it’s just SO EXPENSIVE and six flags is gr8 for the thrills, plus i currently have a pass so

123: Yankees or Red Sox: who? which sport is this[ Here’s What I Think About ]122: War: blehhhh no

121: George Bush: idk american presidents lmao

120: Gay Marriage: YES YES YES YES YES YES

119: The presidential election: ew

118: Abortion: i’ll allow it lmao, i don’t think it’s great, but ik people will still get it whether it’s legal or not so might as well legalize it. also some cases actually need it so like,, yea!! let it happen!! pro-choice!!

117: MySpace: never used it lmao

116: Reality TV: ew ew ew ew EXCEPT FOR COOKING SHOWS

115: Parents: mine or just in general? bc eh

114: Back stabbers: M U R D E R  T H E M 113: Ebay: lmao shipping expenses 

112: Facebook: haven’t used it in years, do use messenger tho

111: Work: i like wedding coordinating with my aunt!! that’s about all the work i’ve done, oh and i’ve babysat

110: My Neighbors: don’t know em, they probably think we’re crazy tho, always yelling

109: Gas Prices: too!! high!!

108: Designer Clothes: eh, clothes are clothes, and some clothes are ugly (a lot of times it’s designer clothes blehh)

107: College: i mean i guess

106: Sports: go team! hit the ball! score the points! woo

105: My family: dysfunctional,,

104: The future: nooooooooooooooooooo

[ Last time I ]103: Hugged someone: uhhhhh....

102: Last time you ate: uhm, around 4?? maybe?? it’s 7 now

101: Saw someone I haven’t seen in awhile: uh?? i never see anyone OH i guess on wednesday last week,,

100: Cried in front of someone: ???? idk??? i cry while everyone’s asleep usually

99: Went to a movie theater: last week !! um, thursday?

98: Took a vacation: uhh, february, early march? i went to ohio

97: Swam in a pool: uh, last monday 

96: Changed a diaper: um, not this year lmao, maybe last year tho idk

95: Got my nails done: ???? i dunno

94: Went to a wedding: last november?? or wait no,, uhm i dunno sometime recently lmao

93: Broke a bone: never! did drop one in water tho :/

92: Got a piercing: december!

91: Broke the law: ?? i don’t wear seatbelts when i sit in the back seat lmao

90: Texted: around two hours ago[ MISC ]89: Who makes you laugh the most: um,, my friends

88: Something I will really miss when I leave home is: MY KITTY BABY

87: The last movie I saw: missing link! the stop motion- i’m a wh*re for animation lmao

86: The thing that I’m looking forward to the most: changing my name, moving out, getting married & having a stable life :’)

85: The thing im not looking forward to: being stuck here forever and eventually kmsing due to stress and depression :’)

84: People call me: Kitty!! Kiki!! (birth name) karebear!! 

83: The most difficult thing to do is: exist within the same room as my mother without bursting into tears or storming off 

82: I have gotten a speeding ticket: nope

81: My zodiac sign is: Virgo! Viriborn for all you homestucks! and dragon in the animal one!

80: The first person i talked to today was: my dad :’) and then i messaged @deanilise even tho she was asleep 

79: First time you had a crush: uh, as far back as i can remember i had a “crush” on Daphne Blake :D but i was like a small child and didn’t know what love was so anytime i saw anyone who i thought was cool or pretty or i wanted to befriend i had a supposed “crush” on them :/

78: The one person who i can’t hide things from: i try to be pretty open, but sometimes i just wanna close off 

77: Last time someone said something you were thinking: yikes idk

76: Right now I am talking to: like talking to or talking to? for the first, just some group chats for the second, no one

75: What are you going to do when you grow up: i wanna be an artist! i would love to be a youtube artist, but i fear i’m not creative enough for such things.. i would also like to be able to tell my stories!

74: I have/will get a job: i dunno,,

73: Tomorrow: church

72: Today: overslept, did some chores, been online

71: Next Summer: hopefully i can go back to colorado to visit my brother !

70: Next Weekend: ugh, church activities & then actual church, as well as other easter festivities

69: I have these pets: baby kitty, and some dogs.... 

68: The worst sound in the world: FORK SCRAPING ON BOWL, ERASER SCRAPING ON PAPER, DOG’S SNORING, MY MOTHER’S VOICE WHEN I’M HAVING SENSORY OVERLOAD

67: The person that makes me cry the most is: my mother, she’s like the only person that makes me cry unless someone says they’re attempting and i can’t get through to them

66: People that make you happy: @onedirtysock @aliaitee @deku-is-tired @deanilise @awkward-scarfy-boi @fourth-best-jeanist @bnhaworld @bnhya @helloiliketits @trashyfxndoms

65: Last time I cried: last night oops

64: My friends are: (see 66) they’re all very nice & supportive which is amazing & i love them all dearly

63: My computer is: a MacBook air with a galaxy cover

62: My School: not in one but the one i’m gonna go to in the fall is just a community college

61: My Car: N/A

60: I lose all respect for people who: hate on anyone, racists, homophobes, transphobes, pedos, terfs, ableists, etc

59: The movie I cried at was: uh, i dunno, but i was crying abt futurama the other night

58: Your hair color is: orange-y with dark brown roots, supposed to be dyeing it soon :)

57: TV shows you watch: BNHA, HIMYM, Bob’s Burgers, TUA w/ @deanilise Futurama, The Simpsons, Fairytail, Runaway’s, Adventure Time, SVTFOE, etc

56: Favorite web site: Tumblr!

55: Your dream vacation: Ireland,, ofc i always dreamed of going to paris when i was younger, and Britain sounds cool too, & i’ve heard belgium is pretty && japan sounds fun && new york city sounds super cool as well so idk any of those places ig

54: The worst pain I was ever in was: uh, probably when i broke my arm, although i can’t remember it, i did used to get growing pains in my legs when i was younger & could hardly sleep so there’s that option as well

53: How do you like your steak cooked: medium or medium-well

52: My room is: messy, but it’s home & also warm

51: My favorite celebrity is: uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh i dunno

50: Where would you like to be: idk, in my bed ig

49: Do you want children: yea! i wanna adopt!

48: Ever been in love: uh, i thought i was, but it was just an intense crush on this girl lmao

47: Who’s your best friend: already answered this lmao

46: More guy friends or girl friends: girls,,

45: One thing that makes you feel great is: laughing, music, & seeing my friends

44: One person that you wish you could see right now: any of y’all would be great tbh

43: Do you have a 5 year plan: survive 

42: Have you made a list of things to do before you die: lmao no, 

41: Have you pre-named your children: uh, i have names picked out that i like, but idk depends how young my kid is when i adopt them, and even then idk if i could bring myself to change their name uwu

40: Last person I got mad at: my mother,,

39: I would like to move to: IRELAND OR SOMETHING I DUNNO I WANT OUT OF THIS GODFORSAKEN COUNTRY

38: I wish I was a professional: artist!! youtube maybe!![ My Favorites ]37: Candy: hmm, i like smarties, m&ms, gummy bears, & sweetarts

36: Vehicle: uhh, vw beetles? WAIT NO JEEP WRANGLERS I THINK

35: President: uh idk

34: State visited: the one i live in lmao, California :)

33: Cellphone provider: idk a lot about them

32: Athlete: N/A

31: Actor: eeeeeeee

30: Actress: eeeeeeee

29: Singer: Case! Patrick Stump!

28: Band: FALL OUT BOYYYYYYYYYYY

27: Clothing store: Hottopic

26: Grocery store: N/A

25: TV show: Arrow! Adventure Time! (ripip) i haven’t seen Arrow in a long time tho so idk if it’s still any good...

24: Movie: Heathers!!

23: Website: Tumblr,,

22: Animal: CATS

21: Theme park: DisneyLand! it’s just sooooooooo expensive ;-;

20: Holiday: HALLOWEEN

19: Sport to watch: Soccer!!

18: Sport to play: none

17: Magazine: i don’t read them

16: Book: The Hunger Games 

15: Day of the week: probably friday or saturday

14: Beach: uh, maybe seal? or hermosa?

13: Concert attended: i’ve been to exactly one (1) and i didn’t enjoy it bc it was for Ariana Grande

12: Thing to cook: well you don’t cook them but, COOKIES!!

11: Food: Ice Cream!! Burgers!! Mashed Potatoes !!

10: Restaurant: In-N-Out probably

9: Radio station: 98.7 alt radio 

8: Yankee candle scent: uh i dunno

7: Perfume: Vanilla Bean Noelle from bbw

6: Flower: daffodils 

5: Color: pink! purple! green!

4: Talk show host: no

3: Comedian: Bo Burnham or John Mulaney

2: Dog breed: Retrievers !

1: Did you answer all these truthfully? yes!

here’s my baby for reference & for putting up with all that

#kitty answers #200 asks #deku-is-tired #calcifer

[wintersqueenmab]

Silly, do all the questions you definitely deleted. All of them.

Well, since you asked so nicely, sure. Under the readmore to save dashboard space.

1. how tall are you?

I’m 5 foot, 9 inches tall, or 175 centimeters for those of you using metric units.

2. what is your body type?

Softer than I’d like, but otherwise pretty standard.

3. what is your favorite part about your body?

I do like the color of my eyes, and I think my hands are pretty nice.

4. is your current hair color your natural hair color?

Partially, yes. However, the top of my head is currently a cotton candy riot, so not that part.

5. are you more outgoing or more shy?

I like to pull off the shy -> outgoing combo for maximum damage.

6. are you more femme or butch?

Being AMAB, I’m pretty sure I’m automatically on the butch side. Not where I’d like to keep it, though.

7. are you tol or smol?

I don’t think 5′9″ is very tall, or very small. The middle it is, then.

8. wine mom or vodka aunt?

Definitely vodka aunt.

9. weird habit?

Does eating popcorn seeds count?

10. favorite meme?

I’m a sucker for bass boosting in the middle of otherwise normal videos.

11. do you sing in the shower?

Ironically, that’s one of the only places I don’t sing.

12. ever used a bow and arrow?

A couple times, but never in any seriousness.

13. are/were you a theatre kid?

Not currently, but I definitely was in high school. Would love to go back.

14. have you ever seen a broadway musical?

Nah, son. Shit’s expensive.

15. do you think musicals are cheesy?

Yes, but in a good way.

16. have you ever been a part of a protest or a march?

Sadly not.

17. favorite Cards Against Humanity Card?

“Pac-Man uncontrollably guzzling cum.”

18. last movie you watched?

Spider-Man: Far from Home.

19. behind the camera or in front of it?

In front, definitely. Doing theater has shown me that I love being in the spotlight.

20. favorite tv show?

Toss up between Steven Universe and A:tLA.

21. meaning behind your url

Comes from an old username I had a long time ago. I still use Rydyr for most things online.

22. reason you joined tumblr

Kingdom Hearts fandom, then almost immediately comboed into Homestuck.

23. who’s your closest tumblr friend?

Probably samysticeti.

24. what’s something most people love that you hate?

Lord of the Rings.

25. have you ever taken narcotics?

Nope.

26. have you had sex?

Sure have.

27. have you ever gotten caught sneaking out or doing anything bad?

Yes, several times.

28. worst/funniest lie you’ve ever told?

I once told my dad that my brother had destroyed my writing journal to get out of writing in it for the day. It worked!

29. describe your passion without mentioning it.

Getting to know systems and the best way to exploit them is pretty dang neat.

30. describe your best friend.

Always there for me, even when I don’t want them there. But they know better.

31. give us one thing about you that no one knows.

Now, what makes you think you’ve earned that?

32. how do you feel right now?

Slightly irritated at the amount of formatting work I had to do for this (a lot), but otherwise good. Go listen to Starlight Brigade if you haven’t heard it, it’s fantastic.

33. what is your biggest fear?

Not becoming who I want to be.

34. what’s a song that always makes you happy when you hear it?

Glory, by Bastille.

35. what is the best decision you’ve made in your life so far?

Being more outgoing has, in general, done a ton for me.

36. have you ever tried your hardest and then been disappointed in the end?

Yeah. That’s life, though.

37. something you fantasize about.

Financial stability, a harem of cuties, being in a harem of cuties. Lots of unattainable goals.

38. last time you cried and why

A while ago, probably over past relationships.

39. what was the last thing that made you laugh?

A dumb play my friend made in a League of Legends match.

40. do you really, truly miss someone right now?

Always.

41. who do you feel most comfortable talking to about anything?

Honestly, nobody. Without sounding like an edgelord, there’s a lot I don’t want people to know because they’d just worry.

42. the last time you felt broken?

Last night.

43. are you starting to realize anything

Many, many things.

44. are you more dominant or more submissive

Depends on the context, obviously. I try to be assertive in everyday life, but I think I’m more submissive in the bedroom.

45. i’ll only date you if _____. (fill in the blank)

I’ll only date you if you treat me with respect.

46. do you prefer to date people the same age as you, younger, or older?

I don’t have any real preference, but I think I’d feel weird if I dated someone significantly younger than myself.

47. describe the person you’re in love with/have a crush on in great detail.

That’s not fair; I have too many crushes to single anyone out. One of the pros/cons of being poly.

48. do you have any kinks?

Look, there’s a whole ass list here. Gotta get more specific.

49. first thing you notice in a person?

Probably their voice if I’m actually interacting with them. If I’m seeing them from afar, it’s their hair.

50. how can someone win your heart?

By being sweet to me.

51. been rejected by a crush?

Of course.

52. have you ever had feelings for someone who didn’t have them back?

Tons of times.

53. would you have sex with the last person you text messaged?

If they were down, yeah.

54. is trust a big issue for you?

Like, do I have trust issues? Not really. Is it a big thing for me in a relationship? Once we hit a certain point, yeah.

55. did you hang out with the person you like recently?

A couple of them, yeah. Not nearly enough, though.

56. is confidence cute?

It’s fucking sexy.

57. what would you say if the person you love/like kissed another girl/boy?

Good for them! They’re living their best life. Fuck jealousy.

58. would you be able to date someone who doesn’t make you laugh?

Probably not. I love being with funny people.

59. does the person you have feelings for right now know you do?

At least one of them does. I try not to make it a big deal.

60. ever embarrass yourself in front of a crush?

I’ve embarrassed myself in front of my partners more times than I care to count.

61. do you want to get married

Not unless the government gets really cool about a lot of things really quickly.

62. worst thing you’ve ever done?

Lied to people that trusted me.

63. three things that turn you on.

Confidence, a nice pair of legs, and the ability to take charge.

64. who do you hate?

Nazis.

65. favorite term of endearment?

Stardust.

66. who was your celebrity/fictional gay awakening?

Probably some fucking Homestuck characters, I dunno.

67. intimidating girls or kind girls?

Both. Both? Both are great.

68. what do you look for in a possible partner?

We gotta like the same stuff. Also want to get freaky in the bedroom the same way.

69. do you tend to like more masculine, feminine, or androgynous girls?

Sixty-nine, eyyyyy. Uh, all of them.

70. are you good at flirting?

Only when I’m unaware I’m doing it.

71. who was the first person you came out to?

My friends in high school.

72. do you have any friends who are wlw?

Yes! Several.

73. is your crush wlw?

Some of them are, yeah.

74. last person to make you reconsider your sexuality?

Pretty much literally any attractive person. I think about it a lot.

75. write a short love poem to your crush/self?

I wish you’d know me

As I’ve gotten to know you

See me as I am

76. do you fall in love easily?

Love, no. Infatuation? Almost pathetically so, yeah.

77. is there something that happened in your past that you hate talking about?

Boy fucking howdy, yeah.

78. are you good at hiding your feelings?

Yep.

79. are you a forgiving person?

Extremely. I just wanna be friends with everyone.

80. what is your “type?”

Kind people that can slam me against a wall and make me thank them for the privilege.

81. fall asleep in her arms or rub her back until she falls asleep in yours?

B O T H

82. tall girls or short girls?

I’d love to be with a girl that just fucking dwarfs me in height.

83. hugs or kisses?

I fucking love hugs. And I’ve had strangers tell me I give great hugs, so I wanna share that with others.

84. twirl her around or get twirled?

Fuck, dude, I’d sure love to get twirled.

85. tummy kisses or thigh kisses?

A tummy kiss that transitions into a big fucking tummy raspberry.

86. hairline kisses or neck kisses?

Neck kisses, hell fucking yeah.

87. play with her hair or stroke her tummy?

Hair, absolutely. Too many people are ticklish.

88. making out or soft kisses?

I don’t understand why I need to choose here. They’re both great in different situations.

89. hugs around the neck or hugs around the waist?

Waist! Easier to pick people up that way.

90. how confident are you in your sexuality?

I’m pretty confident in my ability to be attracted to nearly anyone that’s nice to me.

91. when you like someone do you blush or get butterflies in your stomach?

Butterflies, with blushing only when I get embarrassed around them.

92. have you ever liked a friend as more than a friend? did you tell them?

Yes and yes.

93. how old were you when you realized you were into girls?

Well, being AMAB, this was pretty early. It took me a lot longer to accept being into guys.

94. most embarrassing thing you’ve done in front of a cute girl?

There was this one time I just nerded out about MtG for like ten minutes, and she was just sitting nearby. When I saw her, I almost died.

95. do you have a favorite lesbian ship? is it canon?

Rosemary from Homestuck. It’s so good.

96. what is the most aggravating thing someone has said to you about your sexuality?

“Are you sure you can’t just pick one person and stick to them?”

97. when was the last time a girl made your heart flutter?

Like six hours ago.

98. what is love to you?

Love is caring about another person more than yourself. It’s wanting the best for them at all times. It’s being happy when they’re happy and being sad when they’re sad. It’s seeing the universe in their smile, and glimpsing eternity in how they make you feel.

99. ask me anything.

Well, this sure is awkward. If you read all this, congrats! You know more about me now than my own parents probably do. Have a great night, everyone.

#me #ask meme #99 questions #this was fun to do

[blaperile]

Homestuck Epilogue(s) - Prologue (page 1)

I've just read right until the end of the first Prologue page. Under the Read More are my initial reactions!

Oh boy... it's time. Time for the Epilogues... assuming it's available yet and/or the link on homestuck.com doesn't lead to a VIZ Media buy link for a book form of the Epilogue, I could also see that happening. xD plainWonder also had a good point that perhaps the first part of the epilogue will simply be the snaps we already saw on the MSPA Snapchat. ...Snaps almost feels like a weird thing to say now. I think they've just gotten a way darker meaning for me ever since watching Avengers: Infinity War. xD ANYWAY, without further ado, here we go!!! *clicks link* Hehn, kind of looks like the start page of an all new adventure! And yay, looks like the epilogue IS indeed simply on the website itself and not externally, for I see a command leading to the next page! *hovers over link of > Start and sees URL* www.homestuck.com/epilogues/prologue ....SERIOUSLY??? PFFFFFFFF, typical Hussie right there. Only HE can give an epilogue a prologue. xD Oh boy this is gonna be a long epilogue isn't it. The question is, how much of it is available here already? And what is the prologue even going to be? Will they just be the snaps we've already seen? I'm very curious where this is going now. > Start ....HOLY FUCK. Archive of our own parody??? Or an actual Archive of Our Own "fanfic"???? Oh jegus god. We've truly come full circle now that Hussie is doing a parody of a website famous for housing Homestuck fanfics. Looks like Andrew collaborated with a few people? "Rating: Mature" Sounds about right! "Category: F/F, F/M, M/M, Multi, Other" Sounds about right! "Fandom: Homestuck" Sounds about right! "Characters: John Egbert, Rose Lalonde, Dave Strider, Jade Harley, Jane Crocker, Roxy Lalonde, Jake English, Dirk Strider, Barack Obama" Sounds about ri...WAIT A SECOND. PFFFFFFFFFFFFF Hell fucking yes xD "Aradia Megido, Tavros Nitram, Sollux Captor, Karkat Vantas, Kanaya Maryam, Terezi Pyrope, Vriska Serket, Gamzee Makara, Eridan Ampora, Feferi Peixes, Aranea Serket, Meenah Peixes, Davepetasprite^2, Calliope, Caliborn, Lord English, Original Male Character(s), Original Female Character(s)" Well if this isn't a joke, I'd be VERY happy to see Eridan and Feferi again along with the rest of the gang! Aranea though!!!! That's got me very curious. Is she alive (as in, dead but not double dead)??? I know that was really ambiguous on whether or not she was double dead or not after being killed by GO!Condesce. Kind of sad the other A1 Trolls aren't on the list. Hmm, mention of Davepetasprite^2 but nothing of the other Sprites! Makes sense if this is mainly taking place in the Furthest Ring. Wait a second.... I only just noticed how Equius is the only A2 Troll missing from this list!!! And no true separate mention of Nepeta either. Oh man. Looks like Arquiusprite (who should be on Earth) is also sitting this one out! ...Equius got voided out. :P I also find it very interesting how Caliborn receives a separate mention from Lord English! Are we going to see something from the fight that took place between Caliborn and the Kids? ...Wait, that DID feature Arquiusprite though, who is missing from this list. HMMMMMMM And oh boy, what should we expect from the "original male character(s), original female character(s)"????? Are some of the people from Universe C going to factor into this? Assuming we can take this list of characters seriously... which I kind of doubt considering Barack Obama is on the list. xD ...THOSE CONTENT WARNINGS. OH MY GOD. Oh god I love this already. Kankri would be so proud. :P "The Economy" ==> I got that reference! xD I love all the Gamzee related content warnings. "Trickster Mode" I DARE YOU HUSSIE "Ten years after their adventure began, the heroes are enjoying a well-earned retirement on Earth C. But John still has one last choice to make." HOLY SHIT. 10 years later?! That's... 2 years later from the last thing we saw from John, when he celebrated his 21st birthday and was challenged by Caliborn! Wait... 10 years after the start. THAT'S NOW. It's frickin 2019!!!!! Oh hell yes, Andrew has made it catch up to reality once more. HELL YES. What is the "one last choice" John has to make? To go after Caliborn, which will presumably get them trapped inside the Plot Hole (which is still a term I love to use)? Jeez... that probably means it's also already been so many years since Terezi left. I can't recall on which of John's birthdays it was. Was it his 17th? 18th? I'll check that later. In the contents there is only a "Prologue" link... Oh boy, is this going to lead straight to Archive of Our Own? *hovers over link* www.homestuck.com/epilogues/prologue/1 Nope! Unless this redirects, we're staying on the Homestuck website. *clicks on link* AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH Oh god WALL OF TEXT. Looks like... this really is going to be like a "fanfic", without any images?? I suddenly feel like we're reading one of Hussie's recaps and/or Rose's walkthrough. xD "It starts with a crack. Everything else rises up from that like steam: a trembling thread that cuts through space in jagged lines, splintering the void into razor-sharp shards of putrefying leptons and quarks popping apart like raw eggs in a microwave." Only Hussie could write a sentence like that, ahahaha. Seems like he's talking about the cracks in the Furthest Ring? Are these... going to turn out to be, like,  notes taken by his self-insert who was also right there in the Furthest Ring? :P "raw eggs in a microwave" Well, that explains the "eggs" content warning. xD "At the center of that hole the edges can be heard fraying. Pandemonium, as continuity buckles in the middle and the two ends come smashing together. Around the hole, ghosts scream. They claw at the dying borders of their dreams with fingernail-chipping desperation." Dang, these descriptions are giving me shivers. It reminds me of the sight that Terezi saw in the Furthest Ring and sent to the others on Earth. "At the center, that distortion turns into an eerie music. That’s where the cacophony ends—the shattering, the screaming, the squelching, the sounds of elemental particles being torn apart like string cheese shoved through a meat grinder, then dumped down a strangely melodious garbage disposal." Okay I'm sorry, but I can't help but think of the garbage disposal in Dave's appartment. ...I was saying that as a joke, but now that I think about it actually, this reminds me of how I once made a theory of how that disposal scene was some foreshadowing for the creation of Lord English, mostly because of the Saw and purple Smuppet stuff, but now suddenly the garbage disposal element comes into mention here too. HMMMMMMM "This is the end of everything. This is the end of Paradox Space. You..." Oh man, where is this going? Is it going to turn out there's some kind of other realm beyond the Black Hole that all of the ghosts got sucked into? Like, a true kind of afterlife? "Your name is John Egbert, and you have just had a terrible, deeply pretentious nightmare. You snap out of bed, soaked in sweat, your heart hammering like a fire alarm. It is just as you feared." And suddenly we're John! Has the images Terezi sent them been leaving him with these kind of nightmares? Eeesh.... "You’ve been dreaming in anime again. And you have no idea what it could mean." ...OH GOD DAMN IT HUSSIE YOU BRILLIANT BASTARD. XD "> Look outside just to make absolutely sure the world is not ending." And suddenly we're in Act 1 all over again. :P "The only sound you can hear for miles is the wind skimming the hollows of your neighbors’ pipe homes." Oh hell yes, reference to the wind skimming the void. And heh, at least that last part confirms we're really in the present now where John lives in his salamander neighborhood, not that we're actually somehow back at the events of Act 1 or something. "It’s a normal day in the salamander village, which you refer to as Salamander Village because the damned salamanders never bothered to give this village a name, you guess." ...I could see that. xD That must mean there are like hundreds or thousands of those kinds of villages, hahahaha. Really mustn't be convenient for any non-Consort people trying to navigate over there. :P "Beside your pillow, your phone is vibrating. Rose is calling. The screen of your phone reads 9:30 a.m. April 13, and also the number forty-six, which is how many text messages your friend left you while you were sleeping. A bit excessive, even for her." Rooooooooose! Okay, that's a huge relief to me. I kind of feared they'd all completely drifted apart in the past few years and hardly heard from each other anymore, so I'm really glad to see Rose talking to John is apparently still a thing. And that she's still apparently as wordy as ever. :P I wonder if we're gonna get a dialog (or Rose monologue) now? "Answer the phone" Oh hell fucking yes, here comes some sweet, sweeeeeet dialogue/monologue! "ROSE: Since when are you known to operate your telephone? JOHN: since... i don’t know. has it really been that long since i called? ROSE: I can’t remember the last time. JOHN: neither can i. anyway, what’s up?" Awwww, okay that's sad to hear. I take back what I said earlier, looks like they really don't hear from each other that often anymore. :( "ROSE: Am I correct in presuming this April Thirteenth will be as uneventful as the last? JOHN: yeah, i don’t want to do anything this year. i hope that’s ok." Looks like he still feels the same way like the past few years. D: I feel so sad for John. This really doesn't feel like a happy ending for him. If only he still had his Dad... "All over the neighborhood, the little dad-salamanders are putting on their little rumpled hats and picking up their little suitcases and kissing their little families goodbye for the day" Okay, on one hand the comparisons with John's own family situation are really sad, but I can't help but ROFL that Rumpled Hats are still a thing in this society. "You’ve always been confused about what, exactly, they contribute to the global economy. But it’s pretty cute how much they love playing at being suburban businessmen." Hey, there's where the Economy content warning came from! And it didn't even have to do with Barack Obama! xD "The silence over the phone is growing awkward. You’ve stalled long enough. You decide to just come out and say it." Oh boy... what is he going to say? Something about how sad he is with the current situation? "JOHN: i’ve been dreaming in anime again lately." PFFFFFFFFFFF, JOHN. JOHN NEVER CHANGE. We're getting some hella sweet new quotes here. :P Also, I'd find it really funny if it turns out he's been dreaming of the events of Act 7 which, from our perspective, were rendered in anime form. "JOHN: i have no idea what it could mean. ROSE: I see." Rose, looks like you've found someone to psycho-analyze again! xD "JOHN: whenever i have these dreams, everything’s breaking apart. JOHN: millions of people are screaming and dying. JOHN: i mean, dying permanently. not the kind of bullshit dying that we’ve been doing a lot over the years." Okay so he WAS actually dreaming the stuff we read at the beginning of this prologue then. I love how he calls "their" dying bullshit. " JOHN: what do you think it all means? ROSE: What do I think ‘what’ means? JOHN: what do you think it means that i’ve been dreaming in anime? ROSE: I don’t have the slightest idea what it means that you’ve been dreaming in anime, John. ROSE: To be honest, I... You wait for Rose to finish her thought. She doesn’t, which is troubling because you have never known Rose to leave a thought unfinished in over ten years of acquaintance." That's... indeed quite troubling! Normally this kind of thing is truly Rose's specialty. What's going on over on her side? I mean, it did seem like there was more she wanted to say than just "happy birthday". ....Thinking back to the content warnings... is Rose or Kanaya pregnant??? I don't want to put too much trust into those content warnings though. :P "ROSE: I held out for as long as I could. I figured your birthday was as good a time as any to let you know. JOHN: let me know what?" HERE IT COMES!!!!! "ROSE: It’s crept up on me, these last couple of years. ROSE: Gradually enough to ignore as it was happening, but I can’t anymore." ...Wait what??? Oh god, that does sound different from having a baby. Oh man, please don't tell me she wants to divorce from Kanaya. D: "ROSE: Lately the visions have been overwhelming. JOHN: visions??" Ohhhh, visions! Huh. What kind of visions? About Caliborn? About what's happening in the Furthest Ring? Something else? "ROSE: Would you mind flying to my apartment, so we can continue this in person?" Wait a second. She lives in an apartment now? Looks like unlike John she didn't stay in her old house! Interesting how she moved into an apartment, like Dave originally lived in. "You move the phone away from your ear and assume an expression you haven’t practiced in years. It is the look of a man who actually has something to do." Dang, he must have been getting REALLY bored all this time. That time alone on LOMAX must have been peanuts compared to this. "As you hang up the phone, a familiar feeling settles over you. A feeling of...standing?" ...Has he been floating the entire time? "Standing, and being alone. In your bedroom. As a young man. On your birthday." OH SNAP. I got the reference now. xD "A young man stands alone in his bedroom. It just so happens that today, the 13th of April, is this young man’s birthday. Though it was twenty-three years ago when he was given life, and ten years ago when he was given a name, it feels like it is only today that he will begin to understand what all that means. That young man is YOU, John Egbert. What will you do?" HOLY FUCKING SHIT. OH DAMN. OH SHIT. THAT IS WAY FUCKING EPIC MAN. This is giving me HELLA goosebumps! I'm VERY curious about that final part means, about "understanding what all that means".... Okay, this seems like a good place to end for the day, but I'm VERY excited to start reading the rest!!! Homestuck is BACK IN ACTION baby! Last Edit: 1 minute ago by Blaperile

#Homestuck #The Homestuck Epilogues #update #upd8 #reaction #GOD IT FEELS GOOD TO USE THOSE TAGS AGAIN #John #Rose

[abundantchewtoys]

HS Epi: Meat p10 reaction

So, with little fanfare, we've passed the point in time that is the Masterpiece.

I wonder if John's next interaction with the outside world will be granting himself retcon powers, or whether from his perspective the next thing is being summoned by Vriska. That being said, I wonder how Vriska will react to seeing these people emerge from the house artefact, you'd think she'd be very surprised. Will John & co. have felt it to be hours from their perspective, being trapped? Or longer? Can't have been years, or their relative age difference wouldn't matter any more.

Also, is Davepetasprite^2 nearby for their confrontation with LE? If not, this definitely won't be the final showoff! But if she is, well... I wonder how things turn out, this almost can't already be it for Lord English. Then again, if the perspective now switches back to Earth C for a long time, by the time we switch back the plot could be culminating.

I also wonder if there will be any interaction with the people outside the Black Hole's event horizon (I know, contradiction in termini there). Like, post-retcon Aradia, who'd been watching the mayhem unfold.

---

"Jane Crocker sweeps into her office" Well then. That answers that. Mary Poppins-style entry for them, then? :P Courtyard Droll isn't around to be wielding an umbrella, fortunately.

I'm interested to get a good look into her mind, given all we've heard said about the state of Earth C, and Dave's mistrust in her. Also wondering how her relationship with her Dad has evolved over the years. Wouldn't at all be surprised if he was still leaving supportive notes as well as confectionary in her office.

Blaperile has a good point, Dirk might be coming around, being her campaign manager. Their relationship was always interesting, due to the similarities to as well as the differences with John & Dave's.

"The sun cuts through her venetian blinds, painting butter-yellow strips of light all the way from one end of her impeccably tailored office to the other." In other words, exactly the state in which a private investigator likes their office to brood. :P Stations may change but demeanors don't do as quickly.

"It’s a lovely day, like most days, so not terribly remarkable except for the horrid news that she has just received at her customary morning press conference." There's competition afoot and its name is Vantas.

"[Jane] brushes her hands over her hips to smooth the wrinkles out of her powder-blue pencil skirt. Then she hems, haws, puffs out her cheeks, and takes a very deep breath before snatching a pillow off the nearest couch so that she can scream into it." So majestic. And such a Jane thing to do, too (even though Rose started the whole screaming into pillows for Homestuck), remember the time she was being 'supportive' when Jake was contemplating Dirk's affections? Both times, really.

"There are, surely, a multitude of ways for a person to find out that an acquaintance is running against you in a presidential election. From a carapacian reporter, in front of twenty-six other members of the interspecies press, was not the method Jane would have personally chosen." Welp. Well, yeah, it stood to reason Dave wasn't going to say anything, given his misgivings about her. 27 reporters, huh. Kinda wondering about how representative they were to the entirety of the populace. All the bigwig stations must've been represented, of course, but then it would seem humanity has an overly large representation in those already.

"She cannot believe that Karkat would do this to her. This is no longer a political fiat (which the election would surely have been had she run uncontested by any other civilization-founding celebrities) but rather a battle between “friends.” What did Vantas think he was doing?" Well, uh, it seems that he's giving you fair competition where you seemed to be of the idea there wouldn't be any. That's not really a good starting point for a politician, Jane. Seems like her business-minded attitude is indeed influencing her campaign strategy.

"This could not have possibly been Karkat’s idea." Yeah, I'd thought she'd be on to it quickly.

"He is not cut out for politics, neither intellectually nor in the very important matter of social constitution. Certainly not when it comes to economic policy. In fact, Jane is pretty sure that Karkat Vantas would probably literally burst into flame if too many people happened to look at him at the same time, like a vampire walking out into the sun." I was going to say that's unfair of her, but then she's never known Karkat when he's aflame with purpose, only the Karkat that's been hurt too much and suffered too many losses to remain motivated. Also, of course she'd "think of the economy" first. :P That's hilarious given Dave's concerns.

"Wait. Jane lowers the pillow from her face and stares at her brass-and-glass art deco ceiling. Was that vampire thing xenophobic against Kanaya?" Well, at least we know that IF Jane's really xenophobic, as Dave fears, she's trying to become aware of when she is and doing something about it. Of course, trying and succeeding are two different things - just as Karkat.

As for it being hurtful, well... Good thing she never met Game Over Kanaya, she might have had some objections to death-by-light-from-above.

"Dave was certainly no Dirk Strider, no Rose Lalonde, no Roxy, but he had that same scheming gene, buried deep down beneath his transparent onion layers of posturing and, frankly, rather outdated humor. An instinct to plan." Well, I wouldn't have said as much - if it was genetically determined there's no reason Dave couldn't have just not inherited those genes. But then, I'm all here to see Dave's take on scheming, sure. He's had a great example in John planting ideas about apple juice in his head. The bar is already set.

"And despite being inarguably the dimmest of his family’s impressive ecto-biological stock...

Oh, dear. Stock. That’s likely a problematic word, isn’t it?" Yep, seems like Jane really is trying. Can't believe I'm saying this, but if Kankri were here, he might have some good advice for her. A lot of bad, too, but still.

"Despite being the least mentally gifted member of his family" Eesh, okay, but she's still got a lot of prejudices to work out.

"Dave has always had an awful lot of opinions on the economy. In fact, Jane cannot remember a single conversation she’s ever had with him that wasn’t about the economy. She thinks back to one time at John’s eighteenth birthday when Dave engaged her in a rigorous and rather one-sided debate about deregulation and the failure of “neoliberal austerity measures” until Karkat had to come over and put his hands over his roommate’s mouth to make him stop talking." Well, I guess he's really, REALLY concerned. Can't blame the guy, though, but poor Jane, Rose knows what that's like, being on the other side of that trailing, lumbering monologuing. At least Rose's monologue's don't meander. :P

"carapacians were widely known to be swayed by underdog populism." That's because their civilisation was founded by WV, isn't it?

"And the consorts? Who had even given them the right to vote in the first place? In any other year..." Oh, so... Does that mean the consorts only got their right to vote so recently, after 5000 years. That's... Well, that might just be indicative that until recently, their political activism was nothing to write home about.

Jane starts to chew a pencil and it's just so FITTING for her, she's so fidgety, it's probably how Jade ended up being so giddy.

"In any other year, this wouldn’t be a problem. She’d be happy to accept a graceful, temporary defeat and let Karkat play president for a couple of years. After all, unlike her, he was not immortal." ... Eesh, so, yeah, that confirms that Karkat's godhood isn't expected to be eternal, unlike the humans. They could be wrong about it.

But what is so special about the current year, is the political situation on Earth C THAT volatile, or is Jane aware of things about to unfold on a cosmic scale - or even pan-cosmic, if she knows about the events back in canon with the Black Hole 'n all.

"But Earth C’s paper-thin idyllic history was very close to a boiling point—its very first boiling point, in fact, which will have everything to do with the problematic nature of troll reproduction." Ahhhh, right. So that's why she's aiming for the reigns. Didn't think her 'political takeover' had so moral reasons. ... Or, well, at least humanitarian.

"The first generation of natural-born trolls obviously cannot be entrusted to a troll." ...

Well that's just cruel. I know she'll have reasons given troll history on Alternia and B2 Earth alike, but it's their purpose as gods to change the world for the better, together.

Guess now we get to see the parts of her thinking that gave Dave reason to brand her a fascist, semi-serious or not.

"The citizens of Earth C were able to rest easy knowing that the government held careful rein over the... well, over matters of equity. No one could possibly trust something so important to a troll, knowing what everyone knew about their violent history." So it's the hemospectrum she fears would be reinstated. She's equating their biology with their ideology then, thinking natural-born trolls are fundamentally more oppressive as to those birthed through scientific means. Oooh boy. That's a whole steaming pot of problematic thinking.

"Jane presses her eyes shut and runs her fingers along the fine-grain patterns in her mahogany-paneled desk. She is about to think something that she has promised herself never to think again. In fact, she is about to say it—this horrible, ghoulish, girlish thought that used to rule her world and make her so terribly weak. The shameful thought is expressed out loud in the form of a defeated sigh." ... Is it... "I wish Dad was here?" Even if he's still alive, she might have tried to become her own woman, cutting more ties than is healthy.

"JANE: I need Jake." Pfffff, okay, yeah, that I understand. She needs his support to swing the voters. Guess Jane is also trying very hard to be "over him", just like Jake with Dirk. I can see how well that is going for her. Now I wonder how the Nannasprites are doing.

"She spins around and, still sitting on her desk, presses a familiar entry on her phone’s contact list." Either it's Jake and it's familiar to her because she still looks at it ten times every day, or Dirk's because they get along so well and are working together on her campaign.

"JAKE: Ahoy ahoy!" ... Yeah, this is going to be so cumbersome for Jane, I can just feel it, her old feelings now causing quite the opposite response towards everything that makes Jake who he is.

"the ol’ horse tranquilizer trick." Just... just how many times has Dirk pulled this on him already? And how many more times is Jake willing to go through with their show?

"JAKE: Which i suppose i should have seen coming, as dirk has ended all of our matches in this fashion for the past week." ... Jake. Jake, honey, you need a coach. A non-robotic one. Or settle for a non-shitty spirit guide. I know that narrows it down to basically zero, as far as sprites are concerned, but still.

"JANE: Oh dear. That sounds absolutely terrible, Jake. Is there anything I can do to help?" I wouldn't like it if Jane keeps pretending to care for Jake if there wasn't any truth left to the gesture.

"JAKE: Help? Gadzooks woman! I hardly think myself in need of help. JAKE: Its a jolly good adventure working with someone so predictably unpredictable as our good friend dirk!" Then again, it would be hard not to get exasperated by all of this... airheadedness, well meaning as it is.

"You would think that Jake enjoyed the sadomasochistic nature of his and Dirk’s personal and professional relationships. Judging from the last conversation about election strategy with Dirk, he seems to be perfectly aware of this feature of Jake’s personality. You can’t be too nice when courting his endorsement, Dirk would say. He doesn’t respond to nice." So Dirk is still being rather methodical in his interactions with Jake. :/ But I mean, Jake does respond better to challenges, at least initially. He appears not be scared off/by Dirk though, I wonder how he's worked through his feelings about their breakup?

"something big and hollow and metal connecting with Jake’s head. When Jake comes back to the phone, he’s yelling into it." Jake's life is just like a cartoon on even the best of days, isn't it?

"I appreciate very much that you have called me out of the blue to say such nice things to me with no ulterior motive!

From anyone else, this would have been a portentous statement. However, Jane knows that Jake English could not have possibly meant this with anything but the utmost sincerity." Well, I wouldn't mind it for Jake to have developed a level of self-awareness, but yeah... That's unlikely by now, isn't it?

"JAKE: Because i must note that although i try to stay sporting about what comes at me, i cant say that i am chuffed about how much of my correspondence lately has to do with the marketing of my image. JAKE: Its beginning to feel like all people want from me is to stick my derriere on a signpost for their own profit." ... Well, okay, he's become self-aware to the extent he realizes people idolize him and pine for his affections. But that's just because he was so very much affected by that during the session. It'll take a lot longer for him to pick up on more subtle and rarer things, though.

"It must be so difficult. For you more than the rest of us, due to your, let’s say... JANE: Natural gifts? JAKE: Huh?" Well, guess he doesn't realize his good looks yet, at least.

"JANE: But you know that I have always wanted what’s best for you, right? JANE: And I am ready to give that to you. JAKE: To give me what? JANE: The best, Jake. The very best." That could be very ominous, "what's best for you". But what would it be if it were sincere? A way to follow in his Grandma's footsteps, while ensuring he doesn't blunder and blow up anyting unintentionally?"

Jake is quiet a moment, and Jane can hear the rusty gears turning in his head." Insert "*thinking*" smiley here.

"JANE: You should stop by to see me this evening! JAKE: Do you mean my evening or yours? Were in different time zones right now and i dare say that the sun just went down here so if you wanted to have a soiree on my time youve missed your chance." It'd be a fair question, assuming Jane could've been in his neighbourhood. I'm sure their meetup won't go quite as nefarious as pretending they're dating to the press, right? ... Right, Jane?"

Jane feels her fake smile flexing so hard that it was beginning to hurt. Oh yes, she loved this man in basically every category that you could possibly love a person, but sometimes talking to him is like trying to build a house of cards while riding a mechanical bull." Ah, so they were facetiming? :P Note the past tense in 'loved'. :/ Well, old flames do still elicit feelings of friendship, a lot of times.

"JANE: Mine, of course! I’ll have the best year of your favorite crocodile-made scotch flown in from the Consort Kingdom and we’ll have a little catch-up.

Jake actually hates scotch, and only drinks it for appearance’s sake. But for this—for this unbelievably pivotal moment in the history of the planet that they created with their bare hands—Jane is willing to spend a few thousand boonbucks to watch her old friend pretend to sip at the same glass for a couple of hours while prattling on." So: A) Crocodiles might be living in Scotland, if the scotch authentic. Highlander Crocs in kilts and playing bagpipes. Glorious. B) Boonbucks are the currency running the economy, which explains how they can all be so rich. Of course, their influx of cash could've disrupted the economy, but if it had Dave's would've already complained about it. C) Guess there's never been something as disruptive to happen to Earth C as the Mother Grub, then. Not even natural disasters. D) Plan Fake Date is apparently, actually going to happen.

"Time to work your magic, Crocker." Magic being ruthless business-minded political scheming, I hope. Since she's serving Jake drinks he doesn't like, it'll all be for pretense, down to the drinks too. But I wouldn't like to be in Jake's shoes if she starts to fake-fancying him.

#homestuck #homestuck epilogues #homestuck liveblog #reaction #upd8 #spoiler alert #jane crocker

[forfansbyfans]

Challenge Yourself: A FFBF Artist Interview

Homestuck Tarot Acts 6 & 7 - Cards Illustrated:  Queen of Pentacles, Four of Wands, Page of Swords

It’s always fascinating to see how huge the Homestuck art community is all over the world - Where are you from?

Coastal California, born and raised

We’re in love with the tarot deck! Can you tell us a little bit about how you became involved?

Aryll (who organized the event) posted about it in a Homestuck Art server I'm an admin for (the Homestuck Artists Discord Server) to help get the word out. I was one of many people who was excited by it. I'm incredibly impressed by her selections for the cards, every one was absolutely perfect. (Also she's an amazing artist, and the project is filled with incredible artists, and being able to work with them and get crits from them and see their process was also just incredibly fun and fulfilling.)

Tell us a little bit about the artwork you contributed to the deck – how does the art tie in with the meaning behind the card?

Alright, this might take a bit, partially because I did three and partially because there's a lot in there. I'll try to get into what I can!

Queen of Pentacles: The Queen of Pentacles is a perfect fit for Jane and the Nanasprites. I drew Jane as the queen she is in Propsitian regalia, with a maternal Nanasprite on each side to offer guidance, resources, compassion and playful mischief. The cake Jane's holding with the pentacle frosting represents her material wealth, financial success and security. It hints at her business and creative talents but in a way that's entirely hers, without any crockercorp baggage tainting it. She holds it with an open hand, representing her willingness to share with family and friends. She's centered in the piece, emphasizing her stability. At her feet grow pumpkins, that are both a literal image of pumpkins she grew that (though she didn't know it) sustained Roxy and an entire city of Carapacians, as well as a metaphor for the life and sustenance she creates for those around her. The life symbol on her throne furthers these themes. Lil Seb represents caution (he's on guard, ready to protect his charge) with Jane's hand on his head representing her compassion and maternal affection. (Not to mention holding him back from causing too much mischief! The Queen of Pentacles knows how to keep her family in line) In the background, prospit shines in all its glory, a flourishing kingdom of gold. Skaia shines above, an entire universe waiting to be born, in part thanks to Jane's hand, but she's down to earth and her eyes are set forward, focused on the practical, there here and now. Jane is a great character. I love her and I loved drawing her.

Four of Wands: The Four of Wands depicts S: Unite, one of my all-time favorite flashes. The alpha kids come together in person for the first time ever in a series of shenanigans and time travel. I took some artistic license with the chains on the lanterns so they'd reflect the wands in the original card. Where in the original it evokes a Chuppah, here, homestucks lanterns represents the very life force and the interconnection of the alpha kids. At that very moment, Jake's kiss has caused Dirk's lantern to burst with life, spreading the light of that to all the other lanterns as well. There's also an echo of Dirk's heart symbol in Jake's lantern, and the light almost seems to pierce through Jake's heart. (A lot of this symbolism was in part inspired by some fantastic essays on DirkJake and the lantern scene in particular by RevolutionaryDeulist on tumblr, which I definitely recommend checking out! :3) I tried to keep a symmetry and sense of movement to the card. It's a card of happiness and reunions, that both follows and precedes a lot of hard work. It's everything coming together at one moment, and even if things might get hard again soon, for a while now pure joy. Dirk, Jake, Jane and Jake all see (or are about to see) each other for the first time in person, after what is probably the worst day of all of their lives and a lot of work. While it harmony, celebration, goals achieved and reunions and unions of all kinds, its also a transitory card and can even symbolize a breakdown in communication. (Something that the alpha kids, unfortunately, had plenty of problems with!) Dirk, Jane and Roxy are both acting and watching. There's more to it, but this is the most complicated of the three and I'm afraid the hardest for me to explain, and I seem to be repeating myself so I'm gonna stop now.

Page of Swords: The page of swords is a perfect Tavros card. He's energetic, passionate and creative. Tavros is waiting in the beginning, eager to begin this new project, and look what a beginning it is! An army of countless ghosts waits with him, inspired by his charisma and kindness rather than forced. It's about being ready and moving forward. And importantly, he's successful because he made the choice to do this on his own, ignoring the voices that told him he couldn't succeed and wasn't good enough. It's a card that encourages you to find the people who will nurture your ideas rather than those who bring you down. It also represents communication, which is what it took for him to gather up this army. The breath sign in the clouds is there for multiple reasons. Breath is, of course, Tavros' symbol, and also, the Page of Pentacles is a wind card. But within the Homestuck canon, breath also represents freedom and charisma and many of the aspects of this card. (Also, god rays are cool and fun to draw and make some neat lighting effects.) Like Tavros, of course, the card only represents the beginning. It represents gathering people and friends, and communicating with them, new ideas and the start of something great. But Tavros at this point understands himself well enough to know his own strength. He formed the army, but he isn't the one to take the lead, and he's okay with that.

How have you grown as an artist over the years and what has helped you grow?

Practice is great for improving, but more than that you need to challenge yourself, and you need things to inspire you to do so. I've been drawing since I was three, graduated with a BA in art, and been living off caricaturing for almost a decade. But I also felt like my art was stagnating, and the thing that inspired me most has actually been Homestuck. I actually only got into it recently, only a few years ago, but it's gotten me drawing for myself again for the first time in a long time, and the art discords have a lot of events that have been encouraging me to draw. So even the time I've started drawing homestuck my art has improved more then it had in a long time, and I've really had fun with it again for the first time. But the best way to improve is definitely to find the things your worst at, and study and draw it a lot. Bad at hands? Study a bunch of pictures of hands. Learn anatomy, skeletal and muscular structure. Trace hand photos, draw your own hands. Bad at backgrounds? Study landscapes, trees, perspective... etc. Trying to do different things and work with different styles is good too, things like palette challenges can be great for helping things stay fun and inspired. Sorry, I got a little rambly, and I guess its more a general list of things I learned then the things that sparked my own specific growth, but hopefully it's helpful!

What’s your process? Where do you find inspiration?

I like changing things up. Sometimes I'll sketch thumbnails or even the base sketch on paper, then draw from there in photoshop. Sometimes I'll play with pure color or light and shadow and sort of carve out images. I like to play with art a lot, and how much prep I do varies depending on what I'm drawing; usually if its a commission or illustration with something more in mind I'll do more thumbnailing and have a more structured approach. Inspiration varies. Music can be great for it, Homestuck is hugely inspirational. Games, stories, movies, etc can also all be great. Also I love having themed events, or drawing gift art for people. (Bonus, I love making people happy so I find that particularly satisfying.)

What kind of impact has Homestuck had on your life and art?

It's become my favorite piece of media. I could (and have) gone on a multi page rant about why and everything I like about it. But in an attempt to be succinct, its an interesting complex story with great characters and the perfect balance of humor and serious moments. Seriously, I love every character. It's also, like I mentioned, got me drawing for myself again. I've been drawing much more and improved a lot thanks to Homestuck in the few years since I got into it. I owe a lot to it, and for all people speak bad of the fandom, I think there's much more good then bad, and try my best to be part of the former, trying to help it be a place of encouragement, growth and happiness for everyone involved. :3

What advice would you give to a younger you?

Oh man. There are so many answers I could give here. I'd encourage more introspection. There's a lot of things about myself it took me too long to discover, or things I did because I was following someone else's definitions of success. Teaching myself art with some of the fantastic resources available and focusing on my own goals could have spared me ridiculous amounts of student debt.

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Interview by Cassie Steensrud

@whatpumpkin @cassandraooc

#homestuck #Hiveswap #artists on tumblr #forfansbyfans #tarot #queen of pentacles #four of wands #page of swords #illustration #fan art #what pumpkin #sburb #interview

[skaiatemple]

July 23rd is the Festival of Heart!

If you follow as a practitioner of Pop Culture Paganism, a user of Homestuck inspired Chaos Magic, or just want to use your favorite series to inspire you throughout the year, Skaia Temple is your resource center!

Whether you want to just celebrate it on the day, use it as a date for empowered energy, integrate it into your more mundane celebrations, or just appreciate your favorite characters and concepts this month, we have suggestions for whatever path you want to take with us!

Read below the cut for a condensed idea & resource list for this month of Heart!

Aspect Centered

Celebrate the Aspect in all its glory if you’re all about on celebrating the Festivals for exactly what they represent: The Aspect and all the traits associated with it.

“Forging an identity is extremely important to the Heart-bound, and every decision and action goes toward building a coherent narrative of their own story.”

Heart is about the Self, the Soul. If Life is about self care, Heart is about caring for the self. It’s often discouraged to be selfish about our own needs, but sometimes its just what we might need or deserve. If Blood is about community, Heart is about finding out who you are in it.

Sometimes the strongest weapon we can have is being ourselves completely unabashedly. Whether this means holding your own in conflict, or keeping yourself steady when nothing else is so. We need to be able to have a grasp on ourselves to truly understand how and why we need to grow.

Maybe there’s some facets of your personality you suppress for some reason that you need to learn to let loose, maybe you can find a new or more genuine way to express yourself, or maybe all you need to do is let those around you know that its you who knows yourself best.

This month is for being yourself.

Magical Inspiration

If you want to use Homestuck concepts more abstractly and need some ideas for what brands of magic would work best for the season, if you have an Aspect or character-themed spell, feel free to send it in so it can be added to this section!

Shadow work during Doom was more about making peace with yourself, but doing it during Heart season would be more about wielding it like a sword. Or shitty katana- Another side of it could be glamour magic, both for confidence or just when you need someone to see a specific facet of yourself for any reason. The main idea for now is to make sure your inside feelings match your outside actions.

Love and Romance also arent out of place for something about self-nourishment. Here is a Nepeta themed Romantic Luck spell for the occasion as well!

Integration Route

For people in the broom closet who are too timid or anxious to celebrate the Festivals openly- you can always integrate the Aspects traits to fit in with the more common trends and holidays of the month. Not even Hussie is is Homestuck God, no one will mind!

Appropriately, there are no major traditional holidays in this season, at least not in America. Maybe you could look up some minor holidays and find some that resonate with you and set forth celebrating them unabashedly and with full force- or maybe you could just make it a month where you celebrate You. Make the whole Heart season your Unbirthday Month. (In the event that your birthday is within this season, Happy Birthday! And I hope you have a even happier Unbirthday pt2)

The start of August marks Lammas, celebrating summer harvests, specifically grains- doesn't baking heartshaped bread sound pawsitively adorapurr?

Fandom Driven

For if you’re not all about spirituality or routine and just want to enjoy going all-out with a beloved story & characters, you can honor the ones of this month by driving full-throttle on the fandom bandwagon.

Heart is the Aspect for the Leijons. Some very underappreciated girls who never seem to catch a break. They’re strong beautiful ladies whose voices often go unheard through fear, manipulation, or ill timing to be able to speak out in all of their unique, creative, colorful glory. They show all the best parts of the Heart Aspect, pure timid selves who need only the chance and support to be able to shine brightly light everyone deserves to get to. Look at them and keep in mind that you deserve to express yourself in every way you want to.

It’s also the Aspect for the infamous Dirk Strider, and however you feel about whatever iteration of this walking identity crisis, he too embodies his Aspect strongly. He’s on a constant search to find his self and purpose, and so shows us the darker side of when we might try to change everyone else around us to better fit the picture we’ve painstakingly made to justify who we’re trying to be. Be it admiration, pity, or mouth frothing rage, look at Dirk and remember that whatever path we walk, we should be able to find one that allows us to walk in pace with everyone else that we so care about, and that has to be done with empathy, not anxiety and micromanaging. Stan Dirk.

Draw art, write fic, post analysis’ and/or callout posts for these big bright (inwardly and/or outwardly) characters this season!

We hope you got some ideas for activities you can do with your friends or otherwise use to inspire and better yourself this month. Everyone plays the game of life differently, and everyones beliefs are their own. Celebrate yourself as you see fit, and Thanks for Playing with Us.

~Mod Bee

#festivals #heart guide #heart aspect

[mrultra100]

1000th Post Y’all!

Well how ‘bout that? 1000 posts of my random and ridiculous shenanigans! It’s been a wild ride folks, and I couldn’t be more happy for all of your support! (And to this, that I started this blog for fun back last summer) To celebrate, here are my top 10 favorite posts!

10. https://mrultra100.tumblr.com/post/177268053221/diosmiles (by @diosmiles)

This mash-up of “Interior Crocodile, Alligator” and the SSBU version of “Gangplank Galleon” was made when King K. Rool was revealed as one of the game’s newcomers. When it may be short, it does have a nice rhyme to it. Seriously thou, the updated version of the Kremling King’s theme is fitting for his long awaited return in Smash Ultimate.

9. https://mrultra100.tumblr.com/post/178806537791/amtrax-squigglydigg-new-bendy-and-the-ink (by both @squigglydigg and @amtrax)

Another music one. Out of all the fan-made BATIM songs out there, “Welcome Home” might be my all time favorite of the bunch, with the lyrics, voice acting, etc, Hailey, Austin, and the gang really outdid themselves with this one, especially at the last verse of the song.

8.https://mrultra100.tumblr.com/post/175851041991/cookievampiress-mrultra100-asked-me-to-draw (By @cookievampiress)

Behold ladies and gents (If you remember this one) the very first art request I ever sent! (And also the first V-Twin request at that) Since the first time I since “Fangs a Lot Johnny” (A Johnny Test  season 5 episode), the Vampire Twins (Especially Vampire Mary) have climbed onto the ranks of my all time favorite characters. There’s just something I love about evil goth-like versions of certain cartoon characters, and since I love vampires, this ain’t no exception. 

Though I don’t like to share personal info or complain, for some reason, Cookie decided to block me shortly after the request was done. I could have upsetted her over something, and I wish in the near future, I can speak with her again to see what happened. Again tho, I’m not big on controversy, but I wanted to point that out. Let’s move on!

7. https://mrultra100.tumblr.com/post/179708341611/mexican64-so-two-major-things-happened (By @mexican64)

This piece was made towards Piranha Plant’s reveal as a fighter in Smash, and our first meeting with Alastor in Hazbin Hotel. If there’s something that the 2 have is common, that would be those sharp smiles they have. More points for adding the visual elements of the Radio Demon onto the carnivorous flora, Especially the ears!

6. https://mrultra100.tumblr.com/post/178498693031/bogleech-i-didnt-even-give-gooseworx-any (Made for @bogleech by Gooseworx)

As you may know, “Awful Hospital” happens to be my favorite web-comic, and that’s coming from a guy, who’s not big on stuff like “Homestuck” and all that. Nonetheless, AH could always used it’s own theme that captures the twisted and bizarre feel of the series, and what other that the extremely talented Gooseworx? (Goose also does music for the aforementioned Hazbin Hotel btw) As Bog stated, this this also count as Dr. Phage’s personal theme, very fitting for him as he is my favorite AH character.

5. https://mrultra100.tumblr.com/post/182018074106/seriously-tho-its-been-lil-more-than-2-years-at (By yours truely!)

Outdated meme aside,not to be rude, Did anyone noticed the similarities at all? Guzzlord basically what happen if you feed Vaka-Waka some experimental steroids and throw him in a another dimension. And to make this more loco-crazy, the Mixel came a little more than a year before the Pokemon (Mixels Series 6 was released on October 1, 2015, and Pokemon Sun and Moon was released on Novenber 18, 2016), weird, right?

4. https://mrultra100.tumblr.com/post/180606173256/retrograde64-art-request-for-mrultra100-heres (By @retrograde64)

At the time of this one, I was getting a lil’ tired of sending V-Twin art requests, since there’s now so many of ‘em, so I figured, why not “stretch” (I ain’t sorry for that pun) the boundaries of what I sent as art requests, and try new ideas? If you’re wondering, my favorite of the Flexers (and the Mixels in general) is Tentro.

3. https://mrultra100.tumblr.com/post/182991618561/here-is-it-the-favorite-character-bingo-that-no (By me again, of course, and this was created by @ trash--senpai )

This was created by a good friend of mine (@trash--senpai) and might count as the weirdest request I ever sent. When I asked her to create this one, she was a bit confused by it, considering that she’s a artist, this was strange to her, nonethless, she not only got mine done, she also made one for herself. (I told her that she can make one for herself when she worked on mine)

2. https://mrultra100.tumblr.com/post/182810505846/kirby-after-the-events-of-world-of-light-this (Done by me, based on @terminalmontage)

This is the only drawing of mine on this list, cuz let’s face it, my art skills suck donkey dongs! (More on that later tho) This one was made for Valentine’s Day, and as well all know, celebrating Valentines is killing world-destroying gods together with your loved ones. Sigh... Kirby makes that part too easy!

https://mrultra100.tumblr.com/post/175498459271/draculabrides-fangs-a-lot-johnny-you-can (By @draculabrides)

To finish this list, let’s go back to where it all began. One summer night on July 3, 2018, a certain fella in his mid-teens (I.E, me!) want to create a fandom based blog on a website notorious for feminazis whining about Steven Universe and “political correctness”, Eugh. Anyways, the first post (Or reblog if you will) was a collection of gifs featuring a certain sparkly undead duo who went on to becoming the mascots of said blog.

Welp, guess that all of them, and that’s only 10 posts out of 1000 posts and reblog that I made in almost the last year. To all of my friends and the followers who were crazy enough to follow a fella who’s obsessed with cartoon vampire girls like me ( @good-guy-is-alive , @naty-js , @odreiwa , @captain-animatordreamer ,etc) thanks for everything! Also, I plan to start digital art sometime in the near future, and I might leave this blog to start anew after some practice (and with a whole new name AND look to boot) Don’t get me wrong, I’m not leaving here, I might keep this blog as a memory. I’m Mr. Ultra, the Fandom Jacka** of the Digital Blue Hills of Hell, and I hope you have a nice day. See you later, and “Stay Ultra Folks!”

#@mrultra100 #Ultra Ramblings #1000th post special #future plans #stay tuned